Beyond Band of Brothers (24 page)

I certainly didn't feel like writing anymore. I couldn't explain why, but the only emotion that I could arouse were feelings of anger and after staying mad all day and half the night, I was just plain tired. Mad at what? Just about everything, for just about everything was done wrong or it wasn't done perfectly. Since nothing but perfection was acceptable, I stayed mad. What struck me most was how damn tired I became by the end of each day and how difficult it was to concentrate. I
now had people asking me questions about weapons, targets, harassing fire, grazing fire, chow, transportation, and base of fire. It never ended. I had no time to consider a person's feelings or devotion to the point, or incidental matters. Combat required that my thoughts and feelings remain hard, cold, indifferent, and effective. As to any tender thoughts I might have possessed before the war, I had left them behind in the marshalling area in England. There was no room for trivialities. I did, occasionally, think about death. Sure, I thought long and hard about the paratroopers who had paid the ultimate price, but there was no time to mourn them. Whether on the front line or in a rear area, I refused to lower my guard. Commanding a battalion required every ounce of energy that remained—no time to let up now that the war was drawing to a close.

On April 1, Colonel Sink alerted 2d Battalion that the regiment had received another defensive mission, this time along the Rhine River to assist in sealing the Ruhr “pocket.” Our job was to hold the west bank of the Rhine opposite Dusseldorf and the area south to Worringen, while General Omar Bradley's armies encircled and pinched off the pocket to the east. Second Battalion's sector extended from Sturzelberg on the north to Worringen on our south flank, where we linked up with the 82d Airborne Division. The 82d Division's paratroopers' area extended ten or twelve miles north and south of Cologne, from Worringen on the north to Bonn on the south. Both airborne divisions were basically occupation troops, sending only harassing patrols and artillery fire across the river, and receiving occasional artillery fire in return. This occupation duty continued until the pocket collapsed on April 18. In the interim, we patrolled across the Rhine, although not with the intensity that characterized our combat at Bastogne.
Occupation duty also produced our first real contact with the native German population and with the problems associated with fraternization. Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was adamant on the point of no association between American GI's and the German populace. With so many camps populated with displaced persons (DP) of various nationalities who had been brought into the Fatherland for slave labor, nonfraternization proved a pipe dream. None of our soldiers performed much manual labor since the DP did most of the menial tasks and irritating duties like KP associated with soldiering. The orders prohibiting personal contact were well-intentioned, but totally unrealistic, particularly to soldiers who had spent months on the line with no female contact. As battalion commander, I strove to enforce the regulation, but was never so naïve to think that my paratroopers didn't develop innovative ways to circumvent SHAEF's policy.

As we waited for the Germans encircled in the Ruhr pocket to capitulate, my battalion received orders to send a patrol across the Rhine. The area I selected lay directly across the river from Sturzelberg. This was the safest area in our sector. On the German side of the river, we had observed no activity and the farmland on the opposite shore was covered by an extensive orchard. Lieutenant Harry Welsh, Battalion S-2, was given the job of leading the patrol and I personally set the objectives and controlled the covering artillery concentrations as I accompanied the patrol step by step up the east bank of the river toward the industrial center of Benrath. Welsh was thoroughly disgusted with the safety limits I purposely imposed on the patrol, but I had no intention of losing any more soldiers. Actually we went through the motions of a combat patrol, found nothing, and everybody returned safely. The most dangerous part of the patrol was crossing the Rhine and returning since the river was 350 yards wide and flowing very swiftly.

I also toured a small town named Zons on our side of the river. Zons was a typical German village, founded in the early fifteenth
century. All of the buildings, the castle, and walls were constructed of stone, and a moat surrounded the castle. I wondered how many times this town had been under attack over the past 550 years. After all the destruction that I had witnessed, I was elated that Zons had not been destroyed by the air corps or by artillery fire. In contrast to the small villages that dotted the German countryside, Allied bombers had obliterated the large cities like Cologne. Months of bombardment left only a few houses standing in the entire city. Much of the population fled to the countryside and the few who remained in the large urban areas wandered around in the rubble in search of food and personal possessions. Cities that I had read about in travel journals when I was young simply no longer existed. During the early stages of the war, German residents could scarcely imagine how terrible war could be. They now appreciated the horrors of modern warfare as they witnessed their own cities crumble around them.

