The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (7 page)

At 12.30 P.M., the
Curacoa
signaled, “I AM DOING MY BEST SPEED 25 KNOTS ON COURSE 108. WHEN YOU ARE AHEAD I WILL EDGE ASTERN OF YOU.” Captain Boutwood went below to have lunch just after the signal was sent. When he got back to the bridge around 1 P.M., he saw that the
Mary
was catching up with the
Curacoa,
so he ordered a change of course for the
Curacoa
.
¹⁸

Aboard the
Mary
, Senior First Officer Noel Robinson had been on watch since noon. At 2:04, the wheelhouse clock chimed. A few minutes later, Robinson noted that the
Mary
was now quickly gaining on the
Curacoa
. He ordered the quartermaster to “port a little” and then went into the wheelhouse to check his course. When Robinson got back to the bridge, he was shocked by how close the ships now were to each other. When the
Curacoa
rolled, Robinson could see “down her funnels.”

Robinson turned to the wheelhouse.

“Hard-a-port!”
¹⁹

The
Mary
’s quartermaster spun the wheel as fast as he could. But turning such a mammoth vessel was a slow process. . . .

Telegraphist Allin Martin was a radio operator on the
Curacoa
’s lower bridge:

The upper bridge speaking tube clanged and my “oppo” [opposite number] indicated that if any camera was to hand a particularly good view of the
Queen Mary
was available. Unclipping the bulkhead door, I stepped outside, where, to my horror, I saw the enormous bulk of the
Queen Mary
bearing down on our port quarter at about fifty yards range. Her huge white bow wave seemed as tall as a house and it seemed inevitable that we were within seconds of being torn apart. I dived for my lifebelt.
²⁰

It was 2:12 P.M. Suddenly, the 81,000-ton
Mary
, now moving at 28.5 knots, hit the
Curacoa
150 feet from her stern, breaking through three-inch- thick armor and bulkheads as if they were cardboard.

On deck, the Bedford boys could not believe their eyes. “There were several of us there,” recalled Earl Newcomb. “We knew we were getting close to land and we’d gone up to get a first look. The
Mary
just cut her clean in two.”
²¹

Corporal Bob Slaughter was sunbathing when he felt the collision. Men shouted and ran to the ship’s rail. “My first thought was that we had been torpedoed. . . . I saw the
Curacoa
’s stern going down one side of the
Mary
, and the bow down the other—cut right in two. The
Cura-coa
’s crow’s nest was parallel to the water, and there was a sailor in there still doing semaphore signals. His eyes looked enormous—he was so frightened. All we could do was throw life-jackets. I remember thinking: “ ‘God, here we are, haven’t even got overseas, and we’ve killed all these British sailors.’ ”
²²

Deep below on the
Mary
, the collision felt as if a rowing boat had gone over a log—a jarring and a screech but nothing spectacular. Twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Allen Huddleston, who had worked as a soda jerk in Lyle’s drugstore in downtown Bedford before the war and was married to Private Nicholas Gillaspie’s cousin, Geraldine, was lying on his bunk when he suddenly felt a “small” jolt. “I looked out the porthole and saw half a ship going down,” Huddleston said. “There were people still in her.”
²³

Roy Stevens was getting ready to disembark when the collision happened. “The boat jarred. It was very quick. Soon, everybody was running upstairs to see what happened.” When Stevens got to the top deck, he saw the
Curacoa
sinking in the
Mary
’s wake.

The
Mary
’s Captain Illingworth was also below when the ships collided. He immediately rushed to the wheelhouse.

“Was that a bomb?” he asked.

“No, Captain,” the
Mary
’s quartermaster replied, “we hit the cruiser.”
²⁴

Aboard the forward section of the
Curacoa
, Captain Boutwood was still alive.

“Abandon ship!” he shouted.
²⁵

There was suddenly a deafening screech as steam pipes ruptured. Men jumped off the ship wherever they stood. Clouds of dense black smoke shrouded the area, and oil from the cruiser’s fuel tanks soon covered the surface, making it harder for men to hold onto wreckage. The burnt and badly wounded started to slip into oblivion. Among the ship’s officers, only Captain Boutwood and a Lieutenant Holmes were still alive.

