Band of Brothers

14 THE PATROL *

HAGUENAU

January 18-February 23,1945

In mid-January, desperate to save what they could of their men and equipment in the Bulge, the Germans launched a diversionary operation in Alsace, code name Nordwind (Northwind), in an attempt to draw American troops from the Ardennes area. As in the mid-December attack in the Ardennes, they struck a thinly held sector of the front. (When Patton's Third Army left Alsace to go to the Ardennes, U.S. Seventh Army had slid to its left to take over his position, as well as holding its own.) When Nordwind began, Eisenhower sent the 101st to Alsace to bolster the line.

When word reached the paratroopers that they were to be taken by truck to Alsace, it was accompanied by a rumor that turned out to be exaggerated: the Germans had broken through. Winters' thought was, My God, don't they have anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?

It was a long trip. Alsace was 160 miles south and slightly east of Bastogne. The weather was cold and miserable, with falling snow. The roads were slippery and dangerous. The trucks proceeded at a walking pace; men could jump off, relieve themselves, and catch up to reboard without difficulty. Watching the process was often comical, however, because from outside to inside the men were wearing baggy pants, OD pants, long underwear, and OD colored undershorts. All had buttons—no zippers. Men tried to get everything open while still wearing their gloves. Sometimes it seemed to take forever.

The convoy went from Bastogne to Bellefontaine, Virton, Etain, Toul, Nancy, Drulingen, arriving on January 20. The 506th PIR went into regimental reserve.

While on the road, Sergeant Lipton became ill, with chills and a high fever. At Drulingen he went to see the medical officer, who examined him and declared that he had pneumonia and had to be evacuated to a hospital. Lipton said he was 1st sergeant of E Company and could not possibly leave. As the doctor could not evacuate him that night anyway, he told Lipton to come back in the morning.

Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Lipton had a room in a German house for the night. (Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, changes hands after every war. In 1871 it became German territory; the French got in back in 1919; in 1940 it became German again, in 1945, French.) The room had only a single bed. Speirs said Lipton should sleep on it. Lipton replied that wasn't right; as the enlisted man, he would sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor. Speirs simply replied, "You're sick," which settled it.

Lipton got into the bed. The elderly German couple who lived in the home brought him some schnapps and Apfelstrudel. Lipton had never drunk anything alcoholic, but he sipped at the schnapps until he had finished a large glass, and ate the strudel. He fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, his fever had broken, his energy had returned. He went to the medical officer, who could not believe the improvement. The doctor called it a miracle.

Speirs, delighted by the recovery, said that he and Winters had recommended Lipton for battlefield promotion and that Colonel Sink wanted to talk to him. Lipton went to regiment, where Sink gave him a one-hour grilling on his combat experiences.

Easy stayed in reserve for nearly two weeks, moving almost daily from one village to another. The weather warmed. The sun shone, and the snow began to melt. The ground got mushy. A supply truck arrived carrying an issue of shoepacs complete with arctic socks and felt insoles. "Where were you six weeks ago in Bastogne, when we needed you?" the men shouted at the drivers. Dirty clothes, blankets, and sleeping bags were picked up by the Quartermaster Company and sent to a G.I. laundry. Portable showers capable of handling 215 men an hour were brought in; Easy moved through them as a company. The water wasn't hot, but at least it wasn't ice cold either. Soap and lather, scrub and scrub—it took a major effort to remove six weeks of dirt and sweat.

Movies arrived, including Rhapsody in Blue, Buffalo Bill, and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Stars and Stripes, Yank, and Kangaroo Khronicle brought news of the outside world (not as welcome as one would have supposed, because the news from the Pacific showed that the war there had a long way to go; this ignited rumors that the 101st was going to be shipped to the Pacific for "the big jump" on Japan).

On February 5, Easy moved into the line as the 506th relieved the 313th Infantry of the 79th Division in the city of Haguenau. The population was nearly 20,000, which was big time for the paratroopers in Europe. Carentan had about 4,000 residents, Mourmelon about 4,500, and Bastogne maybe 5,500. Haguenau lay astride the Moder River, a tributary of the Rhine. Easy's position was on the far right flank of the 506th, at the junction of the Moder and a canal that ran through town to cut off the loop in the Moder.

