Today is the anniversary of D-Day. A day we should think of and remember what the Allied forces did and why they did it. We should be remembering REAL heroes for their selfless sacrifices made in the interest of others. The young men and women who stormed the beaches, dropped from the skies, fought in the clouds, and cared for the wounded.
Real Heroes. Like Major Richard Winters, of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. The group came to be known as Easy Company.
The unit experienced heavy turnover because of battlefield casualties. One Easy Company soldier later wrote that among his colleagues, the Purple Heart “was not a decoration but a badge of office.”
Maj. Winters graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1941 before enlisting in the Army. He was selected to attend officer candidates’ school, earned a commission in the summer of 1942 and then - drawn by the promise of extra pay for hazardous duty - volunteered to join a newly formed paratrooper unit.
Of about 500 officers who volunteered to join the elite unit, only 148 made the cut.
Maj. Winters excelled as a infantry leader and a paratrooper and became a hallowed figure among his men for his “follow me” attitude.
He received the military’s second-highest decoration for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross, for his actions on D-Day.
That morning, after landing and untangling from his parachute, Maj. Winters gathered a small group of men for a raid on German cannon emplacements near Brecourt Manor.
Guarded by a platoon of 50 German sentries, the heavily fortified battery had been firing on Utah Beach, causing significant casualties and slowing the Allied advance.
In their assault of the position, Maj. Winters and his men killed 15 German soldiers and took 12 as prisoners. Maj. Winters and his men destroyed three German cannons and completed the action with near-textbook efficiency.The assault Maj. Winters led on those fixed positions is still taught today in our military academies.
Throughout the war, Maj. Winters’s leadership skills earned him commendations and promotions. He served as Easy Company’s commander and was promoted to lead the 506th Regiment’s 2nd Battalion, which included Easy Company.
Maj. Winters and his men eventually saw the end of the European campaign while occupying Adolf Hitler’s mountainside retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, nestled in the Alps above Berchtesgaden. They celebrated by drinking champagne from the Fuhrer’s 10,000-bottle cellar.
Late in the war, one of Maj. Winters’s soldiers, Floyd Talbert, wrote him a letter from an Indiana hospital, thanking him for his loyalty and leadership.
“You are loved and will never be forgotten by any soldier that ever served under you,” Talbert wrote. “I would follow you into hell.”
One of the most harrowing experiences of his military service came in late April 1945. The men of Easy Company discovered a German working camp near Landsberg that was part of the Dachau concentration camp. Maj. Winters found wheels of cheese piled in a nearby cellar and ordered that the nourishment be distributed among the inmates.
“The memory of starved, dazed men who dropped their eyes and heads when we looked at them through the chain-link fence, in the same manner that a beaten, mistreated dog would cringe, leaves feelings that cannot be described and will not be forgotten,” Maj. Winters wrote of the experience. “The impact of seeing those people behind that fence left me saying, only to myself, ‘Now I know why I am here.’”
Richard Davis Winters was born Jan. 21, 1918, in Lancaster, PA. He died on January 2, 2011, in Hershey, PA.
THANK YOU Major Winters and all of those whose lives changed forever on that day in the name of freedom.
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