May
27
WWII memories linger for 5 brothers-in-arms
Filed Under features |
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
As they came of age between 1940 and 1943, Opha Smith’s five sons left their small town in Indiana for places she had never heard of - Gey, Casablanca, Normandy, Salinas, New Guinea.
They volunteered to jump out of planes, crouch in machine gun nests and ride in plywood gliders. They survived diphtheria and gunshot wounds, burrowing into the earth or under trucks at night so they could sleep through the shelling.
Opha Smith had nothing but hope and prayers to bring them home.
And one by one, the five Smith brothers, dozens of war decorations among them, came home - exhausted, but whole.
Ned, 83; Dwight, 81; Russell, 79; Kenneth, 77; and Kyle, 75, are still living, long into retirement, as is a sixth brother, Johnny, who was not old enough to fight in World War II but later served in occupied Germany. Four of the brothers stayed in Indiana, but Ned and Kenneth live in the same Martin County neighborhood, south of Stuart.
For Ned B. Smith, Memorial Day is a time to raise a hand-sewed flag made for him by family. It’s too precious, too beautiful to display on ordinary days, he said.
Ned Smith joined the Army in 1940 for the $28 a month he could send home to help his father, Barbee Smith, who had lost the family’s farm, grocery store and just about everything else during the Depression. He came home with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star.
Little sister Ruth was a 12-year-old girl when her oldest brother left and a married woman when he came back. Even during the Depression, her brothers would always let her reach into their pockets for a nickel, or even a dime. And when she ran foot races against her lanky, athletic teenage brothers, the small girl magically came out the winner, again and again.
“People said you must have had a rough time with all those boys, but they were really very protective of me,” Ruth Small said. Though the family missed them terribly, she said, her mother watched stoically as each of her boys walked off her front porch.
It was only the fourth, Kenneth, who made her wince.
During the months after Pearl Harbor, her fourth son was eager to help his big brothers whip the Nazis and Japanese. He planned to enlist in February 1942, on his 17th birthday.
A photo taken around that time shows a skinny kid with a big hat perched atop his big ears and crew cut. Though already as tall as most men, he looks more like a little boy earnestly playing dress-up in Dad’s uniform.
Opha Smith asked him to wait a little longer. Small remembers Kenny himself down on the bed, crying because Mother was trying to stop him from joining the service.
Nobody remembers now whether pride and patriotism changed her mind, or whether she just relented, knowing that she couldn’t stop a world war, couldn’t stop the days that were dragging boys toward their 18th birthdays.
Either way, she signed Kenny’s papers and let him go.
The telegrams came every day around noon.
“We never knew what they would say,” Small said.
The Smiths had heard about the telegram received by the Sullivans in Waterloo, Iowa, who also had five sons in the war. All five died together when their ship, the USS Juneau, was sunk off Guadalcanal in 1942.
Men from the same families and places didn’t fight together after that. Even tragedy, the Army decided, should be rationed like sugar and gasoline, parceled out to families and towns in more manageable bundles.
But both Kenneth and Ned fought at Normandy, one of the bloodiest battles of the 20th century.
Just before D-Day, Opha Smith received a telegram from Kenneth, saying, “Mother, pray for us boys, we need God now.”
It was 30 days before she heard from him again.
Kenneth Smith was training with the 82nd Airborne Division, preparing for an invasion by air. Because the mission had to be a secret, the men didn’t know anything except that they would be landing in the middle of the night, in enemy-occupied territory.
The plan was for airplanes to release hundreds of gliders over Sainte-Mere-Eglise, near Normandy on the French coast. Pilots would steer the canvas-winged gliders into a field, and the six or seven crewmen would jump out to find the others with the help of small clickers that chirped like a cricket.
That wasn’t the way it happened.
“I know now that it was a suicide mission,” Kenneth said.
Before sunset, he took off with his sergeant and five or six other men in a glider towed by a plane.
As they came in sight of land, he saw ships everywhere in the Channel, so close together that it seemed he could walk on them all the way back to England.
The planes started drawing heavy gunfire. Around 11:30 p.m., over the French coast, the airmen cut the ropes on the gliders. The wings of some were shredded and they plunged into the Channel. Other pilots found that the Germans had flooded the fields with 4 feet of water and strung barbed wire between poles.
Later, people came to call the plywood-and-canvas gliders “flying coffins.”
Kenneth’s glider was torn by only a few bullets, but its descent was more plummet than glide. The glider crashed into a tree, ripping through the branches as the nose hit the dirt. Smith was probably knocked out on impact, because he doesn’t remember the next few hours.
When he came to, the members of his crew were gone, and gunfire was everywhere. Then he saw his sergeant, badly wounded and yelling for morphine. Kenneth looked around frantically, trying to find help.
All the other Americans were dead or gone.
“I didn’t know where anyone else was. I was just there by myself, 17 or 18 years old,” he said.
There wasn’t much he could do for the sergeant, so he crouched down in a ditch a few feet from a road and waited for help. When he heard troops approaching, he signaled once with his cricket.
Americans knew to respond with two chirps. The soldiers didn’t signal.
They were German.
Maybe because it was so dark, or probably because they were more terrified than he was, Kenneth said, they passed him by. The next troops down the road were Americans who led him back to the others.
Ned Smith came into Normandy with the 83rd Infantry Division on landing craft. For the men like Ned, who hadn’t seen the battle maps and weren’t invited to the strategy sessions, the invasion seemed like chaos.
“Most of the time, you didn’t know where you were or what you were doing,” he said.
As a medic, Ned used a small bag of supplies, mostly bandages and morphine, to help save lives - but more often to make death a little kinder. He crouched in a trench until he was needed, then rushed out to the front lines to treat the wounded until they were taken away on a litter.
