Band of Brothers

The September 17, 1944, landing in Holland came off almost without a hitch. After dodging falling equipment and other paratroopers, the men went back to work, having encountered no Germans. Easy Company’s “objective was the bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal at Son” (124). Their path went over an elevated road that made anything moving on it highly visible. The road was the path over the Lower Rhine River, so securing the road was essential for the operation.

At Son, “the Dutch were ecstatic to be liberated” (124). The men were fired on soon after leaving Son as they made their way to the bridge, but no one was hurt. As the Americans approached the bridge over the canal, however, the Germans blew it up. 2nd Battalion laid down fire while 1st Battalion used rowboats and improvised rafts to get across the water, but this took several hours. Sink halted his forces because it was getting dark and he wasn’t sure about the defenses ahead in Eindhoven. The men slept wherever they could, guarded by outposts established by the platoon leaders.

In the morning the two battalions continued south toward Eindhoven. The 506th captured Eindhoven easily after that and were welcomed by the joyous Dutch, who treated them like celebrities. In the morning Winters “got orders to march east, to Helmond, in order to broaden the Eindhoven section of the corridor and to make contact with enemy,” accompanied by British tanks (127).

Initially they were met by nothing more than the cheering Dutch, but outside of Nuenen, Easy Company encountered a column of German tanks. The Germans took out four of the British tanks, so the remaining tanks and company retreated to Nuenen with their wounded (129).Winters and his men attempted to set up a defense in Nuenen, but with the British tankers not willing to destroy too much property in the town, they were unable to turn back the Germans.

After securing a German prisoner for interrogation, Winters had his men retreat to Tongelre. Back at battalion headquarters, Winters told Strayer they’d taken fifteen casualties and been beaten. That night they watched the Luftwaffe bomb a British supply column at Eindhoven, where 800 people were wounded and 227 killed (130).

On September 22, two days later, the 506th moved to defend Uden,on the so-called Hell’s Highway, from German tanks headed there from Helmond. Easy and three British tanks were in the advance. They were quickly surrounded by the German patrol near Uden. After throwing the Germans back, Winters set up roadblocks all around the town and waited for the Germans, who mistakenly assumed the town was heavily defended. Caught behind German Lines, the 506th watched as the Germans shelled the British transports in the supply line on the road. Sink arrived at Uden and used D, E, and F Companies to set up a perimeter. Winters and Nixon observed the action from a church belfry.

Meanwhile, back in the town of Veghel, Webster and six men of E Company hid in foxholes they’d dug and listened to the terrifying sound of German artillery. They got supplies from the British during a break in the shelling. The aboveground picnic of a few of the men was cut short when the shelling resumed, and the men spent the rest of the night sheltering in the freezing, wet foxholes.

After a German sniper dislodged Winters and Nixon from their observation point in a belfry, Winters reinforced his roadblocks on the roads into Uden. At 10:00 P.M., he returned to the one at the northwest corner of the town, only to discover the British tanker assigned to man it eating dinner at a nearby manor. His own men (including Welsh) were sleeping in a tavern. After forcing them back in position, he went in for the night.

The next morning the British managed to drive the Germans from Veghel, and the scattered parts of E Company were reunited in Uden. On September 24 the Germans cut access to the Hell’s Highway again. The Allied forces had lost Arnhem, which was needed to secure the route to the Lower Rhine. Hell’s Highway was still needed to supply most of the First Allied Airborne Army, so the failure of the 101st to secure the highway would “turn into an unmitigated disaster of catastrophic proportions” (135). Surrounded, E Company eventually attacked all four points of the compass as it had been trained to do (135).

Nixon and Winters went out to scout a path for the tanks on the east side of the highway by going into some woods with a solid path alongside it. They were met with German machine-gun fire. Winters ordered his own machine-gunners to lay down fire and furthermore sent them to attack a tank on the other side of the road from their position. Nixon had a narrow escape when a bullet that went through his helmet only left a burn mark. Winters, finding that the German machine-guns were too much to get past, set the rifles to firing so the machine-gunners could withdraw back into the woods. Winters convinced the British Sherman tankers to attack the German tank; the tank commander and his crew died in the effort (137).

On September 26, after almost an entire day in rain and under fire, the 506th was able to advance on the road after the German salient (troops surrounded on all three sides and thus vulnerable to being encircled on the battlefield) withdrew. The men marched back to Uden, fully convinced their time in Holland was over. They were wrong, however, because MARKET-GARDEN was a complete failure, with 8,000 out of 10,005 men killed, wounded, or missing. The Allied forces had their own salient, surrounded on three sides by the Germans with only the Hell’s Highway for supply (138). Although the Allies had assumed the Germans were nearly broken before the operation, by the middle of September, the “Miracle of the West” (138)—the German reestablishment and reconstitution of its forces—was underway.Even worse, the use of important forces in the operation meant that other operationswere postponed (139).

