Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Winters was bored. Being X.O. “was a letdown, a tremendous letdown. The most fun I had in the Army, the most satisfying thing I did was company commander. Being a junior officer was a tough job, taking it from both sides, from the men and from Captain Sobel. But as company commander, I was running my own little show. I was out front, making a lot of personal decisions on the spot that were important to the welfare of my company, getting a job done.” But as battalion X.O., “I was an administrator, not making any command decisions or such, just recommendations to the battalion commander, to the battalion S-2.” I suggested that some people would feel a sense of relief at the change. “I didn’t,” Winters replied.

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.

Liebgott requested, and got, a discharge and a return to duty. So did McCreary, Guarnere, and others. As noted, this was not because they craved combat, but because they knew they were going to have to fight with somebody and wanted it to be with Easy Company. “If I had my choice,” Webster wrote his parents, “I’d never fight again. Having no choice, I’ll go back to E Company and prepare for another jump. If I die, I hope it’ll be fast.” In another letter, he wrote, “The realization that there is no escape, that we shall jump on Germany, then ride transports straight to the Pacific for the battle in China, does not leave much room for optimism. Like the infantry, our only way out is to be wounded and evacuated.”

Hitler launched his last offensive on December 16, in the Ardennes, on a scale much greater than his 1940 offensive in the same place against the French Army. He achieved complete surprise. American intelligence in the Ardennes estimated the German forces facing the VIII Corps at four divisions. In fact by December 15 the Wehrmacht had twenty-five divisions in the Eifel, across from the Ardennes. The Germans managed to achieve surprise on a scale comparable with Barbarossa in June 1941 or Pearl Harbor. The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the offensive made no sense. For Hitler to use up his armor in an offensive that had no genuine strategic aim, and one that he could not sustain unless his tankers were lucky enough to capture major American fuel dumps intact, was foolish.

The result of all this was the biggest single battle on the Western front in World War II and the largest engagement ever fought by the U.S. Army. The human losses were staggering: of the 600,000 American soldiers involved, almost 20,000 were killed, another 20,000 captured, and 40,000 wounded. Two infantry divisions were annihilated; in one of them, the 106th, 7,500 men surrendered, the largest mass surrender in the war against Germany. Nearly 800 American Sherman tanks and other armored vehicles were destroyed.

For the men of Easy, without decent socks and no galoshes, feet always cold and always wet, trench foot quickly became a problem. Corporal Carson remembered being taught that the way to prevent trench foot was to massage the feet. So he took off his boots and massaged his feet. A German shell came in and hit a tree over his foxhole. Splinters tore up his foot and penetrated his thigh. He was evacuated back to Bastogne. At the hospital set up in the town, “I looked around and never saw so many wounded men. I called a medic over and said, ‘Hey, how come you got so many wounded people around here? Aren’t we evacuating anybody?’ ” “Haven’t you heard?” the medic replied. “I haven’t heard a damn thing.” “They’ve got us surrounded—the poor bastards.”

The temptation to get out altogether via a self-inflicted wound was also strong. It did not get light until 0800. It got dark at 1600. During the sixteen hours of night, out in those frozen foxholes (which actually shrank as the night went on and the ground froze and expanded), it was impossible to keep out of the mind the thought of how easy it would be to shoot a round into a foot. A little pain—not much in a foot so cold it could not be felt anyway—and then transport back to Bastogne, a warm aid station, a hot meal, a bed, escape. No man from Easy gave in to that temptation that every one of them felt. One man did take off his boots and socks to get frostbite and thus a ticket out of there. But for the others, they would take a legitimate way out or none. Winters recalled, “When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive. “When a man was killed—he looked ‘so peaceful.’ His suffering was over.”

