“I felt sick inside. I said I’d give a foot to get out of that place. We smelled the gunpowder as a rancid thunderhead enveloped our hole. A nasty, inch-square chunk of hot steel landed in Wiseman’s lap. He smiled.
“Three more. And then three, and then three. No wonder men got combat exhaustion.” Webster later wrote his parents, “Artillery takes the joy out of life.”
Things quieted down sufficiently for the supply people to bring up some British rations. Webster shouted at Hoobler to throw him a can. Hoobler was sitting above ground, laughing and joking, having a picnic with four or five others. “Come and get it,” he called back. “The 88s are taking a break.”
An 88 came in. Hoobler leaped into his hole, with his buddies piling in on top of him.
The men spent the night in their foxholes. There was a drizzle, the air was frosty. They sat with their heads on their knees, pulled their raincoats around their shoulders, and nodded off the best they could.
Back in Uden, Winters and Nixon lost their front-row seat. A German sniper spotted them and fired away. He hit the bell in the belfry. The ringing noise and the surprise sent the two officers flying down the steps. “I don’t think our feet touched the steps more than two or three times,” Winters declared.
He set up his CP at a store on the road junction on the south end of town. The owners, the Van Oer family, who lived there, welcomed them, then went down to the cellar. Winters had his men move the furniture and rugs to one side, then brought in the machine-guns, ammunition, Molotov cocktails, and explosives and prepared to defend against any attack. His plan was, if the Germans came on with tanks, to drop composition C charges and Molotov cocktails on the tanks from the second floor windows—the Russian style of tank defense.
With that position set, Winters went to the other end of town, the northwest corner. On the left side of the road coming into town there was a manor house, with a tavern on the other side. Winters told Welsh to put the roadblock between the two buildings, backed up by one of the British tanks. He indicated he wanted Welsh to set up his CP in the manor.
Winters checked his other roadblocks, then at 2200 he returned to the northwest corner for one last look around.
The British tank was where it was supposed to be, but there was no one in it or around it. Nor were there any E Company men at the roadblock. Highly agitated, Winters ran over to the manor and knocked on the door. A maid answered. She spoke no English, he spoke no Dutch, but somehow she figured out that he wanted to see “the soldiers.” She escorted him down a hallway and opened the door to a large, lavishly furnished living room.
“The sight that greeted my eyes left me speechless,” Winters recalled. “Sitting on the floor, in front of a large, blazing fire in a fireplace, was a beautiful Dutch girl, sharing a dinner of ham and eggs with a British lieutenant.” She smiled at Winters. The lieutenant turned his head and asked, “Is my tank still outside?” Winters exploded. The lieutenant got moving.
Winters went back to the street to look for Welsh and his men. “Where the hell can Harry be?” He looked at the tavern across the street and his question answered itself. He went in and found Welsh and his men sacked out on the top of the bar.
“Harry and I talked this whole situation over,” was the polite way Winters put it. “Satisfied that we would have a roadblock set up to my satisfaction, and that I could get a good night’s sleep and not worry about a breakthrough, I left.”
In Veghel, the Germans continued to attack through the night and into the next morning. British planes and tanks finally drove them off. The 506th moved out again, getting to Uden on the afternoon of September 24. The Easy Company men who had been trapped in Veghel assumed that the small force isolated in Uden had been annihilated; those in Uden likewise assumed that the rest of the company in Veghel had been annihilated. When the two parts reunited and learned that the entire company had survived the encounter in good shape, there was mutual elation.