The Night Sobel Cut the Fence: Dick Winters on the Captain Who Almost Killed Easy Company

It wasn’t a secret that Captain Herbert Sobel was a significant source of irritation for Dick Winters—to put it mildly.

As the first commander of the newly formed Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Sobel was rigid, demanding, and struggled to earn his men’s respect.

Dick Winters, on the other hand, was a natural leader, admired by the men.

Sobel’s incompetence in leading troops during field exercises—including his inability to read maps—became glaringly obvious.

By the time Easy Company reached England, the men feared Sobel would get them killed if he led them into combat.

One incident in particular stood out: the night Sobel ordered a barbed wire fence cut, infuriating local farmers whose cows escaped.

In a candid interview, Winters recalled the absurdity of the moment. “I want to talk about the time Sobel ordered the barbed wire fence cut, and the farmers got a little upset because their cows got out.

How much fun was that for you?” the interviewer asked.

Winters smiled. “Oh, it was, well, you’re smiling now, so it must have been good.” Indeed, it was very good—but the men didn’t realize the magnitude of the trouble Sobel was in because of the incident.

The battalion kept it quiet, but it was just another example of Sobel’s bungling.

For the men, it was funny.

But to the leadership, it was becoming clear that this man made mistake after mistake—not only in tactical situations but in map reading, as seen in the fence incident.

He could have gone over the fence.

He could have gone under it.

That would have been the end of it.

But no—he cut the fence.

The farmer was furious the next day and came to headquarters to report it. “He didn’t like it at all,” Winters recalled. “Just another example of Sobel’s lack of common sense.” Common sense—or the lack thereof—was a recurring theme.

The incident was interesting in the book, and Winters found it particularly telling.

The only difference Winters didn’t mention in the clip was that the field training that led to Sobel cutting the fence actually happened at night, not in broad daylight.

However, it made sense to change the timing to daytime in the series rather than trying to film the scene and make it work in the dark.

As in Band of Brothers, Sobel never discovered that George Luz, Easy Company’s radio man, was the one who impersonated Major Oliver Horton and tricked him into cutting the barbed wire fence.

As Winters pointed out, it was true that Sobel received a severe reprimand from Colonel Strayer after an angry farmer arrived at headquarters to complain about his cows.

Herbert Sobel’s jealousy of Dick Winters reached its peak in reality as in the series, when Sobel tried to court-martial Winters over a latrine inspection.

Sobel had deliberately changed the inspection time and failed to notify Winters successfully.

To resolve the matter, Colonel Strayer transferred Winters out of Easy Company and appointed him as the battalion mess officer—a job Winters often felt was given to those who couldn’t do anything else.

However, by that time, the non-commissioned officers feared Sobel would get them killed if he led them into battle, so they agreed to resign their ranks in protest, each writing a letter to Colonel Robert Sink explaining the situation.

As in the series, after reprimanding the NCOs for attempted mutiny, Colonel Sink decided to relieve Captain Herbert Sobel of command of Easy Company and reassign him to run a new parachute training school in Chilton Foliat, Wiltshire, England.

Sobel was replaced by First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, who took command of Easy Company.

Although Sobel carried a deep grudge until his death over losing command of Easy Company, this transfer certainly saved his life; Meehan’s C-47 plane was shot down during the D-Day operations, killing him and everyone on board.

Dick Winters never met Herbert Sobel again except once during the war.

Their brief real-life encounter occurred when the 101st was stationed in Mourmelon-le-Grand, France, from February 25 to April 2, 1945.

It happened shortly after Winters was promoted to Major.

A fictionalized version of this moment is depicted in Band of Brothers in the scene “We salute the rank, not the man,” which inaccurately shows the meeting in Austria right after V-E Day.

I discuss the accuracy of that scene in detail in a separate video, the link to which I’ll put at the end.

According to Major Dick Winters, Captain Herbert Sobel was determined that Easy Company would be first and best in everything it did.

He expected Easy Company to lead the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in every measurable category, and he intended for Easy Company to be thoroughly prepared when it entered combat.

Despite Sobel’s inability to lead men in the field, many veterans of Band of Brothers later acknowledged that his strict training was the reason they survived the war.

What the veterans rarely mentioned in the same breath, however, was the human cost of that preparation.

Sobel’s obsession with being first in everything translated into brutal forced marches, endless inspections, and a culture of fear that left men exhausted and resentful.

He wanted Easy Company to be the best, and in some ways, he got exactly that—but he never understood that respect could not be ordered like a uniform.

Winters, for his part, never gloated publicly about Sobel’s failings.

When interviewers pressed him, he would allow himself a small smile, a measured pause, and then a dry observation that landed harder than any insult. “The man had no common sense,” he repeated, as if that single phrase explained everything.

Yet there was a strange symmetry to their fates.

