Ralph Berrier

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

  From all appearances, the locals were happy to see the soldier boys. Just three years earlier, these same people had lived in fear of what seemed to be an inevitable German invasion. Now, an altogether different kind of occupation had arrived, an army of foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, fun-loving Yanks, and everyone seemed happy.

  Saford spent his pound notes on tea, bitter beer, and, of course, pretty young English girls, with whom he danced the night away at nightclubs. The debauchery and nightlife of London could not match the unfettered bacchanalia of “Naughty Norfolk,” but not for lack of trying. Army doctors reminded soldiers about the horrors of VD and instructed them to keep prophylactics on their person in case of emergencies, as London was a fun town and a man could almost forget a war was going on.

  All parties and furloughs must end, though, and by March 1944, Saford and his regiment were involved in daily maneuvers. They practiced beach landings on the English coastline, dodged live ammo, and advanced under the scream of exploding shells. They were preparing for the real deal, the big invasion, which would make the landings at Port Lyautey and Sicily seem as easy as ordering fish and chips in an English pub.

  They were reviewed by governmental and military royalty—Churchill, Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and British general Bernard Montgomery addressed the troops during training. Upon viewing the mighty artillery of the Ninth, Churchill proclaimed that the Americans possessed more guns than had been in all of England during the Battle of Britain. On May 27, 1944, those guns and the men who fired them were put on alert: Prepare to sail. Operation Overlord was taking shape. The Great Crusade was about to begin.

  In this war with its mad schemes of destruction

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

  —OLD COUNTRY-MUSIC SONG THAT ROY HALL AND HIS BLUE RIDGE ENTERTAINERS USED TO PLAY

  Saford’s D-Day story is not that of movies and novels. The first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan are not about him or the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment or even the entire Ninth Infantry Division. The Ninth was still sailing across the English Channel on June 6, 1944, in reserve, waiting to hit Utah Beach four days later. By then, nearly 1,500 Americans would be dead, among them nineteen men from the tiny Virginia town of Bedford, just east of Roanoke. Young men who had probably heard Saford play with Roy Hall on WDBJ or perhaps even seen him in person were slaughtered at Omaha Beach in seconds. To this day, little Bedford claims it suffered the highest per-capita loss on D-Day of any town in America, which is why the National D-Day Memorial opened there in 2001.

  By the time Saford arrived at Normandy with the rest of the Sixtieth, most of the D-Day objectives had been accomplished. Still, when Saford disembarked at Utah Beach on June 10, 1944, he was greeted by the occasional mortar shell and stray sniper bullet.

  “I thought y’all had this beach secured,” Saford offered in a smart-ass tone, surely not comprehending the carnage that had occurred a few miles to the east, not knowing that Utah Beach was a picnic by comparison, the beach that suffered the least number of casualties of all the Normandy landings.

  Saford joined the other men of Headquarters Company and unpacked the maps of the Cotentin Peninsula, upon which they had just landed. The division’s mission was to secure this thumb of French soil and capture the key port city of Cherbourg. Success would allow the Allies to sail reinforcements directly from the United States to France and flood the continent with soldiers. Failure meant stalemate, which meant quagmire, which meant a war with no end.

  After two days of unloading and preparations, the division joined the fight. The men had already heard stories of tough fighting across a difficult terrain. Saford pored over his maps and couldn’t understand what the problem was. The ground was rolling farmland, mostly flat, pocked with small towns and villages. From the maps and aerial photographs he studied, he saw that most of the farms were cordoned off by rows of hedges, which he thought might be like American boxwoods and small shrubs. He was wrong.

  Saford was now a platoon sergeant, in charge of fifteen men whom he led into the Normandy countryside. There, he got his first look at the bocage—which sounded so much prettier than “hedgerows,” but was far more imposing to see. These hedgerows were not thickets of boxwoods or flowering forsythia, but walls of earth and stone topped with trees, actual trees. The earthen berms alone were four feet high, the trees another four to ten feet taller on top of that. The hedgerows carved the countryside into a crazy-quilt, Cubist chessboard of fields, orchards, and farms, across which infantry pawns must zig and zag if they were to checkmate the enemy at Cherbourg.

