Ralph Berrier

by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood

  He was dead almost ten years before I finally got it. His story was not that of a sweet old man who played the fiddle. It was that of a strapping, cocky, courageous young man, much stronger and braver than I will ever be.

  Saford Hall swam the Roer, and maybe the Rhine. He later told some family members that he was briefly captured near the end of the war, but quickly escaped from a makeshift prison camp during the chaos of the Germans’ retreat and the advance of his own division.

  He was at the famous Battle of Remagen. Well, almost. The Go-Devils crossed the Rhine on the night of March 8, 1945, one day after the Ninth Armored Division had accomplished the unthinkable by capturing the Ludendorff Bridge at the town of Remagen. The beaten, retreating Nazis poured all they had on the Ninth Infantry Division as it crossed the Rhine, the last major natural obstacle between the Allies and victory. Ten days later, the bridge collapsed after a German rocket struck nearby, killing twenty-eight Americans. By then, engineers had constructed other crossings, and the final push was on.

  German towns fell into Allied hands like winnings pouring out of a slot machine. The Ninth Infantry Division captured ten towns one day, a dozen the next. Only the most fanatical Nazis stood up and fought. Hitler’s well-trained SS resorted to firing antiaircraft guns at the unstoppable Go-Devils. German soldiers surrendered by the thousands. The Third Reich was collapsing.

  On April 30, 1945, ten days after Hitler’s last birthday, the Ninth Infantry Division met the Russians at the Elbe River. After a dismal winter that seemed to drag on eternally, April had flown past, which is what happens when an army is in the midst of a rout. The Germans were smashed, finished, kaput. Everyone on the American side wanted a piece of the fight. In March, the Ninth received its first black foot soldiers, men who accepted demotions in rank in order to get to the front. The African-American soldiers were so gung-ho, many of them went AWOL—not to get away from the fighting, but to get closer to it. One all-black squad neutralized a German tank that had blocked the Go-Devils’ relentless advance.

  On May 1, 1945; word came that Hitler was dead. The next day, Berlin fell to the Americans and the Russians.

  Five days later, on May 7, 1945, Eisenhower ordered the end of all offensive operations. One minute after the church bells struck midnight on May 8, the war in Europe ended.

  • • •

  I do not know how Saford celebrated. Knowing Saford as I do now, maybe it’s better that I don’t. He didn’t have long to soak it all in, because within three weeks of war’s end, he was headed home. Some men were being sent to the Pacific, to help fight the Japanese. Not Saford. Drafted before Pearl Harbor, having killed even before the first guns fired upon the North Africa beaches, having fought across Sicily and Europe right into Germany, he had more than fulfilled his duty to Uncle Sam.

  He left Europe on June 6, 1945—the one-year anniversary of D-Day—and arrived in the States on June 15. So many men were sent home, a week passed before his discharge was processed at Fort Meade, Maryland. From there he hopped a train to Roanoke, where he had some important business to take care of.

  He had to pick up his car at the garage.

  His old Buick had been mothballed since he had left Roanoke in 1941. The car was in pretty sad shape when he saw it—all four tires had dry-rotted and needed replacing. But when Saford asked about the price of tires, he got answered with a question.

  “You a doctor or a mail carrier?” the mechanic asked. “Only doctors and mail carriers can buy tires.”

  Rubber was still being rationed. Saford was incensed.

  “Man, I’ve been gone for four years fighting for this country and you mean to tell me I can’t get tires for my car?”

  Only if he was a doctor or a mail carrier.

  Saford called a mechanic he knew on Church Avenue, who fixed him up with four used tires. Two of them blew before he got out of town. He patched them and headed down the narrow road through Franklin County toward The Hollow.

  He never called Dot. Never drove past her house. I never knew what happened between him and Dot after his return. Some members of the family say that he got a Dear John letter while he was overseas. Others say he came home wanting to be a free man after so many years spent in the country’s service. Whatever the reason, that part of his life was over, as far as he was concerned. He tore on down the road on his four gimpy tires, a soldier boy finally headed home from the war—a war that was still not over for many American fighting boys, including Saford Hall’s younger twin.

