Beyond Band of Brothers

by Major Dick Winters

  In mid-July, the company moved within the confines of Camp Breckinridge, where barracks and hot showers provided a pleasant break from the dirt and grime in the field. The camp itself was a paradise in comparison to any place where we had been. Camp Breckinridge was in close proximity to a number of large towns and contained its share of large post exchanges (PX), theaters, and service clubs, which provided an outlet for the soldiers who had so recently spent an inordinate amount of time in a field environment. Roughly a third of the men received ten-day furloughs in rotation before moving to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in late July to prepare for overseas deployment. Upon their return from furlough, the entire 101st Airborne Division boarded trains en route to North Carolina. Fort Bragg was the staging area for deployment to a combat theater. Easy Company was brought up to full strength and each soldier was outfitted with new gear. The company spent a lot of time on the firing ranges, ensuring that their individual weapons were properly zeroed. I busied myself with my normal administrative duties but my anxiety mounted as the departure date neared. As company executive officer, one of my responsibilities was serving as postal officer, a laborious task that consumed much of my time. Still, I was caught up with the impending deployment, though no one knew with any certainty whether we were heading to the Pacific or to Europe.

  Reflecting on the previous year’s training in Easy Company, I was surprised at just how much I enjoyed the men with whom I served. You would think that after two months of not sleeping on a bed, dirty clothes, and trudging up and down the Tennessee hills, one would relish the peaceful surroundings of Fort Bragg. My only complaint was the emergency rations that they claimed had been especially designed for the paratroopers, K-rations and D-rations, both of which could turn a soldier’s stomach in short order. If you read the list of what the rations contained, they sounded great, but to eat the rations over a period of time was more than a normal fellow could take. The meals were just too concentrated.

  While at Fort Bragg, Colonel Sink decided that all officers should have a new trench coat–style overcoat. He also wanted the officers’ club to stock up on bourbon whiskey. Each officer was assessed for a coat and whiskey. I didn’t drink, never did drink, so I’ll never know why they picked me for the detail of going to Philadelphia to pick up the coats and whiskey. Buying the coats was no problem. I had a list of the sizes and number of coats that I wanted and the name of the supplier to contact. The bourbon was another matter.

  This was wartime, everything was rationed, and I was supposed to buy a truckload of Southern Comfort. I rode around Philadelphia in a taxicab, looked in directories, asked for advice, and got nowhere. I then went back home to Lancaster and called regimental headquarters for advice. The next day Lieutenant Colonel Chase, the regimental executive officer, called and gave me an address in New York City for a distributor for Schenley’s whiskey. I took a train to New York, found the distributor, and was introduced to a pudgy man sitting in a chair with his foot on a stool. My initial impression was that this man had gout. He was surrounded by more beautiful, well-groomed secretaries than I’d ever seen in my life. To say that at this point I was ill at ease hardly describes my feelings, but I had a mission—to get that bourbon or face a firing squad. I was in a totally foreign atmosphere: a kid from a Mennonite family background facing a bloated executive with all the beautiful secretaries, and he the only man who could help me. I told him my mission and what I wanted. He smiled and said, “Yes, I could take care of that order.” In my view, right then and there, that man did his part in helping to win World War II. I spent the next hour endorsing money orders. I had been so na��ve that I had converted my money to small denominations of $20 and $50 money orders.

  On August 22, 1943, the entire division boarded trains and headed north to Camp Shanks, thirty miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. The weather was crisp and cool, with the Hudson River Valley arrayed in beautiful autumn colors that reminded me of the hills in southern Pennsylvania. Camp Shanks, built on 2,000 acres in Orangeburg, New York, was the largest World War II army embarkation camp in the United States. Named after Major General David C. Shanks, commanding general of the New York port during World War I, Camp Shanks opened in January 1943. Over the course of the war, 1.3 million soldiers processed for overseas deployment through the camp, nicknamed “Last Stop USA.” Fully three-fourths of the soldiers who participated in D-Day and a total of seventeen divisions destined for Europe passed through its walls. En route to Camp Shanks, I sat in a car with Lewis Nixon and Harry Welsh as we discussed our ultimate destination. As we continued north, we knew for certain that we were European-bound. The 506th PIR closed in on Camp Shanks on September 1. As we detrained, the men formed columns of fours and marched to their assigned barracks. Each barracks was twenty by one hundred feet and contained two rows of bunks and three coal-burning pot-bellied stoves that provided minimal heating. The movement to the barracks was a long haul, with each trooper loaded to the gills with equipment. All hoped for a brief furlough to New York City, but the NOCs kept us busy with endless rounds of inoculations. Burt Christenson remarked that he had been given so many shots that his “arms hung from his body like limp rope.” When the men were given passes to New York, they were forced to remove their jump boots and their airborne patches from their uniforms for security reasons. Higher headquarters feared that German spies would identify the 101st Airborne Division and ascertain its eventual destination.

