Beyond Band of Brothers

by Major Dick Winters

  World War II ended about as gloriously as I had ever hoped. Berchtesgaden was really the heart of Germany, not Berlin, and it was quite an honor to be in on the final drama. Reich Marshal Goering, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, generals by the dozen, and Germans by the thousands hurried to surrender and escape capture by the Russians. I had never seen anything like it, nor could I have imagined it. The enemy was backed up right into the mountains with no place to go. Then they threw in the towel and started coming out of the hills. Days before the final surrender, everyone knew it was over. Thank God, there just wasn’t any fighting!

  It was at Berchtesgaden on May 6 that the 506th PIR received the following communiqué from division headquarters: “Effective immediately all troops will stand fast on present positions. German Army Group G in this sector has surrendered. No firing on Germans unless fired upon. Full details, to be broadcast, will be issued by SHAEF.” For all intents, combat operations ceased with the receipt of this message. At 0241 hours, local time, May 7, General Eisenhower received the unconditional surrender of Germany at his headquarters at Reims. The Nazi surrender became effective at midnight. Word of the German capitulation immediately filtered down the echelons of command to my headquarters. VE-Day was officially proclaimed on May 8. Outside my command post, the sun climbed into a clear sky over Berchtesgaden. It was D-Day plus 335. The war in Europe was finally over.

  PART FOUR

  Finding Peace

  After a Lifetime of War

  We have won this war because our men are brave . . . not because destiny created us better than all other peoples. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than we are proud. I hope we can rejoice in victory—but humbly. The dead men would not want us to gloat.

  ERNIE PYLE, Brave Men

  13

  Occupation

  May 8, 1945—Victory in Europe—a day for which we had been fighting for over three years. War’s end brought little inner emotion, only a tired sense of relief. We held no formal victory celebrations, but the men conducted their private celebrations, courtesy of Reich Marshal Goering. Photographs of 2d Battalion’s paratroopers at Berchtesgaden give a good idea how happy the men were to have survived the carnage of war. Ernie Pyle, who perished in the war’s final campaign in the Pacific, had penned a final column to cover the end of the Nazi regime before he departed France in 1944. Like many of us, Pyle had had enough of war and needed a respite. As usual he summed up our collective emotions when he wrote: “Somehow it would seem sacrilegious to sing and dance—there were so many who would never sing and dance again. Far too many American boys have come to join the thousands who already had slept in France for a quarter of a century.” Aboard a naval ship enroute to Okinawa in late March 1945, Pyle penned his final thoughts on the war in northwest Europe, when he freely admitted that his “heart is still in Europe, and that’s why I am writing this column. It is to the boys who were my friends for so long. My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended.” He later added, “In the joyousness of high spirits it is easy for us to forget the dead. . . . But here are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world.” I numbered a good many of my men, all good paratroopers, among them. I thanked God that the killing had come to an end.

  Leave it to General Eisenhower to place the war in perspective. Ike distributed his “Victory Order of the Day” as soon as he announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. As usual, he paid tribute to the American G.I., whose “route through hundreds of miles was marked by graves of former comrades. Each of the fallen died as a member of a team to which you belong, bound together by a common love of liberty and a refusal to submit to enslavement.” The Supreme Commander urged each member of the Allied Expeditionary Force to “revere each honored grave, and to send comfort to the loved ones of comrades who could not live to see this day.” Forty-eight members of Easy Company, 506th PIR, alone had paid the last full measure of their devotion so that others could live in a world without tyranny. The war indeed had been a great crusade against the forces of totalitarianism. A steep price had been paid to liberate Europe. I was merely one survivor of the greatest war in the twentieth century. I wasn’t sure how to feel other than to express my gratitude that somehow I had emerged from this great struggle. I found it difficult to summarize my emotions.

  When I realized that the war was over, I felt like a retired fire horse. It’s over, I thought. I’m finished. I did not know what to do with myself, nor did I have much time to think about it. While Americans celebrated the end of the European war in Times Square, the war was sure as hell not over for me. Second Battalion was in the middle of thousands and thousands of German prisoners of war and recently liberated displaced persons, all waiting for someone to tell them what to do. After leaving Berchtesgaden, the 101st Airborne Division began the unenviable task of military occupation. The division’s area of responsibility was a fifty-mile square region just across the border in Austria. On May 8, Colonel Sink ordered 2d Battalion to move out that night at 2200 for Zell-am-See, some thirty miles south of Berchtesgaden. Our convoy consisted of all U.S. Army trucks available, plus any captured German trucks that remained in working order. Each company gave top priority to its truckload of booze from Goering’s officers’ club. Captured German limousines were left behind in Berchtesgaden, though few remained in working order. The convoy moved out with the headlights on full beam. There was no longer need for security. In the back of the trucks the men remained in a party mood. For the past year the normal practice for the troops in a night convoy had been to catch as much sleep as possible since they never knew what was expected of them when they reached their destination. The evening of VE-Day, however, was different. That night was a happy night: a night to celebrate, a night to remember.

