THE NEXT day Vandervoort, Wray, and Sergeant John Rabig went to examine the German officers Wray had shot. Unforgettably, their bodies were sprinkled with pink-and-white apple blossom petals from an adjacent orchard. It turned out that they were the commanding officer (CO) and his staff of the 1st Battalion, 158th Grenadier Infantry Regiment. The maps showed that it was leading the way for the counterattack. The German retreat was in part due to the regiment's having been rendered leaderless by Wray.

Vandervoort later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray's jacket and the missing half ear, he had remarked, "They've been getting kind of close to you, haven't they, Waverly?"

With just a trace of a grin Wray replied, "Not as close as I've been getting to them, Sir."

At the scene of the action Vandervoort noted that every one of the dead Germans, including the two grenadiers more than 100 metres away, had been killed with a single shot in the head. Wray insisted on burying the bodies. He said he had killed them, and they deserved a decent burial, and it was his responsibility.

Later that day Sergeant Rabig commented to Vandervoort, "Colonel, aren't you glad Waverly's on our side?"

BEFORE THE battle was joined, Hitler had been sure his young men would outfight the young Americans. He was certain that the spoiled sons of democracy couldn't stand up to the solid sons of dictatorship. If he had seen Lieutenant Wray in action in the early morning of D-Day plus one, he might have had some doubts.

The campaign in northwest Europe, 1944-45, was a tremendous struggle on a gigantic stage. It was a test of many things, such as how well the Wehrmacht had done in changing its tactics to defend the empire it had seized in blitzkrieg warfare, how well the assembly lines of the Allies and the Axis were doing in providing weapons, the skill of the generals, the proper employment of aeroplanes, and how well a relative handful of professional officers in the US Army in 1940 had done in creating an army of citizen soldiers from scratch.