They got to the farm and without a struggle took the Nazi prisoner. Liebgott interrogated him for thirty minutes, then declared there could be no doubt, this was the man they wanted, and he was guilty as charged. The Americans pushed the man at gun point to the weapons carrier, then drove off. Lynch stopped beside a ravine. They prodded the man out of the vehicle. Liebgott drew his pistol and shot him twice.
The prisoner began screaming. He turned and ran up the hill. Lynch ordered Moone to shoot him.
"You shoot him," Moone replied. "The war is over."
Skinny Sisk stepped forward, leveled his M-l at the fleeing man, and shot him dead.
After the P.O.W.s and D.P.s were sorted and shipped out of the area, the next job was to sort out and consolidate all the captured German equipment and the U.S. Army equipment no longer needed for combat. As the material was gathered and registered, convoys of trucks took it to depots in France.
Officers were ordered to turn in the silk escape map of France they had received before the jump into Normandy or be fined $75. As those maps were damn near sacred to the D-Day veterans, there was universal noncompliance. When told to pay the fine, Winters replied for the entire battalion, taking his line from General McAuliffe: "Nuts." The regimental supply officer, Capt. Herbert Sobel, backed down.
Given the absence of resistance, indeed the enthusiastic cooperation of the Germans and Austrians, by the end of the third week in May there was little real work left for the Americans. All KP, washing clothes, cleaning quarters, or construction tasks were done by local residents anxious to make some money or receive food or cigarettes. Time was hanging heavy on the heads of the young men lusting to go home.
Winters had a track built, a tennis court, and a baseball field, then a rifle range. Competitions were held, between companies, battalions, regiments, all the way up to ETO. He held daily close-order drills.
There were men who loved it. To the serious athletes, those with hopes of a future college or professional career, it was a marvelous opportunity to train. They were excused from all duties, lived in a separate athletic dorm, and got to practice or compete every day. To the few who planned to make a career of the Army, it was a chance to practice their profession.
But to the majority, neither jocks nor career soldiers, it was a bore. They found their outlets in four other ways: as tourists in the Alps, hunting, drinking, and chasing women. The Zeller See, a lake some 4 kilometers in length and 2 in width, was a breathtaking bit of beauty, and a joy to swim in on the long, sunny days of late May and early June. "My bathing suit is getting quite a workout," Webster wrote his mother on May 20. "Will you please mail me another of very gaily colored trunks from Abercrombie and Fitch as quickly as possible? Waist 32, preferably shorts, not trunks."
On the mountain behind Kaprun there was a ski lodge. The chair lift to the lodge was kaput, but it could be reached by climbing the mountain trail. Winters set up a program to rotate one platoon every three days to the lodge for R and R. At the lodge there were Austrian servants and cooks, ski instructors, and hunting guides. The skiing was fabulous; so was the hunting for mountain goats.
There were deer at a lower level, hundreds of them, as this was a prime hunting area for the European aristocracy. The 101st was at the end of the pipeline in the distribution of food. Everyone from the ports of Cherbourg and Le Havre right on down the pipeline had a crack at the food first, and they all had civilian girlfriends to take care of and a flourishing black market to tempt them. So not enough food was getting to the Alps. The paratroopers went out in hunting parties for deer,- venison became a staple in the diet. Private Freeman got a Browning shotgun and supplemented the venison with quail and other birds.
"Women, broads, dames, beetles, girls, skirts, frails, molls, babe, frauleins, Mademoiselles: That's what the boys wanted," Webster wrote. He went on to describe the results: "The cooks were keeping mistresses; the platoon lovers were patronizing the barn; McCreary had a married woman in town; Reese installed his in a private house; Carson fed an educated, beautiful, sophisticated Polish blond (whom he later married); the platoon staff visited a D.P. camp nightly; and in Zell am See, home of the most beautiful women in Europe, the lads with the sunburned blondes were fulfilling their dreams—after talking about women for three years, they now had all they could want. It was the complete failure of the non-fraternization policy."
For those who had wanted and could afford them, there had been women in London, Paris, along the Ruhr, but, Webster observed, "in Austria, where the women were cleaner, fairer, better built, and more willing than in any other part of Europe, the G.I.s had their field day."
The flow of booze was never ending. On May 28, Webster wrote his parents, "Since leaving Berchtesgaden, we've had a bun on every night. Two days ago we hijacked a German Wehrmacht warehouse to the tune of a couple of cases of gin—forty-eight bottles all told. Your package with the orange juice powder, therefore, came in very handy."
Captain Speirs had only one standing order about the drinking—no drunkenness outside. This was strictly enforced by the sergeants, who wanted no incidents with drunken soldier boys on guard duty, or just wandering the streets and mountain paths. In their quarters, however, the men were free to drink all they could hold. Most of them drank more than that.
Webster's squad kept a pitcher of iced tea and gin full and handy. Each night, he wrote, "by eight o'clock Matthews was lisping and stuttering; Marsh was bragging about his squad and how they obeyed him; Sholty was sitting quietly on a bed, grinning; Winn was laughing and shouting and talking about Bastogne; McCreary was boasting of his courage ('There ain't nobody in this platoon braver than I am buddy') with immodesty but complete truth; Gilmore was pressing clothes furiously, a peculiar and most welcome manifestation of his high spirits,- Hale slobbered and poured himself another drink; Chris, who never got rowdy, sat back in cold silence; Rader had passed out in the armchair; and I, who had passed out gracefully and without a struggle, was sound asleep."
The lads would work off their hangovers with an afternoon swim or game of softball. Winters was a nondrinker, who neither approved nor disapproved of drinking; his two best friends, Welsh and Nixon, were heavy drinkers. He never berated anyone for getting drunk on his own time. Had he ever been tempted to do so, he got a reminder each afternoon of why these excesses were taking place. The boys would wear shorts and nothing else in the warm sun while they played softball. Nearly every one of them had at least one scar. Some men had two, three, or even four scars on their chest, back, arms or legs. "And keep in mind," he concluded, "that at Kaprun I was looking only at the men who were not seriously wounded."
There was another reminder of the price that E Company and the others had paid to get to where they were. On June 5, at 2200 hours, the men celebrated the first anniversary of their jump into Normandy. Webster was struck by the contrast. A year earlier, at 2200 hours, "My heart was beating like Gene Krupa's drum and my stomach was tied up and very empty... . Now I am sitting in a cosy house in the Austrian Alps. I have a tall glass of iced tea and gin in one hand, my pen in the other. A lot of boys who took off from that Devonshire airport are dead, buried in lovely cemeteries in Ste. Mere-Eglise, Son, and in Belgium, but I'm still here and very thankful for it and tonight we shall remember them in a way they would have thought most fitting— by having a wild, noisy party."
The officers too were having an on-going party. Speirs had snatched a couple of cases of fine brandy, which he enjoyed in his living quarters with a beautiful Polish D.P. and her small child. Colonel Sink gave some memorable parties at his HQ, the Hotel Zell. One night he invited all 506 officers to meet General Taylor and his staff. It was a bash. Colonel Strayer, who according to Lieutenant Foley "could put away quite a bit of liquor, got a little rambunctious." He got into a fistfight with a general. Lieutenant Foley and a couple of others got a bright idea. They went to the parking lot and siphoned most of the gas from General Taylor's Mercedes (it had belonged to Hitler). They thought it would be very funny when he ran out of gas on his way back to Berchtesgaden in the middle of the night.