Band of Brothers

13 ATTACK

*

NOVILLE

January 14-17,1945

"When word came down for this attack, it pissed me off," Winters remembered. "I could not believe that after what we had gone through and done, after all the casualties we had suffered, they were putting us into an attack. It just had the flavor of an ego trip for General Taylor, a play to show Eisenhower that now that Taylor's back his troops will get off their asses and go into the attack."

That is not fair to General Taylor. The attack was part of a general offensive designed to cut through to the north and link up with the U.S. First Army, thereby trapping the German tanks in the tip of the salient. Or as many as were left, after Monty's shilly-shallying about getting going on the counteroffensive. The Germans had begun to pull their tanks back. They could be expected to fight with all they had to keep that escape route open.

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.

After Foy fell, Easy and the other companies in 2nd Battalion were put into regimental reserve, south of the village. At 0415 the following day, January 14, the Germans launched a counterattack on Foy with six tanks and a company of infantry. It was repulsed, but then another attack with fourteen tanks and a battalion forced the 3rd Battalion of the 506th out of Foy. Easy was alerted, but with the help of artillery the 3rd Battalion was able to mount its own successful counterattack and by 0930 was back in the village.

These actions were carried out under horrid conditions. Another cold front had passed through the area. Daytime temperatures were about 20 degrees F; at night the mercury plunged to below zero F. There was almost daily snow. It was difficult for division to move supplies up the Bastogne-Foy road because of drifts and demands elsewhere. As a result, the men of Easy were almost as badly off as during the first week of the siege. There was not enough food. There were insufficient overshoes, blankets, and sleeping bags. Bed sheets were used for snow suits.

The terrain in front of Easy was also difficult. There was open ground to cross to get to Noville, dense woods still to be cleared. The Germans held the high ground and the solid Belgian buildings in Noville offered sniper and machine-gun positions while providing the Germans with hiding places for tanks.

Colonel Sink told Winters that 2nd Battalion would have the honor of leading the attack on Noville. He would jump off at 1200, January 14, moving from the woods south of Foy around to the left (west), occupy the tiny village of Recogne, then attack over an open, snow-covered field toward Cobra, another tiny village a kilometer or so east of Noville. On Winters' left, 1st Battalion would move north through the woods to clear them out.

Winters was unhappy with the orders. He had 2 kilometers of snow-covered open fields to cross to get to Cobra. It was a bright sunny day. Why attack at high noon? Winters would have preferred to wait through the night, then set out at first light to cross the field. But Eisenhower wanted action, Monty wanted action, Taylor wanted action, Sink wanted action, so 2nd Battalion's HQ, Dog, Easy, and Fox Companies would have to provide it.

There was a fairly deep shoulder running southwest out of Noville to near Recogne. Winters saw that by sending his men straight for it, he could pick up more and more cover as they got closer to Noville. He put the battalion in single file to cut through the snow, dangerous but quick.

As Easy and the rest of 2nd Battalion moved out, so did the 1st Battalion on the left. German tanks in Noville got 1st Battalion in their sights and let loose with some 88s. They did not see 2nd Battalion marching toward Noville in the shelter of that shoulder.

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."

Easy was having its own problems. German machine-guns in Noville opened on the company, at a draw and stream that slowed the Americans while they were exposed. Speirs set up two of his machine-guns to answer the fire. As the American machine-gunners let loose with a burst, a group of eight or ten would dash across the small stream.

The stream was narrow enough for most of the men to jump across. But Pvt. Tony Garcia, carrying an ammo bag with six rounds of mortar ammunition, fell into the stream. He was soaked. By the time his group reached Noville, "my clothing had frozen, causing a crackling sound as I walked. This, however, saved me from going on an all-night patrol which was to have made contact with one of our own units. The platoon sergeant said I could be heard all the way to Berlin and for me to stay put."1

1. Garcia has another memory of that day: "One of the more disturbing incidents that affected me was seeing a horse standing in the snow helpless with one of its front legs shattered by a shell fragment. One of the noncoms mercifully put it out of its misery with a couple of bullets to the head. Though man's brutality to one another is tragic enough, to see helpless animals suffer by his actions is even more tragic."

By 1530 2nd Battalion had crossed the field and was snuggled up to the underside of the shoulder. By dark it had worked its way around to a draw on the southeast corner of Cobru.

Speirs held a meeting of the officers and 1st Sergeant Lipton. He outlined the plan of attack for the morning, up the draw to Noville, with 2nd Platoon on the left, 3rd on the right. Friendly tanks were supposed to be coming up on the right in support on the Foy-Noville road. After the meeting Speirs told Lipton to lead the 2nd platoon in the attack.

