Buddy Ernandez doesn’t get seasick. This son of Lando takes pride
in it, telling a yarn about a deep-sea fishing trip he took once with a
jet fighter pilot.
The pilot, who could do fantastic maneuvers and barrel rolls, spent
the voyage literally spilling his guts. Buddy just smiled and fished.
Rough or easy, the sea doesn’t bother Buddy. After all, he’s been in rougher, tougher places at sea.
The English Channel, to be precise.
June 6, 1944, actually.
That day, he was with 3rd Platoon, C Company of the 18th Regiment
of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division — “the Big Red One.”
The first wave went in at 6 a.m. The 16th Regiment was in that wave.
If not for a mix-up, Buddy would have been in that outfit, and he
is certain he wouldn’t be here, alive today, to tell his story.
The 16th and the rest of the first wave got torn to pieces by
German machine guns and cannons raining bullets and shells down all
morning. More than 1,500 men were killed in that first wave, Buddy says.
So the call went out. The second wave started going in around 7,
hours early. The second wave included the 18th Regiment, which included
Buddy.
Buddy boarded his Higgins boat, a landing craft, and headed out over rough waves to his part of the “Longest Day,”
when the Allies captured Normandy, France, starting the offensive that would end World War II in Europe.
Buddy saw things that day he still can’t get out of his mind, blood
and guts, real blood and guts, arms and legs, pieces of real men
hanging off metal “hedgehogs,” blood in the water, blood on the sand.
Yet for all the horror, next week he’s going back, back to that beach.
Omaha Beach.
“Greatest Generation”
This will be Buddy Ernandez’ third trip back, he says, but “it’s probably the last one.”
Ernandez is one of the greatest generation. He and millions of
other young American men fought the Nazis, liberated death camps, fought
real evil. Then they came home and built things, cars, planes, homes,
creating a booming economic engine. They landed a man on the moon.
But the men who fought World War II are now senior citizens, and they are dying out — some reports put it at 1,000 a day.
Buddy just turned 84. When he first hit the beach, he was younger,
much younger – 2009 marks the 65th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.
He was not yet 17, a student at Edgemoor High School, on the day
everything changed for his generation. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a
sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entered a war on two
fronts, fighting Japan and the Nazis in Germany.
Before that, this Lando boy, this son of the mill village, had few
worries. He had a couple of good coon dogs and he loved to hunt,
shooting squirrels and other small animals in the hills around Fishing
Creek.
But life changed. It was a frightening time, he says. He remembers
reading in the old Charlotte newspapers about six men killed when German
U-boats sunk fishing ships off the coast of North Carolina.
He registered for the draft when he turned 18, and he was called up a year later, in 1943.
Training, deploying
Buddy went to Camp Webster in Macon, Ga., for basic training. His
drill instructor was tough as nails. When his company reported, the
lavatory in the two-story barracks was spotless the first night.
“‘You know who keeps it this clean?’ the sergeant asked us. ‘You do,’” Buddy says, acting the role and pointing his finger.
Buddy tells stories with elaboration. He takes time for details. He
gestures, raises his arms for emphasis. He often closes his eyes, as if
trying to picture the scene. After a few minutes, he really settles in.
He relaxes into his natural Lando accent and the tale comes at its own
speed of his time on “O-mee-ha Beach.”
Basic finished after about four months, and everyone was ordered onto a train and sent to Union Station in Washington, D.C.
“A man will meet you at the station and tell you where to go,” they were told.
At the station, he was put on a truck and taken to Fort Meade, Md.
He carried his duffel bag to a parade ground. He and thousands of other
young men were told to wait until they heard their names.
It took forever. Soldiers played poker and gin rummy, Buddy says,
while they waited. There was a lunch break in the middle of the day. At
the end of the day, Buddy was the only man left standing on the parade
ground.
The lieutenant, a guy “so young, he looked like he had just
graduated from Clemson,” was not happy to see Buddy. He questioned
Buddy, who said his name was never called.
The lieutenant took Buddy to see a colonel, and the colonel heard
both out. The colonel asked Buddy to find his name in the list, and it
was there. Then the colonel asked the lieutenant to read the name aloud.
He stuttered, yet insisted he had called it out on the field.
“The colonel says, ‘If you can’t say it now, you obviously couldn’t
say it then,’” Buddy says. But the train he was to take had left hours
before.
Buddy had some spending money in his pocket. He’d sold Butler and
Leeds, his coon dogs, to a Rock Hill man who admired the dogs yet
promised to sell the dogs back, no questions asked, if Buddy made it
back.
The colonel found Buddy a bunk. A week later, another mass of men
filled the parade ground. Buddy was put on a train again, sent to Camp
Shanks, N.Y, briefly, then put on a boat in a six- to eight-boat convoy
to England, to train for the invasion.
The Big Red One
That was how he ended up in the 18th Regiment. He also learned the
16th was the unit he should have been assigned to. Both were in the 1st
Infantry, the Big Red One, but the 16th was a week ahead of the 18th
while they trained for the invasion. Until D-Day, that is.
The Big Red One was an experienced, busy division. Its men had
landed in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. The ones who survived were
experienced and tough. Guys like Buddy beefed up platoons that had
suffered heavy casualties, but it gave the fresh replacements a chance
to work with battle-tested soldiers.
Buddy’s convoy landed at Liverpool, England, and he made his way to
a camp near Portsmouth, where they trained for more than a year.
They knew their job and they knew the plan. They were to take the
beach, off-load tanks and supplies and fuel. They were to head inland to
assist airborne troops who went in June 5 to places like
Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Cherbourg.