"Our position was somewhat like a point into the German lines," Lieutenant Foley recalled. Easy occupied the buildings on the south bank, the Germans held the buildings on the north bank. The river was high, out of its banks, the current swift. It varied from about 30 to as much as 100 meters wide, it was too far to throw grenades across but close enough for machine-gun, rifle, and mortar fire. Both sides had artillery support. A few kilometers behind their lines the Germans had a huge railway gun (probably a 205 mm) from World War I. It fired shells as big as the 16-inch naval guns that had supported the Americans at Utah Beach.

The paratroopers moved into buildings that had been occupied by the 79th Division. Webster and five other members of 1st platoon took over a building at the juncture of the Moder and the canal. "In keeping with the best airborne tradition of relying on madmen instead of firepower," Webster wrote, "six of us with one B.A.R. relieved eighteen 79th Division doggies with a water-cooled 50 and an air-cooled 30-caliber machine gun." The 79th Division men told 1st platoon that this was a quiet sector, no offensives by either side, but Webster noted that they left in a hurry after the briefest of briefings.

The building the 1st squad of 1st platoon occupied was a wreck. Sections of walls had been blasted away, the roof partially removed by mortar shells, all the windows broken, the floors ankle deep in plaster, bricks, and broken glass, the banisters ripped off for firewood, the toilets choked with excreta, the basement a cesspool of ashes, ordure, and ration cans.

Looking the place over, Cpl. Tom McCreary expressed the general sentiment of his squad: "We got it made."

This was the first time anyone in the squad had lived indoors on the firing line. The men set out to improve their quarters. They rearranged the cellar, putting the bunks and C rations in one room, throwing the trash in another. They found some gas-burning lamps and a working stove. They spliced into a German field telephone system and established communications with the 1st platoon CP. When they needed to relieve themselves, they went to the third floor, "where the toilet bowl was only half full."

George Luz, radio man for the 1st platoon CP, paid a visit. McCreary's squad showed off their accommodations with pride. "If you think this is-good," Luz responded, "you should see Company HQ. They're living like kings." He looked around again, and added, "Them bastards."

(Webster shared Luz's feelings. He went back to the company CP as seldom as possible because "there was altogether too much rank in that place and a private didn't stand a chance.")

As on the Island, movement by day was impossible. Snipers were always ready to blast anyone caught in the open. The least movement would bring down mortars; two or three men outside would justify a couple of rounds of 88s. So, Webster recorded, "our major recreation was eating. We spent more time preparing, cooking, and consuming food than in any other pursuit."

The company's task was to hold the line, send out enough patrols to keep contact with the Germans, and serve as forward artillery observers. McCreary's squad held observation post No. 2. Two men, one at the third floor window, the other in the basement with the telephone, were on duty for an hour at a time. From the window, the men had a beautiful view of the German section of town. They could call for artillery fire just about whenever they wanted, a luxury previously unknown. The Germans would reply in kind.

It was hard to say which was more dangerous, mortars, aimed sniper fire, machine-gun bursts, 88s, or that big railway gun. One thing about the monster cannon, although it was so far to the rear the men could not hear it fire, they could hear the low-velocity shell coming from a long way off. It sounded like a train. Shifty Powers recalled that he was an observer in a third-floor window. When he heard the shell, he had time to dash downstairs into the basement before it landed.

Although the men lived in constant danger—a direct hit from the railway gun would destroy whole buildings—they were in a sense spectators of war. Glenn Gray writes that the "secret attractions of war" are "the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction." He continues, "War as a spectacle, as something to see, ought never to be underestimated."1

1. Gray, The Warriors, 28-29.

Gray reminds us that the human eye is lustful; it craves the novel, the unusual, the spectacular.