Lipton pulled 2nd platoon together to brief the men. Winters stood to the side, listening. Lipton told them the distance to the town was about 800 meters, that they should move quickly to get down the road and into the shelter of the buildings, that they should clear out the buildings working together as teams with rifles and grenades, that the mortar men should be ready to drop rounds on German strong points, that the machine gunners should set up and lay down a base of fire in support, that they should not bunch up, and so on. Winters' sole comment was that the distance was more like 1,000 meters.

As the meeting broke up, the men could hear tank motors starting up and tanks moving around. It was not possible to determine if it was Germans pulling out or Americans coming along the Foy-Noville road.

Winters remembers the night as the coldest of his life. There was little shelter, only hastily dug foxholes. The men had worked up a sweat getting to Cobru. They shivered through the night. They would lie down and drift off, only to be awakened by intense shivering in their now-frozen clothes. Most gave up on trying to sleep. It got so bad that at one point Winters thought about ordering a night attack, but decided against it because of the danger of shooting each other in the confusion.

Lipton was uneasy about leading 2nd Platoon on an attack without knowing what was up ahead, so he decided to go forward with a radio man to scout the situation in Noville. The two men came to a barn on the outskirts of the village, entered it by a door in the back and felt their way through to a door that opened into a courtyard near the main road through Noville. Everything was quiet. Lipton called Speirs on the radio to tell the C.O. where he was and to request permission to scout the town. He said he could see some Sherman tanks up ahead and asked if Speirs knew if American armor had already taken the town. Speirs did not know and told Lipton to look around.

Lipton moved silently forward to the tanks. They were knocked out. American bodies lay frozen and strewn around them. They had been left there when Team Desobry had withdrawn from Noville on December 20, almost a month earlier. The Germans still held the town. Lipton and his radio man withdrew.

The attack jumped off at dawn, January 15. There was resistance, strongest on the right hand side of the road against 3rd platoon. The 2nd platoon quickly got into the center of Noville and up to the burned-out Shermans. The 3rd platoon got into a burned-out building and set up a CP. Over the radio came a message, "Friendly armor on the right."

As Lieutenant Shames and Sergeant Alley got that message, they heard tanks outside the building. Anxious to get the show on the road, Alley told Shames he was going to link up with those tanks. Shames decided to join him. They moved by several burned-out buildings and rounded a corner into the main road. Up ahead, between two buildings, partway out, was the tank they sought.

Alley moved up to the side of the tank. The tank commander was standing in the turret looking the other way, so Alley shouted to him over the roar of the engine to "Come this way." The tank commander turned, and Alley realized he had mistaken a German tank for an American. The German swore, dropped into his tank, and began traversing his turret toward Alley and Shames.

They said not a word to each other. They took off so fast they were kicking snow in the German's face. The tank followed. The Americans ran around a corner. Shames saw an open window and dived in head first. Alley ran 3 meters or so past him and jumped into a doorway with his rifle ready for the infantry he was sure would be with the German tank.

The tank turned the corner and drove right past Shames and Alley. It came to the place where Id platoon was clearing out buildings, near the burned-out Shermans. Lipton and his men dived under the Shermans or ducked behind walls for protection. The German tank stopped and, swiveling its turret, put a shell into each one of the knocked-out Shermans to prevent anyone from using their guns to put a shell into his tank as he drove past. Lipton recalled, "When those shells hit the Shermans, it felt to us under them that they jumped a foot in the air."

The tank roared out of town, headed north toward safety. A P-47 fighter plane spotted it, strafed it, and dropped a bomb on it, destroying the tank.

Alley went to look for Shames. He heard moaning and cries for help. When he got to the window Shames had dived through, he looked and burst into laughter. He saw his lieutenant tangled up in bedsteads, springs, and furniture in a basement Shames had not realized was there.

By noon, 2^nd Battalion held Noville and had set up a perimeter defense. The little village and its surrounding hills had been an objective of the 101st since December 20. Finally it was in American hands.

"We had looked northward at Noville from our positions outside Foy since shortly after we had arrived at Bastogne," Lipton wrote, "and we had convinced ourselves it would be our final objective in the Bastogne campaign." But there was one more attack to make,- General Taylor wanted 2nd Battalion to move further north, in the direction of Houffalize, to clear the village of Rachamps.

Rachamps was off the highway, over to the right (east). It was in a valley. The snow-covered ground sloped gently down to it from all sides, giving an effect similar to attacking from the rim of a saucer toward its center. The 2nd Battalion attacked from the south and southwest, while 1st Battalion on the left came down from north of the village. The men were well-spread and advanced steadily. The Germans put up some resistance, mainly artillery using white phosphorus shells. But as the men of the 506th got to the outskirts of the village, most of the German defenders fled. As the Americans moved in, the Germans began bombarding the village.

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.)

