It was a test of arms, will, and national systems, matching the best the Nazis had against the best the Americans had, with all the advantages on the German side. The 101st not only endured, it prevailed. It is an epic tale as much for what it revealed as what happened. The defeat of the Germans in their biggest offensive in the West in World War II, and the turning of that defeat into a major opportunity “to kill Germans west of the Rhine,” as Eisenhower put it, was a superb feat of arms. The Americans established a moral superiority over the Germans. It was based not on equipment or quantity of arms, but on teamwork, coordination, leadership, and mutual trust in a line that ran straight from Ike’s HQ right on down to E Company. The Germans had little in the way of such qualities. The moral superiority was based on better training methods, better selection methods for command positions, ultimately on a more open army reflecting a more open society. Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.
What veterans of far-flung campaigns these German soldiers were was revealed in a little incident in Rachamps. Sergeant Rader related it: “I almost killed a Kraut prisoner for laughing at me after I got to the town, only to have someone grab my M-1 and shout, ‘Sarge, he has no lips or eyelids!’ He had lost them on the Russian front, frozen off.”
The battle made the 101st into a legend. The legend that began in Normandy and grew in Holland reached its climax in Bastogne. The 101st Airborne was the most famous and admired of all the eighty-nine divisions the United States Army put into the Second World War. Ever since, men have worn that Screaming Eagle on their left shoulders with the greatest of pride.
· · ·
In Rachamps, Speirs set up company CP in a convent. It was the first time the CP had been in a building since Easy left Mourmelon a month earlier. That night the nuns brought into the large hall of the convent a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls to sing a serenade for E Company. The program included French and Belgian songs, several in English, and the German marching song, “Lili Marlene.”
The next morning, January 17, the 17th Airborne Division relieved the 101st on the line. Easy Company got into trucks to begin a move to Alsace. The trucks took the men back down the highway they had sat astride for four weeks, through Bastogne. It was only the second time most of the men had seen Bastogne — first on December 19 when they marched through the town while frightened American soldiers fled to escape the German onslaught, second on January 17, the town secured.
Although the men had seen little of Bastogne, that name — and the experience it represented — would stay with them forever. Whenever thereafter a man from Easy experienced cold or hunger or sleep deprivation, he would remind himself of Bastogne and recall that he had been through much worse.
Easy’s losses were heavy. Exact figures are impossible to come by; in the hurry-up movement out of Mourmelon the company roster was not completed; replacements came in as individuals or in small groups and were not properly accounted for on the roster; wounded men dropped out of the line only to come back a few days later. An estimate is that Easy went into Belgium with 121 officers and men, received about two dozen replacements, and came out with 63. The Easy men killed in action in Belgium were Sgt. Warren Muck, Cpl. Francis Mellett, and Pvts. A. P. Herron, Kenneth Webb, Harold Webb, Carl Sowosko, John Shindell, Don Hoobler, Harold Hayes, Alex Penkala, and John Julian.
The best description of the cost of the Battle of the Bulge to Easy Company comes from Private Webster, who rejoined the company during the truck ride to Alsace. He had been wounded in early October; it was mid-January. He wrote, “When I saw what remained of the 1st platoon, I could have cried; eleven men were left out of forty. Nine of them were old soldiers who had jumped in either Holland or Normandy or both: McCreary, Liebgott, Marsh, Cobb, Wiseman, Lyall, Martin, Rader, and Sholty. Although the other two platoons were more heavily stocked than the 1st, they were so understrength that, added to the 1st, they wouldn’t have made a normal platoon, much less a company.”
Beyond the wounded and killed, every man at Bastogne suffered. Men unhit by shrapnel or bullets were nevertheless casualties. There were no unwounded men at Bastogne. As Winters put it, “I’m not sure that anybody who lived through that one hasn’t carried with him, in some hidden ways, the scars. Perhaps that is the factor that helps keep Easy men bonded so unusually close together.”
They knew each other at a level only those who have fought together in a variety of tactical situations can achieve, as only those who endured together the extreme suffering of combined cold, not enough food, and little sleep while living in constant tension could attain.
They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing. Glenn Gray wrote, “The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose.… How often I wrote in my war journals that unless that day had some positive significance for my future life, it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost.”
2
They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers. The company had held together at that critical moment in the snow outside Foy because 1st Sergeant Lipton and his fellow N.C.O.s, nearly all Toccoa men, provided leadership, continuity, and cohesiveness. Despite a new C.O. and new officers and enlisted recruits, the spirit of E Company was alive, thanks to the sergeants. Having Winters as 2d Battalion X.O. and usually as acting battalion C.O. (Lieutenant Colonel Strayer spent most of the month at regimental HQ, working on an acting basis for Colonel Sink as S-3) was a great help. And Speirs was proving to be an excellent company commander, able to draw out of the company its best.
