BAND OF BROTHERS
E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne
From Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
BAND OF BROTHERS
E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne
From Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
Stephen E. Ambrose
To all those members of the Parachute Infantry, United States Army, 1941-1945, who wear the Purple Heart not as a decoration but as a badge of office.
“From this day to the ending of the World, … we in it shall be remembered … we band of brothers”
Henry V William Shakespeare
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CAMP TOCCOA
July-December 1942
The men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country. They were farmers and coal miners, mountain men and sons of the Deep South. Some were desperately poor, others from the middle class. One came from Harvard, one from Yale, a couple from UCLA. Only one was from the Old Army, only a few came from the National Guard or Reserves. They were citizen soldiers.
They came together in the summer of 1942, by which time the Europeans had been at war for three years. By the late spring of 1944, they had become an elite company of airborne light infantry. Early on the morning of D-Day, in its first combat action, Easy captured and put out of action a German battery of four 105 mm cannon that were looking down on Utah Beach. The company led the way into Carentan, fought in Holland, held the perimeter at Bastogne, led the counteroffensive in the Battle of the Bulge, fought in the Rhineland campaign, and took Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. It had taken almost 150 percent casualties. At the peak of its effectiveness, in Holland in October 1944
and in the Ardennes in January 1945, it was as good a rifle company as there was in the world.
The job completed, the company disbanded, the men went home.
Each of the 140 men and seven officers who formed the original company followed a different route to its birthplace, Camp Toccoa, Georgia, but they had some things in common. They were young, born since the Great War.
They were white, because the U.S. Army in World War II was segregated. With three exceptions, they were unmarried.
Most had been hunters and athletes in high school.
They were special in their values. They put a premium on physical well being, hierarchical authority, and being part of an elite unit. They were idealists, eager to merge themselves into a group fighting for a cause, actively seeking an outfit with which they could identify, join, be a part of, relate to as a family.
They volunteered for the paratroopers, they said, for the thrill, the honor, and the $50 (for enlisted men) or $100
(for officers) monthly bonus paratroopers received. But they really volunteered to jump out of airplanes for two profound, personal reasons. First, in Robert Rader’s words, “The desire to be better than the other guy took hold.” Each man in his own way had gone through what Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the Army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training.
They wanted to make their Army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.
Second, they knew they were going into combat, and they did not want to go in with poorly trained, poorly conditioned, poorly motivated draftees on either side of them. As to choosing between being a paratrooper spearheading the offensive and an ordinary infantryman who could not trust the guy next to him, they decided the greater risk was with the infantry. When the shooting started, they wanted to look up to the guy beside them, not down.
They had been kicked around by the Depression, had the scars to show for it. They had grown up, many of them, without enough to eat, with holes in the soles of their shoes, with ragged sweaters and no car and often not a radio. Their educations had been cut short, either by the Depression or by the war.
“Yet, with this background, I had and still have a great love for my country,” Harry Welsh declared forty-eight years later.