Beyond Band of Brothers

by Major Dick Winters

  Yet even Sobel had to chuckle about some of the men’s antics on furlough or on weekend passes. Take Private Wayne “Skinny” Sisk, one of the first soldiers to join Easy Company. To win over the girls in the 1940s, Sisk used his smile, wit, and the glamour of being a paratrooper. On one occasion the military police arrested “Skinny” on a Saturday afternoon for making out with his girlfriend along the railroad tracks. When asked by Sobel to explain his conduct, Sisk replied, “The train was coming, she was coming, and so was I.”

  Suffice it to say Herbert Sobel was a complex and volatile officer, difficult to serve over, impossible to serve under. For those of us who served in the company, he treated us with equal disdain, officers and enlisted men alike. His constant raving that “The Japs are going to get you,” and his “Hi-Yo Silver,” led to widespread snickering behind his back. Never comfortable in a tactical environment, our commander could not read a map, was constantly lost, and tended to panic when confronted with an unexpected situation. As a result, Captain Sobel rapidly lost the respect of the men. The men did what he ordered because they wanted those wings. Yet they never respected him. If he could not lead men on a hike or on a military maneuver, how could he lead Easy Company in combat? His inability to lead by example or remain calm in a crisis soon became questions that permeated the entire company.

  Despite his personal shortcomings, Sobel drove each member of the company to become an elite soldier capable of taking the war to Hitler’s Germany. In that sense, Herbert Maxwell Sobel “made” Easy Company by producing a combat company that acted with a single-minded purpose. Carwood Lipton, who would later receive a battlefield commission in Europe, noted that Easy Company was very similar to the groups of men in every company in Sink’s 506th save one. Yet there was a difference because Easy coalesced to protect itself against Sobel. In that way, Easy ended up a different way than Sobel intended. Sobel drove us hard and he continued driving us when other companies had already fallen out and gone to the showers. While the other commands within the 506th were getting the hot showers and the early food, we were still out there working, taking an additional lap around the track, and standing at attention to see if anybody was moving. Soon other companies knew of Captain Sobel, including the officers throughout the regiment. No one envied us, but Sobel was producing a magnificent company. Having said that, I would be remiss to disregard the contributions of Easy’s first batch of noncommissioned officers who emerged from the ranks: the Carwood Liptons, Joe Toyes, Bill Guarneres, Floyd Talberts, and others.

  In Sobel’s defense he was equally demanding on himself. Charged with converting “civilians” into an effective fighting force in a relatively short time, he permitted himself few luxuries. Shortly after he assumed command of the battalion, Major Strayer remembered one instance when he disciplined the company commanders for not showing up on time for staff meetings. To demonstrate his point, he confined the company commanders to the camp area for an entire weekend. Their wives raised holy hell. Sobel was the only company commanding officer who was always on time and did as he was instructed, therefore he was not penalized. To his credit he also stood up for his men to higher headquarters. Prior to Easy Company’s movement to the port of embarkation, our battalion commander had the authority to leave any officer behind whom he felt was unsuitable for deployment. When Sobel heard Major Strayer was going to drop one of his officers from the manifest, he went to battalion headquarters and made such a spirited defense that Strayer agreed to keep the officer in the unit and actually pulled him to battalion staff in order to keep him away from troops.

  What bothered Easy Company’s officers, me included, was not Sobel’s emphasis on strict discipline, but his desire to lead by fear rather than example. Each evening he quizzed us on our field manual assignments, which he gave us daily. In his critiques, Sobel was very domineering. There was no give and take. His tone of voice was high-pitched, rasplike. He shouted rather than spoke in a normal way. It just irritated us to no end. Iron discipline the officers could tolerate, but armed with the ultimate authority to dismiss any man in the company, Sobel exceeded the boundaries of acceptable conduct in dealing with citizen-soldiers. If infractions of discipline were not found during inspections, he manufactured deficiencies to prove a point or to emphasize his authority as company commander. To the individual soldiers, Sobel’s propensity to find fault was pure chickenshit, so-named by former infantryman and noted author Paul Fussell because “it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.”

