Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 27, 1993                   TAG: 9307270164
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

HE SOUGHT OUT THE WAR, GAVE HIS ALL

When the Korean War heated up, he hungered to go there. Instead, in November 1952, he was sent to Japan and assigned to a psychological-warfare unit. Sgt. Tayloe had some public-relations experience, but that sort of job wasn't for him.

He told his commanding officer: "Sir, I'm malassigned."

The captain asked Tayloe what he wanted to do.

"How 'bout Korea?" Tayloe suggested.

Tayloe had worked for Norfolk and Western Railway in Roanoke before World War II. So when the captain checked and found that railroad men were sorely needed in Korea, he told Tayloe, "Go home and get your stuff."

Tayloe joined the 765th Transportation Railway Shop Battalion. Its shop was in Pusan, well behind the front lines, because the shop near the front at Inchon had been bombed flat earlier in the war.

The unit's job was to keep the trains running and build new ones to carry men and supplies to the front. He was made superintendent of the shop. He set up the operation just like N&W's Southeast Roanoke shops were organized.

It was tough going for a while. "I didn't know a word of Korean," he remembers. "I had about 300 Koreans working for me. My military men were down to a rock-bottom low - I was down to something like 16 men. That was for the hospital trains and everything."

After six months, though, Gen. Mark Clark visited on an inspection tour. Tayloe told Clark boldly, "Sir, I don't have enough men to cover it." As Clark left, he shook Sgt. Tayloe's hand instead of saluting, looked Tayloe in the eye and said he'd take care of the problem.

He kept his promise. "He took every man on the front line who had any railroad experience and sent them down there," Tayloe remembers.

Things picked up at the shop after that. At its top speed, the unit was repairing at least 35 rail cars a day and constructing another 15 a day.

Tayloe, who eventually rose to the rank of master sergeant, would receive the Army Commendation Medal for raising his unit's daily output of constructed rail cars. The shop's production climbed "to the highest average of any similar unit," according to the commendation he finally received last year, almost 40 years late.

One of the most memorable moments of his 15 months in Korea came in April 1953, when he went along on Operation Little Switch, the first exchange of prisoners between the two sides.

He was selected as a "car knocker" - a safety and maintenance inspector - for the trip across the 38th Parallel to Panmunjon. The train pulled a dozen cars holding several hundred North Korean and Chinese POWs.

As the train crossed into enemy territory, it passed through a neutral corridor, stretching 200 yards on either side of the the tracks and staked off by big orange flags.

While the prisoners were being unloaded, Tayloe and some of the other train men got out to take pictures. The next thing they knew snipers' bullets began whistling by. "We got back to the train a lot quicker than we got away from it," Tayloe remembers.

Then they picked up the American POWs. Some of the North Korean prisoners had lost legs or arms, but most were in good shape, Tayloe remembers. But the Americans the North Koreans exchanged were sick, starving, lacking medical attention.

"To see what they give us in return was pitiful," Tayloe said. "We had to fly them out to hospitals."

Tayloe did not leave Korea unscathed.

On Aug. 23, 1953, less than a month after the armistice had been signed, Tayloe was operating a Cummings diesel locomotive, a small engine used as a sort of switch engine that was used to pull cars around in the shop.

"It was like everything we had in those days," he says. "It was just wired to hold it together."

He was pushing three box cars into the shop with the Cummings when, suddenly, the throttle stuck. It lurched forward, and he feared it was going to crash into a row of cars and topple them over on the men working under them.

There was only one way to stop the Cummings: He reached out the cab, threw up the hood and grabbed the compression lever. He pulled it and cut the power off.

But the locomotive was vibrating so badly by then it threw his left hand off into the engine fan. It sliced off his thumb, his forefinger and half his middle finger.

Someone found the top of his middle finger, and that was sewn back on. But his thumb and forefinger were gone.

When he was in the hospital, he remembers, the thing that kept him going was listening to Nat King Cole's "Pretend You're Happy When You're Blue."

When they unwrapped his hand at the hospital, "I cried like a baby."

Later, after he retured to the States, he visited Walter Reed Hospital to be fitted for an artificial thumb, which in those days was nothing more than cosmetic. Seeing other casualties of the war cured him of ever feeling sorry for himself.

"After seeing those boys with no arms and legs, I said: `What do I need with an artificial thumb?' I never wore the thing."