That spirit was well described by Webster. By this time Webster had been wounded twice and returned to combat after each occasion. He would not allow his parents to use their influence to get him out of the front lines. He would not accept any position of responsibility within E Company. He was a Harvard intellectual who had made his decision on what his point of view of World War II would be, and stuck to it.
He was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, sensitive, level-headed, keenly observant, thoughtful, well-educated. Here he was thrown in the most intimate contact (pressed together on an open truck on icy roads in hilly country, sleeping in a foxhole with other enlisted men) with ill-educated hillbillies, Southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and so on among most of the enlisted men in the company. Of those who had been to college, most were business or education majors. In short, Webster was thrown in with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life, he just would not have known them.
Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others.
His description of his truck ride with his platoon to Alsace deserves to be quoted at length:
“We squished through the mud to our trucks and climbed in. McCreary and Marsh lit cigarettes. Martin made a wisecrack about a passing officer. I asked what had happened to Hoobler. Killed at Bastogne. Poor Hoobler, who got such a kick out of war, dead in the snow. And the others? Muck and his buddy Penkala, who had the deepest hole in one position, had been killed by a direct hit. Sowosko was shot through the head attacking Foy. And so on. Some replacements who had come in after Holland had also died. A lot of men had been evacuated for trench foot, too many, McCreary thought. The platoon wasn’t what it used to be.”
Webster thought that it was. He had followed a long and complicated route through the Replacement Depots to rejoin the company, a time of frustration and loneliness for him among that host of khaki-clad look-alike soldiers. Now he was home, back with 1st platoon, back with Easy Company.
“It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust,” he wrote. “Listening to the chatter in the truck, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who has returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest.”
There were missing chairs at home. They belonged to the men who had been killed, badly wounded, or had broken. But as Webster’s reaction indicates, although Easy had lost many members, and gained others, thanks to the former E Company officers now on battalion or regimental staff and to the noncoms, it remained an organic whole.
1. Garcia has another memory of that day: “One of the more disturbing incidents that affected me was seeing a horse standing in the snow helpless with one of its front legs shattered by a shell fragment. One of the noncoms mercifully put it out of its misery with a couple of bullets to the head. Though man’s brutality to one another is tragic enough, to see helpless animals suffer by his actions is even more tragic.”
2. Gray,
The Warriors,
24.
I
N MID-JANUARY,
desperate to save what they could of their men and equipment in the Bulge, the Germans launched a diversionary operation in Alsace, code name Nordwind (Northwind), in an attempt to draw American troops from the Ardennes area. As in the mid-December attack in the Ardennes, they struck a thinly held sector of the front. (When Patton’s Third Army left Alsace to go to the Ardennes, U.S. Seventh Army had slid to its left to take over his position, as well as holding its own.) When Nordwind began, Eisenhower sent the 101st to Alsace to bolster the line.
When word reached the paratroopers that they were to be taken by truck to Alsace, it was accompanied by a rumor that turned out to be exaggerated: the Germans had broken through. Winters’s thought was, My God, don’t they have anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?
It was a long trip. Alsace was 160 miles south and slightly east of Bastogne. The weather was cold and miserable, with falling snow. The roads were slippery and dangerous. The trucks proceeded at a walking pace; men could jump off, relieve themselves, and catch up to reboard without difficulty. Watching the process was often comical, however, because from outside to inside the men were wearing baggy pants, OD pants, long underwear, and OD-colored undershorts. All had buttons — no zippers. Men tried to get everything open while still wearing their gloves. Sometimes it seemed to take forever.
The convoy went from Bastogne to Bellefontaine, Virton, Etain, Toul, Nancy, Drulingen, arriving on January 20. The 506th PIR went into regimental reserve.
While on the road, Sergeant Lipton became ill, with chills and a high fever. At Drulingen he went to see the medical officer, who examined him and declared that he had pneumonia and had to be evacuated to a hospital. Lipton said he was 1st sergeant of E Company and could not possibly leave. As the doctor could not evacuate him that night anyway, he told Lipton to come back in the morning.
Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Lipton had a room in a German house for the night. (Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, changes hands after every war. In 1871 it became German territory; the French got it back in 1919; in 1940 it became German again, in 1945, French.) The room had only a single bed. Speirs said Lipton should sleep on it. Lipton replied that wasn’t right; as the enlisted man, he would sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor. Speirs simply replied, “You’re sick,” which settled it.
Lipton got into the bed. The elderly German couple who lived in the home brought him some schnapps and
Apfelstrudel.
