Without seeking such a mantle, Dick Winters and his comrades had in recent years come to be seen by their fellow Americans as the embodiment of “the Greatest Generation”; those millions of ordinary young men who had answered the call to fight in the Second World War. For Winters had commanded Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Regiment, whose hard-fought passage from Normandy to Bavaria was recorded in bestselling fashion by the historian Stephen Ambrose, and then memorably filmed for television as Band of Brothers.
Winters’s first taste of combat came an hour after midnight on June 6, 1944. The 101st Airborne Division had been ordered to seize the causeways across the flooded fields behind Utah Beach, so easing the progress of the D-Day landings, but the parachute drop proved chaotic. The C47 transport aircraft were targeted by fierce antiaircraft fire, and the paratroopers scattered over a far wider area than intended.
In common with many others, Winters lost the leg bag containing his equipment during his descent, and landed on enemy territory armed with just a knife. “It was,” he remembered, “a heck of a way to enter a war.”
Ninety per cent of Easy Company was unaccounted for, including its commanding officer, who had in fact been killed along with the entire headquarters section. Winters, then a first lieutenant, rounded up the dozen men that he could find and proceeded with his mission.
This was to destroy a battery of four 105mm howitzers at Brécourt Manor which was pouring fire on to the causeways and was guarded by some 60 soldiers. Quickly assessing the situation, he got a pair of machineguns to distract their attention while two flanking parties enveloped the position, using the Germans’ own supply trenches to cover the attack on each gun. These were then put out of commission with explosive charges.
As a bonus, Winters also captured a map detailing the location of all German artillery and machinegun posts in that part of the Cotentin peninsula, an invaluable piece of intelligence. For decades afterwards, his assault on the position was taught as an exercise at the military academy at West Point. Winters was recommended for the US Army’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, but since the quota for these of one per division had already been reached, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross instead.
The company next saw action during Operation Market Garden, in September, by when Winters had risen to be executive officer of his battalion. Learning that a force of 200 Germans threatened to break through the thin American lines, Winters unhesitatingly led 30 of his men in a bayonet charge that caught the two enemy companies by surprise near a dyke. With the aid of artillery support, they were routed.
During the Ardennes offensive, Winters held the line at Foy, near Bastogne, helping the 101st to throw back German divisions many times their strength. The company ended the war by capturing Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden, the Eagle’s Nest.
For all his undoubted courage, the attribute most identified with Winters, and most prized by his men, was his power of leadership. This he defined as the ability to handle each soldier in the way that motivated him best, while remaining scrupulously even-handed in his treatment of them. Yet despite his gift of inspiring others, Winters himself found it hard to live with his experiences.
“I am still haunted by the names and faces of young men,” he wrote, “young airborne troopers who never had the opportunity to return home after the war ... So many men died so that others could live ... I have discovered that it is far easier to find quiet than to find peace.”
He was sustained by the exceptional closeness that existed among the veterans of Easy Company, a bond noted by Ambrose in 1992 when originally researching a book about D-Day. His history of their war became an unexpected bestseller, and in 2001 it was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, with Winters played by the British actor Damian Lewis.
Richard Davis Winters was born at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1918. His father was a foreman for the Edison Electric Company, but money was tight during the Depression, and from an early age Dick had part-time jobs.
After graduating in 1941 with a degree in business from Franklin & Marshall College, Winters enlisted in the Army. A year of military service was then compulsory, but shortly after he completed his basic training Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered the war.
He was commissioned as an officer and then joined the 506th for the inaugural parachute training course at Camp Toccoa, Georgia. This stood in the shadow of Currahee Mountain from which the unit took its war cry, a Cherokee word meaning “stand alone”.
In the autumn of 1943, the 101st Airborne was sent to England to prepare for D-Day. Winters later paid tribute to the homely atmosphere created for him at Aldbourne, Wiltshire, by the family with whom he was billeted, their own son having been killed serving with the RAF.
In common with many, little glory awaited Winters on his return home from the war. He worked for a time at a nitration works owned by a fellow officer, and then in 1951 was recalled to the Army to train soldiers for the Korean conflict. Yet he had had his fill of combat, and, as soon as he could, resigned his commission.
Winters appears to have been suffering from what is now termed post-traumatic stress, and he became rather reclusive. His father urged him to go deer-hunting as a way of getting him out of the house, but when faced with four of the creatures 20ft from him, he froze. “I couldn’t shoot,” he said later. “I couldn’t even think about lifting that rifle. I was done. I did not want any more killing.”
He bought a farmhouse, and while bringing up his family was employed for many years in a paper mill. In 1972 he set up his own business supplying farmers with animal feed. He retired in 1997, and had latterly been afflicted by Parkinson’s disease.
Since the success of Band of Brothers, Winters had become the focus of the growing admiration of a younger generation for the achievements of the veterans. He received numerous requests for autographs, and lectured widely on leadership. None the less, he was the personification of modesty and dignity. When asked if he was a hero, he liked to echo the words of a letter written to him by one of the men he had led, Myron Ranney: “No; but I served in a company of heroes.”
