The Men of Easy Company Association, the official organization of the original Band of Brothers of World War II, has joined the HBO Foundation in making a financial contribution to the Richard Winters Leadership Project.
Herb Suerth, President of the Men of Easy and a 101st Airborne, 506th PIR veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, confirmed the 501 (c)(3) contribution today.
“We are very happy to have the support of the Men of Easy,” said Tim Gray, President of Tim Gray Media. “The organization is made up of the original members of E Company, so to have their support really validates what we are doing to honor Major Winters and all the American soldiers and all the divisions who led the way on D-Day,” Gray said.
“We are just back from a very successful meeting with town officials in Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, Normandy, France,” Gray continued. “We have identified a location (photos below) for the leadership monument and all I can say is that the location is just spectacular, overlooking Utah Beach and with views of the church steeple in Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, Brecourt Manor and Carentan. All of these locations were important in the display of leadership exhibited by Major Winters on D-Day and the days after the Allied invasion,” Gray said.
To learn more about the Richard Winters Leadership Project, please click here.
To visit the official Men of Easy Company web site, please click here.
To see photos of the proposed location for the Richard Winters Leadership monument in Normandy, please click here. Photos of site begin at bottom of page one.
By Edward Colimore/Inquirer Staff Writer
Sixty-six years ago Saturday night, Army Sgt. Bill Guarnere was dressed to kill.
Ammunition and hand grenades bulged from his uniform and a Tommy gun was slung over his shoulder as he sat in a C-47 transport on its way to Normandy, France.
By 1 a.m. - on June 6, D-Day - he parachuted directly into a firefight in the town square of Sainte-Mere-Eglise.
The same day, Edward “Babe” Heffron waited in England for his turn at combat and prayed for the success of the invasion, dubbed “Operation Overlord.”
The two South Philadelphia natives later fought across Europe as members of the unit made famous by the best-selling book Band of Brothers and HBO mini-series of the same name.
Now both 87, the veterans are fighting together again, this time for a Normandy monument that honors their former commander, Richard Winters, and leadership of the Americans on D-Day.
“He was a good man and a good officer,” Guarnere said of Winters, who has been in ill health in recent months and no longer gives interviews. “He knew what he was talking about and took care of his men. A monument is a wonderful idea.”
Heffron said he “had the utmost respect for Winters. He carried himself like an officer and looked the part. He spoke to you like he knew what he expected out of you.”
Winters, 92, of Hershey, was a first lieutenant with E or Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division when he and his men dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day to successfully knock out German artillery trained on the Normandy beaches. The commander later rose to the rank of major and received the Distinguished Service Cross.
The proposed bronze statue - depicting Winters running with an M1 Garand rifle - is expected to be erected in 2011 at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, near the Utah Beach and Sainte-Mere-Eglise. It would sit atop a stone base bearing names of the units that fought at Normandy and include a quote from Winters: “Wars do not make men great, but they do bring out the greatness in good men.”
“This is not a monument just for Major Winters,” said Tim Gray, a documentary filmmaker (timgraymedia.com) and Kingston, R.I., resident who has been leading the monument effort. “We used him [Winters] as an example of what leadership was on D-Day.”
Gray began raising tax-deductible contributions for the project about a month ago, and has at least $25,000 toward the $400,000 needed to erect the monument and produce a film that will focus on the effort.
Curt Schilling - former pitcher for the Phillies and Boston Red Sox, and fan of Winters - is the national spokesman for the project and will narrate the accompanying documentary. “We’re reaching out to anyone and everyone,” Gray said. “We’re hoping people, individuals and corporations, will recognize what we’re doing.”
Among Winters’ biggest supporters are Guarnere and Heffron, who describe their own experiences while also praising Winters’ steady leadership.
Sgt. Guarnere was ready for a fight by the time D-Day arrived. He had just learned of his brother Henry’s death at the hands of the Germans in Italy and wanted revenge.
On the way to Normandy, Guarnere saw “constant flashes” of gunfire below. “If you ever saw a Fourth of July celebration, magnify that 10,000 times.
“I couldn’t wait to get off the plane,” he said. “I killed every German I could. That’s why they called me ‘Wild Bill.’
“I landed in the middle of a square and they [Germans] were shooting at us. They were kind of scared; we were scared, too.”
Guarnere and Heffron later parachuted into Holland on Sept. 17, 1944, as part of Operation Market-Garden, one of the largest drops of airborne troops in history.
The Germans “were very much surprised,” Heffron said. “You dropped and you held your ground. You did what you had to do.”
Heffron and Guarnere were called upon again in December to fight at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, as the German army tried - one last time - to throw back the Allies.
They were in a freezing, snow-covered forest when the German artillery zeroed in on the Americans there. Guarnere was helping a wounded comrade when a shell exploded, taking off his right leg. “I got whacked,” Guarnere said. “The medics came and got me into a jeep.”
