The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (12 page)

Winters placed his machine guns (manned by Pvts. John Plesha and Walter Hendrix on one gun, Cleveland Petty and Joe Liebgott on the other) along the hedge leading up to the objective, with instructions to lay down covering fire. As Winters crawled forward to the jump-off position, he spotted a German helmet-the man was moving down the trench, crouched over, with only his head above ground.  Winters took aim with his M-1 and squeezed off two shots, killing the Jerry.  Winters told Lt. Lynn Compton to take Sgts. Bill Guarnere and Don Malarkey, get over to the left, crawl through the open field, get as close to the first gun in the battery as possible, and throw grenades into the trench. He sent Sgts.  Carwood Lipton and Mike Ranney out along the hedge to the right, alongside a copse, with orders to put a flanking fire into the enemy position.  Winters would lead the charge straight down the hedge. With him were Pvts.  Gerald Lorraine (of regimental HQ; he was Col. Robert Sink’s jeep driver) and Popeye Wynn, and Cpl. Joe Toye.

Here the training paid off. “We fought as a team without standout stars,” Lipton said. “We were like a machine. We didn’t have anyone who leaped up and charged a machine gun. We knocked it out or made it withdraw by maneuver and teamwork or mortar fire. We were smart; there weren’t many flashy heroics. We had learned that heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important.”

When Lipton and Ranney moved out along the hedge, they discovered they could not see the German positions because of low brush and ground cover. Lipton decided to climb a tree, but there were none of sufficient size to allow him to fire from behind a trunk. The one he picked had many small branches; he had to sit precariously on the front side, facing the Germans, exposed if they looked his way, balancing on several branches. About seventy-five meters away he could see about fifteen of the enemy, some in the trenches, others prone in the open, firing toward E Company, too intent on the activity to their front to notice Lipton.

Lipton was armed with a carbine he had picked up during the night. He fired at a German in the field. The enemy soldier seemed to duck. Lipton fired again. His target did not move. Not certain that the carbine had been zeroed in, Lipton aimed into the dirt just under the man’s head and squeezed off another round.  The dirt flew up right where he aimed; Lipton now knew that the carbine’s sights were right and his first shot had killed the man. He began aiming and firing as fast as he cold from his shaky position.

Lieutenant Compton was armed with a Thompson submachine gun that he had picked up during the night (he got it from a lieutenant from D Company who had broken his leg in the jump). Using all his athletic skill, he successfully crawled through the open field to the hedge, Guarnere and Malarkey alongside him. The Germans were receiving fire from the machine gun to their left, from Lipton and Ranney to their rear, and from Winters’s group in their front. They did not notice Compton’s approach.

When he reached the hedge, Compton leaped over and through it. He had achieved complete surprise and had the German gun crew and infantry dead in his sights.  But when he pulled the trigger on the borrowed tommy gun, nothing happened. It was jammed.

At that instant Winters called, “Follow me,” and the assault team went tearing down the hedge toward Compton. Simultaneously, Guarnere leaped into the trench beside Compton. The German crew at the first gun, under attack from three directions, fled. The infantry retreated with them, tearing down the trench, away from Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey. The Easy Company men began throwing grenades at the retreating enemy.

Compton had been an All-American catcher on the UCLA baseball team. The distance to the fleeing enemy was about the same as from home plate to second base.  Compton threw his grenade on a straight line-no arch-and it hit a German in the head as it exploded. He, Malarkey, and Guarnere then began lobbing grenades down the trench.

Winters and his group were with them by now, firing their rifles, throwing grenades, shouting, their blood pumping, adrenaline giving them Superman strength.

