Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 6, 1993 TAG: 9306060101
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Atkins, a 16-year-old boy, and a friend were riding their bicycles on a Roanoke street that summer afternoon when they ran into Roanoker Jack Simms, dressed in his uniform and headed for a National Guard meeting on his bike.
Simms' Guard company was going to summer camp soon in Canton, N.Y. Simms told Atkins and his friend to come along with him; they could join the Guard and go to camp, too.
The following February, Roanoke's D Company, along with the rest of the Virginia National Guard regiment - the 116th Infantry - was called into federal service for a year. The regiment joined two Maryland National Guard regiments in the 29th Division. The attack on Pearl Harbor that December turned the year's federal service into five.
Atkins and the rest of D Company - by this time filled out with draftees - got into the war on D-Day, June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach. Atkins saw Simms killed that day.
Around a third of Company D's 150 surviving members are in Roanoke this weekend for the company's 12th annual reunion.
The men, now in their 60s, 70s and 80s, get together to renew the strong friendships that they formed during the war.
"I never ever ran into a group of people who knew the word of friendship as well as D Company," said George Kobe, an 80-year-old Californian who lived in Chicago when he was drafted into the Army.
Kobe was married, the father of a son and - at 28 - an "old man" of the unit on D-Day. "Living hell" is the way Kobe describes that June 6th, 49 years ago. "It's an experience you never want to do again."
The horrors the veterans experienced gave many of them a greater appreciation for life and a desire that others not have to endure what they went through. The 29th Division suffered one of the highest casualty rates in World War II and many of those at the reunion were wounded at least once.
Kobe, who was wounded at Vire, France, and sent back to the States to spend 11 months in a hospital, said if wars and their horror are not remembered they will be repeated.
"Killing was our game; we had to kill," Randy Ginman, 75, of Old Bridge, N.J., said of his war service. Before the war he was a hunter, Ginman said, but "since the war I don't want to kill anything." Before the war Ginman used to scoff at World War I veterans when they talked about their experiences. Afterwards he knew "it was every bit as bad as they said."
War changes you, makes you more serious-minded, said Ginman, who retired after 43 years with DuPont. "You can't help wake up in the morning, every morning, and thank God you're here. I still ask myself sometimes `Why me; why did I come back?' "
For some the reunions are a way of coming to terms with the death and destruction that still haunt them nearly 50 years after the fact.
"One of the reasons I came . . . I just like to sit and talk to these guys about combat," said Pat Moseley, 75, of Ruston, La. "I'm convinced it's the only way to get it out of your system."
Moseley joined Company D as a replacement second lieutenant three days after D-Day and was severely wounded by a German mortar shell at St. Lo, France, spending four months in an English hospital.
"Some of the things I ran into, I wouldn't want to think about; it's such a terrible thing," said Ernest Lundy, who lived in Pennington Gap when he was drafted. "A lot of it was like a nightmare; it happened and you forget all about it," he said.
Lundy, 79, now lives near Indianapolis, Ind., and has driven to Roanoke for all 12 company reunions.
Richard Atkins could have avoided the thick of the action on D-Day.
Just before the invasion, Atkins went absent without leave for a couple of days to see his English girlfriend. He still carries a tattoo with her name, Betty, on his forearm.
When he got back to camp, Company D's commander, Walter Schilling of Roanoke, was furious and planned to have Atkins follow the company into France with a kitchen unit. But Atkins begged to go and was put in a landing craft with the captain.
As they neared the beach, a German artillery shell hit the front of the boat, killing the captain and four or five others.
Atkins dumped a radio he was carrying and went over the side but when he got to the beach was hit by a machine-gun bullet in the spine.
He recovered quickly from the wound that left him temporarily paralyzed, rejoined the company and was with it at the Elbe River in Germany when the war ended.
by CNB