  The bocage were hundreds of years old, built by Norman farmers who had walled off their fields to contain their livestock. They were as permanent as any German-built concrete barricade and as formidable as the very Siegfried Line itself. A tank couldn’t plow through a hedgerow, and if one tried, it usually flashed its soft, unprotected underbelly to the enemy.

  There was nothing Saford could do except venture out and get a handle on what actually lay ahead for the infantry. His platoon had to move fast, because other divisions were making progress up the peninsula as the Germans withdrew toward Cherbourg for a last stand. Armed with M1 rifles, sidearms, and grenades, Saford and another man crept along an embankment beneath a slate-gray sky. Eventually, Saford saw that the situation was worse than he thought: The hedgerows were booby-trapped with trip wires and mines.

  Just beyond the rows, from inside the invisible field, Saford was stopped cold by the most frightening sound for an American on a battlefield—the sound of German being spoken. He and the other man dropped to their bellies on the upslope of an earthen berm and listened to the guttural shouts of an unknown number of German soldiers running past on the other side of the hedgerow, not more than five yards away. Saford held his breath until the enemy troops moved far enough down the row for him and his companion to escape and tell the advancing infantry what they were up against.

  • • •

  By mid-June, the regiment was making good progress in hedgerow country, plowing ahead with bulldozers and tanks outfitted with iron forks on the front. The regiment called itself the “Go-Devils” based on a likely apocryphal story about a German commander remarking, “Look at those devils go!” The Germans scattered and fell back, but it was always another mile, another hedgerow, as Allied men dodged machine-gun nests and snipers.

  By June 20, 1944, the Ninth Division had Cherbourg surrounded. Four days later, the division attacked with all three of its regiments. On June 27, the city and its port were in Allied hands.

  The Ninth rested, and then the division turned away from the port city and looked toward Germany.

  That’s how the fight for European liberation began for Saford Hall, a platoon sergeant charged with enormous responsibilities, who gathered reliable intelligence day after exhausting day. Three months after landing in France, Saford had seen war from almost every vantage point, including from his belly and from the heavens. He made photographs from airplanes and watched enemy soldiers pass within a few yards of him as he hid in streambeds and ditches. He told his men they would find themselves within “eye-blinking distance of the Germans.”

  The Ninth Infantry Division broke out from the Normandy hedgerows in July and steamrolled across France, advancing ten, fifteen, even twenty miles a day. The division made such good progress, it outran its maps and its supplies. Saford and scores of other scouts frantically scoped out the territory that lay ahead as they and the men of the Ninth waited for fuel and food. They ate the rations of captured or dead Germans. The Ninth covered 450 miles between D-Day and early September, and it could not afford a day of rest. The trek across northern France and Belgium was not exactly a page out of Fodor’s. Determining Saford’s whereabouts during these days is difficult, like looking for a needle in a France-size haystack. He was somewhere out front, looking for Germans, who weren’t that hard to find. All he had to do was walk in a straight line for a few hundred yards and there they’d b
e. Saford and the Go-Devils chased the Germans across the Seine and Meuse rivers and followed them into their motherland. With every step east, he traveled farther from his own home, where the apple crops were being picked and where people still sang and played music on the radio. Would he live long enough to return to the life he once knew?

  What Saford specifically was up to is left partly to history, partly to imagination. The Go-Devils “ankled it” down muddy roads toward Belgium during July and August, taking towns and villages all across northern France. They met columns of German armor—could these have been the days when Saford and his fellow scouts dived for ditches and held their collective breath as the mighty panzer tanks rumbled past? They forded rivers and streams—Saford’s friends remember his vivid accounts of swimming across raging currents to mark bridgeheads for the anxious infantry. Did he swim the Seine? The Roer? The Meuse? The Rhine? All of the above? All I know for certain is that wherever the Go-Devils of the Sixtieth Infantry went—and they went from France to Belgium to Germany—Saford Hall, that fiddle-playing bastard son of The Hollow, was often a few hundred yards ahead of them.

