April atmore magazine

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“It wasn't bad, besides the fact that I was scared,” he
said. “It is not natural for someone to jump out of a
perfectly good airplane into space.”
Dewitt said the men of Easy Company had a slew of
good officers. The notably most hated officer of Easy
was Captain Herbert Sobel, the training officer, a colorful
character with questionable training tactics.
“I actually liked Sobel,” Dewitt said. “He did what he had
to do to get us prepared and while not understanding it
at the time of training, we were grateful later when we
entered the combat zone.”
Dewitt also expressed his love for the rest of the
officers of the company such as Dick Winters, who went
on to become the famed company commander of Easy
Company.
The small pup the men had come to love unfortunately
had to be left behind in the care of Red Cross nurses
when the men were to be shipped to England in support
of an upcoming invasion.
“I hated to leave him behind,” Dewitt said. “He was a
pretty little dog.”
From Benning, Dewitt and the rest of Easy went to
Fort Bragg, N.C., where they made a few more training
jumps. After a brief stint at Fort Bragg, Dewitt loaded a
train and made his way to New York where the men
loaded onboard a boat bound for England.
While in England, the men of Easy trained for the
upcoming D-Day invasion. Dewitt said maneuvers for
combat training were performed day and night. After a
long wait, the men of Easy Company jumped into
France in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944.
“We jumped at two in the morning,” Dewitt said. “You
could see tracers and bullets all around. When a lot of
the boys landed, they were either shot before they hit
the ground or had their throats cut by the Germans as
they struggled to get out of their parachutes.”
As the men of Easy landed in France, combat started
immediately. To make matters worse, all the men missed
their intended drop zones and were scattered all over.
Dewitt landed in the top of a tree under enemy fire from
two separate machine gun positions.
“The tree that I had landed in had huge leaves,” Dewitt
said. “As the bullets cut through the leaves, it sounded
like twice the number of bullets that it actually was.”
The thought crossed his mind to take out the machine
gun positions, but he was afraid that if he fired, his
position would be noticed and he would be killed so he
waited. To make matters worse, Dewitt was held in the
tree by a huge dog.
“After a while a lady come out from a house and got
the dog,” Dewitt said. “I would give anything to meet her
and thank her. I was just plain scared. I was scared of
the dog and scared of getting killed. I was just scared.”
Dewitt was armed with a .30 caliber machine gun and
had to cut the machine gun off himself, along with a
musette bag of ammo. The machine gun that had fired
on his position had silenced and he then proceeded to
cut himself from the tree. Dewitt rolled down the limbs
of the tree, unhurt, and his combat experience in France
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