Webster’s attitude was, as he wrote his parents, “I am living on borrowed time. I do not think I shall live through the next jump. If I don’t come back, try not to take it too hard. I wish I could persuade you to regard death as casually as we do over here. In the heat of battle you expect casualties, you expect somebody to be killed and you are not surprised when a friend is machinegunned in the face. You have to keep going. It’s not like civilian life, where sudden death is so unexpected.”
When his mother wrote to express her considerable alarm at this attitude (and her worries about his younger brother, who had just joined the paratroopers), Webster was blunt in his reply: “Would you prefer for somebody else’s son to die in the mud? You want us to win the war, but you apparently don’t want to have your sons involved in the actual bloodshed. That’s a strangely contradictory attitude.
“Somebody has to get in and kill the enemy. Somebody has to be in the infantry and the paratroops. If the country all had your attitude, nobody would fight, everybody would be in the Quartermaster. And what kind of a country would that be?”
Lipton felt that “when men are in combat, the inevitability of it takes over. They are there, there is nothing they can do to change that, so they accept it. They immediately become callused to the smell of death, the bodies, the destruction, the killing, the danger. Enemy bodies and wounded don’t affect them. Their own wounded and the bodies of their dead friends make only a brief impression, and in that impression is a fleeting feeling of triumph or accomplishment
that it was not them. [Thank God it was him and not me is a feeling common to many combat soldiers when their comrades fall; later it can produce guilt feelings.] There is still work to be done, a war to be won, and they think about that.”
Once out of the line, back in a rest camp, Lipton goes on, “they begin to think. They remember how their friends were wounded or killed. They remember times when they were inches or seconds from their own death. Far from combat, death and destruction are no longer inevitable—the war might end, the missions might be cancelled. With these thoughts men become nervous about going back in. As soon as they are back in, however, those doubts and that nervousness are gone. The callousness, the cold-bloodedness, the calmness return. Once more there’s a job to be done, the old confidence comes back, the thrill of combat returns, and the drive to excel and win takes over again.”
If that sounds idealized, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and throughout the American Army—and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too—fought the war.
But by no means does Lipton’s analysis apply to all soldiers. Millions of men fought in World War II. No one man can speak for all of them. Still, Lipton’s insights into the emotional state of the combat soldier provide guidance into attempting to understand how men put up with combat.
Coming out of Normandy, many of the men of Easy were fighting mad at the Germans and absolutely convinced the Allies would win the war. “I hope to go back soon,” Webster told his parents, “for I owe the Germans several bullets and as many hand grenades as I can throw.” The Germans had cut the throats of paratroops caught in their harnesses, bayoneted them, stripped them, shot them, wiped out an aid station. Because of these atrocities, “we do not intend to show them mercy.” As to the outcome, “after seeing that beachhead, a breathtaking panorama of military might, I know we cannot lose. As for the paratroopers, they are out for blood. I hope to be back in on the kill.”
Promotions were made. Welsh and Compton moved up from 2nd to 1st lieutenant. Regiment needed new junior officers, to replace casualties; Winters recommended Sgt. James Diel, who had acted as company 1st sergeant in Normandy, for a battlefield commission. Colonel Sink approved, so Diel became a 2nd lieutenant and was assigned to another company in the 506th. Winters moved Lipton up to replace him as company 1st sergeant. Leo Boyle became staff sergeant at Company HQ. Bill Guarnere became a staff sergeant. Don Malarkey, Warren Muck, Paul Rogers, and Mike Ranney jumped from private to sergeant (Ranney had been a sergeant but was busted to PFC. during the Sobel mutiny).