World War II Memories of
Wayne Bayles, U.S. Army, Ret.
CO of Co. "L" 359th
Part 2 of 5
I went up to Omaha Beach in July 1944, that was a month after D-Day. I had to climb up the same old hill and the situation was not good at all. They were about three miles inland when I got there. My first day of what I would call real combat was in September. I was assigned to 3rd Battalion 359th Infantry. I remember going down and meeting the Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Smith. It was noisy and smoky in the little room and he said “lets go out into the barn so we can do some talking”. So we went out into the barn and I saw my first dead soldier. He was laying in the hay, I thought he was asleep. But actually he was dead. The Battalion Commander talked to me for awhile and he decided to assign me to K Company of the 359th. Captain Puly Evans was the Company Commander. One of the guides there took me down and introduced me to the Captain and we talked for a few minutes. He said “Bayles I’m going to assign you to the 3rd Platoon. If you’ll look over on the side of that hill you’ll see them. Do you see them?” and I said “well, I see one squad of them” and he said “that’s it, that’s the whole platoon”. They had had a lot of casualties the day before and there was evidence to that too because the dead were stacked up beside the road two or three deep. It was sad. Anyway, I went over and met my Platoon Sergeant and he talked to me for awhile. He was from Pennsylvania, a coal miner he told me later. He had been offered a commission to take the platoon but he turned them down, he didn’t want any part of it. But he was a Platoon Sergeant. He explained to me where the platoon was scattered out and I told him “Sarge, as soon as it gets dark I want to go out and check the positions”. He looked at me and kind of grinned and said “Lieutenant, if you want to check those positions you had better do it before dark. If you go out there after dark you will get your butt shot off”. So I learned a lot in just a few minutes from him. They shelled that place every night. The German army had an Officer Candidate School for the field Artillery located not too far from there and they had every one of those positions zeroed in. They could drop a shell just about anywhere they wanted. I had to get a hole in the ground before it got dark and I started digging and man, they call the town Gravellote because that is what is was, a lot of gravel. I couldn’t dig and I saw I wasn’t going to dig a hole before dark so I decided I was going to spend some time in this ditch. I was going to build what we call a slit trench in this ditch beside the road. I saw this big pile of rocks down a hundred yards or so and I was going to put a wall of rocks across that ditch, as tall as I was and build another wall of rocks on the other side to make a trench out of that. I started hauling these rocks and (laughs) I needed one more rock. I went back and there was a pretty good size one laying there. I got a hold of it and picked it up and when I did it made a sound. What had happened was I had pulled it right out of the stomach of a German soldier. They had buried him with rocks! It must have been several days before because he smelled. I hadn’t noticed any odor until I pulled that rock out and man it was terrible. I didn’t sleep much that night. I keep saying it wasn’t very funny at the time and I can laugh about it now, but it sure wasn’t funny then.
I believe I may have mentioned it, I arrived in France in July and didn’t join my combat unit until September. In that time interval I have a couple of little jobs, one of them was training cooks and truck drivers, things like that, to be infantry soldiers because they were having a lot of casualties with the riflemen and they weren’t having many casualties with the cooks. We had too many cooks and truck drivers and not enough riflemen. We had set up a little training program close to the beach. Actually we even built a range so we could qualify them on the rifles, if they had never been qualified before, and teach them how to shoot them. We did that for about two or three weeks and I had one man, a real meek sort of guy, that came to me one day and he said “Lieutenant, I’m a truck driver. I don’t think I should go up to the front as a rifleman”. I said “hey man, I’m with you, I agree with that, I don’t want to go either but we have to go. We have to do what we have to do”. But he said “I can’t load a rifle”. I said “that’s no problem, I can teach you how to load a rifle in a couple of minutes”. We used the Ml rifle with an 8 round clip. I said “go get your rifle, I’ll show you how to do it”. He said “I can’t do it”. I said “go get your rifle, bring it over here and I’ll show you how to do it. It won’t take us but a minute”. So he went and got his rifle and brought it back and he showed me he couldn’t. Because with the Ml rifle, you had to push the clip down into the rifle with the thumb of your right hand while you were holding the slide back with the butt of your right hand. He would go to push it down and he was double jointed, every finger including his thumbs on both hands would bend all the way back. He couldn’t get any force at all to push the clip down into the rifle. He was right, he could not load a rifle. As far as I know he finished out the rest of the war as a truck driver.