In the countryside the Germans fared far better than their urban counterparts and much better than the inhabitants in the countries in which we had fought since D-Day. The rural Germans weren't hurting for much during this war, but who would expect them to with France, Poland, and a handful of other countries supplying them with silk stockings, raw materials, and other amenities. What a contrast to the English, who rationed virtually every commodity since early in the war. In my estimation, the people in Germany had not suffered nearly as much as our newspapers had led us to believe. German towns and villages were really something to behold. I never had seen anything like them in England, France, or Belgium. On the whole, military duty in Germany wasn't half bad. The battalion moved into a town, picked the best house, told the folks, “I'll give you a reasonable time to move—fifteen minutes. Leave the beds, silverware, and cooking utensils.” At the end of the reasonable length of time, 2d Battalion had a nice command post and if time permitted a good meal, bed, and bath. What a great way to fight a war! Occupation duty was much better than Normandy, Holland, or Bastogne, where we lived in foxholes most of the
time. Now that we were playing ball in their backyard, a fellow gained a degree of satisfaction in knowing that these people were going to pay for bringing on the war. They knew it, too. After seeing what others had endured at the hands of German occupiers, I was hardly sympathetic to the plight of the German people.

On April 10, the majority of the battalion received a seven-day furlough to Nice, France. While they enjoyed the amenities of the French countryside, the 506th continued sending out periodic patrols. On one of these patrols, Lieutenant Purdue from Fox Company was wounded by a booby trap and was immediately evacuated. That same day, Major William Leach, 506th Regimental S-2, led his first combat patrol. In preparation for the patrol, Leach persuaded my friend Sergeant Al Krochka, a photographer from division headquarters, to fly a small Piper cub over the Rhine for photos of a suspected machine gun emplacement. The plane was hit and Krochka was wounded in the arm by fire from the machine gun. That night, Major Leach and four men attempted to cross the river. Unfortunately they failed to notify Friendly forces that they would be crossing the Rhine. Midstream, Leach and his patrol were fired upon by an American machine gun crew and all were killed. Their bodies were recovered on April 18 in front of Fox Company's position at Sturzelberg.

Leach was a good staff officer who made his way up the ladder of success on the strength of his personality and social expertise. During the crunch times—this Ruhr pocket duty was nothing more than police duty—Leach had never led a patrol. Like Lieutenant Hank Jones at Haguenau, he had not yet earned a battlefield decoration, and like Jones, Major Leach planned to make the army a career. Jones survived his initial brush with combat and was immediately transferred out of the company, but Leach was not as fortunate. The common feeling after his death was that this was a foolish patrol, and that Leach was on an “ego trip,” trying to earn a stupid decoration. In the process he got his entire patrol killed. Six days later, German resistance in the Ruhr pocket came to an end when 325,000 German soldiers
surrendered on April 18. This was the largest bag of enemy prisoners in the war to date.

By mid-April, the war in Western Europe neared a rapid conclusion. Even the Germans realized that the war was over. They battled on only because they were professional soldiers. As we prepared for the final push, the battalion received word that President Roosevelt had died on April 12. Roosevelt was more than a fixture in our lives. He was the only president most of us could remember. Every American soldier in the U.S. Army held the commander-in-chief in utmost respect. Few were familiar with his successor, Harry S. Truman, but none doubted that the new president would see the war to a successful conclusion. By General Eisenhower's orders, each command conducted a simple memorial service for our fallen commander-in-chief. In the interim, 2d Battalion received badly needed supplies. April 19 marked an important day as each paratrooper received a new pair of socks, three bottles of Coca-Cola, and two bottles of beer. Life now was a far cry from what the men had experienced at Bastogne and Haguenau. For the most part the farther that we traveled into Germany, the better we lived. One trooper noted that for the past month, he had never eaten better, kept cleaner, or slept in more comfortable beds than at any other time in the twenty months that he had been overseas. Rations also improved. Instead of eating K-rations, the men enjoyed fresh eggs for breakfast six days in a row. Staff Sergeant Robert Smith joked that if living conditions continued like this for the remainder of the war, he “might sign up to be a thirty-year man.” On careful reflection, he then wrote, “What am I saying? Someone must have jabbed a morphine needle in me.”

