The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • • •

  A couple of days after the bayonet attack, Colonel Sink paid Winters a visit. “Do you think you can handle the battalion?” he asked, indicating that he was considering making Winters the X.O. of 2d Battalion. (Maj. Oliver Horton had been killed in battle at Opheusden on October 5.)

  Winters, twenty-six and a half years old, a captain and company commander for only three months, gulped and replied, “Yes, sir. I know I can handle our battalion in the field. Combat doesn’t worry me. It’s the administration. I’ve never had administration.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sink assured him. “I’ll take care of that part.” On October 9, he made Winters the X.O. of 2d Battalion.

  • • •

  Winters’s replacement as Easy Company commander failed to measure up. He came in from another battalion. Pvt. Ralph Stafford was scathing in his description: “He really screwed up. He not only didn’t know what to do, he didn’t care to learn. He stayed in bed, made no inspections and sent for more plums.” He was shortly relieved.

  Other replacement officers had also failed. Christenson said of one, “Indecision was his middle name . . . . In combat his mind became completely disoriented, and he froze. We, the N.C.O.s of the platoon, took over and got the job done; and never did he complain, for he realized his inability to command under pressure.”

  Webster wrote about a platoon leader in the Nuenen fight: “I never saw him in the fracas. He never came to the front. He failed to live up to his responsibilities; the old men in the platoon never forgave him. For an enlisted man to fail in a grave situation was bad, but for an officer, who was supposed to lead his men, it was inexcusable.”

  Malarkey related that in that fight, Guarnere “was giving hell to some officer who had his head buried in the sand, telling him he was supposed to be leading the platoon . . . . The same officer was later seen at an aid station shot through the hand, suspected of being self-inflicted.”

  A combination of new officers and men who had not been trained up to the standard of the original Currahee group, the rigors of constant pounding by artillery and the danger of night patrols was taking a toll on Easy. The conditions exacerbated the situation.

  Paul Fussell has described the two stages of rationalization a combat soldier goes through—it can’t happen to me, then it can happen to me, unless I’m more careful—followed by a stage of “accurate perception: it is going to happen to me, and only my not being there [on the front lines] is going to prevent it.”2 Some men never get to the perception; for others, it comes almost at once. When it does come to a member of a rifle company in the front line, it is almost impossible to make him stay there and do his duty. His motivation has to be internal. Comradeship is by far the strongest motivator—not wanting to let his buddies down, in the positive sense, not wanting to appear a coward in front of the men he loves and respects above all others in the negative sense. Discipline won’t do it, because discipline relies on punishment, and there is no punishment the Army can inflict on a front-line soldier worse than putting him into the front line.3

  One reason for this is what Glenn Gray calls “the tyranny of the present” in a foxhole. The past and, more important, the future do not exist. He explains that there is “more time for thinking and more loneliness in foxholes at the front than in secure homes, and time is measured in other ways than by clocks and calendars.”4 To the soldier under fire who has reached his limit, even the most horrible army jail looks appealing. What matters is living through the next minute.

  Gray speculates that this is why soldiers will go to such extraordinary lengths to get souvenirs. At Brécourt Manor, Malarkey ran out into a field being raked by machine-gun fire to get what he thought was a Luger from a dead German. In Holland, on October 5, as Webster was limping back to the rear, in an open field under fire from a German 88, he spotted “a German camouflaged poncho, an ideal souvenir.” He stopped to “scoop it up.” Gray explains the phenomenon: “Primarily, souvenirs appeared to give the soldier some assurance of his future beyond the destructive environment of the present. They represented a promise that he might survive.” It is almost impossible to think of anything but survival in a life-threatening situation, which accounts for the opposite phenomenon to souvenir-grabbing—the soldier’s casual attitude toward his own possessions, his indifferent attitude toward money. “In campaigns of extreme hazard,” Gray writes, “soldiers learn more often than civilians ever do that everything external is replaceable, while life is not.”5

