The young German soldier was kneeling directly across the narrow dirt road, no more than two steps away, when Dick Winters jumped up onto the dyke and found himself staring into the man’s face. The sentry had been ducking down, just like the rest of the Germans, trying to keep his head low against the machine-gun fire that had been laid down to cover the American charge. He looked up, and he was as shocked as could be. Winters leveled his rifle at him, and then the boy smiled.

As he smiled, Winters shot him. There was no other way to do it. That was the thought that stayed with Winters for the rest of his life, the justification he would offer again and again when asked about that morning in Holland. There had been no hedgerows like the ones in Normandy, no cover to work with, no way to approach the German position except head-on.

The ground where Easy Company had stopped was low-lying and vulnerable, and Winters knew it would not take the Germans long to realize they could outflank his men and cut them down. The only choice was to take the initiative, to charge across an open field and hit the enemy before the enemy hit them. The charge itself became the stuff of legend, though the real story was more complicated than the one told on screen. In Band of Brothers, a smoke grenade fails to go off, and Winters sprints ahead of his men because he is the only one moving.

In reality, the smoke signal went off exactly as intended. Winters simply outran everyone else. “I was running faster than I ever ran before in my life,” he recalled decades later. “I’ve never run that fast since.

” He could not understand why his men were moving so slowly. They seemed to be crawling. Some of them had tripped on strands of low-lying barbed wire hidden in the grass, tangling their feet and slowing the advance. Winters tripped once or twice himself, but he never stopped running.

He reached the road that led up to the dyke far ahead of the others, alone, with the entire German force on the other side. It was luck, pure luck, that he came up behind them. As he stood on the dyke and looked down, he saw the Germans below him, and he realized they were moving just as slowly as his own men. They had no idea he was there.

He was in a state of mind he had never experienced before and hoped he would never experience again. He was so pumped up, so focused, that the world around him seemed to be moving through molasses. His men were a hundred yards behind, and he was standing on the dyke alone, staring down at an enemy force that outnumbered his entire platoon many times over. The young soldier was the outpost, the lookout whose job it was to keep his head up and watch for exactly this kind of trick.

He was supposed to be the one who warned his comrades if the Americans tried to catch them with their heads down. He did not do his job. He put his head down like everyone else, and when Winters jumped up onto the road, he came up directly across from the sentry, eyeball to eyeball. The German was just as shocked as could be.

The series changed the details. In Band of Brothers, the sentry is kneeling about twenty-five feet away in the field, and Winters hesitates long enough for the young man to smile at him before he fires. But in real life, the boy was directly across that narrow dirt road, only about two steps away. And there was more to the encounter than either the series or Winters’ interviews let on.

In his memoir, Winters wrote that when he jumped onto the roadway and saw the sentry right in front of him, he immediately retreated back to his own side of the road. He pulled the pin of a hand grenade and tossed it over. At the same moment, the German sentry lobbed a potato masher back at him. As soon as the grenade left his hand, Winters realized he had goofed.

He had kept a band of tape around the handle of his grenades, a safety measure to prevent an accident in case the pin was pulled inadvertently. The tape was still on. The grenade he had thrown would not explode. Fortunately, the enemy’s grenade failed to explode as well.

Winters immediately jumped back up on top of the road. The sentry was still hunched down, covering his head with his arms, waiting for the grenade to go off. He was only three or four yards away. “After all these years, I can still see him smiling at me as I stood on top of the dyke,” Winters wrote.

He did not need to take an aimed shot. He simply shot from the hip. The shot startled the entire company. The Americans, who had been moving so slowly in Winters’ hyper-focused perception, began to rise and turn toward him, massing around the dyke.

After killing the sentry, Winters simply pivoted to his right and kept firing, straight into the solid mass of German troops clustered about fifteen to twenty yards away. They had been taking cover from the machine-gun fire laid down by Lieutenant Ree and his men, fire that had been placed between the columns as the Americans rushed across the field. The series omitted the covering fire altogether, which made it seem strange that the young sentry was on his knees when Winters encountered him. In reality, he was hiding from the bullets, and so were the rest of the Germans off to Winters’ right.

