Winters was very popular with the men of Easy. Sobel was very unpopular. Sobel was trying to make himself look better, by making Winters look worse.
For example, the spaghetti incident (which is seen in the miniseries, but explained better in the various books): Winters had mess duty, Sobel told him to have spaghetti served as a special lunch since they wouldn’t be running Currahee that day; Winters has spaghetti served, Sobel announces a sudden run up Currahee. Everybody vomits their special lunch all over themselves.
And then Winters looks like a chump when someone asks “who the hell thought serving spaghetti in mess was a good idea before a run up Currahee?”
Sobel was playing the same game with changing the timing of the inspection on Winters – Winters was censoring the mail (as ordered), before the inspection Sobel ordered. Sobel slyly switches the inspection time, and oops Winters doesn’t learn about it in time. So now he gets to issue a ‘punishment’ that will make Winters look bad. Because, again, no one else will know the details – they’ll only hear the summary (that makes Winters look bad).
So when Winters calls Sobel’s bluff, suddenly there’s the threat that other officers will learn what an ass Sobel is being. Of course the court martial would have found Winters in derelection – but in the course of that finding, Sobel’s shennanigans would have been exposed.
Add to that, the embarrasement of having one of your officers actually request a court martial instead of accepting your punishment, and Sobel was frantic to get Winters to just play along. Bad call, though.
Thank you very much. That was excellent info and it went a long way to explaining a whole lot of the background for me.
It feels very satisfying for me to hear a confirmation of just how much smarter Winters was over Sobel.
Rarely have I felt so much respect and admiration for any character as I have for Lt/Captn/Major Winters. (Ack! He’s not just a character. He’s actually a real person and a character).
I have, on occasion, met some older gentleman (either walking to work or riding the bus or subway) and asked them about their war time experiences. On a few (very few) occasions, I have been in a position to help one or two of them out in a minor way (like maybe giving them a few dollars or some bus tickets). Or at the very least, I have thanked them for their efforts during the war. They don’t usually react very much to that, but I doubt they hear that very often and I think they deserve to hear it a whole lot. I have found that some of them seemed to enjoy the opportunity to have someone who wanted to listen to them. I will never forget one of these gentlemen who had experienced being a prisoner of the Germans as well as taking some of them prisoner. He told me the German women were the very worst. He told me that he ran into more than one who would make a point of shooting Allied prisioners in the knee so they could never fight again. I certainly believed him. It was chilling. But, it’s strange that I’ve never met many older gentleman who appeared to have been shot in the knee.