That was the critical moment in the battle. German tank drivers lined up behind the one McGrath had hit, put their gear in reverse and began to back off. Meanwhile battalion headquarters had stopped the retreat of D and F companies, pulled them together, and pushed them forward about 150 meters, closing the gap somewhat on the left flank.
Still the Germans came on. They tried a flanking movement on the far (north) side of the railroad track. Winters got some mortar fire going, which stopped that attempt. Easy held its ground. The company had taken ten casualties on June 12 in the attack on Carentan, and nine more on June 13 in the defense of Carentan.
Gordon dropped out of the line and found Winters. A piece of shrapnel had gone into the calf of his leg on one side and come out on the other; he was also bleeding from the shrapnel wound in his shoulder. But what bothered him was
a boil that had developed on his shin right above his boot. The pain was unbearable. He told Winters he had to have the boil lanced. Winters told him to hobble his way back to the aid station.
The medic took one look at this man bleeding from the leg and shoulder, looking like someone who had not slept for three days and had just come in from an intense battle, and asked, “Are you hurt?”
“Well, yes,” Gordon replied, “but that’s not the problem. My problem is this boil. Get the boil.” The medic lanced the boil, then looked at the other wounds. He said the shoulder would be all right, “but your leg wound is bad.” Each side of the wound had closed, and Gordon’s leg was turning blue. “You’re going to have some real problems with that,” the medic said. “We’ve got to evacuate you.”
“No way,” Gordon protested. “I didn’t tell Lieutenant Winters.”
“I’ll get word back to him, don’t worry about that.” So Gordon finally agreed to be evacuated.
At 1630, sixty tanks from the 2nd Armored, accompanied by fresh infantry from the 29th Division, came up to relieve Easy. Winters recalled “what a wonderful sight it was to see those tanks pouring it to the Germans with those heavy 50-caliber machine-guns and just plowing straight from our lines into the German hedgerows with all those fresh infantry soldiers marching along beside the tanks.”
“Oh, what a mess they made!” Welsh remembered, rubbing his hands with glee as he thought about it forty-seven years later.
At 2300 Easy and the rest of the 506th was withdrawn into division reserve in Carentan. The officers found billets for the men in undestroyed houses. Winters found a deserted hotel for his billet. Before going to bed, the officers checked on the men. Welsh returned to the hotel from his rounds, sat down on the steps, and fell asleep right there. Winters slept between sheets. It was a sleep he never forgot.
The following day, June 14, the barber shops had opened for business, and the men were queuing up for haircuts (they would help themselves to liquor, food, or whatever in abandoned shops and homes, but they paid for services).
Winters went to the aid station to have his leg wound attended to; for the next five days he took it easy. It was during this period that he wrote the diary entries about his D-Day experiences, quoted in the preceding chapter. Welsh ran the company. Colonel Sink dropped by to thank Winters for the job Easy had done on June 13, when it held the right flank and prevented a German breakthrough that might well have been decisive in the struggle for Carentan. Sink also said he was recommending Winters for the Congressional Medal of Honor for the action at Brecourt Manor on D-Day. Winters thought that was very nice, but wondered what about medals for the men.
As for the action at Carentan, Colonel Sink told reporter Walter McCallum of the Washington Star, “It was Lt.
Winters’ personal leadership which held the crucial position in the line and tossed back the enemy with mortar and machine-gun fire. He was a fine soldier out there. His personal bravery and battle knowledge held a crucial position when the going was really rough.”3