Beyond Band of Brothers

by Major Dick Winters

  Another odd memory of that night occurs to me. After sitting there for a while, I felt as though the foxhole was getting smaller. Then I noticed the ice frosting on the sides of the wall. So, I just stiffened my shoulders and rubbed along the sides, clearing off the frost.

  The battlefront remained relatively quiet for the next week. Second Battalion patrolled the snow-covered woods to our front continuously. January 8 brought an extremely heavy snowstorm. Another heavy German artillery bombardment on the 506th’s positions on January 10 inflicted 126 casualties. Two days later, 2d Battalion attached one company to 3d Battalion for an assault to take Foy. I selected Easy Company to lead the attack. The night before the attack I sat in my foxhole, reading the Infantry Manual on Attack by candlelight. When I think of that—lugging an infantry manual to Bastogne—I should have taken a Hershey chocolate bar instead. I had that manual memorized, but this time that manual wasn’t advanced enough for the situation for which I was preparing. It just seemed too elementary. As I studied the manual, Sergeant Lipton arrived and asked to discuss a highly sensitive matter with me. Lipton expressed his concern that Lieutenant Dike was not up to the task to lead the following day’s assault. I listened intently, but I had little choice other than to acknowledge his concerns and to tell him that I would investigate the matter. I then decided that I would stand on the line of departure and observe the attack when it began the following morning.

  At early dawn, I personally briefed Lieutenant Dike on the conduct of the attack. I then ordered 1st Lieutenant Frank Reis to place two sections of light machine guns on the edge of the woods facing Foy. The guns would provide covering fire as Easy Company moved through the snow across approximately 250 yards of open field to the outskirts of the village. Easy Company crossed the line of departure at 0900 and proceeded to cross the field. The covering fire worked to perfection, but each time the assistant gunner changed the belt, I held my breath through that brief lull of fire. The Germans fired only a few random rifle shots from an outpost on the west end of the village. It was tough going for the men through that snow in a skirmisher formation, but Dike maintained a good formation as the company moved at a decent pace. Then suddenly, Lieutenant Dike halted the company about seventy-five yards from the edge of Foy. Everybody hunkered down in the snow and stayed there for no apparent reason. I called Lieutenant Dike on the radio, but I received no response. The company was like a bunch of sitting ducks out there in the snow. Colonel Sink, who was observing the attack, turned and hollered, “What are you going to do, Winters?”

  “I’m going!” I yelled and I grabbed my M-1 and moved out to take command of Easy Company in order to get them moving again. I had only taken a few steps when I decided that my job was to lead the battalion, not a company. I turned around and walked back and there was Lieutenant Ronald C. Speirs, a natural killer, standing in front of me.

  “Speirs!” I said. “Take over that company and relieve Dike and take that attack on in.”

  Why Speirs was standing next to me I had no idea. I just turned around and there he was. It was just a roll of the dice that he was standing there when I needed someone. I was glad it was Speirs. I respected him as a combat leader because he made good decisions in combat, though his decisions after the battle—off the line—were often flawed. On D-Day, Speirs and his men had disabled the fourth gun in the battery outside Brecourt Manor. Stories later circulated throughout 2d Battalion that Speirs possessed a “killer’s instinct” and that he had once shot one of his recalcitrant sergeants in Normandy on D+1. It was difficult to verify such a story, but the soldiers evidently believed it at face value. Naturally there was more to the story than initially met the eye. D Company had been fighting all night June 5–6, and all day on D-Day. The night of June 6 gave the men on outposts no more than two to three hours rest before starting the battle on June 7. D Company countermarched throughout the night as officers attempted to array the platoons in the proper alignment to cross the line of departure the following morning. The ensuing battle proved to be one of the most confused of the war. As the evening progressed, the tension of the upcoming battle, coupled with the fact that these men had been without rest since early morning on June 5, resulted in near exhaustion. A number of paratroopers and their leaders were actually sleepwalking and unable to comprehend orders. One observer noted that, “Officers and men had kept going too long and were now traveling on their nerve.”