  • • •

  Clayton greeted 1945 in New Guinea, where he was recovering from the wounds he had received on Leyte. He loved the hospital, because it swarmed with army nurses who treated scores of wounded men from battle-torn islands across the South Pacific. Olive-drabbed women rolled up their sleeves and cleaned Clayton’s wounds, changed his bandages, brought hot chow, and soothed his spirit. They were the first kind faces he had seen in months. For the rest of his life, he would speak fondly of them—I still remember his sermons about the “angels of mercy.”

  Soon, he was well enough to leave his hospital bed. Trouble was, no ships were headed back to Leyte anytime soon, so he was assigned to another outfit. Fighting had mostly died down in New Guinea, but pockets of Japanese resistance remained. Clayton thought he might get away with a few routine patrols, then hitch a ride back to the Philippines, where the Deadeyes were cooling their heels and enjoying the sunshine after defeating the Japanese. While his buddies in F Company passed the time between their shooting practice and meals by watching outdoor movies and swimming in the sea, Clayton strapped on his new helmet and headed into the jungles of New Guinea. Time to get back in the war.

  His destination: the island of Biak. The Japanese had been run off this tiny island of coral and jungle months earlier, but an occasional sniper or straggler had to be cut down. The patrols, like every other jungle outing, were hot, sweaty, and miserable. The enemies were ubiquitous and fanatical—and those were just the mosquitoes. Clayton also got his first glimpse of native islanders, brown-skinned, grass-skirt-wearing men and women who emerged from hiding now that the shooting had stopped. He worried that they were headhunters.

  The good news was that Clayton went on only two patrols on Biak. The bad news was why. During his second patrol, Clayton was hammered by a blinding headache. At first, he wondered if the pain had something to do with his head wounds. Sweat poured down his forehead and stung his eyes. He was dizzy and his pace slowed. A sergeant saw him dragging behind and stopped the patrol. He asked Clayton what the problem was.

  By now, Clayton’s teeth chattered, as if the strongest Arctic wind had blown away the jungle heat. He told the sergeant he would be all right. His head just hurt. The sergeant took one look at him and called for a medic.

  “You’ve got malaria fever,” the sergeant said. Clayton was loaded into a Jeep and driven back to camp. Within a few hours, he was back in the same hospital he had left just days earlier. At least he got to see the nurses again.

  He was given quinine and other medicines to knock out the fever. He recovered well enough in a few days to get back in his boots and return to Leyte. The Deadeyes needed him.

  • • •

  The country boy from The Hollow rejoined F Company in the Philippines, where the Deadeyes waited to hear where they would be sent next. He was happy to see the familiar faces, and they were glad to welcome him back, even the funny-talking city boys. Clayton had grudgingly come to like the guys, even though he was a good five or six years older than the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old replacements who were filling the ranks of the battle-depleted company. He never bothered to learn most of the new guys’ names. He called them “Young feller,” just as he had called all the younger dudes since camp.

  He even liked Fox, the hulking galoot from Illinois who picked on little guys and was always itching to fight. He was all right, Clayton decided, especially in battle. Near the end of the Leyte campaign, Clayton and Fox had been on a patrol that
ran into a Japanese sniper. The shooter hid in a spider hole and occasionally popped out of the ground like a prairie dog to fire upon the patrol. Fox told Clayton to cover him as he sneaked around the sniper’s position. When the sniper popped out again, Fox dragged the guy out of the hole by his rifle barrel. Then he beat the guy to death.

  The Deadeyes were going to Japan. They all knew it and dreaded it.

  Their mission sent them to the Ryukyu Islands, literally the “Southwest Islands.” On March 6, 1945, the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division was told that its objective was to capture the largest of the Ryukyus, an island just 350 miles from the Japanese home island of Kyushu. An island called Okinawa.

  The invasion would be called Operation Iceberg—a perfectly ironic military name for a mission that would bring all hell’s fury.