Sobel, removed from command and humiliated before the men he had tried so hard to mold, was sent to Chilton Foliat to train other paratroopers—a posting that kept him far from the killing fields of Normandy.

Meehan, the polished replacement everyone assumed would lead Easy to glory, boarded a C-47 in the pre-dawn darkness of June 6, 1944, and never came back.

The men who had once schemed to escape Sobel’s leadership found themselves quietly acknowledging the bitter irony.

His incompetence in the field had preserved him; his replacement’s competence had doomed him.

War, Winters later reflected, rarely distributed its justice in any way that made sense.

Their final meeting in Mourmelon-le-Grand was brief and awkward.

Winters, now a Major, spotted Sobel across a courtyard and braced himself.

There was no grand confrontation, no dramatic reckoning—just two men whose paths had diverged, exchanging a few stilted words about the weather and the state of the war.

Sobel’s jaw was tight, his pride still raw, and Winters sensed that the old resentment had not faded in the slightest.

According to Winters, Sobel could not bring himself to acknowledge the younger man’s promotion with any warmth.

The conversation ended quickly, and they never spoke again.

It was a small moment, easily overlooked, but it stayed with Winters—a reminder that some men carry their defeats long after the war has moved on.

What Sobel never knew, and what Winters never told him, was how often Easy Company’s veterans would later credit their survival to those miserable marches and inspections.

The man they had despised had, in his own flawed way, given them something invaluable.

It was a truth too complicated for a courtyard reunion—and perhaps too complicated for Sobel himself to ever have accepted.

There was another dimension to Sobel that the men rarely discussed openly: his desperate need to be liked, buried beneath layers of petty tyranny.

He wanted Easy Company to love him the way they loved Winters, and that hunger made him brittle.

Every joke at his expense cut deeper than anyone realized. “He was a strange man,” one veteran later admitted. “He wanted so badly to be one of us, but he never figured out how.”

Winters understood this, which is perhaps why he never joined in the mockery with the same relish as the enlisted men.

He saw Sobel as a cautionary tale—a man whose ambition outstripped his instincts.

In a war that demanded both, that gap was fatal in every sense but the literal one.

The training at Chilton Foliat, meanwhile, became a strange kind of redemption for Sobel.

Far from the men who had rejected him, he drilled new recruits with the same relentless discipline that had once made Easy Company miserable.

And those recruits, like Easy before them, would later credit that discipline with keeping them alive.

The irony was almost cruel: Sobel was a better trainer than he ever was a commander.

But history has a way of flattening men into caricatures, and Sobel became the villain of Easy Company’s story long before the war ended.

The series cemented that image—the incompetent captain, the butt of every joke, the man who cut a farmer’s fence because he couldn’t read a map.

What the caricature missed was the tragedy underneath: a man who gave everything he had to a job he was never suited for, and who lost the only thing he truly wanted—the respect of his men.

Winters, for his part, resisted that flattening.

In later years, when interviewers expected him to skewer Sobel, he offered something more measured. “He contributed to our success,” Winters said quietly. “Whether he meant to or not.” It was as close to an absolution as Sobel would ever receive from the man he had once tried to court-martial.

The veterans of Easy Company carried their memories of Sobel into old age, and the passage of time softened some of the edges.

Men who had once schemed to escape his leadership found themselves, decades later, acknowledging a grudging debt. “I hated him then,” one of them confessed. “But I’d have died on that first day in Normandy without what he drilled into us.”

Still, the bitterness lingered in Sobel himself.

He never forgave the men who had resigned their ranks to force him out, never forgave Sink for the transfer, and never forgave Winters for being everything he was not.

When he died in 1987, he had spent more than four decades nursing a wound that no one else remembered.

Winters outlived him by more than two decades, and in that time he built a life far removed from the muddy fields of England and the killing grounds of Europe.

He became a successful businessman, a husband, a father.

But the men of Easy Company never entirely left him, and neither did the memory of the captain who had taught them—however clumsily—how to survive.

Still, the bitterness lingered in Sobel himself.

He never forgave the men who had resigned their ranks to force him out, never forgave Sink for the transfer, and never forgave Winters for being everything he was not.

When he died in 1987, he had spent more than four decades nursing a wound that no one else remembered.Winters outlived him by more than two decades, and in that time he built a life far removed from the muddy fields of England and the killing grounds of Europe.

He became a successful businessman, a husband, a father.

But the men of Easy Company never entirely left him, and neither did the memory of the captain who had taught them—however clumsily—how to survive.In the end, perhaps that was the truest verdict on Herbert Sobel: he was a man who broke his men before the enemy ever could, and in doing so, unknowingly forged them into something unbreakable.

Winters knew it.

The veterans knew it.

Only Sobel, in his stubborn pride, refused to see it.What do you think—was Sobel a tragic figure, or simply a man who never learned what leadership truly meant?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.