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July 26 - August 2, 2021
They were idealists, eager to merge themselves into a group fighting for a cause, actively seeking an outfit with which they could identify, join, be a part of, relate to as a family.
Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.
Had a similar modus operandi during the military service.
They came out of the Depression with many other positive features. They were self-reliant, accustomed to hard work and to taking orders. Through sports or hunting or both, they had gained a sense of self-worth and self-confidence.
They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1. But having been caught up in the war, they decided to be as positive as possible in their Army careers.
The officers were as new to this paratrooping business as the men; they were teachers who sometimes were not much more than one day ahead of the class.
The men were told that Currahee was an Indian word that meant “We stand alone,” which was the way these paratroopers expected to fight. It became the battle cry of the 506th.
When they were issued their rifles, they were told to treat the weapon as they would treat a wife, gently. It was theirs to have and to hold, to sleep with in the field, to know intimately. They got to where they could take it apart and put it back together blindfolded.
Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers. Their trust in, and knowledge of, each other is total.
“Organization for a common and concrete goal in peacetime organizations does not evoke anything like the degree of comradeship commonly known in war . . . . At its height, this sense of comradeship is an ecstasy . . . . Men are true comrades only when each is ready to give up his life for the other, without reflection and without thought of personal loss.”
You lead by fear or you lead by example. We were being led by fear.”
They hated him so much that even when he should have earned their respect, he failed.
Benning was a welcome relief to the men of E Company in the sense that they were getting realistic training for becoming paratroopers rather than spending most of their waking hours doing physical exercises.
Standing in that open door was an obvious moment of truth. Men who had been outstanding in training, men who later won medals for bravery in combat as ordinary infantry, would freeze.
Usually, however, if a man froze once, he would never jump.
The relationship was based on mutual respect brought about by an identical view of leadership. “Officers go first,” as Welsh put it.
“I could see a silhouette at night,” Gordon said, “and tell you who it was.
England in the late fall and early winter of 1943 was a wonderland for the boys from the States.
Older British observers complained, “The trouble with you Yanks is that you are overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” (To which the Yanks would reply, “The trouble with you Limeys is that you are underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.”)
To have any chance of success, it would be necessary to practice. For the practice to be realistic, it would be necessary to find a piece of the English coastline similar to Utah Beach.
“If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you real quick—dead!”
The men were as hardened physically as it was possible for human beings to be. Not even professional boxers or football players were in better shape.
They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.
“I swore that when I got to Normandy, there ain’t no German going to be alive. I was like a maniac. When they sent me into France, they turned a killer loose, a wild man.”
“Hitler made only one big mistake when he built his Atlantic Wall,” the paratroopers liked to say. “He forgot to put a roof on it.”
The significance of what Easy Company had accomplished cannot be judged with any degree of precision, but it surely saved a lot of lives, and made it much easier—perhaps even made it possible in the first instance—for tanks to come inland from the beach.
“I wanted to send it back to Kitty to make a wedding gown for our marriage after the war. (Optimism?)”
And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.
I have sympathy for him; writing accurately about a battle for which you have conflicting testimony from the eyewitnesses and participants is a challenge, and then some. Military historians do the best they can.
Another problem emerged, one that was to plague the airborne forces throughout the next year. Every liberated village in France, and later in Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Austria, was full of wine, cognac, brandy, and other fine liquor, of a quality and in a quantity quite unknown to the average enlisted man.
The men were completely at ease working at night, indeed some of them insisted they could see better in the dark than in daylight.
Once more there’s a job to be done, the old confidence comes back, the thrill of combat returns, and the drive to excel and win takes over again.”
But he felt the risk was worthwhile, because he had learned on June 6 at Brécourt Manor that the key to a successful attack was to lay down a good, steady base of fire and then advance right under it. Done correctly, the job got accomplished with few casualties.
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.”
“Men, there’s nothing to get excited about. The situation is normal; we are surrounded.”
That seems doubtful, but we will never know because it was never tried.
A man’s inability to do anything about the artillery fire added to the widespread, overwhelming feeling of frustration.
Best of all was the daily British rum ration. Next best was finding German rations.
He thought to himself, This is just like the movie All Quiet on the Western Front.
“They got me!” which even then seemed to him “an inadequate and unimaginative cliché.” (Like all writers, he was composing his description of the event as it happened.)
They had bunched up in one big mass, inexcusable in Winters’s view.
“Follow me” was his code. He personally killed more Germans and took more risks than anyone else.
“Indecision was his middle name . . . . In combat his mind became completely disoriented, and he froze.
When it does come to a member of a rifle company in the front line, it is almost impossible to make him stay there and do his duty. His motivation has to be internal.
Comradeship is by far the strongest motivator—not wanting to let his buddies down, in the positive sense, not wanting to appear a coward in front of the men he loves and respects above all others in the negative sense.
“In campaigns of extreme hazard,” Gray writes, “soldiers learn more often than civilians ever do that everything external is replaceable, while life is not.”5 What is not replaceable is the esteem of comrades, but to the replacement soldier, just arrived, there is no comradeship, so there is nothing to hold him to his post.
This was not because they had a love of combat, but because they knew if they did not go to war with Easy, they would be sent to war with strangers,
What is remarkable is that so many did not break.
The Germans dropped some leaflets, Why Fight for the Jews?
The only effect of the propaganda, by both sides, was to bring a good laugh.
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.