War provides more meat to satisfy that lust than any other human activity. The fireworks displays are far longer lasting, and far more sensational, than the most elaborate Fourth of July display. From OP 2 Webster could see "the shells bursting in both friendly and hostile zones of Haguenau and watch the P-47s strafing right and left." At night, the antiaircraft batteries miles behind the line turned their searchlights straight into the sky, so that the reflections from the clouds would illuminate the front. Both sides fired flares whenever an observer called for them; a man caught outside when one went off had to stand motionless until it burned out. Every machine-gun burst sent out tracers that added to the spectacle.

The big artillery shells would set off fires that crackled and flamed and lighted up the countryside. "There's something eerie about a fire in combat," Webster noted. "The huge, bold flames seem so alien and strident in a situation where neither side dares show the tiniest match flame."

War satisfies not only the eye's lust; it can create, even more than the shared rigors of training, a feeling of comradeship. On February 9, Webster wrote his parents, "I am home again." His account of life in OP 2 mentions the dangers endured but concentrates on his feelings toward his fellow squad members. "How does danger break down the barriers of the self and give man an experience of community?" Gray asks. His answer is the "power of union with our fellows. In moments [of danger] many have a vague awareness of how isolated and separate their lives have hitherto been and how much they have missed... . With the boundaries of the self expanded, they sense a kinship never known before."2

2. Gray, The Warriors, 43-46.

(Webster and Pvt. Bob Marsh had orders one night to set up the machine-gun on the porch of his building, to provide covering fire for a patrol if needed. They were exposed in such a way that if they fired, a German self-propelled gun directly across the river would spot them without the aid of observers. But they decided that if the patrol was fired upon, they would open up with everything they had, "because the lives of some twenty men might depend on us." Webster, who never volunteered for anything, commented, "This was one of those times where I could see playing the hero even if it meant our death.")

Gray's third "delight" provided by war is delight in destruction. There is no gainsaying that men enjoy watching buildings, vehicles, equipment being destroyed. The crowds that gather in any city when a building is about to be demolished illustrates the point. For the soldier, seeing a building that might be providing shelter to the enemy get blasted out of existence by friendly artillery is a joyous sight. In his World War I diary German soldier Ernst Juenger wrote of "the monstrous desire for annihilation which hovered over the battlefield. ... A neutral observer might have perhaps believed that we were seized by an excess of happiness."3

3. Quoted in Gray, The Warriors, 52.

The soldier's concern is with death, not life, with destruction, not construction. The ultimate destruction is killing another human being. When snipers hit a German on the other side, they would shout, "I got him! I got him!" and dance for joy. Pvt. Roy Cobb spotted a German walking impudently to and fro before a cottage a couple of hundred meters away. He hit him with his first shot. Pvt. Clarence Lyall, looking through his binoculars, said the hurt, perplexed expression on the German's face was something to see. As the soldier tried to crawl back to the cottage, Cobb hit him twice more. There were whoops and shouts each time he got hit.

As always on the front line, there was no past or future, only the present, made tense by the ever-present threat that violent death could come at any instant. "Life has become strictly a day to day and hour to hour affair," Webster wrote his parents.

Replacements came in. This was distressing, because when an airborne division, which was usually brought up to strength in base camp in preparation for the next jump, received reinforcements while on the front line, it meant that the division was going to continue fighting. At OP 2, "four very scared, very young boys fresh from jump school" joined the squad. Webster commented: "My heart sank. Why did the army, with all its mature huskies in rear echelon and the Air Corps slobs in England, choose to send its youngest, most inexperienced members straight from basic training to the nastiest job in the world, front line infantry?"

One of the replacements was 2nd Lt. Hank Jones, a West Point graduate (June 6,1944, John Eisenhower's class) who had completed jump school at Benning in late December. He left New York in mid-January, landed at Le Havre, and arrived in Haguenau in mid-February. As Lieutenant Foley commented, "Teach them how to say 'Follow me' and ship them overseas was the quickest way to replace the casualties." Jones was cocky, clean-cut, likable. He was eager for a chance to prove himself.

