The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Pvt. Ray Cobb had the shakes. Webster heard Sergeant Martin comforting him, “the way a mother talks to a dream-frightened child: ‘That’s all right, Cobb, don’t worry, we’re not going back out there. Just relax, Cobb, take it easy.’ ”

  Martin went over to a Cromwell, hiding behind a building. He pointed out the church steeple and asked the commander to take it out, as the Germans were using it as an observation post.

  “So sorry, old man, we can’t do it,” the commander replied. “We have orders not to destroy too much property. Friendly country, you know.”

  The Germans kept pressing. Their aim was to get through to the highway leading from Eindhoven to Nijmegen—“Hell’s Highway,” as the 101st named it—and cut it. But they could not get through Nuenen.

  Winters had decided to withdraw under the cover of darkness, but before giving ground he wanted a prisoner for interrogation. He called for volunteers for a patrol. No one volunteered.

  “Sergeant Toye,” he called out.

  “Yes, sir, I’m here.”

  “I need two volunteers.”

  Toye selected Cpl. James Campbell and a private and set out. They were tripping over British and American bodies as they made their way to a nearby wood. A German soldier fired at them. Toye told his men to stay put. He crept into the woods, went around the German, got behind him, and gently placed his bayonet against the man’s back. The soldier gave Toye no trouble. Pushing the German ahead of him, Toye returned through the woods and delivered his prisoner.

  The company retreated to Tongelre. Winters noticed that the Dutch people who had been cheering them in the morning, were closing their shutters, taking down the orange flags, looking sad and depressed, expecting the Germans to reoccupy Eindhoven. “We too were feeling badly,” Winters remarked. “We were limping back to town.”

  After getting his men settled down and fed, Winters went to battalion HQ. He found Lieutenant Colonel Strayer and his staff laughing it up, eating a hearty supper, in a jovial mood. Strayer saw Winters, turned, and with a big smile asked, “How did it go today, Winters?”

  Tight-lipped, Winters replied, “I had fifteen casualties today and took a hell of a licking.” The conversation in the room came to an abrupt stop.

  Easy got one break that day. The company bedded down in Tongelre, so it watched, rather than endured, a seventy-plane Luftwaffe bombing mission against the British supply column in Eindhoven. As the Allies had no antiaircraft guns in the city, the Germans were able to drop bright yellow marker flares and then make run after run, dropping their bombs. The city was severely damaged. Over 800 inhabitants were wounded, 227 killed.

  The next morning, Strayer moved his other two companies into Nuenen. They found Sergeant Randleman holding the fort. The German tanks had moved out, to the northwest, toward Son. Company E set up close-in defenses around Eindhoven and stayed there two days.

  • • •

  On the morning of September 22, Winters got orders to mount his men on trucks. The 506th was moving to Uden, on Hell’s Highway, to defend the town against a Panzer attack that the Dutch underground warned was coming from Helmond. Regimental HQ Company, with Lt. Col. Charles Chase (the 506th Regimental X.O.) in command, accompanied Easy and three British tanks in an advance party. There were only enough trucks for the 100 or so men of HQ Company plus a platoon of Easy. Winters, Lieutenant Welsh, and Captain Nixon joined the convoy.

  The trucks got through Veghel and into Uden without encountering resistance. Winters and Nixon climbed to the top of the church steeple to have a look. When they got to the belfry, the first thing they saw was German tanks cutting the highway between Veghel and Uden. Then Winters spotted a patrol coming toward Uden. He ran down the stairs, gathered the platoon, and said, “Men, there’s nothing to get excited about. The situation is normal; we are surrounded.” He organized an attack, moved out to meet the German patrol, and hit it hard, driving it back. Colonel Chase told Winters to set up a defense. Easy, with help from HQ Company, set up roadblocks on all roads leading into Uden.

  Winters told Sergeant Lipton to take every man he could find, regardless of unit, and put him into the line. Lipton saw two British soldiers walking by. He grabbed one by the shoulder and ordered, “You two come with me.”

