Beyond Band of Brothers (29 page)

Though I yearned for the days when I commanded Easy Company, I didn't long for the Dutch weather, which had produced such misery. For one thing, I would never spend another night like that one a year earlier: I was wet through and through, and naturally being a paratrooper, I did not have a change of clothes—no blanket, nothing. And it was cold as a son-of-a-gun. Things were all “snafued,” walking around in the black of night, not knowing where we were exactly, where anybody else was, and houses burning, people crying, shaking hands, and every bush a prospective enemy.

By the final week in September 1945, preparations were made to send the remaining members of the 101st Airborne Division back to the States. Rumors circulated throughout the camp that all remaining “eighty-five-pointers” and a quota of high-point officers would leave soon. I immediately went to see Colonel Chase and presented my case for my early departure. All I wanted to do was to get out of the army, to return home, and to start my new life. If I stayed, I would have sat around every night with old soldiers and fought the war over and over through stories and memories. I couldn't live like that. There was far too much chickenshit in this man's army, now that the fighting was over. In fifteen minutes Chase vowed that I was okay, that I had done right by him, and now in my hour of need, he'd do okay by me. He did just that. Regiment issued orders on October 1 to transfer me to the 75th Infantry Division, which was to be filled with high-point men and was scheduled to return home with the 16th Corps Headquarters in the
early part of October. For my last Saturday night with the 506th PIR, I attended a regimental party. Actually I made only a token appearance, having delegated my work to junior officers with considerably more social experience than I possessed.

When I received the news that I would be going home, I could hardly believe it. I had been lucky enough to live through this whole damn mess and get a round-trip ticket home. Home! My gosh, would my folks even know me? Would I know them? My sister? Chow? Water—hot water. And milk, I really had not had any in over two years at that point, not real milk with calcium in it. Returning home, however, proved to be a more difficult task than I expected. Originally the enlisted soldiers were going to Reims while the 75th Division and the officers were scheduled to depart from Marseilles in southern France. A strike by transportation handlers, coupled with the army's usual red tape and bureaucracy, delayed our redeployment. Two weeks after I was scheduled to leave, I was still in Camp Pittsburgh, France, where I was now serving as 2d Battalion executive officer of the 290th Infantry Regiment, 75th Infantry Division. Naturally I had daily contact with the other officers in the battalion, few of whom had spent much time in combat. What little contact I had with these officers was reserved for them telling me how the 75th Infantry Division had won the war. Their first action had been in the Ardennes on Christmas Day, 1944. Seemed that I remembered that day as well.

To compensate for our delay, headquarters issued us three-day passes which were supposed to soothe our ruffled feathers about being confined in Europe when all we wanted was to return to the United States. I for one had joined the 75th Division to return home, not to go on pass. What's more, headquarters rescinded the order that stated all field-grade officers with less than 100 points could not go home. I now had 108 points and was about as rare as a man in a Wave barracks.

On November 1, I finally arrived at the staging area following a two-day ride through the French countryside. I was now commanding the battalion since the commanding officer had been transferred
because he didn't have sufficient points. Watching a bunch of low-point officers trying to make the ship was a sight to behold. As the train transited the country, my chief concern was keeping 1,150 G.I.s from riding on the top of the cars and jumping off the train to kiss the girls. The experience certainly kept a fellow from becoming despondent. Our staging area at Marseilles was a hill so hard that in order to pitch tents, the soldiers used iron stakes. I spent my last afternoon in France driving a jeep through the streets of Marseilles. The port was mighty big and in relatively fair shape, but the Germans had sunk a lot of ships and destroyed a number of piers and warehouses evacuating southern France during the summer of 1944. As for the town itself, Marseilles was rough, tough, and ugly, a typical port town.

