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Chapter 5. “Follow Me”; Normandy, June 6, 1944

Summary 

The paratroopers jump from planes flying too low and too fast, unable to orient themselves with precision. The men drop into a miles-long region rather than their planned pinpoint positions. As they touch down, they form up into impromptu groups with whomever they find, sometimes men of their own company, sometimes the badly displaced members of other divisions. They battle with German forces defending positions while trying to link up with their units.

Winters lands separated from his company with only his bayonet. He finds Lipton with several soldiers of Easy Company and some paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne. They join a bunch from the 502nd and ambush a four-cannon German patrol moving down the street. They bump into D Company with about forty men and began moving toward St. Marie-du-Mont. By dawn, they find the 2nd Battalion staff with about forty more men and additional munitions. Winters and the rest of his men arm themselves and prepare to fight.

The commander of the 2nd Battalion tasks the men of Easy Company with taking out a German battery of four cannons laying fire on the beach and the warships at sea. The German defending the area, Colonel Frederick von der Heydte, finds the battery abandoned by his troops and fortifies the battery with a platoon of fifty men.

On the Allied side, Winters devises a plan of attack with his men, placing machine guns along the hedge leading up to the battery and sending a group to assault the trench with grenades. Lipton and Ranney go to the right with orders to provide flanking fire on the enemy. Winters leads the charge straight down the middle with soldiers Lorraine, Toye, and Wynn. Easy Company takes the first gun in twenty seconds. Methodically, they take the second, third, and fourth guns similarly and then disable the battery using explosives. After three hours of fighting, Easy Company wipes out a fifty-man platoon of German paratroops defending the battery. By late afternoon, the Germans pull their forces from St. Marie-du-Mont. Although the men of Easy Company later received medals for their bravery and soldiering, this battle introduces them to the reality of war’s violence and brutality. Later, Winters’s account of the operation for the Army’s combat historian S. L. A. Marshall downplays the drama of the battle, and the glory is given to another battalion who captured a battery with 195 men.

Analysis 

Despite superiors’ best efforts to design a plan for success, D-Day starts badly for the paratroopers when an unexpected cloud bank forces the pilots out of formation and off-course. No matter how powerful a leader is, one can’t control the weather, and nature here foils a solid plan of attack. The paratroopers’ scattered and chaotic drop leads to both tragedy and good luck for the Normandy campaign. Before the Americans’ arrival, the Germans thought the Americans were more numerous than they were, which put them in a hesitant frame of mind. However, the Americans are trained for unpredictability. They react to the unplanned events with the flexibility that had been drilled into them, and they rely on what they had been trained to do in such circumstances. The Americans form effective fighting units with whomever they join.

The chapter title, “Follow Me,” quotes Winters’s battle cry during Easy Company’s first mission, disarming a four-cannon battery guarded by a platoon of fifty German soldiers. Winters finds himself picked for this impromptu mission based on the trust he’s earned during the twenty-two months of training. The chapter describes in detail how Winters devises the offensive, coordinates the attack, and personally engages the enemy. The showcasing of Winters’s leadership and behavior in battle emphasizes both tactical savvy and grace under pressure.

Reflecting on the turn of fate that put him in charge instead of Sobel, Winters feels he is the right man appearing at the right time. His skilled use of terrain, the multidirectional attack, and the cooperation he commands from his men would not have been characteristics of a Sobel operation, whom Winters feels sure would have led the entire company to rush the enemy’s position rather than disperse and attack from different covert positions. And yet, later, when given a chance to describe to a historian the particulars that made the operation so successful with so few men, Winters doesn’t want to seem like he is bragging. This is a perfect example of why his self-effacing manner endears him to his men. However, in hindsight years later, those same men would credit the hardening of their resolve to Sobel’s brutal training.

The sight of death at close quarters, both of their brothers-in-arms and the enemy, crushes any feelings of invincibility among the Americans, and they learn valuable lessons about what can happen when taking unnecessary risks while under fire. But despite the day’s chaos and losses, the men of Easy Company remain purposeful. They had come to win, not to die. Easy Company becomes not more frightened but more careful and thus more effective. These young men had truly matured overnight into professional soldiers.

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