Band of Brothers

The weight of the men’s gear, the speed and propeller blasts of the planes that dropped them, the untested leg bags, the height at which they jumped (low), and the speed of their descent made for brutal landings. They immediately encountered Germans and sometimes even mistook each other for the enemy.

Although the drop zone was supposed to be close to Ste. Marie-du-Mont, the loss of formation in the air meant the men were scattered over 20 kilometers (73). Their Pathfinders had come down in the English Channel, so the paratroopers couldn’t figure out where they had landed.

While attempting to go to their intended destination, the men encountered German patrols. The scattered men of E Company eventually formed impromptu groups and headed south to find their company.

One paratrooper, Jim Alley, was wounded when he landed on a glass wall and discovered by a young Frenchwoman who left shortly thereafter. Fortunately for him, she returned with a member of the 506th who told him he was near Ste. Mere-Eglise. Later, he ran into E Company paratroopers. Like many of the scattered troopers, Alley and his peers formed “ad hoc units, defending positions, harassing Germans, trying to link up with their units” as they had been instructed to do (75). It was their good fortune that the scattered drop and resulting widespread skirmishes led the Germans to overestimate how many paratroopers had landed.

Winters landed on the outskirts of St. Mere-Eglise with only his bayonet; his leg bag and everything else were scattered during his jump. He could see a fire at the church and hear weapons firing nearby. Along with another paratrooper who landed just after him, he cut around St. Mere-Eglise to head east to the coast. He ran into Lipton soon after. Lipton had landed a block from the church, and only figured out where he was when he came to a road sign at the edge of town. He had fallen in with members of the 82nd and a few of the men from E Company just before running into Winters.

Using his knowledge of the location of the road sign, Winters began leading the troop to Ste. Marie-du-Mont, where they should have landed. They were joined by paratroopers from the 502d and later ambushed by Germans. Theytook members of a German patrol prisoner at about 3 A.M. in the morning. They killed the prisoners after they jumped them during a fight with a German machine gunner (77). Guarnere, who had lost his brother to the war only months before, described the incident as being “as easy as stepping on a bug,” noting, “We are different people now than we were then” (77). They encountered more and more troops from their corps, some of them with the weapons and gear they needed. The paratroopers were 8 kilometers from their objective and ready to fight.

Their move toward Ste. Marie-du-Mont was met by the movement of German commander Colonel Frederick von der Heydte, head of the German 6th Parachute Regiment. A battle-hardened soldier with twenty years of experience, he was the most senior German officer in the area because the other officers were away at exercises near the Seine River. He had battalions around the three Allied objectives (Ste. Mere-Eglise, Ste. Marie-du-Mont, and Carentan), but the widespread presence of the scattered Allied paratroopers made counterattacking difficult.

Von der Heydte went to the top of the church at Ste. Marie-du-Mont to survey Utah Beach, where he was able to see the massive fleet coming in, a stark contrast to the quiet surrounding the town and the dark. He rode north by motorcycle to the German artillery at Brécourt Manor only to discover that it had been abandoned. He rode back to Carentan and ordered the German 1st Battalion to objectives at Marie-du-Mont and the artillery at Brécourt. That artillery was “perfectly placed to lob shells on the landing craft on Utah Beach, and to engage the warships out in the Channel” (78).

By 7 A.M., a poorly-armed and short-staffed E Company had joined the 2nd Battalion. As they made their way from the village of Le Grand-Chemin,the objective in Ste. Marie-du-Mont, they took fire. Winters was called up front, where officers and his friends Hester and Nixon told him about the artillery (hidden and thus not on the planning maps they’d learned back in England) between them and Ste. Marie-du-Mont. Von der Heydte had managed to get men on the artillery, which was now firing on the landing at Utah Beach. 2nd Battalion Commander Strayer had only 100 men when he needed 600, and they needed to be defended from counterattack. He could only spare one company to attack the artillery battery. He sent E Company under Winters’s command to do the job.

Winters told his men to drop everything except the weapons and prepared them for a “quick frontal assault,” with cover from two machine guns placed in the hedgerows around an irregularly-shaped field that gave them the advantage of attacking from multiple directions (79). Winters killed a German in a trench and sent three men to drop grenades into the trench. He sent Ranney and Lipton to fire on the flanks of the Germans.

The rigorous training the men had received from Sobel and the U.S. Army showed in their discipline. According to Lipton, there were no “flashy heroics” because they had learned that “heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important” (79-80). Lipton climbed a spindly tree to find the hidden German position, then fired into the German trenches. Men scattered out in the open as they attacked E Company.

Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey, the men assigned to drop grenades in the trenches, were able to reach the German troops unnoticed because the Germans were too distracted by the attacks of Lipton and Ranney. Compton’s gun failed when he attacked the German troops, but at Winters’s command, the men drove the Germans from the first gun. The German infantryheaded toward Brécourt Manor.

