Free Beyond Band of Brothers by Major Dick Winters, Colonel Cole C. Kingseed

asked for advice, and got nowhere. I then went back home to Lancaster and called regimental headquarters for advice. The next day Lieutenant Colonel Chase, the regimental executive officer, called and gave me an address in New York City for a distributor for Schenley’s whiskey. I took a train to New York, found the distributor, and was introduced to a pudgy man sitting in a chair with his foot on a stool. My initial impression was that this man had gout. He was surrounded by more beautiful, well-groomed secretaries than I’d ever seen in my life. To say that at this point I was ill at ease hardly describes my feelings, but I had a mission—to get that bourbon or face a firing squad. I was in a totally foreign atmosphere: a kid from a Mennonite family background facing a bloated executive with all thebeautiful secretaries, and he the only man who could help me. I told him my mission and what I wanted. He smiled and said, “Yes, I could take care of that order.” In my view, right then and there, that man did his part in helping to win World War II. I spent the next hour endorsing money orders. I had been so na��ve that I had converted my money to small denominations of $20 and $50 money orders.
    On August 22, 1943, the entire division boarded trains and headed north to Camp Shanks, thirty miles north of New York City on the Hudson River. The weather was crisp and cool, with the Hudson River Valley arrayed in beautiful autumn colors that reminded me of the hills in southern Pennsylvania. Camp Shanks, built on 2,000 acres in Orangeburg, New York, was the largest World War II army embarkation camp in the United States. Named after Major General David C. Shanks, commanding general of the New York port during World War I, Camp Shanks opened in January 1943. Over the course of the war, 1.3 million soldiers processed for overseas deployment through the camp, nicknamed “Last Stop USA.” Fully three-fourths of the soldiers who participated in D-Day and a total of seventeen divisions destined for Europe passed through its walls. En route to Camp Shanks, I sat in a car with Lewis Nixon and Harry Welsh as we discussed our ultimate destination. As we continued north, we knew for certain that we were European-bound. The 506th PIR closed in on Camp Shanks on September 1. As we detrained, the men formed columns of fours and marched to their assigned barracks. Each barracks was twenty by one hundred feet and contained two rows of bunks and three coal-burning pot-bellied stoves that provided minimal heating. The movement to the barracks was a long haul, with each trooper loaded to the gills with equipment. All hoped for a brief furlough to New York City, but the NOCs kept us busy with endless rounds of inoculations. Burt Christenson remarked that he had been given so many shots that his “arms hung from his body like limp rope.” When the men were given passes to New York, they were forced to remove their jump boots and their airborne patches from their uniforms for security reasons. Higherheadquarters feared that German spies would identify the 101st Airborne Division and ascertain its eventual destination.
    Within days Easy Company moved to the port of embarkation. It was a short train ride to the New Jersey docks at Weehawken, where a harbor boat ferried troops to Pier 88. At the pier, troop ships were tied up for boarding. Loading the ship that would take the 506th PIR to England took nearly a full day. In our minds was a letter that Captain Sobel had sent to our parents, in which he extolled the training and dedication of their respective sons and in which he encouraged loved ones to write frequent letters to “arm him with a fighting heart.”
    One of our officers, Lieutenant Fred “Moose” Heyliger, received notice as we boarded the S.S. Samaria that his wife had just given birth to a boy, “Little Moose.” The receipt of this news forced the rest of the company to