He was married, in 1948, to Ethel Estoppey. She survives him together with their son and daughter.
Major Dick Winters, soldier, was born on January 21, 1918. He died on January 2, 2011, aged 92
Audrey Lawson-Johnston
Last survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania who was saved by her teenaged nursemaid
In the era when virtually the entire Royal Armoured Corps was based in Germany confronting the threat of Soviet invasion of Central Europe, Robin Carnegie was unusual as a cavalryman for having seen active service in Korea, both as a tank commander and in the infantry role, qualified as a parachutist and for being an authority on operational logistics.
The son of Sir Francis Carnegie, he was educated at Rugby, where the back trouble that plagued him through most of his life was incurred on the sports field. He was commissioned into the 7th Queen’s Own Hussars in 1946 and began his service with the British Army of Occupation in Northern Italy, a duty that proved an uninterrupted pleasure other than for occasional border patrols in the region threatened by Tito’s irredentist partisans.
His regiment did not serve in Korea but he went out as an individual reinforcement to the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars who, equipped with Centurion and Cromwell tanks, supported 29th Infantry Brigade in the fighting after the Chinese intervention in the campaign. He transferred to the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards when they relieved the 8th Hussars in December 1951 and completed his Korean episode as the machinegun officer with the 1st Battalion The Shropshire Light Infantry.
After attending the Staff College, Camberley, he was appointed chief personnel and logistics officer of 16th Parachute Brigade in Cyprus, an experience that exacerbated his back problem — due to a heavy parachute landing — but began his preoccupation with operational administration. As well as serving in Cyprus during the EOKA insurrection, he went to Jordan with the Parachute Brigade in 1958 to forestall any threat to Amman by the new revolutionary Iraqi regime of General Abdul Qassim, a move requiring significant logistic improvisation.
More Middle East experience followed in 1959 on taking a squadron of the Queen’s Own Hussars — the regiment formed by the amalgamation of the 3rd King’s Own Hussars with his own — to Aden. The beginnings of the political turmoil that led to Britain leaving the area in 1967 were already evident, but he later referred to this period of his service, during which he held an independent command, as one of the most enjoyable.
He appeared to enjoy his stint — always hard work — on the directing staff at Camberley, that began on leaving Aden. Tall, slightly stooping and deliberately spoken, he had something of the air of calm and understanding of a classicist don, although — if that were suggested — he would laughingly protest that he would not have been nearly clever enough.
Operational logistics came his way again in 1965 when he was appointed chief personnel and logistics officer of the 17th Gurkha Division, resisting Indonesian incursions into East Malaysia. This involved supply of isolated outposts in the Borneo jungle using Royal Navy and RAF helicopters; on one occasion even arranging the delivery of a small python borrowed from Singapore Zoo to deal with the rats infesting such an outpost.
Command of the Queen’s Own Hussars in 1967 took him back to Aden for the final fraught months before the British withdrawal, his armoured cars covering the evacuation in November of that year. He then had the unusual experience of having squadrons deployed in Cyprus, Singapore and Hong Kong with his headquarters at Maresfield in Sussex. He took this wide dispersion of his regiment in his stride, being acknowledged as one of its finest commanding officers and was appointed OBE in 1968.
After a year as the senior personnel and logistics staff officer of the 3rd Division in the UK-based Strategic Reserve, he was appointed commander of 11th Armoured Brigade in Germany in 1971. This was a period for testing new ideas for the defence of the North German plain against possible Soviet attack in overwhelming force, without resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Co-operation with German formation commanders, some with experience against the Russians in the final stages of the Second World War, was developed to a closer extent than formerly, led by his divisional commander, Major-General (later Field Marshal Lord) Edwin Bramall.
By this stage of his career, Carnegie was perceived as a rapidly rising star and it came as no surprise when, following a sabbatical year at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, he was appointed GOC of the 3rd Division in England. This reflected his experience of brush-fire wars in regions of UK interest, for which his division was tasked to deal.
His return to Germany as Chief of Staff Headquarters BAOR raised speculation that he might succeed to the command of 1st (British) Corps but, instead he went to the MoD as Military Secretary in 1978 and was appointed KCB in the following year.
Carnegie’s final appointment in the Army was Director-General of Military Training working in an outpost of the MoD at the former RAF station at Old Sarum. Although well-equipped for this post and strongly supported by the then Chief of the General Staff, his former divisional commander, he found it difficult to establish his authority in the face of opposition from divisional commanders who considered training solely their prerogative.
Only 57 at the conclusion of this appointment, he had time enough before retirement for a four-star post, which he was offered but chose instead to retire to Wiltshire, his recurrent back problem probably being a contributory factor. He was a Deputy Lieutenant for Wiltshire and served as Chairman of the Appeal Body of the Army Benevolent Fund in Wiltshire and sat as a non-Service member of the Home Office Selection Board for the Police, Prison and Fire Services.
He was married to the artist Iona Sinclair, daughter of Major-General Sir John Sinclair, in 1955. She survives him, with a son and two daughters.