  The man looked Lipton up and down calmly and said, “Sergeant, is that the way you address officers in the American army?” Lipton took a closer look and saw that on his British combat uniform was the insignia of a major. “No, sir,” he stammered. “I’m sorry.” The major gave him a bit of a half-smile as he walked away.

  The Germans did not come on. Had they realized that there were fewer than 130 men in Uden and only three tanks, they surely would have overrun the town, but evidently Winters’s quick counterattack against their lead patrol convinced them that Uden was held in strength. Whatever the reason, they shifted the focus of their attack from Uden to Veghel.

  Winters and Nixon climbed to the belfry again. They had a clear view of Veghel, 6 kilometers south. “It was fascinating,” Winters recalled, “sitting behind the German lines, watching tanks approach Veghel, German air force strafing, a terrific exchange of firepower.” The members of Easy who were in Veghel remember it as pure hell, the most intense shelling they had ever experienced.

  It was a desperate battle, the biggest the 506th had yet experienced. It was also critical. “The enemy’s cutting the road did not mean simply his walking across a piece of asphalt,” the history of the division points out. “That road was loaded with British transport vehicles of every type. Cutting the road meant fire and destruction for the vehicles that were caught. It meant clogging the road for its entire length with vehicles that suddenly had nowhere to go. For the men at Nijmegen and Arnhem, cutting the road was like severing an artery. The stuff of life—food, ammunition, medical supplies, no longer came north.”2

  Webster was in Veghel. When the German artillery began to come in, he took shelter in a cellar with a half-dozen Easy men, plus some Dutch civilians. “It was a very depressing atmosphere,” he wrote, “listening to the civilians moan, shriek, sing hymns, and say their prayers.”

  Pvt. Don Hoobler was with the 3d squad, 1st platoon, hiding in a gateway. He decided to have some fun with Pvt. Farris Rice, so he whistled a perfect imitation of an incoming shell. Rice fell flat on his face. That put Hoobler in stitches: “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Boy, sure sucked you in on that one!”

  “Goddamn you, Hoobler, that’s bad on a guy.”

  BzzYoo . . . BAM! A real shell came in. Hoobler stopped laughing.

  Colonel Sink same roaring up in a jeep, jumped out, and began barking orders right and left. He got the men of Easy, and those of D and F Companies, to establish a perimeter defense with orders to shoot at anything moving.

  Webster and the others climbed out of the cellar and went into an orchard. Webster and Pvt. Don Wiseman frantically dug a foxhole, 2 feet wide, 6 feet long, 4 feet deep. They wanted to go deeper but water was already seeping in.

  Sitting helplessly under intense artillery fire is pure hell, combat at its absolute worst. The shells were coming in by threes. “Wiseman and I sat in our corners and cursed. Every time we heard a shell come over, we closed our eyes and put our heads between our legs. Every time the shells went off, we looked up and grinned at each other.

  “I felt sick inside. I said I’d give a foot to get out of that place. We smelled the gunpowder as a rancid thunderhead enveloped our hole. A nasty, inch-square chunk of hot steel landed in Wiseman’s lap. He smiled.

  “Three more. And then three, and then three. No wonder men got combat exhaustion.” Webster later wrote his parents, “Artillery takes the joy out of life.”

  Things quieted down sufficiently for the supply people to bring up some British rations. Webster shouted at Hoobler to throw him a can. Hoobler was sitting above ground, laughing and joking, having a picnic with four or five others. “Come and get it,” he called back. “The 88s are taking a break.”

  An 88 came in. Ho
obler leaped into his hole, with his buddies piling in on top of him.

  The men spent the night in their foxholes. There was a drizzle, the air was frosty. They sat with their heads on their knees, pulled their raincoats around their shoulders, and nodded off the best they could.

  • • •

  Back in Uden, Winters and Nixon lost their front-row seat. A German sniper spotted them and fired away. He hit the bell in the belfry. The ringing noise and the surprise sent the two officers flying down the steps. “I don’t think our feet touched the steps more than two or three times,” Winters declared.

