From Normandy to the bench: Justice Buck Compton's life of service

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,

For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother,"

- William Shakespeare, Henry V

On Veterans Day, the California Courts of Appeal have reason to feel a personal connection. Among their ranks is a true hero: Justice Buck Compton. As a young man, Compton was one of the Band of Brothers in E Company, aka Easy Company, part of the 101^st Airborne Division, heralded by historian Stephen Ambrose. For his heroic actions on June 6, 1944, D-Day, Compton received the Silver Star.

But Compton's achievements didn't stop there. He enjoyed a remarkable life and achieved impressive success.

Early years

When he was a small boy, Compton worked in the movies. He most enjoyed his job when Marian Davies was playing in a film because she always brought gifts for the kids on the set. He least liked working with Charlie Chaplin because he didn't like children.

During Prohibition, his parents made homemade beer in the bathtub. Compton helped cork the bottles. In grammar school, he was caught collecting money for horserace pools.

Buck Compton wasn't always named Buck. His mother was so proud of her hometown of Lynn, Massachusetts that she named her only child after it. Embarrassed at bearing the name Lynn, Compton began calling himself Buck when he was a teenager.

Tragedy struck his life one day when he came home from high school to see a police car in the driveway. His father had committed suicide. It was just he and his mother after that. He graduated from Los Angeles High in 1939.

UCLA

A sports scholarship was his only hope of going to college, and Compton got a football scholarship to UCLA. He was also in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). To earn money, he picked up trash for four hours each morning. He played two sports: football and baseball. Jackie Robinson was a teammate in both sports. Years later, Compton was voted into the UCLA Baseball Hall of Fame.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, ROTC students knew they were going to go to the war but didn't know when. In the middle of his senior year, just after he turned 21, he got orders for active duty to Officers Candidate School (OCS), at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Fort Benning

OCS graduates were called 90-day wonders. After OCS, the Army required Compton to teach a one-hour class each morning on aircraft identification. The rest of the day was free, until he had to head to the ballpark -- his commander wanted him on the baseball team.. He wrote to his mother that she was not to tell anyone what he was doing. There was a war going on, and he felt humiliated that his only contribution was exhibiting model airplanes and playing baseball.

Commanders routinely blocked any application that would take a baseball player away from playing baseball. The only two exceptions where a commander was powerless were flight training and parachute training. Flight training took a year. Compton was afraid the war would end before he completed the flight training course.

Jump training took a month, so Compton decided to try to be a paratrooper. He had to make five live jumps from a C-47 to qualify to wear the wings of a parachutist. And that's what he did.

Europe

Compton went to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth. Once there, he was sent to Easy Company in Auburn, England in December 1943. The company was divided into three platoons. Compton was leader of the second platoon.

D-Day

Compton jumped over Normandy on June 6, 1944, near Utah Beach, landing in an orchard. The men were scattered. About a dozen met up and headed toward the beach. He lost his weapon in the jump but came upon a lieutenant with a broken leg who gave Compton his Thompson machine gun and two grenades.

The small group saw two Germans manning a Howitzer, which Compton said was about the size of a car. It was aimed toward the Americans landing on the beach. Compton held the Thompson at hip level, intending to spray the two Germans. The Germans heard him and wheeled around. Without hesitation, Compton pulled the trigger. That's when he realized the Thompson's firing pin had also broken when the Lieutenant with the broken leg landed. His borrowed machine gun was completely useless. Unbeknownst to Compton, another American was right behind him. Wild Bill Guarnere shot and killed one German. Compton threw one of the grenades to kill the other. That was his first kill.

Compton was one of only two men in Easy Company to receive a Silver Star for bravery during D-Day.

Operation Market Garden

Operation Market Garden, in September 1944, was a failed attempt to have the British and Americans enter Germany before Christmas 1944. The allies tried to capture several key bridges in the Netherlands. Had they succeeded, the war would have been shortened by six months.

From a C-47, Easy Company parachuted into Holland. Americans were out-manned and out-gunned in the operation that involved many battles, but Eisenhower said going through Holland was the quickest way to get to Germany. He later said he had to try it.

