Ralph Berrier

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

  Clayton was truly alone.

  • • •

  The Blue Ridge Entertainers made a second and final visit to the Grand Ole Opry at Nashville’s War Memorial Auditorium in the fall of 1942 and played “Don’t Let Your Sweet Love Die.” That record was selling like war bonds, and Roy expected a huge royalty check the next spring.

  Back in Roanoke, the band had no shortage of show dates. They continued to play schools and the city’s movie palaces, the Rialto and the American, adding patriotic songs to their repertoire. A big favorite was “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,” a country-pop number that Roy included in a 1942 songbook. The lyrics could’ve applied to any member of his band:

  In this war with its mad schemes of destruction

  Of our country fair and our sweet liberty

  By the mad dictators, leaders of corruption

  Can’t the U.S. use a mountain boy like me?

  “Can’t the U.S. use a mountain boy like me?” Yes, Clayton, it sure could.

  In October 1942, sixteen months after Saford had been drafted, Clayton received notice to report to Draft Board No. 2 again. He had no wreck-related injuries to spare him from the service this time. He was inducted into the army and was told he would be sent to basic training within two months. He was about to join Saford in the fight of their lives.

  • • •

  Saford, naturally, thrived in the army.

  He was the wiseass, the smart-aleck. Confident and cocky, he talked his way into special training courses, much the same way he had talked his and Clayton’s way into Bassett Furniture’s finishing room. His scholastic record was less than impressive—made even less so when he reported that seven years of grammar school and two years of high school added up to a tenth-grade education—but you don’t need a sheepskin to know how to read a map. Saford excelled in map courses at Fort Bragg. Within a few months, he was promoted to corporal and was enrolled in intelligence and reconnaissance training, where he learned basic tactics needed for scouting, including camouflage, concealment, and mapmaking. Training for “suicide missions” was part of the regimen. He swam across rivers and lived in the forests, figuring out which plants were edible. Turned out that life in the army was a whole lot like growing up in The Hollow.

  The army needed men like Saford, poor bastards just crazy enough to try anything once. The boys of the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment had barracks fever. Many, like Saford, had been in the army for a year or more. They were so desperate to get out and fight they would’ve mixed it up with their own mamas.

  Saford surely knew nothing of the high-level planning that was about to blow the relative peace and prosperity of his recent life to smithereens. He just knew he was going to fight. That was all right with him. He’d done it all his life.

  • • •

  Saford returned to Roanoke a final time in the summer of 1942. He had stayed in touch with his young bride fairly frequently, writing letters and sending photographs of himself and his new army buddies. Some of the pictures were of Saford and a guy named “Private Warner” and apparently had been made in a photo booth in New York City—Lord knows what Saford was doing in Manhattan, perhaps completing more “training.” He wrote on the back of the pictures, “Two sheets in the wind.” He appeared to be enjoying himself.

  This last trip to Roanoke was just to see Dot. The young couple relaxed at the Wilbourne house, where they played records and sang old torch songs. The world was changing all around them. When Saford left for the train station next to the grand old Hotel Roanoke, he told Dot he didn’t know when or if he’d be able to see her again.

  A day or two later, Dot awoke feeling like her underwear was on fire. Her private area itched and hurt. She examined herself and thought she saw little critters down there, rummaging around her privates. She begged her mama to take a look.

  “Mama, what are these critters on me?”

  Lottie Wilbourne nearly died when she saw what her daughter was talking about. She wailed and moaned and spirited her teenage daughter to the doctor’s office, all the while cursing that no-account, fiddle-playing hillbilly soldier boy who had done this to her little girl.

  • • •

  By August 1942, Saford Hall was on his way to war. Dwight Eisenhower, who would soon be appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in the North Africa Theater of Operations, had received his directive to attack the enemy in the soft underbelly of Africa as soon as practical. A full-force assault on Europe had been ruled out until the Allies had more fighting experience. Saford and the rest of his outfit were sent to Norfolk, Virginia, for amphibious training. Thousands of soldiers invaded and re-invaded the Virginia coast dozens of times in full-dress rehearsals for the landings to occur an ocean away.