He carried two canteens, one with water for himself and another with whiskey for the dying.
“The ones that were in bad shape, they were so happy to get that drink,” he said.
German snipers seemed to be everywhere, firing from the trees, from behind the hedgerows.
Ned was in those hedge rows when his commander had to leave to find more ammunition. With some trepidation, Ned agreed to take over while he was gone. For 30 minutes, he kept the Americans in place and fighting, and was later awarded a Bronze Star for action beyond the call of duty.
Kenneth’s division quickly took Sainte-Mere-Eglise, the first French town liberated by the Allies, and fought for 36 more days.
“We never gave up an inch,” he said.
Nearly half of his division was lost.
On Christmas Day 1944, Ned was in the blasted-out town of Gey, Germany. The troops dressed up a bedraggled Christmas tree in the rubble, under a tangle of communications wires. Around 11 a.m., cooks were getting started on the holiday meal, and Ned posed for a picture with his buddies.
Then they got the news that the Germans had rallied from retreat and were surging westward. Ned and his division were told to pack up and prepare to join other units fighting them back in the Battle of the Bulge. They drove in Army trucks, all Christmas Day and through the night.
Ned and the others ate Christmas dinner out of a tin rations container that looked like a Fancy Feast cat-food can.
Kenneth’s division also was at the Battle of the Bulge. It was a mean, cold winter, with 3 to 4 feet of snow on the ground. The soldiers put straw in their galoshes to keep their feet warm.
Ned was wounded for the second time a few days later, so he did not run into Kenneth during the battle.
But one day, Kenneth was out hunting eggs for breakfast when a man in the back of a passing truck started waving wildly and yelling, “It’s your brother! It’s your brother!”
Kenneth knew it couldn’t be Ned, who he had learned was recovering in the hospital. Or Dwight, who was in the Pacific Theater. Russell was in Ecuador, helping to guard the Panama Canal.
It wasn’t until Kyle used his nickname from home, “Pig,” that Kenneth recognized him. He went sprinting for the truck and hopped in the back. Kenneth hadn’t known that his younger brother had joined up.
Years later, Kyle said he thinks the chances of that surprise meeting were 1 in a million.
One brother mentioned that Ruth had gotten married to a man named Small, and they agreed that, when they got home, they would size him up and toss him out if he was not up to family standards. (Malcolm Small was allowed to stay. He and Ruth were married for more than 50 years before he died in 1996.)
Hours after the brothers caught up on talk about home, Kyle was injured by gunfire and sent to a hospital.
After a final offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans were exhausted and demoralized.
As the Smith brothers’ various divisions chased retreating Germans, they picked up hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who dutifully dropped their weapons and fell into line for a march to POW camps.
Some had been fighting for almost eight years, but more were old men and boys who seemed very young, even to 19-year-old Kenneth. The elite German SS soldiers fought viciously to the death, Kenneth said, but rank-and-file German troops seemed much more human.
“They were just like us,” he said. “They wanted to go home.”
As his troops advanced into Germany, they came across a concentration camp.
He can’t remember the name of the place. But he can’t seem to forget the awful smell, the thousands of bodies and the faces of the few who were still alive.
Kenneth tried to talk to one man, whose skin hung loosely off his skeleton. But the man went limp just then, and died.
Over the years, Ruth Small’s memories of her brothers’ absence have worn smooth as sea glass, encrusted by time. But one is still sliver sharp.
Small overheard a neighbor gossiping about her mother. Mistaking strength for ruthlessness, the neighbor said that Mrs. Smith didn’t seem to care about her boys at all.
“That hurt me so bad, that she would say that,” Small said.
The neighbor must not have noticed the pride Opha Smith took in a small white flag with five blue stars that hung in her front window, Small said. Maybe she didn’t read the letters Smith wrote about her boys to The Washington Democrat newspaper, signed simply, “A Soldier’s Mother.”
Opha Smith died in 1949, at the age of 61. Technically, the cause of death was a ruptured tumor, Ned said. But Small wonders whether it also might be possible for a mother to die from three years of unyielding fear.
“I think she worried herself to death trying to get those boys home,” she said.
The boys’ homecomings were happy but quiet. Kyle got diphtheria on the ship home, and Ned came back after V-E Day, so they missed the New York City ticker tape parades.
The brothers quickly took jobs, set up lives, moved on. First their children and then their grandchildren sometimes asked for stories, but the brothers stayed mostly silent.
“We never could get the boys to talk about the war,” Small said. “It took them a long, long time.”
Sixty years later, Kenneth and Ned politely offer shards of memory, but they don’t want to dwell on the sadness.
“I don’t go in for this stuff,” Kenneth said. “It’s history.”
Ned is proud of all he was able to do in the war and proud that people want to hear about his experiences all these years later.
But even now, he can’t talk about the dead or wounded.
And he won’t see the 1998 blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan. He doesn’t think much of its fictional premise that the Army would send a squad of men to take Private Ryan out of combat because his three brothers had all been killed.
It’s a nice thought that one life would matter so much, he said, but that sort of thing doesn’t happen in a war.
“You just don’t risk five lives for one,” he said.
Besides, Ned said, he doesn’t watch war movies. The few he saw gave him the sort of nightmares that made him yell out in his sleep.
Now, he just wants to keep the killing safely locked up in the past, where it belongs.
Copyright 2001 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
May 27, 2001 Sunday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION, Pg. 1A
LENGTH: 2156 words
What a story! And a miracle that these brothers lived to tell it.
My Uncle was killed in Gey, Germany in the battle there on December 11, 1944.
He was in the 331st Infantry, 83rd Division, Company “H”, 2nd Battalion.
Could one of these who were there maybe know of him?
Probably not. But it seemed worth asking.
Thank You