At first light on Christmas Eve morning, Winters inspected his MLR. He walked past Corporal Gordon, “his head wrapped up in a big towel, with his helmet sitting on top. Walter sat on the edge of his foxhole behind his light machine-gun. He looked like he was frozen stiff, staring blankly straight ahead at the woods. I stopped and looked back at him, and it suddenly struck me, ‘Damn! Gordon’s matured! He’s a man!’ ” A half hour later, at 0830, Gordon brewed himself a cup of coffee. He kept coffee grounds in his hand grenade canister, “and I’d melted the snow with my little gas stove, and I’d brewed up this lovely cup of coffee.” As he started to sip it, the outposts came in with word that a German force was attempting to infiltrate Easy’s lines. His squad leader, Sgt. Buck Taylor, told him to “get on that machine-gun.” Gordon brushed snow from his weapon and the ammo box adjacent to the gun, telling his assistant, Pvt. Stephen Grodzki, to look sharp, pay attention to detail. A shot from a German rifleman rang out. The bullet hit Gordon in the left shoulder and exited from the right shoulder. It had brushed his spinal column; he was paralyzed from the neck down.

The 101st still had a complaint. As the story of the Battle of the Bulge is told today, it is one of George Patton and his Third Army coming to the rescue of the encircled 101st, like the cavalry come to save the settlers in their wagon circle. No member of the 101st has ever agreed that the division needed to be rescued!

The doctor, Maj. M. L. Stadium, told him that had the bullet varied one-half inch in one direction, it would have missed him; had it varied that much in the other direction, the wound would have been fatal. Gordon considered himself to be “fortunate, very fortunate. A million dollar wound.” Only a man who had been in the front line at Bastogne could describe such a wound in such words.

Hoobler was in a state of exhilaration after shooting a man on horseback. He moved from one position to another, hands in his pockets, batting the breeze with anyone who would talk. In his right-hand pocket he had a Luger he had picked up on the battlefield. A shot rang out. He had accidentally fired the Luger. The bullet went through his right thigh, severing the main artery. In great pain, Hoobler rolled about the ground, crying out for help. Private Holland, the 1st platoon medic, tried to bandage the wound. Two men carried Hoobler back to the aid station, but he died shortly after arrival.

Sergeants Rader, Randleman, Muck, and Christenson, and Cpls. Robert Marsh and Thomas McCreary gathered at the CP. Martin suggested that they sit down. Lts. Stirling Horner, Peacock, and Foley were there. Horner spoke first: “Your platoon commander, Lieutenant Peacock, has been awarded a thirty-day furlough to the States and he leaves today.” He explained that the PR man at Division HQ thought it would be a great idea to send one officer from each regiment involved in the heroic defense of Bastogne to the States for a war bond drive and other publicity purposes. Colonel Sink decided to make the selection by drawing lots. Captain Nixon won, Peacock came in second in the 506th. Nixon said he had already seen the States and didn’t want to go, so Peacock got the assignment. Everyone looked at Peacock, who stammered, “I have been awarded this furlough, I feel certain, because of the great job you men did in Holland and here, and the only thing I can say is thanks.” Sergeant McCreary jumped up, ran to Peacock, and started pumping his hand, saying, “Boy, am I glad to hear you’re going home, Lieutenant! That’s the best news we’ve had since we left Mourmelon.” Peacock, completely misunderstanding, blushed. He said he felt overwhelmed, that praise from one of the men was the highest praise. The sergeants smiled at each other. They were feeling as happy to see Peacock going as he was to be going. The noncoms felt they had carried his load throughout Holland and the Ardennes. “No one t...

Lipton looked down at Guarnere. Guarnere looked up and said, “Lip, they got ol’ Guarnere this time.” Malarkey joined them. Guarnere and Toye, as he recalled, were conscious and calm, no screaming or yelling. “Joe says, ‘Give me a cigarette, Malark.’ And I lit the cigarette for him.” There was a pause in our interview. I urged him to go on. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Malarkey said. Another pause, and then he continued: “Joe smoked, looked at me, and asked, ‘Jesus, Malark, what does a man have to do to get killed around here?’ ” Stretcher bearers got to Guarnere first. As he was being carried away he called out to Toye, “I told you I’d get back to the States before you!”