Even though Market Garden was not a military success, the 101^st helped liberate Holland. The Dutch were openly grateful every step of the way. They treated Easy Company as if they were movie stars, lining the roads to greet them. They brought out chairs, hot tea, apples, pears, peaches, applesauce and milk. On Sept. 13, a little Dutch girl pinned a small doll onto Compton's uniform.

On Sept. 20, Compton was shot in the buttocks. He was so big, his men had to take down a farmhouse door and place him face down on it to drag him to the back of a withdrawing tank. Compton took a lot of ribbing in the process. The bullet went into his right cheek and out the left. One of the men laughed at his wound, "You're the only guy I ever saw in my life that got hit with one bullet and got four holes."

In France, Compton woke up from surgery to see a fellow Bruin. Mickey Panovich, who lettered in basketball and track at UCLA, was on the cot next to him.

Easy Company was in Holland for 80 days and by the time the operation was over, one third of its 154 men were either dead or wounded. Once healed, Compton was back leading his platoon.

Battle of the Bulge

An announcement came in mid-December 1944 that Easy Company had another operation coming up. Until then, the men thought the Germans were retreating.

It was the Battle of Bastogne, in Belgium, which was a major part of the Battle of the Bulge. Completely surrounding the 101^st, on Dec. 22, the Germans demanded the Americans surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe responded: "NUTS," perplexing the German commander.

Compton displayed the telltale sign of a warrior at the breaking point when he threw down his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. He collapsed from the strain after he watched two of his close friends, severely wounded and writhing in the snow. After months of combat and looking at his friends' dangling mangled legs and the snow bright red around them, Compton collapsed and was evacuated to a Paris hospital.

In his book, Compton said he did not believe he suffered from shell shock the way he was portrayed in the mini-series Band of Brothers. He just remembered sitting down by a fallen tree and crying after one major battle.

On Dec. 26, Patton's army broke through, and the 101^st was no longer surrounded. On New Year's Eve, 1944, to celebrate how the fortunes of war had turned, every American gun in Bastogne joined in a serenade to the Germans.

After the war

Compton came home on a transport ship in December 1945. He noted in his book that when the ship entered New York harbor, the Statue of Liberty had a whole new meaning for him.

He went back to UCLA to finish. Then he unsuccessfully tried out for the L.A. Angels and later turned down an offer from the Spokane Indians.

A family friend, Goodwin Knight, who went on to become Governor of California, suggested law school. With all the men returning from war, there were 20 applicants for every spot. Compton followed that advice, but not right away.

First, Compton worked as an electrician in 1946. Then he and a friend started an attorney service business. After that, he became a plain clothes officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. Finally, he went to Loyola Law School.

In 1951, Compton left the LAPD and became a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, working in the Long Beach office for years, eventually becoming head deputy in Long Beach. He also got his real estate license and showed houses on weekends.

When Evelle Younger, who would later become California's Attorney General, was elected District Attorney, he appointed Compton as the county's Deputy D.A., making him second in command of the Los Angeles District Attorney's office.

Assassination

On June 4, 1968, just after Younger had been reelected as D.A., Compton's doorbell rang. It was the police asking him to accompany them to Parker Center. Bobby Kennedy had just been shot at the Ambassador Hotel.

Younger told Compton he wanted him to handle the prosecution of Sirhan Sirhan, a man who had emigrated here from Palestine in 1957. Bobby was declared dead on June 6, 1968, 24 years to the day after D-Day.

On April 17, 1969, Sirhan was convicted of murdering Kennedy, and Judge Herbert V. Walker imposed the death penalty. When California abolished the death penalty in 1972, the sentence was reduced to life in prison.

The bench

Governor Ronald Reagan offered Compton a seat on the Superior Court, but Younger advised him to turn it down, telling him "those jobs are a dime a dozen." In 1970, Reagan appointed Compton directly to the Second District Court of Appeal, where he served until 1990.

In his autobiography, Compton wrote: "As far as I've ever known, I've been the only ex-policeman to sit on the appellate court in California, if not in the whole country."

