“As Moose and I proceeded down the path leading to Welsh’s CP,” Winters related, “we were walking shoulder to shoulder, as the path was only about six feet wide, slightly raised. There was a drop of about three feet into a drainage ditch on each side.”
Out of the darkness came an order, “Halt!”
Heyliger was a calm, easygoing man, a C.O. who did not get excited unnecessarily. So when Winters felt him take an extra hard deep breath, he tensed. Winters figured Heyliger had forgotten the password.
Heyliger started to say “Moose,” but before he got the word half out, blam, blam, blam—an M-1 spat three bullets out from a distance of 10 yards.
Heyliger dropped to the road with a moan. Winters dived into the ditch on the left side of the road. He feared they had run into a German patrol because the M-1 fire had been so rapid it could have been a German machine pistol. Then he heard footsteps running away.
Winters crawled back onto the path, grabbed Heyliger, and pulled him to the side. He had been hit in the right shoulder, a fairly clean wound, and in the left calf, a bad one—his calf looked like it had been blown away. Winters set to bandaging the leg.
A few minutes later Winters heard footsteps running his way. As he moved to grab his rifle, he heard Welsh calling in a low voice, “Moose? Dick?”
Welsh and two of his men helped bandage Heyliger. They gave him morphine shots and carried him back to the battalion CP. By then he had lost so much blood, and had had so many shots of morphine, he had a waxlike pallor that made Winters doubt he was going to make it.
He made it. Within a week he was back in a hospital in England. While there he was promoted to captain and given the British Military Cross for the rescue patrol. But for Heyliger, the war was over.
The soldier who shot Heyliger had been tense, frightened, unsure of himself. The incident broke him up. He was a veteran, not a recruit. Winters decided not to punish him. Soon thereafter, he was eased out of the company.
On November 7, Heyliger wrote Winters from his hospital bed. “Dear Dick: Here I am laying flat on my back taking it easy. I want to thank you for taking care of me that night I got hit. It sure is a stupid way to get knocked off.
“I arrived here naked as a jay bird. Didn’t have a thing. I know you have my wings and pistol, but I am sweating out the clothes in my bed roll and the rolls of film in my musette bag . . . .
“Jesus, Dick, they put casts right over my wounds and it smells as if a cat shit in my bed. I can’t get away from that stink.
“Well, this is short, but my right arm is very weak. Remember me to all.”
• • •
Heyliger’s replacement as C.O. of Easy was 1st Lt. Norman S. Dike, Jr. He came over from division HQ. Tall, slim, good looking, he was well educated and talked in a military tone of voice. He made a good impression.
• • •
Being X.O. put Winters into daily contact with Nixon, by now battalion S-3. They hardly could have been more different. Winters grew up in a middle-class home; Nixon’s father was fabulously wealthy. Winters had not gotten out of Pennsylvania in his teenage years; Nixon had lived in various parts of Europe. Winters was a graduate of a small college; Nixon came from Yale. Winters never drank; Nixon was an alcoholic. But they were the closest of friends, because what they had in common was a dedication to the job at hand, and a remarkable ability to do that job. Every member of Easy interviewed for this book said Winters was the best combat commander he ever saw, while Nixon was the most brilliant staff officer he knew in the war.
“Nixon was a hard man to get out of the sack in the morning,” according to Winters. One day in November, Winters wanted to get an early start. Nixon, as usual, could not be talked into getting up. Winters went to his bed, grabbed his feet while he was still in his sleeping bag, and threw them over his shoulder.
“Are you going to get up?”
“Go away, leave me alone.”
Winters noticed that the water pitcher was half-full. Still holding Nixon’s feet on his shoulder, he grabbed the pitcher and started pouring the contents on Nixon’s face. Nixon opened his eyes. He was horrified. “No! No!” he begged. Too late, the contents were on their way. Only then did Winters realize that Nixon had not gone outside to piss away the liquor he had drunk, but used the water pitcher instead.
Nixon yelled and swore, then started laughing. The two officers decided to go into Nijmegen to investigate the rumor that hot showers were available for officers there.
• • •
The campaign dragged on. Increasing cold added to the misery of the daily rains. Finally, in late November, Canadian units began to replace the 101st. Easy’s turn came on the night of November 24–25, when it pulled out of the line. In the morning, the men boarded trucks for the trip back to France for rest, refitting, receiving replacements, and a shower, which the enlisted men had not had in sixty-nine days.
Easy had jumped on September 17 with 154 officers and men. It came out of Holland with 98 officers and men. Lieutenants Brewer, Compton, Heyliger, and Charles Hudson had been wounded, along with forty-five enlisted men. The Easy men killed in action were William Dukeman, Jr., James Campbell, Vernon Menze, William Miller, James Miller, Robert Van Klinken. The company had taken sixty-five casualties in Normandy, so its total at the end of November was 120 (some of these men had been wounded in both campaigns), of whom not one was a prisoner of war.
As the trucks rolled back down Hell’s Highway, the Dutch lined the roads to cheer their liberators. “September 17,” they shouted, as the convoy moved through Nijmegen, Uden, Veghel, Eindhoven.
The men of Easy did not feel like conquering heroes. Sergeant Lipton summed it up: “Arnhem Annie said over the radio, ‘You can listen to our music, but you can’t walk in our streets.’ She was right. We didn’t get into Arnhem.”
* * *
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.
10
Resting, Recovering, and Refitting
MOURMELON-LE-GRAND
November 26–December 18, 1944
AT 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 an
d 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. corp
s, 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.
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys Page 19
