Dick Winters: the leader of Easy Company

On the morning of D-Day, Lieutenant Dick Winters gathered a handful of paratroopers and attacked a German battery that was firing on Utah Beach. It was the start of a war that took him from Normandy to Holland, Bastogne and Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and of a reputation as one of the finest small-unit leaders of the war. He never thought of himself as a hero. When fame came to him half a century later, he used it to talk about leadership.²

A Pennsylvania volunteer

Winters was born on 21 January 1918 in New Holland, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Ephrata and Lancaster. He paid his way through Franklin and Marshall College with part-time jobs, giving up wrestling, his favorite sport, to make time for work and study, and graduated in 1941 with a degree in economics and the highest academic standing in the business college.³

On 25 August 1941 he enlisted in the army. He later admitted that he had no desire to get into the war; he joined to complete a year's service and avoid being drafted later. Army tests marked him out for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and there he volunteered for the paratroopers, "a new thing that looked like a challenge," as he put it.⁴

Toccoa and Currahee

In July 1942 the new second lieutenant reported to a bare camp in Georgia, then called Toombs and soon renamed Toccoa, where the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment was being raised under Colonel Robert Sink. The 506th was the first regiment to go through airborne training as a whole unit, an experiment: of about 5,300 volunteers, only 1,800 finished the course. Everyone, officer or private, had to run up and down nearby Currahee Mountain, which Winters called "a real killer" and a test that treated every man the same.⁵

Winters was assigned to Company E, Easy Company, of the 2nd Battalion. The company's first commander, Captain Herbert Sobel, drove the men hard, and Winters later judged that he had pushed them close to mutiny and lost their respect. More men, he thought, would have died in battle had Sobel led them into it.⁶

England

The regiment sailed for England in September 1943 and settled in the village of Aldbourne. Winters boarded with an elderly couple, the Barneses, whose son, a Royal Air Force airman, had been killed; he had first met them tending his grave. They took him in as one of the family, and he credited those quiet months with preparing him for what came next. Before the invasion the officers studied sand-table models of the drop zones in the marshaling area at Uppottery, though Winters believed the real test would be the ability to think on one's feet.⁷

The night drop

Winters jumped into Normandy at about 1 a.m. on 6 June 1944 and landed near Sainte-Mère-Église. His leg bag, with his weapons, ammunition, spare clothing and food, tore loose from his harness in the jump; he later took a rifle and ammunition from a dead paratrooper and got food from his men. The plane carrying Easy Company's commander, Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, was shot down, and Winters, the company's executive officer, took command.⁸ › D-Day, 1944

Brécourt Manor

After a night of wandering, Winters reached the 2nd Battalion's gathering point at Le Grand-Chemin with just 13 men of Easy Company. An officer called him forward, and the battalion's Captain Clarence Hester pointed to a hedgerow and told him there was fire along it and to take care of it. There was no plan and no briefing. Behind the hedgerow, at Brécourt Manor, a battery of four German 105 mm guns was firing on Causeway No. 2, one of the roads the 4th Infantry Division needed to get off Utah Beach.⁹

Winters put his small force against the guns from the flanks and used the Germans' own connecting trench to take them one at a time. All four guns were destroyed, at the cost of one man killed, Private John Hall. Accounts give the attackers as a dozen or 13 men and the defenders as about 50, and the attack was later credited with saving many lives on the beach. Years afterward a medic who had come up that causeway behind the tanks wrote to Winters to thank him for silencing the guns; he was Elliot Richardson, later Attorney General.¹⁰

Winters was promoted to captain and received the Distinguished Service Cross, the army's second-highest decoration for valor. The assault has been studied at West Point as a textbook example of a small force taking a fortified position. That evening, Winters later recalled, he promised himself that if he survived the war he would find a small farm in the Pennsylvania countryside and spend the rest of his life in peace and quiet.¹¹

The dike in Holland

In September 1944 the 101st Airborne dropped into Holland for Operation Market Garden, the Allied attempt to seize a bridgehead over the Rhine. After fighting along "Hell's Highway," the division moved to the low ground between the rivers that the men called "the Island." On 5 October Winters took a squad up to the dike along the Rhine to stop a large German force from infiltrating, then brought up a platoon, ordered bayonets fixed, and led a charge across an open field that broke the Germans and prevented a breakthrough of the thin American line.¹² › Operation Market Garden

Bastogne and Foy

In December 1944 the German offensive in the Ardennes brought the 101st from its rest camp at Mourmelon in France to Bastogne. The 506th held a sector in the woods with no farmhouses or shelter of any kind, only foxholes. Food ran short; Winters wrote that for two weeks the men "were really hurting." He estimated that a third of the 506th's casualties came from trench foot, and he remembered sitting in his foxhole while the ice built up around him until it seemed to close in.¹³ › The Battle of the Bulge

In the attack on the village of Foy in January 1945, Easy Company's commander, Lieutenant Norman Dike, froze in the open field. Winters turned to the first officer he saw, Ronald Speirs, and told him to take the company in. "It could have been anybody," he said later; it was a roll of the dice that Speirs was standing there.¹⁴

Winters finished the war in Germany as a major, and Easy Company ended it at Berchtesgaden, near Hitler's mountain retreat. Besides the Distinguished Service Cross he received numerous other decorations.¹⁵

A quiet life

Discharged in 1945, Winters worked for Nixon Nitration Works, the family firm of his wartime friend Lewis Nixon, served briefly again during the Korean War, and then settled in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he built a successful business, raised a family with his wife Ethel and kept the promise he had made himself on D-Day. For decades the war was something he rarely spoke about.¹⁶

Band of Brothers and the lessons of leadership

In May 1988 the historian Stephen Ambrose learned that Easy Company veterans were holding a reunion at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans and joined them uninvited. His standing as Eisenhower's biographer won their trust, and he went on to interview Winters for more than 13 hours. The result was the 1992 book Band of Brothers, and in 2001 the HBO miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks carried the story to tens of millions of viewers.¹⁷

Ambrose urged Winters to speak about leadership whenever he could, and he did. In a five-page letter to Ambrose of 12 August 1996, now in the collections of the National WWII Museum, he set out his principles: a leader must be in first-class physical condition, must be "the first one up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night," and must be "up front and visible with the men before an attack." When a barrage ended, he wrote, the commander had to be the first man on his feet, talking to his men, because that broke the fear that froze them. He signed his letters "Hang tough."¹⁸

Winters always insisted that the real heroes were the men he served with. He died in 2011 at the age of 92. On 6 June 2012 a bronze statue of him, running with an M1 Garand, was unveiled near Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, on the road to Utah Beach, as a monument to combat leadership; much of the money for it was raised by a Pennsylvania schoolboy, Jordan Brown, who started collecting at 11.¹⁹

Follow the 101st Airborne through D-Day, Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, meet America's greatest military heroes, explore the World War II, or see what else happened on 6 June.