By LARRY ALEXANDER, Staff Writer

For the first few years of his life, Richard Winters of the famed “Band of Brothers” of World War II, lived in the New Holland area.

So it is fitting that New Holland has become the first location in Lancaster County where one can donate toward a Richard Winters statue in France.

Steve Loewen, owner of the New Holland Radio Shack and president of the town’s historical society, has made the bracelets available in his store at 331 E. Main St.

The rubber, olive-green bracelets with Winters’ favorite saying “Hang Tough” stamped onto them, require a minimum donation of $1 each.

The bracelets are the project of 11-year-old Jordan Brown, a fourth-grader at South Lebanon Elementary School. An article about the boy’s project appeared in the Intelligencer Journal/ Lancaster New Era and grabbed Loewen’s interest.

“When I was younger I watched the ‘World At War’ series and ‘Victory At Sea’ and all of those,” Loewen said. “And when I read about the boy from Lebanon trying to sell bracelets to help raise funds for the statue, I thought, ‘if I can help by selling them here, I’ll do it.’ ”

Loewen, who is confined to a wheelchair, can’t hold a book to read it. But when he first saw the “Band of Brothers” HBO mini-series on TV, he became “very enthralled” about Winters and the men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division.

In 2004, he attended what was Winters final, major public speaking appearance, at Donegal High School.

“So I’m a real Dick Winters fan,” Loewen said.

Loewen’s appreciation of veterans grew from being around his grandfather, Wayne Ranck, a World War I veteran who helped found the New Holland American Legion and was, Loewen said, “a big veterans guy in town.”

“Through being around him and others, I developed a real appreciation for what the veterans have done for the country,” Loewen said.

Loewen has done minimal advertising other than mentioning the bracelets on his sign in front of the store and having a small sign on the store counter. Mostly, he said, they sell themselves.

“Everyone who comes in and reads the sign buys one,” he said.

The statue is the idea of documentary filmmaker Tim Gray of Rhode Island, who hopes to raise $400,000 for the project, which will include a documentary to be aired on a national cable channel.

The statue will be located in St. Marie-du-Mont, a town in Normandy, France, that Winters and his paratroopers helped liberate on June 6, 1944. It’s about three miles inland from Utah Beach.

While the statue will depict Winters, it also will honor all U.S. Army officers who led soldiers into combat on D-Day.

lalexander@lnpnews.com

Read more: http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/264089#ixzz0t7b4sEtX

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.

By MONICA VON DOBENECK, The Patriot-News

Curt Schilling, former pitcher for the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox, said today that he became the spokesman for a proposed monument to World War II hero Dick Winters because of his great respect for the Hershey man.

He said he has watched the HBO mini-series “Band of Brothers,” based on the experiences of Winters and other members of his Easy Company, at least 30 times. “World War II and the history of that generation has always been a passion of mine,” he said.

Schilling, who said he grew up “an Army brat,” owns a small publishing company called Multi-Man Publishing that focuses on World War II. “Major Winters is the second man I ever held in such idolization after my father,” he said. “He lived in a time and place when honor and integrity and the flag meant more than today.”

Documentary filmmaker Tim Gray is proposing the monument to leadership to be built by sculptor Stephen Spears near the shores of Normandy where Winters led his men on D-Day. Gray will also film an accompanying documentary to be narrated by Schilling.

Winters, who lives in Derry Twp., was a first lieutenant with E Company, 506th regiment of the 101st Airborne Division when he and his men parachuted behind enemy lines on June 6, 1944, to take on a German artillery position firing on Utah Beach. They also fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Dachau and Hitler’s Eagles Nest.

Armed Forces Radio Interview 5-26-2010

I had the honor of appearing on the United States Armed Forces Radio Network today to discuss the Richard Winters Leadership project. Armed Forces Radio continues to reach our troops throughout the world providing them with news from home and the front lines. Armed Forces Radio was an especially important resource to soldiers, sailors and airmen during World War II.

To listen to today’s interview simply click the link at the top of this story. Of course, the interview started before I thought it did, thus my relaxed tone!

Kingston, RI May 25, 2010- Tim Gray Media’s Navy Heroes of Normandy documentary film, chronicling the building and dedication of the first United States Navy monument in Normandy, France, took home two Emmy Awards Saturday night at Gillette Stadium.

