Nonparticipation in Operation Varsity was a disappointment to many of the replacements, who had gone through the rigors of jump school, joined the most famous airborne division in the world in Belgium or Germany, and never taken part in a combat jump. At Mourmelon a unit of Troop Carrier Command made it possible for men who wished to do so to make a few jumps, to qualify for their paratrooper bonus or just for the fun of it. Lieutenant Foley made two. But that wasn’t like the real thing.
So on March 24 the members of E Company watched with mixed feelings as one C-47 after another roared down the runway at the nearby airfield, circled, formed up into a V of Vs, nine abreast, and headed northeast. “It was a beautiful sight,” Foley recalled. “It made your heart pump faster and for a guy like me, having been integrated into a company that had been on two combat jumps, I did feel that I had missed the last opportunity.”
Some of the old soldiers felt the same way. To his amazement, Webster found himself wishing that he was jumping with the 17th. “It would have been fun.” Instead, he stood on the ground with his buddies, cheering, giving the V-for-Victory sign, shouting, “Go get ’em, boys! Give ’em hell!” Then, Webster wrote, “I watched them fade in the distance with a dull drone and I suddenly felt lonely and abandoned, as though I had been left behind.”
One 506th man who was not left behind was Captain Nixon. General Taylor selected him to jump with the 17th as an observer for the 101st. Fortunately for Nixon, he was assigned to be jumpmaster of his plane. The plane was hit; only Nixon and three others made it out before it crashed. Nixon was attached to the 17th for only one night; on March 25 he was sent back over the Rhine and flown by a special small plane back to the 2d Battalion in Mourmelon. The jump qualified Nixon to be one of two men in the 506th eligible to wear three stars on his jump wings—Normandy, Holland, and Operation Varsity. The other was Sergeant Wright of the Pathfinders, who had been in Easy Company back at Toccoa.
German resistance to Operation Varsity was fierce. Meanwhile infantry and armored divisions of the U.S. First Army were pouring across the Rhine via the recently captured Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, then swinging north to encircle the German army defending Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr.
Eisenhower needed to bolster the ring around the Ruhr. The 82d and 101st were available. The orders came at the end of March. The company was moving out, back to the front, this time on the Rhine River.
The veterans resolved not to take any chances. The end of the war was in sight, and they now believed what they could not believe at Bastogne, that they were going to make it. Safe. More or less intact. They wanted to escape the boredom of garrison, they knew how to take care of themselves, they were ready to do their job, but not to be heroes.
In contrast to the veterans, the replacements thought Mourmelon was a super place. They trained with veterans, day and night, in realistic problems, all under the watchful eye of a man who was a legend in E Company, Major Winters. They had learned lifesaving lessons. They had gotten to know and be accepted by the veterans. They were proud to be in the company, the regiment, the division, and were eager to show that they were qualified to be there.
So Easy was ready at the end of March, when orders came to prepare to move out. It would be by truck, to the Rhine. Webster was delighted to be getting out of Mourmelon, apprehensive and excited about going back into combat, and disappointed that he was not jumping into battle. “I had hoped to make another jump,” he wrote, “rather than ride to the front in trucks, for there is an element of chance in an airborne mission—it may be rough; it may be easy; perhaps there will be no enemy at all—which appeals to me more than a prosaic infantry attack against an enemy who knows where you are and when you’re coming.”
Private O’Keefe was about to enter combat for the first time. He has a vivid memory of the occasion. “We wore light sweaters under field jackets, trousers bloused over combat boots, trench knife strapped on right leg, pistol belts with attached musette bags, one phosphorus grenade and one regular hand grenade taped onto our chest harness, canteens, first aid kit, K rations stuffed into our pockets, steel helmet and rifle. We carried cloth bandoliers for our rifle clips in place of the old-fashioned cartridge belts. Our musette bags carried a minimum of shorts, socks, shaving gear, sewing kit, cigarettes, etc.” After hearing Mass celebrated by Father John Maloney and receiving a general absolution, O’Keefe pulled himself into a truck and was off for Germany.
• • •
Easy Company was about to enter its fifth country. The men had liked Britain and the English people enormously. They did not like the French, who seemed to them ungrateful, sullen, lazy, and dirty. They had a special relationship with the Belgians because of their intimate association with the civilians of Bastogne, who had done whatever they could to support the Americans.
They loved the Dutch. Brave, resourceful, overwhelmingly grateful, the best organized underground in Europe, cellars full of food hidden from the Germans but given to the Americans, clean, hard-working, honest were only some of the compliments the men showered on the Dutch.
Now they were going to meet the Germans. For the first time they would be on front lines inside enemy territory, living with enemy civilians. And if the rumor proved true, the one that said instead of living in foxholes they were going to be billeted in German houses, they would be getting to know the Germans in an intimate fashion. This would be especially true once the Ruhr pocket was eliminated and the advance across central Germany began. Then they would be staying in a different house every night, under conditions in which the occupants would have only a few minutes notice of their arrival.