  Pity the poor people of Norfolk. The city had not endured an occupation like this since Union forces had invaded during the War of Northern Aggression. More than thirty-four thousand soldiers stormed the streets, most of them looking for sex, well aware that this would be their last chance to get laid for a very long while. Main Street provided a buffet of prostitutes and beer joints. Soldiers were arrested by the hundreds for fighting, drunkenness, and carousing. They didn’t call the place “Naughty Norfolk” for nothing. Saford mailed Dot another photo-booth picture of himself and his pal Warner after a night of some obvious R&R on the town.

  Of course, there was a major military operation to prepare for, so perhaps Saford didn’t have as much time for carousing as he would’ve liked. He was placed in a company of men that had been handed a dangerous, unprecedented assignment: They were to hit the beaches of North Africa ahead of the invading troops, under cover of darkness, by swimming at least two hundred yards to the shore and setting up infrared lights and signals to guide the Allied invaders. Saford and his comrades would perform this feat of derring-do armed only with a trench knife and two hand grenades each. Once the beaches were marked, Allied forces would invade and the battle would begin.

  On the misty, chilly morning of October 24, 1942, Saford Hall, one of Judie Hall’s bean-fed bastards from The Hollow, set sail from Norfolk on a two-week voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of North Africa, where the Axis forces awaited. The old instigator was really about to start something this time.

  THE

  WAR

  Mamo’s soldier boys: Clayton, Saford, and Asey

  Both Saford and Clayton enlisted in the Army during World War II.… Both were wounded, and both received many medals for heroism.

  —MOM, FROM THE BIRTHDAY PARTY INVITATION, 1994

  I wish I could tell you that Clayton and Saford were heroes. I would love to tell you that Papa Clayton won the Congressional Medal of Honor for saving his platoon and an entire village of Filipino children by single-handedly wiping out a company of Japanese marauders. I wish I could report that Saford earned a Silver Star by silencing a German machine gun nest using only a bag of rocks and a Zippo lighter. But old war stories don’t always play out the way they do in the movies. Heroes aren’t supermen. Sometimes, they’re just good ol’ boys who survived, which was certainly heroic enough for those of us who got a chance to be born.

  I can verify Clayton and Saford’s war stories only to a certain degree of accuracy. Separating truth from myth is messy work. Tall tales and lies come as easy to country boys as howling does to a beagle. In many ways, storytelling is a competition, just like seeing who can skip a rock the most times on a pond or who can pick the most apples in a day or who can throw a ball the farthest. Being twins juiced this natural gamesmanship and the stories. When the twins told their war tales, they surely polished them like the fine pieces of furniture they worked on in the Bassett finishing room. Even if research sometimes strips away the varnish of embellishment, the bare wood stories are still pretty damn impressive.

  A better historian than I would have walked the beaches of Morocco and exclaimed “Aha! It was here where the Western Naval Task Force landed, here where the ships sa
iled up the Sebou River, and here where the Second Battalion of the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment was baptized in battle. And, looky there! The Casbah! Aha, it all makes sense to me now!” But I am not that guy. I stayed home and talked to old men.

  I’m the kind of “historian” who records hundreds of hours of interviews then formulates the perfect follow-up questions long after the interview subjects are dead and gone. Lacking the means to hop a flight to Manila, which you can’t get to from Roanoke anyway, or the guts to quit my job in order to devote every waking minute to the thrilling adventures of the Ninth and Ninety-sixth Infantry Divisions, I instead slogged back through the swamp of old interviews and read books and combed through war records and memoirs in search of something that sounded like the truth.

  Still, when I watch that old video recording of Saford talking about his wartime exploits and I hear him repeat his famous story about meeting Patton, I ask myself: Aw, did that really happen or did he make that up?

