Band of Brothers (11 page)

Pvt. John D. Hall of A Company joined the group. Winters ordered a charge on the third gun. Hall led the way, and got killed, but the gun was taken. Winters had three of his men secure it. With eleven men, he now controlled three 105s.

At the second gun site, Winters found a case with documents and maps showing the positions of all the guns and machine-gun positions throughout the Cotentin Peninsula. He sent the documents and maps back to battalion, along with the prisoners and a request for more ammunition and some reinforcements, because “we were stretched out too much for our own good.” Using grenades, he set about destroying the gun crews’ radio, telephone, and range finders.

Captain Hester came up, bringing three blocks of TNT and some phosphorus incendiary grenades. Winters had a block dropped down the barrel of each of the three guns, followed by a German potato-masher grenade. This combination blew out the breeches of the guns like half-peeled bananas. Lipton was disappointed when he returned with his demolition kit to discover that it was not needed.

Reinforcements arrived, five men led by Lt. Ronald Speirs of D Company. One of them, “Rusty” Houch of F Company, raised up to throw a grenade into the gun positions and was hit several times across the back and shoulders by a burst from a machine-gun. He died instantly.

Speirs led an attack on the final gun, which he took and destroyed, losing two men killed.

Winters then ordered a withdrawal, because the company was drawing heavy machine-gun fire from the hedges near Brécourt Manor, and with the guns destroyed there was no point to holding the position. The machine-gunners pulled back first, followed by the riflemen. Winters was last. As he was leaving he took a final look down the trench. “Here was this one wounded Jerry we were leaving behind trying to put a MG on us again, so I drilled him clean through the head.” It was 1130. About three hours had passed since Winters had received the order to take care of those guns.

·    ·    ·

With twelve men, what amounted to a squad (later reinforced by Speirs and the others), Company E had destroyed a German battery that was looking straight down causeway No. 2 and onto Utah Beach. That battery had a telephone line running to a forward observer who was in a pillbox located at the head of causeway No. 2. He had been calling shots down on the 4th Infantry as it unloaded. The significance of what Easy Company had accomplished cannot be judged with any degree of precision, but it surely saved a lot of lives, and made it much easier — perhaps even made it possible in the first instance — for tanks to come inland from the beach. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Easy Company saved the day at Utah Beach, but reasonable to say that it made an important contribution to the success of the invasion.

Winters’s casualties were four dead, two wounded. He and his men had killed fifteen Germans, wounded many more, and taken twelve prisoners; in short, they had wiped out the fifty-man platoon of elite German paratroops defending the guns, and scattered the gun crews. In an analysis written in 1985, Lipton said, “The attack was a unique example of a small, well-led assault force overcoming and routing a much larger defending force in prepared positions. It was the high morale of the E Company men, the quickness and audacity of the frontal attack, and the fire into their positions from several different directions that demoralized the German forces and convinced them that they were being hit by a much larger force.”

There were other factors, including the excellent training the company had received, and that this was their baptism of fire. The men had taken chances they would not take in the future. Lipton said he never would have climbed that tree and so exposed himself had he been a veteran. “But we were so full of fire that day.”

“You don’t realize, your first time,” Guarnere said. “I’d never, never do again what I did that morning.” Compton would not have burst through that hedge had he been experienced. “I was sure I would not be killed,” Lipton said. “I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move.”

(Paul Fussell, in
Wartime,
writes that the soldier going into combat the first time thinks to himself, “It
can’t
happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced, etc.” That feeling soon gives way to “It
can
happen to me, and I’d better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover / dig in / expose my position by firing my weapon / keep extra alert at all times, etc.”
¹

In his analysis, Winters gave credit to the Army for having prepared him so well for this moment (“my apogee,” he called it). He had done everything right, from scouting the position to laying down a base of covering fire, to putting his best men (Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey in one group, Lipton and Ranney in the other) on the most challenging missions, to leading the charge personally at exactly the right moment.

Winters felt that if Sobel had been in command, he would have led all thirteen men on a frontal assault and lost his life, along with the lives of most of the men. Who can say he was wrong about that? But then, who can say that the men of Easy would have had the discipline, the endurance (they had been marching since 0130, after a night of little or no real sleep; they were battered and bruised from the opening shock and the hard landing) or the weapons skills to carry off this fine feat of arms, had it not been for Sobel?

Sink put Winters in for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Only one man per division was to be given that ultimate medal for the Normandy campaign; in the 101st it went to Lt. Col. Robert Cole for leading a bayonet charge; Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross. Compton, Guarnere, Lorraine, and Toye got the Silver Star; Lipton, Malarkey, Ranney, Liebgott, Hendrix, Plesha, Petty, and Wynn got Bronze Stars.

·    ·    ·

A month or so later, Winters was called into regimental HQ. Sink, Strayer, and the staff were sitting in a tent. At the head of a table was S. L. A. Marshall, the Army’s combat historian. The atmosphere around the table was “electric,” Winters remembered. “Those West Pointers would have ‘killed’ to have the opportunity I had to be sitting in the chair across from Marshall.”

“O.K., Lieutenant,” Marshall said, “tell me what you did out there on D-Day. You took that battery of 105s, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“Tell me how you did it.”

“Well, sir, I put down a base of fire, we moved in under the base of fire, and we took the first gun. And then we put down another base of fire and we moved to the second gun and the third gun and the fourth gun.”

