In this video, we’re going to hear Dick Winter’s comments about shooting the young German soldier during the Crossroads Battle in Holland on October 5th, 1944. In episode 5 of Band of Brothers, titled Crossroads, Captain Dick Winters realizes he and his men are in a vulnerable low-lying position or they can be easily outflanked by the Germans.
Winters decides that instead of giving the German soldiers enough time to figure this out, his men will take the initiative and charge approximately 200 yards across an open field toward an elevated road from where they’ll begin a surprise assault on an unknown number of German troops on the other side. Winters leads second squad.
Lieutenant Peacock is in charge of first squad and Sergeant Telbert commands third squad in the series. Due to a delayed smoke grenade intended to signal the start of the charge, Winter sprints to the elevated road that leads up to the dyke well ahead of the other men. However, in real life, there was no delayed smoke grenade.
The smoke signal went off as intended, and Winter simply outpaced everyone else. “I was running faster than I ever ran before in my life,” recalled Winters. “Everybody else was moving so slow. I couldn’t understand it. One reason some of the men fell behind is that they tripped on strings of low-lying barbed wire hidden in the grass.
Winter said that he tripped once or twice, too, but continued running. Upon reaching the road in the series, Winters immediately notices a young German sentry who is kneeling about 25 ft away in a field on the other side of the road. They lock eyes and Winters momentarily hesitates to fire his rifle. The young German who looks to be a teenager starts to smile at Winters.
It is then that Winters steadies his rifle and fires. This moment is first recalled in Band of Brothers when Winters is typing his afteraction report. We later see it in the form of a flashback Winters has while he is on a 48-hour pass in Paris and sees a boy on a train who reminds him of the young man he shot.
After the battle is over in the series, Winters stares down at the body of the young German soldier. Another member of Easy Company approaches and inspects the deceased soldier’s uniform, noticing a patch on his collar. “Jesus, Captain, they’re SS,” the soldier tells Winters. Soon after, Winters goes and sits alone, visibly affected by what has unfolded.
During an interview with Pennsylvania State Representative John Payne, conducted in the early 2000s, Dick Winters reflected on the crossroads battle and his real life encounter with the young German soldier. Let’s now listen to what he had to say. There was no other way to do it. There was no uh there was no hedge like we had in Normandy and so forth.
You had to make a frontal attack was the only approach to it. But in making that decision when I started out to run across there, I was running faster than I ever ran before in my life. I’ve never run that fast since. And the thing about it was everybody else was moving so slow I couldn’t understand it.
My men were moving so slow I couldn’t understand it. I got up there and jumped up in the dyke as you’re relating here. And as I look at the Germans down there and see in the position I’m in, I’m behind them very luckily. Just luck. But they’re moving so slow. See, it’s not only my men that are moving so slow, but the Germans are moving so slow.
And I can’t understand why they’re moving so slow. I’m normal, but they’re not. So, in standing there, I’m in a different state of mind that I’ve ever been in before. Hope I never get there again. But I was that pumped up that uh I don’t know how else to explain it. And my men are very slow in getting up to me because Lord dear, they’re 100 yards behind.
So, there’s one there’s one little memory there’s, but it it’s it’s a memory worth sharing with you. Uh, and jumping up on the dyke, as the picture points out, there’s this young soldier right across the road from me. Actually, he was not out in the field like we show in the uh film. He was directly on the other side of that road about two steps away because it was just a narrow dirt road coming up from the river.
And I happened he was the outlook. He was their outpost. He was a guy was supposed to be keeping his head up and keeping observation that somebody didn’t pull a trick on him like we had just done. uh somebody to come up and uh catch them while they’re keeping their heads down from our covering fire. That was his job to keep them informed.
He didn’t do it. He put his head down as well. And I came up directly across from him, eyeball to eyeball, and he was just as shocked as could be. I leveled off at him and the thing that re remembers I can never forget was he smiled and as he smiled I shot him. Now the other thing I want to keep the record straight here so to speak.
Uh this group had been come to Arnum. They had come in they had been in Normandy. This comes out in the history of theyhad been in Normandy, been shot up, come back off the line, received replacements just like we had after Normandy and now we’re coming back on the line for the first time.
So they had come up through Germany. They stopped at Arnum uh for two three days to rest up before being committed to the island to wipe us out. And so uh during that time there’s a couple SS a small unit of SS come up into Arnum as well. So that these troops were actually 369th Volk grenaders, but they did have blended in with them some SS, but so they weren’t all SS, but the SS were blended in there obviously to help keep the 369th boys on the ball because they were hardnosed.
They were hard-nosed soldiers and that uh but that should be that should be understood that they weren’t all SS. Some interesting things to note from the clip you just watched. Winter said that the young German lookout was much closer to him in real life. According to Winters, the German soldier was directly across the narrow dirt road only about two steps away.
It’s unclear why Band of Brothers changed this and instead placed the soldier about 25 ft away in the field. When Winters notices him, the soldier is ducking down, as are the mass of German soldiers about 15 to 20 yards away to Winter’s right. This is because they were still attempting to avoid the base of machine gun fire that was laid down by Lieutenant Ree and his men when the charge began.