  After years spent searching for the truth, I’ve come to ask myself another question: Do I even care if he did? What is it they say at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

  There’s history, then there’s his story, which is what Saford told us the same day Ruth gave me the fiddle for my birthday. Mom operated the video camera (it was two days before the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day) and captured it forever:

  “I’d like to tell first a little history of our Ninth Division,” Saford began, sounding like the narrator of a play giving his one thousandth performance, which is sort of what he was doing.

  He spoke nonstop for almost an hour, save for the occasional curveball question I’d lob every few minutes (“Did you ever meet Patton?!”). Saford suffered the interruptions, then picked up the trail that ran from North Africa to Sicily and on to England and France. And, yes, he said he did meet Patton, who commanded the Western Task Force, which included Saford’s outfit. During his videotaped monologue, Saford recounted this favorite story about the preparations for the North Africa landings:

  Patton said, “I’ll tell you one thing, anybody that’s got any questions, now’s the time to ask ’em.” I stuck up my hand. I knew when I hit the beach that the enemy would start firing at me and our boats would start firing from about a hundred yards back in the water. I was right in the middle. I questioned him. He said, “Yes sir, sergeant, what is your question?”

  I said, “Sir, my job is to mark the beach and go on inland and cease that gun.”

  He said, “Yes, boy. You’ve been briefed well, sergeant. You are really on the ball.”

  I said, “Yes, sir. There’s one thing I want to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When our boys get so far in shore with their Higgins boats and PTLs and things, hauling personnel … the enemy’s gonna open up on them, then they’re gonna open up and I’m right in the middle. What’s going to happen to me?”

  He had a habit of biting his lip on the side … [then Patton said], “Heh! What the hell’s one out of a million?”

  It sounds like something Patton could’ve said. That’s the way Saford always told it.

  • • •

  Saford had never been inclined to pray much in his first twenty-three years, but in the waning hours of November 7, 1942, he had a brief conversation with the Lord. If he wasn’t coming back from this cruise, he wanted to make sure he had cleared up a few things with the Big Guy.

  He slept a little, then, shortly after midnight, pulled on a black wet suit and gathered his gear. He had sharpened his trench knife the entire voyage from Norfolk, filing the blade until it could slice a hair in two. He even sharpened the knuckles on the knife’s handle. When mission hour came, he climbed down from the ship and joined a detachment of other men in a Higgins boat and set off into the oily, moonless night. Fifteen miles through choppy Mediterranean waters lay the beaches of French Morocco. This was it.

  The overall North African invasion was called Operation Torch. Saford was part of the Western Task Force, whose mission was to invade Morocco and capture an airfield at Port Lyautey, a few miles inland up the Sebou River. Saford’s job was to mark the beaches with infrared signals and lights to guide the invading forces.

  About a mile from the invisible shoreline, Saford and his fellow beach markers disembarked from the Higgins boats and climbed into rubber rafts. The men paddled silently until they were within two hundred yards of the beach, at which point they slit their rafts and sank them. With lights, infrared signals, two grenades, and a trench knife strapped to each of their torsos, the men swam in pairs toward the shore. Saford swam alongside a private named Borowski, both cutting through the surf as noiselessly as fish.

  The beach was guarded not by Germans, but by the French. North Africa was ostensibly still part of the French empire, but the French themselves were now governed by the Nazi-friendly Vichy rulers. American commanders believed that the French military would turn on the Germans and join the Allies once the landings began. In fact, negotiations between American and French leaders were under way to ensure that the French would not oppose the landings. Out in the surf and closing in fast, Saford knew nothing about negotiations or compromises. He had a mission he aimed to carry out.

  He and Borowski made it to the beach, where they rolled in the sand until their sticky wet suits were coated and perfectly camouflaged. Now came the tough part they had trained for at Fort Bragg. The two French guards who patrolled the beach never knew what hit them when a pair of miniature sand dunes rose from the ground, grabbed them from behind, and slit their throats with trench knives that had been sharpened all the way across the Atlantic.

