Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 4, 1994 TAG: 9406060129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GREG EDWARDS and MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITERS NOTE: above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
IN 1939, Ray and Roy Stevens, twins from a Bedford County farm family, joined the local National Guard company.
Five years later, the brothers, then 24, had risen to the rank of sergeant and, one dreary June morning, found themselves on separate boats bearing down on the coast of northern France. They were part of the greatest armada the world has ever seen and at the tip of an invasion force of 2.5 million men bent on liberating Europe from the tyranny of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi thugs.
Roy was older than Ray by 20 minutes. They came from a family of 14 children, five of whom died in infancy. Their parents farmed near Thaxton, raising corn, tomatoes and hay with the help of horse-powered machinery.
For 25 cents a week, the boys helped a neighbor feed her cattle. They eventually dropped out of school to help support the family. For recreation, they watched the Saturday afternoon industrial league baseball games in Bedford or played the game themselves in a pasture using a homemade ball. They hunted squirrels and rabbits with a "gravel-shooter," a slingshot.
Like many twins, Ray and Roy were closer than most siblings. After they both went to work full time, they bought a 130-acre farm together. For a while, they dated sisters, borrowing their brother Harold's Plymouth.
"We'd have to sell a cow or two before we got any gas to go in it," Roy recalled.
An older brother, Jack, had been in Bedford's Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment; when a spot opened up in 1939, Ray and Roy flipped for it. Ray won and entered the Guard; Roy got in a week later.
"We put that uniform on, and we were something; that's what it felt like," Roy said.
The Guard was almost like a club. There was even an initiation. The Guardsmen would line up in two rows, take their belts in their hands and welcome new recruits as they crawled through their ranks. It was a first taste of discipline, the kind that would find the Guardsmen doing close-order drills right behind the front lines of battle.
The Guard met weekly and went to camp each summer at Virginia Beach. On Feb. 3, 1941, the 29th Infantry Division, which included the 116th and other Guard units from Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, D.C., was called up for a year's federal service. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor while the 29th was on its way back to Fort George Meade, Md., from war games in North Carolina.
The 29th was one of the first American infantry divisions sent to England and the first to receive amphibious assault training. It's been said that the well-trained but untested 29th Division was picked to lead the D-Day invasion because its soldiers lacked the fear of battle known to veterans.
Roy Stevens, now 74, returned to Bedford after the war and lives in retirement near the farm where he grew up. His brother Ray remained behind in France.
Willard Norfleet joined the National Guard in 1938 mostly because it was something to do, but also because of the $1-a-week pay and because he thought the uniform might impress the girls. It did.
He was no born soldier, however.
When he joined the Guard, Norfleet didn't have it in his heart to kill a living creature. Nor did he feel passionate about the growing menace of Nazi Germany. In 1938, he didn't know what a Nazi was.
He was 20, a native Roanoker who finished the fifth grade before going to work, first for a roofer and later at an auto parts business. Europe was an ocean away, another world.
By 1941, the threat of war couldn't be ignored. When his term with the Guard expired, he signed up for another year. If he was going to war, he wanted to go with guys he knew.
Soon after, they were called up for duty and sent to England.
Norfleet liked England. His company's touch football team won the divisional championship, earning him an eight-day pass to London. The English, he said, were good hosts. Every month, he ate dinner with an English family.
Training seemed to go on forever. Norfleet and the 29th Division were stationed in England for more than two years before D-Day. He became a platoon leader, leading his men on endless marches and through practice runs on the beaches to prepare for the invasion.
He had a tough captain, Walter Schilling, who handled problems the old-fashioned way. "Anytime you don't like what I'm doing," he told his men, "I'll take my shirt off and settle it with you."
As D-Day approached, though, Norfleet remained the same life-loving man that he was before. "They didn't know whether I would kill or not kill or what I would do. They never asked."
Fifty years later, he is proud that he never fired a weapon in his 10 days of combat in Normandy. He tossed the one hand grenade he carried into a hedgerow, "pin and all."
A self-described sinner before the war, Norfleet promised God that he would become a devout Christian if he lived through the invasion. Today, at 76, he remains true to that vow.
He was wounded when an artillery shell - friendly fire - hit a tree near him, and shrapnel ripped through his right elbow. Norfleet nearly bled to death, and the wound left his arm permanently crippled.
He returned to Virginia and spent more than a year at Woodrow Wilson General Hospital in Augusta County. While in the hospital, he married a woman from Roanoke he'd known before the war. They have a son and three grandchildren.
His arm and other health problems have plagued him. For a long time, he suffered nightmares. He said he couldn't go to the bathroom at night unless he left a light on. He never returned to work, taking military disability instead.
Only recently has he been able to talk about D-Day.
"I wanted to forget about it, get it out of my mind."
Murphy Scott was born in Franklin County and in 1927 moved with his family to Vinton, where his father ran a dairy farm. He attended William Byrd High School and lettered in four sports.
He'd spend weekends going to the movies or playing pickup games of baseball. He and his friends sometimes played a team of convicts at a Bedford County prison. The outfield had guard towers.
After high school, Scott moved to Martinsville, where he lived with his sister and her husband and went to work for the W.M. Bassett Furniture Co.
On Feb. 1, 1941, he joined Martinsville's Guard unit. Two days later, the Guard was federalized and the start of World War II kept Scott in the Army. "At least I was with people I knew," he said.
After Pearl Harbor, the Guard patrolled the East Coast, and Scott helped guard Nags Head, N.C., from a German invasion. Later, Scott helped train new recruits to fill out the ranks of the 116th Infantry. On weekends, he'd come home to see his girlfriend.
