The next morning, January 17, the 17th Airborne Division relieved the 101st on the line. Easy Company got into trucks to begin a move to Alsace. The trucks took the men back down the highway they had sat astride for four weeks, through Bastogne. It was only the second time most of the men had seen Bastogne— first on December 19 when they marched through the town while frightened American soldiers fled to escape the German onslaught, second on January 17, the town secured.
Although the men had seen little of Bastogne, that name— and the experience it represented—would stay with them forever. Whenever thereafter a man from Easy experienced cold or hunger or sleep deprivation, he would remind himself of Bastogne and recall that he had been through much worse.
Easy's losses were heavy. Exact figures are impossible to come by; in the hurry-up movement out of Mourmelon the company roster was not completed; replacements came in as individuals or in small groups and were not properly accounted for on the roster; wounded men dropped out of the line only to come back a few days later. An estimate is that Easy went into Belgium with 121 officers and men, received about two dozen replacements, and came out with 63. The Easy men killed in action in Belgium were Sgt. Warren Muck, Cpl. Francis Mellett, and Pvts. A. P. Herron, Kenneth Webb, Harold Webb, Carl Sowosko, John Shindell, Don Hoobler, Harold Hayes, Alex Penkala, and John Julian.
The best description of the cost of the Battle of the Bulge to Easy Company comes from Private Webster, who rejoined the company during the truck ride to Alsace. He had been wounded in early October; now it was mid-January. He wrote, "When I saw what remained of the 1st platoon, I could have cried; eleven men were left out of forty. Nine of them were old soldiers who had jumped in either Holland or Normandy or both: McCreary, Liebgott, Marsh, Cobb, Wiseman, Lyall, Martin, Rader, and Sholty. Although the other two platoons were more heavily stocked than the 1st, they were so understrength that, added to the 1st, they wouldn't have made a normal platoon, much less a company."
Beyond the wounded and killed, every man at Bastogne suffered. Men unhit by shrapnel or bullets were nevertheless casualties. There were no unwounded men at Bastogne. As Winters put it, "I'm not sure that anybody who lived through that one hasn't carried with him, in some hidden ways, the scars. Perhaps that is the factor that helps keep Easy men bonded so unusually close together."
They knew each other at a level only those who have fought together in a variety of tactical situations can achieve, as only those who endured together the extreme suffering of combined cold, not enough food, and little sleep while living in constant tension could attain.
They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing. Glenn Gray wrote, "The deepest fear of my war years, one still with me, is that these happenings had no real purpose... . How often I wrote in my war journals that unless that day had some positive significance for my future life, it could not possibly be worth the pain it cost."2
2. Gray, The Warriors, 24.
They got through the Bulge because they had become a band of brothers. The company had held together at that critical moment in the snow outside Foy because 1st Sergeant Lipton and his fellow N.C.O.'s, nearly all Toccoa men, provided leadership, continuity, and cohesiveness. Despite a new C.O. and new officers and enlisted recruits, the spirit of E Company was alive, thanks to the sergeants. Having Winters as 2nd Battalion XO and usually as acting battalion C.O. (Lieutenant Colonel Strayer spent most of the month at regimental HQ, working on an acting basis for Colonel Sink as S-3) was a great help. And Speirs was proving to be an excellent company commander, able to draw out of the company its best.
That spirit was well described by Webster. By this time Webster had been wounded twice and returned to combat after each occasion. He would not allow his parents to use their influence to get him out of the front lines. He would not accept any position of responsibility within E Company. He was a Harvard intellectual who had made his decision on what his point of view of World War II would be, and stuck to it.
He was a man of books and libraries, a reader and a writer, sensitive, level-headed, keenly observant, thoughtful, well-educated. Here he was thrown in the most intimate contact (pressed together on an open truck on icy roads in hilly country, sleeping in a foxhole with other enlisted men) with ill-educated hillbillies, Southern farmers, coal miners, lumbermen, fishermen, and so on among most of the enlisted men in the company. Of those who had been to college, most were business or education majors. In short, Webster was thrown in with a group of men with whom he had nothing in common. He would not have particularly liked or disliked them in civilian life, he just would not have known them.
Yet it was among this unlikely group of men that Webster found his closest friendships and enjoyed most thoroughly the sense of identification with others.
His description of his truck ride with his platoon to Alsace deserves to be quoted at length:
"We squished through the mud to our trucks and climbed in. McCreary and Marsh lit cigarettes. Martin made a wisecrack about a passing officer. I asked what had happened to Hoobler. Killed at Bastogne. Poor Hoobler, who got such a kick out of war, dead in the snow. And the others? Muck and his buddy Penkala, who had the deepest hole in one position, had been killed by a direct hit. Sowosko was shot through the head attacking Foy. And so on. Some replacements who had come in after Holland had also died. A lot of men had been evacuated for trench foot, too many, McCreary thought. The platoon wasn't what it used to be."
Webster thought that it was. He had followed a long and complicated route through the Replacement Depots to rejoin the company, a time of frustration and loneliness for him among that host of khaki-clad look-alike soldiers. Now he was home, back with 1st platoon, back with Easy Company.
"It was good to be back with fellows I knew and could trust," he wrote. "Listening to the chatter in the truck, I felt warm and relaxed inside, like a lost child who has returned to a bright home full of love after wandering in a cold black forest."
There were missing chairs at home. They belonged to the men who had been killed, badly wounded, or had broken. But as Webster's reaction indicates, although Easy had lost many members, and gained others, thanks to the former E Company officers now on battalion or regimental staff and to the noncoms, it remained an organic whole.
14 THE PATROL *
HAGUENAU
January 18-February 23,1945
In mid-January, desperate to save what they could of their men and equipment in the Bulge, the Germans launched a diversionary operation in Alsace, code name Nordwind (Northwind), in an attempt to draw American troops from the Ardennes area. As in the mid-December attack in the Ardennes, they struck a thinly held sector of the front. (When Patton's Third Army left Alsace to go to the Ardennes, U.S. Seventh Army had slid to its left to take over his position, as well as holding its own.) When Nordwind began, Eisenhower sent the 101st to Alsace to bolster the line.
When word reached the paratroopers that they were to be taken by truck to Alsace, it was accompanied by a rumor that turned out to be exaggerated: the Germans had broken through. Winters' thought was, My God, don't they have anybody else in this army to plug these gaps?
It was a long trip. Alsace was 160 miles south and slightly east of Bastogne. The weather was cold and miserable, with falling snow. The roads were slippery and dangerous. The trucks proceeded at a walking pace; men could jump off, relieve themselves, and catch up to reboard without difficulty. Watching the process was often comical, however, because from outside to inside the men were wearing baggy pants, OD pants, long underwear, and OD colored undershorts. All had buttons—no zippers. Men tried to get everything open while still wearing their gloves. Sometimes it seemed to take forever.