Of the thirty days Dick Winters spent in the Bastogne area during World War II, he would always say the same thing: “It was by far the worst. It was brutal. ” Ask almost any other Band of Brothers veteran who was there, and nearly all of them would answer without hesitation that Bastogne was their worst experience of the war. For many of those men, what they lived through in the frozen woods and fields around that Belgian crossroads town during the Battle of the Bulge would follow them home and haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Before they were rushed into that hell, Easy Company and the rest of the 101st Airborne had been resting and recovering at Camp Mourmelon in France, fresh from the fighting in Holland during Operation Market Garden. They expected a quiet Christmas to close out 1944. There was even a morale-boosting football game planned for Christmas Day between the Screaming Eagles team and the Sky Train team, dubbed the Champagne Bowl, that the men were looking forward to. That game never took place.

On December 16, 1944, the Germans launched a massive offensive through the densely forested Ardennes region, and Easy Company and the rest of the 101st were rushed west to defend the vital crossroads town of Bastogne, Belgium. “Little did we realize that we were heading straight into the biggest, bloodiest battle in the history of the US Army,” Dick Winters later wrote in his memoir. It would become known as the Battle of the Bulge, and it would be the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front. The men arrived ill-equipped.

They lacked proper winter clothing, and they were short on weapons, ammunition, and other supplies. To say it was cold in the Bastogne area is an enormous understatement. The Ardennes was experiencing the coldest winter in thirty years. Temperatures plummeted to as low as minus ten to minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit at night, and wind chills in exposed positions pushed effective temperatures down to minus twenty to minus forty.

Daytime highs were often only in the teens or single digits. “You can’t describe it,” Winters recalled. The cold killed and maimed on its own: roughly twenty percent of all American casualties during the Battle of the Bulge, over fifteen thousand men, were due to cold-weather injuries like trench foot, frostbite, pneumonia, and hypothermia. Band of Brothers devotes two episodes to Easy Company’s experiences in the Bulge during December 1944 and January 1945.

In the second, titled “The Breaking Point,” the men endure not only the intense cold but also barrages of intense German shelling. Those artillery barrages claimed the right legs of both Joe Toye and Bill Garnier, and a week later, the lives of Skip Muck and Alex Penkala. “It is difficult to describe the effects of an artillery bombardment to someone who has not experienced combat,” Winters noted in his memoir. “If you live through it, you will never forget it, nor will you ever be the same.

Artillery doesn’t only kill, it maims and tears the body apart sending limbs in every direction. ”

While the jarring effects of witnessing this firsthand breaks Buck Compton in the series and leaves others, including Don Malarkey, deeply affected, Band of Brothers ends before showing how such experiences affected the men after they returned home, including long after World War II was over. “I am not sure anyone who lived through Bastogne doesn’t carry the scars of that ferocious campaign,” Winters wrote. For many of the men, including Dick Winters, places like Bastogne would never truly leave them, and they would continue to face ongoing emotional and psychological battles in the decades that followed.

This is the true cost of war that is not talked about enough. In an interview conducted by Pennsylvania State Representative John Payne in the early 2000s, Winters reflected on the true weight of Bastogne and the lifelong toll it took on him. When the conversation turned to the four campaigns he fought in, he was quick to single one out. “Not Bastogne.

There again, we’re under—when you mentioned four here, I consider that Bastogne. So this is the artillery we’re under at Bastogne. That was by far the worst I’ve ever received, for everybody. ”

He explained why.

Looking at a map he had just shared, he pointed out the German units that had them surrounded. “You’ll see a lot of artillery. ” During the German demand for surrender at Christmastime, the wording of that demand was essentially surrender or I’ll shell you off the earth. “He had the artillery he felt to do it,” Winters said.

“And there were times that we weren’t too sure he was right. ” When the Germans concentrated that artillery on their area, as they did on the Second Battalion on the 9th of January, it was brutal. Winters gestured to the Band of Brothers picture. “Speaks for itself.

Does a very good job. It does a very good job in having you share the feelings of that time. ”

Payne, himself a military man, picked up on something. “One was pretty sharp that I just thought you said very quickly without hesitation, 9th of January.

You remember that date like it was yesterday. No question. You had it right there that fast. ” He also noticed the military habit in the way Winters phrased it.

“Most civilians would say January the 9th, but if we’ve been in the military, it’s the 9th of January. ”

Winters answered directly. “Look, you live this every day. You live this every day.

You have recall. And you don’t live the whole thing every day, but there are segments that will pop up every day. ” Then, he added, the reason Payne almost didn’t notice: “And then you tell them the day and course you’re keeping it to yourself. You’re not going around talking about it.

”

Payne thanked him for talking about it, then asked the question so many veterans are asked: What was the transition like? How difficult was it to go from combat conditions and readjust back into civilian life? Winters looked him straight in the eye. “Do you think this guy you’re looking at today has adjusted, to this day?

” It was a slow process, he explained, and as he had shared earlier, he relived the war with flashbacks. “So, this is part of the adjustment you’re still making today. ”

Many of the other Band of Brothers veterans shared similar sentiments. After Don Malarkey returned to college at the University of Oregon, his grades began to slip.

“I couldn’t concentrate like before the war,” he said in his memoir. Like Winters, flashbacks would instantly take him back to places like Bastogne. He would thrash in his sleep from nightmares and wake up drenched in sweat. “I still shiver because of the Battle of the Bulge,” he noted decades later.

“One more day there and I honestly think I would have gotten hypothermia. ” Throughout his book, Malarkey describes Bastogne as a wave that is constantly building over his shoulder and closing in. “Like a lot of other guys in Easy Company, I tried to drink away the memories,” he said. “There wasn’t a glass of scotch I brought to my lips that I wasn’t back in Bastogne, where we were surrounded for eight straight days, every time.

”

If there’s anything that Band of Brothers fails to capture, it’s that these are just two of more than 500,000 American soldiers who participated in the Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle ever fought by the American Army to this day. There were more than 75,000 American casualties, including approximately 19,000 soldiers killed and more than 23,000 taken prisoner. Each soldier who survived is a man who had to carry the weight of what he experienced with him for the rest of his life. These men became the country’s mailmen, construction workers, teachers, factory workers, electricians, and bus drivers.

In other words, people routinely encountered them without ever knowing the battles they continued to fight and the price they never stopped paying to have secured freedom.