Three days later, the entire 101st Airborne Division was en route to Bavaria as Allied headquarters attached the division to Lieutenant General Alexander Patch's Seventh (U.S.) Army in southern Germany in its advance to secure Hitler's “Alpine Redoubt.” Whether Hitler ever intended to fortify the Bavarian Alps was anyone's guess, but Eisenhower wasn't taking any chances. We left our defensive positions along
the Rhine and boarded 40' x 8' (cars designed to carry either forty men or eight horses) railroad cars. Supply also issued five K-rations per man. Due to the conditions of the German railroad system at the time, the rail convoy trip of 145 miles traversed four countries: Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France to reach Widden, Germany. On April 25, we switched modes of transportation and climbed aboard big, amphibious vehicles called DUKWs: D (1942), U (amphibian), K (all-wheel drive), W (dual-rear axles) to carry us to the vicinity of Miesbach southeast of Munich. We traveled through the German countryside, continuing our journey through Mannheim and Heidelberg until we reached Ulm. At Ulm astride the Danube River, we stopped to gas the DUKWs and then proceeded to Buchloe, which lay at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. There we halted for the night because once again the convoy was low on fuel. Our standard operating procedure was to dispatch reconnaissance patrols whenever we halted. Earlier in the day, Frank Perconte, one of the original Toccoa men from Easy Company, reported that he and his patrol had discovered a German concentration camp. The 10th Armored Division had entered Landsberg the previous day and had also come across several concentration camps in the Landsberg-Buchloe area. Later we discovered Hitler had constructed six large “work camps” in the vicinity.

By now the men and I were seasoned combat veterans, but the sights we witnessed when we arrived at the camp defied description. The horror of what we observed remains with each paratrooper to this day. You could not explain it; you could not describe it; and you could not exaggerate it. It did not take long to realize that the Nazis were intent on eliminating all the Jews, gypsies, and anyone who disagreed with Hitler's regime. The memory of starved, dazed men who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, left a mark on all of us forever. Nor could you underestimate the barbarity of the Nazi regime, even during the latter stages of the war. I
immediately directed Nixon to take all the local inhabitants to clean up the camp, including the crematorium and the burial pits.

As I went through the war, it was natural to ask myself,
Why am I here? Why am I putting up with the freezing cold, the constant rain, and the loss of so many comrades? Does anybody care?
A soldier faces death on a daily basis and his life is one of misery and deprivation. He is cold; he suffers from hunger, frequently bordering on starvation. The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, if only to myself,
Now I know why I am here! For the first time I understand what this war is all about.

That night, I selected a large home in Buchloe for my battalion headquarters. In the cellar and in the adjoining buildings, we discovered stacks and stacks of huge wheels of cheese. I did not know if the Germans had a factory in the village or not, but I knew what had to be done. We immediately distributed cheese to the internees at the camp and to our troops. I then radioed our problem of the concentration camp to regiment and requested help. Within hours Major Louis Kent, the brigade medical officer, arrived and cautioned us against overfeeding the former inmates. Under his supervision, we halted the distribution of the cheese because the ingestion of so many calories would have produced a detrimental effect on the emaciated prisoners. A more difficult task was forcing the liberated internees to return to the camp so that medical personnel could care for them.

In spite of the horror associated with our initial contact with the Holocaust, it is difficult to exaggerate the natural beauty of the Bavarian countryside. Spring flowers covered verdant fields watered by crystal-clear mountain brooks. One Easy Company trooper, Staff Sergeant Robert T. Smith, couldn't believe “that he had ever seen countryside so nice to look at as here in Germany . . . since they prohibit the lining of the roadways with signboards and such. When we ride down a highway you can take in all the scenery instead of having to read all about ‘Burma-shave.' ” The most beautiful region in Germany heralded
the coming spring. It was an enchanting time, watching Hitler's Third Reich crumble before our eyes.

Munich fell to the Seventh Army on April 30, prompting congratulations from SHAEF for the destruction of “the cradle of the Nazi beast.” The 101st Airborne Division, however, sought a bigger prize—the capture of Hitler's Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden. On May 3, 2d Battalion was located at Thalham, Germany. The past few days had been spent moving through streams of German soldiers, who were slowly walking toward Munich, or just lying along the sides of the autobahn. Once in a while we encountered scattered rifle shots, a token resistance by a dying regime. At other times there were more German soldiers with weapons marching north than there were 506th paratroopers heading south. Literally thousands of Germans choked the autobahns as we raced into Bavaria. American and German soldiers exchanged glances with great curiosity. I am sure both armies shared one thought—
just let me alone. All I want is to get this war over and go home.
That night we received the word that at 0930 the next morning, we would be moving out to seize Berchtesgaden. Regiment directed us to draw additional ammo and rations.