  At other times, our commander deliberately embarrassed the platoon leaders in front of their men. Not surprisingly, Sobel rapidly emerged as the central target of hate and scorn within Easy Company. One officer summed up our collective appraisal by stating that Sobel was dedicated to doing everything by the book, but he seemed to possess tunnel vision. He could not, or would not, see or anticipate the results of his disciplinary measures on the men. As a result Easy Company gave their loyalty and devotion to their platoon leaders, who in turn took care of their men the best they could and who softened Sobel’s dictatorial behavior. Several troopers, including Richard “Red” Wright, Terrence “Salty” Harris, and Lieutenant Walter Moore, however, sought an escape from Sobel’s wrath and they volunteered for the pathfinders.

  Any relationship between company commander and company officers that existed in Easy Company remained strictly professional. Captain Sobel had no friends within the company and few within the regiment. At the end of the day, he went one way, and we officers went the other, hoping not to run into him at the officers’ club. As training progressed through the first half of 1943, Sobel’s tactical ineptitude, coupled with his increasing paranoid behavior as our overseas deployment neared, led to the total loss of any confidence that remained in his leadership. So traumatic was my own relationship with Captain Sobel that sixty years after the war, it’s still painful remembering my initial meeting with him.

  Why then was Captain Sobel retained in command by Colonel Sink and Major Strayer? I suspect the answer lies in Easy Company’s performance vis-à-vis the other companies within the regiment. Sobel’s hard hand, for better or worse, resulted in a well-disciplined and physically conditioned airborne company. Senior officers tolerated Sobel’s erratic behavior because he produced the desired results. One indicator of Easy Company’s success within the 506th was reflected in the number of company officers who were pulled up to battalion and regimental headquarters. Senior commanders only assign the most talented officers to headquarters staffs. Colonel Sink and Major Strayer were no exception. Within the first eight months of the company’s existence, Lieutenants Matheson, Lavenson, Nixon, and Hester were all reassigned to 2dBattalion staff. Hester, Matheson, and Nixon remained on Strayer’s staff until Colonel Sink advanced them to regimental staff. For Matheson, the call to regiment occurred before D-Day. Hester was transferred to 3rd Battalion in Holland, while Nixon joined regimental staff during Bastogne. Lavenson was severely wounded outside Carentan. For the remainder of the war, every vacancy in battalion staff was filled by an officer from Easy Company. For that, Sobel deserved a portion of the credit. He was a satisfactory training officer, but he was definitely not a leader of troops. I suspect he did his best, but he was in the wrong job and that was hardly his fault. Having grown up in urban Chicago, he was ill-suited for the outdoor life required for the leader of an elite infantry unit. Nor was he cut out for the field grade officer. Better suited for administrative duties, Sobel stayed in Easy Company until imminent combat conditions dictated his reassignment—but that was all in the future.

  Interpersonal relationships and command problems aside, training at Toccoa remained as demanding as ever. After several weeks of intense physical training, Colonel Sink lined up a C-47 Dakota aircraft to qualify his officers before the bulk of the troops arrived for basic infantry training. The airstrip at Camp Toccoa had been constructed by leveling the top of “Dick’s Hill,” a medium-sized hill that the Le Tourneau Earth-Moving Company
had lopped off about halfway up and flattened for an airstrip. The landing strip was very short and built to take care of Piper Cubs, not Army C-47s. The length of the runway required that a C-47, in taking off with a load of jumpers, could just barely get airborne by the end of the strip. To reach flying speed, the pilot had to dive the plane parallel to the downward slope of the mountain. That was a real thrill. To land the plane, the pilot could not stop while going in a straight line, so, as he came near the edge of the mountain, he had to turn left or right, as the wing of the plane extended over the edge of the slope. It was much safer to jump from the plane than to land in it.