  In spite of what rumors prevailed concerning Lieutenant Speirs’s actions, what actually occurred that evening was D Company received orders to halt its attack toward Ste. Come du Mont in order for regimental headquarters to coordinate a rolling barrage in support of the ground assault. Regimental artillery had designated fifteen targets to be shelled in the vicinity of Ste. Come du Mont. To initiate the attack, regimental artillery fire was adjusted back toward American lines, before moving forward again in increments of 100 yards every four minutes. Colonel Strayer directed D Company to follow this “rolling barrage” toward the objective. Lieutenant Speirs then passed the word down the line to his squad leaders to hold their current position until the artillery fire was coordinated. One of his sergeants ignored the orders. Speirs repeated the order and the sergeant again refused to obey. Spears then shot the sergeant between the eyes. In doing so, Speirs probably saved the lives of the rest of the squad. To his credit, Speirs immediately reported the incident to his company commander, Captain Jerre S. Gross. Gross was killed the next day during the continued assault on Ste. Come du Mont, so the incident was not pursued. Certainly none of Speirs’s soldiers said anything to higher headquarters. I think the platoon members exercised sound judgment—they might have been next. Secondly, if anybody had taken it upon himself to return Speirs’s fire, he would have had to pay an unknown price. I credit the men with a good instinct for survival.

  Other rumors centered on Speirs’s alleged killing of six German prisoners of war. My personal contact with Lieutenant Speirs after D-Day was somewhat limited until I relinquished command of Easy Company. As battalion executive officer, I knew each of the battalion’s officers and could analyze each leader’s strengths and weaknesses. My own assessment was that Lieutenant Speirs was one of the finest combat officers in 2d Battalion. His men respected him, but they also feared him because Speirs had clearly established the fact that he was a killer. He worked hard to earn a reputation as a killer and he often killed for shock value. The senior leadership of the battalion and regiment must have heard the allegations surrounding Speirs, but in their desperation to keep qualified officers who were not afraid of combat, they chose either to ignore or not to investigate the charges. When I first heard the stories, I was speechless. What he did in Normandy was unbelievable, inexcusable. In today’s army, Speirs would have been court-martialed and charged with atrocities, but we desperately needed bodies, officers who led by example and were not afraid to engage the enemy. Speirs fit the bill.

  In any event, Speirs ran forward at the double quick as soon as I directed him to take command of the company. Confronting Lieutenant Dike by a haystack behind which the command group had sought refuge, Speirs seized command of the company. Dike offered no resistance. Lieutenant Speirs then sprinted across the front to locate I Company, which was on E Company’s flank. A German 88 opened up on him as he raced toward Foy. “Damn impressive,” was how Lipton later described Speir’s dash across the “no-man’s land” that separated the German and American lines. After coordinating with I Company, Speirs returned across the same field and led Easy Company into Foy. With support of Lieutenant Reis’s machine guns that were laying down an effective base of fire, Easy Company captured Foy in house-to-house fighting. By 1100 Nixon reported that Foy was secure. In the process of taking the town, Easy Company had captured twenty prisoners, while suffering one man killed and several wounded. Without Speirs’s intervention, however, the casualties would have been excessive.

  In retrospect, what we had just witnessed during the attack on Foy was a classic
case of combat fatigue at the worst possible time. We had observed indications of this earlier, but Dike had been sent to us as a favorite protégé of somebody from regimental headquarters. That evening Colonel Sink called for a meeting at regimental headquarters for all the principal parties involved in this attack. Lieutenant Colonel Strayer was present and Sink asked, “What are you going to do about Company E?”

  Strayer turned to me and repeated the question, “What are you going to do about Company E, Winters?”

  I gave no explanation, but just replied, “Relieve Lieutenant Dike and put Speirs in command.” That settled it. End of meeting. Colonel Sink immediately approved my recommendation. Speirs was now in command and would remain in command of Easy Company until the end of the war. Of the six officers who commanded Easy Company since its activation at Toccoa—Sobel, Meehan, myself, Heyliger, Dike, and now Speirs—“Sparky” Speirs commanded the company longer than any of his predecessors. In spite of his alleged misconduct, his contribution to the unit’s success cannot be underestimated. As far as Lieutenant Dike was concerned, he sure as hell did not return to my battalion. He just packed his bag and left. Later we discovered that he was transferred to regimental headquarters as an assistant operations officer.