  What is not replaceable is the esteem of comrades, but to the replacement soldier, just arrived, there is no comradeship, so there is nothing to hold him to his post. Gray tells the story of a deserter he found in a woods in France in November 1944. The lad was from the Pennsylvania mountains, he was accustomed to camping out, he had been there a couple weeks and intended to stay until the war ended. “All the men I knew and trained with have been killed or transferred,” the deserter explained. “I’m lonely . . . . The shells seem to come closer all the time and I can’t stand them.” He begged Gray to leave him. Gray refused, said he would have to turn him in, but promised he would not be punished. The soldier said he knew that; he bitterly predicted “they” would simply put him back into the line again—which was exactly what happened when Gray brought him in.6

  At the front, not only spit-and-polish discipline breaks down. Orders can be ignored, as supervision is not exact where danger of death is present. “Old soldiers have learned by bitter experience to be independent and to make their own decisions,” Webster wrote his parents shortly after he was wounded. “Once our lieutenant told my squad leader to take his eight men and knock out some anti-aircraft guns that were firing on a flight of gliders. Nine men with rifles fighting dual-purpose 88s and 40 mms! The sergeant said yes [censored]. By using his own judgment he saved our lives in a situation where a new man would have rushed in blindly. This same lieutenant later ordered two scouts into a German position, but they, knowing better, got [censored].”

  Veterans tried to help replacements, but they also took care not to learn their names, as they expected them to be gone shortly. It was not that the old hands had no sympathy for the recruits. “Our new members,” Webster wrote his parents, “representatives of the 18-year-old draft, were so young and enthusiastic-looking it seemed a crime to send them into battle. We paratroopers get the best men in the army, but it’s a hell of a fate for somebody who’s never been away from home or high school to come here.”

  No man in Easy had been in combat before June 6, 1944, but by October all the men who took off from England on the evening of June 5 who were still alive in Holland had been through two combat jumps and two campaigns. Many of them had been wounded; some of the wounded had gone AWOL from the hospital to go to Holland. This was not because they had a love of combat, but because they knew if they did not go to war with Easy, they would be sent to war with strangers, as the only way out of combat for a rifleman in ETO was death or a wound serious enough to cost a limb. If they had to fight, they were determined it would be with their comrades.

  Replacements could seldom reach this level of identification. Further, as the army was speeding up the training process to provide men for the battle, the replacements were not of the quality of the original Currahee men. At Veghal, Webster saw a replacement named Max “moaning and clutching his right hand.”

  “Help me! Help me! Somebody help me!”

  “What’s wrong? Shot anywhere else?”

  “No, no. It hurts!”

  “Why don’t you get up and run?”

  “He didn’t feel like it. He was in shock so bad he just wanted to lie there and moan . . . . It’s a funny thing about shock. Some boys can have their foot blown off and come limping back to the aid station under their own power, while others, like Max, freeze up at the sight of blood and refuse to help themselves. They say that shock is largely physical, but it seems to me that one’s mental attitude has a lot to do with it. Max wasn’t aggressi
ve, he wasn’t hard, he wasn’t well-trained.”

  That officers and men broke under the constant strain, tension, and vulnerability is not remarkable. What is remarkable is that so many did not break.

  • • •

  With Winters’s replacement gone, 1st Lt. Fred “Moose” Heyliger took over the company. Heyliger was an OCS graduate who had led the HQ Company mortar platoon in Normandy (where he was promoted to 1st Lieutenant) and Holland. He had been in E Company back in the States. From the first, Winters liked him immensely.

  Heyliger was a good C.O. He visited the outposts at night. He went on patrols himself. He saw to the men as best could be done. Like the men in the foxholes, he never relaxed. The tension was always there. His company was spread much too thin to prevent German patrols from penetrating the line, and the dangerous possibility of another breakthrough of the size of that of October 5 was in his mind constantly. He bore up under the responsibility well, took the strain, did his duty.

