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Sgt. Earl Hale was one of the first into Rachamps. He and Liebgott ducked into a barn, where they surprised and made prisoner six SS officers. Hale lined them up nose to nose and told them that if he and Liebgott got killed they were going to take the Germans with them. Hale covered them with his tommy-gun to make the point.
A shell exploded outside. Hale was standing by the door. He got hit by a piece of shrapnel and went down. An SS officer pulled his knife from his boot and slashed Hale's throat. He failed to cut an artery or sever the windpipe, but did cut the esophagus. Blood gushed out. Liebgott shot the officer who did the cutting, then the others. Medic Roe got sulfa powder on Hale's wound. A jeep evacuated him to Luxembourg, where an amazed doctor patched him up, leaving a crooked esophagus. Because of Hale's condition, the doctor gave him a medical order stating that he did not have to wear a necktie. (Later, Hale was stopped by an irate General Patton who chewed him out for not wearing his necktie. Hale triumphantly produced his slip of paper, leaving Patton for once speechless.)
The easy victory at Rachamps showed how completely the 101st Airborne had won its head-to-head battles with a dozen crack German armored and infantry divisions. The Americans had gone through a much more miserable month than the Germans, who had an open and bountiful supply line. For the 101st, surrounded, there were no supplies in the first week and insufficient supplies thereafter. Those were the weeks that tried the souls of men who were inadequately fed, clothed, and armed. This was war at its harshest, horrible to experience. The 101st, hungry, cold, under-armed, fought the finest units Nazi Germany could produce at this stage of the war. Those Wehrmacht and SS troops were well fed, warm, and fully armed, and they heavily outnumbered the 101st.
It was a test of arms, will, and national systems, matching the best the Nazis had against the best the Americans had, with all the advantages on the German side. The 101st not only endured, it prevailed. It is an epic tale as much for what it revealed as what happened: The defeat of the Germans in their biggest offensive in the West in World War II, and the turning of that defeat into a major opportunity "to kill Germans west of the Rhine," as Eisenhower put it, was a superb feat of arms. The Americans established a moral superiority over the Germans. It was based not on equipment or quantity of arms, but on teamwork, coordination, leadership, and mutual trust in a line that ran straight from Ike's HQ right on down to E Company. The Germans had little in the way of such qualities. The moral superiority was based on better training methods, better selection methods for command positions, ultimately on a more open army reflecting a more open society. Democracy proved better able to produce young men who could be made into superb soldiers than Nazi Germany.
What veterans of far-flung campaigns these German soldiers were was revealed in a little incident in Rachamps. Sergeant Rader related it: "I almost killed a Kraut prisoner for laughing at me after I got to the town, only to have someone grab my M-l and shout, 'Sarge, he has no lips or eyelids!' He had lost them on the Russian front, frozen off."