The easy victory at Rachamps showed how completely the 101st Airborne had won its head-to-head battles with a dozen crack German armored and infantry divisions. The Americans had gone through a much more miserable month than the Germans, who had an open and bountiful supply line. For the 101st, surrounded, there were no supplies in the first week and insufficient supplies thereafter. Those were the weeks that tried the souls of men who were inadequately fed, clothed, and armed. This was war at its harshest, horrible to experience. The 101st, hungry, cold, under-armed, 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. 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.

What veterans of far-flung campaigns these German soldiers were was revealed in a little incident in Rachamps. Sergeant Rader related it: "I almost killed a Kraut prisoner for laughing at me after I got to the town, only to have someone grab my M-l and shout, 'Sarge, he has no lips or eyelids!' He had lost them on the Russian front, frozen off."

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.

In Rachamps, Speirs set up company CP in a convent. It was the first time the CP had been in a building since Easy left Mourmelon a month earlier. That night the nuns brought into the large hall of the convent a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls to sing a serenade for E Company. The program included French and Belgian songs, several in English, and the German marching song, "Lili Marlene."

The next morning, January 17, the 17th Airborne Division relieved the 101st on the line. Easy Company got into trucks to begin a move to Alsace. The trucks took the men back down the highway they had sat astride for four weeks, through Bastogne. It was only the second time most of the men had seen Bastogne— first on December 19 when they marched through the town while frightened American soldiers fled to escape the German onslaught, second on January 17, the town secured.

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.

The best description of the cost of the Battle of the Bulge to Easy Company comes from Private Webster, who rejoined the company during the truck ride to Alsace. He had been wounded in early October; now it was mid-January. He wrote, "When I saw what remained of the 1st platoon, I could have cried; eleven men were left out of forty. Nine of them were old soldiers who had jumped in either Holland or Normandy or both: McCreary, Liebgott, Marsh, Cobb, Wiseman, Lyall, Martin, Rader, and Sholty. Although the other two platoons were more heavily stocked than the 1st, they were so understrength that, added to the 1st, they wouldn't have made a normal platoon, much less a company."

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."

They knew each other at a level only those who have fought together in a variety of tactical situations can achieve, as only those who endured together the extreme suffering of combined cold, not enough food, and little sleep while living in constant tension could attain.

They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing. Glenn Gray wrote, "The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose... . How often I wrote in my war journals that unless that day had some positive significance for my future life, it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost."2

2. Gray, The Warriors, 24.

They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers. The company had held together at that critical moment in the snow outside Foy because 1st Sergeant Lipton and his fellow N.C.O.'s, nearly all Toccoa men, provided leadership, continuity, and cohesiveness. Despite a new C.O. and new officers and enlisted recruits, the spirit of E Company was alive, thanks to the sergeants. Having Winters as 2nd Battalion XO and usually as acting battalion C.O. (Lieutenant Colonel Strayer spent most of the month at regimental HQ, working on an acting basis for Colonel Sink as S-3) was a great help. And Speirs was proving to be an excellent company commander, able to draw out of the company its best.

That spirit was well described by Webster. By this time Webster had been wounded twice and returned to combat after each occasion. He would not allow his parents to use their influence to get him out of the front lines. He would not accept any position of responsibility within E Company. He was a Harvard intellectual who had made his decision on what his point of view of World War II would be, and stuck to it.

He was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, sensitive, level-headed, keenly observant, thoughtful, well-educated. Here he was thrown in the most intimate contact (pressed together on an open truck on icy roads in hilly country, sleeping in a foxhole with other enlisted men) with ill-educated hillbillies, Southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and so on among most of the enlisted men in the company. Of those who had been to college, most were business or education majors. In short, 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.

Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others.

His description of his truck ride with his platoon to Alsace deserves to be quoted at length:

"We squished through the mud to our trucks and climbed in. McCreary and Marsh lit cigarettes. Martin made a wisecrack about a passing officer. I asked what had happened to Hoobler. Killed at Bastogne. Poor Hoobler, who got such a kick out of war, dead in the snow. And the others? Muck and his buddy Penkala, who had the deepest hole in one position, had been killed by a direct hit. Sowosko was shot through the head attacking Foy. And so on. Some replacements who had come in after Holland had also died. A lot of men had been evacuated for trench foot, too many, McCreary thought. The platoon wasn't what it used to be."

Webster thought that it was. He had followed a long and complicated route through the Replacement Depots to rejoin the company, a time of frustration and loneliness for him among that host of khaki-clad look-alike soldiers. Now he was home, back with 1st platoon, back with Easy Company.

"It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust," he wrote. "Listening to the chatter in the truck, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who has returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest."

There were missing chairs at home. They belonged to the men who had been killed, badly wounded, or had broken. But as Webster's reaction indicates, although Easy had lost many members, and gained others, thanks to the former E Company officers now on battalion or regimental staff and to the noncoms, it remained an organic whole.