Robert Wynn

Background

From South Hill, Virginia, he befriended Darrell 'Shifty' Powers on a machinist course in Norfolk in 1941; after Pearl Harbor the two worked at the Portsmouth Navy Shipyard, then enlisted together for the paratroopers with a bet that whoever quit would owe the other ten dollars - asked later what got him into the paratroopers, Wynn said 'Shifty did.' Trained under Captain Sobel at Toccoa, he became Sobel's runner at Camp Mackall. On D-Day he was shot in the buttocks in the attack on the Brécourt Manor guns and apologised to Lieutenant Winters for having 'goofed', which Winters later called a beautiful example of a soldier dedicated to his company.

Told in hospital that ninety days out of action would mean another unit, he got himself back to Easy Company and fought on; in Haguenau he fell into the Moder River on a patrol, screaming so loudly, Clancy Lyall said, that he must have woken all the Germans. He survived to the end of the war and died just over a year before the series first aired.