Peacock gone, Dike taking a walk, Compton gone, one replacement lieutenant who had turned himself in to the aid station with trench foot (which by this time almost every member of the company had) and another who was suspected of shooting himself in the hand—the battalion commander had to be concerned with the problem of the breaking point. Winters related his feelings in an interview: “I had reached that stage in Bastogne where I knew I was going to get it. Sooner or later, I’m gonna get it. I just hope the hell it isn’t too bad. But there never was a fear in me that I was gonna break. I just felt that I was going to be hit sooner or later. But as far as the breaking point, no.” After a reflective pause, he went on, “But you don’t see people getting hit around you every day, every day, every day, continuing on and on, and—not knowing how long this was going to go on. Is this going to go on forever? Am I ever going to see home again?”

There is a limit to how long a man can function effectively in this topsy-turvy world. For some, mental breakdown comes early; Army psychiatrists found that in Normandy between 10 and 20 percent of the men in rifle companies suffered some form of mental disorder during the first week, and either fled or had to be taken out of the line (many, of course, returned to their units later). For others, visible breakdown never occurs, but nevertheless effectiveness breaks down. The experiences of men in combat produces emotions stronger than civilians can know, emotions of terror, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, helplessness, uselessness, and each of these feelings drained energy and mental stability.

“There is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat,’ ” the Army psychiatrists stated in an official report on Combat Exhaustion. “Each moment of combat imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure . . . psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds in warfare . . . . Most men were ineffective after 180 or even 140 days. The general consensus was that a man reached his peak of effectiveness in the first 90 days of combat, that after that his efficiency began to fall off, and that he became steadily less valuable thereafter until he was completely useless.”1 By January 3, 1945, Easy Company had spent twenty-three days on the front line in Normandy, seventy-eight in Holland, fifteen in Belgium, a total of 116. Statistically, the whole company was in danger of breaking down at any time.

Suddenly a shell burst in the trees, then another and another. They kept coming. Cpl. George Luz was caught out in the open. He began racing toward his foxhole. Sergeant Muck and Pvt. Alex Penkala called out to him to jump in with them, but he decided to get to his own and with shell bursts all around, splinters and branches and whole trees coming down, made it and dived in. Lipton was sharing a foxhole with Sgt. Bob Mann, the Company HQ radio man. The Germans sent over some mail. A shell that was a dud hit just outside their foxhole. Lipton looked at it. Mann lighted a cigarette. Lipton had never smoked, but he asked for one, and that night had his first cigarette. Luz went to check on Muck and Penkala, the men who had offered to share their foxhole with him. The hole had taken a direct hit. Luz started digging frantically. He found some pieces of bodies and a part of a sleeping bag.

Speirs was an officer with a reputation. Slim, fairly tall, dark hair, stern, ruggedly handsome, he cultivated the look of a leader, and acted it. One of his fellow D Company junior officers, Lt. Tom Gibson, described him as “a tough, aggressive, brave, and resourceful rifle platoon leader.” His nicknames were “Sparky” (among his fellow officers) and “Bloody” (with the enlisted). He had led a bayonet attack and won the Silver Star in Normandy. There were stories. The rumor mill swirled around Lieutenant Speirs. No one ever saw “it” happen with his own eyes, but he knew someone who did. They may be just stories, but they were believed, or half-believed, by the men of E Company. One story was about the time in Normandy when Speirs had a major problem with drinking in his platoon. He put out a blanket order. No more wine. None. The next day he ran into a drunken noncom. He gave an order, the noncom back-talked him, and he took out his pistol and shot the man between the eyes. The conclusion to the story goes like this: “And he never had any trouble with drinking after that.”

