A Long Ago Soldier

By Bud Wilkes

This story carries the authors desire it will aid, in its small way, the mending process for combat soldiers who are stricken by postwar distress upon returning home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503556737

Bud Wilkes

Bud Wilkes resides in Savannah, Georgia. His long career in maritime shipping extended from the study of international commerce at the University of Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1948, to the ports of Norfolk, New Orleans, Houston and Savannah. He survives his beloved wife of 50 years, Sara Garner and has three children, Mitch, Tom, and Barbara, a daughter-in-law, Carole, and a granddaughter, Meredith. As a staff sergeant in World War II, he served with the 102nd Infantry Division along the Roer River in Germany during 1944-1945, and in the advance of the division to Stendal, on the Elbe River. As a volunteer with a small band of soldiers of some renown, called Rogers Night Raiders, he made reconnaissance and combat missions across the Roer, and was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star plus Oak Leaf Cluster, the Purple Heart, an honorary French Croix de Guerre and an honorary Russian Bravery Medal.

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Copyright © 2015 by Bud Wilkes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The author’s daughter, Barbara, assisted in typing the manuscript of this story, his youngest son, Tom, served as copy editor, and his oldest son, Mitch, arranged for the reproduction of the author’s 1945 photograph and provided geographic material.

Rev. date: 06/29/2015

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Contents

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Dedicated

to

My Sara, our Mitch, Tom and Barbara, and to

daughter-in-law Carole and granddaughter Meredith

Foreword

T hese long ago wartime involvements are put to script primarily for my immediate family members. Perhaps any others reading the lines herein, exempting similarly experienced infantry veterans, will gain from them better comprehension of how it was to serve as a combat soldier in northern Europe during World War II.

One’s military duty in warfare mostly does not fade in memory. For exactness of dates and for peripheral happenings, I have referenced our unit’s history publication, With the 102nd Infantry Division through Germany.

Chapter One

N ormandy’s bluffs and cliffs, quiet for three and a half months, basked in the warm afternoon sun. They sought, it seemed, every last ray as further therapy before ominously forming clouds perhaps interfered.

Sighting on September’s twenty-third afternoon, year 1944, those bluffs and cliffs infused with glory and sacrifice was by far the most momentous experience I had known, my age then twenty-one. Hundreds more GI’s stood alongside the troopship SANTA PAULA’s open deck rail to absorb the view set their gaze as fixedly as mine. We were observing a coastline penetrated and captured on D-Day.

Vaguely distinguishable in our passing of the invasion beaches, others unseeable on the vessel’s route, was Utah Beach. Perceiving how it had been for the officers and GI’s by the thousands, who from ships onto landing craft had approached the shore there on that tumultuous, ever to be hallowed, June sixth morning, was to linger on lifelong. They had confronted the high ground advantage provided all along the bluff to German defenders, Wehrmacht troops, which openly exposed them to withering machine guns and rifles fire. Men succeeding in reaching the beach from the landing crafts would have moved forward through the wide expanse of sand in patterns predictable by defenders atop the bluff, every man in the assault necessarily having weaved past aptly phrased hedgehogs - hideous crossed steel cuttings, firmly footed, symmetrically placed, intended to deny tanks. Sheer grit and resolve had prevailed magnanimously in the assault for everyone beholden to freedom.

Next observed was the towering cliff along Utah Beach’s right, in line from the vessel. Its name, we learned, is Pointe du Hoc. Measured arithmetically, its height was a hundred feet. Measured in courage, stalwartness and valor mounted by two hundred and twenty-five dedicated Rangers on invasion day, the height became colossal. On attempting with ropes and spikes to climb to the cliff’s top to make useless the Wehrmacht long-range cannon known to have been positioned strategically on grounds shortly beyond, ninety of the Rangers either had perished or had gotten badly wounded by the enemy’s bullets and grenades. Success was achieved at day’s end, enemy bullets and grenades be damned in deference to devotion for country.

Silence gripped us during Pointe du Hoc’s dimming from vision on the vessel’s continuation southward close to the coast. I could not but wonder, as others must have wondered, when our time arrived for entering the fighting, if I would have capability to emulate the grit, the stalwartness demonstrated by the thousands who on D-Day annexed the Wehrmacht- infested shore. Like the others along the ship’s rail, I absorbed the emotions and adrenaline flows pumped into me by the Utah Beach and Pointe du Hoc sightings and blended them into an irrevocable vow to do my best.

Word came soon after passing Pointe du Hoc to prepare for disembarkation. I can recall how keyed up I also became about stepping for the first time onto foreign soil. As a bit of a history buff in my youth, I pitched skyward my anticipation over entering a land inhabited in early times by the Gauls, Romans, Celts, Burgundians and Franks. It would be the land in which over the centuries names arose such as Ceasar, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc, and Napoleon. I would be seeing how the French lived, observing their customs, and I would be hearing their language. Further, I soaked in the calming, agrarian look of the landscape beyond the bluffs, its composition principally hedgerows, apple orchards, fields, barns, cattle pastures, narrow roads, and thinly scattered towns and villages in a bucolic setting.

Unfortunate timing in the vessel’s anchoring at the disembarkation port, Cherbourg, until then undisclosed to us sideswiped for a while the keyed up feelings of probably every soldier on board. A sudden rain burst and the encroachment of darkness complicated our departure from the vessel at the anchorage site, the shore some two hundred yards away. Docking at the port’s one pier for large ocean going ships, the pier utilized in prewar years by the luxury liner NORMANDIE for routine voyages from Cherbourg to New York and back, was not possible because it had been battered by bombs into non-use. Instead, disembarkation was into open top barges to be towed through the rain and darkness to a landing point slightly to the pier’s left.

An inordinately long while passed, upward of three hours, before our company’s turn to descend to the barges came. We had stood on the vessel’s open deck from the disembarkation’s very beginning, everyone among us getting thoroughly drenched and feeling as though our backpacks were cutting into our shoulders. By the time we got ashore, the anxiety of our first- ever steps onto foreign soil could not but fade.

Shelter from the rain was provided by canvas-topped two-and-a-half ton Army trucks that screechingly pursued a reverse direction along the coast from that which the troopship had taken. Peppy GI banter aided in making time fly until we reached our untold destination, although not much help was needed. Our ride lasted only around ten miles, with departure from the trucks occurring at a town nearly attached to the coastline, St. Pierre-Église, where our I Company’s bivouac area spread through an apple orchard thriving productively near the town.

A contrastingly nutrient-deprived hedgerow, four to five feet in height, separated the orchard from the town, and thus the hedgerow transformed itself each day at our lunch break into a place of rapport with the local populace. Our ineptness at speaking French was met with by ear-to-ear grins and smiles in concert with discourse-achieving hands and arms as interpreters. They passed to us their petite rounds of marvelous camembert cheese, and we passed to them cigarette packets, brick chocolate bars and small soap bars, all three items having run short during Nazi occupation years. We just about evened out in the exchanges, the cheese a most welcomed supplement to our not very appealing canned C rations, and our items treated as wonders in the lives of Normans in their short three months of climbing back to normalcy. Monetary value had no bearing whatsoever in the exchanges. Soley of value was the warm rapport.

Around a week into our bivouacking near St. Pierre-Église we gladdened over a field kitchen’s erection in the apple orchard. To stand in a too slowly moving chow line, at its terminus hot food splashed onto anxiously receptive mess kits, was a