  So he would have been among the first Go-Devils that September to hit the Siegfried Line, the seemingly impenetrable wall of defenses Germany had constructed along its border with France. The battered and bloodied Sixtieth was ordered to follow the Germans into the Hürtgen Forest and cut them off from the rest of the western front. To do that, the Sixtieth required its daily ration of intelligence, so Saford plunged yet again into the hellish no-man’s-land between warring armies.

  He spotted a small, darkened farmhouse in the German countryside, squatting on the edge of a great forest. Dusk fell as he stepped quietly inside to investigate the possibility of setting up a listening post. He walked through a cozy, unoccupied front room into the kitchen and craned his neck to peer through a doorway down a shadowy hall.

  At the end of the hallway stood a large German officer, surprised and wide-eyed. The German drew his Luger and fired once, sending a bullet shrieking past Saford’s ear. Saford drew his .45 and fired down the hallway, but the German had disappeared. Saford spun on his heels and hotfooted it out of the kitchen. He saw the German through another doorway, and both men fired and missed. Saford ran for the front door and saw the German running away from him, back toward the kitchen. The German turned, fired, and missed again. Saford squeezed off one more errant shot, spilled out the front door, and sprinted into the forest. His little firefight encapsulated the fighting of late 1944—two sides on top of each other, shooting ceaselessly with no end in sight.

  • • •

  Back in San Luis Obispo, California, the army made Clayton and his crew do the craziest things. The soldiers had to climb a thirty-foot wooden tower while weighed down by twenty-five pounds of gear, and then, after they scaled the top, they had to turn around and jump off the other side into a pool of water.

  Clayton and the rest of the Deadeyes were amphibious, and all amphibians must know how to swim for their lives. And climb down rope ladders into waiting watercraft, race atop roiling surf without tossing their cookies, and, finally, disembark on beaches ablaze with murderous fire.

  By now, the Deadeye training consisted not only of practicing marksmanship with an arsenal of weapons—M1 rifles, Browning automatic rifles, .22 and .45-caliber pistols, and .22-caliber rifles—but also of reading, going to classes, and learning newfangled tactics. The Deadeyes were really going to war.

  In California, Clayton got a letter from Elinor, Reba’s baby sister. Clayton figured she must have been about thirteen or fourteen by now. She wrote to ask how he was doing and to tell him that everything in Roanoke was fine. Her brother Marvin was in the service and the Holland family prayed daily that the Lord would look after him. Several of her uncles on her mother’s side were in the army, too.

  Clayton didn’t receive a ton of letters while he was in camp, unlike the other fellows, who seemed to get mail every day. He was glad to receive news from Roanoke, even if it was from a seventh-grader. He wrote her back, told her things were going swimmingly in camp, and requested that she say hello from him to all the Hollands back in Roanoke. He included a lapel pin and an insignia patch in the envelope. He told her he looked forward to seeing everybody in Roanoke soon.

  On July 22, 1944, Clayton and the rest of F Company rode riverboat steamers down the Sacramento River to the San Francisco pier that would be their entrance ramp to war. Hundreds of residents from the towns along the river lined its banks and waved at the ferries, as tugboats tooted salutes. Upon arrival, the Deadeyes climbed the gangplanks of the USS Sea Marlin, wearing their olive drab uniforms and steel helmets, carrying duffel bags. They sailed past the Golden Gate Bridge and into the calm waters of the Pacific, bound for Hawaii, where they would train in steamy jungles in preparation for tropical combat.

  A trip to Hawaii sounded lovely to the troops. Hula girls in grass skirts, beautiful weather, sandy beaches—it all made war sound kind of like a vacation, only with live ammunition.

  During the voyage, men listened to the music of the Ninety-sixth Infantry Division band topside—no Western songs, unfortunately for Clayton—and watched flying fish from the rails. The Deadeyes arrived at Pearl Harbor in waves. Men poured by the shipful onto flatbed, narrow-gauge railcars dubbed the “Pineapple Express,” which carried soldiers past sugar cane and pineapple groves on a two-hour ride to the wood-and-tarpaper Schofield Barracks.

  The jungles of Oahu must have felt like the end of the earth to a country boy from Virginia. Training included lessons on how to catch and eat frogs, lizards, and snakes, and how to spot a camouflaged enemy in the trees. Soldiers were taught to swing from vines and to throw grenades, as if World War II were a Tarzan movie.

