Will the Legacy of American Manhood Die with Dick Winters?

by Geoffrey Botkin, January 22, 2011

Earlier this month, Major Richard Winters died quietly in central Pennsylvania and was buried next to his parents in a family plot. A mere smattering of news stories and obituaries noted his passing. What they said was a curious commentary on the times of Dick Winters as seen by today’s generation. There were a few column-lines devoted to his rank as a soldier in WWII, and then a few column-inches on his celebrity status as the man made famous on HBO in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries.

If celebrity status is the most important thing our entertainment-oriented generation respects about Dick Winters, then America does not understand manhood. Could it be possible that history will mark Richard Winters, 1918-2011, as one of the last American men?

How Boys Must Be Raised

Dick Winters grew up on a Pennsylvania farm with parents who were born in the 1800s. Richard and Edith raised their farm boy to grow into maturity — a kind of maturity very common to the men of colonial and frontier America. They imparted this American legacy to their son. Winters later entered the US military in 1941 with the fully developed character of a man. The pressures of deadly combat did not “make a man of him.” He was already a man. He took the American version of manhood with him into war, and he influenced history. Enemy bullets and bayonets only sharpened his sense of duty and maturity. “He made one right decision after another,” author Stephen Ambrose noted. “‘Follow me’ was his code. He personally killed more Germans and took more risks that anyone else.”^[1]

Many of the paratroopers who enlisted with Winters had received training in manhood from fathers who were part of a 19th Century culture that valued and preserved moral certainty. During combat training in Georgia, Winters looked for men with a masculine toughness of mind. He had no idea that his men would be on the front for so many months. Combat training prepared the boys of Easy Company for a deadly mission in Normandy: three days of hard fighting and dying at an 80% expected casualty rate. When the mission was expanded from days to months, it was manhood that sustained Easy Company through unimaginable hardship. Though they watched their friends bleed and die around them, they kept moving with great consistency of maturity. They were thinking like men, acting like men, fighting like men, persevering like men, and they were completely ready to die like men. Winters was moving through Europe with real men who would demonstrate maturity through one of the greatest tests of manhood in modern history. Every one of them was inspired by the quiet manliness of their commanding officer.

How Men Fight

Winter’s manhood must be remembered in the context of moral conflict. Winters had enemies, and that is what he called them. He had no trouble speaking the language of moral certainty. His enemies were bad guys, and Winters could draw a clear line between good and bad, right and wrong, moral certainty and the immoral certainty of the Third Reich.

As a young man, Winters responded to the moral tests of his day with a kind of moral backbone his enemies wanted to destroy. Nazi warriors tried for months to kill him. Young Winters was not confused by uncertainty of life, intimidated by the strength of the enemy, or squeamish about duty. He didn’t pause to examine his emotions or to whine about the challenge or to worry about being “separated from his heart,” a phrase modern men use as an excuse for growing up.

Yes, lethal enemies have a way of focusing the mind on what is important. But so does an important mission. Winters and his boys jumped out of bullet-ridden airplanes right into the middle of the Nazi army. On purpose. At night. In the confusion of the drop, they were separated from one another. Their company commander was killed before he hit the ground. They had never seen a real Nazi, but now their enemies were everywhere. Easy Company had never experienced the horrors of combat. The young Americans were lost, helpless, inexperienced, completely surrounded and under attack. They were afraid, as any young men would be. But they were not morally lost. They had the kind of iron backbone that guaranteed moral orientation and moral stamina. It was this inner strength that sustained them as men. What helped Easy Company handle this unsettling situation like men?

How Men Think

Winters could think calmly because the confidence of manhood sustained him. He could lead under the pressure of any moral test. He could be decisive. He could inspire other brave men. His adult life was marked by a unique kind of masculine thinking at every step.

By the third day on the ground, Easy Company had done more mature, intelligent fighting than many generals see in a lifetime. These young Americans of the 101st Airborne went on to three more months, then another three months, then another. Their story is a record of uncommon valor. It is also a record of what was once common manhood.

