He was also desperate. His best friend, Harry Welsh, was up ahead, trying to deal with that machine-gun. If I don’t do something, Winters thought to himself, he’s dead. No question about it.
But the men wouldn’t move. They did look up. Winters recalled, “I will never forget the surprise and fear on those faces looking up at me.” The German machine-gun seemed to be zeroing in on him, and he was a wide open target. “The bullets kept snapping by and glancing off the road all around me.”
“Everybody had froze,” Strohl remembered. “Nobody could move. And Winters got up in the middle of the road and screamed, ‘Come on! Move out! Now!’ ”
That did it. No man in the company had ever before heard Winters shout. “It was so out of character/’ Strohl said,
“we moved out as one man.”
According to Winters, “Here is where the discipline paid off. The men got the message, and they moved out.”
As Sergeant Talbert passed Winters, he called out, “Which way when we hit the intersection?”
“Turn right,” Winters ordered.
(In 1981, Talbert wrote Winters: “I’ll never forget seeing you in the middle of that road. You were my total inspiration. All my boys felt the same way.”)
Welsh, meanwhile, was neutralizing the machine-gun. “We were all alone,” he remembered, “and I couldn’t understand where the hell everybody was.” Thanks to the distraction caused by Winters running back and forth, the machine-gunner had lost track of Welsh and his six men. Welsh tossed some grenades at the gun, followed by bursts from his carbine. The men with him did the same. The machine-gun fell silent.2
2. Winters wrote in 1990: “Later in the war, in recalling this action with Major Hester, he made a comment that has always left me feeling proud of Company E’s action that day. As S-3, Hester had been in a position to see another company in a similar position caught in M.G. fire. It froze and then got severely cut up. E Company, on the other hand, had moved out, got the job done, and had not been cut up by that M.G.”
The remainder of Easy Company drove into the intersection at a full run, and secured it. Winters sent the 1st platoon to the left, the 2nd to the right, clearing out the houses, one man throwing grenades through windows while another waited outside the door. Immediately after the explosion, the second man kicked in the door to look for and shoot any survivors.
Tipper and Liebgott cleared out a house. As Tipper was passing out the front door, “A locomotive hit me, driving me far back inside the house. I heard no noise, felt no pain, and was somehow unsteadily standing and in possession of my M-l.” The German rear guard was bringing its prepositioned mortars into play. Liebgott grabbed Tipper and helped him to a sitting position, called for a medic, and tried to reassure Tipper that he would be O.K.
Welsh came up and got some morphine into Tipper, who was insisting that he could walk. That was nonsense; both his legs were broken, and he had a serious head wound. Welsh and Liebgott half dragged him into the street, where “I remember lying at the base of the wall with explosions in the street and shrapnel zinging against the wall above my head.”
Welsh got Tipper back to the aid station being set up in a barn about 20 meters to the rear.
Mortars continued coming in, along with sniper fire. Lipton led 3rd platoon to the intersection and peeled off to the right. There were explosions on the street; he huddled against a wall and yelled to his men to follow him. A mortar shell dropped about 2 meters in front of him, putting shell fragments in his left cheek, right wrist, and right leg at the crotch. His rifle clattered to the street. He dropped to the ground, put his left hand to his cheek and felt a large hole, but his biggest concern was his right hand, as blood was pumping out in spurts. Sergeant Talbert got to him and put a tourniquet on his arm.