A few of Justice Compton's decisions

In some of Justice Compton's decisions, his love of the institution of baseball was revealed. In one, a spectator was injured by a ball. He wrote the fan assumed the risk of injury by sitting in a seat clearly unprotected by any form of screening. 185 Cal. App. 3d 176. In another case, a jury awarded a married couple damages after they were hurt in a parking lot fight following a Dodgers' game. Justice Compton reversed, finding insufficient evidence to support the judgment. 168 Cal. App. 3d 912. In a third baseball case, a discharged coach lost his wrongful termination suit in the Superior Court. The other panel members reversed, but Compton dissented, stating that "a private employer ought to be able to 'run his own railroad' as he or she sees fit." 218 Cal.App.3d 661.

Smack in the midst of the Women's Liberation Movement when women demanded to be addressed as Ms., Justice Compton likely ruffled some feathers. In a case against the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters, he held that a statute requiring that women's names be preceded by the designation of Miss or Mrs. on ballots did not discriminate or deny equal protection. 34 Cal.App.3d 448. He must have angered women even more in another case because they surrounded his courthouse the day after another opinion came out. The protest was led by attorney Gloria Allred after Justice Compton reversed a man's conviction for raping a woman. 72 Cal.App.3d 190.

One of Justice Compton's holdings in favor of a restaurant has been cited over 1,200 times. His opinion affirmed a trial court's finding that a 3/4 inch deviation in a sidewalk was a trivial defect. 192 Cal.App.3d 394.

Probably the opinion for which Justice Compton was best known was Barber v. Superior Court. Two medical doctors were charged with murder after acceding to the request of family members to discontinue a patient's life support. In issuing a prohibitory injunction, Compton held that the doctors' conduct, even though intentional and with knowledge the patient would die, was not unlawful. 147 Cal.App.3d 1006.

Conclusion

In Compton's book, former Senator John McCain, who had been a POW in a North Vietnamese prison for many years during the Vietnam War, wrote a foreword that included these words about Easy Company: "America has relied throughout its history on the courage and honor of its extraordinary citizens who, though they may come from the most ordinary situations, stand up when duty calls them to act. The Band of Brothers, that company of citizen soldiers, who helped our country wage and win World War II, represented that timeless virtue. The unselfish determination to serve a cause greater than self-interest."

In reading three books for this article, I was amazed at how Compton and his fellow citizen soldiers kept their sense of humor throughout their many military battles despite frozen feet, trench foot and diarrhea. In the midst of fighting, someone might call out something about the value of a million-dollar wound, which would mean going home. Another might yell, "Momma, if you ever prayed for me, pray for me now" or "Artillery takes the joy out of life."

Between battles, they played craps, using British pounds, French Francs, U.S. Dollars, Dutch Guilders and Belgium Francs. Many had flunked math in high school but still managed to figure out how much was owed.

Serving in Easy Company may have been the highpoint of his life, but Buck Compton never stopped. For years after, he served in the Air Force Reserve. After retiring from the Court of Appeal, he hosted a radio commentary show. He also took tour groups around the Normandy battleground. He died in 2012 when he was 90 years old.

Buck Compton was what America is all about. Happy Veterans Day, Lt. Compton!

Information for this article was found in "Band of Brothers" by Stephen Ambrose, "Beyond Band of Brothers" by Dick Winters and "Call of Duty" by Lt. Lynn "Buck" Compton.

In a former life, Justice Eileen Moore served as a combat nurse in Vietnam in the Army Nurse Corps. She was awarded the Vietnam Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal and the Cross of Gallantry with Palm. She is a life member of Vietnam Veterans of America. Since 2008, she has chaired the Judicial Council's Veterans and Military Families Subcommittee. She is a member of the Council on Criminal Justice, the Veterans Justice Commission, an advisor to the California Lawyers Association's Military and Veterans Committee and the Orange County Veterans & Military Committee. She is on the board of the California Association of Collaborative Courts. She is the author of two award-winning books, "Race Results" and "Gender Results."