How Men Retreat

When Dick Winters assaulted the Nazi infantry in 1944, the Nazis knew there was something uniquely American in the resolve of Winters and his men. It was a species of American manhood that had been forged in the colonies and on the American frontier. There was simply no cowardice or hesitation or timidity in the way Winters took one objective after another.

Before the American invasion, however, Nazi social planners encountered a softer sort of man almost everywhere they turned. Chamberlain was a pushover. Hitler was rightly contemptuous of the German protestant pastors. “They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable jobs and incomes,”^[2] he scoffed. Hitler was able to walk all over men like Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who cowered before the Nazi army like . . . the perfect nice guy. He betrayed his nation and allowed Nazi officers to roll in and take whatever liberties they wanted.

How appropriate that Europeans contemptuously refer to modern American men as “quislings.” Just as Drucker predicted, today’s undisciplined American juveniles, in their forties, cannot imagine the world in which Dick Winters lived. Most don’t have a clue as to why America has lost the respect of her former allies, and all her former enemies. It is because American men no longer even speak the language of maturity and responsibility.

The morally discerning man has been replaced by “the tolerant man” who is intellectually bound to excruciating political correctness. The concept of friend-or-enemy suggests a tense divergence between good and evil. The very concept suggests the existence of good and evil, right and wrong. The honorably faithful man, who knows which side he is on, has been replaced by the nice guy. Outwardly, the nice guy is accommodating, docile, and equivocating — the man who never judges anything or anyone. Inwardly, he is paralyzed by fears and will surrender anything to cling to his artificial life of selfish peace and affluence.

The artificial men our time have artificial minds that guarantee ignorant passivity. They have forgotten that men have the duty to develop their capacities to discern and act. As for enemies, they have little to fear, because passive men are no threat to evil. Evil can advance without resistance.

How Men Surrender

Dick Winters hurled himself into world history in 1944 on D-Day, taking the war to Hitler on Hitler’s home turf. But while Winters was away killing America’s enemies, he was betrayed at home. There were forces at work killing American manhood. By the time Winters returned home, America was a different place. It was less civil. It was less mature because American males were surrendering maturity and responsibility. Grown American businessmen were like children compared to those mature boys who fought with Winters to save civilization. The materialistic fellows on Main Street were sinking into a spineless self-centeredness as though someone was whispering to them that they were completely excused from manly responsibility.

Less than a decade after Winters trained his men to fight Nazis, he was ordered by the US Army to train other young American officers to fight Communists in Korea. He tried. Then, in frustration, he resigned from the military because the young officer candidates would not be men. They were frivolous and undisciplined. They were not serious about the meaning of conflict or manhood. They were not willing to think like men. And they were not willing to grow up.

“Every few hundred years,” wrote Winters’ contemporary Peter Drucker, “in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself — it’s worldview; its basic values: its social and political structures; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived. . . . We are currently living through just such a transformation.”^[3]

Winters saw this transformation first-hand. It was more than a shift in fads or cultural preferences. The post-WWII transformation destroyed American manhood in the same way Winters destroyed Nazi gun emplacements. This happened because parents ceased to raise boys into the maturity of real life, and the maturity necessary for manhood. America without manhood can no longer be America. It can only exist as a new-world playground for spoiled, infantile males — and for the social planners who function as their babysitters.

How Men Persevere

There is a lot more to the story of Dick Winters than a few medals and a celebrity name. It is time to pay respect to a man who embodied a kind of manhood our modern culture has carelessly misplaced. In lectures to military cadets he said, “Strive.” This is what it will take for a few good men to reestablish moral courage in America. It will take perseverance in the face of unrelenting opposition. It will take leadership in the tradition of Dick Winters. “Strive,” Winters taught, “to be a leader of character, competence, and courage.”

Winters defined manhood in his lectures. But the greater definition is in the record of his actions, both in war and in peace. If American men will honor Major Winters by learning about his legacy and following his moral competence, they may get their heritage of maturity back. They may be able to get their moral strength back. They may be able to get American manhood back. Then, perhaps, they too can live and die as heroes.