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 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.
Captain Hester came up, bringing three blocks of TNT and some phosphorus incendiary grenades. Winters had a block dropped down the barrel of each of the three guns, followed by a German potato-masher grenade. 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, "Rusty" Houch of F Company, raised 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 Brecourt 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), Company E 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' 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 I were being hit by a much larger force."
There were other factors, including the excellent training the company had received, and that this was their baptism of fire. 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, in Wartime, writes that the soldier going into combat the first time thinks to himself, "It can't happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced, etc." That feeling soon gives way to "It can 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."1)
1. Fussell, Wartime, 282.
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 Sobel had 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.
A month or so later, Winters was called into regimental HQ. Sink, Strayer, and the staff were sitting in a tent. At the head of a table was S. L. A. Marshall, the Army's combat historian. The atmosphere around the table was "electric," Winters remembered. "Those West Pointers would have 'killed' to have the opportunity I had to be sitting in the chair across from Marshall." "O.K., Lieutenant," Marshall said, "tell me what you did out there on D-Day. You took that battery of 105s, didn't you?" "Yes, sir, that's right." "Tell me how you did it."
"Well, sir, I put down a base of fire, we moved in under the base of fire, and we took the first gun. And then we put down another base of fire and we moved to the second gun and the third gun and the fourth gun." "O.K., anything else?"
"No, sir, that's basically it." As a junior officer facing all that brass, Winters figured he had better not lay it on too thick. So he made it sound like a routine training problem.
When Marshall wrote his book, Night Drop, to Winters' disgust he left out Easy Company, except to say "the deployed [2nd] battalion had kept the German battery entertained at long range... ." He did give a full account of the capture of a battery at Holdy, near causeway No. 1, by the 1st Battalion, 506th. Marshall wrote that the battalion had 195 men lined up to take the battery. Winters commented, "With that many E Co. men, I could have taken Berlin!"2
2. S. L. A. Marshall, Night Drop: The American Airborne Invasion of Normandy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 281-86. Marshall has come in for considerable criticism for the mistakes in his work, especially from paratroopers who were there. I have sympathy for him; writing accurately about a battle for which you have conflicting testimony from the eyewitnesses and participants is a challenge, and then some. Military historians do the best they can.