82 years ago today, Dick Winters led Easy Company in the fight he later called the highlight of the whole war. Not D-Day. “The Island.” 🇺🇸 The Island was the long strip of Dutch polder north of Nijmegen, between the Waal & the Lower Rhine. After Uden, the 101st was sent there to hold the ground Market Garden had not quite taken. Easy Company went in with 5 officers & 130 enlisted. Winters put 2nd & 3rd Platoons on the line & kept 1st in reserve. The first 2 days were quiet. Then, around 0400 on October 5th, the enemy hit in strength, machine guns & mortars, striking 3rd Battalion & killing the battalion commander, Major Horton. A patrol under Sgt. Art Youman had already run into a large body of Germans at a crossroads about 3/4 of a mile east of Easy’s command post. Winters wrote that one look at those men was enough. They had been in combat. They had faced death in the night. There was no question about it. He took a patrol forward himself. Closing on the crossroads, he heard voices, then saw 7 enemy soldiers silhouetted on the dike by a machine gun. He crawled to the drainage ditch at the bottom of the dike until he was about twenty-five yards behind them. With the night sky running out, he halted the patrol about 40 yards from the gun & had Sgt. William Dukeman & Cpl. Pat Christenson set up their machine gun. Fire broke both ways. Dukeman was killed by mortar fire. Dukeman was a Toccoa man, Winters wrote, a man they all respected, beloved by everyone in the company. What followed was what Winters thought was better soldiering than Brecourt Manor on D-Day. A base of fire from the machine guns. Then the run across open ground at two companies of SS, a force he put at nearly 300 men. Attack, marksmanship, then a withdrawal by the book: leapfrogging back to the dike, always laying fire. As the last groups came over, the Germans dropped a heavy concentration of mortar & artillery right on that crossroads. He had already decided it was better to call it a day & live to fight tomorrow. From the 55 men in the attack, Easy took 22 casualties. Nixon & Winters estimated the enemy at 50 killed, 11 captured, & countless wounded. The Germans had the numbers, about 10 to 1, & the observation for their guns. Easy had the shooting. Winters later called it his apogee as company commander. Brecourt had mattered more to the landing at Utah Beach. This one, he said, showed every man, in every phase of infantry tactics: patrol, defense, attack under a base of fire, withdrawal, & above all marksmanship with rifles, machine guns, & mortars. No senior officer was there to see it. On October 16 he recommended 1st Platoon, & the 1st section of the light machine-gun platoon, for a citation. Colonel Sink’s order praised their “daring & aggressive spirit & sound tactical ability.” Winters’s line was simpler. “God, I was proud of these men.” October 5th was his last combat action as commander of Easy Company, & the last day he fired his weapon in the war. On October 9th, Colonel Sink moved him to 2nd Battalion as executive officer. “I guess I had contributed my share, but killing never made me happy. Satisfied, yes, because I knew I had done my job; but never happy.”