Lieutenant-General Sir Robin Carnegie, KCB, OBE, was born on June 22, 1926. He died on January 1, 2011, aged 84
Vang Pao
Vang Pao was one of the most important and divisive Cold War players in Southeast Asia. The Hmong leader dedicated his life to fighting communism and was a key operative in the Secret War in Laos, the CIA’s largest clandestine operation, which ran between 1960 and 1975.
Vang Pao was born in a Hmong village in Xiangkhuang province in northern Laos in 1929. The Hmong are one of several ethnic communities who migrated from China into Vietnam, Laos and Thailand from the early 19th century until as recently as the 1950s and traditionally live on isolated high mountain ridges.
While still a teenager, Vang Pao fought the Japanese in Laos. As a young man, he joined the French fight against the Viet Minh, until France’s colonial ambitions came to an end in 1954. He then joined the Royal Lao Army and attained the rank of General Officer, becoming the only Hmong to rise this high in the Laotian military.
Laos, a landlocked country slightly larger than Great Britain, was stuck on a Cold War fault line in the 1950s, right between communist North Vietnam and capitalist Thailand.
In March 1961 President Kennedy warned that the security of all SouthEast Asia would be in danger if Laos lost its neutrality. But Kennedy had already given the green light to clandestine operations. The CIA recruited Vang Pao in 1960, and the Hmong leader set out to create a guerrilla fighting force of 30,000 soldiers — partly by marrying into different clans, partly by offering cash, rice or new markets for opium, his people’s cash crop. This rag-tag ethnic militia was to take on the Pathet Lao, the Laotian communists.
To train his mercenaries, Vang Pao set up a military base at Long Cheng, a valley deep in the jungles of Laos. Once the CIA had carved an airstrip into the wilderness in 1962 the top-secret site quickly grew to become the second-largest city in Laos. At the same time, hundreds of runways were constructed by the United States Agency for International Development to fly food supplies to refugees in remote areas. This enabled Air America, a private airline owned by the CIA, to move troops, ammunition, money and drugs around a country that had virtually no roads.
Throughout the war, the CIA dealt with only one man in the hills of northern Laos — Vang Pao was the agency’s single power broker. In the 2008 documentary The Most Secret Place on Earth, the Long Cheng CIA case officer Vint Lawrence remembered his leadership qualities. “He had a way of connecting to the common, utterly illiterate, opium-smoking Hmong, who lived on the back, away up in the mountains ... he was an extraordinarily charismatic leader ... and he had serious shortcomings, he was very impatient.”
By the late 1960s, Vang Pao’s jungle city had 40,000 inhabitants and was the world’s busiest airport. His guerrillas baited Pathet Lao units and North Vietnamese troops who would then be bombed by planes taking off from Long Cheng, manned by Hmong pilots. Yet Vang Pao’s base was not marked on any maps and the US continued to claim political neutrality.
The only money in the hills of northern Laos had long been in the growing of opium. But as the war intensified, foreign buyers no longer visited remote villages. To finance part of the Hmong militia, Hmong officers used Air America to fly opium out of the villages into Long Cheng, where it was turned into heroin. According to Alfred McCoy, J. R. W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a company called Xiangkhuang Air Transport took the heroin to the Lao capital, from where the drugs were moved into international markets.
Initially, Vang Pao’s gambit paid off and his CIA-sponsored militia made significant gains against the communists. But everything changed with the arrival of US troops in neighbouring Vietnam in 1965. A successful counterinsurgency fell victim to another American war. For nine years, American planes bombed Laos around the clock, primarily to stop the flow of North Vietnamese military supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The bombing killed thousands of ordinary Laotians and barely slowed the movement of arms.
Vang Pao’s guerrilla army became a sideshow and by the early 1970s, most of his soldiers had been killed. As communist troops closed in on Long Cheng in May 1975, Vang Pao and his CIA handlers reluctantly abandoned several thousand Hmong fighters to face the advancing enemy. Some Hmong units faded into the jungle and continued to fight, though most either resettled in Laos or fled as refugees to Thailand.
Along with several thousand fighters, Vang Pao moved to the US, where he became the most prominent leader of the Hmong community, which numbers around 200,000 today. The former general continued to campaign for his people’s eventual return to a free, non-communist homeland. In a 2006 interview for The Most Secret Place on Earth, Vang Pao confirmed his support for the remaining Hmong fighters in Laos: “The Hmong who have helped me in the past and who are still in Laos, ask me to help them. So I have to get involved.”
Vang Pao was seen by many American Hmong as an exiled head of state, while others thought of him as a Cold War relic. In 2007, Vang Pao, along with other Hmong officials, was arrested and charged in a federal court for allegedly planning to overthrow the Laotian Government. All charges were dropped in 2009 and the truth of these allegations is unlikely to be established. In Laos, Vang Pao remained persona non grata and the Government has consistently denied its people information on the Secret War.
Vang Pao was said to have had five wives in Laos — where multiple marriages are lawful — but divorced all but one of them before leaving for the US. One of his sons claimed in 2007 that he had fathered more than 20 children.
Vang Pao, leader of the Hmong people in Laos, was born in December 1929. He died on January 6, 2011, aged 81
