Charles Winters

Charles Thompson Winters (February 10, 1913 – October 29, 1984) was an American businessman who volunteered during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined $5,000 for violating the Neutrality Act of 1939 after helping smuggle three B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers to Israel in the late 1940s. Of the small handful of Americans prosecuted for aiding Israel in the 1948 war, only Winters served time in prison.

Winters received a posthumous pardon by President George W. Bush on December 23, 2008.

Early life Winters, the Protestant son of Scotch-Canadian and Irish parents, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1913. after the war, buying decommissioned military cargo planes that were being used to transport fruits and vegetables. A friend and flight engineer named Al Schwimmer, known as the father of the Israeli air force, enlisted Winters in his efforts to supply aircraft to Jewish fighters in Israel; with his government experience, Winters managed to smuggle three B-17 bombers to Israel. Taking off from Miami, the two B-17s refueled in Puerto Rico, as if completing a normal shipping route, but instead flew to Israel by way of the Azores and Czechoslovakia; They constituted the newly created Israeli Air Force's first heavy bombers. In his diary on July 16, 1948, David Ben-Gurion noted their arrival in Israel, and mentioned that they had already been used for several bombing runs in Egypt. They formed 69 Squadron of the Israeli Air Force, known as the "Hammers".

Winters was subsequently prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney in Miami for violating the Neutrality Act of 1939 in conspiring to smuggle three bombers via Czechoslovakia to Palestine. Schwimmer, while convicted, was not sentenced to prison, and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2000. Another man in the operation, Herman Greenspun, was also convicted with no prison time, and pardoned in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. and his ashes were buried in the Alliance International Cemetery in Jerusalem's "German Colony," next to Jerusalem's German Templar cemetery as well as scattered from Mount Tabor. the American Jewish Committee, and Steven Spielberg. Democratic Representative Ron Klein, who led the congressional group, commented that "President Bush made the right decision today to issue a posthumous pardon to Charles Winters, a Florida resident who played an essential role in the creation of the state of Israel."

Winters' lawyer, Wilmer Hale partner Reginald Brown, stated, "He did a heroic thing and, at the time, the law didn't reflect our values. The pardon is a way of the law catching up with the history." His son James responded to the pardon, saying, "This is a present for my father...It was a monumental challenge, but my dad used to always say 'Keep the faith,' and we did". Winters' pardon constituted the first posthumous pardon since Henry Ossian Flipper in 1999.