A D-Day addendum

Earlier today I posted about the 75th Anniversary of D-Day on June 6th and a bit about my father's involvement in the war as a U. S. Army Chaplain at that time. Since then I have had a chance to transcribe his own account of that time. Here it is, with some notes:

"I received orders to report to the Adjutant General in Washington for a flight to London "to fulfill an emergency war mission." By leaving at once I was able to be home a day and a half. When I arrived in Washington, they put me on the very next plane for Great Britain. The orders had been published before D-Day, when the army expected many casualties among men and chaplains during the invasion. There were not nearly as many as were expected, so when they got me there, they had no real need for me, and kept me waiting for three weeks for an assignment. I made use of the time seeing England - Shakespeare country, Castles, Cathedrals, etc.

Then I was assigned to a regiment of Engineers which was located at the time in Cornwall. This gave me a chance to see the beautiful coast of Cornwall, including the quaint old seacoast town of St Ives (on the road to which I had often - in my childhood fancy - met the man who had seven wives, cats and kits).

For a week we were bivouacked near Taunton. (1) I attended the Congregational Church at Taunton and heard Dr. Sidney S. Berry, (2) Executive Secretary of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. We were good friends from the first.

Less than two months after I left the States, I was in France with my regiment. We crossed the channel on a Liberty Ship, (3) from Southampton to Utah Beach - near Ste. Mere Eglise. The first night on French soil I slept under a lean-to against my jeep, and that night it rained cats and dogs. However, I slept warm and dry. We felt that now we were within range of the enemy's planes, and that it was quite possible that we should undergo bombing and strafing. During the night, our searchlights and anti-aircraft guns went into action a number of times. Every day we were near Ste. Mere Eglise, thousands of planes passed over our heads, heading for the front with men and supplies, and returning with the wounded. We began at once repairing roads and bridges so that our trucks (and tanks, etc.) could move rapidly to the front. Every night I gathered together the men of one company or another for a service of worship. We met where we could - in a tent, a pasture, an orchard, around a camp fire, in a barn, the room of a house. Sometimes they sat, sometimes they stood.

Everywhere we went in France, there were signs along the roads, "Mines cleared to hedges." Unless specifically marked, we knew it was likely that the fields were still infested with mines and booby-traps. Even in the field where we were first bivouacked, one of the men dug up a mine while digging a ditch. There were plenty of other evidences that we were in a country at war. Along the roads there were knocked out trucks, tanks, cannon, anti-aircraft guns - mostly German, implements of war that had failed to stop the invader. Some towns had been almost totally destroyed. Whatever the shelter the Germans had chosen had been leveled. Macadamized roads  were full of bomb craters and shell holes, filled with loose dirt or gravel, but in need of constant repair. There was a constant stream of U.S. Army trucks, tanks, moving up to the front.

St. Lo I shall never forget. It was literally the city of the dead. A thousand planes had leveled it in 11 minutes. The homes of the people had become their tombs. For months afterward, survivors were returning and digging out the bodies of their loved ones. Three important roads passed through St.Lo, so my regiment went to work to clear away the debris in the streets, so that the Red Ball(4) trucks and tanks could pass through."

Notes:  
(1) Taunton is located in Somerset, England. This may be the Congregational church dad attended:

 

First North Congregational Church, Taunton, Somerset, England

(2) Dr. Berry was born on July 25, 1881, and so was 63 years old when dad met him, 15 years older than dad,who turned 48 two weeks before D-Day. Berry was educated at Cambridge and became Secretary of the Congregational Union in the 1920s.

(3) Dad crossed the channel on the Liberty Ship Jane Long, built in 1943. 

A Liberty Ship used the summer of 1944 on the English channel

(4) "The Red Ball Express was a famed truck convoy system that supplied Allied forces moving quickly through Europe after breaking out from the D-Day beaches in Normandy in 1944. To expedite cargo shipment to the front, trucks emblazoned with red balls followed a similarly marked route that was closed to civilian traffic. The trucks also had priority on regular roads. Conceived in an urgent 36-hour meeting, the convoy system began operating on August 25, 1944. Staffed primarily with African-American soldiers, the Express at its peak operated 5,958 vehicles that carried about 12,500 tons of supplies a day. It ran for 83 days until November 16, when the port facilities at Antwerp, Belgium, were opened, enough French rail lines were repaired, and portable gasoline pipelines were deployed" - fromWikipedia