Wynn was hit in the butt and fell down in the trench, hollering over and over, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant, I goofed off, I goofed off, I’m sorry.” A German potato-masher grenade sailed into the trench; everyone dived to the ground.  “Joe, look out!” Winters called to Toye. The grenade had landed between his legs as he lay facedown. Toye flipped over. The potato masher hit his rifle and tore up the stock as it exploded, but he was uninjured. “If it wasn’t for Winters,” Toye said in 1990, “I’d be singing high soprano today.” Winters tossed some grenades down the trench, then went tearing after the retreating gun crew. Private Lorraine and Sergeant Guarnere were with him. Three of the enemy infantry started running cross-country, away toward Brecourt Manor.  “Get ‘em!” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy gun; Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed, and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.  A fourth German jumped out of the trench, about a hundred yards up the hedge.  Winters saw him, lay down, took careful aim, and killed him. Fifteen or twenty seconds had passed since he had led the charge. Easy had taken the first gun.  Winters’s immediate thought was that there were plenty of Germans farther up the trench, and they would be counterattacking soon. He flopped down, crawled forward in the trench, came to a connecting trench, looked down, “and sure enough there were two of them setting up a machine gun, getting set to fire. I got in the first shot and hit the gunner in the hip; the second caught the other boy in the shoulder.”

Winters put Toye and Compton to firing toward the next gun, sent three other men to look over the captured cannon, and three to cover to the front. By this time Lipton had scrambled out of his tree and was working his way to Winters. Along the way he stopped to sprinkle some sulfa powder on Wynn’s butt and slap on a bandage. Wynn continued to apologize for goofing off. Warrant Officer (WO) Andrew Hil, from regimental HQ, came up behind Lipton.

“Where’s regimental HQ?” he shouted.

“Back that way,” Lipton said, pointing to the rear. Hill raised his head to look. A bullet hit him in the forehead and came out behind his ear, killing him instantly.

After that, all movement was confined to the trench system, and in a crouch, as German machine-gun fire was nearly continuous, cutting right across the top of the trench. But Malarkey saw one of the Germans killed by Winters, about thirty yards out in the field, with a black case attached to his belt. Malarkey thought it must be a Luger. He wanted it badly, so he ran out into the field, only to discover that it was a leather case for the 105mm sight. Winters was yelling at him, “Idiot, this place is crawling with Krauts, get back here!” Evidently the Germans thought Malarkey was a medic; in any case the machine gunners did not turn on him until he started running back to the trench. With bullets kicking up all around him, he dived under the 105.

Winters was at the gun, wanting to disable it but without a demolition kit.  Lipton came up and said he had one in his musette bag, which was back where the attack began. Winters told him to go get it.

Time for the second gun, Winters thought to himself. He left three men behind to hold the first gun, then led the other five on a charge down the trench, throwing grenades ahead of them, firing their rifles. They passed the two Jerries at the machine gun who had been wounded by Winters and made them prisoners. The gun crew at the second gun fell back; Easy took it with only one casualty.

With the second gun in his possession, and running low on ammunition, Winters sent back word for the four machine gunners to come forward. Meanwhile six German soldiers decided they had had enough; they came marching down the connecting trench to the second gun, hands over their heads, calling out “No make dead! No make dead!”

Pvt. John D. Hall of A Company joined the group. Winters ordered a charge on the third gun. Hall led the way and got killed, but the gun was taken. Winters had three of his men secure it. With eleven men, he now controlled three 105s.  At the second gun site Winters found a case with documents and maps showing the positions of all the guns and machine-gun positions throughout the Cotentin Peninsula. He sent the documents and maps back to the battalion, along with the prisoners and a request for more ammunition and some reinforcements, because “we were stretched out too much for our own good.” Using grenades, he set about destroying the gun crew’s radio, telephone, and range finders.  Capt. Clarence Hester came up, bringing three blocks of TNT and some phosphorous incendiary grenades. Winters had a block dropped down the barrel of each of the three guns, followed by a German potato masher. This combination blew out the breeches of the guns like half-peeled bananas. Lipton was disappointed when he returned with his demolition kit to discover that it was not needed.  Reinforcements arrived, five men led by Lt. Ronald Speirs of D Company. One of them, Pvt. “Rusty” Houch of F Company, rose up to throw a grenade into the gun positions and was hit several times across the back and shoulders by a burst from a machine gun. He died instantly.

