Compiled by company historian Jake Powers and providing an outstanding insight into Easy Company, its training and campaigns, the majority of the photographs, maps and artifacts in this limited edition come from the private collection of Major Richard D Winters, one of the most celebrated figures of World War II. These include a set of photographs Winters acquired from regimental photographer Al Krochka, in return for a German Luger pistol, at the end of the war.
Above: Major Winters' personal photographs with handwritten notes.
Other photographs were taken by Easy Company soldiers: Amos 'Buck' Taylor used colour Kodachrome film during training at Toccoa and Camp Mackall; Forrest Guth carried Rod Strohl's folding camera into combat on D-Day using a specially sewn-on pocket on his jump suit; Robert 'Burr' Smith captured Easy Company in training using an Eastman Retina 35mm; and Herb Suerth left the line during the Battle of the Bulge to capture his comrades with a 1939 Falcon.
Above: (left) Robert 'Burr' Smith pictured in a 'nut-cracker' - a regulation parachute harness hung from a hoop suspended in the air and (right) climbing the 40ft-high rope training structure at Toccoa.
Fort Benning - Parachute Training
Norm Neitzke: 'We had a 45ft tower that you'd jump off and then come down on a line, ending up in a pile on the ground. This was not too much of a problem, but after that you ended up with the 250ft tower, and those things are scary.'
Roy Gates: 'You gotta jump and they don't have time for people who hesitate.'
England - the passage to the European theatre
On March 23rd 1944, 1,000 paratroopers of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 506th made a rehearsal drop from the skies above England's south-west. The drop was carried out in perfect formation in front of Churchill and Eisenhower. What would follow were weeks of manoeuvres, both on the ground and in the air, perfecting formations and timing.
Above: Winston Churchill and the Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower inspect immaculate and eager airborne troops in England.
Normandy - June 5th 1944, D-Day
Bill Guarnere: 'D-Day was just one big mess, which was normal to us - we just acted instinctively. Before the jump we had Normandy all laid out on a sand trap. We were under the assumption that the hedgerows were only three or four feet high and we could just jump and run over them. But when we got to Normandy it wasn't like that - they were about 10 or 20ft high - tanks couldn't even get through them. That's what made the fighting very bad - we weren't prepared for that kind of fighting. Even so, our training took over when we went into combat. You would do things you never thought you would do.'
Holland - Operation Market Garden
Rod Bain: 'As we were moving in the direction of Arnhem, part of the company stopped in a little town called Veghel, and part of it went ahead in a truck. Somehow the Germans came in behind the trucks and cut the rest of the company off. I was stuck with very few men and two or three officers. The Germans were so close they could have knocked us out in an instant, but they seemed to concentrate on the rest of the company who were stuck south in Veghel - who got a real walloping. But somehow they dug in and withstood it.'
Germany - At the beginning of April 1945 Easy Company were deployed to the Ruhr pocket, facing Sturzelberg, on the west bank of the Rhine. In a war that was transparently drawing to a close, Easy Company became increasingly wary of taking risks, especially those men that had survived against all odds in Bastogne.
Jack Foley: 'My greatest impression of Germany was in Cologne and the residents who were outside working. Where buildings had been destroyed, there were people out on the road picking up the bricks and cobblestones. Everybody was in the midst of repairing; men, women, children - they were recovering.'
Berchtesgaden
Clancy Lyall: 'We had the task of taking the last combat command of the second world war - Berchtesgaden, Zell am See and Kaprun. This was supposedly where all the German generals and SS troopers were still hiding out, and we were the best trained to find the SS troopers in the hills around Berchtesgaden.'
Above: '2nd Battalion Headquarters at Berchtesgaden. Lewis Nixon and Winters are pictured sitting next to each other in the middle. Harry Welsh is furthest to the right.'
THE PHOTOGRAPHY - Easy Company
