The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (27 page)

Schultz was simultaneously appalled and awed by what he had seen. “There was a part of me that wanted to be just as ruthless as my friend,” he commented.  Later, he came to realize that “there but for the grace of God go I.” By June 12, Easy Company, 501st PIR, had been fighting since shortly after midnight, June 6. Mostly its engagements were small firefights in the fields and tiny villages. But on June 12 it was ordered to make an all-out attack in the town of Carentan. It would spearhead the drive to link up the men from Omaha Beach with those from Utah. Street fighting was a new experience for the company, and it showed.

The objective was a T-junction defended by a company of German parachutists-elite troops. The last hundred or so meters of the road leading to the T-junction was straight, with a gentle downward slope. There were shallow ditches on both sides, then sidewalks and behind them houses. Lt. Richard Winters put the 1st platoon, under Lt. Harry Welsh, on the left side of a road, just past where the road curved then straightened out, with 2nd platoon on the right and 3rd platoon in reserve. The men lay down in the ditches by the side of the road, awaiting orders. The German defenders had not revealed their machine-gun position or fired any mortars. Everything was quiet.  At 0600 Winters ordered, “Move out.” Welsh kicked off the advance, running down the road toward the T-junction some fifty meters away, his platoon following.  The German machine gun opened fire, straight down the road. It was in a perfect position, at the perfect time, to wipe out the company.  The fire split the platoon. The seventh man behind Welsh stayed in the ditch. So did the rest of the platoon, almost thirty men. They were facedown in the ditches on both sides of the road, trying to snuggle in as close as they could.  Winters jumped into the middle of the road, highly agitated, yelling, “Move out!

Move out!” It did no good; the men remained in place, heads down in the ditch.  From his rear, Winters could hear Lt. Col. Robert Strayer, Lts. Clarence Hester and Louis Nixon, and other members of the battalion HQ hollering at him to “get them moving, Winters, get them moving.”

Winters threw away his gear, holding onto his M-1, and ran over to the left side, “hollering like a madman, ‘Get going!’ “ He started kicking the men in the butt. He crossed to the other side and repeated the order, again kicking the men.

“I was possessed,” Winters recalled. “Nobody’d ever seen me like that.” He ran back to the other side, machine-gun bullets zinging down the street. He thought to himself, My God, I’m leading a blessed life. I’m charmed.  He was also desperate. His best friend, Harry Welsh, was up ahead, trying to deal with that machine gun. If I don’t do something, Winters thought to himself, he’s dead. No question about it.

But the men wouldn’t move. They did look up. Winters recalled, “I will never forget the surprise and fear on those faces looking up at me.” The German machine gun seemed to be zeroing in on him, and he was a wide open target. “The bullets kept snapping by and glancing off the road all around me.” “Everybody had froze,” Pvt. Rod Strohl remembered. “Nobody could move. And Winters got up in the middle of the road and screamed, ‘Come on! Move out! Now!’

“

That did it. No man in the company had ever before heard Winters shout. “It was so out of character,” Strohl said, “we moved out as one man.” According to Winters, “Here is where the discipline paid off. The men got the message, and they moved out.”

As Sgt. Floyd Talbert passed Winters, he called out, “Which way when we hit the intersection?”

“Turn right,” Winters ordered.

(In 1981, Talbert wrote Winters: “I’ll never forget seeing you in the middle of that road. You were my total inspiration. All my boys felt the same way.”)