  Without realizing it, during the night we bypassed Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the commander-in-chief of the German armies in Italy and his staff, who were four miles back toward Berchtesgaden as we drove through Saalfelden. He would later turn himself in to General Taylor on May 10. One by one the bigwigs of the Nazi Party were rounded up. Colonel Sink accepted the surrender of General Tolsdorf on May 7. The 101st Airborne also bagged Julius Streicher, the famous Jew-baiter, and Franz Xavier Schwarz, treasurer of the Nazi Party, along with Frau Goering. Streicher would later be condemned to death during the Nuremberg trials and executed on October 16, 1946.

  At dawn on May 9, our ragtag convoy arrived at Zell-am-See. This part of Austria was a popular resort region containing beautiful country, picturesque scenery, and clear mountain lakes. Around the lakes stood numerous mansions that Nazi officials had enjoyed since the Anschluss incorporated Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in 1938. As we drove into town, Austrian civilians and the German soldiers stared in amazement and utter disbelief at the sight of our invading army. I can’t imagine what must have gone through their minds as we rolled into town. They certainly could not have been impressed with our military appearance. Unlike the highly immaculate German army in which equipment and appearance were maintained at a high state of readiness, Sink’s paratroopers arrived in nondescript trucks. We had no big tanks, no large artillery, and our uniforms were old, beat-up army fatigue pants and blouses. The German soldiers outnumbered us many times, and their dress and military appearance was far more impressive than ours. Had I been an Austrian or German soldier that morning, I would have asked myself, This is the army that beat us? Impossible!

  Impossible or not, we were the victors. Military occupation was the spoils of war, the price of defeat for the loser, the payment for the victor. Second Battalion was ordered to continue across the valley and take over the villages of Kaprun and Bruck. Kaprun lay at the foot of the Austrian Alps, which had halted the German retreat south. The few passes available through the Alps to Italy were still closed by snow. I established my headquarters in the
hotel located in the center of Kaprun. The companies were scattered throughout the villages, wherever the company commanders could find good housing.

  Our first priority was to establish order and to maintain discipline. Consequently, the first thing I did was to contact the local German military commander. My instructions to him were threefold: first, I wanted all weapons in the valley and the villages around Kaprun-Bruck collected and deposited at the airport, the school, and the church; second, all officers could keep their personal sidearms and enough weapons for their military police; and third, I would inspect the enemy army’s camps, troops, and kitchens the following day. The German commander nodded his concurrence, saluted smartly, and left to execute my orders.

  Let me point out that at this time, I was twenty-seven years old, only a few years out of college, and like all the troops, I was wearing a dirty, well-worn combat fatigue jacket and pants. I felt a little ridiculous giving orders to a professional Prussian-born German colonel, twenty years my senior, who, while I was attending college from 1939 to 1941, had been invading Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, and the Soviet Union, and who was dressed in a clean field uniform with an array of medals covering his chest. The picture was analogous to what Robert E. Lee experienced when dressed in his finest uniform, he surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse to Ulysses S. Grant, who wore a private’s tunic covered with mud.

  On the first night in Kaprun, I established a curfew and passed the word through the local burgomaster (mayor) to the townspeople that everybody would be required to be off the streets and in their homes by 1800 hours until 0600 the following day. By 1800 the streets were empty. In the center of the village around the hotel where the battalion command post was located, all the townspeople and soldiers were standing in the doorways of their homes or leaning from the windows. Everybody was cooperating with this new army of occupation, when, suddenly, one old, bald-headed Austrian, in his leather Alpine-style short pants, marched to the middle of the square and very defiantly, with his hands on his hips, took a belligerent stand. Along with the rest of the battalion staff, I was taking all this in from an upstairs balcony overlooking the square. Lieutenant Ralph D. Richey, a gung-ho replacement officer, one of the very best replacement officers we received, came over to me and asked if I would like him to take some men and arrest the old man. I answered, “No, let him alone. Let’s just watch for a while.”

  The old man stood there, chin out, challenging us. All the townfolk and troops in the area had nothing else to do or look at but him. After about five minutes it started to strike everyone as silly, and after an additional ten minutes, everybody was giggling and laughing so the old man went back to his house, embarrassed. We never had additional trouble with the people of Kaprun again, so I lifted the curfew after one week.

  The next morning, accompanied by Captain Nixon, I took off in my jeep to inspect the sites where I had ordered the weapons to be deposited. I was shocked at the mountain of weapons that had been assembled at each site. Then I realized that I was looking at the result of the famous German reputation for efficiency. I had stipulated yesterday “all weapons,” meaning all military weapons. No one had questioned my order or sought clarification, so they gathered “all weapons.” Before us now lay stacks of hunting rifles, target rifles, hunting knives, antiques, and of course, military weapons.

  After I made arrangements to collect the weapons, I inspected the camps and kitchens. I found everything well organized and functioning. Some of the German troops were lined up for review. They were clean, well-dressed, and in good condition. The kitchens themselves were in good order and that day, the German troops served from a large kettle of potato soup cooking over the fire.

