Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

What Did You Do in The War, Zayde? Robert S. Cone of the Filthy Thirteen

Reports that Jack Agnew, a member of the so-called Filthy Thirteen, a US Army combat unit during World War II that inspired Hollywood’s “Dirty Dozen,” has died at age 88, should remind us that the sole Jewish member of that group is still enjoying a well-earned, peaceful retirement in Delray Beach, Florida.

Robert S. Cone, born in 1921, was written about in 2003 in the historical title “Filthy Thirteen: From the Dustbowl to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest — The True Story of the 101st Airborne’s Most Legendary Squad of Combat Paratroopers” by Richard Killblane and Jake McNiece. As a direct result of this publication, at a 2006 ceremony at his home, Cone was belatedly awarded thirteen (a coincidental number?) long-overdue military medals for service on D-Day, including the Bronze Star, Purple Heart, POW medal and Presidential Unit Citation.

A modest man, Cone was a postal worker and plumber after the war, rarely speaking to his wife and three children about his past heroics. Other members of the Filthy Thirteen have explained that “The Dirty Dozen” film was only “30 percent true” and unlike the movie’s murderous soldiers, the real life Filthy Thirteen were merely disobedient drunks. Cone’s Judaism was fortunately not discovered during the eleven months which he spent in three POW camps in Germany, before he was liberated by the Russian Army near the Polish border.

Watch Robert Cone explain in a 2008 conference how he joined the paratroopers:

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.