Then there was the day in Normandy when Speirs was walking down a road by himself and passed a group of ten German P.O.W.s. They were under guard and were digging a roadside ditch. Speirs stopped, broke out a pack of cigarettes, and gave one to each P.O.W. They were so appreciative he jumped into the ditch and gave them the whole pack. Then he took out his lighter and gave each one a light. He stepped back up on the road and watched them inhale and chat. Suddenly and without warning he unslung the Thompson .45-caliber submachine-gun he always carried and fired into the group. He continued raking back and forth until all the P.O.W.s were dead. The guard was stunned. Speirs turned and walked away.

Gibson said he had told the story often over the years, never naming names, but using it as an example of what can happen in war. He continued, “We all know war stories seem to have a life of their own. They have a way of growing, of being embellished. Whether the details are precise or not there must be a kernel of truth for such a story to ever have been told the first time.”

At this moment, Speirs arrived, breathless. He managed to blurt out to Dike, “I’m taking over.” Sergeant Lipton and the others filled him in. He barked out orders, 2d platoon this way, 3d platoon that way, get those mortars humping, all-out with those machine-guns, let’s go. And he took off, not looking back, depending on the men to follow. They did. “I remember the broad, open fields outside Foy,” Speirs wrote in a 1991 letter, “where any movement brought fire. A German 88 artillery piece was fired at me when I crossed the open area alone. That impressed me.” Standing at the site in 1991 with Winters and Malarkey, Lipton remembered Speirs’s dash. He also recalled that when they got to the outbuildings of Foy, Speirs wanted to know where I Company was. “So he just kept on running right through the German line, came out the other side, conferred with the I Company C.O., and ran back. Damn, that was impressive.”

Winters glanced to his left. The 88s were tearing up the 1st Battalion. “Men were flying through the air,” Winters recalled. “Years later, in the movie Doctor Zhivago, I saw troops crossing snow-covered fields, being shot into by cannon from the edge of the woods, and men flying through the air. Those scenes seemed very real to me.”

Sgt. Earl Hale was one of the first into Rachamps. He and Liebgott ducked into a barn, where they surprised and made prisoner six SS officers. Hale lined them up nose to nose and told them that if he and Liebgott got killed they were going to take the Germans with them. Hale covered them with his tommy-gun to make the point. A shell exploded outside. Hale was standing by the door. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel and went down. An SS officer pulled his knife from his boot and slashed Hale’s throat. He failed to cut an artery or sever the windpipe, but did cut the esophagus. Blood gushed out. Liebgott shot the officer who did the cutting, then the others. Medic Roe got sulfa powder on Hale’s wound. A jeep evacuated him to Luxembourg, where an amazed doctor patched him up, leaving a crooked esophagus. Because of Hale’s condition, the doctor gave him a medical order stating that he did not have to wear a necktie. (Later, Hale was stopped by an irate General Patton who chewed him out for not wearing his necktie. Hale triumphantly produced his slip of paper, leaving Patton for once speechless.)

It was a test of arms, will, and national systems, matching the best the Nazis had against the best the Americans had, with all the advantages on the German side. The 101st not only endured, it prevailed. It is an epic tale as much for what it revealed as what happened. The defeat of the Germans in their biggest offensive in the West in World War II, and the turning of that defeat into a major opportunity “to kill Germans west of the Rhine,” as Eisenhower put it, was a superb feat of arms. The Americans established a moral superiority over the Germans. It was based not on equipment or quantity of arms, but on teamwork, coordination, leadership, and mutual trust in a line that ran straight from Ike’s HQ right on down to E Company. The Germans had little in the way of such qualities. The moral superiority was based on better training methods, better selection methods for command positions, ultimately on a more open army reflecting a more open society. Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.

