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The night of April 12, Leach set out at the head of a four-man patrol from the S-2 section at regimental HQ. But he made one fatal mistake: he failed to tell anyone he was going. Easy Company men on outpost duty heard the splashing of the boat the patrol was using as it crossed the river. As far as they were concerned, unless they had been told of an American patrol at such and such a time, any boat in the river contained enemy troops. They opened up on it; quickly the machine-guns joined in. The fire ripped the boat apart and hit all the men in it, including Leach. Ignoring the pitiful cries of the wounded, drowning in the river, the machine-gunners kept firing bursts at them until their bodies drifted away. They were recovered some days later downstream. In the judgment of the company, Leach and four men had "perished in a most unnecessary, inexcusable fashion because he had made an obvious and unpardonable mistake."
That day the company got the news that President Roosevelt had died. Winters wrote in his day book, "Sgt. Malley [of F Company]鈥攇ood news鈥攎ade 1st Sgt. Bad news鈥擯res. Roosevelt died."
"I had come to take Roosevelt for granted," Webster wrote his parents, "like spring and Easter lilies, and now that he is gone, I feel a little lost."
Eisenhower ordered all unit commanders to hold a short memorial service for Roosevelt on Sunday, April 14. Easy Company did it by platoons. Lieutenant Foley, who "never was much enamored with Roosevelt," gathered his platoon. He had a St. Joseph missal in his musette bag - in it he found a prayer. He read it out to the men, and later claimed to be "the only man who ever buried Franklin D. as a Catholic."
Overall, Easy's time on the Rhine, guarding the Ruhr pocket, was boring. "Time hung so heavily," a disgusted Webster wrote, "that we began to have daily rifle inspections. Otherwise, we did nothing but stand guard on the crossroads at night and listen to a short current events lecture by Lieutenant Foley during the day." With their high energy level and the low demands on them, the men turned to sports. They found some rackets and balls and played tennis on a backyard court, or softball in a nearby field. Webster was no athlete, but he had a high level of curiosity. One day he realized "the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition," when he and Pvt. John Janovek scaled a 250-foot-high factory smokestack. When they got to the top, they had a magnificent view across the river. To Webster, "the Ruhr seemed absolutely lifeless," even though "everywhere we looked there were factories, foundries, steel mills, sugar plants, and sheet-metal works. It looked like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis decentralized."
On April 18, all German resistance in the Ruhr pocket came to an end. More than 325,000 German soldiers surrendered.
Easy was put to guarding a Displaced Persons' camp at Dormagen. There were Poles, Czechs, Belgians, Dutch, French, Russians, and others from different parts of Nazi-occupied Europe in the camp, tens of thousands. They lived in a common barracks, segregated by sex, crowded, all but starving in many cases, representing all ranges of age. Once liberated, their impulse was to catch up on their rest and their fun, so sadly lacking for the past few years. Webster reported that they "were contentedly doing nothing. They had worked hard under the Germans, and eaten little. Now they would rest."