The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Winters wandered around, kicking open doors, when “Lord! I had never seen anything like this before.” In a vaulted cellar, 15 meters by 10 meters, there were row after row of liquor racks stretching from floor to ceiling. The brand names covered the world. The later estimate was that the room held 10,000 bottles. Winters put a double guard on the officer’s club entrance, and another on the cellar. And he issued an order: no more liquor, every man in the battalion was to go on the wagon for seven days.

  Commenting in 1990 on this improbable order, Winters said, “Now, I am no fool. You don’t expect an order like that to be carried out 100 percent, but the message was clear—keep this situation under control. I don’t want a drunken brawl!”

  That afternoon, Winters called Captain Nixon to him. “Nix,” he said, “you sober up, and I’ll show you something you have never seen before in your life.”

  The next morning, May 7, Nixon came to Winters, sober, and asked, “What was that you said yesterday that you were going to show me?” Winters got a jeep, and they drove to the officer’s club. When Winters opened the door to the cellar, “Nixon thought that he had died and gone to heaven.”

  He was sure he had when Winters said, “Take what you want, then have each company and battalion HQ bring around a truck and take a truckload. You are in charge.”

  An alcoholic’s dream come true, paradise beyond description. First choice of all that he could carry from one of the world’s great collections, then a chance to let his friends have all they wanted, and the perfect excuse to celebrate, the end of the war had come, and he was still alive.

  For the consequences, see the photograph of Nixon on the morning of May 8.

  For the company as a whole, the celebration was grand and irresistible. Despite Winters’s orders, and despite regular guard duty rotation, there was a party. There had to be: on May 7 the Germans surrendered in Reims to General Eisenhower, and word was flashed around Europe to cease fire, take away the blackout curtains, and let the light of peace shine out. News of the German surrender, Winston Churchill said, was “the signal for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.” The men of Easy Company saw to it that Berchtesgaden participated in the party to the full.

  Once the distribution of Goering’s wine had taken place, Carson recalled that “you could hear the champagne corks going off all day long.” As the celebration got noisier, Captain Speirs began to grow a bit worried that it would become excessive. Sergeant Mercier, remembered by Private O’Keefe as “our most professional soldier,” got into the spirit of the day when he dressed in a full German officer’s uniform, topped off with a monocle for his right eye. Someone got the bright idea to march him over to the company orderly room and turn him in at rifle point to Captain Speirs.

  Someone got word to Speirs before Mercier showed up. When troopers brought Mercier up to Speirs’s desk, prodding him with bayonets, Speirs did not look up. One of the troopers snapped a salute and declared, “Sir, we have captured this German officer. What should we do with him?”

  “Take him out and shoot him,” Speirs replied, not looking up.

  “Sir,” Mercier called out, “sir, please, sir, it’s me, Sergeant Mercier.”

  “Mercier, get out of that silly uniform,” Speirs ordered.

  Shortly thereafter, he called the company together. He said he noted that the men who were relatively new to the company were celebrating out of proportion to their contribution to the victory. He wanted it toned down. No more shooting off of weapons, for example, and especially not of German weapons, which made everyone jumpy when they went off.

  But trying to stop the celebration was like trying to stop the tide. Not even Speirs could resist. Back in company HQ, he and Sergeant Carson sat in the orderly room, popping champagne bottles, throwing the empties out the French doors. Soon there was a pile of empties outside. Speirs and Carson went to the balcony for some fresh air. They looked at the bottles.

  “Are you any good with that .45 pistol?” Speirs asked. Carson said he was.

  “Let’s see you take the neck off one of those bottles.” Carson aimed, fired, and shattered a bottle. Speirs took his turn with the same results; soon they were banging away.

  Sergeant Talbert came storming in, red-faced, ready to shoot the offenders of the company order. He saw Carson first. “Carson, I’ll have your ass for this,” he shouted. Just as he started explaining that Captain Speirs had ordered no shooting, Speirs stepped out from behind Carson, a smoking .45 in his hand.

  After a few seconds of silence, Speirs spoke: “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I caused this. I forgot my own order.”