The men dropped grenades as they had been instructedand were then joined by the rest of E Company. Winters killed two more Germans in the trenches to head off a counterattack, sent Toye and Compton to attack the next gun, and put men to get a captured German cannon, and sent others to cover them up front. Lipton treated a wounded soldier and was standing beside Warrant Officer Andrew Hill when Hill was killed with a shot to the forehead.

Fighting was almost entirely in the trenches at that point. Winters assigned Lipton to retrieve his demolition kit to disable the first gun, then took the second gun with just one casualty. Winters sent back a request for four machine gunners since they were low on ammunition, took prisoner six Germans who surrendered, and sent Pvt. John D. Hall to capture the third gun. Hall was killed but the troops captured the gun.

Near the second gun, Winter found maps and documents with all the Cotentin Peninsula guns and machine-gun locations. He sent this valuable intelligence back to headquarters with the prisoners and asked for additional ammunition and reinforcements (he had only eleven men at this point). He got his reinforcements, which arrived after he destroyed the German gun crews’ equipment using grenades and TNT (83). The reinforcements, under the command of Lt. Speirs of D Company, captured the last gun, but not before Houch of F Company was killed. With all four guns destroyed, Winters withdrew his men to avoid the heavy fire from Brécourt Manor, having met his objective in just three hours.

Ambrose writes that with his eleven men, Winters was able to destroy the battery on Causeway 2 at Utah Beach, probably saving many lives and maybe even making it possible “possible in the first instance” for the tanks to come in off the beach (83). Their meaningful contribution to the larger efforts was made possible with such a small force by good leadership, multiple points of attack that convinced the Germans that a larger force had assaulted them, and good training. Inexperience also played a role, a point made by several of the men’s comments that they would never have taken those chances later in the war(83).

Winters, who gave the credit to the good preparation from the Army, speculated that had Sobel “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 his men” (85). Ambrose counters by wondering if the men would have performed so well without the preparation Sobel gave them. Winters and several of the men there that day were recognized for their bravery with honors and medals (85). During an interview with historian S.L.A. Marshall, Winters explained what they had done in a matter-of-fact way, but he was unhappy to find that Marshall mentioned E Company’s actions only in passing in Night Drop, his history of the war.

Members of E Company continued to join up as they made their way to their objective in Marie-du-Mont. Winters put his men to work firing on Brécourt Manor, still held by the Germans. By noon, infantry from the 4th was coming in and fifty men from E Company were under the command of Winters since Meehan (already dead, unbeknownst to his men) had never shown up. Lt. Nixon brought four Sherman tanks and set Winters the task of providing infantry support for the attack on Brécourt Manor. Winters destroyed Brécourt with the tanks, which, despite being manned by first-time tankers, were heavily armed (87). Brécourt Manor was in Allied hands by the afternoon.

The Germans retreated later that day, as the 2nd Battalion entered the town. Winters settled his troops for the night amid the sounds of German troops marching past and Germans shooting their guns in the air. He prayed before going to sleep that night and promised himself “to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet” (88).

On June 7, E Company, along with the rest of the 2d Battalion, was assigned to join up with troops from Omaha Beach, which required moving south to Carentan. After clearing the intervening towns of Germans, E Company made it to Angoville-au-Plain, where Colonel Sink had set up his command headquarters. They stayed there for three days. During those three days, E Company regrouped as more men found their way back, buried dead bodies, and drank the large of amount of alcohol they found in the liberated towns. Men took souvenirs from the bodies of dead Germans.

On June 10, the 29th from Omaha Beach joined the 101st. They’d secured their beachheads but the troops couldn’t move inland since the Germans, including Von der Heydte’s 6th Parachute Regiment, were still in Carentan, to the southwest. The “lack of sufficient armor or artillery, the skill and determination of the defenders, and the hedgerows” made the task of securing the strategically-important objective difficult (91). Under General Taylor, the task of the 101st Airborne was to attack from three different directions starting at 5 A.M. on June 12.

The night marching wasn’t particularly difficult for the enlisted men since Sobel had trained them well, but the regimental officers, who had performed poorly on the training exercises, did not do well. Companies lost contact with each other as companies that navigated difficult parts of the terrain took off quickly without making sure those coming behind them also got through. Regimental officers “kept changing orders for the boundaries” (92) of the battalions. The troops were hopelessly spread out. Winter, now acting commander in Meehan’s continued absence, tried to contact the battalions (93).

E Company eventually reached the important Paris-Cherbourg railroad line that ran through the area, then received word that German armor was on its way (94). Lipton placed Tipper, his gunner, on a bank to help defend their position. Tipper’s defense almost ended in death when his ammunition carrier, Ramirez, removed the safety pins from his bazooka rounds, but they were eventually able to find them and re-insert them.