Heffron continued on and was among the first soldiers to enter Adolph Hitler’s Eagles Nest, the German leader’s abandoned mountain sanctuary at Berchtesgaden. There, a German general and colonel asked to surrender to an American officer of equal rank.
“I said, ‘Well, I’m pretty rank,’ and got a lieutenant to take care of it,” said Heffron, who refused to return the salute of the German officers.
He returned to Philadelphia in late 1945 and decided to check up on his old platoon sergeant. He walked to Guarnere’s house, the two went out for a beer, and they have been inseparable ever since.
They still feel a strong bond and share a kind of celebrity as members of the “band of brothers.”
Many people phone them or show up at their houses just to meet them and shake their hands. Last month, a woman from France came to Guarnere’s door and gave him a bottle of wine.
They don’t enjoy the attention; they’d prefer to put the war behind them. But these days, they’ll endure it for the sake of their commander and the monument project.
Winters “deserves it,” said Guarnere.
Contact staff writer Edward Colimore at 856-779-3833 or ecolimore@phillynews.com.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG|Providence Phoenix
Amid the moral ambiguity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the handwringing over weapons of mass destruction, drone attacks, and the rights of detainees — there is something startling about the raw patriotism of the documentary Navy Heroes of Normandy.
Heroes, produced by Rhode Island filmmaker Tim Gray, tells the story of the Navy’s often underappreciated role in D-Day and the recent erection of a memorial to American sailors on French soil.
The documentary, which recently picked up New England Emmys for writing and videography, is unabashed in its hagiography; it is openly sentimental about a time when we were right and the enemy, easily indentified, was wrong.
“It was a clearly defined war,” says Gray, a former television sports reporter whose day job is spokesman for Treasurer Frank T. Caprio. “And we haven’t had one of those since.”
The film focuses on the stories of Navy men and Coast Guardsmen — several of them from Rhode Island — who participated in the largest amphibious assault in history. And it is their stories, all the more powerful coming from a generation of men trained to withhold, that are the most compelling part of the film.
Richard Fazzio of Woonsocket breaks as he speaks of the men who died at his side. “This is the first time I ever talked about it,” he says. “I hope it’s my last.”
Ernie Corvese of Smithfield has a look of terror in his downcast eyes as he talks of hopping out of a ship blown up only moments later, killing all of those onboard.
Vincent DiFalco of Cranston was a Coast Guardsman whose transport ship was destroyed as it approached Omaha Beach — killing a group of Army Rangers below deck. “I was in the water,” he says, “and I called for my mother.”
Retired Navy Captain Gregory Streeter, president of the Naval Order Foundation, also has a prominent role in the documentary. The war in the European theater, he explains, has long been cast as the Army’s war.
And so the Navy, lauded for its role in the Pacific, has never quite gotten its due for the effort at Normandy — transporting tens of thousands of soldiers onto shore and helping to break the well-fortified German troops with relentless shelling.
That may explain why there was no monument, until recently, to the Navy’s contributions on D-Day among the dozens of plaques and statues in Normandy.
The latter section of the film focuses on the efforts of Streeter and others to remedy the situation. After a half-million dollar fundraising campaign, we learn, Alabama sculptor Stephen Spears designed a statue of three figures: a commander pointing toward shore, a sailor carrying a shell, and another carrying a gun.
It is a handsome bit of bronze and granite, on a bluff above Utah Beach. And the unveiling in September 2008, captured on film, serves as a sort of catharsis for a prideful group of sailors at hand.
Heroes, which has aired on about 10 public television stations across the country to date and is available onwww.timgraymedia.com, is not the filmmaker’s first foray into World War II history.
D-Day+62 Years: Rhode Island Veterans Return to Normandy has aired on about 155 public television stations across the country under the title D-Day: The Price of Freedom.
A new project, We Who Are Alive and Remain, will tell the story of soldiers in the E Company (“Easy Company”) who did not make it into historian Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers and the HBO series of the same title.
And Gray is also working on a documentary about leadership, to be narrated by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, that will focus on Major Richard Winters, who was the focus of Band of Brothers.
Gray says his interest in the D-Day assault came out of a childhood reach for the heroic. For the black and white.
“When I was about six years old, I picked up one of those World War II encyclopedias and was fascinated by the stories and the drama of the period,” he says. “When you’re a kid, these are your heroes.”
Home Box Office (HBO) has made a tax-deductible donation to the Richard Winters Leadership Project. HBO becomes the first corporate entity to do so. HBO recently aired the 10-part series The Pacific and in 2001, debuted the Emmy Award-winning series Band of Brothers, which focused on Major Winters and the Men of Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne and their fight to liberate Europe in WWII.
“I thank HBO for getting the ball rolling on this important project,” said Tim Gray, President of Tim Gray Media. “Major Winters and the Men of Easy have a special relationship with HBO and they are very appreciative that HBO made the initial donation to the monument and film project, recognizing the leader of Easy Company, Major Dick Winters and all those who led the way on June 6, 1944 (D-Day).”
To learn more about the Richard Winters Leadership project please click here.
