Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406050074
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DOVER, DEL. LENGTH: Long
Walter "Bud" Moore, tall, skinny and a couple of classes shy of a diploma at Spartanburg (S.C.) High School, was right in the middle of it, streaming toward Utah Beach in an LCI landing craft, with his heart in his throat and sheer amazement in his eyes.
Shells were screaming over his head - in both directions.
"The big Navy guns on the big battlewagons began blasting with the 16-inchers, and you could see the shells land," Moore said. "The way they were firing the guns, and the way all the stuff was flying and everything else, you'd have said nothing could stay alive up there.
"It was the doggonedest sight you ever saw."
At 68, Bud Moore is a legendary NASCAR Winston Cup owner known for building cars that win races no matter who steers them - from Joe Weatherly to Buddy Baker to Bobby Allison to Dale Earnhardt to Ricky Rudd to Geoff Bodine, with other winners in between.
Perhaps Moore's greatest contribution, one of which he is fiercely proud, is his service as a foot soldier in the U.S. Army who was baptized in combat on Utah Beach.
Throughout American history - from Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox" of the American Revolution, to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the "wizard" of the Confederate Army - Southern men have been fierce and courageous warriors, and Moore was no exception.
He won two Bronze Stars at the price of five Purple Hearts. He was shot through the hip, blown out of a jeep and hit while huddled in a foxhole. He still managed to come home in one piece.
Fifty years later, he still has nightmares about the war. He does not care to describe them.
"Well, it's just a situation," he said. "Certain things. You sort of halfway wake up. Something pops in the mind. It just happens, that's all."
His war memories are vivid and detailed, but some stories remain private. They still hurt too much to tell.
"I don't really like to talk about some of the battles we did do and some of the guys we lost," Moore said.
The United States was 18 months into World War II when Moore was drafted in June 1943. He was supposed to take algebra and trigonometry in summer school to get his high school diploma, but the Army took him instead. After 13 weeks in basic training in Mississippi, Army officers said he was a soldier.
By April 1944, Moore was in England. Around June 1, he learned his unit would board an LCI to participate in a dry run of an amphibious landing.
"When we moved out into the [English] Channel, all I could see was ships just as far as I could see - thousands of them, just thousands of them," he said. "I told some of my buddies, `Boys, I can tell you one thing: This ain't no dry run. This is the real thing.' "
The assault was delayed several days because of bad weather. On the morning of June 5, officers came aboard the ship and told the troops they would hit Utah Beach at 5 a.m. the next day.
"I didn't get much sleep that night," Moore said. "None of the guys did that were on that boat, because we knew what was coming that next day."
Sometime that night, the LCI started moving. By daybreak, the men on board could see the shore of France.
About 200 yards from the beach, the LCI stopped, dropped its nose and disgorged Bud Moore into his first battle.
"All these German shells were coming in there, and all hell's breaking loose," Moore said. "The water was up shoulder high. We had probably 150 yards before we got to water that was knee-deep."
Next to him, a soldier took a direct hit.
"He just disappeared," Moore said. "All this stuff flying, and I was so scared."
On the boat, he had thought how strange it was that people really were out there trying to kill each other.
"These people are crazy," he thought to himself. "Something's wrong."
But, struggling in the surf, he wasn't thinking anything except how incredibly scared he was and how hard it was to make his legs run in water. On his back, besides his backpack, was a 51-pound tripod for his crew's water-cooled machine gun.
Suddenly, he stepped into a hole. He went under. Salt water swept into his eyes. They burned so badly he had to stop, with German shells still coming in, and clear his eyes. Finally, he was moving again.
Today, he looks back on the experience and estimates it took him 5 to 7 minutes to wade through the water, run across the beach and find a relatively safe place at the edge of the bluff.
The landing at Utah Beach was far milder than at nearby Omaha Beach. Thousands of Americans fell at Omaha; a few hundred were killed at Utah.
That was only the beginning.
Moore and his unit advanced abut a half-mile June 6. They kept advancing for the next 11 months, until the war was over, fighting from town to town. War was a daily ordeal.
"The only thing I can say is, when you were out there fighting all day long, it was real thrilling for nighttime to come because everything sort of stopped," Moore said. "And when you dug your foxhole and laid down in that foxhole, you praised the Lord you made it through that day and hoped you were going to make it tomorrow.
"But it wasn't no real comfort. Sometimes we got harassing artillery [fire]. We got very little sleep."
It was four or five weeks before he bathed, Moore remembers.
"We didn't shave. I don't even remember whether we brushed our teeth. But nobody got to shave, there were no clean clothes and no clean socks. And all the clothes had all this salt in them and your legs got raw where it rubbed. I remember I was so bad, at one point I just took off my underwear and throwed them away."
He was wounded five times. His most serious injury was a gunshot wound in the hip. Soon after he was released from the field hospital, "I got blowed out of a jeep by an artillery shell and I got shrapnel [wounds] all over," Moore said.
He was wounded three more times by shrapnel.
"One time, I was at the field hospital for about an hour-and-a-half for shrapnel. They got it all out, put some methiolate and Band-Aids on me in about 25 or 30 places and sent me right back out," he said. "But I was fortunate for as many times as I was blowed out of foxholes. I never really had a major problem, although I had both ear drums busted and I can't hear very well."
Moore received one Bronze Star for being on the front lines for nine months and 14 days without being evacuated. He won the other when he and another soldier captured a German regimental headquarters.
This happened in the fall of 1944, after he had been promoted to corporal and given the job of positioning the machine gun teams.
He and a soldier named Hess were sent off in a Jeep and almost immediately captured a German soldier trying to flee a farmhouse.
"Then we went on up the road," he said. "We were supposed to turn right and go up over a hill, but we went straight on. We must have went another 200 or 300 yards and there was this little, red brick building. Someone started firing on us and I started firing back. I shot out the windows and everything. And all of a sudden I stopped firing and they stopped firing at me. And about that time a white flag came out of one window."
Moore and Hess sent in their prisoner. Hess, who knew a bit of German, told the soldier to tell his comrades that if they didn't come out, he and Moore would call in artillery fire to blow the place apart.
"They all came piling out," Moore said.
If the Germans were surprised they had been captured by two foot soldiers, Moore's commanding officer was more amazed when he and Hess returned with 20 prisoners.
Moore said he hasn't talked to any of his fellow soldiers in about 10 years. And he's never returned to France.
"I'm going back pretty soon," he said. "I'm hoping to go back and start from where I hit the beach and just drive and go all the way back to Czechoslovakia, where I was when the war ended.
"It means a whole lot to me to be recognized. I'd like to see that everybody else in that war is recognized in the same way."
by CNB