  The inspection of a few camps and troops was nothing more than a means of establishing a line of communications and a relationship between our headquarters and their headquarters. We left them alone; they respected us; there was no trouble. After the initial inspection, each day the German commander sent a staff officer who spoke English to my headquarters in the morning. After we got to know each other, he recalled stories about the horrific conditions on the Eastern Front. He told us how in the winter the tanks became so cold that if your bare skin touched the metal of the tank, the skin’s surface literally stuck and tore as you pulled away. He also related his experiences fighting the 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne. Reflecting a common belief that circulated many Allied camps at the time, our new friend suggested that “our armies should join hands and wipe out the Russian army.” I can also remember my answer to that invitation: “No thanks, all I want to do is get out of the army and go home.”

  Until we arrived at Kaprun, none of the officers, me included, fully comprehended the scope of occupational duties. I had graduated from OCS, fought in four major campaigns, and conducted two combat jumps, but no one had ever taken his time to tell me how to handle a surrender. My region of responsibility literally contained thousands of former Allied prisoners of war, thousands of displaced persons brought here to work from other countries, and now thousands of German soldiers. They all wanted something. They needed help, food, medical care, everything. I looked at these people and thought how lucky they were to be alive since so many had died and so many others were crippled. Here they were, all wishing to return home. Charming as the Austrian countryside was, occupation duty was one hell of a mess. Despite the fact that I had 25,000 Germans under my charge, there seemed like nothing to do, no reason to work.

  There was little alternative but to address the problems, one issue at a time. We went to work. As soon as possible, in an orderly manner, German prisoners were moved out of the area via truck convoys and by train to stockades in Nuremberg and Munich. On May 10, Lieutenant Stapelfeld escorted a trainload of German soldiers, women, and horses to Nuremberg, before hitching a ride back to 2d Battalion two days later. There were certainly no shortages of prisoners. We had no idea how many German soldiers remained in those hillside forests. Some were in small groups, some were solo. Each day, we sent jeeps to patrol secondary roads and trails, trying to locate and direct these troops to our airport compound. Today, I still find it amazing that we did not suffer casualties from these patrols for we were sitting targets for any die-hard Germans who weren’t prepared to surrender. Apparently they wanted to return home as much as my men. I estimated that my battalion of 600 men had been surrounded by approximately 25,000 German soldiers and almost as many displaced persons when we moved into the area on May 9.

  There was one German prisoner who caught my personal attention. He was a major from a German panzer unit—a true German and one hell of a good soldier. We talked over tactics, soldiering in general, and were pleased to discover that at Bastogne we had fought each other tooth and nail. Quite a coincidence! The major had been wounded six times during the war, but he had kept soldiering to the very end. The day following our revelations, he presented me his pistol as a token of friendship between us and as a formal surrender to his captor. He did so on his own volition rather than leaving his pistol on a desk in some office. When he handed me his sidearm, I noticed that the pistol had never been fired. There was no blood on it. It remains one of the few mementos I have kept from the war. The pistol still has not been fired—and it never will. This is the way wars ought to end. Let the generals and politicians participate in elaborate ceremonies. At the soldier level, a peaceful transfer of weapons, a smart salute or some other gesture of respect—that’s the way it should be for soldiers who had faced the bullets.

  The growing number of displaced persons continued to present a special problem. I thought I had seen a lot of DPs before, but this area was jammed! Feeding these people was a problem. We were in no position to handle the feeding of so many people. As quickly as possible, we assembled them in groups according to their nationality: Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and other eastern European nations. Once organized, we next shipped them by truck convoy to major holding areas throughout southern Germany.

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nbsp; Regimental headquarters now directed me to consolidate the mounds of captured German equipment and the excess U.S. Army equipment that we no longer needed for combat. Convoys of trucks were organized and all excess equipment was shipped to depots in France. Supply officers made ridiculous demands on subordinate headquarters, which culminated in the height of absurdity when senior headquarters directed all officers who had received a silk escape map before the jump into Normandy to turn them in or be fined $75. I had kept my escape map sewn in the belt lining of my pants all through the war. After four campaigns, that map had sentimental value. There are times that the army comes up with some rules and orders that defy common sense and are meant to be disobeyed. This time I took a firm stand and I borrowed a punch line from General McAuliffe at Bastogne. Writing a short note to Captain Sobel, still serving as regimental S-4, I wrote, “Nuts!” To add salt into Sobel’s wound, I signed the message, “Richard D. Winters, Major, Commanding.” That ended it. I kept my map and it currently occupies a place of honor in my private office. Nor did I pay the $75 fine. Memories of this type of military inefficiency made it easy to decide not to make the army a career.

  Sobel suffered one additional mishap before returning to the States. In late May Charles Lindbergh and the chief of staff of the Strategic Bomber Survey visited the 506th Regiment in Zell-am-See. Close to Colonel Sink’s headquarters was a senior officer from the Luftwaffe with the unusual name of Martini. Lindbergh wanted to interview Martini’s chief signal officer concerning German attempts to improve their communications and radar facilities. No one could find Martini until Sobel sounded off after hearing his name. According to Major Salve Matheson, Sink’s operations officer, Sobel said, “Oh, I threw him in the pokey a couple hours ago for violating curfew.” Matheson retrieved the German officer in time for Lindbergh to complete his interview.