But when they hit Omaha Beach, everything went bad.
The Longest Day
Only one unit landed at its intended location that day. Nothing
else went right, but the few officers who survived were innovative.
The 16th hit the beach first, Buddy says.
“About all of them died,” he said. So the klaxon on their boats called, “All hands on deck, all hands on deck.”
The second wave had to go in early.
He got in his Higgins boat with 30 other soldiers, rode the waves and hit Omaha Beach for the first time in his life.
The men were loaded down with every piece of equipment that could
be conceived, but once they landed, Buddy says, soldiers started
stripping down to the essentials – ammo and weapons, ammo and weapons.
The beach was almost impossible to pass through — barricaded with concrete, concertina wire, mines.
Buddy remembers how his squads got through. A destroyer, the USS
Frank-ford, turned parallel to the beach and shelled the German
positions, stopping the deadly fire that was pinning down the men on
that part of the beach.
Buddy fought 12 to 14 hours, dodging bullets, firing his Browning
Automatic Rifle, stripping ammo off the wounded and the dead, trying to
stay alive.
It was night, around 9 p.m., when his fighting stopped, briefly. With a little time to regroup, they headed inland.
“I got one thing that nobody can ever take away,” Buddy says. He
was there, on “Bloody Omaha,” the biggest battle ever fought, and he
survived.
He was 19 years old.
The war in Europe
Buddy walked every mile, he said, from the beach, with fire fights
every day and many nights, 50 miles to battles in Belgium. His last
combat action was in Aachen, the first German city conquered in the war.
He helped liberate a work camp. It wasn’t one of the death camps
that epitomize the evil of Nazi Germany. But it was also not a pleasant
sight. He had to delouse the workers, mostly women and young children.
He then helped drive the displaced Czechs and Slavs back to their homelands in the Balkans.
He became part of the occupation until he got orders to head west.
He boarded a boat, the Mexican Victory, which carried him past the white
cliffs of Dover and back to the United States.
The Statue of Liberty
On the 15-day sea voyage back, counselors told the men to put the
war behind them, to forget the bad and look forward to the good that
would come when they got home.
If he saw it on his way over to Europe, he doesn’t say. But he does
mention it as part of his return. When the Mexican Victory pulled into
New York harbor, Buddy saw the Statue of Liberty. It meant something to
him.
The troops took a short hop to a nearby station and Buddy and the
soldiers were put on a train, again. This time he got a sleeper cabin in
a fancy Pullman car.
He and his fellows were unloaded at Fort Bragg, N.C., and told to
stick around if they wanted to serve in the peacetime army, or hit the
road. He wanted to get the hell out, so he hit the road, hitching a ride
to Charlotte with a guy whose brother showed up in a car.
A bus from Charlotte took him back to Chester County, to the old
company store in Lando. His siblings were all babies, so there was no
one to meet him. He walked the last bit to his home.
His mother “grabbed him by the neck,” he says. She cried.
“I’m glad to see you home,” she told him. She knew he would be
getting out sooner or later, but she didn’t expect him “so soon.”
It was Jan. 17, 1946. He had been away for almost three years.
An American life
He got a job at a printing company, took some classes under the
G.I. Bill, but after showing fellow members of the American Legion that
he could cook, he talked himself into opening a restaurant. His mother
had taught him to cook as a young man and he liked it.
He opened the Columbia Street Grill, a restaurant where the Cyclone
now stands. He was leasing the space, but later opened his own
restaurant, Buddy’s Drive-In, on the J.A. Cochran Bypass, in the ’60s.
He met Beverly at a Sugar Bowl a few years before and the two got
married, had a daughter. They worked hard to build a nice life for
themselves. They ran the restaurant for almost 30 years.
They’ve leased half of the drive-in to various Chinese restaurants
over the years. But they keep the other half for themselves, keeping it
ready and clean. Every Fourth of July, they cook barbecue for sale.
Buddy smokes his barbecue and won’t give up his recipe.
So he managed to put a lot of it behind him, as he was advised.
But he can’t keep it all inside.
Peace
Buddy says that any man who has fought in a war knows it has just
one lesson. War is terrible. The man who’s been to war doesn’t believe
in war. He wants peace.
When World War II ended, the whole world was at peace.
“Didn’t last long, did it?” he says.
Soldiers like him hailed the creation of the United Nations. What a
wonderful thing, he says — an organization that would prevent war.
Yet every few years, there’s another war.
“Where the hell is the U.N.?”
His voice carries obvious disgust over the war in Iraq. It shouldn’t have happened, he says.
Heroes
His experience has taught him much. Though the survivors of World
War II are lauded as the greatest generation, though the soldiers who
fought are hailed as heroes, Buddy says there are no heroes who can talk
about Omaha Beach today.
The only heroes are already over there, buried beneath crosses and Stars of David in the fields of France.
He and his wife will visit those fields again next week, with a
British survivor of the battle they met and befriended a few years ago.
They are riding over on a ferry from England to France, almost the same
sea route Buddy took in 1944.
Media reports say President Barack Obama will speak at a ceremony
over there. A soldier attached to the State Department in Paris has
obtained tickets for the Ernandezes and their friends to the official
program on June 6, 2009.
In a word
The counselors years ago told him to forget it, don’t talk about it, but he can’t forget.
He puts the whole experience into one word, using its real meaning.
His eyes close, his arms shake a little as he says it, as if, there
in his den, he’s actually already back there, back in ’44, back
“crawling over nothing but dead people.”
As if he’s back on the beach.
“It was the most … awesome … thing ever.”
From
The News & Reporter of Chester, S.C.
