Part 8 (1/2)

After a couple of shots from the cannon and several bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun, the artillery spotter was no more.” Salomon's daring feat notwithstanding, it was obvious that the army was going to have to work out a better system for tank-infantry communication than having junior officers jump up and down in front of American tanks. Until that was done, the tanks would play a minor supporting role to the infantry, following the GIs into the next field as the infantry overran it. The U.S. First Army had not produced anything approaching a doctrine for offensive action in the hedgerows. It had expended enormous energy to get tanks by the score into Normandy, but it had no doctrine for the role of tanks in the hedgerows. In peacetime, the army would have dealt with the problem by setting up commissions and boards, experimenting in maneuvers, testing ideas, before establis.h.i.+ng a doctrine. But in Normandy time was a luxury the army didn't have. So as the infantry lurched forward in the Cotentin, following frontal a.s.saults straight into the enemy's kill zones, the tankers began experimenting with ways to utilize their weapons in the hedgerows.

Beginning at daylight on June 7, each side had begun to rush reinforcements to the front. The Americans came in on a tight schedule, long since worked out, with fresh divisions almost daily. Sgt. Edward ”Buddy” Gianelloni, a medic in the 79th Division, came ash.o.r.e on D-Day plus six on Utah Beach. The 96 men marched inland; when they reached Ste.-Mere-Eglise, a paratrooper called out to Gianelloni, ”Hey, what outfit is that?”

”This is the 79th Infantry Division,” Gianelloni replied. ”Well, that's good,” the paratrooper said. ”Now if you guys are around this time tomorrow you can consider yourselves veterans.” The Germans came in by bits and pieces because they were improvising, having been caught with no plans for reinforcing Normandy. Further, the Allied air forces had badly hampered German movement from the start. At dawn, all along the plateau above the bluff at Omaha, Gis shook themselves awake, did their business, ate some rations, smoked a cigarette, got into some kind of formation, and prepared to move out to broaden the beachhead. But in the hedgerows, individuals got lost, squads got lost. German sniper fire came from all directions. The Norman farm homes, made of stone and surrounded by stone walls and a stone barn, made excellent fortresses. Probing attacks brought forth a stream of bullets from the Germans, pretty much discouraging further probes. Brig. Gen. Norman ”Dutch” Cota, a.s.sistant division commander of the 29th, came on a group of infantry pinned down by some Germans in a farmhouse. He asked the captain in command why his men were making no effort to take the building. ”Sir, the Germans are in there, shooting at us,” the captain replied. ”Well, I'll tell you what, Captain,” said Cota, unbuckling two grenades from his jacket. ”You and your men start shooting at them. I'll take a squad of men and you and your men watch carefully. I'll show you how to take a house with Germans in it.”

Cota led his squad around a hedge to get as close as possible to the house. Suddenly, he gave a whoop and raced forward, the squad following, yelling like wild men. As they tossed grenades into the windows, Cota and another man kicked in the front door, tossed a couple of grenades inside, waited for the explosions, then dashed into the house. The surviving Germans inside were streaming out the back door, running for their lives. Cota returned to the captain. ”You've seen how to take a house,” said the general, still out of breath. ”Do you understand? Do you know how to do it now?” ”Yes, sir.”

”Well, I won't be around to do it for you again,” Cota said. ”I can't do it for everybody.”

That little story speaks to the training of the U.S. Army for the Battle of Normandy. At first glance, Cota's bravery stands out, along with his sense of the dramatic and his knowledge of tactics. He could be sure the story would get around the division. A lesson would be learned. His own reputation would go even higher, the men would be even more willing to follow him. But after that first glance, a question emerges. Where had that captain been the last six months? He had been in training to fight the German army. He had been committed to offensive action, trained to it, inspired to it. But no one had thought to show him how to take an occupied house. He knew all about getting ash.o.r.e from an LCVP, about beach obstacles, about paths up the bluff, about ravines, about amphibious a.s.sault techniques. But no one had shown him how to take a house because there were no standing houses on Omaha Beach, so that wasn't one of his problems.

Not on June 6. But on June 7 it became his number one problem. The same was true for the two hundred or so company commanders already ash.o.r.e and would be for the hundreds of others waiting to enter the battle. As Cota said, he couldn't be there to teach all of them how to take a house. They were going to have to figure it out for themselves.