  Eventually, men were granted passes to Honolulu, a brilliant maneuver by the army to remind the boys what they were fighting for. Lines of forty men, mostly sailors, formed outside the whorehouses on Hotel Street. Outside, armed guards kept the lines moving and ensured the men all had their “peace.” Inside, young women bestowed many a soldier with a good “lei.” On the street, the army maintained a prophylactic station that handed out rubbers like they were cigarettes. Two army-approved dollars imprinted with the word “Hawaii” bought a fellow five minutes of ecstasy with a Honolulu Lulu. Soldiers had their photographs taken with haggard hula “girls” whose ample breasts were covered only with leis.

  • • •

  Naturally, Clayton loved Hawaii. He didn’t want to leave. No wonder, considering what awaited him and the rest of the Deadeyes.

  Jungle training continued and the division, which had come of age in the desert air of Oregon, nearly melted in the tropical heat and humidity. Their target was revealed to be the isolated Pacific island of Yap, one thousand miles east of the Japanese-infested Philippines. The time had come to say good-bye to lei-wearing hula girls and beautiful beaches.

  Clayton and the rest of the men of F Company climbed aboard the USS War Hawk on September 15, 1944, as giant cranes loaded twenty-five thousand tons of equipment and supplies onto ships bound for a tropical hell. Clayton had been promoted to corporal again just before the division set sail from Pearl Harbor. F Company, which had billed itself the “Fighting Foxes,” needed disciplined leaders, and Clayton, aside from feeding fiddles to enlisted men and shaking them by the scruff of the neck, was GI all the way. Still, he let his commanders down again.

  The voyage hadn’t even begun when Clayton got into trouble. The soldiers had been ordered not to touch any cargo that was being loaded, especially if the cargo was navy supplies. If a soldier got caught with so much as a navy raisin in his possession, he would be busted. Just as Clayton boarded the warship, a pallet of apples crashed to the deck. Bright red apples rolled in every direction, and sailors chased after them, picking them up while hollering at the army boys to leave those apples alone—but Clayton didn’t listen. A few rolled right up to his army boots, and he scooped them up and stuffed them in every available
pocket.

  As he nibbled his contraband on the deck, Clayton was confronted by a navy chief petty officer, who demanded to know where the soldier had gotten his apple.

  “Out there on the deck,” Clayton said casually. “They’re rolling around everywhere. Go get yourself all you want.”

  A little while later, a voice crackled over the loudspeaker:

  “Corporal Hall, 382nd, Company F, report immediately to Captain Barron, starboard side.”

  Captain Barron! James R. Barron was the Fighting Foxes’ company commander. He was a tough, no-nonsense, crew cut-sporting Texan whom Clayton had gotten to know well, mainly because Barron was the guy who busted him in rank each time, including this time.

  Clayton liked Barron and he believed Barron liked him, even if he did once call Clayton “crazy” for smacking a guy in the face with a fiddle. Now, Barron had summoned him. Clayton didn’t know a thing about a ship except how to board and exit one (even if he had to jump), so he asked a buddy how to get to starboard side. The buddy thought a minute then asked, “Which way are we headed?”

  Clayton said, “That ain’t got nothing to do with it.” Eventually, he found Barron, who had a big smile on his face.

  “Corporal Hall!” he said with sarcastic enthusiasm. “Corporal Clayton Hall, from The Hollow, Virginia! So good to see you.”

  Barron really dressed him down. Here they were, leaving the United States for war, and Clayton could not follow the most simple order he’d ever receive—do not touch navy apples.

  As Barron busted him again, Clayton had something to say.

  “These stripes don’t mean nothing to me,” he said. “From now on, I ain’t got to worry about nobody else but old Clayton.”

  Private Clayton Hall returned to the deck and headed straight for the ship’s stern. The bastard banjo plucker from The Hollow felt as alone as one could feel on a warship packed with 1,500 men. Honolulu dissolved into the horizon and Oahu sank into the sea, until at last the world he knew had vanished before his eyes. Then Clayton Hall did something he never remembered doing before, not even as a little boy terrorized by brothers and bullies. He cried.