In the spring of 1944, as Easy Company prepared for the greatest airborne operation in history, one of its most feared officers was doing something few who knew his reputation would have predicted. Ronald Spears, the man later immortalized as the cold-blooded killer who told a shattered soldier to accept that he was already dead, was planning a wedding. Just days before the jump into Normandy, the paratrooper who embodied the primal warrior ideal was about to marry an English woman he had met while stationed in the south of England. Spears had arrived in Winchester around November 1943, sent ahead to establish a camp for an infantry division arriving from Africa, likely the Ninth Infantry Division which set up its headquarters there that month.
Winchester was an ancient town, the old capital of England, with narrow streets lined by pubs, bookshops, and tea rooms, and a Gothic cathedral rising above it all. The medieval Great Hall of Winchester Castle held the legendary Round Table linked to King Arthur. It was the kind of place that seemed designed for a love story, and for Spears, that love story found him. There he met Margaret Edna Griffith, who went by her middle name, Edna.
She was five months younger than Spears, with a warm smile and long hair that cascaded down her neck. In summer she loved sunbathing on the pebble beaches of her country. Edna had come to Winchester as a private in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the all-female branch of the British Army. The ATS put women to work as radar technicians, clerks, searchlight operators, vehicle mechanics and drivers, filling jobs vacated by men so those men could serve in combat, much like the American Rosie the Riveter.
The two became deeply attached to one another, and before long they were engaged. Spears would later call Edna the love of his life. Marriage, however, was not a simple matter for an American soldier in wartime England. The United States War Department had sent a memo to commanding officers in Britain acknowledging that while they might discourage marriage on the grounds of common sense, they could not forbid it officially.
In practice, a soldier needed approval from his regimental commander before he could legally wed in a civil ceremony that would be recognized back in the States. Without that approval, a foreign spouse could be denied benefits. For Spears, that meant convincing Colonel Robert Sink, commander of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, that his feelings for Edna were genuine. He succeeded.
By then Spears had already proven himself a skilled and dependable officer, and Sink gave his consent. The wedding was set for Sunday, May 21, 1944, at St. Michael’s Church, a thirteenth-century parish in Aldbourne, not far from where the regiment was stationed. Ron wore his formal military dress, the chocolate-brown Class A jacket with his jump wings pinned over his left breast, while Edna wore a pleated blouse and a flowered bonnet.
A number of fellow officers attended, among them Buck Compton, who would team up with Spears on a perilous D-Day mission just two weeks later. Dick Winters was also at the church that day, but he was there for another wedding, that of Staff Sergeant Leo Boyle, who was marrying a British woman named Winifred Louise Hawkins at the same time. In May 1944, Spears was still in Dog Company, and Winters had not yet come to know him well. That would change in January 1945, when Spears was given command of Easy Company after relieving First Lieutenant Norman Dike during the attack on Foy.
The wedding offered a welcome distraction from the ever-present thought of combat, which was closing in fast. On June 6, just sixteen days later, Ron and the men of the regiment would drop into Normandy. The honeymoon was immediately juxtaposed with the horrors of war and long separation. Still, Spears counted himself fortunate, because most GIs could not see their families at all during the conflict, with an ocean between them.
After D-Day, the paratroopers returned to England five weeks later, and Ron saw Edna again, though the reunion was brief. They would see each other only a little during the war. Yet those brief moments together produced a joyful outcome. A baby boy was born before the war ended, and they named him Robert, after Ron’s father.
When the war was over, Spears was eager to return to his wife and new son. In a letter dated June 11, 1945, to Forrest Guth, who had been sent home on leave under Colonel Sink’s lottery system, Spears wrote that he was hoping for a furlough to England to see his wife and baby, and expected to go soon. His new family, the end of the war, and his success on the battlefield should have marked a joyful period in his life. But the future he had begun to chart was about to collapse.
The source of the ruin lay in a past Edna had believed was closed forever. Before America entered the war, she had been deeply in love with a British lieutenant named Robert Gutteridge. The war had interrupted their plans to build a life together. In 1941 Gutteridge went off to fight with the 31st Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, in Libya.
On December 3 of that year he took command of his troop after both his troop commander and second-in-command were wounded. For two weeks he showed exceptional courage and leadership, earning the Military Cross. He was wounded on December 15, 1941, and captured. He would remain a prisoner of war for the next four years, first in a military hospital in Italy, then, after Italy surrendered, at Oflag 79 near Brunswick, Germany, where he stayed for the rest of the war until the camp was liberated by the American Ninth Army in 1945.
All that time, Edna believed her boyfriend was dead. By the time she met Ronald Spears in 1944, she had accepted her loss and was ready to move forward. Then came the shock of her life. She learned that Robert Gutteridge was not dead.
He had survived the war and was on his way home. Seeing him again must have been like seeing a ghost. She had found love twice in her life, and now she faced a terrible decision: relocate to America with her new husband and baby, or remain in Britain and return to the man she had thought she lost forever. She hesitated to leave for the United States, and that hesitation spelled the end of her marriage to Spears.
The situation was made even harder by the fact that Spears was a career soldier and could not care for their son on his own if they separated. At Christmas 1945, Ronald Spears boarded the Queen Mary bound for America. He sailed alone, without Edna and without his infant son. Around him, GIs were filled with optimism for their futures, but he embarked with a broken heart and a deep sense of loss.
The future he had begun to chart had slipped away from him. He later said that after his return to the States they were divorced under American law, and that Edna then married her prewar sweetheart and lived happily until her death. Her husband became a lawyer, and Spears called him a fine guy. Ronald Spears would marry three more times.
Two of those marriages ended in divorce, but he found happiness in his fourth and final marriage in 1987, more than two decades after retiring from the military. It was the same year his first wife Edna passed away. Five years later, Spears wrote to Dick Winters, telling him, I loved her and still do. In a letter in the years after that, he said of Edna, she was a wonderful person.
Despite the distance, Spears remained present in his son Robert’s life, and contact between them grew as the boy got older. He was there for Robert’s first day of prep school in England, and for other important occasions as well. When Ron visited, Edna and her husband treated him like a member of the family. When Robert grew up and had children of his own, he often brought his family to America to stay with his father, and in turn Spears frequently traveled to England to spend time with them.
Spears said that Robert’s three beautiful children were his pride and joy. Robert followed in his father’s footsteps, making a career as a soldier and retiring from the British Army as a lieutenant colonel, the same rank his father had held. Of his son, Spears wrote, I am very proud of him.
True love may have eluded Ronald Spears in the end, but out of that heartbreak came a son he maintained a deep and lasting relationship with, and who he always supported.