  Saford dragged the first man he ever killed behind a dune. He and Borowski located the coastal defenses and returned to the beach to signal the artillery positions to the ship. They marked the beach with the infrared signals and blue flashlights. The Allied invasion of North Africa was about to begin. Soon, the sun would rise behind them and expose them to the enemy.

  The landing unfolded agonizingly slowly. Ships lost their formation during the night, landing craft floundered in the crashing waves, and raw, green soldiers seemed not to know what to do once they finally hit the beach.

  French guns opened up and the nightmare scenario Saford had laid out for Patton began. Saford was caught in the middle of the shelling. He found a helmet nearby and used it to dig like a groundhog. He buried himself in his sandy foxhole behind a dune and listened to shells roar overhead, flying in both directions.

  The shelling went on for hours. When it ended, Saford sat up in the sand and stared right into the sun, bleary-eyed and lightheaded from lack of sleep. He saw a shadowy form of a human silhouette, a brown-skinned, bearded man, clad in a flowing white robe.

  “Christ?” Saford muttered.

  Just as he realized the man was not Jesus but merely an Arab trader who had come to see what all the shooting was about, he heard someone running at him from behind. A soldier clambered over the dune and stuck his rifle right up against Saford’s back, nicking him a little with the bayonet. Saford turned and saw that the boy was American.

  “Hey!” Saford hollered. “What are you doing? I’m an American!”

  The young, nervous private barked at Saford to shut up.

  “They told us you’d say something like that,” the private said, keeping his bayonet against Saford’s back. Saford kept the chatter up. Using as many English words as possible could only help, he reckoned.

  “I know I’m supposed to say ‘Hey Mack’ and all that stuff they taught us at Fort Bragg, North Carolina,” Saford said.

  “How do you know about that?” the private asked, confused.

  “You’re Second Battalion, right? Take me to Major Breeze and we’ll get this straightened out.”

  The major was summoned and the confusion was all sorted out. Within his first six hours of combat, Saford had been first to the beach, had slit a man’s throat, had nearly been kill
ed by French and American guns, and had been captured by his own men. And the war had just begun.

  • • •

  Clayton played his final shows with Roy Hall in mid-December 1942. He wouldn’t make music again for—how long? Two years, at least? He had no idea when he’d next see Roanoke or the view from a stage.

  Knowing that this was a young soldier’s farewell performance, Roy let Clayton sing a couple of songs for his final radio programs.

  Tommy kicked up a cloud of dust with “Arkansas Traveler.” Clayton kept up with his two-finger banjo style, then he stepped up to the microphone and sang “Hung Down My Head and Cried,” which was a pretty good theme song for a boy about to go off to the army.

  He and Jay Hugh buddied up for a few duets during the course of the preformance. One of the best was a number they called “Long Steel Rail,” which was bedecked with lovely verses sure to put people in the Christmas spirit:

  The prettiest girl I ever saw was killed one mile from town

  Her head was in the driver’s wheel and the body was never found

  Clayton and Jay Hugh punctuated each verse with a harmonized yodel that could peel the acoustic tiles off the studio walls. Cousin Irving commended the boys on their selection.

  “I like it. It’s kinda lonesome sounding, but it picks you up,” he said.

  “I don’t know what we’re gonna do with that song,” Jay Hugh piped in. “Clayton’s got to go in the army.”

  “Well, I reckon you’ll have to find somebody else,” Irving figured. He turned to Clayton. “Hi, Private!”

  But there was nobody else. Everybody had gone off to war. Saford, Bill, Roy’s brother Rufus, and now Clayton. Jay Hugh would be gone soon, as well. The Blue Ridge Entertainers were in their final days.

  Late in the session, Clayton was called to the mike again, this time to do “Old Shep,” which had been a hit record the year before for Red Foley. The sentimental song about a boy and his dog already sounded quaint and completely out of step with the times.