Major Dick Winters and Captain Lewis Nixon, who met in Officer Candidate School and became best friends, are pictured celebrating the end of the war in Berchtesgaden in early May 1945.

They are sitting on the patio of Hitler’s alpine retreat, the Berghof. The two men are depicted by Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston in “Band of Brothers”. Of his close friendship with Lewis Nixon, Dick Winters once said, “Nixon was a hard drinker, a free spirit who enjoyed the wild life and partied with the best of them. On the surface, no two individuals were more diametrically opposed in temperament than Nixon and I.

I was a confirmed teetotaler and never swore. I preferred a quiet evening in the barracks to the nightlife of Columbus, Georgia, or neighboring Phenix City, Alabama. Despite the differences in lifestyle, I sensed we shared mutual feelings and ways of looking at life.

I could understand him and help him understand me, as well as understand himself. Our friendship evolved naturally, and he soon became my closest friend.”