Band of Brothers (36 page)

Most patrols were similarly unsuccessful. Malarkey reported that a replacement officer took out a patrol, got across the river, advanced several hundred yards inland, drew fire from a single rifleman, reported over the radio that he had met stiff resistance, and withdrew to friendly territory, to the mingled relief and disgust of his men.

A couple of days later, things didn’t work out so well. The patrol leader was Maj. William Leach, recently promoted and made regimental S-2 by Sink. He had been ribbed unmercifully back at Mourmelon when his gold leaves came through: “When are you going to take out a patrol, Leach?” his fellow officers asked. He had never been in combat and consequently had no decorations. Characterized by Winters as “a good staff officer who made his way up the ladder on personality and social expertise,” Leach wanted to make a career out of the Army. For that, he felt he needed a decoration.

The night of April 12, Leach set out at the head of a four-man patrol from the S-2 section at regimental HQ. But he made one fatal mistake: he failed to tell anyone he was going. Easy Company men on outpost duty heard the splashing of the boat the patrol was using as it crossed the river. As far as they were concerned, unless they had been told of an American patrol at such and such a time, any boat in the river contained enemy troops. They opened up on it; quickly the machine-guns joined in. The fire ripped the boat apart and hit all the men in it, including Leach. Ignoring the pitiful cries of the wounded, drowning in the river, the machine-gunners kept firing bursts at them until their bodies drifted away. They were recovered some days later downstream. In the judgment of the company, Leach and four men had “perished in a most unnecessary, inexcusable fashion because he had made an obvious and unpardonable mistake.”

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That day the company got the news that President Roosevelt had died. Winters wrote in his day book, “Sgt. Malley [of F Company] — good news — made 1st Sgt. Bad news — Pres. Roosevelt died.”

“I had come to take Roosevelt for granted,” Webster wrote his parents, “like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost.”

Eisenhower ordered all unit commanders to hold a short memorial service for Roosevelt on Sunday, April 14. Easy Company did it by platoons. Lieutenant Foley, who “never was much enamored with Roosevelt,” gathered his platoon. He had a St. Joseph missal in his musette bag; in it he found a prayer. He read it out to the men, and later claimed to be “the only man who ever buried Franklin D. as a Catholic.”

·    ·    ·

Overall, Easy’s time on the Rhine, guarding the Ruhr pocket, was boring. “Time hung so heavily,” a disgusted Webster wrote, “that we began to have daily rifle inspections. Otherwise, we did nothing but stand guard on the crossroads at night and listen to a short current events lecture by Lieutenant Foley during the day.” With their high energy level and the low demands on them, the men turned to sports. They found some rackets and balls and played tennis on a backyard court, or softball in a nearby field.

Webster was no athlete, but he had a high level of curiosity. One day he realized “the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition,” when he and Pvt. John Janovek scaled a 250-foot-high factory smokestack. When they got to the top, they had a magnificent view across the river. To Webster, “the Ruhr seemed absolutely lifeless,” even though “everywhere we looked there were factories, foundries, steel mills, sugar plants, and sheet-metal works. It looked like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis decentralized.”

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On April 18, all German resistance in the Ruhr pocket came to an end. More than 325,000 German soldiers surrendered.

Easy was put to guarding a Displaced Persons’ camp at Dormagen. There were Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Dutch, French, Russians, and others from different parts of Nazi-occupied Europe in the camp, tens of thousands. They lived in a common barracks, segregated by sex, crowded, all but starving in many cases, representing all ranges of age. Once liberated, their impulse was to catch up on their rest and their fun, so sadly lacking for the past few years. Webster reported that they “were contentedly doing nothing. They had worked hard under the Germans, and eaten little. Now they would rest.”

Their happiness, singing, and willingness to do favors for the soldiers endeared them to the men of Easy. KP was now a thing of the past. No member of Easy ever peeled a potato after this point or swept a room or washed a mess kit or policed the area. There were always D.P.s for that, especially as the Americans were so generous in paying.

More than a few men took along a combination son and servant. Luz practically adopted a thin little boy, Muchik, who wore battered shoes much too large. His parents had died in the slave labor camp. Muchik’s big dark eyes and bright energetic demeanor were irresistible to Luz. He got Muchik a uniform of sorts and brought him along for the tour of Germany, teaching him the fundamentals of Army profanity as they rode along. As the division history notes, “Though strict orders were given that no D.P.s were to be taken along, some of the personnel spoke very broken English, never appeared in formations, and seemed to do a great deal of kitchen police.”
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In short, Easy was about to depart on a tour of Germany that would be first-class in every way. Comfortable homes each night, great food and wine, free to take almost whatever they wanted, being driven along an autobahn reserved for them, riding at a leisurely pace on big rubber tires, with wondrous sights to see, the dramatic Alps on one side, the dramatic disintegration of what had been the most feared army in the world on the other, with body servants to care for their every need.

Except one. They would have loved to have brought some of the D.P. girls along, but they did no better with them than they had with the German girls. Like G.I.s everywhere, they assumed that a D ration and a couple of Chelseas were the key to any woman’s heart, only to be disappointed.

The second-generation Czechs and Poles in the company had been especially excited. They spent all their spare time, night and day, using their limited language ability to court the stocky, balloon-chested peasant girls of their fathers’ native lands. But contrary to their expectations, the girls, with their Catholic upbringing and Central European background, were chaste.

For Webster, the effect of the D.P. camp was to stir up his hatred of the Germans. “Why were these people here?” he asked himself about the D.P.s. They had done nothing, had no politics, committed no crime, possessed nothing. They were there because the Nazis needed their labor.