Although the men had seen little of Bastogne, that name—and the experience it represented—would stay with them forever. Whenever thereafter a man from Easy experienced cold or hunger or sleep deprivation, he would remind himself of Bastogne and recall that he had been through much worse. Easy’s losses were heavy. Exact figures are impossible to come by; in the hurry-up movement out of Mourmelon the company roster was not completed; replacements came in as individuals or in small groups and were not properly accounted for on the roster; wounded men dropped out of the line only to come back a few days later. An estimate is that Easy went into Belgium with 121 officers and men, received about two dozen replacements, and came out with 63. The Easy men killed in action in Belgium were Sgt. Warren Muck, Cpl. Francis Mellett, and Pvts. A. P. Herron, Kenneth Webb, Harold Webb, Carl Sowosko, John Shindell, Don Hoobler, Harold Hayes, Alex Penkala, and John Julian.

Beyond the wounded and killed, every man at Bastogne suffered. Men unhit by shrapnel or bullets were nevertheless casualties. There were no unwounded men at Bastogne. As Winters put it, “I’m not sure that anybody who lived through that one hasn’t carried with him, in some hidden ways, the scars. Perhaps that is the factor that helps keep Easy men bonded so unusually close together.”

Whenever there was a lull, the men at OP 2 could hear a wheezing, choking, gurgling sound from across the river. The wounded German soldier abandoned by the patrol had been shot in the lungs. Webster and his buddies debated what to do, kill him and put him out of his misery or let him die in peace. Webster favored killing him, because if he were left alone the Germans would send a patrol to fetch him, and he could report on all the activity around OP 2. “Then they will shell us even more,” Webster predicted. Webster decided to haul himself across the river, using the rope, and knife the man. McCreary vetoed the idea. He said the Germans would use the wounded man as bait for a trap. Webster decided that he was right. A hand grenade would be better. Accompanied by Pvt. Bob Marsh, Webster moved cautiously down to the river bank. He could hear the German gasping and slobbering in ghastly wheezes. “I pitied him,” Webster wrote, “dying all alone in a country far from home, dying slowly without hope or love on the bank of a dirty little river, helpless.” Marsh and Webster pulled the pins on the grenades and threw them beside the German. One exploded, the other was a dud. The wheezing continued. The Americans returned to their outpost, got more grenades, and tried again. The wheezing continued. They gave it up; let him die in his own time. When the shelling finally ceased, just before dawn, the wheezing went on, getting on everyone’s nerves. Cobb decided he could take it no more. ...

Former Easy Company officers were by March occupying key positions in regiment (S-3 and S-4) and battalion (the C.O. of 1st Battalion was Lieutenant Colonel Hester; Winters was C.O. of 2d Battalion, where the S-2 and S-3 were from Easy). One of their number, Matheson, eventually became a major general and C.O. of the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. One is bound to say, one last time, that Captain Sobel must have been doing something right back in the summer of ’42 at Toccoa. You could never prove it with Winters, whose feelings for Sobel never softened. Indeed, Sobel’s return provided Winters with one of the most satisfactory moments of his life. Walking down the street at Mourmelon, Major Winters saw Captain Sobel coming from the opposite direction. Sobel saw Winters, dropped his head, and walked past without saluting. When he had gone a further step or two, Winters called out, “Captain Sobel, we salute the rank, not the man.” “Yes, sir,” Sobel answered as he snapped off a salute.

The man who had replaced Sobel and Winters as C.O. of Easy, Captain Speirs, continued to impress both officers and enlisted men. “Captain Speirs promises to be as good an officer as Winters,” Webster thought. He realized that many disagreed with him, men “who loathed Speirs on the ground that he had killed one of his own men in Normandy, that he was bull-headed and suspicious, that he believed there was no such thing as Combat Exhaustion.” But to Webster, “He was a brave man in combat, in fact a wild man, who had gotten his Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts legitimately. Speirs swears by common sense, combat noncoms, and training with the emphasis on battle, rather than the book. I like Speirs.”