Survivors swam from the ship, knowing they could be sucked under with it. Suddenly, the bow lurched into the sky and what remained of the
Curacoa
sank. Escaping air created a final anguished groan. The
Cu-racoa
disappeared beneath the waves at 2:24 P.M., ten minutes after being struck.

Aboard the
Mary
, Captain Illingworth struggled to contain his emotions. Although he could see many survivors in the water, he ordered his men to continue their course. There were more than 11,000 troops on board: To stop would be to risk all their lives.

Seventeen-year-old Private Bob Sales of Company B had gone on deck to get some air. He couldn’t understand why the
Mary
did not stop to pick up survivors.

“You’re crazy as hell, man,” a soldier told him.“The
Mary
, sitting still in the water—a German submarine could blow [us] off the face of the earth.”
²⁶

They were only hours from Scotland, but would they make it? Indeed, how badly damaged was the
Mary
? Captain Illingworth ordered Staff Captain Harry Grattidge to find out. Grattidge had been awakened by the impact and had arrived on deck just as the remnants of the
Curacoa
disappeared beneath the ocean.
²⁷
Now he rushed to the
Mary
’s forepeak to assess the damage:

The speed was still on the ship when I reached the forepeak. By the light of a torch I could see the water racing in and out of the forepeak, a great column of it forming a kind of cushion from the collision bulkhead, the watertight reinforced steel wall that rises from the very bottom of the ship to the main deck. If that bulkhead were weakened I did not like to think of the
Mary
’s chances. I sweated through my silent inspection. But finally, not a crack. Not a break. I turned to the bosun and the carpenter: “Get every length of wood you can find, bosun. Get it down here and strengthen that collision bulkhead as much as you possibly can. I’ll report to the Captain.” . . . I was sick at what we had done, yet I marveled, too, at the strange and terrible impregnability of the
Queen Mary
. It came home to me that she had no equal anywhere in the Atlantic, perhaps not anywhere in the world.
²⁸

Relieved that the
Mary
had suffered no life-threatening damage, Illingworth set a course, at thirteen knots, for Greenock. He also ordered the destroyers in the escort to go to the
Curacoa
survivors’ rescue. It was well over two hours after the collision when the rescue ships reached the scene of the disaster. Survivors clung to rafts and floatnets. Some held on with their last strength to debris. Captain Boutwood was pulled near death from the water by the crew of a whaleboat from the Bramham destroyer.

Only 101 men from the
Curacoa
’s crew of 439 were saved. Twenty-one bodies would later wash ashore along the coast of Scotland. No one from the stern of the boat survived. All but a few of the men who had marveled at the
Mary
from the boat’s quarterdeck had been killed. The Gray Ghost was the last thing they saw.

Later that afternoon, Lieutenant Ray Nance and ten other officers in his quarters were called down to the
Mary
’s main lounge. The chandeliers had been taken down and the floors planked over. Hundreds of 29th Division officers sat waiting nervously. Captain Illingworth informed them that the tragedy could not be mentioned under any circumstance. Information about the sinking would not be public until the war ended.

The tragedy’s impact on the Bedford boys was enormous. “It was a great shock to see that happen,” recalled Roy Stevens. “We’d not been in combat before. We’d never seen people die like those who drowned there. The men were very disturbed.”
²⁹

Was the collision yet another bad omen? The near capsizing had set the superstitious on edge. Now many others worried that such a gut-wrenching catastrophe, before they had even encountered the enemy, meant the 29th Division was cursed with bad luck. One thing was certain—with their own eyes they had now seen how expendable men were in war.