  One other memory of that day and that attack deserves special mention. It, too, left me in a foul mood. As the men were carrying the wounded back from Foy, I was suddenly aware of two photographers standing beside me, taking pictures of this detail. I was not sure where they came from or who they belonged to. I only know that I had never seen them before. When the casualty detail reached about twenty to twenty-five yards from the woods, well out of danger of any possible fire from Foy, one photographer put down his camera and dashed out to help carry one of the wounded soldiers. He grabbed the soldier in such a manner that he got as much blood on the sleeve and front of his new, clean, heavily fleeced jacket as possible. Then this photographer turned toward his buddy, who was still taking pictures, and put on a big act of being utterly exhausted as he struggled across those final yards to the woods. At that point, he immediately dropped out of the picture. What a phony! This just topped off my day for phonies.

  The next day regiment directed 2d Battalion to continue the attack to seize the high ground around Noville. When word came down for this attack, it pissed me off. I could not believe that after what we had gone through and accomplished, after all the casualties we had suffered, that Colonel Sink was ordering us to lead another attack. H-Hour was scheduled for 1200. This was another point of not using good judgment by regiment or division command. Why would you send men across one and a half miles of wide-open fields to Recogne-Cobru-Noville, through snow almost knee-deep, in the middle of a bright sunny day? The Germans were sitting on the high ground with tanks concealed in hull-defilade under the cover of buildings. Why not attack in early morning, at the first light of day, so that we would have had the cover of darkness for at least part of the time?

  That day I earned my pay. Before we crossed the line of departure, I recognized that our salvation just might be that there was a fairly deep shoulder in the terrain on the southwest side of Noville. If I sent the column straight for it, I could pick up more cover as we approached Noville. We were fortunate. The enemy did not have any strong points on the shoulder and the plan worked perfectly. I placed the entire battalion in single file to cut through the snow. It was a highly dangerous and not very tactical formation. As we approached Noville, 1st Battalion was about 400 yards to our left and slightly to the rear of our column. From time to time, I glanced over to see how they were doing. They were being cut up by direct fire from the German 88s from those tanks in Noville. The enemy fire was striking their line with devastating effect. Men were literally flying through the air. Years later in the movie Dr. Zhivago, I saw troops crossing snow-covered fields, being shot by cannons from the edge of the woods, and men flying through the air. Those scenes seemed very real to me; I could sure relate that experience with the attack on Noville.

  We worked very hard getting across those fields and getting snuggled up to the underside of that shoulder by about 1530. By dark, I had worked the battalion around to a draw on the southeast corner of town. To do that, we advanced through fire from some machine guns in Noville that were covering the draw. To counter this fire, we set up a couple of light machine guns of our own. The Germans would fire; we would give them a return burst and at the same time, we sent a group of eight to ten men across the draw and a stream to the other side. It became a cat-and-mouse game. It took a lot of patience, but we accomplished it without any casualties. By dark, 2d Battalion was in position for the attack the next day. The night was the coldest night of my life and I think the same went for every other man in the outfit. We had worked hard all afternoon and we were dripping wet with sweat. After the sun went down, it grew bitterly cold. All we could do was shiver. At one point during the night, I attempted to rest on a little knoll of ground. In no time, I just shivered myself down that knoll to the bottom of the draw. I soon gave up trying to catch any sleep.

  Without sharing this thought with anybody at the time, at one point I considered conducting a night attack rather than standing there all night freezing to death. For some reason I had the feeling that the Germans had pulled out. I quickly reconsidered my alternate plan, realizing that the chances were too great that we could end up shooting some of our own men in the dark. The next morning at first light, we jumped off the attack on Noville. Resistance was light. The enemy had evacuated Noville, leaving nothing more than a small rear guard to conduct a delaying action while the rest of the enemy retreated. We captured a few prisoners, among whom were two junior officers. Lieutenant Ed Thomas, my intelligence officer (S-2), tried to obtain some worthwhile information with no success. On January 16, 2d Battalion continued the attack and cleared the villages of Rachamps and Hardigny. This was our final attack in Belgium and marked an end to the major combat engagements of Easy Company and 2d Battalion, 506th PIR. Though we would routinely conduct combat patrols to establish contact with the enemy, never again would the battalion conduct large scale attacks against determined enemy resistance.