Eisenhower finally arrived. He drove past the whole division, then climbed up on a reviewing stand to give a speech. He announced that the division had received a Presidential Distinguished Unit Citation, the first time in the history of the Army that an entire division had been so cited, for its performance at Bastogne. In a short speech, Ike was effusive in his praise: “You were given a marvelous opportunity [in Bastogne], and you met every test . . . . I am awfully proud of you.” He concluded with a mixture of praise and exhortation: “With this great honor goes also a certain responsibility. Just as you are the beginning of a new tradition, you must realize, each of you, that from now on, the spotlight will beat on you with particular brilliance. Whenever you say you are a soldier of the 101st Division, everybody, whether it’s on the street, in the city, or in the front line, will expect unusual conduct of you. I know that you will meet every test of the future like you met it at Bastogne.”

Easy Company was about to enter its fifth country. The men had liked Britain and the English people enormously. They did not like the French, who seemed to them ungrateful, sullen, lazy, and dirty. They had a special relationship with the Belgians because of their intimate association with the civilians of Bastogne, who had done whatever they could to support the Americans. They loved the Dutch. Brave, resourceful, overwhelmingly grateful, the best organized underground in Europe, cellars full of food hidden from the Germans but given to the Americans, clean, hard-working, honest were only some of the compliments the men showered on the Dutch. Now they were going to meet the Germans. For the first time they would be on front lines inside enemy territory, living with enemy civilians. And if the rumor proved true, the one that said instead of living in foxholes they were going to be billeted in German houses, they would be getting to know the Germans in an intimate fashion. This would be especially true once the Ruhr pocket was eliminated and the advance across central Germany began. Then they would be staying in a different house every night, under conditions in which the occupants would have only a few minutes notice of their arrival. They would be coming as conquerors who had been told to distrust all Germans and who had been forbidden by the nonfraternization policy to have any contact with German civilians. But except for Liebgott and a few others, they had no undying h...

The standard story of how the American G.I. reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were, as noted, regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average G.I. never was in Holland, only the airborne). The story ends up thus: wonder of wonders, the average G.I. found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and lifestyles (many G.I.s noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as “just like us.”

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.”

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.

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.

Winters was struck by the German fanaticism, the discipline that led German engineers to blow their own bridges when the uselessness of the destruction was clear to any idiot, and “the total futility of the war. Here was a German army trying to surrender and walking north along the autobahn, while at the same time another group was blowing out the bridges to slow down the surrender.”

On April 29 the company stopped for the night at Buchloe, in the foothills of the Alps, near Landsberg. Here they saw their first concentration camp. It was a work camp, not an extermination camp, one of the half-dozen or more that were a part of the Dachau complex. But although it was relatively small and designed to produce war goods, it was so horrible that it was impossible to fathom the enormity of the evil. Prisoners in their striped pajamas, three-quarters starved, by the thousands; corpses, little more than skeletons, by the hundreds. Winters found stacks of huge wheels of cheese in the cellar of a building he was using for the battalion CP and ordered it distributed to the inmates. He radioed to regiment to describe the situation and ask for help. The company stayed in Buchloe for two nights. Thus it was present in the morning when the people of Landsberg turned out, carrying rakes, brooms, shovels, and marched off to the camp. General Taylor, it turned out, had been so incensed by the sight that he had declared martial law and ordered everyone from fourteen to eighty years of age to be rounded up and sent to the camp, to bury the bodies and clean up the place. That evening the crew came back down the road from the camp. Some were still vomiting. “The memory of starved, dazed men,” Winters wrote, “who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that...