  • • •

  “The British are masters of intrigue,” according to Cpl. Walter Gordon. “I wouldn’t necessarily want them on my flank for an assault on some target, but I sure would like to have them plan it, because they are very good at planning.”

  He was referring to “the Rescue,” which took place at midnight, October 22–23. A week earlier, Col. O Dobey (nicknamed “The Mad Colonel of Arnhem”) of the British 1st Airborne Division, who had escaped from a German hospital after being made prisoner, had swum across the Rhine and contacted Colonel Sink. Dobey said there were 125 British troops, some ten Dutch resistance fighters who were being sought by the Germans, and five American pilots hiding out with the Dutch underground on the north side of the Lower Rhine. He wanted to get them back, and he needed help. Sink agreed to cooperate. As the crossing point was across from Easy’s position, Sink volunteered Heyliger to lead the rescue patrol. Or, as Gordon put it, “We would furnish the personnel, the British would furnish the idea and, I suppose, the Band-Aids. A fair swap, by British standards.”

  Dobey was in contact with the Dutch underground on the far side via telephone (for some reason, the Germans had never cut those lines). He designated the night of October 22–23 for the operation. The American 81st AA-AT Battalion would fire tracers over the river with their Bofors guns to mark the spot where the Dutch would bring the men waiting to be rescued. To allay German suspicion, for several nights before the operation, the 81st fired tracers at midnight.

  On the appointed night, Heyliger, Lts. Welsh and Edward Shames, and seventeen men selected by Heyliger followed engineer tape from the dike down to the river, where British canvas collapsible boats had been hidden the previous evening. It was, as usual, a murky night, with a drizzle adding to the obscurity. The shivering men edged the boats into the river. At midnight, the Bofors fired the tracers straight north. The Dutch underground blinked the V-for-Victory signal with red flashlights from the north bank. Easy began paddling as silently as possible across the river.

  The men crossed with pounding hearts but without incident. They leaped out of the boats and moved forward. Gordon had the machine-gun on the left flank; he set it up and prepared to defend against attack. Cpl. Francis Mellett had the machine-gun on the right flank. Private Stafford was at the point for the column seeking contact with the Dutch underground, Heyliger immediately behind him.

  Stafford moved forward stealthily. There was no firing, no illumination. This was enemy territory, completely unfamiliar to the Americans, and it was pitch black. “The absolute quiet was almost petrifying to me,” Stafford remembered.

  Stafford took another cautious step. A large bird flew up not more than a foot away from his face. “I am positive my heart stopped beating,” Stafford recalled. “I flipped off the safety on my M-1 and was about to fire when Lt. Heyliger calmly said, ‘Easy.’ ”

  They continued on and shortly met the British troops. The first one Stafford saw “hugged me and gave me his red beret, which I still have.” A British brigadier stepped forward and shook Heyliger’s hand, saying he was the finest looking American officer he had ever seen.

  Heyliger motioned for the British to move in column to the boats, urging them to keep silent. But they just could not. Pvt. Lester Hashey recalled one saying, “I never thought I’d be so glad to see a bloody Yank.” Lieutenant Welsh, who was in charge down at the boats, grew exasperated with the Brits who kept calling out, “God bless you, Yank,” and told them they would all get killed if they didn’t shut up.

  The British got into the boats; Heyliger pulled his men back in leapfrog fashion; soon everyone was ready to shove off. Gordon was the last one back, and in the trailing boat crossing the river. “There was a certain amount of excitement and urgency,” he said, and he was certain the Germans would sink them all any moment. But they were never spotted. By 0130 the entire party were safely on the south bank and crossing noman’s-land on the way to the American front line behind the dike.

  The next day Colonel Sink issued a citation for gallantry in action. He declared that “the courage and calmness shown by the covering force was a major factor in this successful execution. So well organized and executed was this undertaking that the enemy never knew an evacuation had taken place.

  “All members of this covering force are commended for their aggression, spirit, prompt obedience of orders and devotion to duty. Their names appear below.”