Winters went through two full clips before he dropped back to his side of the road for cover. He inserted a third clip and began popping up, taking a shot or two, then popping back down. Gradually, the rest of his platoon arrived and joined the fight. The Germans tried to flee toward the river, some of them firing back as they ran, but their aim was thrown off because they were bumping into one another.

What the Americans discovered, as they later counted the enemy, was that they had stumbled into two full companies of German soldiers, around three hundred men in total. Winters and his group numbered about thirty-five. After the battle, Winters stared down at the body of the young German soldier. Another member of Easy Company approached and inspected the dead man’s uniform, noticing a patch on his collar.

“Jesus, Captain, they’re SS,” the soldier told him. The identification stuck. In the series, the young sentry is shown as an SS trooper, and Winters himself, in his book and in various interviews, described the enemy as two companies of SS soldiers. But in the interview with Pennsylvania State Representative John Payne, conducted in the early 2000s, Winters wanted to set the record straight.

The troops he had fought that day were actually the 369th Volksgrenadiers, a unit that had been in Normandy, had been shot up, had come back off the line, and had received replacements just as Easy Company had after Normandy. They had come up through Germany and stopped at Arnum for two or three days to rest before being committed to the island to wipe out the Americans. While they were there, a small unit of SS had come up into Arnum as well, blending in with the Volksgrenadiers. So they were not all SS.

The SS were mixed in, Winters explained, obviously to keep the 369th boys on the ball, because they were hard-nosed soldiers. But it should be understood, he said, that they were not all SS. It was unclear whether the young sentry Winters shot was one of the SS. The series identified him that way, but Winters never confirmed it.

What he did confirm was the grenade exchange, the mistake with the tape, and the fact that the series had left it out. There was a subtle nod to the omission in Band of Brothers, a detail most viewers would never catch. After the battle, when Lewis Nixon approaches Winters, who is sitting alone, Winters is holding a grenade and can be seen unwrapping and playing with the piece of tape that he had used to hold down the handle in case the pin was accidentally pulled. Winters never took pleasure in what he did that day, even though he considered the crossroads battle the highlight of all of Easy Company’s engagements.

He spoke highly of his men’s actions, but the killing weighed on him. “Captain Nixon and I estimated the enemy casualties as fifty killed, eleven captured, and countless wounded,” he wrote. “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. ” During the war, Winters killed at least seven men, including the young German soldier in Holland. He would carry the memory of that boy’s smile for the rest of his life, and he would never know what it meant. Was the boy happy that Winters’ grenade had not gone off?

Was he smiling as if he had just lost a game and was acknowledging that Winters had won? Was he smiling because Winters was hesitating to pull the trigger, and the boy thought the American might not fire? Or was he smiling because he knew that the soldier in front of him would quickly realize he was significantly outnumbered? Winters never knew, and he never would.

The war took a profound toll on him, as it did on most soldiers. The sensitive boy who had entered basic training came home an embittered man, determined to divorce himself from his past. As he tried to readjust to civilian life, his father encouraged him to accept an invitation from a family friend to go on a deer hunting trip in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. Winters accepted, hoping it would be fun, but he was miserable for the entire week.

The trip became especially difficult when he was confronted with several white-tailed deer in the woods. He waited, and suddenly about four deer came bounding down the mountainside and stopped barely twenty feet from him. “But I couldn’t shoot,” he recalled in Larry Alexander’s biography Biggest Brother. “I couldn’t even think about lifting that rifle.

I was done. I did not want any more killing. ”

Though it might seem hard to believe, especially with what still lay ahead for Easy Company, including Bastogne, the crossroads battle marked the last time Dick Winters fired his weapon in combat. Several days later, on October 9, 1944, Colonel Sink made Winters the executive officer of Second Battalion.

He would never fire his rifle in battle again, but he would never forget the face of the young German soldier whose life he ended on that dyke in Holland. The smile had become etched into his memory, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.