70 years later, WWII dad’s letters inspire son’s journey
Billy Winters was 4 months old and living with his mother in Orlando in 1944 when his fighter-pilot dad was killed in France, shot down by Nazi gunners.
Until last year, Winters knew little of the 27-year-old aviator.
Now, 70 years later, Winters is discovering his father.
Oneletter at a time. And there are hundreds of them.
U.S. Army Capt. William Robert Winters had promised to write his newlywed and pregnant wife, Peaches, every day he was at war.
He often began cheerfully, “Hi Sweetie” or “Hi Honey,” and usually signed off, “Always Yours, Bob.”
She treated each letter as a keepsake, slip--
ping it back into its envelope and tucking it away in a drawer.
When finally counted, they numbered 212 in all. Sometimes Peaches’ captain wrote to her twice a day.
On this Memorial Day weekend, the pilot’s son, inspired by the letters, has traveled to France to visit his father’s grave for the first time and to place amemorial in a wildflower field where the P-47 Thunderbolt on a strafing mission crashed and burst into flames.
“It’s hard to explain why I feel I have to do this,” Winters said of his trip to France.
The retired insurance man, now living in Ormond Beach, did not even begin to read his father’s letters until last year, three years after he discovered them in a drawer following his 87-year- old mother’s death in 2010.
“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read them,” he said. “They were hers. They weren’t mine.”
But he was persuaded to read the letters — perhaps just a few at a time — by a friend associated with the American World War II Orphans Network, whose members lost a father in the war.
Reading your father’s war letters “can be emotional and overwhelming,” said Judith Hathaway of Kansas, who lost her father in 1945 when his B-17 bomber was shot down in Germany. “But most of us would love to have that treasure from our dads.”
Capt. Winters’ correspondence reveals an insight into his personality: He worried constantly about his wife, just 21.
Born in Georgia, Gloria Dickens was naturally nicknamed “Peaches” by the Army boys who infiltrated Orlando in the 1940s. The U.S. Army Air Corps had set upa flight-training airfield at what is now Orlando Executive Airport.
Freshly graduated in 1941 from Orlando High School, she had no interest in what she called those “wild” fliers at the airfield.
But Winters, a Wiscons in native, won her over. They were married in the base chapel in 1943 and honeymooned in Dayton a Beach.
Eight months later, he was shipped to Europe with the 81st Fighter Squadron and flew 80 combat missions as part of the Ninth Air Force Thunderbolts, supporting the muddy, advancing troops of U. S. Gen. George S. Patton.
The pilot’s letters, always written in neat cursive, portray a war-weary aviator eager to fight for freedom but homesick.
“I always had the urge naturally as every one else did to go to combat,” he wrote to Peaches. “I think now that it was nothing but curiosity ... well, my curiosity is well-satisfied and I am ready to come home to my wife.”
The letter ends abruptly: “Have to close. The air raid [siren] just sounded.”
Before the babywas born, he was convinced it would be a boy who should be named Billy. He tried to calm his wife’s fears about female temptations overseas. “Asfar as your thoughts about the English girls — you can forget them.”
He shared silly stories — such as about accidentally setting his tent and pants on fire.
Then he wrote of his excitement of the boy born at Orange General Hospital in Orlando.
“You know I don’t think I ever really felt proud about anything until I saw the picture this morning,” the decorated pilot wrote after receiving the first picture o fhis baby. “I really feel quite flattered to be his Daddy and I am awfully in love with his Mummy, too.”
Peaches not only saved that letter, she decorated it with lipsticked kisses.
His letters were often censored by the War Department to hide his unit’s location or other details that could aid the enemy if the mail were intercepted. But he penned a bare-bones account of a victorious air battle with the German air force.
“I celebrated Billy’s [birth] announcement by knocking down an FW-190 this afternoon,” he wrote.
“I celebrated Billy’s [birth] announcement by knocking down an FW-190 this afternoon. Hope I can get a few more before it ends.” U.S. Army Capt. William RobertWinters’ letter
“Hope I can get a few more before it ends.”
On Nov. 24, 1944, he described cold, hard rains and radio reports “which aren’t to be considered too authoritative” telling of ground gains by American troops. He reminisced about Christmas 1943 in Orlando, when he wasn’t much help with the shopping.
“We sure did have fun, tho,” he wrote. “So be good, love me more than ever, and keep that cute little guy and yourself in good health for me.”
It was his last letter to Peaches.
On Dec. 9 she received instead a telegram that read: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your husband Captain William R Winters has been reported missing in action since twenty-five November over France. “
Peaches wrote 52 letters to her husband over the next five months. None was answered.
All were marked “missing” and sent back to her unopened. They remain in a box, still unopened almost 70 years later. Winters can’t bring himself to relive his mother’s grief by reading her words.
A final telegram April 26, 1945, confirmed Capt. Winters’ death.
Peaches and Billy were visited in November that year by Ed Winters, the pilot’s brother who was en route to Miami to deliver an automobile. The brothers had enlisted on the same day. On his way back home, he stopped in Orlando again and never left.
He and Peaches married two months later, a union of 45 years that produced six more children.
Growing up in Orlando, where he graduated from Bishop Moore Catholic High, Billy Winters called his uncle “Dad” and referred to his pilot father as “Daddy Bob.”
“When we went to the beach,” he recalled, “Mom would say, ‘ Daddy Bob’ is across the ocean.”
The memorial in France, a bronze plaque paid for by Winters, bears a photograph of the father he never met and a phrase, written in both English and French: “He gave his life for freedom and for the people of France.”