On November 4, I climbed aboard the
Wooster Victory
en route to Hampton Roads, Virginia. As the ship left the harbor, I couldn't help but remember a similar voyage when the S.S.
Samaria
had departed the United States. In the interim between both voyages, two years had passed, but I had aged two decades, a seemingly lifetime of war encapsulated in twenty-two months. Like most soldiers, I would never be the same, but I would adjust, just as we had done when we arrived in England in September 1943, and as we had done following our baptism of fire on D-Day. The U.S. Army processed me for separation on November 29, 1945, at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, only a few miles from my home in Lancaster.

The next day, the 101st Airborne Division was officially deactivated. Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, no longer existed. When I received the news, I was saddened because the division had been my home for the better part of three years. Originally the 101st was the airborne division scheduled to remain in the postwar army, but with the departure of General Maxwell Taylor to West Point and a highly publicized public relations campaign engineered by Major General James Gavin, the commanding general of the 82d Airborne Division, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall personally intervened to save the 82d. Since the peacetime military force only fielded
a single airborne division, the Screaming Eagles passed into history. The whole thing, to me, felt like an insult.

When I reached home, one of the first things I did was to go directly to the post office, where the Internal Revenue Service office was located, and insist that I pay the income tax on my income as an officer. The IRS man looked at me incredulously and said, “Son, you don't have to do this even though the regulations say you must. We will waive this return.”

I responded, “Sir, I want to pay my part of the bill. I am proud to be an American!”

He bowed his head and we figured out my bill, which I immediately paid in full.

My expectations upon returning to civilian life were no different than most servicemen lucky enough to come home. I was ready to change my army fatigues for civilian attire. My priorities consisted of finding a decent job so I could make a comfortable living, finding a wife, beginning a family, and finding peace and happiness. I remained on terminal leave until my official discharge on January 22, 1946. At long last I was Mr. R. D. Winters again. Proud as I was of my wartime rank, I never used it in my postwar life. I enjoyed my civilian status after four years of war.

While I was extremely happy to put the army behind me, I realized that I was a different man than I was when I joined the army over four years earlier. The war changed me in many ways, as it does all who experience combat. Having witnessed so much mass suffering and unparalleled barbarism that mankind is capable of inflicting upon itself, I don't see how any survivor can ever be cruel to anything again. In addition, I was a far better judge of character than I had been in 1941. That feeling remains with me today, fully sixty years after the war. When I meet people for the first time and get to know them, I can't help but judge them and size them up. Do they have leadership? Would they be good in combat? Do they pass the test?

I was also more disciplined than I remembered being before I
deployed to Europe. This discipline helped me adapt to civilian life once I returned to Pennsylvania. Like all veterans, I had to adjust to society, the life that you are going to share with others in order to make a living. I certainly never confused the challenges in the workplace with what I had experienced in combat. There would be no life-and-death struggles in the corporate world. Business hardly equates to war. Such comparisons demean the word.

Within two weeks of returning home, I accepted Lewis Nixon's invitation to travel to New York City and meet his parents. His father offered me a job and in January 1946, I became personnel manager for the Nixon Nitration Works in Nixon, New Jersey, for $75 a week. While working, I took advantage of the G.I. Bill and attended refresher courses in business and personnel management at Rutgers University. The G.I. Bill provided me the opportunity to adjust my frame of mind from military to business. I married Ethel in 1948 and was later promoted to general manager of Nixon Nitration Works, where I remained until my recall to service for the Korean conflict.

Now a family man, I had been briefly recalled to active duty for the Korean War in June 1951, with orders to join the 11th Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I had seen enough of war, so when the army in its infinite wisdom granted reservist officers a delay of six months to report for active duty, I traveled to Washington, D.C. to see General Tony McAuliffe, who was the U.S. Army's personnel chief. I asked if he remembered me and he certainly did. After a few minutes of informal conversation, I told him that I would like to be excused from going to Korea. McAuliffe sat there, nodding his head understandingly, and he asked me point-blank if he could make battalion commanders out of the officers currently graduating from West Point and from the universities around the country. From what I had seen of the peacetime army in Europe and the United States, I responded, “No, sir, I don't think you can.”