  • • •

  F Company and the rest of the Deadeyes conducted training exercises through March, which consisted mostly of dress-rehearsal landings that introduced the new recruits to the fun and excitement of amphibious invasions. On March 27, 1945, F Company set sail aboard the troop transport USS La Porte. By now, every combat vet and green rookie had heard of Okinawa. On board the transports, soldiers were told that the Okinawa climate would be mild—much more comfortable than the jungles—that the people were of Chinese and Japanese lineage, and that the island had been independent before Japan annexed all of the Ryukyus in 1879 following negotiations with the Chinese that were arbitrated by—of all people—President Ulysses S. Grant.

  Enemy strength on Okinawa was estimated to be more than 60,000. The Americans countered with 180,000 army troops and marines, plus the navy.

  The night of March 31, 1945, the navy’s biggest guns pounded the island. Destroying opposing forces on or near the beach was more important than the element of surprise. “Here we are, you bastards,” the guns announced. Men attended chapel services on board the ships, and they read their army-distributed New Testaments. They were confident they would lick the Japanese. Hell, the Allies had run the Japs off every island they’d held. Why would Okinawa be any different? Sure, it’s part of the enemy homeland, but still.

  The Deadeyes were ready to finish this war. Things were going well in Europe. Maybe they’d get some reinforcements. Men came up with sayings like “Home alive in Forty-Five,” “Back from the sticks in Forty-Six,” and “Home or Heaven in Forty-Seven.” Did the first saying have a remote chance of coming true?

  For many—thousands, really—it did not.

  A little bottle of liquor and a little rusty gun

  Makes all of these young boys just think that they’re grown

  —“IF TROUBLE DON’T KILL ME, I’LL LIVE A LONG TIME,” AS PERFORMED BY THE HALL TWINS

  D-Day was taken. The term had been commonly used by the military to mark the scheduled start of any operation, but following the events of June 6, 1944, the name “D-Day” would forevermore be associated with Operation Overlord. The Okinawa invaders would have to choose another name for Operation Iceberg. So the commanders opted for L-Day, which, in the time-honored military tradition for completely misstating the situation, stood for Love-Day. The Japanese got it right, however. After three months of fighting, shelling, shooting, burning, killing, and dying that would lay an entire island and most of its inhabitants to waste, the Japanese had another name for the Battle of Okinawa: “Tetsu no Ame.” The Typhoon of Steel.

  The typhoon made landfall beneath a cloudless blue sky on April 1, 1945. The largest military task force ever assembled arrived aboard 1,300 ships that carried hundreds of thousands of men, a force that included six combat divisions and announced its presence with guns blazing, planes flying, and bombs dropping. F Company and the rest of the 382nd Regiment were held in reserve and would land several hours after the initial invasion. Clayton awoke to the voices of their division and battalion commanders, General James Bradley and Colonel Macey L. Dill, blasting over the ship’s loudspeakers, wishing them good luck and God’s blessings. The soldiers gulped down a breakfast of steak and reconstituted eggs, then went up on deck to watch the bombardment. Word came quickly that the 381st and 383rd had landed against “light resistance.” It was time. Clayton and the rest of the 382nd disembarked shortly after 11 a.m. and headed for the skinny island that was sixty miles long and barely fifteen miles across at its widest. Until now, American forces in the Pacific had been called “liberators” for chasing the Japanese out of such places as Guadalcanal, New Guinea, and the Philippines. This day, they called themselves “conquerors,” for they were hitting the Japanese on their home turf. It was Easter Sunday, a holy day for celebrating life, hope, and peace—which must have seemed like the worst April Fool’s Day joke ever pulled.

  The landing craft churned to the beach without harassment from bullets or shells. The amphibious vehicles crossed over a reef and an ancient defensive seawall and spilled their bellies full of soldiers onto the sand. Since it was Easter, the army had provided the F Company men with a lovely holiday meal of more rancid turkey packed in white thermal cans. The men strapped the cans to their backs, along with their rifles, grenades, knives, pistols, and other weapons of really massive destruction. When they hit the beach, however, they were told to drop the cans. The white cans against olive drab made perfect bull’s-eyes for any sniper. The army might have had this invasion business down pat, but it couldn’t do holiday meals for squat.