This little tale is real sweet. When the war ended I was in the hospital in Cherbourg, France. My company was in Czechoslovakia. When the war ended they pulled back their position I guess to give Czechoslovakia to the Russians. We pulled back to a place called Graffenwahr, a little town that was an army training center and still is. That is where the company was when I got out of the hospital and they gave me my command back. I had a mess sergeant that was really something, he could really cook a meal. He came to me one day and said “Lieutenant I’m out of sugar. I’d like to make some ice cream. We found a place that can make some ice cream. I’d like to have some cake and ice cream for Sunday, but I’m out of sugar”. I said “go over to K Company and I Company and see if you can borrow some”. He said “I’ve already asked, they don’t have any”. And I said “talk to the Battalion S 4 and see if they have any”. He said “they don’t have any either”. I didn’t suspect what he was up to but anyway he finally said “Lieutenant one of our platoons is guarding a German warehouse over in the next little town that is full of sugar. I don’t think it is right for us not to have any sugar and all that German sugar over there stacked up for them, so what I would like to do is get a little of that sugar but I want to get your permission”. I thought about that for a little while and I said “well we don’t want to get into any trouble but O.K. go get enough sugar to fix us up here”. A few days later my acting Battalion Commander, Major Scanlon called me. He said “come up here”. So when I got there, he introduced me to a friend of his, a major, who was with the military government. He was the military governor of that district that we were in. He said “Wayne, some Germans reported to my friend here that your jeep had stolen about one thousand pounds of sugar out of the warehouse.” I said “oh come on, no way”. “O.K., I’ll admit I did tell them they could get enough sugar to make some ice cream out of”. The major said “well I thought the Germans were just stretching it a little bit, or lying about it. Just don’t let it happen any more”. I said “It won’t, I assure you of that”. I went straight to the mess hail and said to the mess sergeant “let me see that sugar you got the other day”. He said “O.K. come on”. He had it hidden up in the attic. I went up and there was eight, one hundred and fifty pound bags of sugary He really had taken it, but I didn’t go back and tell them that we did because I had already told them we didn’t. We had a sweet story around there for a long time after that.
This thing is really sad, there is absolutely nothing funny, then or now, about it. When I was first assigned to K Company it was as a Rifle Platoon Leader, but then I got promoted to 1st Lieutenant. And in a rifle company, in those days you had three rifle platoons and one weapons platoon. The weapons platoon consisted of two 30 caliber machine guns and three 60 millimeter mortars. We were still in the vicinity of Metz and we had moved in to relieve another company that had been there for some time. We put the mortars in my platoon in exactly the same spots as the mortars in the previous platoon that we were relieving. They had been shelling the Germans at night, they would use them to kind of chase the Germans around in the trenches. At night they would go outside the posts, or their fort, in the outdoor trenches and the Battalion Commanders would like to run them around out there with these little mortars just to keep them awake all night. So when my platoon went in we sat the guns in exactly the same position. The Battalion Commander told me to shell, to shoot at them. I computed the problem, measured the distance on the map, added 150 yards for safety, measured the azimuth, and asked the machine gun position which was up on
the front, we were back a little ways but the machine guns were up on the front, to observe the fire. I fired one round and they started screaming “don’t fire anymore, halt, cease fire”. What had happened was that that one round that we had fired with all the safety features figured in had landed right exactly in the center of one of my machine gun positions and killed two of my best men. I about flipped. I assumed all the res ponsibility for it myself, it could have been a mistake on my part in computing the problem, it could have been a mistake on the gunners part who set the data on the gun sight, it could have been a defective round, we’ll never really know what happened. But the end result was the shell that I gave the order to fire landed right in the machine gun position of my own men and killed two of them. The Battalion Commander was trying to console me and said “hey man you’re not the first person that that has happened to, that has happened frequently. This is war, we still have a long way to go, don’t let that get you down”. I tried to keep it out of the back of my mind but even to this day I never did get over it. I’m sorry. That machine gun position was four feet by four feet. If I had bees shooting at it trying to hit it, I would have probably never, never hit it.
