"This guy reading an article here is saying that 'The Germans are BAD'" ~ Band of Brothers

I think we have all heard, in whatever way it has been worded, how one person has the chance to change history. I do not know if it is a well believed idea, and on the surface can it really be proven as fact? I am not one for graphs and such to prove a statistic, but I did want to give my overview on this as a historian. (Can I call myself a historian? I will let all of you decide the terms of whatever title I should fall under.)

This topic has been one I have been aware of for years, and the more I study history as a whole the more I see it. The way in which I study history is to delve into depth of eras and events, while keeping in mind the complete picture. This ensures I can see how one event, take the charge at Missionary Ridge in 1863, was impacted by events years before it, and impacted events many years after. Does this mean Arthur McArthur's reckless charge up the ridge played a role in turning the tide of WWII in the allies' favor? I suppose logically, no. After all, Douglas McArthur was not forced to follow in the footsteps of his great...however many greats...grandfather. He could have ditched military life all together. However, these connections are fascinating.

Let me get down to the matter at hand so that I can better explain these intertwining threads of history.

I am going to be using the landing at Normandy and D-Day as a baseline for this post. As a bit of background, D-Day was the day in which allied forces landed in Northeastern Europe in an effort to take back land lost to German forces during the early fighting of WWII. The most well known of the invasion was the landing at the beaches of Normandy, in which soldiers were dropped off after an over seas voyage. There are many famous pictures documenting this landing. The allies made a frontal charge into France and Germany, pushing back against the axis, in a determined effort to end the war which had been dragging on for years before America joined. (I mention this as I didn't know until I was older that WWII was being fought before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thanks school textbooks, for leaving out vital information.)

The D-Day invasion took place on June 6th 1944, and the charge into axis territory continued until the war ended in 1945. While yes, there was respite during this time, it wasn't as if the soldiers were on a constant march for a year, that time period can be considered a charge in a sense. The respite did not last long, and the fighting was intense.

Now, while Normandy remains as one of the most well known factors of the invasion, it couldn't have happened without several events which took place before and during the landing. I can't get into all of them in one post, but to sum up, there was the French resistance aiding in the invasion, spies gathering important information for the allies, and much more. There were also the paratroopers.

The paratroopers were a brand new branch for the Americans. Their training was to jump behind enemy lines, be dropped right into the thick of it all, and hit the ground fighting. They aided the Normandy invasion by weakening the enemy from the inside, and their jump had to time perfectly with the landing. If they jumped too soon, the troops from the landing wouldn't get to them in time to offer them aid - you need backup when your smack in the middle of the enemy. And they couldn't jump too late or they would fail to help those at the beach.

I know there is a thing, a genre of fiction, which changes events in history with what if. Examples being, what if Hitler had won the war? What I am presenting is not that. I am presenting known facts and pointing out what should be taken as guesses and thoughts. After all, even with a known fact, the outcome could have been different because once a person is in a situation you cannot know for certain what they will do. While we can gather ideas based on personality, we cannot say for certain it would have gone down as such.

Now, back to the paratroopers. These were split into different companies. I think Easy Company is the most well known of them all, probably because a lot of the men from there wrote books. Their books lead to Stephen Ambrose writing Band of Brothers which was later turned into a mini-series which Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg worked on.

Throughout its creation and during the war itself, Easy Company had different men who led it. Sobel was in charge when the company was in the states training and preparing for war. The survivors who wrote books or talked of their time in the company were united in their dislike of Sobel. (In fairness to Sobel himself, he was in charge of a bunch of young men who were heading into a deadly war and whom he knew many would be killed in fighting. In that situation, ranking officers are on the harsher side. One reason being, they want the men to be prepared in every way possible to fight so that they might live. You can't train soldiers for war by coddling them.)

Anyway, while the survivors would all say they disliked Sobel, after the fact they understood his methods. While they didn't agree with all his actions, they had to admit that it was his harshness - and even his unjust actions over certain situations - that helped in them forming such a close bond with each other.