“O.K., anything else?”

“No, sir, that’s basically it.” As a junior officer facing all that brass, Winters figured he had better not lay it on too thick. So he made it sound like a routine training problem.

When Marshall wrote his book
Night Drop,
to Winters’s disgust he left out Easy Company, except to say “the deployed [2d] battalion had kept the German battery entertained at long range.…” He did give a full account of the capture of a battery at Holdy, near causeway No. 1, by the 1st Battalion, 506th. Marshall wrote that the battalion had 195 men lined up to take the battery. Winters commented, “With that many E Co. men, I could have taken Berlin!”2

·    ·    ·

At about 1215, Sgt. Leo Boyle joined up. He had been dropped in the 82d’s DZ, gotten lost, figured out where he was, marched toward Ste. Marie-du-Mont, and found his company. “The first man I met was Winters. He was tired. I reported in to him. He grunted and that’s all I got out of him. I thought maybe he’d be a little more happy to see me, but he’d been under tremendous stress.”

The men were congratulating one another, talking about what they had accomplished, trying to piece together the sequence of events. They were the victors, happy, proud, full of themselves. Someone found some cider in a cellar. It got passed around. When the jug got to Winters, he decided he was “thirsty as hell, and needed a lift.” He shocked his men by taking a long pull, the first alcohol he had ever tasted. “I thought at the time it might slow down my thoughts and reactions, but it didn’t.”

Lieutenant Welsh reported for duty. He had been in various fire-fights alongside some men from the 82d. In his backpack he was carrying his reserve parachute; he carried it throughout the Normandy campaign. “I wanted to send it back to Kitty to make a wedding gown for our marriage after the war. (Optimism?)” German machine-gun fire from the hedgerow across the road from Brécourt Manor was building up. Winters put his machine-gunners to answering with some harassing fire of their own. Malarkey found his mortar tube, but not the base plate or tripod. Setting the tube on the ground, he fired a dozen rounds toward the Manor. Guarnere joined him, working another mortar tube. They discovered later that every round hit its target. “That kind of expertise you don’t teach,” Winters commented. “It’s a God-given touch.” When Malarkey ran out of mortar rounds, his tube was almost completely buried. An old French farmer got a shovel to help him dig it out.

2. S. L. A. Marshall,
Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 281–86. Marshall has come in for considerable criticism for the mistakes in his work, especially from paratroopers who were there. I have sympathy for him; writing accurately about a battle for which you have conflicting testimony from the eyewitnesses and participants is a challenge, and then some. Military historians do the best they can.

Along about noon, infantry from the 4th Division began to pass Le Grand-Chemin. Welsh remembered “the faces of the first foot soldiers coming up from the beach while they puked their guts out from the sight of the distorted and riddled bodies of dead troopers and Germans.”

There were about fifty E Company men together by then. No one knew of Lieutenant Meehan’s fate, but Winters had become the de facto company commander.

Lieutenant Nixon came forward, with four Sherman tanks following. He told Winters to point out the enemy position to the tankers, then use E Company to provide infantry support for an attack. Winters climbed onto the back of the first tank and told the commander, “I want fire along those hedgerows over there, and there, and there, and against the Manor. Clean out anything that’s left.”

The tanks roared ahead. For the tankers, this was their first time in combat, their first chance to fire their weapons at the enemy. They had a full load of ammunition, for their 50-caliber and their 30-caliber machine-guns, and for their 75 mm cannon.

“They just cut those hedgerows to pieces,” Welsh remembered. “You thought they would never stop shooting.”

By midafternoon, Brécourt Manor was secured. The de Vallavieille family came out of the house, headed by Colonel de Vallavielle, a World War I veteran, along with Madame and the two teenage sons, Louis and Michel. Michel stepped into the entry into the courtyard with his hands raised over his head, alongside some German soldiers who had remained behind to surrender. An American paratrooper shot Michel in the back, either mistaking him for a German or thinking he was a collaborator. He lived, although his recovery in hospital (he was the first Frenchman evacuated from Utah Beach to England) took six months. Despite the unfortunate incident, the brothers became close friends with many of the E Company men. Michel became mayor of Ste. Marie-du-Mont, and the founder and builder of the museum at Utah Beach.

·    ·    ·

By late afternoon, the Germans had pulled out of Ste. Marie-du-Mont, as Easy and the rest of 2d Battalion moved in, then marched south-southwest a couple of kilometers to the six-house village of Culoville, where Strayer had 2d Battalion’s CP. Winters got the men settled down for the night, with his outposts in place. The men ate their K rations. Winters went on a patrol by himself. Outside the village, he heard troops marching down a cobbled road. The sound of hobnailed boots told him they were Krauts. He hit the ditch; the German squad marched past him. He could smell the distinct odor of the Germans. It was a combination of sweat-soaked leather and tobacco. That’s too close for comfort, Winters thought.

Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that “they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

Before Lipton went to sleep, he recalled his discussion with Sergeant Murray before they jumped on what combat would be like and what they would do in different situations. He drifted off feeling “gratified and thankful that the day had gone so well.”

As Winters prepared to stretch out, he could hear “Germans shooting their burp guns, evidently in the air, for they did no harm, and hol-lering like a bunch of drunk kids having a party,” which was probably what was happening.

Before lying down, Winters later wrote in his diary, “I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for his help on D plus one.” And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.