Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story referred to the medal lawmakers want Army Maj. Richard D. Winters to receive as the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Pennsylvania lawmakers want Congress to recommend honoring New Holland native and Army Maj. Richard D. “Dick” Winters for World War II heroism after D-Day.
The state Senate on Monday passed a resolution that said Winters deserves the Medal of Honor for leading an October 1944 bayonet charge at the Heteren Crossroads in the Netherlands.
The president decides who will receive the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award for valor.
Winters, who died in 2011 and is buried in Ephrata Township, was featured in “Band of Brothers,” a book by Stephen E. Ambrose and a 10-part HBO series.
He was born at Lancaster General Hospital in 1918 and his family lived briefly in New Holland and then Ephrata Borough. In the late 1920s, the family moved to South West End Avenue in Lancaster city.
He worked after the war as a sales representative for Whitmoyer Laboratories in Myerstown, Lebanon County, and as a grain broker and distributor of animal nutritional products for Poorbaugh Grain in Lancaster. He began R.D. Winters Supply Company Inc. in 1971, distributing animal feed products and nutritional supplies to feed mills. He also started R.D. Winters Inc., which sold Hershey byproducts for animal feed.
He died in Campbelltown, Lebanon County, at age 92 in 2011.
“You could not find a better man than Dick Winters,” William “Wild Bill” Guarnere, who served under him, told LNP | LancasterOnline shortly after Winters died. “He was such a leader.”
A statue of Winters, modeled after a similar honor in Normandy, is featured at the Major Dick Winters Leadership Memorial and Veterans Plaza in Ephrata Borough.
A similar resolution is pending in the state House.
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