On October 3, a bitterly cold and overcast day, they finally arrived in the Forth of Clyde and boarded “lighters” (old channel ferries) that took them to Greenock harbor. As the Bedford boys formed up on the dockside, the war suddenly felt very close. Barrage balloons filled the dirty skies as they marched through terraced streets to Greenock’s station, where they boarded an old train of the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway. “It was gray, cold, raining,” recalled Roy Stevens. “We were not too happy that day.”
³⁰

The men had no idea where they were headed. Some hoped for a training camp in the south of England. But others predicted they were going directly to another port to board another troopship, this time bound for Africa. Considering their luck, they could be digging foxholes in the desert just in time for Christmas.

C
OMPANY A SAT CRAMPED
together in old British railway carriages. Drab terraced homes gave way to country. Men were soon crowding the greasy windows to catch glimpses of the fall landscape in the Scottish border country, some parts uncannily similar to Virginia’s— rolling hills dotted with patches of bluish heather, crumbling stone walls, crooked lanes, and sheep farms. In northern England, at some junctions, gaggles of grubby schoolchildren, evacuated from London because of the Blitz, called for candy and gum. At several stations, pale-faced Red Cross girls offered refreshment—crumpets and tarts, served with piping hot tea.
¹

As darkness fell, blackout blinds came down in the train. Suddenly, an air raid siren wailed. The Bedford boys had never heard a real warning before. The war was above them and all around them—they were traveling through a county that had been under attack for over three years. “I tried to get some sleep,” recalled Bob Slaughter. “Other boys gambled and shot dice. We were all ready to go to war. But of course back then we didn’t know what war was.”
²

Early on October 4, 1942, the Bedford boys shouldered their hundred- pound barrack bags and marched into an old British army base on Salisbury Plain, southwest of London. Their new home, said an officer, was called Tidworth Barracks. It dated back to Elizabethan times and had been used at the turn of the century as a cavalry post. To most of the men it looked like a Dark Ages prison, all “steel, brick, rock—not a plank of wood anywhere, very cold, austere.”
³
The nearest towns were Andover and Salisbury with its magnificent cathedral, and just ten miles away stood the ancient wonder of Stonehenge.

The Bedford boys’ first task was to “go get sacks.” The men discovered a mass of straw and were told to fill cloth bags to form a mattress. They then placed them on “double-decker beds” knocked up by a bad carpenter. Any man over six feet slept with his knees to his chin. It was freezing, yet their only source of warmth—two ancient pot-bellied stoves—was extinguished at lights out. The next morning, each of Company A’s four barracks discovered there were just two bathtubs with claw feet for fifty men.
⁴

By the second morning at Tidworth, the 116th’s 1st Battalion was laid low with a scabies epidemic caused by infested straw in the mattresses. “Everybody was just scratching and clawing all over,” recalled Company D’s Bob Slaughter. “To make matters worse, the British food rations were pretty meager. Breakfast was maybe a smoked herring—what the Brits called a kipper. It stank. Then there was bread and marmalade. The bread was hard. The marmalade was bitter—just orange peelings and no sugar. And they gave us cups of tea. Not coffee. We felt like we were being starved. Each night, we’d go to the PX [the company store] and spend all our money on candy bars. But the Coca-Cola had no sugar and was served warm. Everything was just horrible.”
⁵

Far worse was to come. As soon as the men had recovered from scabies, they began the longest training program any American infantrymen endured in World War II. It would last over twenty months, from October 1942 to May 1944. The U.S. chiefs of staff had not yet decided when to invade Europe and they were concerned about the American forces’ lack of combat experience and rigorous training. So they opted to turn the 29th into as strong an invasion force as possible. For seven days a week, broken once a month by a forty-eight-hour pass, Company A was pushed to its physical limits. Fifty men from Bedford had arrived at Tidworth. Each week, that number fell as one man after another was weeded out or assigned to a different unit.

The 29th Division’s commander, Major General Leonard Gerow, wanted to prove that his troops, largely made up of National Guard out- fits, could be made just as tough and battle-ready as any others in the army of the United States. A plainspoken and popular graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Gerow was keenly aware of how some of his fellow generals, namely Lt. Gen. Lesley McNair, Chief of Staff of U.S. Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C., belittled the National Guard troops under his command. If Gerow had to work his men twice as hard as other division commanders to prove West Pointers like McNair wrong, then so be it.