The machine gun fire was laid down between each column as the men rush toward the road leading up to the dyke. The series omits the cover fire altogether, and as a result, it seems a little odd that the young German sentry is on his knees when Winters encounters him. But in real life, he was taking cover from the machine gunfire, as were the rest of the German soldiers off to Winter’s right.
It’s worth pointing out that there was more to the encounter with the young German soldier than Dick Winters mentions in the clip or that’s shown in Band of Brothers. In his memoir, Dick Winters said that when he jumped up onto the roadway and saw the young German sentry right in front of him, he immediately retreated back to his side of the road.
“I pulled the pin of a hand grenade and tossed it over,” wrote Winters. At the same time, the German sentry lobbed a potato masher back at me. Winter said that as soon as he threw his grenade, he realized he had goofed. I had kept a band of tape around the handle of my grenades to avoid an accident in case the pin was pulled accidentally.
Fortunately, the enemy’s grenade also failed to explode. I immediately jumped back up on top of the road. The sentry was still hunched down, covering his head with his arms, waiting for my grenade to explode. He was only 3 or 4 yards away. After all these years, I can still see him smiling at me as I stood on top of the dyke.
It wasn’t necessary to take an aimed shot. I simply shot from the hip. That shot startled the entire company, and they started to rise and turn toward me and mass. After killing the sentry, I simply pivoted to my right and kept firing right into the solid mass of troops. Winters went through two clips before dropping back to his side of the road for cover.
He inserted a third clip and began popping up, taking a shot or two and then popping back down. Gradually, the remainder of Winter’s platoon arrived and joined in the fight as the Germans tried to flee toward the river with some firing back as they ran. Their aim was thrown off due to the fact that they were bumping into one another.
Like in the series, they discovered that it was actually two companies of German soldiers totaling around 300 men. They had been outmatched by Winter’s group of about 35 men. Though Winters described them in his book in various interviews as being two companies of SS soldiers, he explained in the clip that he wanted to set the record straight and clarify that they were not all SS troops, but rather there was a unit of SS troops mixed in.
While the young German sentry Winter shot is identified as being an SS troop in the series, it is unclear whether that was the case in real life. Though the series doesn’t show Winters and the German soldier lobbing grenades at each other, including Winters making the mistake of leaving a piece of tape over the handle of his grenade.
There is a subtle nod to this omission in Band of Brothers. After the battle is over and Lewis Nixon approaches Winters, who is sitting by himself, Winters is holding a grenade and can be seen unwrapping and playing with the piece of tape that he used to hold down the handle in case the pin was accidentally pulled.
Of that day, Winter spoke highly of Easy Company’s actions, citing the crossroads battle as being the highlight of all of Easy Company’s engagements. However, he never took pleasure in taking the life of an enemy soldier. Captain Nixon and I estimated the enemy casualties as 50 killed, 11 captured, and countless wounded. I guess I had contributed myshare, said Winters.
But killing never made me happy. Satisfied, yes, because I knew I had done my job, but never happy. During the war, Dick Winters killed at least seven men, including the young German soldier in Holland. In Band of Brothers, it begins to take its toll on Winters, who is haunted by flashbacks of the young German soldier he shot.
In real life, the effects of killing enemy soldiers and seeing his friends killed and maimed had a profound impact on Winters, as it did most soldiers. The sensitive boy who had entered basic training, returned home from the war, and embittered man, determined to divorce himself from his past. As he tried to readjust to civilian life after the war, Winter’s father encouraged him to accept an invitation from a family friend to go on a deer hunting trip in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania.
Winters accepted the offer, but was miserable for the entire week. While he had hoped the hunting trip would be fun, it became especially difficult when he was confronted with several white-tailed deer in the woods. Winters recalled the moment in Larry Alexander’s biography of him titled Biggest Brother.
I waited and suddenly about four deer came bounding down the mountainside and stopped barely 20 ft from me, recalled Winters. But I couldn’t shoot. I couldn’t even think about lifting that rifle. I was done. I did not want any more killing. In interviews conducted more than 50 years later, Dick Winter said that he never forgot the face of that young German soldier whose life he ended on that dyke in Holland.
The soldier’s smile had become etched into his memory. He never knew why the young man had smiled at him. Was he happy Winter’s grenade didn’t go off? Was he smiling as if he just lost the game and was acknowledging Winters had won? Was he smiling because Winters was hesitating to pull the trigger and he thought Winters might not fire? Or was he smiling because he knew the American soldier in front of him would quickly realize that he was significantly outnumbered? Like Winters will never know the answer.
Though it might seem hard to believe, especially with what still lied ahead for Easy Company, including Baston, the crossroads battle marked the last time that Dick Winters fired his weapon in combat. Several days later, on October 9th, Colonel Sank made Winters the executive officer of Second Battalion. If you want to learn more about Dick Winters and the men of Easy Company, check out the videos linked on the screen.
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