Welsh, meanwhile, was neutralizing the machine gun. “We were all alone,” he

remembered, “and I couldn’t understand where the hell everybody was.” Thanks to

the distraction caused by Winters running back and forth, the machine gunner had

lost track of Welsh and his six men. Welsh tossed some grenades at the

gun,followed by bursts from his carbine. The men with him did the same. The

machine gun fell silent.*

Winters wrote in 1990: “Later in the war, in recalling this action with Major [Clarence] Hester, he made a comment that has always left me feeling proud of Company E’s action that day. As S-3, Hester had been in a position to see another company in a similar position caught in M.G. [machine-gun] fire. It froze and then got severely cut up. E Company, on the other hand, had moved out, got the job done, and had not been cut up by that M.G.” The remainder of Easy Company drove into the intersection at a full run and secured it. Winters sent the 1st platoon to the left, the 2nd to the right, clearing out the houses, one man throwing grenades through windows while another waited outside the door. Immediately after the explosion, the second man kicked in the door to look for and shoot any survivors.  Pvts. Ed Tipper and Joe Liebgott cleared out a house. As Tipper was passing out the front door, “A locomotive hit me, driving me far back inside the house. I heard no noise, felt no pain, and was somehow unsteadily standing and in possession of my M-1.” The German rear guard was bringing its pre-positioned mortars into play. Liebgott grabbed Tipper and helped him to a sitting position, called for a medic, and tried to reassure Tipper that he would be OK.  Welsh came up and got some morphine into Tipper, who was insisting that he could walk. That was nonsense; both his legs were broken, and he had a serious head wound. Welsh and Liebgott half dragged him into the street, where “I remember lying at the base of the wall with explosions in the street and shrapnel zinging against the wall above my head.” Welsh got Tipper back to the aid station being set up in a barn about twenty meters to the rear.  Mortars continued coming in, along with sniper fire. Pvt. Carwood Lipton led 3rd platoon to the intersection and peeled off to the right. There were explosions on the street; he huddled against a wall and yelled to his men to follow him. A mortar shell dropped about two meters in front of him, putting shell fragments in his left cheek, right wrist, and right leg at the crotch. His rifle clattered to the street. He dropped to the ground, put his left hand to his cheek and felt a large hole, but his biggest concern was his right hand, as blood was pumping out in spurts. Sergeant Talbert got to him and put a tourniquet on his arm.  Only then did Lipton feel the pain in his crotch. He reached down for a feel, and his left hand came away bloody.

“Talbert, I may be hit bad,” he said. Talbert slit his pants leg with his knife, took a look, and said, “You’re OK.”

“What a relief that was,” Lipton remembered. The two shell fragments had gone into the top of his leg and “missed everything important.” Talbert threw Lipton over his shoulder and carried him to the aid station. The medics gave Lipton a shot of morphine and bandaged him up.  Sgt. Don Malarkey recalled that during “this tremendous period of fire I could hear someone reciting a Hail Mary. I glanced up and saw Father John Maloney holding his rosary and walking down the center of the road to administer last rites to the dying at the road juncture.” (Maloney was awarded the DSC.) Winters got hit by a ricochet bullet that went through his boot and into his leg. He stayed in action long enough to check the ammunition supply and consult with Welsh (who tried to remove the bullet with his knife but gave it up) to set up a defensive position in the event of a counterattack.  By this time it was 0700, and the area was secured. F Company, meanwhile, had hooked up with the 327th. Carentan had been captured. Lieutenant Colonel Strayer came into town, where he met the commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 327th.  They went into a wine shop and opened a bottle to drink to the victory.  Winters went back to the battalion aid station. Ten of his men were there receiving first aid. A doctor poked around Winters’s leg with a tweezers, pulled the bullet, cleaned out the wound, put some sulfa powder on it and a bandage.  Winters circulated among the wounded. One of them was Pvt. Albert Blithe.

“How’re you doing, Blithe? What’s the matter?”

“I can’t see, sir. I can’t see.”

“Take it easy, relax. You’ve got a ticket out of here, we’ll get you out of here in a hurry. You’ll be going back to England. You’ll be OK. Relax,” Winters said, and started to move on.

Blithe began to get up. “Take it easy,” Winters told him. “Stay still.”

“I can see, I can see, sir! I can see you!”

Blithe got up and rejoined the company. “Never saw anything like it,” Winters said. “He was that scared he blacked out. Spooky. This kid just completely could not see, and all he needed was somebody to talk to him for a minute and calm him down.”

The company went into defensive position south of Carentan. The second day in this static situation, someone came down the hedgerow line asking for Pvts. Don Malarkey and Skip Muck. It was Fritz Niland. He found Muck, talked to him, then found Malarkey, and had only enough time to say good-bye; he was flying home.  A few minutes after Niland left, Muck came to Malarkey, “his impish Irish smile replaced by a frown.” Had Niland explained to Malarkey why he was going home?  No. Muck told the story.