He would quickly get his opportunity, because the regimental S-2, Captain Nixon, needed some live prisoners for interrogation. On February 12 he asked Winters to arrange to grab a couple of Germans. Winters was still a captain, a distinct disadvantage in dealing with the other two battalion commanders, who were lieutenant colonels. But he had friends on the regimental staff, where Colonel Strayer was X.O. and Nixon and the S-4 (Matheson) were old E Company men. Matheson scrounged up some German rubber boats for Winters to use to get a patrol over the river. Winters picked E Company for the patrol.

It would be a big one, twenty men strong, drawn from each platoon plus Company HQ section, plus two German-speaking men from regimental S-2. Lieutenant Foley picked Cobb, Mc-Creary, Wynn, and Sholty from 1st platoon. Once across the river, the patrol would divide into two parts, one led by Sgt. Ken Mercier, the other by Lieutenant Jones.

The men selected for the patrol spent two days outside Haguenau practicing the handling of the rubber boats. On February 14, Winters and Speirs visited OP 2, much to the dismay of the 1st squad, because they stood in front of the OP studying the German position with binoculars, gesturing with their hands, waving a map. "We inside cursed heartily," Webster recalled, "fearing that a German observer would spot them and call down artillery fire on our cozy home."

The plan Winters and Speirs worked out would call on Easy to display many of its hard-earned skills. The lead scout would be Cpl. Earl McClung, a part Indian who had a reputation for being able to "smell Krauts." The patrol would rendezvous at a D Company OP, where the men would drink coffee and eat sandwiches until 2200. They would come to the river under cover of darkness and launch the first rubber boat. It would carry a rope across the river to fasten to a telephone pole on the north side so that the others could pull their boats across. Once in the German lines the patrol would split into two sections, the one under Lieutenant Jones going into town, the other under Sergeant Mercier to a house on the bank of the river suspected of being a German outpost.

Whether or not the patrol succeeded in capturing prisoners, it would have plenty of support for its retreat back across the river. If either section ran into trouble, or got its hands on prisoners, the section leader would blow a whistle to indicate that the withdrawal was underway. That would be the signal for both sections to gather at the boats, and for Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Malarkey to start the covering fire.

The covering fire had been worked out down to the smallest details. Every known or anticipated German position was covered by designated rifle fire, machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire. A 57 mm antitank gun was borrowed from division and emplaced to shoot into the basement of a house that could not be hit by indirect artillery fire. D Company had a 50-caliber machine-gun (stolen from the 10th Armored at Bastogne) set up to rake the German positions. The 1st platoon would have its 30-caliber machine-gun set up on the balcony of OP 2, ready to spray the German dwelling across the river, if necessary (the crossing would be made right in front of OP 2).

The night of February 15 was still and dark. The German mortars shot only a couple of flares and one or two 88s. The American artillery was silent, waiting for the whistle. The searchlights were out, as Speirs had requested. The Americans shot no flares. There was no small arms firing, there was no moon, there were no stars.

The first boat got across successfully. Two others made it. The fourth boat, with McCreary and Cobb in it, capsized. They drifted a hundred meters or so downstream, managed to get out, tried again, only to capsize once more. They gave it up as a bad job and returned to OP 2.

Jones and Mercier gathered the men who had made it over, divided them, and set out on their tasks. With Mercier was a just-arrived replacement from Company F. Without Speirs or Winters knowing it, the young officer—gung-ho and eager to prove himself—had attached himself to the patrol. As he followed Mercier up the north bank of the river, he stepped on a Schu mine and was killed. He had been on the front line barely twenty-four hours.

Mercier continued toward his target, eight men following him. When he got close enough to the German outpost, he fired a rifle grenade into the cellar window. As it exploded, the men rushed the building and threw hand grenades into the cellar. As those grenades exploded, Mercier led the men into the cellar, so close behind the blast that Pvt. Eugene Jackson, a replacement who had joined up in Holland, was hit in the face and head by fragments of shrapnel. In the cellar, the Americans found the still-living Germans in a state of shock. They grabbed one wounded and two uninjured men and dashed back outside. Mercier blew his whistle.

