Up on the dike, O'Keefe recalled, "I couldn't see a damn thing but the noise was almost on top of me. Suddenly the nose of a small tank stuck out through the fog. I yelled, 'Halt, who goes there?' and ready to dive off that dike into the hole with Lager."
A voice came out of the tank: "It's just a couple of Limeys, and we're lost." O'Keefe ordered the man to come down to be inspected. A British sergeant did so, saying, "By God, Yank, are we glad to see you! We started out on that bloody dike at midnight, and we can't find our way off."
"What's making that noise?" O'Keefe asked.
"Oh, that," the Brit replied. "It's one of our treads. It broke. We can only travel about two miles an hour. The tread goes around but hits the ground on each rotation." O'Keefe suggested that the sergeant put his crew mate out in front, walking ahead, else they might get plastered at the next check point. The sergeant said he would. O'Keefe rejoined Lager, glad to note that Lager had them covered with his M-l the whole time. The little incident gave Lager and O'Keefe confidence in themselves and one another. They decided they had the hang of it.
Another night, at another place along the river, O'Keefe was on outpost with a recent recruit, Pvt. James Welling. From West Virginia, Welling was thirty years old, making him just about the oldest man in the company. O'Keefe was the youngest. Although Welling had just joined the company, he was a combat veteran who had been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, volunteered for paratroopers after discharge from hospital in England, made all five qualifying jumps in one day, and was now a member of the 101st.
On the outpost, they were standing in a waist-deep foxhole when a ten-ton truck came barreling along the road. "Halt," O'Keefe yelled, three times. No one heard him. A convoy of nine trucks, bumper to bumper, passed him by, engines roaring.
"What do you do when you yell 'Halt!' and you realize that they'll never hear you?" O'Keefe asked Welling.
"Not much you can do," he replied.
Half an hour later the trucks came back, full speed, except now there were only eight trucks.
"Jim, what's down that road?" O'Keefe asked.
"I don't know, nobody said."
A quarter of an hour later Captain Speirs showed up, "madder than hell." He shouted at Welling, "Why didn't you stop those trucks? The bridge is out down there and one of those trucks is now hanging over the edge." Having heard various stories about Speirs's temper, O'Keefe expected the worst. But Welling shouted right back:
"How the hell were we going to stop nine trucks going full-bore? And why didn't someone tell us the bridge was out. Hell, we didn't even know there was a bridge there."
"Where's the other guard," Speirs demanded.
O'Keefe stepped out of a shadow with his M-l pointed about waist high and said as menacingly as he could, "Right here, sir." Speirs grunted and left.
A night or so later, a jeep came along, no lights. Welling called out "Halt!" The jeep contained Captain Speirs, another captain, and a major in the back seat. Welling said the password. Speirs gave the countersign in a normal conversational tone. Welling couldn't make out what he had said and repeated the challenge. Speirs answered in the same tone; Welling still didn't hear him. Tense and a bit confused, O'Keefe lined up his M-l on the major in the back. He looked closely and realized it was Winters.
Welling gave the password for the third time. The captain who was driving finally realized Welling had not heard and yelled out the countersign. Speirs jumped out of the jeep and started to curse out Welling.
Welling cut him off. "When I say 'Halt!' I mean 'Halt!' When I give the password, I expect to hear the countersign." Speirs started sputtering about what he was going to do to Welling when Winters interrupted. "Let's go, Captain," he said in a low voice. As they drove off, Winters called out to Welling, "Good job."
There were patrols across the Rhine, seldom dangerous except for the strong current in the flooded river, nearly 350 meters wide. When Winters got orders on April 8 to send a patrol to the other side, he decided to control the patrol from an observation post to make certain no one got hurt. Winters set the objectives and controlled the covering artillery concentration, then monitored the patrol step by step up the east bank of the river. Lieutenant Welsh, battalion S-2, accompanied him and was disgusted with the safety limits Winters insisted on. "We went through the motions of a combat patrol," Winters remembered, "and found nothing. Everyone returned safely."
Most patrols were similarly unsuccessful. Malarkey reported that a replacement officer took out a patrol, got across the river, advanced several hundred yards inland, drew fire from a single rifleman, reported over the radio that he had met stiff resistance, and withdrew to friendly territory, to the mingled relief and disgust of his men.
A couple of days later, things didn't work out so well. The patrol leader was Maj. William Leach, recently promoted and made regimental S-2 by Sink. He had been ribbed unmercifully back at Mourmelon when his gold leaves came through: "When are you going to take out a patrol, Leach?" his fellow officers asked. He had never been in combat and consequently had no decorations. Characterized by Winters as "a good staff officer who made his way up the ladder on personality and social expertise," Leach wanted to make a career out of the Army. For that, he felt he needed a decoration.
The night of April 12, Leach set out at the head of a four-man patrol from the S-2 section at regimental HQ. But he made one fatal mistake: he failed to tell anyone he was going. Easy Company men on outpost duty heard the splashing of the boat the patrol was using as it crossed the river. As far as they were concerned, unless they had been told of an American patrol at such and such a time, any boat in the river contained enemy troops. They opened up on it; quickly the machine-guns joined in. The fire ripped the boat apart and hit all the men in it, including Leach. Ignoring the pitiful cries of the wounded, drowning in the river, the machine-gunners kept firing bursts at them until their bodies drifted away. They were recovered some days later downstream. In the judgment of the company, Leach and four men had "perished in a most unnecessary, inexcusable fashion because he had made an obvious and unpardonable mistake."
That day the company got the news that President Roosevelt had died. Winters wrote in his day book, "Sgt. Malley [of F Company]—good news—made 1st Sgt. Bad news—Pres. Roosevelt died."
"I had come to take Roosevelt for granted," Webster wrote his parents, "like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost."
Eisenhower ordered all unit commanders to hold a short memorial service for Roosevelt on Sunday, April 14. Easy Company did it by platoons. Lieutenant Foley, who "never was much enamored with Roosevelt," gathered his platoon. He had a St. Joseph missal in his musette bag - in it he found a prayer. He read it out to the men, and later claimed to be "the only man who ever buried Franklin D. as a Catholic."
Overall, Easy's time on the Rhine, guarding the Ruhr pocket, was boring. "Time hung so heavily," a disgusted Webster wrote, "that we began to have daily rifle inspections. Otherwise, we did nothing but stand guard on the crossroads at night and listen to a short current events lecture by Lieutenant Foley during the day." With their high energy level and the low demands on them, the men turned to sports. They found some rackets and balls and played tennis on a backyard court, or softball in a nearby field. Webster was no athlete, but he had a high level of curiosity. One day he realized "the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition," when he and Pvt. John Janovek scaled a 250-foot-high factory smokestack. When they got to the top, they had a magnificent view across the river. To Webster, "the Ruhr seemed absolutely lifeless," even though "everywhere we looked there were factories, foundries, steel mills, sugar plants, and sheet-metal works. It looked like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis decentralized."