It was more an occupation position than front line. The platoons kept outposts down on the river bank, while the men stayed in homes in various small villages. There was some artillery shelling, back and forth, but not much. There was no small arms fire.
The men were on outpost each night. Here Private O'Keefe got his initiation. One night he was on outpost with Pvt. Harry Lager, who had also just joined the company at Mourmelon, in a ready-made foxhole beside the dike. They heard a thump, thump, thump. O'Keefe whispered to Lager, "Stay in the hole but make room for me to drop in a hurry. I'm going up on that dike to see if I can make out what that is approaching."
Up on the dike, O'Keefe recalled, "I couldn't see a damn thing but the noise was almost on top of me. Suddenly the nose of a small tank stuck out through the fog. I yelled, 'Halt, who goes there?' and ready to dive off that dike into the hole with Lager."
A voice came out of the tank: "It's just a couple of Limeys, and we're lost." O'Keefe ordered the man to come down to be inspected. A British sergeant did so, saying, "By God, Yank, are we glad to see you! We started out on that bloody dike at midnight, and we can't find our way off."
"What's making that noise?" O'Keefe asked.
"Oh, that," the Brit replied. "It's one of our treads. It broke. We can only travel about two miles an hour. The tread goes around but hits the ground on each rotation." O'Keefe suggested that the sergeant put his crew mate out in front, walking ahead, else they might get plastered at the next check point. The sergeant said he would. O'Keefe rejoined Lager, glad to note that Lager had them covered with his M-l the whole time. The little incident gave Lager and O'Keefe confidence in themselves and one another. They decided they had the hang of it.
Another night, at another place along the river, O'Keefe was on outpost with a recent recruit, Pvt. James Welling. From West Virginia, Welling was thirty years old, making him just about the oldest man in the company. O'Keefe was the youngest. Although Welling had just joined the company, he was a combat veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, volunteered for paratroopers after discharge from hospital in England, made all five qualifying jumps in one day, and was now a member of the 101st.
On the outpost, they were standing in a waist-deep foxhole when a ten-ton truck came barreling along the road. "Halt," O'Keefe yelled, three times. No one heard him. A convoy of nine trucks, bumper to bumper, passed him by, engines roaring.
"What do you do when you yell 'Halt!' and you realize that they'll never hear you?" O'Keefe asked Welling.
"Not much you can do," he replied.
Half an hour later the trucks came back, full speed, except now there were only eight trucks.
"Jim, what's down that road?" O'Keefe asked.
"I don't know, nobody said."
A quarter of an hour later Captain Speirs showed up, "madder than hell." He shouted at Welling, "Why didn't you stop those trucks? The bridge is out down there and one of those trucks is now hanging over the edge." Having heard various stories about Speirs's temper, O'Keefe expected the worst. But Welling shouted right back:
"How the hell were we going to stop nine trucks going full-bore? And why didn't someone tell us the bridge was out. Hell, we didn't even know there was a bridge there."
"Where's the other guard," Speirs demanded.
O'Keefe stepped out of a shadow with his M-l pointed about waist high and said as menacingly as he could, "Right here, sir." Speirs grunted and left.
A night or so later, a jeep came along, no lights. Welling called out "Halt!" The jeep contained Captain Speirs, another captain, and a major in the back seat. Welling said the password. Speirs gave the countersign in a normal conversational tone. Welling couldn't make out what he had said and repeated the challenge. Speirs answered in the same tone; Welling still didn't hear him. Tense and a bit confused, O'Keefe lined up his M-l on the major in the back. He looked closely and realized it was Winters.
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 realize
d "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
2. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 715.
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 DP 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-l, was particularly obnoxious. One day he had the company lined up for inspection. An old German woman rode her bicycle innocently through the ranks. Richie 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 loonies, 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 Hedngebüicke, 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 cobble stones. House 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. Eis
enhower'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
3. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 723.
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.
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