This little incident happened about mid January after the Bulge had slowed down and we had headed back toward the Siegfried Line area, I remember that, to a little town called Habscheid. I’m not sure if it is Belgium or Germany but it was right on the border. I remember seeing the dragon teeth on the tank that was part of the Siegfried Line. I was executive officer of K Company and we had moved into this little town and cleaned out everybody, we didn’t have to fight to get in because there was hardly anybody there, just a few civilians left. During the night some boys in one of the platoons called me up and said “Lieutenant, there is a pregnant lady in this house down in the basement and she is screaming and hollering and about to drive us crazy. She is going to have a baby and we don’t know what to do and it scares us, we don’t like it. So you have to do something about it”. (Laughs) I said “O.K. I’ll call the doctor”. I called the battalion aide station, we had a Jewish doctor there, he was a nice fellow but he didn’t care much for the Germans. I understand that now. I told him we had this situation of the German woman up there and we didn’t know what to do. He said he would come up. He got in the jeep, you would have to see the roads to understand the situation, the roads were awful, about knee deep in mud. It was a bad situation because of the route he had to take to get up there. It was about four or five miles that he had to come up in the jeep, at night in the mud. It was really bad, it took him a long time to get there. But he came up and we showed him the house, he went down into the basement, checked the lady and said it was going to he four or five days yet, no problem. He got back in his jeep and goes back to the aide station. The next day, the boys called me up again and said “Lieutenant, you have to do something. That woman is screaming and hollering and about to drive us crazy. You have to do something”. Well I had a new uniform change and a clean shave; I had a watch with a sweep second hand on it and didn’t have anything else to do. I remembered the doctor said it was going to be four or five days, so I jokingly told the fellows “I’ll come up there and do that job myself”. I went up and went to the basement and sure enough she was carrying on something fierce. Her husband was standing there beside the bed with her. I took her arm and checked her pulse, looking at my new watch with the sweep second hand on it and I realized something was going on, I realized this women needed some help. We looked and she was having the baby, the baby’s head had already started out. I knew it had taken the Battalion Surgeon about three or four hours to get up there the last time and he wouldn’t want to come back. I knew right away that someone needed to help this woman. Only one Sergeant stayed with me when they saw what was going on, and the others ran. I mean they got out of that building and left. This one Sergeant said “well Lieutenant we’re the only ones left, I’ll help you with whatever we need to do”. So I started to work, I said “go call that doctor, get him back up here as soon as you can, I know it will be awhile but get him back up here”. I rolled up my sleeves, and the baby was ready to come out, I could tell that. I didn’t know what I was doing, I knew a little bit, but as the baby came out, I could see that the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and I knew that that wasn’t good, I knew it wasn’t supposed to be that way. I started pulling on it trying to turn the little fellows head just a little bit trying to keep the pressure off the throat. I kept pulling on the cord, finally he came out. We got him out and I untwisted the cord from around his neck and I knew it had to be cut. But the problem was I didn’t know where, I knew they usually left a little of it on there, but I didn’t know much about that. I was afraid if I cut it the baby would bleed to death or the lady would bleed to death. I didn’t know what to do, but I took some sewing thread and tied real tight in two places. Then I took a pair of scissors and cut it in between. She calmed down a little bit and maybe an hour later the doctor finally got up there. The travel was a little better in the daytime and a little faster. He checked the baby over and said its O.K. and put some kind of drops in its eyes and he took care of the lady. He got the afterbirth out of her, the husband took it out, and told us to give her a good bath and take care of the baby. He got back in his jeep and went on back. Things had quieted down a little bit but there I was with number one on my weapon. That’s the last one I hope I ever have to have anything to do with. It turned out all right. We left the next day and three or four days later I had to back to the division rear to pick up the payroll and I stopped back in to see if things were alright. The old lady was up cleaning house and the little baby was over in his crib crying so apparently he did alright. They told me they named him Peter Wayne. Stars and Stripes wrote it up, there was a piece in the paper about it. I didn’t have sense enough then to know to cut it out and bring it home, I just let it go. But it was in the Stars and Stripes.
There was a kid from Crockett County, his name was Earnest Neal Lloyd. We were on maneuvers up in Tennessee in what they call the Tennessee Maneuver Area around Murfreesboro, Bell Buckle, south of Nashville, all down in there in the summer of 1941. We were on a two-week maneuver but on one weekend they told us they were going to be in that one spot until Monday and if we wanted to go home, we could go home. So Earnest Neal and I caught a ride on an Army truck into Nashville and got out on Highway 70 and started hitchhiking. I don’t recommend it. We weren’t out there too long until a guy came along in a 1938 Ford, I’ll always remember that car. He stopped and we told him we were going to Jackson. He said “well, get in. I don’t have anything to do, I might as well just drive on down to Memphis. We’ll drive through Jackson, I’ll take ya’ll all the way home”. That sounded pretty good until we were in the car a few minutes when we found out he was drunker than a skunk. If you don’t know Highway 70, southwest out of Nashville, is full of curves. It was built back in the old days when they went around the curves instead of fill in the holes. It was really scary. I kept trying to get him to let us out, thinking up all kinds of excuses. One time I even told him “I have an aunt that lives down here in Dickson, I think I’ll just get out and spend the night with her”. He said “no, I’m going to take you guys all the way home, I feel sorry for you soldier boys and I’m going to take you all the way to Jackson”. Well we didn’t want to go all the way to Jackson with him, but nevertheless, he wouldn’t let us talk him out of it. We got a little bit west of Dickson, I can’t remember just exactly where it was, but it wasn’t too far past Dickson, and I had a thought. I said “hey, let’s stop and get a beer”. Well he bought that. I didn’t drink beer but I thought he must have been drinking some so we found a little honky tonk along side the road and we pulled over and the three of us went inside. It was crowded of course. We stood at the bar, I bought him a beer and as soon as he started drinking that beer, Earnest Neal and I took off, slipped out (laughs). We ran down the road a few hundred yards so he couldn’t look out the door and see us and started hitchhiking again. We caught a ride with a telephone truck. I remember we got into the back of this truck with a whole lot of digging equipment and so forth and there were already two other soldiers in there beside us. We made it back home, back into this area but we had to get back up there. It doesn’t pay to hitchhike, but if you do, before you get into the car make sure the guy is not drunk. It’s scary.