They would be coming as conquerors who had been told to distrust all Germans and who had been forbidden by the nonfraternization policy to have any contact with German civilians. But except for Liebgott and a few others, they had no undying hatred of the Germans. Many of them admired the German soldiers they had fought. Webster was not alone in feeling that most of the atrocities they had heard about were propaganda. Anyway they would soon see for themselves whether all the Germans were Nazis, and if the Nazis were as bad as the Allied press and radio said they were.
* * *
1. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 697–99.
16
Getting to Know the Enemy
GERMANY
April 2–30, 1945
THE REACTIONS OF THE MEN OF EASY to the German people depended on their different preconceptions and experiences. Some found reasons to reinforce their hatred; others loved the country and the people; nearly every one ended up changing his mind; all of them were fascinated.
The standard story of how the American G.I. reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were, as noted, regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average G.I. never was in Holland, only the airborne).
The story ends up thus: wonder of wonders, the average G.I. found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and lifestyles (many G.I.s noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as “just like us.”
G.I.s noted, with approval, that the Germans began picking up the rubble the morning after the battle had passed by, and contrasted that with the French, where no one had yet bothered to clean up the mess. Obviously they noted with high approval all those young German girls and the absence of competitio
n from young German boys. They loved the German food and beer. But most of all, they loved the German homes.
They stayed in many homes, from the Rhine through Bavaria to Austria, sometimes a different one each night. Invariably they found running hot and cold water, electric lights, a proper toilet and paper, coal for the stove.
Webster wrote of this period, “Coming off guard into your own home was a sensation unequaled in the army. We left the hostile blackness behind when we opened the outside door. Beyond the blackout curtains a light glowed and, as we hung our rifles on the hat rack and shed our raincoats, idle chatter drifted from the kitchen and gave us a warm, settled feeling. A pot of coffee would be simmering on the stove—help yourself. Reese would be telling about a shack job he had in London, while Janovek, Hickman, Collette, and Sholty played blackjack. Wash your hands at the sink. This was home. This was where we belonged. A small, sociable group, a clean, well-lighted house, a cup of coffee—paradise.”
Even better, the men were not getting shot at, or shooting. No wonder so many of them liked Germany so much. But as Webster commented, “In explaining the superficial fondness of the G.I. for the Germans, it might be well to remember the physical comforts which he enjoyed nowhere else in the army but in the land of his enemies.”
The experiences of the men of E Company in Germany illustrates how much better off during the war the German people were than the people of Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland. Of course in the big cities in Germany it was, by mid-April of 1945, Götterdämmerung, but in the countryside and small villages, where, although there was usually some destruction at the main crossroads, the houses generally were intact, complete with creature comforts such as most people thought existed in 1945 only in America.
By no means was every G.I. seduced by the Germans. Webster went into Germany with a complex attitude: he didn’t like Germans, he thought all Germans were Nazis, but he discounted as propaganda the stories about concentration camps and other atrocities. He found the German people “too hard-faced.” He thought the French were “dead and rotting,” but Germany was only “a crippled tiger, licking its wounds, resting, with a burning hatred in its breast, ready to try again. And it will.”
Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”1
Orders from on high were nonfraternization. G.I.s were not supposed to talk to any Germans, even small children, except on official business. This absurd order, which flew in the face of human nature in so obvious a way, was impossible to enforce. Officers, especially those who hated the Germans, tried anyway. Webster was amused by the intensity of Lieutenant Foley’s feelings. He wrote that Foley “had become such a fiend on the nonfraternization policy that he ordered all butts field-stripped [i.e. torn apart and scattered] so that the Germans might derive no pleasure from American tobacco.”
Webster also recalled the time he and Foley were picking out houses for the night. “As we walked around to the backyard for a closer inspection, we were greeted with a horrifying spectacle that aroused all the nonfraternization fervor in Foley: two infantrymen sociably chatting with a couple of Fräulein. Unspeakable, outrageous, unmilitary, forbidden. Lt. Foley gave them hell and bade them be on their way. With the resigned air of men who knew the barren futility of the nonfraternization policy, the gallants sulkily departed.”
It is worth pausing here to see the Americans as conquerors through the microcosm of E Company. They took what they wanted, but by no means did they rape, loot, pillage, and burn their way through Germany.
If they did not respect property rights, in the sense that they commandeered their nightly billets without compensation, at least when the Germans moved back in after they left, the place was more or less intact. Of course there were some rapes, some mistreatment of individual Germans, and some looting, but it is simple fact to state that other conquering armies in WWII, perhaps most of all the Russian but including the Japanese and German, acted differently.