“There was Germany and all it stood for,” Webster concluded. “The Germans had taken these people from their homes and sentenced them to work for life in a factory in the Third Reich. Babies and old women, innocent people condemned to live in barracks behind barbed wire, to slave twelve hours a day for an employer without feeling or consideration, to eat beet soup, mouldy potatoes, and black bread. This was the Third Reich, this was the New Order: Work till you died. With cold deliberation the Germans had enslaved the populace of Europe.” So far as Webster was concerned, “The German people were guilty, every one of them.”

The guard duty lasted only a few days. Back on the Rhine, Winters instituted a training schedule that included reveille, inspection, calisthenics and close-order drill, squad tactics, map reading, and so forth. The day ended with retreat. It was like being back in basic training, and much resented.

As always in a rear echelon area, rank was being pulled, widening the distance between the enlisted men and the officers. Lt. Ralph D. Richey, a gung-ho replacement officer serving as battalion S-1, was particularly obnoxious. One day he had the company lined up for inspection. An old German woman rode her bicycle innocently through the ranks. Richey became so enraged that he fetched her a blow that knocked her off her bicycle. She burst into tears; he stormed at her and ordered her to move on. The men were disgusted by his behavior.

The following day the company made a forced 5-mile speed march, Lieutenant Richey leading. The men rolled up their sleeves and carried their weapons as comfortably as possible. Richey was furious. He halted the company and gave the men hell. “I have never seen such a sloppy company,” he shouted. “There are 120 men in this company and I see 120 different ways of carrying a rifle. And you guys think you’re soldiers!”

The incident set Webster off on a tirade. “Here was a man who had made us ashamed of our uniform railing at us for being comfortable on a speed march,” he wrote. “Here was the army. Officers are gentlemen, I’ll do as I damn please. No back talk. You’re a private. You can’t think. If you were any good, you’d be an officer. Here, carry my bedroll. Sweep my room. Clean my carbine. Yes sir. Why didn’t you salute? You didn’t see me! Well, by God, go back and salute properly. The looies, God bless’em. Privileges before responsibilities.”

Not all officers were like Richey. Captain Speirs, for all his bluster and reputation, cared for the men. Sensing their boredom, he arranged a sightseeing trip to Cologne. He wanted them to see the city and the effects of air bombardment (Cologne was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany).

Two things most impressed the men. First, the extent of the destruction. Every window was shattered, every church had been hit, every side street was blocked with rubble. The magnificent cathedral in the center of town had been damaged but had survived. The giant statue of Bismarck on a horse was still standing, but Bismarck’s sword, pointing toward France, had been cut off by flying shrapnel.

A group of Easy men wandered to the Rhine, where they began pointing and laughing at the grotesque ruins of the
Hängebrücke,
or suspension bridge. An elderly German couple stood beside them. To the shame of the Americans, the Germans began to cry and shake their heads. All their beautiful bridges had been twisted and mangled, and here were American boys laughing.

The second impression was not of destruction but of people. Lieutenant Foley noted that “the residents, on their own volition, were determined to clean up and sweep out the ruins of war. Along most of the streets there were neat stacks of salvageable cobblestones. Houses were worked on to remove the debris. They were still in bad shape, yet they appeared almost ready to be rebuilt. Amazing.”

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April 19 was a big day for the company. The division quartermaster handed out thirty-four pairs of socks per platoon, or about one pair for each man, plus three bottles of Coca-Cola (accompanied by stern orders to turn in the bottles) and two bottles of American beer per man. The men got paid for February and March, in the form of Allied Military Marks; these were their first marks and they were ordered to turn in all their French, British, Dutch, Belgian, and American money for marks.

On April 22 the company loaded up in the German version of the 40-and-8s. The cars had been sprayed with DDT and filled with straw. Each man got five K rations.

They were off to Bavaria and the Alps. Bradley had assigned the 101st to U.S. Seventh Army. Its objectives were Munich, Innsbruck, and the Brenner Pass. The purpose was to get American troops into the Alps before the Germans could create a redoubt there from which to continue the war. Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden was the presumed HQ for this combination last stand and the beginning of a guerrilla war against the occupiers. Eisenhower’s biggest fear was that Hitler would get to the Eagle’s Nest, where he would be well protected and have radio facilities he could use to broadcast to the German people to continue the resistance or begin guerrilla warfare.

It turned out that the Germans had neither serious plans nor sufficient resources to build a Mountain Redoubt, but remember we are only four months away from a time when everyone assumed the German Army was kaput, only to be hit by the Bulge. So the fear was there, but the reality was that in its drive to Berchtesgaden, Easy was as much as 100 miles behind the front line, in a reserve position, never threatened. The company’s trip through Germany was more a grand tour than a fighting maneuver.

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The tour began with a 200-kilometer train ride through four countries. So great was the Allied destruction of the German rail system that to get from the Ruhr to southern Germany it was necessary to go through Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. The men rode in open cars, sleeping, singing, swinging their feet out the doors, sunbathing on the roof of the 40-and-8. Popeye Wynn led them in endless choruses of the ETO theme song, “Roll Me over in the Clover.”

The train passed within 25 miles of Bastogne. The division history commented, “The occasional evidence of the bitter fighting of three months before made the hair rise on the necks of many of the veterans of Bastogne. But at the same time, remembering only snow, cold, and dark and ominous forests, they were surprised at the beauty of the rolling lands under the new green of spring.”
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They got back into Germany and then to the Rhine at Ludwigshafen, where they got off the train and switched to a vehicle called DUKW: D (1942), U (amphibian), K (all-wheel drive), W (dual rear axles). These DUKWs had come in with the invasion of the south of France. These were the first E Company had seen. The DUKW was outstanding in every respect, but because it was a hybrid, neither the War nor the Navy Department ever really got behind it. Only 21,000 were built in the course of the war.