  Webster, Luz, and O’Keefe had meanwhile found their way to Goering’s wine cellar. They were late; the other Easy men had already been there and Winters had withdrawn the guard, throwing the cellar open to anyone. As Webster, Luz, and O’Keefe drove to the site in Luz’s Volkswagen, they saw a steady stream of German trucks, Volkswagens, even armored cars winding up the road to the officer’s club.

  The last contingent of E Company men had a wooden box with them, which they stuffed with bottles. “I was shocked to find that most of the champagne was new and mediocre,” Webster remarked. “Here was no Napoleon brandy and the champagne had been bottled in the late 1930s. I was disappointed in Hitler.”

  What Webster failed to take into account was that Nixon had preceded him, and Nixon was a connoisseur of fine liquor, and he had picked out five truckloads for himself and the other officers long before Webster, also a self-styled connoisseur, arrived. “On this occasion,” an amused Winters commented, “the Yale man [Nixon] pulled his rank on the Harvard boy.”

  Outside the club, Webster, Luz, and O’Keefe ran into a group of French soldiers, drinking, shouting “La guerre est finis! La guerre est finis!” shooting their machine-pistols into the sky, slapping the Americans on the back, asking for cigarettes, offering drinks.

  The Americans gave away cigarettes, shook hands all around, and took off, driving back to their apartment as fast as possible. And there, Webster wrote, “began a party unequalled. Popping corks, spilling champagne, breaking bottles. Raucous laughter, ringing shouts, stuttering, lisping sentences. Have anusher glash. Here, goddammit, lemme pop that cork—ish my turn. Ishn thish wunnerful? Shugalug. Filler up. Where is Hitler? We gotta thank Hitler, the shun uvva bish. Bershteshgaden, I love you.

  “And that was the end of the war.”

  • • •

  Everyone in Europe was celebrating, victor and vanquished. First among the celebrants were the young men in uniform. They had survived, they would live, they had the best cause to celebrate.

  On the morning of May 8, O’Keefe and Harry Lager went looking for eggs. They came to a farmhouse in a clearing, smoke curling up from the chimney. They kicked the door in, then ran inside with rifles ready to fire, and scared the hell out of two Italian deserters who jumped straight up and froze.

  There was a bottle of champagne on a table. With one quick motion the Italian nearest it grabbed the neck of the bottle, stuck it out toward O’Keefe, whose rifle was pointed straight toward his stomach, and offered a drink, saying “Pax!”

  The tension snapped. They drank to peace. The Americans left, to continue their egg hunt. They came to a lodge in the woods. “It was beautifully situated,” O’Keefe wrote. “A man in his late twenties in civilian clothes was standing on a low porch at the front of the house. As we came to the steps leading up to the porch, he stepped down with a smile on his face and said, in English, ‘The war is over. I have been listening to the wireless.’

  “He was holding himself erect but it was noticeable that he had a bad right leg. I glanced at it; he explained, ‘I was with the Afrika Korps and was shot up badly and sent home. I was a soldier.’

  “He asked us to come in and have a glass of wine. We said ‘No’ but he said ‘Wait! I’ll bring it out,’ and he left, to reappear with three glasses of wine. We raised them in salute, as he said, ‘To the end of the war.’ We raise
d ours, and we all drank. There was something basically soldierly and right about it.”

  They found some eggs, returned to their apartment, and celebrated the end of the war with scrambled eggs and Hitler’s champagne.

  18

  The Soldier’s Dream Life

  AUSTRIA

  May 8–July 31, 1945

  LATE ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 8, Winters got orders to prepare 2d Battalion to move out that night for Zell am See, Austria, some 30 kilometers south of Berchtesgaden, where it would take up occupation duty. At 2200 hours the convoy began to roll, headlights on full beam. In the back of the trucks the men continued their party, drinking, singing, gambling. When the convoy arrived at Zell am See in the morning, the men were dirty, unshaven, wearing grimy Army fatigue pants and blouses.

  German soldiers were everywhere. Zell am See was as far south as the Wehrmacht could retreat; beyond it were the peaks of the Alps, and beyond them Italy, and all the passes were still closed by snow. There were, it turned out, about 25,000 armed German soldiers in the area of responsibility of 2d Battalion, which numbered fewer than 600 men.

