The victors: Eisenhower and his boys: the men of World War II by Stephen E. Ambrose

Author:Stephen E. Ambrose
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: World history: Second World War
ISBN: 9780684856292
Publisher: New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, c1998.
Published: 2010-10-11T23:00:00+00:00

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

hedge and then shoot.” The Germans also pre-sited mortars and artillery on the single gaps that provided

the only entrances into the fields. Behind the hedgerows, they dug rifle pits and tunneled openings for

machinegun positions in each corner. Wray moved up sunken lanes, crossed an orchard, pushed his way

through hedgerows, crawled through a ditch. Along the way he noted concentrations of Germans in fields

and lanes. A man without his woodsman’s sense of direction would have gotten lost. He reached a point

near the N-13, the main highway coming into Ste.-Mère-Eglise from Cherbourg.

The N-13 was the axis of the German attacks. Wray, “moving like the deer stalker he was”

(Vandervoort’s words), got to a place where he could hear guttural voices on the other side of a

hedgerow. They sounded like officers talking about map coordinates. Wray rose up, burst through the

obstacle, swung his M-1 to a ready position, and barked in his strong command voice,”Hände hoch!” to

the eight German officers gathered around a radio.

Seven instinctively raised their hands. The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him

instantly between the eyes. Two Germans in a slit trench one hundred meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts

from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him. Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right

ear.

Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted

to run away. When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and

dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.

Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he

came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing. “Who’s got more

grenades?” he demanded. He wanted more grenades.

Then he started leading. He put a 60mm mortar crew on the German flank and directed fire into the

lanes and hedgerows most densely packed with the enemy. Next he sent D Company into an attack

down one of the lanes. The Germans broke and ran. By mid-morning Ste.-Mère-Eglise was secure, and

the potential for a German breakthrough to the beaches was much diminished. The next day

Vandervoort, Wray, and Sgt. John Rabig went to the spot to examine the German officers Wray had

shot. Unforgettably, their bodies were sprinkled with pink and white apple blossom petals from an

adjacent orchard. It turned out that they were the commanding officer and his staff of the 1st Battalion,

158th Grenadier Infantry Regiment. The maps showed that it was leading the way for the counterattack.

The German confusion and subsequent retreat were in part due to having been rendered leaderless by

Wray.

Vandervoort later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray’s jacket and the missing half-ear, he

had remarked, “They’ve been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they Waverly?”

With just a trace of a grin, Wray had replied, “Not as close as I’ve been getting to them, sir.”

At

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