THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406040030 SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL SOURCE: By Larry Maddry\ DATELINE: 940606 LENGTH: Long
Hemingway, the grand old man of courage had to be there, of course. For D-Day remains the benchmark of collective and individual valor during that last great war.
{REST} And in that decisive hour - when the pip, pip, pip of German machine gun fire from shore riddled bodies already dead in the surf and nibbled at the nerves of the living - Robert Anderson Jr. passed the test.
He met the hard gaze of the bearded author of ``A Farewell to Arms'' and was not found wanting.
Both men lived to tell of their brush with death that day. But Anderson, unlike many others who served their country with distinction on June 6, 1944, has no need to recall his part in the invasion of Normandy.
He had a Nobel Prize winner do it for him.
On D-Day, the Norfolkian was a Navy lieutenant junior grade and skipper of a 36-foot LCV (P) loaded with helmeted troops attacking Fox Green Beach.
Hemingway, who tagged along as a war correspondent wrote about Anderson in a piece called ``Voyage to Victory,'' published in Collier's magazine on June 22, 1944. The writing has the crisp directness of most Hemingway prose, describing their landing craft in detail (down to the rubber tube life preservers wrapping TNT in the bow) and the battleships behind them hurling shells roaring like freight trains onto the French coast.
Anderson is the hero of the piece. The author described him as a ``handsome, hollow-cheeked boy with a lot of style and a sort of easy petulance.''
Example: ``What's your course, coxswain?'' Anderson shouted from the stern.
``Two-twenty, sir,'' the coxswain, Frank Currier of Saugus, Mass., answered. He was a thin-faced, freckled boy with his eyes fixed on the compass.
``Then steer two-twenty, damn it,'' Anderson said. ``Don't steer all over the whole damn ocean.''
Later in the piece, Hemingway described Anderson's courage in placing his landing craft at risk as he directed it through a mine field to rescue wounded men on shore. Anderson's vessel went forward when others were backing off the beach because of enemy fire. It took more than a little guts. Hemingway was so impressed he later recommended Anderson for the Navy Cross.
Anderson said his farewell to arms when the war ended and never saw the famous author again. He is returning to Normandy and Omaha Beach today with his wife, Betty. This time it will be to pay respects. He will go with heavy steps to that cemetery in Normandy where a vast field of green grass is stitched with acres of marble crosses whose whiteness blinds in the noon sun.
Anderson, a retired attorney, is 73 now. A few days ago, I reached him by phone in London, asking if he retained his ``easy truculence.''
``I think my truculence becomes less easy as time wears on,'' he replied.
He said he had been unaware that Hemingway was going on his boat until the night before the invasion. ``We were on a Dutch ship,'' he recalled. ``I had seen him aboard ship but had kept a distance,'' partly because his skipper had been courting the author's favor and been put down for it.
The ship, the Dorothea Dix, had launched Anderson's landing craft at about 2:30 a.m. Hemingway had a way of throwing his weight around and Anderson had gotten his attention by reminding him when he stepped aboard that he was in charge of the boat.
He remembered that Hemingway was wearing a beard then. He had read some of his short stories but was more fearful of what was to come than impressed by an author.
``What did impress me was his massive strength. It was a bearlike physical strength accompanied by great strength of mind. He could really use those binoculars. He had a great eye for detail, and, frankly, I was glad he was along when things got hot. He was very cool and capable of dealing, you felt, with whatever we came up against.''
Anderson is rightly proud of that Hemingway piece about him. Things happened so fast on D-Day that he didn't eat for 12 hours after leaving the ship. ``We had 28 soldiers on board and didn't land them until 1 p.m.,'' he recalled. ``But we were so busy I had forgotten about food. The destroyers saved us by firing at nearly point blank range onto the shore. Tanks on fire in the water. One man blown apart by a shell. Hemingway wrote about that.''
It was not until years later that Robert Anderson learned Hemingway was an admirer of author Sherwood Anderson - the celebrated writer whose lean style, in a way, resembled his own.
Sherwood Anderson was Bob's cousin. But he never mentioned it as they stood side by side with the machine gun bullets whizzing overhead like angry bees.
``I later thought about telling him that in a letter,'' Anderson said. ``But I never did.''
{KEYWORDS} D-DAY WORLD WAR II NORMANDY
by CNB