  The contrast in appearance was almost as great as the contrast in numbers. The conquering army looked sloppy, unmilitary, ill-disciplined; the conquered army looked sharp, with an impressive military appearance and obvious discipline. Winters felt that the German soldiers and Austrian civilians must have wondered, as they gazed fascinated at the first American troops to arrive in the area, how on earth they could have lost to these guys.

  Winters set up Battalion HQ in the village of Kaprun, 4 kilometers south of Zell am See. The valley was one of the most famous mountain resort areas in the world, especially popular with rich Germans. The accommodation, ranging from the zimmer frei at farmhouses to luxurious hotels, were stunning. All the rooms were occupied by wounded German soldiers. They had to move out, to be sent by truck or train to stockades in the Munich area. The Americans moved in.

  Their job was to maintain order, to gather in all German soldiers, disarm them, and ship them off to P.O.W. camps. Winters got started the morning of May 9, immediately upon arrival. He had the senior German commander in the area brought to him. “I was twenty-seven years old,” Winters recalls, “and like all the troops, I was wearing a dirty, well-worn combat fatigue jacket and pants, and had that bucket on my head for a helmet. I felt a little ridiculous giving orders to a professional German colonel about twenty years my senior, who was dressed in a clean field uniform with his medals all over his chest.”

  Winters gave his orders anyway. He directed the colonel to see to the collection of all weapons in the area and to stack them in the airport, at the school, and in the church yard. He gave officers permission to keep their side arms and allowed German military police to retain their weapons. And he said that the following day he would inspect the German camps, troops, and kitchens.

  The next morning, May 10, Winters and Nixon drove by jeep to inspect the arms dumps. They were shocked by what they saw: in all three locations, a mountain of weapons. Winters realized he had made a mistake when he said “all weapons.” He had meant military weapons, but the colonel had taken him too literally. There was a fantastic collection of hunting rifles, target rifles, hunting knives, antique firearms of all kinds, as well as a full division’s stock of military weapons. It seemed enough to start World War III.

  When he inspected the camps and kitchens, Winters found everything well organized. Troops were lined up for review, looking parade-ground sharp, clean, well-dressed, in good condition. The kitchens were in good order, the cooks were making large kettles of potato soup over fires.

  Thereafter, Winters dealt with an English-speaking German staff officer, who came to his HQ each morning to report and receive orders. There was no trouble; in Winters’s words, “We left them alone, they respected us.” The German staff officer would tell stories about his tour of duty on the Eastern Front, and of fighting against the 101st in Bastogne. He told Winters, “Our armies should join hands and wipe out the Russian Army.”

  “No thanks,” Winters replied. “All I want to do is get out of the Army and go home.”

  That was what nearly everyone wanted, none more than the German troops. Before any could be released, however, all had to be screened. The German encampments were crawling with Nazis, many of whom had put on enlisted men’s uniforms to escape detection. (The most notorious of these was Adolf Eichmann, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal in a camp near Berchtesgaden. He managed to escape before he was detected, got to Argentina with his family and lived well until 1960 when Israeli agents discovered his whereabouts, captured him in a daring commando raid, brought him to Israel for trial, and hanged him.)

  Lieutenant Lipton was serving as leader of the machine-gun platoon in HQ Company, 2d Battalion. Winters assigned him to oversee a lager of several hundred prisoners. One of them was Ferdinand Porsche, designer of the Volkswagen and the Panther and Tiger tanks. In mid-May, Lipton cleared about 150 of the prisoners for release. The senior German officer, a colonel, asked permission to talk to them before they were let go. Lipton agreed.

  “His talk was long and was a good one,” Lipton recalled. “He told them that Germany had lost the war, that they had been good soldiers and he was proud of them, and that they should go back to their homes and rebuild their lives. He said that all of them were needed for the reconstruction of Germany. When he finished, the men gave a loud cheer,” and took off.

