Band of Brothers (24 page)

1. When I did a joint interview with Strohl and Winters in the summer of 1990, the conversation went as follows:
Ambrose: So Rod comes back and tells you, “We’ve got a penetration here.” Now pick up the story.
Winters: Let me tell you when he comes in, he’s been in combat. He is breathless and you take one look at him and you know here’s a guy that has just faced death. No question about it.
Strohl: I didn’t look that bad.
Winters: You don’t have to be ashamed of it. Somebody shooting at you.
Strohl: He’s saying I shit my pants. I never.

2. Paul Fussell,
Wartime,
282.

3. Except certain death. The Wehrmacht in Normandy, for example had German sergeants standing behind foreign conscripts. A Pole in the Wehrmacht at Omaha Beach managed to be taken prisoner. At his interrogation, he was asked how the front-line troops stood up to the air and naval pounding. “Your bombs were very persuasive,” he replied, “but the sergeant behind me with a pistol in his hand was more so.” But the American Army didn’t do things that way.

4. Gray,
The Warriors,
119.

5. Gray,
The Warriors,
82.

6. Gray,
The Warriors,
17–18.

A
T 0400 NOVEMBER 26,
Easy arrived at Camp Mourmelon, outside the village of Mourmelon-le-Grand (nearby was the village of Mourmelon-le-Petit), some 30 kilometers from the cathedral town and champagne center of Reims. Mourmelon had been a garrison town for at least 1,998 years — Julius Caesar and his Roman legions had used it as a campground in 54 B.C. The French Army had had barracks there for hundreds of years, and still does in the 1990s. Located on the plain between the Marne River to the south and the Aisne River to the north, on the traditional invasion route toward Paris (or toward the Rhine, depending on who was on the offensive), Mourmelon was in an area that had witnessed many battles through the centuries. Most recently the area had been torn up between 1914 and 1918. The artillery craters and trenches from the last world war were everywhere. American Doughboys had fought in the vicinity in 1918, at Chàteau-Thierry and Belleau Wood.

The transition from front line to garrison duty was quick. The first day in camp featured a hot shower and a chance to launder clothes. The second day the company had a marching drill; the next day there was a regular retreat formation with cannon firing and inspection. On November 30, the mail caught up with the men, boosting morale 100 percent.

One might have thought that after more than two months on the front line, the paratroopers would have wanted to sleep for a week. But after one or two experiences of that miracle that is a soldier’s night sleep, the boys needed a physical outlet for their energy and some nonsensical way to release the built-up tension. On December 1, everyone got a pass to Reims. So did the men of the 82d Airborne, camped nearby. The mix was volatile. Although Reims was crawling with M.P.s, because it was Eisenhower’s HQ, there was plenty to drink, and thus plenty of drunks and plenty of men who wanted to fight.

“What’s that eagle screaming for?” an 82d man would ask his buddies when they encountered someone wearing the Screaming Eagle shoulder patch.

“Help! Help! Help!” was the reply. And a fistfight would start. On December 4, all passes to Reims were canceled because, as one trooper put it, “the boys won’t behave in town.”

Division tried to work off some of the excess energy by ordering 5-mile marches, parades, and lots of calisthenics. It also organized games of baseball, basketball, and football. It borrowed football equipment from the Air Force, flown in from England. Tryouts were held for a Christmas Day Champagne Bowl game between the 506th and the 502d; those who made the team practiced for three hours and more a day. For other entertainment, Division set up three movie theaters, and opened a Red Cross club. The chow was superb.

Several days after arrival at Mourmelon, the men got paid in the mess hall at the conclusion of dinner. Sergeant Malarkey drew his pay and had started out the door when he noticed a crap game in progress. A hot shooter had piled up a big bankroll. Malarkey thought he could not possibly continue to throw passes so he started fading the shooter. In a few minutes he had blown three months’ pay. He left the mess hall thinking how dumb he was — not to have gambled, but to have lost everything without once shooting the dice himself.

Back in barracks he ran into Skip Muck. There was a dice game going on. Malarkey asked Muck if he intended to get in it; no, Muck replied, he was tired of being broke all the time. Besides he only had $60 left after paying off his previous gambling debts. Malarkey thereupon talked him into a $60 loan and got into the game. In fifteen minutes he had built himself a bankroll of French francs, British pounds, U.S. dollars, Belgian francs, and Dutch guilders. (The arguments about the exchange rate around those crap games were intense; somehow these guys, most of whom had hated — and mostly flunked — math in high school, figured it out.)

