Happy (heavenly) Birthday to Major Dick Winters ('Band of Brothers')

Major Dick Winters led perhaps the most storied U.S. Army unit in all of World War II.

On D-Day, he and his "band of brothers" in Easy Company defeated a far larger German force and allowed the Allied advance to continue.

At the Dachau concentration camp, they liberated scores of Holocaust prisoners who'd endured months, if not years, of hell.

And as the war in Europe drew to a close, they captured Hitler's personal mountaintop retreat in southern Germany — then kicked back on his terrace in triumph while sipping champagne from his wine cellar.⁠ ⁠

But for decades, Winters was reluctant to even tell his story, lest he be called a hero.

Eventually, however, Easy Company's harrowing and courageous exploits on the Western Front in 1944 and 1945 would be immortalized in "Band of Brothers."

The Author who wrote the article “Band of Brothers”, the late Stephen Ambrose started a historical tour company that still operates, back in 2018 I went on their Band of Brothers tour, starting in Toccoa and all the way to Berchtesgaden and the Eagles Nest. The tour includes more than following the path of Easy Company, we spent 2-days of the 14-day tour in Normandy and other points of interest, a really fantastic trip.

The long and brutal combat experienced by the men in Band of Brothers was duplicated by many thousands of American soldiers in WW II on D-Day and afterwards. For example, the father of a family friend was a young lieutenant in the first wave to land on Omaha Beach and then fought across France and into Germany. Remarkably, he had to put a pistol to the head of the British naval rating who was piloting his landing craft in order to make him go all the way to the beach. Otherwise, as Saving Private Ryan accurately showed, the entire boatload of men would have drowned by being dumped into water over their heads.

Winters deserves full credit for his D-Day exploit. You should read the account in the book, Band of Brothers. Winters was recommended for the Medal of Honor, but they had a policy of one per division for the landing. In England prior to the landing he was staying with an English couple, who had lost their own son in France prior to Dunkirk. This was not unusual for officers (he was a 1LT). They heard the account of his exploit on the BBC radio reports. ("Mentioned in the dispatches"?) I read that his actions are still taught as an example of initiative and leadership at West Point to this day. (Unfortunately, they were not very diverse team.)

One does get the impression that the Germans they faced were not the best. In one vignette at the chateau (where the German artillery they were attacking was located and the troops quartered) during the height of the engagement, one of his men saw two Germans lackadaisically walking across a field with mess kits heading to chow, well within rifle range. He asked Winters what he should do. "Shoot 'em!" Unheard, beyond the ocean tide, Their [German] mother made her moan."

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