Berchtesgaden was a magnet for the troops of all the armies in southern Germany, Austria, and northern Italy. South of Salzburg, the Bavarian mountain town of Berchtesgaden was Valhalla for the Nazi gods, lords, and masters. Hitler had a home there and a mountaintop stone retreat called the Aldershorst (Eagle’s Nest) 8,000 feet high. Thanks to a remarkable job of road building, cars could get to a parking place within a few hundred feet of the Aldershorst. There a shaft ran into the center of the mountain to an elevator which lifted into the Aldershorst. The walls of the elevator were gold leaf. It was to Berchtesgaden that the leaders of Europe had come in the late 1930s to be humiliated by Hitler. Daladier of France, Mussolini of Italy, Schuschnigg of Austria, Chamberlain of Britain, and others. They had feared Hitler, as had the whole world. Now that Hitler was dead, the fear was removed, but that only highlighted the fascination with Hitler and his favorite retreat, which seemed to hold one of the keys to his character. It was to Berchtesgaden that the highest-ranking Nazi leadership flocked, to be near their Führer. Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Martin Bormann had houses in the area. There was a fabulous apartment complex for the SS.

So Berchtesgaden was really two magnets: the symbolic home of Hitler’s mad lust for power, and the best looting possibilities in Europe. Everybody wanted to get there—French advancing side by side with the 101st, British coming up from Italy, German leaders who wanted to get their possessions, and every American in Europe. Easy Company got there first.

Thereafter, Winters dealt with an English-speaking German staff officer, who came to his HQ each morning to report and receive orders. There was no trouble; in Winters’s words, “We left them alone, they respected us.” The German staff officer would tell stories about his tour of duty on the Eastern Front, and of fighting against the 101st in Bastogne. He told Winters, “Our armies should join hands and wipe out the Russian Army.” “No thanks,” Winters replied. “All I want to do is get out of the Army and go home.” That was what nearly everyone wanted, none more than the German troops. Before any could be released, however, all had to be screened. The German encampments were crawling with Nazis, many of whom had put on enlisted men’s uniforms to escape detection. (The most notorious of these was Adolf Eichmann, wearing the uniform of a Luftwaffe corporal in a camp near Berchtesgaden. He managed to escape before he was detected, got to Argentina with his family and lived well until 1960 when Israeli agents discovered his whereabouts, captured him in a daring commando raid, brought him to Israel for trial, and hanged him.)

In mid-May, Lipton cleared about 150 of the prisoners for release. The senior German officer, a colonel, asked permission to talk to them before they were let go. Lipton agreed. “His talk was long and was a good one,” Lipton recalled. “He told them that Germany had lost the war, that they had been good soldiers and he was proud of them, and that they should go back to their homes and rebuild their lives. He said that all of them were needed for the reconstruction of Germany. When he finished, the men gave a loud cheer,” and took off.

One night Sgt. Robert Marsh was driving Pvt. John Janovec back from a roadblock by a side road. Janovec was leaning on the unreliable door of a German truck. They hit a log. He lost his balance, fell, and hit his head on the pavement. Marsh rushed him to the regimental aid station in Zell am See, but he died on the way of a fractured skull. Captain Speirs gathered up his few personal possessions, a watch, his wings, his wallet, and his parachute scarf, and mailed them to Janovec’s parents. “He had come a long way,” Webster wrote. “He had jumped in Holland and fought in Bastogne. He hated the army, and now, when the war is over and the golden prospect of home was in sight, he had died.”

On November 30, 1945, the 101st was inactivated. Easy Company no longer existed. • • • The company had been born in July 1942 at Toccoa. Its existence essentially came to an end almost exactly three years later in Zell am See, Austria. In those three years the men had seen more, endured more, and contributed more than most men can see, endure, or contribute in a lifetime.

They had had three remarkable men as company commanders, Herbert Sobel, Richard Winters, and Ronald Speirs. Each had made his own impact but Winters, who had been associated with the company from Day 1 to Day 1,095, had made the deepest impression. In the view of those who served in Easy Company, it was Dick Winters’s company.

