On October 5, 1944, Captain Richard Winters of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, found himself sprinting across an open field in the Dutch countryside near the village of Opheusden. The lightly armed American paratroopers had been pushed into an exposed, low-lying position along the Nederrijn, or Lower Rhine, during the chaotic fighting that followed Operation Market Garden. Winters realized that his men were dangerously vulnerable to being outflanked by German forces holding the high ground along a dyke. Rather than wait for the enemy to exploit the advantage, he made the decision to seize the initiative with a frontal assault across roughly 200 yards of open ground toward an elevated road that led up to the dyke.
The plan called for three squads to charge together, with Winters personally leading the second squad, Lieutenant Peacock commanding the first, and Sergeant Talbert the third. To cover the advance, Lieutenant Ree and his men laid down machine gun fire between the columns of charging paratroopers, forcing the Germans to keep their heads down. The signal to begin the assault came from a smoke grenade, which went off as intended. Winters later recalled that he was running faster than he had ever run before in his life and that he had never run that fast since.
His men, by contrast, seemed to be moving impossibly slow. Some of them tripped on strands of low-lying barbed wire hidden in the grass. Winters admitted that he tripped once or twice himself, but he kept going and reached the road well ahead of everyone else. When Winters jumped up onto the raised roadway, he found himself directly across from a young German sentry, the enemy’s outpost, who was supposed to be keeping watch while the rest of the German troops stayed under cover from the American machine gun fire.
The sentry had failed at his job, keeping his head down like the others. Now he was only a few steps away from Winters, and both men were stunned. In the Band of Brothers television series, the encounter is depicted with the German sentry kneeling about 25 feet away in an open field, but Winters later clarified that in real life the young soldier was directly on the other side of the narrow dirt road, only about two steps away. He was hunched down, covering his head with his arms, trying to shield himself from the machine gun fire that was still sweeping the area.
The exchange was not as simple as the series suggests. In his memoir, Winters described what actually happened in those frantic seconds. When he first saw the sentry, he dropped back to his own side of the road, pulled the pin on a hand grenade, and tossed it over the road toward the German. At the same moment, the German sentry lobbed a stick grenade, a potato masher, back at Winters.
Winters immediately realized he had made a serious mistake. He had wrapped a band of tape around the handle of his grenades to prevent an accidental detonation if the pin were pulled prematurely, and now that tape was preventing the grenade from functioning properly. Fortunately for him, the German’s grenade also failed to explode. Winters jumped back up on top of the road.
The sentry was still crouched down, waiting for Winters’ grenade to go off. He was only three or four yards away. Winters looked at him, and in that moment the young German lifted his head and smiled. Winters never understood why.
He never learned whether the boy was relieved that the American grenade had failed, whether he was acknowledging defeat, whether he thought the American might hesitate, or whether he had realized that Winters was badly outnumbered. Whatever the reason, the smile became permanently etched into Winters’ memory. He simply shot from the hip. It was not an aimed shot.
It did not need to be. The sound of the shot startled the rest of Easy Company, and the men began to rise and move toward him. Winters pivoted to his right and kept firing directly into a solid mass of German troops who were clustered about 15 to 20 yards away, still trying to stay low. He went through two full ammunition clips before dropping back behind the road for cover.
He inserted a third clip and then began popping up, taking a shot or two, and dropping back down again. Gradually, the rest of his platoon caught up and joined the fight. The Germans, caught completely by surprise, tried to flee toward the river, some firing back as they ran, but their aim was thrown off as they bumped into one another amid the chaos. When the fighting was over, Winters and the men of Easy Company discovered what they had been up against.
The German force consisted of two companies, roughly 300 men, from the 369th Volksgrenadier Division. They had been pulled from the line after heavy fighting in Normandy, reorganized with replacements, and were being held in reserve at Arnhem for a few days of rest before being committed to the island to wipe out the American positions. Mixed in with the Volksgrenadiers was a small unit of SS troops, sent to stiffen the resolve of the regular soldiers. According to Winters’ estimates, the enemy suffered 50 killed, 11 captured, and countless wounded.
All of that damage had been inflicted by roughly 35 American paratroopers. Despite the victory, Winters took no pleasure in it. In later interviews, he spoke with respect for the young German sentry he had killed and acknowledged the immense pressure of the moment. He described being in a state of mind he had never experienced before and hoped he would never experience again.
He was so pumped up, as he put it, that everything else around him seemed to be moving in slow motion. He also took care to correct what he saw as an error in the popular retelling of the battle. The German troops they faced were not all SS. The SS unit had been blended in among the Volksgrenadiers, but the majority of the enemy soldiers were regular German army troops.
The series identifies the young sentry as SS, but Winters suggested it is unclear whether that was true in real life. Winters reflected on the battle with pride in his men’s performance. He called the crossroads battle the highlight of all of Easy Company’s engagements. But the personal cost of the war weighed heavily on him.
Winters later acknowledged that he killed at least seven men during the war, including the young German soldier on that dyke in Holland. And while he was satisfied that he had done his job, he made a point of saying that killing never made him happy. The toll of combat followed Winters home. The sensitive young man who had entered basic training returned from the war embittered and determined to divorce himself from his past.
His father encouraged him to accept an invitation from a family friend to go deer hunting in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Winters agreed, hoping the trip would be enjoyable, but he was miserable for the entire week. At one point, he found himself face to face with several white-tailed deer that came bounding down the mountainside and stopped barely 20 feet from him. He later recalled that he could not shoot.
He could not even think about lifting the rifle. He was done with killing. In interviews conducted more than 50 years later, Winters said that he never forgot the face of the young German soldier whose life he ended on that dyke. The boy’s smile stayed with him for the rest of his life, and he never learned what it meant.
The crossroads battle also marked the end of an era in another way. Several days afterward, on October 9, 1944, Colonel Robert Sink made Winters the executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, a promotion that took him away from leading men in combat. It was the last time Dick Winters ever fired his weapon in battle.