While Eisenhower insisted twenty years later in interviews with Ambrose that prioritizing MARKET-GARDEN had been the right call, Ambrose doesn’t agree with that assessment anymore (139).Ambrose offers several reasons for his position. As talented as the E Company was, it had not succeeded because it lacked sufficient artillery and numbers to meet the Germans, who fought just as well as the Americans. The British tankers and American infantry had not been able to coordinate well, probably because they had never trained together. In larger terms, the front the Allies had attempted to defend with the operation was simply too narrow to be held. Ambrose sees the ambition of the operation as overconfidence. For E Company, the cost of that failure was the loss of twenty-two more officers and men (139).

Although E Company “had been trained as a light infantry assault unit,” (141), from October to November of 1944 they were among those assigned to defend “the island,” a 5-kilometer tract of land between the Lower Rhine and Wahl Rivers in Holland. The terrain of the land—riddled with dikes on top of which were narrow roads, and bordered by high hills held by the Germans on the north side—made for difficult conditions.

The Germans took advantage of their high ground by firing at will, so the Allied forces spent most of their time in wet trenches and only moved at night. The trench warfare, lack of tank support, and artillery battles between the British and Germans were reminiscent of the battles of World War I, according to Ambrose, while the use of jet planes by both sides and V-2 rockets by the Germans marked this as a modern war (142).

The misery of the men was compounded by the poor British rations. The men looted food (along with other valuable items) from the evacuated farms and homes that surrounded them. In between surviving, they went on night patrols. The island was a “stagnated front” (143) that barely changed for the entire two months Easy Company helped to patrol it.

Easy Company, along with the rest of the 506th, arrived on October 2 to relieve the British 43d. They were stretched thin butwere required to cover “3 kilometers with only 130 men” (143). The departing British soldiers’ reassurance that the island was “’a rest position’” notwithstanding, the forbidding appearance of the island made it clear that the company had landed in a “no-man’s land” (143) surrounded by dikes. Winters did his best to cover the assigned territory by setting up outposts in vulnerable spots along the dikes, setting up a communication system, and sending out regular patrols along the river banks (144).

These precautions were warranted, as an encounter on October 5 showed. A sergeant out on patrol ran into a company of German SS troops who had managed to cross the dike at a previously undetected ferry. Using the excellent marksmanship of his rifles, his communications system, and stealth, Winters managed to attack the Germans. He called for reinforcements, bringing his number of men up to thirty. Luck was on his side as well, since the Germans had neglected to put up an outpost on the road from the dike to the ferry. He managed to get his men to the road first. They fired at will, a “duck shoot” (148) that killed the slow-moving Germans.

Winters called headquarters, which promised a platoon from Fox Company. Winters knew he needed to cut off access to the ferry crossing, so he split his men into two groups once the reinforcements arrived. He planned to have them lay down fire and leapfrog each other until they reached the spot on the river where the ferry crossing was. The Germans attacked with artillery fire and the German troops attacked the right rear flanks of Winters’s forces, resulting in “many casualties” (150-151). Winters called for medics to move his injured. By the end of the action, Fox and Easy had eighteen casualties (151).

It was only later that it became clear that a mere thirty-five men from Easy Company had taken on 300 Germans. Winters credits luck and “the poor quality of German leadership” (152) with having made that feat possible. Ambrose argues that the fitness of Easy Company, the communication system set up by Winters, and the “textbook” maneuvers they’d learned at Toccoa were important contributors to their success as well. Winters was the decisive factor, ultimately, because “he made one right decision after another” (153). There was nothing he could have done, however, against the artillery (153). Easy Company’s good performance had also allowed Sink to focus on a simultaneous attack at Opheusden instead of being forced to defend headquarters(153). Despite Winters’s misgivings about becoming an administrator, Sink promoted Winters to the executive officer position for the2nd Battalion, where he quickly became bored (161).

The series of men sent to Easy Company to replace him failed, for the most part, until 1st Lieutenant Heyliger assumed command over the company. He was a good leader who was respected by the men, having served in Normandy and with E Company when it was in the United States. Heyliger, for example, led the men on a midnight rescue of 125 British troops, Dutch resistance fighters on the run from the Germans, and five American pilots from the other side of the German Rhine, all without being noticed by the Germans.

On October 28, the 101st relieved a British unit by taking on a larger patrol area, and Easy Company shifted to defending an area around the village of Driel (160). Winters and Sergeant Lipton were shocked to discover that, unlike Easy Company, the British did not make a practice of firing on the Germans when they were visible. The constant firing of German artillery and their position on the high ground on the north side of the Lower Rhine meant the Allied troops still had to stay in their wet foxholes most of the time, although food, reading material (including anti-Semitic German pamphlets), and American songs played by German propagandist “Arnhem Annie” could be had further back from the line (160-161).

Winters, who was frustrated with being away from the action in his new position, decided on October 31 to go on a night patrol with Heyliger to inspect the outposts and further proof their area against incursions by the Germans. Heyliger was nearly killed when one of their own, a “tense, frightened, unsure of himself” veteran, shot Heyliger when Heyliger paused before giving the password (162). Heyliger survived and was shipped back to England. Sink replaced him with 1st Lieutenant Norman Dike (163).

In late November, the 101st was relieved by Canadian forces. Easy Company returned to France to recuperate, their original 154 officers and men now down to 120. They were tired and had never made it to Arnhem (164).