  By 11:45 a.m., Clayton and the rest of F Company had landed at Brown Beach No. 2. The weather was lovely. The temperature was in the sixties, and a cool coastal breeze swept the bomb-cratered beach. One soldier called it “the most American weather we’ve seen.” Within a few hours, the company had moved inland about 1,700 yards without detecting hide nor hair of the enemy.

  “I’ve already lived longer than I thought I would,” a young private exclaimed.

  • • •

  In The Hollow, the peach trees would have burst into fluorescent pink blossoms, followed closely by snowdrifts of apple blooms. Had it been just two years since Clayton had last seen his mother and his old home place? Had it been four years since he and Saford sang together on the radio? A lifetime had passed since then. In Japan, the cherry trees were in bloom. The next time fruit trees bloomed in both countries, the war would be over, a fact inconceivable to the men who had just landed on an island where nearly every tree had been—or would be—blasted into sawdust and wood chips.

  • • •

  All the Deadeye regiments had landed near the middle of the long island and were now headed south. The marines fought to the north. Late on the operation’s fourth day, F Company met its first real resistance. The Japanese felled trees across the road to Kamiyama. Two accompanying tanks had been knocked out by mines. Battalion commander Colonel Cyril D. Sterner moved his men and tanks across an open field and sealed caves and pillboxes, killing nearly 150 enemy soldiers.

  Clayton and several soldiers stopped in front of a tank to await orders from F Company commander Captain James R. Barron. The captain had become a father figure to the “Fighting Foxes” of F Company. Barron had proven himself a terrific officer, a no-nonsense, GI-all-the-way guy who didn’t play favorites among his men. He was a soldiers’ officer. The men gathered around him as he looked through his binoculars. They waited eagerly for his instructions.

  As Barron fiddled with his binoculars, a sniper’s bullet struck him in the forehead. He died instantly. Clayton saw the whole thing. A couple of the guys saw the sniper in an open field and chased and riddled him with M1 fire. F Company had walked smack-dab into the Japanese front line and lost the only company commander it had known since Oregon. The real battle of Okinawa had begun.

  • • •

  The Japanese strategy was obvious—they were going to fight a defensive battle from the abundant high ground and inflict devastation on the Americans. The commanders of the mighty Japanese Thirty-second Army knew that they probably could not save Okinawa from the Americans, but they were going to make damn sure the America
ns paid a high price for taking it. So high, in fact, that they would think twice before attempting a full-scale invasion of Japan. The Japanese soldiers were ordered to prefer death to surrender, to fight until the last man had either been killed or had killed himself.

  Rifle platoons manned the front line. For years, the army had filled the rifle platoons of its infantry divisions with the less educated and the less wealthy—that is, guys like Clayton. The smart boys were sent to officer training school or the Army Air Corps or logistical teams. As F Company eyed the rocky, deadly hills before it, its ranks included guys from the wrong side of the tracks, farm boys, and one bastard from The Hollow. They would endure the brunt of the shelling and, if they survived and didn’t crack up, they would meet the enemy head-on. They were the frontline grunts who, as a brigadier general once explained, had nothing to look forward to but “death, mutilation, or psychiatric breakdown.” My Papa Clayton was one of those guys. The disposable ones.

  Enemy machine gunners raked entire platoons of Americans from their high positions. F Company was pinned down at the bottom of a ridgeline they called Porter Hill. Supporting tanks were slowed by mines. The shelling continued.

  The only way to advance was with help from the navy’s big guns. However, the navy was engaged in a fight to the death with kamikazes and the Japanese navy. If the Americans lost the battle at sea, the men on the island would lose their support and be stranded. Finally, they received enough tank and artillery support to move on the hill and capture it. One hill down, but how many more to go?

  The rock and shale were almost impervious to entrenching tools. Wasn’t there a decent place to dig a foxhole in the Pacific? If it wasn’t swamps in the Philippines, it was rocks in Okinawa. Clayton dug a hole close to the other guys, who burrowed in as deep as they could, then watched for enemy infiltrators. Clayton looked to his left and saw a Jap crawling toward Private Lloyd Jones’s foxhole. He turned and fired quickly, right above Jones’s head, and killed the enemy. Before Jones knew what the hell had happened, he saw the dead Jap rolling down the hill.