Malarkey took his money over to the N.C.O. club and got into a game with some twenty players. He threw $60 of U.S. money into the game — the amount he had borrowed from Muck. He won. He let it ride and won again. And again. And again. On the last throw he had $3,000 riding. He won.

He was afraid to leave the game with more than $6,000, which was damn near the whole company payroll. He put the large francs in his pockets and stayed in the game until he had lost all the American, British, Dutch, and Belgian money. Returning to barracks, he gave Muck the $60 plus a $500 tip. He still had $3,600.

·    ·    ·

The men were put to work improving the barracks. The most recent occupants had been two divisions of German infantry plus several squadrons of light cavalry. German orders of the day, propaganda posters, and the like were on the walls. They came down, the leavings of the horses were cleaned up, bunks were repaired, latrines and roads improved. “And thru it all like a bright thread,” the 506th scrapbook
Currahee
declared, “ran the anticipation of the Paris passes. Morning, noon, and night, anywhere you happened to be you could hear it being discussed.”

Division policy was that the men would go into Paris by companies, one at a time. The ones who made it came back with tales that topped those their fathers told after visiting Paris in 1918–19. The ones who were waiting discussed endlessly what they were going to do when they got to the city.

Some individuals got passes. In a couple of cases, they were wasted. Dick Winters got a pass; he went to Paris, got on the Metro, rode to the end of the line, and discovered that he had taken the last run of the day. Darkness had fallen, the city was blacked out, he walked back to his hotel, got in well after midnight, and the next day returned by train to Mourmelon. “That was my big night in Paris.” Pvt. Bradford Freeman, from Lowndes County, Mississippi, got a pass to Paris. Forty-six years later he recalled of his one day in the City of Lights, “I didn’t care for what I saw, so I went back to camp.”

There appeared to be no hurry about getting to Paris, as the general impression was that the paratroopers were going to stay in camp until the good campaigning weather returned in the spring. At that time they expected to jump into Germany, on the far side of the Rhine. The impression was reinforced when General Taylor flew back to the States to participate in conferences regarding proposed changes in organization and equipment of the American airborne divisions. It became a certainty on December 10, when Taylor’s deputy, Brig. Gen. Gerald Higgins, flew to England with five senior officers from the 101st to give a series of lectures on MARKET-GARDEN. Command passed to Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the division’s artillery commander.

·    ·    ·

Veterans were returning from hospital, new recruits coming in. Buck Compton rejoined the company, recovered from his wound in Holland. Lt. Jack Foley, who had hooked up as replacement during the last week in Holland, became assistant platoon leader of 2d platoon under Lieutenant Compton. The men, Foley remembered, “were a mixture of seasoned combat veterans, some with just Holland under their belt, and of course green replacements.”

The replacements, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds fresh from the States, were wide-eyed. Although the veterans were only a year or two older, they looked terrifying to the recruits. They were supposed to have handed in their live ammunition when they left Holland, but almost none had done so. They walked around Camp Mourmelon with hand grenades hanging off their belts, clips of ammunition on their harnesses, wearing their knives and (unauthorized) side arms. To the recruits, they looked like a bunch of killers from the French Foreign Legion. To the veterans, the recruits looked “tender.” Company commander Lieutenant Dike, Welsh, Shames, Foley, Compton, and the other officers worked at blending the recruits into the outfit, to bring them up to Easy’s standard of teamwork and individual skills, but it was difficult as the veterans could not take field maneuvers seriously.

By the end of the second week in December, the company was back to about 65 percent of its strength in enlisted men. Officer strength was at 112.5 percent, with Dike in command, Welsh serving as X.O., and two lieutenants per platoon plus a spare. Put another way, the airborne commanders expected that casualties in the next action would be highest among the junior officer ranks. Welsh was by now the oldest serving officer in the company, and he had not been at Toccoa. Only Welsh and Compton had been in Normandy with Easy; Welsh, Compton, Dike, Shames, and Foley had spent some time in Holland.