  He sat up his CP at a store on the road junction on the south end of town. The owners, the Van Oer family, who lived there, welcomed them, then went down to the cellar. Winters had his men move the furniture and rugs to one side, then brought in the machine-guns, ammunition, Molotov cocktails, and explosives and prepared to defend against any attack. His plan was, if the Germans came on with tanks, to drop composition C charges and Molotov cocktails on the tanks from the second floor windows—the Russian style of tank defense.

  With that position set, Winters went to the other end of town, the northwest corner. On the left side of the road coming into town there was a manor house, with a tavern on the other side. Winters told Welsh to put the roadblock between the two buildings, backed up by one of the British tanks. He indicated he wanted Welsh to set up his CP in the manor.

  Winters checked his other roadblocks, then at 2200 he returned to the northwest corner for one last look around. The British tank was where it was supposed to be, but there was no one in it or around it. Nor were there any E Company men at the roadblock. Highly agitated, Winters ran over to the manor and knocked on the door. A maid answered. She spoke no English, he spoke no Dutch, but somehow she figured out that he wanted to see “the soldiers.” She escorted him down a hallway and opened the door to a large, lavishly furnished living room.

  “The sight that greeted my eyes left me speechless,” Winters recalled. “Sitting on the floor, in front of a large, blazing fire in a fire-place, was a beautiful Dutch girl, sharing a dinner of ham and eggs with a British lieutenant.” She smiled at Winters. The lieutenant turned his head and asked, “Is my tank still outside?” Winters exploded. The lieutenant got moving.

  Winters went back to the street to look for Welsh and his men. “Where the hell can Harry be?” He looked at the tavern across the street and his question answered itself. He went in and found Welsh and his men sacked out on the top of the bar.

  “Harry and I talked this whole situation over,” was the polite way Winters put it. “Satisfied that we would have a roadblock set up to my satisfaction, and that I could get a good night’s sleep and not worry about a breakthrough, I left.”

  • • •

  In Veghel, the Germans continued to attack through the night and into the next morning. British planes and tanks finally drove them off. The 506th moved out again, getting to Uden on the afternoon of September 24. The Easy Company men who had been trapped in Veghel assumed that the small force isolated in Uden had been annihilated; those in Uden likewise assumed that the rest of the company in Veghel had been annihilated. When the two parts reunited and learned that the entire company had survived the encounter in good shape, there was mutual elation.

  The company prepared to spend the night in Uden. The men who had been there were amazed when the men who had undergone the shelling in Veghel dug foxholes 4 feet deep; they had only dug 6 inches or so into the ground and let it go at that. The officers had billets in houses in Uden. Lieutenant Peacock of 1st platoon approached Webster’s foxhole and told him to come along. Webster climbed out, and they walked to Peacock’s billet above a liquor store on the village square.

  “Take that broom and sweep this room out,” Peacock ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” Webster replied, thinking to himself, What kind of a man is this? He decided, “I would rather starve to death as a bum in civilian life than be a private in the army.”

  • • •

  The Germans had lost Uden and Veghel, but they hardly had given up. On the evening of September 24, they attacked Hell’s Highway from the west, south of Veghel, and managed to drive a salient across it. Once again the road was cut.

  It had to be reopened. Although the strategic objective of MARKET-GARDEN had been lost by now (on September 20 the Germans had retaken the bridge at Arnhem from Col. John Frost’s battalion of the British 1st Airborne Division, and the division as a whole had been thrown on the defensive and the Guards Armored Division had been halted on September 22 some 5 kilometers south of Arnhem), it was still critical to keep the road open. Tens of thousands of Allied troops were dependent on it totally for their supplies. The units north of Veghel included the U.S. 101st at Uden and the 82d at Nijmegen, the British 1st Airborne north of the Lower Rhine, outside Arnhem, the Guards Armored and the 43d Wessex Divisions, the Polish parachute regiment, and the British 4th Dorset and 2d Household Cavalry regiments, all between Nijmegen and Arnhem. If the 101st could not regain control of the road and keep it open, what was already a major defeat would turn into an unmitigated disaster of catastrophic proportions.