“Well, that's your answer,” he said, “So, there isn't a whole lot more to say.”

I thanked him for his time and left, went back home and packed—not for overseas, but for Fort Dix, New Jersey. There, the army assigned me as a regimental plans and training officer. Compared to my wartime experience, training at Fort Dix was simply terrible. I had always prided myself on my ability to adjust to any situation, but training new officers who couldn't care less about attending classes exceeded my patience. I couldn't wait to get out, so I volunteered for ranger school. Before long, I received orders for overseas deployment. I traveled to Seattle, the port of debarkation, and was going through the indoctrination and preparation when an administrative officer walked into a room full of officers and announced, “There is a new order. Any officer who has been recalled involuntarily does not have to continue to Korea. He can resign. If there are any officers here who would care to take advantage of this, please step forward.” I stepped forward and that's how my military career came to an end.

Deciding not to return to Nixon Nitration Works, I became a production supervisor of an adhesive plaster mill for Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1951, I had purchased a 106-acre farm in Pennsylvania along the foothills of the Blue Mountains, east of Indiantown Gap. I rented the old farmhouse to a young family and eventually started building a new home for our family, stone by stone. Wanting to return to Pennsylvania to be closer to the farm, in 1955 we rented a home near Gettysburg and I found employment in the agricultural field with Whitmoyer Laboratories and then several other companies. During this time we continued to spend all possible weekends at the farm, and our home was finally well enough along for us to move into in 1960 when our second child was ready for first grade. Here, I finally felt I had found the peace and quiet that I had promised myself on D-Day.

In 1972 I formed my own corporation and for the next twenty-five years, I distributed animal health products and basic vitamin premixes to feed mills in Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1979, when the push for recycling had begun, I was asked by Hershey Chocolate Company
if it was possible to sell their waste candy by-products for animal feed. Planning to use the contacts that I had developed over many years, I agreed to a contract with them to manage a warehouse to store and process the material. With my two employees, and Ethel as office manager and secretary, we went to work cleaning up the abandoned plant and putting it back in working order. We hired more men and as we found that cattle and hogs loved chocolate as much as humans, we soon became a thriving business selling to feed mills and large farmers. With experience and a little imagination, I found new uses and new combinations for the products and we finally were shipping material to new customers in other parts of the country and overseas. With the business prospering, Hershey Chocolate Company decided to take over the running of the warehouse. I continued as a distributor of nutritional premixes until I finally retired in 1997.

By 1980, with employees and office staff to help me at work, I had been able to attend the Company E reunion. Life before that had been too hectic to think much about my wartime experiences and like most veterans, I was too busy earning a living, but I had always maintained contact with the men by phone, letters, and occasional visits from the closest ones or any men passing through the local area.

The 1988 reunion in New Orleans and the contact with author Stephen Ambrose sparked a new interest in recalling my war experiences, and I dedicated myself to putting my memories as well as the letters from the men in order. Our second home in Hershey became the central repository for private correspondence and official records of the company and the battalion in which I had served. Telling the story of Easy Company not only became my motivation, but also my passion. Hence, when Ambrose wrote
Band of Brothers
, the records that I had compiled over the years became his primary source.

Beginning in 1946, former Sergeant Mike Ranney, Sergeant Bob Rader, and Corporal Walter Gordon began organizing Easy Company reunions. Later, Bill Guarnere took up the torch and encouraged the members of the company to stay in touch, but it was Ranney, who had
earned a journalistic degree at the University of North Dakota, that served as the principal organizer of the initial reunions. He had hoped to write his memoirs and a history of Easy Company that he intended to entitle
Easy Does It!
, but his premature death in 1988 at the age of sixty-five halted his efforts. It was a shame that Easy Company lost Mike Ranney before we found Steve Ambrose and before we started to get organized to write
Band of Brothers
. Mike was a natural journalist who would have added immeasurably to the project.