  To determine who would serve as jumpmaster of the first contingent of officers, Sink conducted a “Junior Olympics.” The competition consisted of the best time up and down Currahee, most push-ups, most chin-ups, and the best time through the obstacle course. First Lieutenant Wally Moore was the only man to beat me on that run up Currahee when my legs cramped. I won the overall competition, however, and was rewarded by becoming number one jumper in the first stick to jump at Toccoa. As the aircraft climbed to 1,000 feet, it circled over the drop zone and decelerated to around ninety miles per hour. A Regular Army sergeant instructed us to “stand up and hook up.” Hooking my static line to the anchor cable, I placed my left foot on the edge of the open door. Gazing down to the drop zone, I looked over the cornfields below and placed both hands on the outside edge of the plane. The green light came on and the sergeant yelled, “Go!”

  Out I stepped into thin air and the inexorable force of nature took over as gravity carried me downward. It was an exhilarating feeling, but I experienced no sensation of falling. On my initial jump, I almost caught my chute in the high-tension line running through the cornfield that was also our landing field. Having landed safely, I was back up with the other officers until we all made five jumps by evening. We were now airborne qualified and could “blouse our boots,” the traditional mark of an airborne soldier. Colonel Sink ran three or four groups of officers through this system of qualification before the plane had an accident while landing on the field. He determined that this method of qualification was too dangerous, so the remainder of the regiment qualified at Fort Benning. That night the officers congregated at the officers’ club to celebrate our newly acquired status as airborne officers. The liquor flowed freely and I received my share of good-natured ribbing because I was a teetotaler.

  Every soldier who endures basic training emerges with stories that evolve with passing years. Both Sink and Strayer developed innovative training programs to bolster our morale and to foster unit cohesion. Before the regiment left Toccoa, Colonel Sink directed that a final physical test be conducted to eliminate unsuitable men from the regiment. Companies were rotated through the testing center, with noncommissioned officers from other battalions judging the individual stations. One of the men, Burt Christianson, remembered that the day before the test, Easy Company was primed and ready, confident that the men were now in the best physical conditioning of their young lives. On the day of the test, we began with the obstacle course. Each soldier received ten points if he successfully negotiated the course in three minutes. For every three seconds under three minutes, he earned an extra point. From the obstacle course, Easy Company marched to the push-up area, where each trooper was required to do thirty push-ups for ten points. For each additional push-up, another point was awarded to the contestant. Many members of the company had placed wagers on Captain Sobel’s inability to do thirty push-ups, but he successfully passed this station. Next up was the standing broad jump, also worth ten points with additional points for additional distance.

  Sink’s decathlon continued with the pull-up station, where each trooper had to do six overhand pull-ups to the chin from a hanging position using a horizontal bar. The next event was to run at a ten-foot wall, leap up to catch the top of it, and then pull oneself over for ten points. This was followed by a duck-walk for fifty yards in thirty-five seconds, a feat that was far more difficult than it sounds. The 100-yard dash was next over a field where the green grass was about four inches high. To obtain the required ten points, you had to cover the ground in thirteen seconds, not too hard except by this point each member of the company was near exhaustion. The final event was the one mile run over a half-mile course. When a soldier reached the turnaround point, he shouted his name and received his time. If you completed the mile in six minutes, you received ten points and another ten points if you made the half-mile in three minutes. The men who received the highest scores in Easy Company in the physical competition were Burt Christenson, Gordon Carson, George Rainer, Carwood Lipton, and Robert Van Klinken. Their collective reward included bragging rights in the company and the opportunity to represent the company in the battalion competition the following day.

  Much has also been written about the “Hog and Innards Problem” over Thanksgiving. This sounds gross, but it actually wasn’t that bad. The setup for the exercise consisted of stringing barbed wire on top of stakes about eighteen inches high. This ended up being like a net, covering an area approximately twenty feet wide and fifty to sixty feet long. The ground was covered with hog entrails—hearts, livers, intestines, the works. And then, to make sure you kept your head and butt down, two .30-caliber light machine guns were set up to fire live ammunition over the top of the barbed wire. The barrels of the machine guns rested on 2'' x 4'' supports and the legs of the tripods were sandbagged down. For a basic infantry training exercise, this resembled a real combat atmosphere. We had a real incentive to keep our heads and butts down in the hog guts. I thought it was an excellent exercise, and it’s one everyone remembered.

