Nearly every soldier had something confiscated. Generally it was unauthorized ammunition, nonregulation clothing, or pornography. Cans of fruit cocktail and sliced peaches, stolen from the kitchen, were gone, along with expensive shirts, none of it ever returned. One soldier had been collecting prophylactic kits. A few condoms were evidently acceptable, but 200 constituted contraband; they were posted on Sobel’s list of confiscated items.
“That marked a turning point for me,” Tipper recalled. “Before Sobel’s raid I had disliked him but had not really hated the man. Afterward I decided Sobel was my personal enemy and I did not owe him loyalty or anything else.
Everyone was incensed.”
There was talk about who was going to shoot Sobel when the company got into combat. Tipper thought it was just talk, but “on the other hand I was aware of a couple of guys in Company E who said little but who in my judgment were fully capable of killing Sobel if they got the chance.”
On the next field exercise, E Company was told that a number of its men would be designated as simulated casualties so the medics could practice bandaging wounds, improvising casts and splints, evacuating men on litters and so forth. Sobel was told that he was a simulated casualty. The medics put him under a real anesthetic, pulled down his pants, and made a real incision simulating an appendectomy. They sewed up the incision and bound it up with bandages and surgical tape, then disappeared.
Sobel was furious, naturally enough, but he got nowhere in pressing for an investigation. Not a man in E
Company could be found who could identify the guilty medics.
How fit the men of Easy were was demonstrated at Mackall when the Department of the Army had Strayer’s 2nd Battalion—already famous for the march to Atlanta—take a standard physical fitness test. The battalion scored 97
percent. As this was the highest score ever recorded for a battalion in the army, a Colonel Jablonski from Washington thought Strayer had rigged the score. Winters recalled, “They had us run it a second time, officers, men, service personnel, cooks, everybody—and we scored 98 percent.”
Promotions were coming Easy’s way. All three staff sergeants, James Diel, Salty Harris, and Mike Ranney, were original members of the company who had started out as privates. So too with the sergeants, Leo Boyle, Bill Guarnere, Carwood Lipton, John Martin, Elmer Murray, Bob Rader, Bob Smith, Buck Taylor, and Murray Roberts. Carson made corporal. Lieutenant Matheson moved up to regimental staff, while Lieutenants Nixon, Hester, and George Lavenson moved on to the battalion staff. (Through to the end of the war, every vacancy on the 2nd Battalion staff was filled with an officer from Easy. Companies D, F, and HQ did not send a single officer up to battalion. Winters commented, “This is why communications between battalion, regiment HQ, and Company E were always excellent. It is also why Company E
always seemed to be called upon for key assignments.”)
In early May, Winters’s 1st platoon got a new second lieutenant, Harry Welsh. He was a reluctant officer. In April 1942, he had volunteered for the paratroopers and been assigned to the 504th PIR of the 82nd Airborne. After jump school, he made sergeant. Three times. He kept getting busted back to private for fighting. But he was a tough little Irishman with obvious leadership potential. His company commander noticed and recommended Welsh for OCS.
Welsh was assigned to Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th PIR. He had wanted to return to the 504th, but Army doctrine was to send OCS graduates to new units, because it feared that if they went back to their old outfit, they would be too familiar with their enlisted friends. Sobel put Welsh in Winters’s platoon. They immediately became the closest of friends. The relationship was based on mutual respect brought about by an identical view of leadership. “Officers go first,”
as Welsh put it.
At the end of May, the men of Easy packed up their barracks bags and joined the other companies of the 506th for a stop-and-go train ride to Sturgis, Kentucky. At the depot Red Cross girls had coffee and doughnuts for them, the last bit of comfort they would know for a month. They marched out into the countryside and pitched pup tents, dug straddle trenches for latrines, and ate the Army’s favorite meal for troops in the field, creamed chipped beef on toast, universally known as SOS, or Shit on a Shingle.