For his faults, Sobel did know what he was doing when it came to training. He even joined the company in England in preparation to jump on D-Day. Unfortunately, while he was a force to be recked with in boot camp, the stress of combat was too much. During the training in England in which the company acted out mock battles with each other, it quickly became clear that Sobel could not remain calm, level headed, and functioning when it would come to fighting. (Unfortunately for him, the fact that the men more or less hated him helped with nothing. They did not want to help him figure out a way to deal with this, some going so far as to flat out refusing to follow him to war. Which, I mean, you really don't want to follow someone into battle who is going to crack, but them refusing was a risky move because if the general hadn't been so wise as to see what was going on, those that refused could have been set before the firing squad.)

Sobel was sent back to the states before the jump, to continue training new recruits, and Easy Company was put under the leadership of another man. Now, there was one man that the soldiers did admire in their company, a man who was quickly moving up through the ranks. However, by the time they jumped, he did not hold the rank needed to lead the company. This would come later.

This man was named Dick Winters. He was opposite of Sobel in many ways, which meant that at first the men didn't think he would be someone they could trust. (I guess, in their minds it was, don't trust the guy who could be a bit of a jerk but also don't trust the guy who was quiet and mellow. Gotta have a good middle ground I guess.)

Winters was from a Quaker family. In their books, the men would describe as more soft spoken; he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, and he didn't leave the base on pass days. Rather than head to town to hang out with girls and get drunk at bars, Winters would remain on base and do whatever it was he did. (I think the running assumption was that he would hide in his barracks and read his Bible but I don't think any of the company ever confirmed that as fact.)

The men of the company did have their doubts when they learned Winters was a Quaker. Quakers are known for being peaceful and you want the man in front of you to fight just as well as you are. After all, while you are guarding his back, you want to trust he is guarding your front. But, as I said earlier in the post, Winters was not the one in charge of Easy Company when they jumped on D-Day. But by that time he was a higher ranking officer.

The jump itself was worse than what any of the men had prepared themselves for, and they had been prepared for things to be horrible. They flew in at the dead of night, they could barely see anything, but they heard the anti-aircraft guns being fired off and planes around them being shot out of the sky. Then they had to jump into the blackness, land who knew where, and try to meet up with their company before they were killed. You can better understand the reason why some, on landing, ducked into ditches and didn't want to rush out onto the road and get right into the fighting with an enemy they could hardly see in the night.

Winters realized what was going on and acted in the way I feel only young men in a moment of reckless stupidity can. (I can claim that, because those who wrote or spoke about what happened next thought he'd lost his mind. And I believe, when he recounted it later in life, thought somewhat the same.) Leaving the safety of his ditch, Winters began to run up and down the road, yelling at the men to get out of their hiding places and fight.

(I don't know what this says about me, but anytime I hear of that event I see the slight humor in it. Just the fact that the quiet Quaker who they probably all believed didn't even know one foul word or had never kissed a girl, and so forth, was the one making a target of himself to the enemy while yelling at the others to join him. Please, someone insure me I am not alone in giggling a little at the image.)

Spurred on by Winters' reckless actions - Winters himself admitting later it wasn't the smartest thing he had ever done - the company joined him and began the attack. Now, this is where we circle back around to the point made at the beginning. Winters was one man. He did not win D-Day on his own by any means, but his actions did play a big role in how it all turned out. He ignited courage in the company. Can we say the whole battle would have gone different if Sobel had been there? Not by any means. Maybe put in that situation, Sobel would have risen to the occasion. On that same note, no one had any clue at the landing that Winters was going to sprint up and down the road and shout loud enough that if the enemy could have gotten a good aim on him they would have shot him. (To this day, I think this stands as one of those things were all logic says that Winters should have died that night but was kept alive by a force beyond our control.)

What is known is that Sobel's harshness united the company and Winters' crazy actions inspired them to follow him wherever he led once he was given command. With that in mind, I will say this. Don't undermine yourself. Also, look deeper into history. These connections are fascinating. And lastly, try not to be like me and giggle at inconvenient times, it leads to people questioning your sanity.