  The most grueling exercise Easy Company endured during our time at Toccoa was the field march to Atlanta, a distance of 118 miles, during the period December 1 to December 4, 1942. Some reports say the march was 112 miles, others 115 miles. Who cares? It was a killer! Prior to deploying the regiment to Fort Benning, Colonel Sink had discovered a newspaper article that said the Japanese had conducted a forced march of 100 miles in seventy-two hours down the Malayan Peninsula. Determined to demonstrate that his men could better the Japanese mark, Sink selected 2d Battalion to prove his point while 1st Battalion traveled to Columbus, Georgia, by train and 3d Battalion marched directly to Fort Benning from Atlanta to begin airborne training. Lieutenant Sal Matheson, who had joined battalion staff as adjutant, laid out the course for Major Strayer. The march was conducted during unusually severe weather conditions with full field equipment less rolls. Private First Class Smith remembered that the march started out with the assumption that the battalion had landed in hostile territory and had only its regular war rations and equipment. Approximately 100 miles of the march was made over rough and muddy roads, with temperatures dipping below freezing every day. Of the 586 men who initiated the march, only twelve failed to complete the journey. The elapsed time to complete the entire exercise was seventy-five hours and fifteen minutes according to the battalion’s letter of commendation, with the actual marching time of thirty-three hours and thirty minutes.

  Seven miles outside the gates of Camp Toccoa, a cold winter rain turned to snow as the battalion began its trek toward Atlanta. The first day out, we covered forty-four miles, followed by forty miles on the second day. My worst memory was the morning of the third day. It had been raining the entire preceding day so that when we camped late that night, we were in mud to the tops of our boots. When we lay down to sleep, we were in the mud. I took my boots off and put them by my head in the mud. During the night the temperature dropped dramatically and the mud froze, so when I awoke, the sleeping bag was frozen in the mud and I was stiff and sore all over. But the worst part was that my boots were frozen stiff and I could hardly get them on, even with the laces loosened all the way. The lesson I learned that morning, and I’ve never forgotten, was to always get your boots or shoes nice and wide and a little on the long side. Your feet always swell under severe stress.

  PFC Robert T. Smith described t
he field march as “the most miserable experience” he ever had. By the end of the hike, Smith’s knees and ankles were so swollen that he could hardly walk for three days afterward. Another of Easy Company’s men, Gordon Carson, remembered that those four days were the worst four days he had ever spent. Beginning on Tuesday at 7:30 A.M., the company marched in the cold and rain through the mud and rain in the Georgia back hills. We stopped to eat at 12:15 P.M. and resumed the march an hour later, not stopping until we reached the bivouac area at 8:45 P.M. The wind was so high the men couldn’t keep their fires going. Tuesday night, said Carson, “was the most uncomfortable night I ever spent in my life.” Tuesday, Carson was never colder; Wednesday, he was never more tired. I vividly recall seeing Floyd Talbert, one of our best soldiers, slugging along with his machine gun. I can still see the determination on Talbert’s face. Later we developed a personal friendship that transcended rank. Talbert was athletic and dedicated. You knew if your life were on the line, he would come through. Another of my 2d Platoon troopers, DeWitt Lowery not only carried his light machine gun, but also the company’s faithful mascot, “Currahee,” in his backpack. Second Battalion had adopted Currahee shortly after the majority of troopers had arrived at Toccoa. He stayed with Easy Company long enough to see all the qualified paratroopers receive their hard-earned wings on graduation day.

  Dog and Fox Companies shared equally in Easy’s hardships. Private First Class Leonard Hicks of Fox Company remembered the freezing rain that drenched everything and everyone the first day out. As his pain increased, he began hallucinating, claiming that at one point he saw two or three Johnny Rebs watching the battalion as they trudged through the Georgian woods. The miserable weather also affected Fox Company’s 1st Sergeant Willie Morris, whose usual enthusiasm was waning as the day progressed. Aided by his buddies, Private Hicks and the remainder of 2d Battalion reached the campus of Oglethorpe University on the evening of the third day.