  Apparently General Taylor was satisfied with our efforts. On the day following the capture of Noville, Taylor and members of his staff met with Brigadier General Gerry Higgins, his assistant division commander, and Colonel Sink to conduct an impromptu map reconnaissance adjacent to the Noville town hall to discuss future strategy. The next day the 17th Airborne Division relieved the 101st Airborne Division on the front line. Our division was ordered into Corps Reserve. The battle for Bastogne was finally over, but the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division had written the brightest chapter in its combat history. It had been a costly campaign, but the American army learned valuable lessons in conducting winter warfare. One of the most valuable lessons was the importance of keeping your ears tuned to the noises of the night. A skilled soldier can recognize the sound of feet breaking the crust of the snow and the implications of a motor turning over in the distance. Radio operators learned not to talk directly into the microphone because the voice’s condensation freezes the microphone and renders the radio inoperable. A light coat of oil on a weapon proved more effective than a thick layer of oil. The most important lesson lay in the reliance on common sense and field expediency, neither of which was covered in the elementary field manuals that addressed offensive and defensive operations.

  I am not sure anyone who lived through Bastogne doesn’t carry the scars of that ferocious campaign. I was extremely proud that 2d Battalion’s lines were never broken. No enemy breakthrough or penetration occurred. Second Battalion held firm. Again, the performance of the American paratrooper in the war’s deadliest campaign was the factor that kept Easy Company troopers, and by extension the remainder of the division, bonded so unusually close.

  11

  The Final Patrols

  Unbeknownst to the 101st Airborne Division, which was fighting for its very survival at Ba
stogne, on New Year’s Eve the Germans launched a diversionary attack in Alsace to divert Eisenhower’s attention from the Ardennes. Code-named Nordwind, the offensive ran up against Alexander Patch’s Seventh (U.S.) Army. Seventh Army had first landed in southern France in August 1944 and formed the southern terminus of Eisenhower’s broad front approach to the Rhine. Once Allied headquarters directed Patton northward to relieve Bastogne, Patch’s army extended its boundary to take over the portion of the line formerly held by Patton. The German attack initially made substantial headway, forcing Patch and his senior headquarters, Lieutenant General Jacob Devers’s VI Army Group, to request reinforcements. With no available reserves at his disposal, Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division. On January 19, Colonel Sink’s 506th PIR was moving to the rear when new orders directed them to conduct a road movement 160 miles to Alsace along the German-French border. The thought of stopping another enemy breakthrough left me thinking, “My God, don’t they have anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?”

  The next day we boarded trucks and began the convoy over snow-covered, slippery highways. The route took us from Bastogne through Bellefontaine, Virton, Etain, Toul, Nancy, to Alsace. We arrived at Drulingen on January 22 and immediately were placed into a reserve position. This gave me the opportunity to write a short letter to my friend DeEtta Almon in the States in which I attempted to summarize the previous month’s fighting and respond to a series of questions that she had posed. Rereading her previous letters, I noticed that she had again expressed disappointment at my lack of correspondence. That was understandable, but circumstances had been beyond my control. None of us would ever forget this past Christmas and New Year’s Day. My friend said she was full of fight, so I responded in kind. I wrote, “If you want to fight, you might as well do it now while I don’t have much zip left because I am a fighting man when I am strong. I might as well fight the Germans, the army, and you at the same time instead of individually. I feel like I can take care of the whole bunch and still not knock myself out. At least I am not really worried about a fight from you for all you can throw are strong words and right now they don’t even faze me. The words just sort of bounce off.” It was my first letter since we had departed Mourmelon for Bastogne. I then compared her letter to a close artillery shell—I just hit the dirt when I heard it coming, waited until the shrapnel stopped singing overhead, then I went about my way. Having endured a month on the line in freezing temperatures, nothing fazed me now. As I told my friend, “Sometimes a piece of spent shrapnel hits you, might leave your leg or arm stiff and a little black and blue, but you’re not hurt enough to stop. So it goes in any kind of a fight. You get hit, sure, you are bound to; but that doesn’t mean you’re out or that you’re even hurt, unless you want to think so.” I still had a job to do.