Major Richard Winters arrived in Normandy with only the clothes on his back and no weapon in his hands. The drop on June 6, 1944, had scattered the paratroopers of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment across the Cotentin Peninsula, and the heavy German anti-aircraft fire and dense cloud cover had made a shambles of the plan. Winters landed near Sainte-Mère-Église, alone and unarmed, but he did not wait. He gathered whatever men he could find and moved toward the objective, becoming the de facto commander of Easy Company because its actual commander, First Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, was missing and presumed lost.
It was a role Winters had been preparing for, in ways he had not anticipated, since before the war even began. Born in New Holland, Pennsylvania, on January 21, 1918, Richard Davis Winters grew up in Lancaster after his family moved there when he was eight. His childhood was defined by hard work, often taking summer jobs to pay for his schooling. He graduated from Lancaster Boys High School in July 1937 and entered Franklin and Marshall College, where he joined the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity and played sports until the demands of his studies and part-time jobs forced him to drop the extracurriculars.
He completed his degree in economics in 1941 and was drafted into the United States Army the following August. Winters had no desire to fight in the war that was already consuming Europe. He hoped his service would be brief. Training at Camp Croft in South Carolina went well enough that he excelled as an instructor for recruits, and in April 1942 he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for officer candidate school.
There he met Lewis Nixon, a fellow officer in training who would become a lifelong friend. By July, Winters had volunteered for paratrooper training and been assigned to the newly formed 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. He earned his jump wings, was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division, and in August 1942 was assigned to Company E under the command of First Lieutenant Herbert Sobel. Sobel was a harsh and demanding leader, and the relationship between the two men quickly soured.
Winters was determined to learn from him, however, and proved himself a natural soldier and leader. He was promoted to first lieutenant and given command of the second platoon, and in October 1942 he became acting company commander, officially taking the post in May 1943. But the friction with Sobel continued. In October 1943, Winters was court-martialed for failing to follow an order to inspect a latrine.
The incident drove a permanent wedge between them, and many of the enlisted men, who respected Winters far more than they respected Sobel, came to see him as the real commander of Easy Company. Sobel, unwilling to let the matter rest, manufactured another accusation, and Winters was reassigned to serve as battalion mess officer at company headquarters, a move widely viewed as a demotion. Winters accepted it without complaint and continued to serve. The noncommissioned officers of Easy Company, however, pressured the regimental commander, Colonel Sink, to remove Sobel.
Sink eventually transferred Sobel to Chilton Foliot, revoked Winters’s punishment, and restored him as leader of the first platoon. Winters later acknowledged that Sobel’s grueling training sessions had made him a better officer, even if the experience had been painful. That training proved essential in the months that followed. In September 1944, Winters fought during Operation Market Garden, the Allied airborne operation in the Netherlands.
With only twenty men under his command, he successfully attacked and routed a German force of roughly two hundred soldiers. His leadership did not go unnoticed, and on October 9 he was appointed battalion executive officer, a post normally reserved for a major. The previous XO, Major Oliver Horton, had been killed, and although Winters still held only the rank of captain, he was chosen because he was the most qualified officer available. On December 16, 1944, Winters led his men through the Battle of the Bulge, the German offensive through the Ardennes that caught the Allies off guard.
He successfully broke through the enemy lines, and in March 1945 he was promoted to major. By November of that year, with the war in Europe over, he boarded the ship Wooster Victory in Marseille and sailed home. He arrived in New York City, was processed at Indiantown Gap, and was officially discharged from the army in January 1946, having taken leave with pay in the meantime. The transition to civilian life came quickly.
In December 1945, Lewis Nixon’s father offered Winters a job at the family business, Nixon Nitration Works in Edison, New Jersey. Winters accepted and began working there in January 1946, while also taking business and personnel management courses at Rutgers University under the GI Bill. He stayed with the company until 1951, when he was recalled to active duty for the Korean War. Assigned first to the 11th Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he was later transferred to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to serve as the regimental planning and training officer.
There he found the training officers lacking in discipline, a failure that disappointed him deeply, and he was sent to Ranger School for further training. He completed the program and graduated as a Ranger. In January 1952, Winters was promoted to major in the United States Army Reserve, but he was given the option to resign his commission, and he chose to do so. In April 1953, he was honorably discharged, ending his military career.
He returned to New Jersey in 1954 and found work as a production supervisor at a plastic adhesive company in New Brunswick. A year later, he moved to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, to work at Whitmore Laboratories. In 1972, he became an entrepreneur, starting a business that supplied chocolate byproducts from the Hershey Company to animal feed producers. In 1990, Winters met historian Stephen Ambrose and shared his experiences from Easy Company during the war.
Ambrose wrote a book based on those stories, Band of Brothers, published in 1992, and in 2001 the Home Box Office network turned it into a miniseries of the same name, with actor Damian Lewis portraying Winters. The series brought Winters renewed public attention, and he began appearing publicly, giving speeches and interviews about his wartime experiences. In 2005, Larry Alexander published a biography titled Biggest Brother: The Life of Major Dick Winters, The Man Who Led The Band of Brothers, and the following year Winters released his own memoir, Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters, written with military historian Colonel Cole C. Kingseed.
Winters had married Ethel Estoppey on May 16, 1948, and the couple had two children, a daughter, Jill, and a son, Richard T. Winters. He retired in 1997 and moved with his family to Hershey, Pennsylvania. On January 2, 2011, Winters died in Palmyra, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
His death was a profound loss to the men of Easy Company, the nation, and all who had come to know his story. His legacy endured through the men he led, the example he set, and the account of the war he left behind.