The story ends up thus: Wonder of wonders, the average G.I. found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles (many G.I.s noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft white toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as "just like us."
G.I.s noted, with approval, that the Germans began picking up the rubble the morning after the battle had passed by, and contrasted that with the French, where no one had yet bothered to clean up the mess. Obviously they noted with high approval all those young German girls and the absence of competition from young German boys. They loved the German food and beer. But most of all, they loved the German homes.
They stayed in many homes, from the Rhine through Bavaria to Austria, sometimes a different one each night. Invariably they found running hot and cold water, electric lights, a proper toilet and paper, coal for the stove.
Webster wrote of this period, "Coming off guard into your own home was a sensation unequaled in the army. We left the hostile blackness behind when we opened the outside door. Beyond the blackout curtains a light glowed and, as we hung our rifles on the hat rack and shed our raincoats, idle chatter drifted from the kitchen and gave us a warm, settled feeling. A pot of coffee would be simmering on the stove—help yourself. Reese would be telling about a shack job he had in London, while Janovek, Hickman, Collette, and Sholty played blackjack. Wash your hands at the sink. This was home. This was where we belonged. A small, sociable group, a clean, well-lighted house, a cup of coffee—paradise."
Even better, the men were not getting shot at, or shooting. No wonder so many of them liked Germany so much. But as Webster commented, "In explaining the superficial fondness of the G.I. for the Germans, it might be well to remember the physical comforts which he enjoyed nowhere else in the army but in the land of his enemies."
The experiences of the men of E Company in Germany illustrates how much better off during the war the German people were than the people of Britain, France, Belgium, and Holland. Of course in the big cities in Germany it was, by mid-April of 1945, Gotterdammerung, but in the countryside and small villages, where, although there was usually some destruction at the main crossroads, the houses generally were intact, complete with creature comforts such as most people thought existed in 1945 only in America.
By no means was every G.I. seduced by the Germans. Webster went into Germany with a complex attitude: he didn't like Germans, he thought all Germans were Nazis, but he discounted as propaganda the stories about concentration camps and other atrocities. He found the German people "too hard-faced." He thought the French were "dead and rotting," but Germany was only "a crippled tiger, licking its wounds, resting, with a burning hatred in its breast, ready to try again. And it will."
Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. "The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people," he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. "In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French."1
1. Writing of the G.I.s' experience with the German people and of the effect of feeling that they were "just like us," Glenn Gray points out, "The enemy could not have changed so quickly from a beast to a likable human being. Thus, the conclusion is nearly forced upon the G.I.s that they have been previously blinded by fear and hatred and the propaganda of their own government." Gray, The Warriors, 152.
Orders from on high were nonfraternization. G.I.s were not supposed to talk to any Germans, even small children, except on official business. This absurd order, which flew in the face of human nature in so obvious a way, was impossible to enforce. Officers, especially those who hated the Germans, tried anyway. Webster was amused by the intensity of Lieutenant Foley's feelings. He wrote that Foley "had become such a fiend on the non-fraternization policy that he ordered all butts field-stripped (i.e. torn apart and scattered) so that the Germans might derive no pleasure from American tobacco."
Webster also recalled the time he and Foley were picking out houses for the night. "As we walked around to the backyard for a closer inspection, we were greeted with a horrifying spectacle that aroused all the non-fraternization fervor in Foley: Two infantrymen sociably chatting with a couple of Fraulein. Unspeakable, outrageous, unmilitary, forbidden. Lt. Foley gave them hell and bade them be on their way. With the resigned air of men who knew the barren futility of the non-fraternization policy, the gallants sulkily departed."
It is worth pausing here to see the Americans as conquerors through the microcosm of E Company. They took what they wanted, but by no means did they rape, loot, pillage, and burn their way through Germany. If they did not respect property rights, in the sense that they commandeered their nightly billets without compensation, at least when the Germans moved back in after they left, the place was more or less intact. Of course there were some rapes, some mistreatment of individual Germans, and some looting, but it is simple fact to state that other conquering armies in WWII, perhaps most of all the Russian but including the Japanese and German, acted differently.
Webster told a story that speaks to the point. "Reese, who was more intent on finding women than in trading for eggs, and I made another expedition a mile west to a larger village where there were no G.I.s. Like McCreary, Reese tended to show an impatience with hens and a strong interest in skirts,- regardless of age or appearance, he'd tell me, 'There's a nice one. Boy that's a honey. Speak to her Web, goddamn!' Since I was shy, however, and those females invariably looked about as sociable as a fresh iceberg, I ignored his panting plaints. Besides, the Fraus weren't apt to be friendly in public, where the neighbors could see them. Maybe indoors or at night. Finally we came to a farm where a buxom peasant lass greeted us. Reese smiled. After I had gotten some eggs, Reese, who kept winking at her, gave her a cigarette and a chocolate bar, and, as love bloomed in the garden of D ration [a newly issued food package] and Chelseas, I backed out the door and waited in the sun. No dice, Reese later reported. I returned home with a helmetful of eggs, Reese with a broken heart. But it was, as he said, 'good fratranizin' territory.' He tried again that night before the six o'clock curfew went into effect. No luck."
Had Reese been a Soviet, German, or Japanese soldier, this little nonincident probably would have turned out differently.
The company moved by truck from Mourmelon to the Ruhr pocket. The 101st took up positions on the west bank of the Rhine, facing Düsseldorf. The 2nd Battalion's sector was from Sturzelberg on the north to Worringen on the south, with the 82nd Airborne on the battalion's right flank. The 82nd faced Cologne.
It was more an occupation position than front line. The platoons kept outposts down on the river bank, while the men stayed in homes in various small villages. There was some artillery shelling, back and forth, but not much. There was no small arms fire.
The men were on outpost each night. Here Private O'Keefe got his initiation. One night he was on outpost with Pvt. Harry Lager, who had also just joined the company at Mourmelon, in a ready-made foxhole beside the dike. They heard a thump, thump, thump. O'Keefe whispered to Lager, "Stay in the hole but make room for me to drop in a hurry. I'm going up on that dike to see if I can make out what that is approaching."