“Endurance and strength tests called ‘burp-up’ exercises were given to monitor physical fitness,” recalled Corporal Bob Slaughter. “Those who passed earned the Expert Infantryman’s Badge and an extra five dollars in the monthly paycheck. Failing to qualify meant transfer to a noncom-bat outfit.”
⁶

To qualify, first the men had to run a hundred yards in twelve seconds in army boots and uniform, do thirty-five push-ups and ten chin-ups, get across an obstacle course at a sprint, and then show themselves to be deadly accurate with a Colt .45, the Garand M-1 rifle, and a BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle], the standard issue submachine gun.

All of this was done beneath sullen skies on the damp and wind-exposed Salisbury Plain. “It seemed to me the first few months in England the sun seemed to be rationed,” recalled Slaughter. “Thick fog, a biting wind and cold drizzle were typical weather during November and December. We accepted bland, scanty food; little sleep and rest; and not enough warm clothing.”
⁷

To mark its first Christmas away from home, the 29th Division held parties for evacuated British kids. Men took items from care packages and gave them as presents. For propaganda purposes, there were actually two Christmas dinners: one in early December, staged for newspapers back home, and one on Christmas day.

At 10 P.M. on Christmas, John Schenk took time to be alone and think about Ivylyn. It had recently snowed and John had sent her a photograph of him and two other Bedford boys clowning about in their shorts, wearing British helmets. It cheered Ivylyn—he seemed to be enjoying himself.

The highlight of any day for Schenk and the Bedford boys was mail call. Company A’s mail clerk, a Pennsylvanian named Ned Bowman, would deliver mail first to Fellers, Nance, and other officers, next to Master Sergeant John Wilkes, and then walk into the barracks and call out men’s names. Some boys would fall into deep depression if they failed to get a letter from home or a Red Cross parcel. Packages from home were shared around, and delicacies and ethnic foods were often tasted for the first time. By 1943, the average GI received fourteen letters each week and wrote one letter a day unless in combat.
⁸

Like many Bedford boys replying to letters from home that Christmas, Schenk masked his homesickness with humor. He’d been forced to give up his habit of smoking a cigar after dinner. “A cigar over here is quite a treat,” he explained. “The English think that Churchill is the only one who can smoke one.”
⁹
Ivylyn promptly went out and bought a humidor. “I drew a picture and sent it,” she remembered. “I told him it would be waiting when he got back.”
¹⁰

Sometimes relatives sent clippings from the
Bedford Bulletin
which fascinated many of the boys who had grown nostalgic since leaving America. By New Year’s Day, 1943, over 1,500 Bedford County men were in service and death notices were starting to appear in the
Bedford Bulletin
. Among the first to die was John Canaday, twenty-one, a classmate of several of the Bedford boys. He had been killed fighting the Japanese in the South Pacific. More men from Bedford were being drafted every week and those who had been deferred so that they could work farms were “not happy over having to explain constantly why they are not in service. One man, whose son was deferred for this reason, went out one morning and found his fence posts leading to the highway painted yellow.”
¹¹

The big news from home that winter was the crash of a B-25 bomber into the side of Sharp Top, one of the twin Peaks of Otter. Five men lost their lives when the plane hit head-on at 10 P.M. on February 2, 1943. Many townspeople saw the bomber fly over Bedford so low that they feared it would crash in the town itself. “Those who reached the scene of the disaster were sickened by the sheer horror of what they saw,” reported the
Bulletin
. “All the bodies were cruelly crushed and mangled, some were dismembered, and one of the searchers said that the head of one of the men had not been found when he left.”
¹²
For the first time, the war had truly hit home.