  Within days Easy Company moved to the port of embarkation. It was a short train ride to the New Jersey docks at Weehawken, where a harbor boat ferried troops to Pier 88. At the pier, troop ships were tied up for boarding. Loading the ship that would take the 506th PIR to England took nearly a full day. In our minds was a letter that Captain Sobel had sent to our parents, in which he extolled the training and dedication of their respective sons and in which he encouraged loved ones to write frequent letters to “arm him with a fighting heart.”

  One of our officers, Lieutenant Fred “Moose” Heyliger, received notice as we boarded the S.S. Samaria that his wife had just given birth to a boy, “Little Moose.” The receipt of this news forced the rest of the company to listen to Moose sing songs all night as he celebrated the birth of his son. The rest of us were filled with trepidation, but each trooper took consolation in the fact that he was part of the best damned unit in the entire U.S. Army. As we walked up the gangplank of the Samaria, everyone knew that there was no turning back. Easy Company was off to war.

  4

  Old Beyond My Years

  In early September 1943, Easy Company began its transatlantic passage aboard the British steamer S.S. Samaria. As we departed New York Harbor and passed the Statue of Liberty, I wondered if I would ever be coming back. Had I seen my family for the last time? Would we reach England without encountering any German submarines? Knowing that I was in the paratroopers was some consolation even though each of us knew our mission required us to be dropped behind enemy lines and that we would have to fight outnumbered until we could be relieved. None of the men had any combat experience or had any idea what combat would be like. As New York faded on the horizon, I stood and searched my soul, saying a silent prayer that God would allow me to return home.

  What I remember most was the filthy condition of the ship. The excessive dirt, the terrible food, and the fact that we washed our mess kits in a garbage pail nearly turned my stomach. Forrest Guth, a trooper from Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had joined the paratroopers with his two friends Roderick Strohl and Carl Fenstermacher recalled that the prevalent rumor on board was that the British crew consumed American food, while the paratroopers were forced to eat British food. What struck him most was the cooks serving fish chowder for breakfast. After ten days on the S.S. Samaria, I felt as though I had lost all my muscle tone, especially in my legs. The thought occurred to me that if we had to come off this ship and go directly into combat, it would have been mighty rough. Arriving in Liverpool on September 15, we were immediately tr
ansported to Aldbourne, in Wiltshire, approximately eighty miles west of London on the Salisbury Plain. Aldbourne was a typically quaint English town with houses constructed of brick and stone. Flowers were in bloom and most homes had well-kept yards with colorful gardens. As company executive officer, I commanded the company in Captain Sobel’s absence and I handled the administrative and logistical requirements as Easy Company settled into their new billets. Within days of our arrival in England, our troops occupied their new barracks, which were Nissan huts and tarpaper shacks, heated by two large pot-bellied stoves. Officers were crammed into a huge manor house until private housing could be obtained.

  Aldbourne would be Easy Company’s home for the next nine months, until the unit moved to the departure airfield for the invasion of France. The initial week in the English countryside was dedicated to orientation to our new environment. To ensure American soldiers understood the intricacies of Allied cooperation, the United States War Department distributed a pamphlet to American servicemen who were going to Britain to prepare for the invasion of occupied Europe. This pamphlet’s avowed aim was to prepare these young American GIs for life in a very different country and to prevent any friction between them and the local populace. Printed in 1942, the Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain attracted a great deal of attention for its candid views of how Britons were viewed on our side of the Atlantic. The booklet cautioned the Americans on how to conduct themselves. Included were orders not “to fight old wars and to bring up old grievances” from the American Revolutionary period so as Hitler would be unable “to make his propaganda effective” and separate the Atlantic partners. If he could do that, his “chance of winning might return.” We were also told not to use phrases and colloquialisms that our allies might find offensive. Two unpardonable sins would be to comment on the British Government or politics or to criticize the King. The War Department assured us that the British would welcome us as friends and allies, but we ought to remember that crossing the ocean did not automatically make us heroes. There were “thousands of housewives in aprons and youngsters in knee pants in Britain who had lived through more high explosives in air raids than many soldiers saw in first class barrages in the last war.” In short, our government directed us to behave ourselves and neither be condescending, nor “a show off” because Americans were routinely more highly paid than the British Tommy. Accordingly, Easy Company conducted tours, visited local bars, met village officials, and generally became acquainted with English customs. We soon found that the English were similar to Americans in many aspects, but in other ways it was as if we were from different planets. Plumbing, electric light wiring, furniture, heating, and cooking seemed light-years behind what I was used to in the United States. Most Britons had never eaten popcorn, marshmallows, hot dogs, and other eatables that they characterized as strictly Yank chow. Nor did they possess the large and varied assortment of expressive adjectives that we did and often an expression of ours meant something entirely different to them.