Webster told a story that speaks to the point. “Reese, who was more intent on finding women than in trading for eggs, and I made another expedition a mile west to a larger village where there were no G.I.s. Like McCreary, Reese tended to show an impatience with hens and a strong interest in skirts; regardless of age or appearance, he’d tell me, ‘There’s a nice one. Boy that’s a honey. Speak to her Web, goddamn!’ Since I was shy, however, and those females invariably looked about as sociable as a fresh iceberg, I ignored his panting plaints. Besides, the Fraus weren’t apt to be friendly in public, where the neighbors could see them. Maybe indoors or at night. Finally we came to a farm where a buxom peasant lass greeted us. Reese smiled. After I had gotten some eggs, Reese, who kept winking at her, gave her a cigarette and a chocolate bar, and, as love bloomed in the garden of D ration [a newly issued food package] and Chelseas, I backed out the door and waited in the sun. No dice, Reese later reported. I returned home with a helmetful of eggs, Reese with a broken heart. But it was, as he said, ‘good fratranizin’ territory.’ He tried again that night before the six o’clock curfew went into effect. No luck.”
Had Reese been a Soviet, German, or Japanese soldier, this little nonincident probably would have turned out differently.
• • •
The company moved by truck from Mourmelon to the Ruhr pocket. The 101st took up positions on the west bank of the Rhine, facing Düsseldorf. The 2d Battalion’s sector was from Stürzelberg on the north to Worringen on the south, with the 82d Airborne on the battalion’s right flank. The 82d faced Cologne.
It was more an occupation position than front line. The platoons kept outposts down on the river bank, while the men stayed in homes in various small villages. There was some artillery shelling, back and forth, but not much. There was no small arms fire.
The men were on outpost each night. Here Private O’Keefe got his initiation. One night he was on outpost with Pvt. Harry Lager, who had also just joined the company at Mourmelon, in a ready-made foxhole beside the dike. They heard a thump, thump, thump. O’Keefe whispered to Lager, “Stay in the hole but make room for me to drop in in a hurry. I’m going up on that dike to see if I can make out what that is approaching.”
Up on the dike, O’Keefe recalled, “I couldn’t see a damn thing but the noise was almost on top of me. Suddenly the nose of a small tank stuck out through the fog. I yelled, ‘Halt, who goes there?’ and ready to dive off that dike into the hole with Lager.”
A voice came out of the tank: “It’s just a couple of Limeys, and we’re lost.” O’Keefe ordered the man to come down to be inspected. A British sergeant did so, saying, “By God, Yank, are we glad to see you! We started out on that bloody dike at midnight, and we can’t find our way off.”
“What’s making that noise?” O’Keefe asked.
“Oh, that,” the Brit replied. “It’s one of our treads. It broke. We can only travel about two miles an hour. The tread goes around but hits the ground on each rotation.” O’Keefe suggested that the sergeant put his crewmate out in front, walking ahead, else they might get plastered at the next checkpoint. The sergeant said he would. O’Keefe rejoined Lager, glad to note that Lager had them covered with his M-1 the whole time. The little incident gave Lager and O’Keefe confidence in themselves and one another. They decided they had the hang of it.
Another night, at another place along the river, O’Keefe was on outpost with a recent recruit, Pvt. James Welling. From West Virginia, Welling was thirty years old, making him just about the oldest man in the company. O’Keefe was the youngest. Although Welling had just joined the company, he was a combat veteran who had been wounded
in the Battle of the Bulge, volunteered for paratroopers after discharge from hospital in England, made all five qualifying jumps in one day, and was now a member of the 101st.
On the outpost, they were standing in a waist-deep foxhole when a ten-ton truck came barreling along the road. “Halt,” O’Keefe yelled, three times. No one heard him. A convoy of nine trucks, bumper to bumper, passed him by, engines roaring.
“What do you do when you yell ‘Halt!’ and you realize that they’ll never hear you?” O’Keefe asked Welling.
“Not much you can do,” he replied.
Half an hour later the trucks came back, full speed, except now there were only eight trucks.
“Jim, what’s down that road?” O’Keefe asked.
“I don’t know, nobody said.”
A quarter of an hour later Captain Speirs showed up, “madder than hell.” He shouted at Welling, “Why didn’t you stop those trucks? The bridge is out down there and one of those trucks is now hanging over the edge.” Having heard various stories about Speirs’s temper, O’Keefe expected the worst. But Welling shouted right back:
“How the hell were we going to stop nine trucks going fullbore? And why didn’t someone tell us the bridge was out? Hell, we didn’t even know there was a bridge there.”
“Where’s the other guard?” Speirs demanded.
O’Keefe stepped out of a shadow with his M-1 pointed about waist high and said as menacingly as he could, “Right here, sir.” Speirs grunted and left.
A night or so later, a jeep came along, no lights. Welling called out “Halt!” The jeep contained Captain Speirs, another captain, and a major in the backseat. Welling said the password. Speirs gave the countersign in a normal conversational tone. Welling couldn’t make out what he had said and repeated the challenge. Speirs answered in the same tone; Welling still didn’t hear him. Tense and a bit confused, O’Keefe lined up his M-1 on the major in the back. He looked closely and realized it was Winters.
The Men of World War II Page 29