Lipton had never drunk anything alcoholic, but he sipped at the schnapps until he had finished a large glass, and ate the strudel. He fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, his fever had broken, his energy had returned. He went to the medical officer, who could not believe the improvement. The doctor called it a miracle.
Speirs, delighted by the recovery, said that he and Winters had recommended Lipton for battlefield promotion and that Colonel Sink wanted to talk to him. Lipton went to regiment, where Sink gave him a one-hour grilling on his combat experiences.
Easy stayed in reserve for nearly two weeks, moving almost daily from one village to another. The weather warmed. The sun shone, and the snow began to melt. The ground got mushy. A supply truck arrived carrying an issue of shoepacs complete with arctic socks and felt insoles. “Where were you six weeks ago in Bastogne, when we needed you?” the men shouted at the drivers. Dirty clothes, blankets, and sleeping bags were picked up by the Quartermaster Company and sent to a G.I. laundry. Portable showers capable of handling 215 men an hour were brought in; Easy moved through them as a company. The water wasn’t hot, but at least it wasn’t ice cold either. Soap and lather, scrub and scrub — it took a major effort to remove six weeks of dirt and sweat.
Movies arrived, including
Rhapsody in Blue, Buffalo Bill,
and
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Stars and Stripes, Yank,
and
Kangaroo Khronicle
brought news of the outside world (not as welcome as one would have supposed, because the news from the Pacific showed that the war there had a long way to go; this ignited rumors that the 101st was going to be shipped to the Pacific for “the big jump” on Japan).
· · ·
On February 5, Easy moved into the line as the 506th relieved the 313th Infantry of the 79th Division in the city of Haguenau. The population was nearly 20,000, which was big-time for the paratroopers in Europe. Carentan had about 4,000 residents, Mourmelon about 4,500, and Bastogne maybe 5,500. Haguenau lay astride the Moder River, a tributary of the Rhine. Easy’s position was on the far right flank of the 506th, at the junction of the Moder and a canal that ran through town to cut off the loop in the Moder.
“Our position was somewhat like a point into the German lines,” Lieutenant Foley recalled. Easy occupied the buildings on the south bank, the Germans held the buildings on the north bank. The river was high, out of its banks, the current swift. It varied from about 30 to as much as 100 meters wide, it was too far to throw grenades across but close enough for machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire. Both sides had artillery support. A few kilometers behind their lines the Germans had a huge railway gun (probably a 205 mm) from World War I. It fired shells as big as the 16-inch naval guns that had supported the Americans at Utah Beach.
The paratroopers moved into buildings that had been occupied by the 79th Division. Webster and five other members of 1st platoon took over a building at the juncture of the Moder and the canal. “In keeping with the best airborne tradition of relying on madmen instead of fire-power,” Webster wrote, “six of us with one B.A.R. relieved eighteen 79th Division doggies with a water-cooled 50 and an air-cooled 30-caliber machine gun.” The 79th Division men told 1st platoon that this was a quiet sector, no offensives by either side, but Webster noted that they left in a hurry after the briefest of briefings.
The building the 1st squad of 1st platoon occupied was a wreck. Sections of walls had been blasted away, the roof partially removed by mortar shells, all the windows broken, the floors ankle deep in plaster, bricks, and broken glass, the banisters ripped off for firewood, the toilets choked with excreta, the basement a cesspool of ashes, ordure, and ration cans.
Looking the place over, Cpl. Tom McCreary expressed the general sentiment of his squad: “We got it made.”
This was the first time anyone in the squad had lived indoors on the firing line. The men set out to improve their quarters. They rearranged the cellar, putting the bunks and C rations in one room, throwing the trash in another. They found some gas-burning lamps and a working stove. They spliced into a German field telephone system and established communications with the 1st platoon CP. When they needed to relieve themselves, they went to the third floor, “where the toilet bowl was only half full.”
George Luz, radio man for the 1st platoon CP, paid a visit. McCreary’s squad showed off their accommodations with pride. “If you think this is good,” Luz responded, “you should see Company HQ. They’re living like kings.” He looked around again, and added, “Them bastards.”
(Webster shared Luz’s feelings. He went back to the company CP as seldom as possible because “there was altogether too much rank in that place and a private didn’t stand a chance.”)
As on the Island, movement by day was impossible. Snipers were always ready to blast anyone caught in the open. The least movement would bring down mortars; two or three men outside would justify a couple of rounds of 88s. So, Webster recorded, “our major recreation was eating. We spent more time preparing, cooking, and consuming food than in any other pursuit.”