The previous day Niland had gone to the 82nd to see his brother Bob, who had told Malarkey in London that if he wanted to be a hero, the Germans would see to it, fast, which had led Malarkey to conclude that Bob Niland had lost his nerve.  Fritz Niland had just learned that his brother had been killed on D-Day. Bob’s platoon had been surrounded, and he manned a machine gun, hitting the Germans with harassing fire until the platoon broke through the encirclement. He had used up several boxes of ammunition before getting killed.  Fritz Niland next hitched a ride to the 4th Infantry Division position, to see another brother who was a platoon leader. He too had been killed on D-Day, on Utah Beach. By the time Fritz returned to Easy Company, Father Francis Sampson was looking for him, to tell him that a third brother, a pilot in the China-Burma-India theater, had been killed that same week. Fritz was the sole surviving son, and the army wanted to remove him from the combat zone as soon as possible.

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

Father Sampson escorted Fritz to Utah Beach, where a plane flew him to London on the first leg of his return to the States.

With Carentan captured, the Americans had linked up and established a continuous line. Attention now shifted to the drive inland, through the hedgerows. It wasn’t going well. Less than two weeks after the exultation over the success of D-Day came the letdown. On the left, Montgomery had promised to take Caen on D-Day, but he still didn’t have it and showed no great urgency in going after it. His reluctance to attack (as the Americans saw it) led to a severe strain on the Alliance, and on the relations between Eisenhower and Montgomery specifically.

That the two men would have difficulty in dealing with each other was almost inevitable, given the contrasts between them. Eisenhower was gregarious, while Montgomery lived in isolation. Eisenhower mixed easily with his staff and discussed all decisions with his subordinates; Montgomery set himself up in a lonely camp, where he slept and ate in a wood-paneled trailer he had captured from Rommel in the desert. Montgomery wrote his directives by hand and handed them down from on high, while Eisenhower waited for general agreement among his staff and usually had his operations officer write the final directive.  Montgomery had shunned the company of women after his wife’s death and did not smoke or drink. Eisenhower was modest, Montgomery conceited. “I became completely dedicated to my profession,” Montgomery once said of himself.  He had indeed made an intensive study of how to command. What he had not studied was how to get his ideas across. He always seemed to be talking down to people, and his condescension became more marked the more intensely he felt about a subject. Montgomery’s arrogance offended even British officers, while most Americans found him insufferable. What one American called “his sharp beagle-like nose, the small grey eyes that dart about quickly like rabbits in a Thurber cartoon,” his self-satisfaction, all irritated.  The personality differences were significant factors in the always strained Eisenhower-Montgomery relationship, but what mattered more was fundamental disagreement over strategy and tactics, and their different structural positions. Eisenhower’s military theory was straightforward and aggressive. Like Grant in the Virginia Wilderness in 1864, he favored constant attack, all along the line. He was an advocate of the direct approach and put his faith in the sheer smashing power of great armies. He was once accused of having a mass-production mentality, which was true but beside the point. He came from a mass-production society, and like any good general he wanted to use his nation’s strengths on the battlefield.

To Montgomery, “it was always very clear . . . that Ike and I were poles apart when it came to the conduct of the war.” Montgomery believed in “unbalancing the enemy while keeping well-balanced myself.” He wanted to attack on a narrow front, cut through the German lines, and dash on to his objective.  Further, Eisenhower was responsible to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, and beyond that body to the two governments. Montgomery was in theory responsible to Eisenhower, but in reality he looked to Field Marshal Alan Brooke, not Eisenhower, for guidance. Montgomery was the senior British officer on the Continent, and as such saw himself as responsible for his nation’s interests.  The British had neither the manpower nor the material resources to overwhelm the Germans, and they had learned from 1914 to 1918 that it was near suicidal for them to attempt to do so. The British strength was brains, not brawn. Montgomery proposed to defeat the Germans in France by outthinking and outmaneuvering them;

Eisenhower wanted to outfight them.

The initial difficulty centered around the taking of Caen. Montgomery had promised it, did not have it, would not attack it. By mid-June, he was claiming that he had never intended to break out of the beachhead at Caen, on the direct road to Paris; rather, his strategy was to hold on the left while Bradley broke out on the right. His critics charge that he changed his plan because of his failure at Caen; Montgomery himself insisted that he had all along planned to pin the German panzers down in front of Caen while Gen. Omar Bradley outflanked them. There is a fierce, continuing, and unresolvable controversy among military experts on this point.