Speirs gave Guth the details on the Bronze Star he was entitled to for participation in Normandy, Holland, and Belgium, and promised to inform him as soon as it came through. He added a postscript: "Clark is Armorer Artificer just now—sent Burlingame back to his platoon—he couldn't keep your Kraut generator going! We have regular electricity and hot water here in Austria.
"By the way, you can wear your 'Presidential Unit Citation' ribbon and an Oak Leaf Cluster on it no matter what outfit you are in—you earned it with the 101 A/B."
The company was breaking up. General Taylor ordered all high point men who had not yet been rotated home to be transferred to the 501, stationed in Berchtesgaden. The 501st was being inactivated and was to serve as a vehicle to transport all high-point men from the division back to the United States for discharge. Others from the old company were in hospital or already discharged. Recruits who had joined up in Mourmelon or Haguenau were now regarded as veterans.
General Taylor made a trip to the States,- when he returned toward the end of June, he announced that the 101st was to be redeployed to the Pacific, after a winter furlough in the States. Meanwhile the War Department insisted that the division undergo a full training regime, a critical process if it was to go into combat again, as more than three-quarters of the division was made up of recruits.
So close-order drill and calisthenics became the order of the day again, along with nomenclature of the M-l, nomenclature and functioning of the BAR, and nomenclature and functioning of the carbine. A road march. Arm and hand signals. Squad tactics. Barracks inspection. Mess kit inspection. Military courtesy and discipline. First aid and sanitation. Clothing check. Map reading. Dry run with the rifle. One solid week of triangulation. Firing on the range. "Thus it went," Webster wrote, "and I with it, in mounting disgust."
Lieutenant Peacock returned, more chickenshit than ever. "We suffered his excesses of training to such a degree," Webster wrote, "that the men who had known him in Holland and Bastogne hated even to look at him. I was so mad and exasperated that, if I had possessed fewer than 85 points, I would have volunteered to go straight to Japan and fight, rather than put up with another day's basic under Peacock."
By the middle of July every veteran of Normandy was gone, except the long-suffering Webster, who still could not get the adjutant to accept his point total. Colonel Sink had given the high-point men a farewell speech: "It is with mingled feelings that your regimental commander observes the departure of you fine officers and men. He is happy for each of you. You have worked and fought and won the right to return to your homes and to your friends.
"I am sorry to see you go, because you are friends and comrades-at-arms.
"Most of you have caught hell at one time or another from me. I hope you considered it just hell and fair. It was never intended to be otherwise.
"I told you people to get those Presidential Citations and you did it. It will forever be to your credit and honor.
"Then God speed you on your way: May the same Fellow who led you by the hand in Normandy, Holland, Bastogne, and Germany look kindly upon you and guard you until the last great jump!"
At the end of July, the division was transferred by 40-and-8s to France. E Company went into barracks in Joigny, a small town south of Paris. Winters, Speirs, Foley, and others took furloughs in England. On August 6 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, laying to rest the fears of another campaign in the Pacific. After that, everything in the airborne was in flux, with low-point men being transferred into the 17th Airborne, others into the 82nd. The 101st magazine, the Screaming Eagle, complained, "The outfit seems more like a repple-depple than a combat division."1
1. Rapport and Northwood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 775.
On August 11, Colonel Sink was promoted to assistant division commander. On August 22 General Taylor left the 101st, or what was left of it, to become superintendent at West Point. Shortly thereafter, the 506th packed up and moved out, to join the 82nd Airborne in Berlin. It was said that Colonel Sink cried when his boys marched to the Joigny depot for shipment to the 82nd. Webster thought it fitting that he do so, as he was "the heart and soul of our regiment." Writing in 1946, Webster went on: "Our beautiful dark-blue silk regimental flag with Mount Currahee, the bolt of lightning, and the six parachutes embroidered on it is rolled in its case, gathering dust in the National Archives in Washington."
On November 30, 1945, the 101st was inactivated. Easy Company no longer existed.
The company had been born in July 1942 at Toccoa. Its existence essentially came to an end almost exactly three years later in Zell am See, Austria. In those three years the men had seen more, endured more, and contributed more than most men can see, endure, or contribute in a lifetime.
They thought the Army was boring, unfeeling, and chicken and hated it. They found combat to be ugliness, destruction, and death, and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands made on the body—anything, that is, except letting down their buddies.
They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them.
They had had three remarkable men as company commanders, Herbert Sobel, Richard Winters, and Ronald Speirs. Each had made his own impact but Winters, who had been associated with the company from Day 1 to Day 1,095, had made the deepest impression. In the view of those who served in Easy Company, it was Dick Winters' company.
The noncoms especially felt that way. The ones who served as corporals and sergeants in combat had been privates in Toccoa. They had spent their entire three years in E Company. Officers, except Winters, came and went. Many of the officers continued their association with E Company as members of the battalion or regimental staff, but only Winters and the noncoms were present and accounted for (or in hospital) every day of the company's existence. They held together, most of all in those awful shellings in the woods of Bastogne and at that critical moment in the attack on Foy before Speirs replaced Dike. The acknowledged leaders of the noncoms, on paper and in fact, were the 1st sergeants, William Evans, James Diel, Carwood Lipton, and Floyd Talbert.
Sergeant Talbert was in the hospital at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, on September 30, 1945. He wrote a letter to Winters. He was no Webster as a writer, but he wrote from the heart and he spoke for every man who ever served in Easy Company.
He said he wished they could get together to talk, as there were a lot of things he wanted to tell Winters. "The first thing I will try to explain is ... Dick, you are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier that ever served under you or I should say with you because that is the way you led. You are to me the greatest soldier I could ever hope to meet.
"A man can get something from war that is impossible to acquire anyplace else. I always seemed to strengthen my self-confidence or something. I don't know why I'm telling you this. You know all that.
"Well I will cut this off for now. You are the best friend I ever had and I only wish we could have been on a different basis. You were my ideal, and motor in combat. The little Major we both know summed you up in two words, 'the most brave and courageous soldier he ever knew.' And I respected his judgment very much. He was a great soldier too, and I informed him you were the greatest. Well you know now why I would follow you into hell. When I was with you I knew everything was absolutely under control."