  Following our first week in England, officers were billeted in private homes. Looking for an opportunity to escape the crammed conditions of our not-so-spacious manor, I went to a local church where I was fortunate to meet a family named Barnes. The Barneses had recently lost a son in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. I first met this couple following services on my first Sunday in England. Walking to the adjacent cemetery, I sat on a bench and took time for personal reflection and simply to enjoy some solitude. As I looked over the cemetery, I noticed an elderly couple tending to one of the graves. They then sat on an adjacent bench and the three of us talked for nearly an hour. They told me their names were Mr. and Mrs. Francis Barnes and that they were paying respects to their son Robert. The Barneses invited me to join them for afternoon tea, and I graciously accepted their invitation. I saw them periodically over the course of the next several weeks, and when our unit requested billeting within the local community, the Barnes family volunteered to host two officers as long as I was one of them.

  Along with Lieutenant Harry Welsh, I moved in and the Barneses soon adopted me as a full-fledged member of their family. The Barneses also had a child from London—Elaine Stevens, thirteen years old, a refugee from the London bombing—as a houseguest. Because my sister, Ann, was also thirteen years old, they became penpals. My personal quarters were with the family in a room over their grocery store. The room wasn’t big and we slept on army cots, but the comforts of home were a pleasant respite from the crowds and the barracks. While Harry Welsh spent his free time at a pub that was only a stone’s throw from our room, I spent my evenings with the Barnes family.

  Life with the Barneses suited me perfectly. I greatly appreciated what Francis Barnes and his wife were doing for me. They provided me a home, a family, and a fireplace to come to at the end of a day’s training. They adopted me as a son. Francis Barnes was a lay preacher at one of Aldbourne’s three churches. On Sundays I always had a special invitation to come to their church. Mr. Barnes would preach the sermon, Mrs. Barnes played the organ, and I wore my best dress uniform and sat front and center. Most Sundays I was the only soldier in church, but I know that without a spoken word, everybody knew my lifestyle.

  A typical evening began with Mrs. Barnes knocking on my door before 9:00 P.M. and saying, “Lieutenant Winters, would you like to come down and listen to the news and have a spot of tea?” Sitting around a smoldering chunk of peat in the fireplace, we listened to the BBC. Afterward, everybody would gather around the table and Mr. Barnes would read a passage from the Bible, then he would say a prayer, after which Mrs. Barnes would serve tea and biscuits or some fresh bread. Around 10:00 P.M., Mr. Barnes would then announce that it was time for bed.

  My association with the Barnes family was one of the most enjoyable experiences in my life. They prepared me mentally for the tasks that lay ahead. I had observed their personal suffering at the loss of their son and experienced similar feelings when I lost some of my men in Normandy and the subsequent campaigns. By giving me time to reflect and to study my manuals for the nine months prior to the invasion, the Barneses helped me develop my own personality and hone my leadership skills. This formative period of my life was very important in continuing to build the fundamental characteristics my parents had initiated, and they helped shape my life. Today I realize what the Barnes family did was help me develop the most fundamental element in good leadership—lead by example, live by setting a good example. They lived for nearly ten years after the war, and I still treasure the mementoes that they gave me. Years later I returned to Aldbourne with Stephen Ambrose and excused myself for a few minutes to place flowers on their graves. I then took a minute to reflect on this wonderful couple and sat on the same bench where we had first met so many years earlier.

  We were in England to prepare for war, not to tour the countryside, and the days were filled with intense training. Training monopolized six days of the week, with the average week consisting of prolonged marches, marksmanship, and simulated night attacks. Hikes of varying length, some up to twenty-five miles, were conducted, and there was special emphasis on physical conditioning. Map-reading remained an important component of every field exercise and every week Easy Company conducted a two- to three-day field training exercise. Captain Sobel continued to perform poorly in the field, further exasperating the platoon leaders and the men. He remained as tyrannical, inflexible, and paranoid as he had been at Toccoa. Tension was building within the company, particularly among the officers who bore the primary responsibility for preparing the men for combat.

  Nowhere was the pressure more apparent than on Sobel himself. Whereas the punishment he administered in the States was often mean and degrading, in England the punishment passed the point of normalcy to outright cruelty. If a man was late getting back to camp, instead of extra kitchen police (K.P.) duty, he had to dig a six-foot-by-six-foot pit with his entrenching tools at night after the day’s training. When the soldier was finished, Sobel would t
ell him “to fill it up.” Our commander’s inability to make decisions, coupled with his tactical incompetence, continued to alienate both officers and men alike. While Sobel was partially effective in matters where he controlled everything, he would be utterly helpless in combat where adaptability and initiative were keys to survival. The noncommissioned officers soon began grumbling and dissension spread throughout Easy. While such talk is always detrimental to the discipline in any unit, Sobel was simply not cut out to be a combat leader. While the men could tolerate a tough taskmaster, they were simply afraid to have Sobel lead them into combat. Within two months of arriving in England, things boiled over and I found myself in the middle of it. The ensuing confrontation between Captain Sobel and me brought out the best and worst qualities of leadership within Easy Company.