  General Taylor ordered Colonel Sink to eliminate the German salient south of Veghel. At 0030, September 25, Sink ordered his battalions to prepare to move out. At 0445 the 506th began marching, in a heavy rain, south from Uden toward Veghel. The order of march was 1st Battalion on the right, 3d Battalion on the left, 2d Battalion in reserve. At about 0700 the weary men passed through Veghel. At 0830 the 1st and 3d Battalions began the attack on the salient. Initially the advance went well, but soon the German artillery and mortar fire thickened. German tanks, brand-new Tiger Royals with 88 mm guns, dug in along the road, added their own machine-gun and shell fire. They were supported by Colonel von der Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment, Easy’s old nemesis at Ste. Marie-du-Mont and Carentan. The concentration on the narrow front was murderous. About noon, the battalions were forced to halt and dig in.

  Sink ordered Lieutenant Colonel Strayer to have 2d Battalion make an end run, a flanking move to the left. It would be supported by British Sherman tanks. There was a wood of young pine trees along the left (east) side of the highway to provide a screen for the flanking movement. Company E led the way for the battalion.

  Company E’s first attack in Holland had been to the south, toward Son and then Eindhoven. The second had been to the east, toward Nuenen. The third had been to the north, into Uden. Now it would be attacking to the west, thus completing the points of the compass. That is the way surrounded troops fight. That was the way the airborne had been trained to fight.

  • • •

  Nixon joined Winters to scout the terrain. They found a pathway on the edge of the woods that was solid and firm, providing traction for the tanks. Good enough so far, but the woods ran out 350 meters from the highway, giving way to open ground that provided no cover whatsoever for the final assault.

  Winters put the company into formation: scouts out, two columns of men, spread out, no bunching up. They got halfway across the field when the Germans opened up with machine-gun fire. Everyone hit the ground.

  Guarnere and Malarkey got their 60 mm mortar into action. Guarnere called out range and direction; Malarkey worked the mortar. He was the only man in the field at that point who was not flat on his stomach. His first round knocked out a German machine-gun post.

  Winters was shouting orders. He wanted machine-guns to go to work. The crews found a slight depression in the ground and set up the gun. They began to lay down a base of fire. Winters spotted a Tiger Royal dug in hull-defilade on the other side of the road and told the machine-gunners to take it under fire.

  Turning to his right, Winters noticed Nixon examining his helmet, a big smile on his face. A German machine-gun bullet from the first burst had gone through the front of his helmet and exited out the side at such an angle that the bullet simply left a burn mark on his forehead. It did not even break the skin.

&n
bsp; The German fire was too intense; Winters decided to pull the company back to the woods. The process would be to maintain the base of fire from the machine-guns while the riflemen backed off the field; when the riflemen reached the woods, they would begin firing to permit the machine-gunners to pull back.

  When Lipton reached Winters, on the edge of the woods, Winters told him, “They [the machine-gunners] will need more ammo. Get some out there to them.” Lipton ran to a Sherman tank (all the tanks were behind the woods, out of sight from the Germans—much to the disgust of the men of Easy). Shermans used 30-caliber machine-guns, the same as Easy Company’s machine-guns. Lipton got four boxes of ammunition from the British. He gave two to Sergeant Talbert and took two himself. They ran out to the machine-guns in the middle of the field, which were firing continuously, dropped the boxes, circled around, and ran back to the edge of the field as fast as they could run. “The Germans were poor shots,” Lipton remembered. “We both made it.”

  Just as the German parachute troops began to drop mortars on the machine-gun positions, Easy’s riflemen went to work and the machine-gunners were able to withdraw.

  Winters ran back to the tanks. He climbed on the lead tank “to talk nose to nose with the commander.” He pointed out that there was a Tiger Royal dug in on the far side of the road. “If you pull up behind the bank on the edge of the woods, you will be hull-defilade, and you can get a shot at him.” As Winters climbed down, that tank and the one to its left cranked up and began plowing straight through that stand of small pine trees, knocking them down.

  As the first tank got to the far edge of the woods, it wheeled left to line up for a shot at the Tiger. Wham! The Tiger laid an 88 into it. The shot hit the cannon barrel and glanced off the hull. Evidently the German commander had fired blind, lining up on the falling tops of the trees.