The signal unleashed a tremendous barrage. It shook the ground. Heavy artillery from the rear was supplemented by mortars and the antitank gun. Webster, watching from the balcony of OP 2, described the scene: "We saw a sheet of flame, then a red ball shoot into the basement of a dwelling across the creek. The artillery shells flashed orange on the German roads and strongpoints. Half a mile away to our direct front a house started to burn. D Company's 50-caliber opened up behind us in a steady bark. A solid stream of tracers shot up the creek, provoking a duel with a German burp gun which hosed just as steady a stream of tracers back at D Company from the protection of an undamaged cellar."

Mercier and his men dashed back to the boats, where they met Jones and his section. As they started to cross, they decided that the wounded German soldier was too far gone to be of any use, so they abandoned him by the river bank. One of the replacements, Pvt. Alien Vest, drew a pistol to kill the man, but was told to hold his fire. The wounded German was not going to do them any harm, and there was no point to revealing their position. Some men swam, using the rope to pull themselves back across; others used boats.

Once across, the patrol members ran to the cellar at OP 2, pushing the two prisoners in front of them. As they reached the cellar, German artillery shells exploded in the backyard, the beginning of a barrage by the Germans all across E Company's line.

Down in the cellar, the patrol members crowded around the prisoners. The Americans were excited, many of the men chattering—or rather shouting over the tremendous noise— trying to describe individual experiences. Their blood was up.

"Lemme kill 'em, lemme kill em!" shouted Vest, rushing toward the prisoners with his pistol drawn. Somebody stopped him.

"Get outta here, Vest. They want these bastards back at battalion," someone else yelled.

The prisoners, according to Webster, "were a pair of very self-possessed noncoms, an Unterofflzier (buck sergeant) and a Feldwebel, or staff sergeant. They stood calm, like rocks, in a hot, smelly room full of men who wanted to kill them, and they never moved a finger or twisted their expressions. They were the most poised individuals I've ever seen."

As the explosions outside increased, Private Jackson, who had been wounded on the patrol, began screaming, "Kill me! Kill me! Somebody kill me! I can't stand it, Christ I can't stand it. Kill me, for God's sake kill me!" His face was covered with blood from a grenade fragment that had pierced his skull and lodged in his brain.

Sergeant Martin related, "Of course no one was going to kill him, because there is always hope, and that goddamn prisoner made me so goddamn mad I started kicking that goddamn son-ofabitch, and I mean I kicked that bastard every way I could." He concluded lamely, "Emotions were running real high."

Someone telephoned for a medic with a stretcher, quick. Roe said he would be there in a flash.

Jackson continued to call out. "Kill me! Kill me! I want Mercier! Where's Mercier?" He was sobbing.

Mercier went to him and held his hand. "That's O.K., buddy, that's O.K. You'll be all right."

Someone stuck a morphine Syrette in Jackson's arm. He was by then so crazed with pain he had to be held down on the bunk. Roe arrived with another medic and a stretcher. As they carried the patient back toward the aid station, Mercier walked beside the stretcher, holding Jackson's hand. Jackson died before reaching the aid station.

"He wasn't twenty years old," Webster wrote. "He hadn't begun to live. Shrieking and moaning, he gave up his life on a stretcher. Back in America the standard of living continued to rise. Back in America the race tracks were booming, the night clubs were making their greatest profits in history, Miami Beach was so crowded you couldn't get a room anywhere. Few people seemed to care. Hell, this was a boom, this was prosperity, this was the way to fight a war. We read of black-market restaurants, of a manufacturer's plea for gradual reconversion to peacetime goods, beginning immediately, and we wondered if the people would ever know what it cost the soldiers in terror, bloodshed, and hideous, agonizing deaths to win the war."

During a pause in the German barrage, guards escorted the prisoners back to Captain Winters at battalion HQ. Mercier was smiling from ear to ear as he handed over the two live prisoners. The buck sergeant talked a lot, the staff sergeant remained silent.

The night was no longer peaceful. Both sides fired everything they had. Fires blazed up and down the river. Tracers criss-crossed over the water.

