Training continued. It progressed through squad and platoon to company and then to battalion level. The division was preparing for a daylight airborne mission, Operation Eclipse, a drop on and around Berlin.
No one was going to drop on Berlin until the Allied armies had gotten across the Rhine. For months, the men of Easy had been anticipating a jump on the far side of the river, but when it came, Easy did not participate. Eisenhower decided to give the 17th Airborne a chance at a combat jump and assigned it to Operation Varsity, the largest airborne operation of all time (the 17th plus the British 1st and 6th Airborne Divisions) and to save the 82nd and 101st for Berlin.
Nonparticipation in Operation Varsity was a disappointment to many of the replacements, who had gone through the rigors of jump school, joined the most famous airborne division in the world in Belgium or Germany, and never taken part in a combat jump. At Mourmelon a unit of Troop Carrier Command made it possible for men who wished to do so to make a few jumps, to qualify for their paratrooper bonus or just for the fun of it. Lieutenant Foley made two. But that wasn't like the real thing.
So on March 24 the members of E Company watched with mixed feelings as one C-47 after another roared down the runway at the nearby airfield, circled, formed up into a V of Vs, nine abreast, and headed northeast. "It was a beautiful sight," Foley recalled. "It made your heart pump faster and for a guy like me, having been integrated into a company that had been on two combat jumps, I did feel that I had missed the last opportunity."
Some of the old soldiers felt the same way. To his amazement, Webster found himself wishing that he was jumping with the 17th. "It would have been fun." Instead, he stood on the ground with his buddies, cheering, giving the V-for-Victory sign, shouting, "Go get 'em, boys! Give 'em hell!" Then, Webster wrote, "I watched them fade in the distance with a dull drone and I suddenly felt lonely and abandoned, as though I had been left behind."
One 506th man who was not left behind was Captain Nixon. General Taylor selected him to jump with the 17th as an observer for the 101st. Fortunately for Nixon, he was assigned to be jump-master of his plane. The plane was hit; only Nixon and three others made it out before it crashed. Nixon was attached to the 17th for only one night; on March 25 he was sent back over the Rhine and flown by a special small plane back to the 2nd Battalion in Mourmelon. The jump qualified Nixon to be one of two men in the 506th eligible to wear three stars on his jump wings— Normandy, Holland, and Operation Varsity. The other was Sergeant Wright of the Pathfinders, who had been in Easy Company back at Toccoa.
German resistance to Operation Varsity was fierce. Meanwhile infantry and armored divisions of the U.S. First Army were pouring across the Rhine via the recently captured Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, then swinging north to encircle the German army defending Germany's industrial heartland in the Ruhr.
Eisenhower needed to bolster the ring around the Ruhr. The 82nd and 101st were available. The orders came at the end of March. The company was moving out, back to the front, this time on the Rhine River.
The veterans resolved not to take any chances. The end of the war was in sight, and they now believed what they could not believe at Bastogne, that they were going to make it. Safe. More or less intact. They wanted to escape the boredom of garrison, they knew how to take care of themselves, they were ready to do their job, but not to be heroes.
In contrast to the veterans, the replacements thought Mourmelon was a super place. They trained with veterans, day and night, in realistic problems, all under the watchful eye of a man who was a legend in E Company, Major Winters. They had learned lifesaving lessons. They had gotten to know and be accepted by the veterans. They were proud to be in the company, the regiment, the division, and were eager to show that they were qualified to be there.
So Easy was ready at the end of March, when orders came to prepare to move out. It would be by truck, to the Rhine. Webster was delighted to be getting out of Mourmelon, apprehensive and excited about going back into combat, and disappointed that he was not jumping into battle. "I had hoped to make another jump," he wrote, "rather than ride to the front in trucks, for there is an element of chance in an airborne mission—it may be rough; it may be easy; perhaps there will be no enemy at all—which appeals to me more than a prosaic infantry attack against an enemy who knows where you are and when you're coming."
Private O'Keefe was about to enter combat for the first time. He has a vivid memory of the occasion. "We wore light sweaters under field jackets, trousers bloused over combat boots, trench knife strapped on right leg, pistol belts with attached musette bags, one phosphorus grenade and one regular hand grenade taped onto our chest harness, canteens, first aid kit, K-rations stuffed into our pockets, steel helmet and rifle. We carried cloth bandoliers for our rifle clips in place of the old-fashioned cartridge belts. Our musette bags carried a minimum of shorts, sox, shaving gear, sewing kit, cigarettes, etc." After hearing Mass celebrated by Father John Maloney and receiving a general absolution, O'Keefe pulled himself into a truck and was off for Germany.
Easy Company was about to enter its fifth country. The men had liked Britain and the English people enormously. They did not like the French, who seemed to them ungrateful, sullen, lazy, and dirty. They had a special relationship with the Belgians because of their intimate association with the civilians of Bastogne, who had done whatever they could to support the Americans.
They loved the Dutch. Brave, resourceful, overwhelmingly grateful, the best organized underground in Europe, cellars full of food hidden from the Germans but given to the Americans, clean, hard-working, honest were only some of the compliments the men showered on the Dutch.
Now they were going to meet the Germans. For the first time they would be on front lines inside enemy territory, living with enemy civilians. And if the rumor proved true, the one that said instead of living in foxholes they were going to be billeted in German houses, they would be getting to know the Germans in an intimate fashion. This would be especially true once the Ruhr pocket was eliminated and the advance across central Germany began. Then they would be staying in a different house every night, under conditions in which the occupants would have only a few minutes notice of their arrival.
They would be coming as conquerors who had been told to distrust all Germans and who had been forbidden by the nonfraternization policy to have any contact with German civilians. But except for Liebgott and a few others, they had no undying hatred of the Germans. Many of them admired the German soldiers they had fought. Webster was not alone in feeling that most of the atrocities they had heard about were propaganda. Anyway they would soon see for themselves whether all the Germans were Nazis, and if the Nazis were as bad as the Allied press and radio said they were.
16 GETTING TO KNOW THE ENEMY
* GERMANY
April 2-30,1945
The reactions of the men of Easy to the German people depended on their different preconceptions and experiences. Some found reasons to reinforce their hatred; others loved the country and the people; nearly every one ended up changing his mind; all of them were fascinated.
The standard story of how the American G.I. reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were, as noted, regarded as simply wonderful in every way (but the average G.I. never was in Holland, only the airborne).