  Gordon’s name is there. When I suggested that he must be proud to have volunteered for and carried out so well such a hazardous operation, he said the only reason he went along was that Heyliger had selected him. “It was not a volunteer operation. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have volunteered, I’m just saying I didn’t volunteer.”

  • • •

  On October 28, the 101st Division’s area of responsibility was enlarged. The 506th shifted to the east on the river bank, just opposite Arnhem. Easy was in the line in the vicinity of the village of Driel, which put the company in the easternmost tip of the Allied advance toward Germany. It was replacing a British unit.

  As the company moved into its new positions, Sergeant Lipton and battalion X.O. Winters talked with the British commander. He said they could see Germans moving around and digging in along the railroad track to the east. (Easy was still on the right flank of the 506th, at Driel; that put it at the point where the line bent at an acute angle, meaning one platoon faced north, another east, with the third in reserve.)

  “Well, when you see them, why don’t you fire on them?” Winters asked.

  “Because when we fire on them, they just fire back.”

  Winters and Lipton looked at each other in disbelief. Easy always tried to keep the German heads down and on the defensive whenever it occupied the front line.

  It did so at Driel and kept up active patrolling. The artillery continued to pound away. The Germans still had the advantage of holding the high ground north of the river, so movement by day was impossible. The platoons in the front line lived in foxholes. The rain was all but constant. No one ever got really dry. No shaves, no showers, no relaxation. A miserable existence.

  To the rear, at the CPs and further back, conditions improved somewhat. Artillery was a problem, of course, but there was hot food and other compensations. The men listened to “Arnhem Annie,” a German propaganda broadcaster, over the radio. Between American songs, she invited them to cross the river, surrender, and live in comfort until the war was over. The supply people were able to bring copies of Yank and Stars and Stripes to the men. The 101st’s daily news sheet, The Kangaroo Khronicle, resumed publishing. The Germans dropped some leaflets, Why Fight for the Jews? The 506th P.O.W. Interrogation Team broadcast over a loudspeaker surrender invitations to the Germans.

  The only effect of the propaganda, by both sides, was to bring a good laugh.

  • • •

  Winters was bored. Being X.O. “was a letdown, a tremendous letdown. The most fun I had in the Army, the most satisfying thing I did was company commander.
Being a junior officer was a tough job, taking it from both sides, from the men and from Captain Sobel. But as company commander, I was running my own little show. I was out front, making a lot of personal decisions on the spot that were important to the welfare of my company, getting a job done.”

  But as battalion X.O., “I was an administrator, not making any command decisions or such, just recommendations to the battalion commander, to the battalion S-2.”

  I suggested that some people would feel a sense of relief at the change.

  “I didn’t,” Winters replied.

  • • •

  1st Lt. Harry Welsh’s 2d platoon had the sector of the line facing east. His CP was in a barn some 50 meters west of the railroad tracks, where the Germans had their outposts. His platoon strength was down to two dozen men; even if he kept half of them on alert, that meant twelve men to cover a front of 1,500 meters. With a more than 200-meter gap between outposts, it was relatively easy for German patrols to penetrate the line after dark. They did so regularly, not with the purpose of mounting an attack—like the Allies, they had accepted the static situation and their lines were thinly held, too—but to make certain the Americans were not building up.

  After his experiences on October 5, Winters was worried about the porous situation at the front. When he heard a member of the rescue mission of October 22–23 describe the penetration of German lines without being spotted as “fantastic,” he snorted: “The Germans did the same thing to us. They got two companies across and we never fired a shot at them until they got up on the dike. So what’s the big deal?”

  Winters was also frustrated in his new job. He craved action and fretted over the German penetrations. On the afternoon of October 31, he called Heyliger on the telephone to suggest that that night the two of them make their own inspection of the outposts. Heyliger agreed. At 2100 hours that evening, Winters arrived at Easy’s CP. Heyliger telephoned Welsh to let him know that he and Winters were on their way out to see him.