The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Welling gave the password for the third time. The captain who was driving finally realized Welling had not heard and yelled out the countersign. Speirs jumped out of the jeep and started to curse out Welling.

  Welling cut him off: “When I say, ‘Halt!’ I mean ‘Halt!’ When I give the password, I expect to hear the countersign.” Speirs started sputtering about what he was going to do to Welling when Winters interrupted. “Let’s go, Captain,” he said in a low voice. As they drove off, Winters called out to Welling, “Good job.”

  • • •

  There were patrols across the Rhine, seldom dangerous except for the strong current in the flooded river, nearly 350 meters wide. When Winters got orders on April 8 to send a patrol to the other side, he decided to control the patrol from an observation post to make certain no one got hurt. Winters set the objectives and controlled the covering artillery concentration, then monitored the patrol step by step up the east bank of the river. Lieutenant Welsh, battalion S-2, accompanied him and was disgusted with the safety limits Winters insisted on. “We went through the motions of a combat patrol,” Winters remembered, “and found nothing. Everyone returned safely.”

  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.”

  • • •

  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.”

  • • •

  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.”2

  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 Reic
h, 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.”

  • • •

  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.

  • • •

  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.”3

  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.

  The men of E Company wished it had been 210,000, or even 2,100,000. A DUKW could carry twenty fully equipped riflemen in considerable comfort. It could make 5 knots in a moderate sea, 50 miles per hour on land riding on oversized rubber tires. It was a smooth-riding vehicle, without the bounce of the deuce-and-a-half G.I. truck or the springless jarring of the jeep. Webster said the DUKW “rides softly up and down, like a sailboat in a gentle swell.”

  They crossed the Rhine on the Ernie Pyle Bridge, a pontoon structure built by the engineers, and headed toward Munich. They went through Heidelberg, and Webster was entranced. “When we saw all the undamaged buildings and the beautiful river promenade, where complacent civilians strolled in the sun, I was ready to stay in Heidelberg forever. The green hills, the warm sunlight, the cool, inviting river, the mellow collegiate atmosphere—Heidelberg spelled paradise in any language.”

  From then on the convoy traveled a circuitous route southeast, skirting mountains, on main roads and side paths. All the while, Webster wrote, “we marveled at the breathtaking beauty of Germany. As a writer said in the ‘New Yorker,’ it seemed a pity to waste such country on the Germans.”

  In midafternoon, Speirs would send Sergeants Carson and Malarkey on ahead to pick out a company CP in such-and-such a village. They were to get the best house and reserve the best bedroom for Captain Speirs.

  Carson had high school German. He would pick the place, knock on the door, and tell the Germans they had five minutes to get out, and they were not to take any bedding with them. Give them more than five minutes, Speirs had told them, they will take everything with them.

  Once the advance party came on an apartment complex three stories high, perfect for HQ and most of the company. Car
son knocked on doors and told tenants, “Raus in funf minuten.” They came pouring out, crying, lamenting, frightened. “I knocked on this one door,” Carson recalled, “and an elderly lady answered. I looked at her and she stared at me. God, it was a picture of my own grandmother. Our eyes met and I said, ‘Bleib hier,’ or stay here.”

  Malarkey picked up the story. “Then Speirs would finally show up and you wouldn’t see Speirs for about two or three hours. He was the worst looter I ever saw. He couldn’t sleep at night thinking there was a necklace or something around.” Whenever he got a chance, Speirs would mail his loot back to his wife in England. He needed the money it would bring; his wife had just had a baby.

  Nearly all the men of Easy, like nearly all the men in ETO, participated in the looting. It was a phenomenon of war. Thousands of men who had never before in their lives taken something of value that did not belong to them began taking it for granted that whatever they wanted was theirs. The looting was profitable, fun, low-risk, and completely in accord with the practice of every conquering army since Alexander the Great’s time.

  Lugers, Nazi insignia, watches, jewelry, first editions of Mein Kampf, liquor, were among the most sought-after items. Anything any German soldier had was fair game; looting from civilians was frowned upon, but it happened anyway. Money was not highly valued. Sgt. Edward Heffron and Medic Ralph Spina caught a half-dozen German soldiers in a house. The Germans surrendered; Heffron and Spina took their watches, a beautiful set of binoculars, and so forth. They spotted a strongbox on the shelf. Spina opened it; it was a Wehrmacht payroll in marks. They took it. In Spina’s words, “There we were two boys from South Philly who just pulled off a payroll caper with a carbine and a pistol.”

  Back at their apartment, Heffron and Spina debated what to do with the money as they knocked back a bottle of cognac. In the morning they went to Mass at the Catholic church and gave the money away to the worshipers, “with the exception of some bills of large denominations which we split up,” Spina confessed. “We weren’t that drunk not to keep any for ourselves.”