Speirs led an attack on the final gun, which he took and destroyed, losing two men killed.

Winters then ordered a withdrawal because the company was drawing heavy machine-gun fire from the hedges near Brécourt Manor, and with the guns destroyed there was no point to holding the position. The machine gunners pulled back first, followed by the riflemen. Winters was last. As he was leaving he took a final look down the trench. “Here was this one wounded Jerry we were leaving behind trying to put a MG on us again, so I drilled him clean through the head.” It was 1130. About three hours had passed since Winters had received the order to take care of those guns.

With twelve men, what amounted to a squad (later reinforced by Speirs and the others), E Company had destroyed a German battery that was looking straight down causeway No. 2 and onto Utah Beach. That battery had a telephone line running to a forward observer who was in a pillbox located at the head of causeway No. 2.  He had been calling shots down on the 4th Infantry as it unloaded. The significance of what Easy Company had accomplished cannot be judged with any degree of precision, but it surely saved a lot of lives, and made it much easier-perhaps even made it possible in the first instance-for tanks to come inland from the beach. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Easy Company saved the day at Utah Beach, but reasonable to say that it made an important contribution to the success of the invasion.

Winters’s casualties were four dead, two wounded. He and his men had killed fifteen Germans, wounded many more, and taken twelve prisoners; in short, they had wiped out the fifty-man platoon of elite German paratroops defending the guns, and scattered the gun crews. In an analysis written in 1985, Lipton said, “The attack was a unique example of a small, well-led assault force overcoming and routing a much larger defending force in prepared positions. It was the high morale of the E Company men, the quickness and audacity of the frontal attack, and the fire into their positions from several different directions that demoralized the German forces and convinced them that they were being hit by a much larger force.”

There were other factors, including the excellent training the company had received and their combat inexperience. The men had taken chances they would not take in the future. Lipton said he never would have climbed that tree and so exposed himself had he been a veteran. “But we were so full of fire that day.” “You don’t realize, your first time,” Guarnere said. “I’d never, never do again what I did that morning.” Compton would not have burst through that hedge had he been experienced. “I was sure I would not be killed,” Lipton said. “I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move.” (Paul Fussell, inWartime, writes that the soldier going into combat the first time thinks to himself, “Itcan’t happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced, etc.” That feeling soon gives way to “Itcan happen to me, and I’d better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover / dig in / expose my position by firing my weapon / keep extra alert at all times, etc.”) In his analysis Winters gave credit to the army for having prepared him so well for this moment (“my apogee,” he called it). He had done everything right, from scouting the position to laying down a base of covering fire, to putting his best men (Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey in one group, Lipton and Ranney in the other) on the most challenging missions, to leading the charge personally at exactly the right moment.

Winters felt that if Captain Sobel had still been in command, he would have led all thirteen men on a frontal assault and lost his life, along with the lives of most of the men. Who can say he was wrong about that? But then, who can say that the men of Easy would have had the discipline, the endurance (they had been marching since 0130, after a night of little or no real sleep; they were battered and bruised from the opening shock and the hard landing), or the weapons skills to carry off this fine feat of arms, had it not been for Sobel?  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.

With the first light the Allied bombers approached the Norman coast, wave after wave of the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators and the two-engine B-26 Marauders filling the sky. Their task was to drop their 500-pound bombs right at the water’s edge, to stun or kill the German defenders in their pillboxes, fortifications, and trenches.  As the low-flying Marauders approached Utah Beach, the sky brightened and the crews saw a sight unique in world history. None of them ever forgot it; all of them found it difficult to describe. Below them, hundreds of landing craft were running into shore, leaving white wakes. Behind the landing craft were the LSTs and other transports, and the destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. “As I looked down at this magnificent operation,” Lt. Allen Stephens, a copilot in a B-26 of the 397th Bomb Group, said, “I had the surging feeling that I was sitting in on the greatest show ever staged.”