Scott, Willard Norfleet, Ray and Roy Stevens and others of the 116th Infantry went to England aboard the Queen Mary in late September 1942. On the way, the big ship, following a zigzag course, struck and cut in two a British cruiser that was escorting it. Because of the submarine threat, the luxury-liner-turned-troop ship couldn't stop. The cruiser sank within five minutes, and the soldiers of the 116th watched as some of 300 British sailors drowned.
In England, Scott opened a letter one day from his girl back home to find she had fallen for someone else. Partly to forget the "Dear John" letter, Scott joined the newly formed 29th ranger battalion, one of a handful of ranger outfits being trained in commando tactics by the British in Scotland. He also eased his pain with the companionship of a British nurse.
The training included double-time marches and practice amphibious landings under fire. "The British commandos would shoot holes in your [boat] paddle," he said. He climbed cliffs with and without ropes and trained in the tactics of house-to-house fighting.
When Gen. Charles Gerhardt, commanding officer of the 29th Division, objected to taking the 29th Rangers from his control, the battalion was disbanded, and Scott and others returned to their old units. But the ranger training prepared him for what lay ahead.
When the division was moved into a guarded staging area on Britain's southern coast, Scott and other soldiers knew the invasion was coming. Scott was eager. "Let's go and get it over with," he thought at the time.
Scott was a sergeant and leader of a mortar squad. He carried the mortar sight and an M-1 rifle when they hit the beach. Scott came through D-Day unscathed, though some of his closest friends did not. He was wounded in July during the battle for St. Lo. He returned to his unit in September and finished the war with them.
Scott, now 74, is the retired assistant principal of Hidden Valley Junior High School in Roanoke County.
Unlike Scott, Norfleet and the Stevens brothers, Joe Comer didn't belong to a National Guard unit. He was drafted into service in 1942.
Comer lived in Buena Vista and had gone to work for the Norfolk & Western Railway after dropping out of school in 1935. He was content to work for the railroad just as his father and grandfather had done. Comer's son works for the railroad today.
Three weeks before receiving his draft notice, Comer had been promoted to fireman; his job was to keep the coal fire stoked on a locomotive.
When he was drafted, Comer signed up along with two buddies to become a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. "I told them if they'd sign up, I would, too."
The paratroopers - ground soldiers who jump into enemy territory, usually at night - were a new outfit and considered elite. Many of the paratroopers, including Comer, wore their hair in mohawks as a badge of honor.
Training began with jumping and learning to roll in sawdust pits. It concluded with live night jumps and war games once a month. Sometimes, it was so dark where they practiced that they walked into stone walls.
By D-Day, Comer was a veteran of a combat jump in Sicily in July 1943 and another two months later in Italy. He earned the nickname "Doc" in Italy when he helped a wounded paratrooper.
The 82nd's mission on D-Day was to parachute in the early morning darkness around the French town of Sainte-Mere-Eglise and capture it from the Germans before dawn, when the beach landings would begin a few miles away. The town was an important communications point for the German forces on the coast.
Many of the paratroopers mistakenly were dropped into the center of town and were shot by the Germans before they reached the ground. Sainte-Mere-Eglise did become the first French town liberated in the invasion, however.
Comer survived D-Day, just as he had survived Sicily and Italy. He made a fourth jump into Belgium, but missed the fall of Berlin and the end of the war because of a ruptured appendix, not related to combat.
He eventually became an engineer for the railroad. He married in 1947, and he and his wife, Dorothy, moved to Roanoke in 1957. They have two daughters, one son, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He retired in 1980.
Today, at 76, Comer says the war changed him. He was carefree before, maybe a little naive. Afterward, he was more serious. Three of his brothers were in the war. One was killed in the Pacific.
"I kind of realized how things were," Comer said.
John Talton thought he'd spend his war days as a pilot.
He ended up on Omaha Beach, a Navy demolitions specialist, landing before the Bedford wave. His job was to rig the German beach obstacles with explosives and blow a path through the defenses for the incoming troops.
Talton's war experience began in 1942 when he enlisted in the Naval Air Corps - as a pilot.
He was 21, a bookkeeper at a creamery in Raleigh, N.C., and his dream of becoming a flyboy dated to his childhood days of building model airplanes after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. He trained in North Carolina, Indiana and Florida for more than a year.
In September 1943, he failed a routine pressure chamber test. His days as a pilot were through, and the Air Corps released him. "I thought I was out," he said. The Navy called him right back up for regular duty.
Talton volunteered to join the Combat Demolition Unit, a precursor to today's Navy Seals. Originally, he thought the group worked aboard ships that picked up mines in the water. Instead, as D-Day approached and Talton was sent to England for training, he learned he would be among the first men to storm the Normandy beaches.
He survived Omaha Beach, despite the 52 percent casualty rate the demolition units suffered. The next day, with his unit devastated and the beach secure, he tried to hitch a ride with a boat to get off the beach. An officer refused to let him board, saying he would be classified a deserter.
By chance, he met up with his brother, a foot soldier, that same day. "I think we hugged each other real good and strong." After his ordeal, Talton felt grim about his brother's chances, and he later wrote their mother saying he didn't expect to see his brother alive again.
His brother survived the war.
After Germany's defeat, Talton joined the Pacific campaign, although he didn't see action. He was discharged in March 1946. He worked briefly in a Richmond bank and settled in Radford in 1947.
Today, at 74, he is retired from the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, is married, and has two children and three grandchildren. This weekend, he's returning to France to receive the medals he never received after the war.
The medals don't mean much now. He considers himself a survivor, not a hero. The real heroes, he says, are marked with white crosses and stars on the bluffs overlooking Omaha Beach.
"They're buried in the cemetery."
by CNB