  • • •

  Other high-ranking German officials, men who had good reason to fear that they would be charged with war crimes, were hiding in the mountains. Speirs was told by the D.P.s about a man who had been the Nazi head of the slave labor camps in the area and had committed a great many atrocities. He investigated, asked questions, and became convinced they were telling the truth. Further investigation revealed that this man was living on a small farm nearby.

  Speirs called in 1st Sergeant Lynch. He explained the situation, then gave his order: “Take Moone, Liebgott, and Sisk, find him, and eliminate him.”

  Lynch gathered the men, explained the mission, got a weapons carrier, and took off up the mountain. During the trip, Moone thought about his predicament. He was sure that Captain Speirs did not have the authority to order an execution based on testimony from the D.P.s. But Speirs was the company C.O. and Moone was just an enlisted man carrying out an order. He decided, “I’m not complying with this bullshit. If someone has to do the shooting, it won’t be me.”

  They got to the farm and without a struggle took the Nazi prisoner. Liebgott interrogated him for thirty minutes, then declared there could be no doubt, this was the man they wanted, and he was guilty as charged. The Americans pushed the man at gunpoint to the weapons carrier, then drove off. Lynch stopped beside a ravine. They prodded the man out of the vehicle. Liebgott drew his pistol and shot him twice.

  The prisoner began screaming. He turned and ran up the hill. Lynch ordered Moone to shoot him.

  “You shoot him,” Moone replied. “The war is over.”

  Skinny Sisk stepped forward, leveled his M-1 at the fleeing man, and shot him dead.

  • • •

  After the P.O.W.s and D.P.s were sorted and shipped out of the area, the next job was to sort out and consolidate all the captured German equipment and the U.S. Army equipment no longer needed for combat. As the material was gathered and registered, convoys of trucks took it to depots in France.

  Officers were ordered to turn in the silk escape map of France they had received before the jump into Normandy or be fined $75. As those maps were damn near sacred to the D-Day veterans, there was universal noncompliance. When told to pay the fine, Winters replied for the entire battalion, taking his line from General McAuliffe: “Nuts.” The regimental supply officer, Capt. Herbert Sobel, backed down.

  • • •

  Given the absence of resistance, indeed the enthusiastic cooperation of the Germans and Austrians, by the end of the third week in May there w
as little real work left for the Americans. All KP, washing clothes, cleaning quarters, or construction tasks were done by local residents anxious to make some money or receive food or cigarettes. Time was hanging heavy on the heads of the young men lusting to go home.

  Winters had a track built, a tennis court, and a baseball field, then a rifle range. Competitions were held, between companies, battalions, regiments, all the way up to ETO. He held daily close-order drills.

  There were men who loved it. To the serious athletes, those with hopes of a future college or professional career, it was a marvelous opportunity to train. They were excused from all duties, lived in a separate athletic dorm, and got to practice or compete every day. To the few who planned to make a career of the Army, it was a chance to practice their profession.

  But to the majority, neither jocks nor career soldiers, it was a bore. They found their outlets in four other ways: as tourists in the Alps, hunting, drinking, and chasing women. The Zeller See, a lake some 4 kilometers in length and 2 in width, was a breathtaking bit of beauty, and a joy to swim in on the long, sunny days of late May and early June. “My bathing suit is getting quite a workout,” Webster wrote his mother on May 20. “Will you please mail me another of very gaily colored trunks from Abercrombie and Fitch as quickly as possible? Waist 32, preferably shorts, not trunks.”

  On the mountain behind Kaprun there was a ski lodge. The chair lift to the lodge was kaput, but it could be reached by climbing the mountain trail. Winters set up a program to rotate one platoon every three days to the lodge for R and R. At the lodge there were Austrian servants and cooks, ski instructors, and hunting guides. The skiing was fabulous; so was the hunting for mountain goats.

  There were deer at a lower level, hundreds of them, as this was a prime hunting area for the European aristocracy. The 101st was at the end of the pipeline in the distribution of food. Everyone from the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre right on down the pipeline had a crack at the food first, and they all had civilian girlfriends to take care of and a flourishing black market to tempt them. So not enough food was getting to the Alps. The paratroopers went out in hunting parties for deer; venison became a staple in the diet. Private Freeman got a Browning shotgun and supplemented the venison with quail and other birds.