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 1. "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 their 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. He grabbed a grenade, went to the river bank, heaved it over, and finally killed the German.

During the night Sergeant Lipton had been hit by a mortar shell, one fragment on his right cheek close to his ear and the other in the back of his neck. He went to the aid station and got patched up. (Thirty-four years later he had the metal in his neck removed when it started giving him trouble.)

The following day, February 16, Winters called Lipton to battalion HQ, to present him with his Honorable Discharge as an enlisted man, effective February 15, and a copy of the orders awarding him a battlefield commission as a 2nd lieutenant, effective February 16. "When I was wounded I was a civilian!" Lipton remarked. "I had already been discharged, and my commission had not yet been effective. I've often wondered how it would have been handled if I had been killed by that mortar shell." He added, "I have always felt that the battlefield commission was the greatest honor that I have ever had."

Lieutenant Jones, by all accounts, performed well on his first patrol—meaning, apparently, he wisely let Mercier make the decisions. Within a week, Jones was gone, having been promoted to 1st lieutenant. "After one patrol!" Lieutenant Foley commented. "Jones was a West Pointer, a member of the WPPA, the West Point Protective Association, known by the ring they all wore. 'It don't mean a thing if you don't have that ring!' " Jones moved onto a staff job at regiment. Malarkey wrote, "It was rumored that the conclusion of the war was fast approaching and that West Pointers, who would staff the peacetime army, were being protected."

Colonel Sink was so delighted with the successful patrol, he ordered another one for the next night. In the meantime, however, it had snowed, then turned colder. The snow was frozen on top, crunchy, noisy. The cold air had cleared out the sky and the moon was shining. Winters thought a patrol under such circumstances was suicidal, so he decided to disobey orders.

Sink and a couple of staff officers came to 2nd Battalion CP to observe. They had a bottle of whiskey with them. Winters said he was going down to the river bank to supervise the patrol. When he got to the outpost, he told the men to just stay still. With the whiskey working on him, Sink would soon be ready for bed. The patrol could report in the morning that it had gotten across the river and into German lines but had been unable to get a live prisoner.4

4. Glenn Gray writes, "To be required to carry out orders in which he does not believe, given by men who are frequently far removed from the realities with which the orders deal... is the familiar lot of the combat soldier. ... It is a great boon of front-line positions that disobedience is frequently possible, since supervision is not very exact where danger of death is present. Many a conscientious soldier has discovered he could reinterpret military orders in his own spirit before obeying them." The Warriors, 189.

Some of the men wanted liquor too. Cobb and Wiseman went out on a daytime scrounging mission, even though orders were never to show yourself in daylight. They found a cellar filled with schnapps. They grabbed two bottles each and, shot at by German snipers, ran down the street like schoolboys with stolen

apples.

Wiseman got hit in the knee. He stumbled and fell, breaking his bottles. Cobb saved his. The two men ducked into a cellar and started enjoying the schnapps. "You take a bunch of G.I.s," Martin pointed out, "there is no such thing as just taking a shot of schnapps. You have to drink the whole goddamn thing before you quit." Wiseman and Cobb drank a bottle each. When they got back to 1st platoon HQ, roaring drunk, Cobb got into a fight with Marsh.

Lieutenant Foley separated the men. He chewed out Cobb for being off-limits, disobeying orders, being drunk and disorderly, and so on. Cobb became enraged and began mouthing off. He ignored Foley's direct order to shut up. Instead, he charged Foley. Two men grabbed him and threw him down. Sergeant Martin pulled his .45 pistol. Foley told him to holster his weapon, ordered Cobb arrested, and had him taken back to regiment for lockup.

Wiseman, meanwhile, loudly rejected Medic Roe's order to evacuate. He said he was staying with his friends.

Foley got his platoon settled down, then went to regimental HQ to write up court-martial papers for Cobb. It took him several hours. He took the papers to Colonel Sink and told him the details. As Foley was leaving, Sink said to him, "Foley, you could have saved us all a lot of trouble. You should have shot him."