It was the N.C.O.s who were providing continuity and holding the company together. Among the N.C.O.s who had started out at Toccoa as privates were Lipton, Talbert, Martin, Luz, Perconte, Muck, Christenson, Randleman, Rader, Gordon, Toye, Guarnere, Carson, Boyle, Guth, Taylor, Malarkey, and others. That so many of its Toccoa officers were on the 506th regimental or 2d Battalion staff helped Easy to maintain coherence. They included Major Hester and Captain Matheson (S-3 and S-4 on regimental staff) and Captains Winters and Nixon (X.O. and S-2 on battalion staff). Overall, however, after one-half year of combat, Easy had new officers and new privates. But its heart, the N.C.O. corps, was still made up of Toccoa men who had followed Captain Sobel up and down Currahee in those hot August days of 1942.

·    ·    ·

Many of the men they had run up Currahee with were in hospital in England. Some of them would never run again. Others, with flesh wounds, were on the way to recovery. In the American 110th General Hospital outside Oxford, three members of 1st platoon, Easy Company, were in the same ward. Webster, Liebgott, and Cpl. Thomas McCreary had all been wounded on October 5, Webster in the leg, Liebgott in the elbow, McCreary in the neck. Webster was practicing his writing: in his diary, he described his buddies: “120-pound Liebgott, ex–San Francisco cabby, was the skinniest and, at non-financial moments, one of the funniest men in E Company. He had the added distinction of being one of the few Jews in the paratroops. In addition, both he and McCreary, ancient men of thirty, were the company elders. McCreary was a lighthearted, good-natured little guy who, to hear him tell it, had been raised on a beer bottle and educated in the ‘Motor Inn,’ Pittsburgh.”

According to Webster, “the gayest spot in the 110th was the amputation ward, where most of the lads, knowing that the war was over for them, laughed and joked and talked about home.” Webster was right to say “most” rather than “all,” as some of those with million-dollar wounds wouldn’t have given a nickel for them. Leo Boyle, in another ward of the 110th, wrote Winters: “Dear Sir, Now that I’ve got this far, damned if I know what to write!

“After two experiences I can say it isn’t all the shock of the wound that one carries away with him. It’s the knowledge that you’re out of the picture [fighting] for some time to come — in this, my case, a long time.

“I don’t expect to be on my feet before Xmas. I do expect to be as good as new some day. There is no bone damage, just muscle and tissue damage and a large area hard to graft.

“And Sir, I hope you take care of yourself (Better care than I’ve seen you exercise) for the reason there are too few like you and certainly none to replace you.” He added that Webster, Liebgott, Leo Matz, Paul Rogers, George Luz, and Bill Guarnere, all also residents for varying periods of time of the 110th, had been in to see him.

Forty-four years later, Boyle wrote, “I never became fully resigned to the separation from the life as a ‘trooper’ — separated from my buddies, and never jumping again. I was ‘hooked’ or addicted to the life. I felt cheated and was often mean and surly about it during my yearlong recuperation in the hospitals.”

Liebgott requested, and got, a discharge and a return to duty. So did McCreary, Guarnere, and others. As noted, this was not because they craved combat, but because they knew they were going to have to fight with somebody and wanted it to be with Easy Company. “If I had my choice,” Webster wrote his parents, “I’d never fight again. Having no choice, I’ll go back to E Company and prepare for another jump. If I die, I hope it’ll be fast.” In another letter, he wrote, “The realization that there is no escape, that we shall jump on Germany, then ride transports straight to the Pacific for the battle in China, does not leave much room for optimism. Like the infantry, our only way out is to be wounded and evacuated.”

Webster went to a rehabilitation ward, then toward the end of December to the 12th Replacement Depot in Tidworth, England. This Repo Depo, like its mate the 10th, was notorious throughout ETO for the sadism of its commander, its inefficiency, chickenshit ways, filth, bad food, and general conditions that were not much of a step up from an Army prison. Evidently the Army wanted to make it so bad that veterans recovered from their wounds, or partly recovered, or at least able to walk without support, would regard getting back to the front lines as an improvement. Jim Alley, wounded in Holland, recovered in hospital in England, went AWOL from the 12th Replacement Depot and hitched a ride to Le Havre, then on to Mourmelon, where he arrived on December 15. Guarnere and others did the same.

Webster did not. He had long ago made it a rule of his Army life never to do anything voluntarily. He was an intellectual, as much an observer and chronicler of the phenomenon of soldiering as a practitioner. He was almost the only original Toccoa man who never became an N.C.O. Various officers wanted to make him a squad leader, but he refused. He was there to do his duty, and he did it — he never let a buddy down in combat, in France, Holland, or Germany — but he never volunteered for anything and he spurned promotion.