Back in England, the Bedford boys grew ever more miserable: The winter of 1942–43 was one of the coldest on record in England, yet the boys’ training program, much of it spent outside, got far tougher as the weather got worse. By February, shortcuts were no longer tolerated on marches; MPs were posted to make sure every man completed the weekly twenty-five- mile “yomps.” One New Yorker in Company A recalled that it was “not unusual to march out with heavy overcoats, covered with our ponchos and be fighting frozen icicles on one side and sweating on the other.”
¹³

The damp chill in England seemed to penetrate everything. “Us yanks can’t figure the weather here like we could at home,” Captain Fellers wrote his parents. “I remember back there when Dad used to go out in the yard and take a look at the mountains, and if he saw any snow flurries on the Peaks [of Otter] he would come in and pull his chair closer to the fire. Here the people don’t seem to mind the weather at all.”
¹⁴

Eventually, the conditions on Salisbury Plain began to improve as spring approached. The colors brightened. Crocuses appeared and then the first daffodils. And Company A began to earn the praise of battalion commanders: Captain Fellers was shaping a first-class fighting force. On average, the men were seven pounds heavier—most of it muscle—than when they had left America. Their chest sizes had increased by an inch at least and their self-confidence had soared. Several sergeants were selected for officer training and Jack Powers earned the rare honor of being chosen to join the 29th Division’s elite combat unit, known as the Rangers, the American counterpart of the British commandos.

On March 27, 1943, Captain Fellers wrote his parents “from somewhere in England” about Company A’s swift progress:

I am beginning to think it is hard to beat a Bedford boy for a soldier. Out of less than a hundred we left there with I would say about a dozen have made officers and several more will be soon. They are good practical officers too with a year or more of regular non-commission service behind them. I am truly proud to be commanding my old hometown outfit and just hope I can carry them right on through and bring all of them home.
¹⁵

In early May, the 29th Division was ordered to vacate Tidworth and move to warmer climes. On May 23, 1943, the Bedford boys formed up and began a six-day journey that would take them 160 miles to the southwest. Four days were spent marching and two in the back of trucks. Exhausted, the Bedford boys finally dropped their packs in a new barracks near Ivybridge in Devon, twelve miles from the channel port of Plymouth. The move was part of “Operation Bolero,” a long-range plan for transferring and then accommodating almost two million American servicemen in Britain in the run-up to an invasion of Europe, which Allied commanders had now set for the summer of 1944.

When the Bedford boys explored nearby towns and especially coastal villages, they were astonished to find palm trees growing in some parks because of the more temperate weather brought by the Gulf Stream’s effect along the entire southwest coast of England. But when they ventured north, they discovered far less hospitable terrain—a deserted, godforsaken stretch of moorland called Dartmoor.

Some of the men recognized Dartmoor from the successful Hollywood horror movie,
Hound of the Baskervilles,
starring Basil Rathbone. Even in mid-summer, the area could be just as bleak as the ghoulish wasteland portrayed in the film. To a GI without a compass, Dartmoor was also potentially lethal, mired with boot-sucking bogs and peaty quicksand. But on the odd day when the sun broke through dirty clouds, it was also starkly beautiful. There were wild ponies and delicate wildflowers, and the moss and heather changed color with the weather.
¹⁶

Company A began to camp out on the moors, even in the most deplorable conditions. “You couldn’t stay dry,” said Allen Huddleston. “Water would always seep into everything. You’d lie down on your bed sheet and before long the water would come through. It was horrible.”
¹⁷
Roy Stevens remembered one awful evening when the men set up their pup tents on the moors in a hurry because of a downpour: “Captain Fellers came along and knocked down several tents that weren’t in proper line. There were still guys in them.”
¹⁸

Men did their best to fend off the blues. Wallace “Snake Eyes” Carter filled his water can with whiskey he’d bought on the black market and took a good swig every few miles.
¹⁹
Others chanted caustic songs to take their minds off their sore feet and blisters.

One verse was particularly popular:

I want to go again to the moors,
To follow their winding trails,
To stand again on their lonely slopes,
In the cold and the rain and the gales.
Oh, I’ll go out to the moors again,
But mind you and mark me well:
I’ll carry enough explosives,
To blow the place to hell.
²⁰

When the boys passed through villages, locals often lined the route, shouting encouragement, sometimes providing snacks and cups of tea. If the Bedford boys came across English children, they would toss chocolate bars and shower the prettiest girls with strips of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum from their C rations.