The company’s task was to hold the line, send out enough patrols to keep contact with the Germans, and serve as forward artillery observers. McCreary’s squad held observation post No. 2. Two men, one at the third-floor window, the other in the basement with the telephone, were on duty for an hour at a time. From the window, the men had a beautiful view of the German section of town. They could call for artillery fire just about whenever they wanted, a luxury previously unknown. The Germans would reply in kind.
It was hard to say which was more dangerous, mortars, aimed sniper fire, machine-gun bursts, 88s, or that big railway gun. One thing about the monster cannon, although it was so far to the rear the men could not hear it fire, they could hear the low-velocity shell coming from a long way off. It sounded like a train. Shifty Powers recalled that he was an observer in a third-floor window. When he heard the shell, he had time to dash downstairs into the basement before it landed.
Although the men lived in constant danger — a direct hit from the railway gun would destroy whole buildings — they were in a sense spectators of war. Glenn Gray writes that the “secret attractions of war” are “the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction.” He continues, “War as a spectacle, as something to see, ought never to be underestimated.”
1
Gray reminds us that the human eye is lustful; it craves the novel, the unusual, the spectacular.
War provides more meat to satisfy that lust than any other human activity. The fireworks displays are far longer lasting, and far more sensational, than the most elaborate Fourth of July display. From OP 2 Webster could see “the shells bursting in both friendly and hostile zones of Haguenau and watch the P-47s strafing right and left.” At night, the antiaircraft batteries miles behind the line turned their searchlights straight into the sky, so that the reflections from the clouds would illuminate the front. Both sides fired flares whenever an observer called for them; a man caught outside when one went off had to stand motionless until it burned out. Every machine-gun burst sent out tracers that added to the spectacle.
The big artillery shells would set off fires that crackled and flamed and lighted up the countryside. “There’s something eerie about a fire in combat,” Webster noted. “The huge, bold flames seem so alien and strident in a situation where neither side dares show the tiniest match flame.”
War satisfies not only the eye’s lust; it can create, even more than the shared rigors of training, a feeling of comradeship. On February 9, Webster wrote his parents, “I am home again.” His account of life in OP 2 mentions the dangers endured but concentrates on his feelings toward his fellow squad members. “How does danger break down the barriers of the self and give man an experience of community?” Gray asks. His answer is the “power of union with our fellows. In moments [of danger] many have a vague awareness of how isolated and separate their lives have hitherto been and how much they have missed.… With the boundaries of the self expanded, they sense a kinship never known before.”
2
(Webster and Pvt. Bob Marsh had orders one night to set up the machine-gun on the porch of his building, to provide covering fire for a patrol if needed. They were exposed in such a way that if they fired, a German self-propelled gun directly across the river would spot them without the aid of observers. But they decided that if the patrol was fired upon, they would open up with everything they had, “because the lives of some twenty men might depend on us.” Webster, who never volunteered for anything, commented, “This was one of those times where I could see playing the hero even if it meant our death.”)
Gray’s third “delight” provided by war is delight in destruction. There is no gainsaying that men enjoy watching buildings, vehicles, equipment being destroyed. The crowds that gather in any city when a building is about to be demolished illustrates the point. For the soldier, seeing a building that might be providing shelter to the enemy get blasted out of existence by friendly artillery is a joyous sight. In his World War I diary German soldier Ernst Juenger wrote of “the monstrous desire for annihilation which hovered over the battlefield.… A neutral observer might have perhaps believed that we were seized by an excess of happiness.”
3
The soldier’s concern is with death, not life, with destruction, not construction. The ultimate destruction is killing another human being. When snipers hit a German on the other side, they would shout, “I got him! I got him!” and dance for joy. Pvt. Roy Cobb spotted a German walking impudently to and fro before a cottage a couple of hundred meters away. He hit him with his first shot. Pvt. Clarence Lyall, looking through his binoculars, said the hurt, perplexed expression on the German’s face was something to see. As the soldier tried to crawl back to the cottage, Cobb hit him twice more. There were whoops and shouts each time he got hit.
As always on the front line, there was no past or future, only the present, made tense by the ever-present threat that violent death could come at any instant. “Life has become strictly a day to day and hour to hour affair,” Webster wrote his parents.
· · ·
Replacements came in. This was distressing, because when an airborne division, which was usually brought up to strength in base camp in preparation for the next jump, received reinforcements while on the front line, it meant that the division was going to continue fighting. At OP 2, “four very scared, very young boys fresh from jump school” joined the squad. Webster commented: “My heart sank. Why did the army, with all its mature huskies in rear echelon and the Air Corps slobs in England, choose to send its youngest, most inexperienced members straight from basic training to the nastiest job in the world, front line infantry?”