Normandy was a soldier's battle. It belonged to the riflemen, machine gunners, mortarmen, tankers, and artillerymen who were on the front lines. There was no room for maneuver. There was no opportunity for subtlety. There was a simplicity to the fighting: for the Germans, to hold; for the Americans, to attack.

Where they would hold or attack required no decision-making: it was always the next village or field. The real decision-making came at the battalion, company, and platoon levels: where to place the mines, the barbed wire, machine-gun pits, where to dig the foxholes-or where and how to attack them. Throughout First Army, young men made many discoveries in the first few days of combat, about war, about 97 themselves, about others. They quickly learned such basics as to keep down or die-to dig deep and stay quiet-to distinguish incoming from outgoing artillery-to judge when and where a sh.e.l.l or a mortar barrage was going to hit-to recognize that fear is inevitable but can be managed-and many more things they had been told in training but that can only be truly learned by doing. Putting it another way, after a week in combat, infantrymen agreed that there was no way training could have prepared them for the reality of combat. Capt. John Colby caught one of the essences of combat, the sense of total immediacy: ”At this point we had been in combat six days. It seemed like a year. In combat, one lives in the now and does not think much about yesterday or tomorrow.”

Colby discovered that there was no telling who would break or when. His regimental CO was ”grossly incompetent,” his battalion commander had run away from combat in his first day of action, and his company CO was a complete bust. On June 12 the company got caught in a combined mortar-artillery barrage. The men couldn't move forward, they couldn't fall back, and they couldn't stay where they were-or so it appeared to the CO, who therefore had no orders to give, and was speechless.

Colby went up to his CO to ask for orders. The CO shook his head and pointed to his throat. Colby asked him if he could make it back to the aid station on his own, ”and he leaped to his feet and took off.

I never saw him again.” Another thing Colby learned in his first week in combat was: ”Artillery does not fire forever. It just seems like that when you get caught in it. The guns overheat or the ammunition runs low, and it stops. It stops for a while, anyway.”

He was amazed to discover how small he could make his body. If you get caught in the open in a sh.e.l.ling, he advised, ”the best thing to do is drop to the ground and crawl into your steel helmet. One's body tends to shrink a great deal when sh.e.l.ls come in. I am sure I have gotten as much as eighty percent of my body under my helmet when caught under sh.e.l.lfire.”

Colby learned about hedgerows. Once he got into a situation where ”I had to push through a hedgerow.

A submachine-gun emitted a long burst right in front of my face. The gun was a Schmeisser, which had a very high rate of fire that sounded like a piece of cloth being ripped loudly. The bullets went over my head. I fell backward and pa.s.sed out cold from fright.”

About themselves, the most important thing a majority of the GIs discovered was that they were not cowards. They hadn't thought so, they had fervently hoped it would not be so, but they couldn't be sure until tested. After a few days in combat, most of them knew they were good soldiers. They had neither run away nor collapsed into a pathetic ma.s.s of quivering Jell-O (their worst fear, even greater than the fear of being afraid).

They were learning about others. A common experience: the guy who talked toughest, bragged most, excelled in maneuvers, everyone's pick to be the top soldier in the company, was the first to break, while the soft-talking kid who was hardly noticed in camp was the standout in combat. These are the cliches of war novels precisely because they are true. They also learned that while combat brought out the best in some men, it unleashed the worst in others-and a further lesson, that the distinction between best and worst wasn't clear. On June 9, Pvt. Dutch Schultz of the 82nd Airborne was outside Montebourg. That morning he was part of an attack on the town. ”I ran by a wounded German soldier lying alongside of a hedgerow. He was obviously in a great deal of pain and crying for help. I stopped running and turned around. A close friend of mine put the muzzle of his rifle between the German's still crying eyes and pulled the trigger. There was no change in my friend's facial expression. I don't believe he even blinked an eye.”

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 98 the grace of G.o.d 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 b.u.t.t. He crossed to the other side and repeated the order, again kicking the men.

”I was possessed,” Winters recalled. ”n.o.body'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 G.o.d, 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. ”n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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.”) 99 Welsh, meanwhile, was neutralizing the machine gun. ”We were all alone,” he remembered, ”and I couldn't understand where the h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sing 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 rea.s.sure 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 sh.e.l.l dropped about two meters in front of him, putting sh.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y.

”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 sh.e.l.l 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.

100 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 hara.s.sing 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.