Wiseman, still drunk, refused any aid for his wound. He said he would talk to Sergeant Rader, no one else. Rader tried to talk some sense into him, without success. He too was court-martialed. "This ordeal was another blow to my mind," said Rader, "after Hoobler died and Howell was injured at Bastogne."

On February 20, Easy went into reserve, as the 3rd Battalion, 506th, took over its position. Within hours of Easy's departure, the Germans scored a direct hit on OP 2. Winters got his promotion to major that day. On February 23, the 36th Division relieved the 101st. The airborne division moved to Saverne, in the rear, in preparation for a return to Mourmelon.

The 101st had seldom been in a rear area. What the men saw there made them wonder how any supplies ever reached the front line. Twice in Haguenau they had received a beer ration of three bottles each. The cigarettes they got were Chelseas or Raleighs, much despised. No soap, an occasional package of gum, once some toothpaste—except for C and K rations and ammunition, that was all that reached the front lines. Being near a supply depot in the rear, the men learned why. The port battalions unloading the ships coming from America got their cut, the railroad battalions helped themselves to Milky Way candy bars and cases of Schlitz beer, chalking it up to "breakage," the truck drivers took the cartons of Lucky Strikes (by far the favorite brand), and by the time division quartermaster and regimental and battalion S-4 skimmed off the best of what was left, the riflemen on the front line were fortunate to get C rations and Raleigh cigarettes.

Shifty Powers got a new M-l. That was a mixed blessing. He had been using one issued to him in the States. He loved that old rifle. "It seemed like I could just point it, and it would hit what I'd pointed it at. The best shooting rifle I ever owned. But every time we'd have an inspection, I'd get gigged because it had a pit in it, in the barrel. You can't get those pits out of those barrels, you know. It's pitted in there." He got tired of being gigged, turned it in and got a new M-l. "And I declare, I couldn't hit a barn with that rifle. Awfulest shooting thing there ever was." But at least he wasn't being gigged any longer.

Colonel Sink sent down orders to follow a rigorous training schedule while in reserve. Speirs thought this an idiotic proposal and made no effort to conceal his sentiments. He told the men of Easy that he believed in training hard and sensibly back in base camp and in taking it easy in a reserve area.

Speirs could not get the company out of two compulsory formations. The first was to hold a drawing for rotation back to the States. One man from every company would go home for a thirty-day leave; he would be chosen in a company lottery. The winner had to have been in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, and a total absence of black marks on his service record. No VD, no AWOL, no court-martial. Only twenty-three men in Easy were eligible. Speirs shook up the names in a steel helmet and drew out Forrest Guth's slip. There was a polite cheer. Speirs said he hated to lose Guth but wished him luck. A couple of men shook his hand. The remainder walked sadly away, according to Webster, "like men who had glimpsed Paradise on their way to hell." The second formation was a battalion review. Speirs's philosophy was to avoid the unnecessary but to do properly and with snap the required. He told the men he wanted them to look sharp. Rifles would be clean. Combat suits had to be washed. A huge boiler was set up; the men cooked their clothing with chunks of soap. It took a long time,- Private Hudson decided he would skip it. When he showed up for the formation in his filthy combat suit, Speirs berated him furiously. Foley, his platoon commander, jumped on him. Sergeant Marsh, his acting squad leader, tried to make him feel the incredible magnitude of his offense. Hudson grinned sheepishly and said, "Gosh, gee whiz, why is everybody picking on me?"

General Taylor came for the battalion review, trailed by a division PR photographer. As luck would have it, he stopped before Hudson and talked with him. The photographer took their picture together, got Hudson's name and home-town address, and sent the photo to the local newspaper with a copy to Hudson's parents. Of course the general looked great talking to a battlehardened soldier just off the front lines rather than a bunch of rear echelon parade-ground troopers. "So," Webster commented, "the only man in E Company with a dirty combat suit was the only man who had his picture taken with the general."

"We didn't realize it yet," Winters said, "but we all started walking with more care, with eyes in the backs of our heads, making sure we didn't get knocked off." After Haguenau, he explained, "you suddenly had a gut feeling, 'By God, I believe I am going to make it!' "