Tim Gray won an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary Program Writing, his second Emmy in that category. Gray also won an Emmy for documentary writing for D-Day+62 Years: Rhode Island Veterans Return to Normandy in 2007.

Navy Heroes of Normandy Director of Photography, Jim Karpeichik-President of Ocean State Video in Cranston, RI-took home an Emmy for Outstanding Videography for a Documentary Program. Karpeichik also won in that same category in 2007 for D-Day+62 Years.

Navy Heroes of Normandy was also nominated for a third Emmy in the category of Outstanding Historical or Cultural Program.

Tim Gray Media, www.timgraymedia.com, is a full-service video production company founded in 2005. In addition to HD documentary films, TGM also produces corporate videos and web based video files. “It’s an honor to be continually recognized by your peers for the work you produce,” said Tim Gray, President of TGM.

Gray’s two documentary films on WWII are currently airing nationally on PBS stations around the country and internationally. “It’s an honor to share these amazing stories with so many people. We are losing 1,000 WWII vets a day, 30,000 a month. Soon all we will have are these films,” Gray said.

First Lt. Richard Winters Leadership Statue in Normandy, France and Accompanying HD Documentary film on Dick Winters Leadership of Men in Combat on D-Day and in the European Theatre during World War II

This project has the approval of Major Richard Winters and all donations are tax-deductible through the Rhode Island PBS Foundation, a 501 (c)(3)

The Project: A statue to be dedicated in Normandy (Ste. Marie-du-Mont) recognizing (then) First Lieutenant Richard Winters and the leadership abilities of all US Army officers during the Normandy phase of Operation Overlord. The statue will be designed by internationally known sculptor Stephen Spears of Fairhope, AL and be the likeness of Lt. Winters. Mr. Spears is the sculptor of the United States World War I Doughboy statue in Cantigny, France and the U.S. Navy World War II monument, dedicated in 2008 outside the Utah Beach museum, Ste. Marie-du-Mont, France.

The Statue: A selected and approved likeness (by the Winters’ family) of (then) 1st Lt. Winters. The statue of Mr. Winters will be positioned in a leadership position (as a leader of men). The statue will be identified as 1st Lt. Richard Winters, E-Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne, but will also be representative of ALL the Army officers who were responsible for leading soldiers into combat in Normandy on June 6, 1944 and will showcase all the division and unit patches of those who fought in Normandy in the very early stages of D-Day. The monument will prominently feature the words: Leadership 6-6-1944 below Lt. Winters’ likeness.

The Documentary Film: Will focus on Lt. Winters’ leadership abilities in Europe in WWII, his ability to motivate, inspire and lead men when initial planning has broken down, all principles that are still important today to those who lead and set the stage for others to succeed. Interviews with E Company men alive today and with Major Winters will be utilized. This film will air on a national cable channel.

Fundraising for statue and film project: To be organized by Tim Gray Media, an Emmy Award-Winning documentary film company based in Kingston, Rhode Island: (www.timgraymedia.com). TGM focuses on the production of films which chronicle the stories of WWII veterans.

501(c)(3): Through a co-production partnership with the Rhode Island PBS Foundation, all donations and sponsorships of this project are tax-deductible. RIPBS is a 501(c)(3) organization.

National Spokesperson for project & narrator/host of film: Former Boston Red Sox and 3-time World Series champion and National Museum of World War II board member, Curt Schilling.

Dedication: Statue dedication in France and documentary debut in Philadelphia or at the National World War II Museum (New Orleans, LA): Late 2011, early 2012.

Education: 1,000 copies of the DVD will be donated to school systems (all levels) in Pennsylvania free of charge on behalf of the Major Winters and Ethel Winters.

Richard Winters Leadership Award (presented annually): In addition to the monument to Dick Winters in Ste. Marie-du-Mont, a Major Richard Winters Leadership Award (a bronze medal with the likeness of the actual monument engraved on the medallion w/ribbon and name of recipient) will be presented each year to current members of the 101st Airborne who display exceptional leadership qualities in both combat and non-combat situations. Award winners to be determined by 101st Airborne representatives and presented at a time to be determined by 101st officials.

Donations: Tax-deductible donations to the project can be made payable to:
The Rhode Island PBS Foundation
c/o Kathryn Larsen
RIPBS
50 Park Lane
Providence, RI 02907

In the memo line of the check indicate: Richard Winters Leadership Project.

PayPal: You may also make a donation via PayPal at www.timgraymedia.com (Donate link).