MAJ (Ret) Dick Winters dies

[Dinny]

Please take a moment to pay your respect with a brief moment of silent gratitude.

Sometime after the end of European operations in World War II, Maj. Dick Winters witnessed a German general bidding his troops farewell, before the POWs were repatriated into the rubble that was once their homeland.

Coming from a former enemy, the words nevertheless struck Winters -- a paratrooper who had jumped into Normandy a year earlier -- as universal among soldiers:

"Men, it’s been a long war; it’s been a tough war. You’ve fought bravely, proudly for your country. You’re a special group. You’ve found in one another a bond that exists only in combat, among brothers. You’ve shared foxholes, held each other in dire moments. You’ve seen death and suffered together. I’m proud to have served with each and every one of you. You all deserve long and happy lives in peace."

This moment was captured poignantly in HBO’s award-winning 2001 miniseries, "Band of Brothers," based on historian Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 bestseller. The book and the miniseries were hailed by veterans as gritty, realistic and human accounts of the experiences of the 101st Airborne Division.

Yet this past week, when our news cycle was dominated by bloodshed of another kind in Arizona, the nation barely noticed the passing of one of its wartime heroes, Winters, at age 92.

Part of the vanishing breed of World War II veterans, Richard "Dick" Winters, a quiet
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Pennsylvania boy, enlisted in the Army in 1941 following his college graduation. He volunteered for a paratrooper slot in the 101st, where only one of five officer candidates made the cut.

During the jump into Normandy, Winters was thrust to the head of E Company, 506th Parachute Regiment, when his commander was killed. On the invasion’s first day, at Bretcourt Manor, he led an assault with 13 men against a major enemy battery defended by 50 Germans, an action for which he earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest combat award for valor.

Later that year, in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, he led 30 troops to secure a key crossroads against a force of 300 Germans. That December, in the Battle of the Bulge, he was among the surrounded Americans that held Bastogne for a week, stalling 15 Wehrmacht divisions until relieved by Patton’s Third Army.

Winters finished the war commanding his regiment’s 2nd Battalion, when it captured Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, in Berchtesgaden. In that operation, his unit also liberated Jewish concentration camps, a focal point that he once described as "why we fight."

Following the war, excluding a brief Army training stint during the Korean conflict, Winters settled into life as a successful business executive, and then in 1972 bought a farm of his own. Until his 1997 retirement, he sold animal feed to other Pennsylvania farmers.

There has long been a movement to award Winters the Congressional Medal of Honor for Bretcourt, an endorsement downgraded during the war because of quotas. That official action, many veterans claim, remains shamefully buried in Congress.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that we didn’t notice Winters’ passing. An intensely private man, in recent years he was afflicted by Parkinson’s and in a nursing home. He had died on Jan. 2, and buried on Jan. 8, the day of the Arizona shootings. At his request, however, the news didn’t hit media outlets until after his services.

Winters was somewhat uneasy with his newfound celebrity and the attempts to award him the Medal of Honor. Nevertheless, he conceded that it helped gain recognition for the rank-and-file troops, both those who served with him, and the larger cohort of America’s youth who pushed back the Axis tide.

So when the nation officially had a moment of silence for the victims of the Arizona shooting, I paused to remember Dick Winters and those of his generation.

It seemed more than fitting. In 2001, HBO first aired "Band of Brothers" in the months following the 9/11 attacks, and in retrospect, the timing was perfect.

During a period which still casts a shadow of ambiguity, controversy, and division over all Americans, the nightly exploits of Winters and the 101st Airborne were a relief. They juxtaposed the uncertainty of that time with an era of moral clarity for going to war -- as abhorrent as it is -- and the grim effects on those who fight.

For that alone, it’s no surprise that Dick Winters took the German general’s words to heart. He found a small corner of Pennsylvania farm country, and there he made a long and happy life, in peace.

 http://www.506infantry.org/

Sleep well old warrior, your mission is complete. Currahee!


Thanks, Dinny