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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

they were teachers who sometimes were not much more than one day ahead of the class.

Easy had a full complement of 132 men and eight officers. It was divided into three platoons and a headquarters section. There were three twelve-man rifle squads plus a six-man mortar team squad to a platoon. A light infantry outfit, Easy had one machine-gun to each of the rifle squads, and a 60 mm mortar in each mortar team.

it took 500 officer volunteers to produce the 148 who made it through Toccoa, and 5,300 enlisted volunteers to get 1,800 graduates.

At the end of the second week, Tipper went on, “We were told, ‘Relax. No runs today.’ We were taken to the mess hall for a tremendous meal of spaghetti at lunchtime. When we came out of the mess hall, a whistle blew, and we were told, ‘The orders are changed. We run.’ We went to the top of Currahee and back with a couple of ambulances following, and men vomiting spaghetti everywhere along the way.

At the end of a march Sobel would check each man’s canteen to see that it was still full.

The Army had a saying, Gordon related: “We can’t make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.”

There is not a day that has passed since that I do not thank Adolf Hitler for allowing me to be associated with the most talented and inspiring group of men that I have ever known.”

I asked every member of Easy that I interviewed for this book if the extraordinary closeness, the outstanding unit cohesion, the remarkable staying power of the identification with Easy came about because of or in spite of Sobel. Those who did not reply “Both,” said it was because of Sobel. Rod Strohl looked me in the eye and said flatly, “Herbert Sobel made E Company.” Others said something similar. But they nearly all hated him.

Strayer made that Thanksgiving even more memorable by laying on the Hawg Innards Problem. He stretched wires across a field, at about 18 inches off the ground. Machine-gunners fired over the top of the wire. Beneath it, Strayer spread the ground with the intestines of freshly slaughtered hogs—hearts, lungs, guts, livers, the works. The men crawled through the vile mess. Lipton recalled that “the army distinction between ‘creep’ and ‘crawl’ is that a baby creeps, and a snake crawls. We crawled.”

Parachute school was supposed to begin with physical training (A stage), followed by B, C, and D stages, each lasting a week, but the 506th skipped A stage. This happened because the 1st Battalion arrived ahead of the others, went into A stage, and embarrassed the jump school sergeants who were assigned to lead the calisthenics and runs.

Usually, however, if a man froze once, he would never jump.

There was more. A jeep drove up and dumped out Private Doe’s barracks bags. He had to take off his boots, put on regular shoes, wear his pants down like a regular infantryman (“straight legs,” as the paratroopers called them). He picked up his bags and, followed by the sub-machine-gunners, marched sadly away, the drum continuing to roll, a picture of bleak loneliness. This was repeated nine times. After that, the 506th had little problem with men returning late from a furlough.

(Through to the end of the war, every vacancy on the 2d Battalion staff was filled with an officer from Easy. Companies D, F, and HQ did not send a single officer up to battalion.

Sgts. Myron “Mike” Ranney, a twenty-one-year-old from North Dakota, of 1st platoon,

Few made their thoughts articulate, but Webster dealt with his directly. He wrote his mother, instructing her to “stop worrying about me. I joined the parachutists to fight. I intend to fight. If necessary, I shall die fighting, but don’t worry about this because no war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”

Troops wearing German uniforms and carrying German weapons roamed constantly through the marshaling area, to familiarize the men with what the enemy looked like and what weapons they carried.

Everyone was given the verbal challenge, “Flash,” the password, “Thunder,” and the response, “Welcome.”

Winters remembered going past some British antiaircraft units stationed at the field, “and that was the first time I’d ever seen any real emotion from a Limey, they actually had tears in their eyes.”

Colonel von der Heydte wanted to see for himself. He drove his motorcycle from Carentan to Ste. Marie-du-Mont, where he climbed to the top of the church steeple, 50 or 60 meters above the ground. There he had a magnificent view of Utah Beach. What he saw quite took his breath away. “All along the beach,” he recalled in a 1991 interview, “were these small boats, hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before.”

Sink put Winters in for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Only one man per division was to be given that ultimate medal for the Normandy campaign; in the 101st it went to Lt. Col. Robert Cole for leading a bayonet charge; Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross. Compton, Guarnere, Lorraine, and Toye got the Silver Star; Lipton, Malarkey, Ranney, Liebgott, Hendrix, Plesha, Petty, and Wynn got Bronze Stars.

Michel became mayor of Ste. Marie-du-Mont, and the founder and builder of the museum at Utah Beach.

Fritz’s mother had received all three telegrams from the War Department on the same day.

Easy had jumped into Normandy on June 6 with 139 officers and men. Easy was pulled out of the line on June 29 with 74 officers and men present for duty.

“I cannot understand why you hope for a quick end of the war. Unless we take the horror of battle to Germany itself, unless we fight in their villages, blowing up their houses, smashing open their wine cellars, killing some of their livestock for food, unless we litter their streets with horribly rotten German corpses as was done in France, the Germans will prepare for war, unmindful of its horrors. Defeat must be brought into Germany itself before this mess can come to a proper end; a quick victory now, a sudden collapse, will leave the countryside relatively intact and the people thirsty for revenge. I want the war to end as quickly as anybody wishes, but I don’t want the nucleus of another war left whole.”

The objective was the bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal at Son. The route was over a north-south road that ran from Eindhoven to Veghel to Nijmegen to Arnhem.

Bully beef and heavy Yorkshire pudding were particularly hated, as was the oxtail soup, characterized as “grease with bones floating in it.”

Holland is the most densely populated country on earth).

With thirty-five men, a platoon of Easy Company had routed two German companies of about 300 men. American casualties (including those from Fox Company) were one dead, twenty-two wounded. Germans casualties were fifty killed, eleven captured, about 100 wounded.

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.

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.

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.

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 German Commander received the following reply: ’22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.’

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,

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.”

As to putting a company as badly mauled as Easy into a frontal attack over a snowfield in bright daylight, this didn’t come about because Taylor wanted glory but because Eisenhower needed men. He had no reserves available to throw into the attack, this was the moment to attack, he had to attack with what was there on the front lines. In other words, Easy was paying the price for the policy of limited mobilization. There simply were not enough troops for the job.

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.)

The 101st, hungry, cold, underarmed, fought the finest units Nazi Germany could produce at this stage of the war. Those Wehrmacht and SS troops were well fed, warm, and fully armed, and they heavily outnumbered the 101st. 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.

Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.

The battle made the 101st into a legend. The legend that began in Normandy and grew in Holland reached its climax in Bastogne. The 101st Airborne was the most famous and admired of all the eighty-nine divisions the United States Army put into the Second World War. Ever since, men have worn that Screaming Eagle on their left shoulders with the greatest of pride.

They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers.

Webster was thrown in with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life, he just would not have known them.

(Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, changes hands after every war. In 1871 it became German territory; the French got it back in 1919; in 1940 it became German again, in 1945, French.)

we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war.”

(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 experiences of the men of E Company in Germany illustrates how much better off during the war the German people were than the people of Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland.

“In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”

On April 18, all German resistance in the Ruhr pocket came to an end. More than 325,000 German soldiers surrendered.

When the convoy reached the autobahn leading east to Munich, the road was reserved for Allied military traffic, the median for Germans marching west to captivity. Gordon Carson recalled that “as far as you could see in the median were German prisoners, fully armed. No one would stop to take their surrender. We just waved.”

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.