Von der Heydte had moved his troops out of Carentan to reload supplies and weapons, and he left fifty men with 80-mm mortars on a southwestern T-junction road intersection to hold out as long as possible: he was preparing a counterattack from the southwest.Initially, no German attack came as a result, although one Lt. Lavenson was shot in the buttocks while defecating (94).

Winters was angry at this point because the constant changes in orders had tired his men and meant that they had lost the chance to reconnoiter before daylight. They were ordered to attack at 6:00 A.M. When the troops moved out, the hidden German machine-gunners used their fire to split the men on the road from the men still in their ditches on the sides of the road.

Despite Winters’s command to move out of the ditches, the men refused. He physically kicked men out of the ditches, desperate to get them moving toward his best friend Welsh, who was taking fire in the road, but they just kept looking up at him as German bullets came near him but did not hit him. Winters—who never yelled—moved to the middle of the road to yell at the men to move out, which finally got the frozen men to move. Winters’s yells and presence in the road had also distracted the German gunners from Welsh and the six men with him long enough for them to take out the guns. E Company secured the road at the T-junction.

Tipper and Lipton were wounded clearing the surrounding area. Father Joel Maloney walked down the middle of the road to administer last rites to the dying, heedless of the firing around him. Winters took a bullet to the leg but stayed in battle to “check ammunition and consult with Welsh [and] to set up a defensive position in case of a counterattack” (97). They’d captured the objective, and Strayer and another commander celebrated their victory over wine. Winters went to first aid to have his bullet removed. While there, he encountered Pvt. Albert Blithe, who had been blinded during the battle. After being reassured by Winters, he regained his sight, probably having lost it from the fear (98).

Because of the terrain at the T-junction road, it was obvious that the Germans would attack from the southwest when they returned. As Winters’s men prepared to defend their position on the far right along a railroad track, Leo Boyle of the 1st Platoon spotted an incoming German tank. The machine-gunner on the tank shot Boyle, wholater met Sobel “‘ferrying supplies to the front by jeep’” (98)when he was evacuated to England. After gunners drove off the tank, Winters regrouped to set up defensive position 3 kilometers down the road from their original position, only to be met by Germans who were in the next hedgerow in front of them.

Just after midnight, Winters received orders to attack at dawn, 5:30 AM. The tense men watched and listened as drunk German troops shot their guns and yelled at them, while Sergeant Talbert, wearing a German poncho he’d found, was bayoneted by one of his own men, who mistook him for a German (99).

When the moment came for the attack, Von Der Heydte instantly counterattacked with his paratroopers. The fighting was chaotic, and E Company was eventually left alone and exposed on their left flank as Dog and Fox Companies broke. To their right were the railroad tracks. Gordon (later wounded and evacuated despite his protests) and Rod Strohl kept laying down fire for their company, while the officers continued to lead despite difficult conditions.

A German tank launched an attack on their exposed left flank. Welsh and his gunner, McGrath, managed to hit the unarmored underside of the tank, changing the course of the battle. The tank exploded. The tanks behind it reversed course. D and F Companies were forced to stop retreating and move forward to protect E Company’s exposed left flank.Winters thwarted a German attempt to flank them on the north side of the railroad tracks. Ambrose notes that E Company had taken nineteen casualties over the course of their two days defending Carentan (100).

Easy Company was relieved by tanks from the 2nd Armored and 29th Division at 4:30 in the afternoon, much to the relief of Winters.

By 11:00 P.M. that night, the entire 506th was back in reserve at Carentan and down for the night in deserted houses and hotels around the town. The men took what they could find from deserted stores and houses but paid for their haircuts (102). Winters, recuperating from his leg wound, wrote the diary entries Ambrose quotes in Chapter Five, while Welsh ran the company. Sink came by to thank Winters for his actions at Carentan and to let him know he was recommending him for a Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions there and at Brécourt Manor. “Winters,” writes Ambrose, “thought that was very nice, but wondered about medals for the men” (102). Sink later told a reporter that it was Winters’s actions that made the difference.

Meanwhile, the Germans and the Americans dug in.The American troops mostly stayed in their foxholes, although patrols went out on dangerous missions to get information on German troop positions and strength. The 101st was finally relieved by the 83nd Infantry Division on June 29, their stench a sharp contrast to the cleanliness of the incoming troops. From June 6 to June 29, E Company had lost sixty-five men out the original 139 officers and men they started with, contributing to the overall 50% casualty rate of their regiment (105).

Carentan was the 101st’slast battle at Normandy. They went to Utah Beach to train, recuperate, and scrounge whatever they could get their hands on. Eleven men received their medals from General Omar Bradley and once he was assured that no reporters were around, told the men that they might make it to Berlin by Christmas (106). The Army promoted Winters to captain on July 1, and on July 10, the men were moved down to the beach to prepare for the return to England. The men landed in Southampton, England, on July 12.