Sergeant Talbert was in the hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, on September 30, 1945. He wrote a letter to Winters. He was no Webster as a writer, but he wrote from the heart and he spoke for every man who ever served in Easy Company. He said he wished they could get together to talk, as there were a lot of things he wanted to tell Winters. “The first thing I will try to explain . . . Dick, you are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier that ever served under you or I should say with you because that is the way you led. You are to me the greatest soldier I could ever hope to meet. “A man can get something from war that is impossible to acquire anyplace else. I always seemed to strengthen my self-confidence or something. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You know all that. “Well I will cut this off for now. You are the best friend I ever had and I only wish we could have been on a different basis. You were my ideal, and motor in combat. The little Major we both knew summed you up in two words, ‘the most brave and courageous soldier he ever knew.’ And I respected his judgment very much. He was a great soldier too, and I informed him you were the greatest. Well you know why I would follow you into hell. When I was with you I knew everything was absolutely under control.”

Winters felt as strongly about the men as they did about him. In 1991 he summed up his company’s history and its meaning: “The 101st Airborne was made up of hundreds of good, solid companies. However, E Co., 506 P.I.R. stand out among all of them through that very special bond that brings men together. “That extra special, elite, close feeling started under the stress Capt. Sobel created at Camp Toccoa. Under that stress, the only way the men could survive was to bond together. Eventually, the noncoms had to bond together in a mutiny. “The stress in training was followed by the stress in Normandy of drawing the key combat mission for gaining control of Utah Beach. In combat your reward for a good job done is that you get the next tough mission. E Company kept right on getting the job done through Holland—Bastogne—Germany. “The result of sharing all that stress throughout training and combat has created a bond between the men of E Company that will last forever.”

FORTY-EIGHT MEMBERS of Easy Company had given their lives for their country. More than 100 had been wounded, many of them severely, some twice, a few three times, one four times. Most had suffered stress, often severe. All had given what they regarded as the best years of their lives to the war. They were trained killers, accustomed to carnage and quick, violent reactions. Few of them had any college education before the war; the only skill most of them possessed was that of combat infantryman. They came out determined to make up for the lost time. They rushed to college, using the G.I. Bill of Rights, universally praised by the veterans as the best piece of legislation the United States Government ever conceived. They got married and had kids as quickly as possible. Then they set out to build a life for themselves.

Talbert had enclosed a recent photograph. He looked like a mountain man. In his reply, Winters told him to shave off the beard and get his hair cut if he intended to come to San Diego. He did, but he still showed up wearing tattered hunting clothes. The first morning, Gordon and Don Moone took him to a men’s store and bought him new clothes. Before the year was out, he died. Gordon wrote his epitaph. “Almost all of the men of Company E suffered wounds of various severity. Some of us limp, some have impaired vision or hearing, but almost without exception we have modified our lives to accommodate the injury. Tab continued in daily conflict with a demon within his breast. He paid a dear price for his service to his country. He could not have given more without laying down his life.” Dick Winters paid him an ultimate tribute: “If I had to pick out just one man to be with me on a mission in combat, it would be Talbert.”

Capt. Herbert Sobel had no physical wounds, but deep mental ones. He also disappeared from sight. He married, had two sons, got a divorce, and was estranged from his children. He worked as an accountant for an appliance company in Chicago. Maj. Clarence Hester was in Chicago on business one day in the early 1960s. He arranged for a lunch together. He found Sobel to be bitter toward E Company and life generally. Twenty years later Guarnere tried to locate Sobel. He finally found his sister, who told him Sobel was in bad mental condition and that he directed his rage at the men of E Company. Guarnere nevertheless paid Sobel’s dues to the 101st Association, hoping to get him involved in that organization, but nothing happened. Shortly thereafter Captain Sobel shot himself. He botched it. Eventually he died in September 1988. His funeral was a sad affair. His ex-wife did not come to it, nor did his sons, nor did any member of E Company.

When old E Company men call him today and open the conversation by saying, “You won’t remember me, but we were together during the war,” Speirs replies, “Which war?” His son Robert, born in England during the war, is an infantry major in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the “Green Jackets,” and Speirs’s “pride and joy.”