By GARY WESMAN
Morning News staff reporter
James and Ruth
Whitcher of Erie, newlyweds during World War II, have kept a secret from the Army all through their 50-year marriage.
Jim Whitcher, a decorated GI and D-Day veteran, went AWOL one night in the spring of 1944. And got
away with it.
It was only for a few hours. His reason might even satisfy a stone-hearted MP.
Jim Whitcher left his base without permission to say goodbye to his wife of 5/4 months, to tell Ruth that he was being
shipped overseas before dawn the next day.
""I was AWOL that night,'' Whitcher, 73, a retired toolmaker, said. ""Well, too late to do anything about it now.''
The Whitchers were reminiscing about
their World War II experiences one recent night at their house on Hudson Road in southwest Erie, their home for the past 48 years.
""Tell about the night you came to see me,'' Mrs. Whitcher, the former Ruth
Shields of North East, urged her husband.
""I don't know if I want to tell that one,'' Jim Whitcher said.
""Oh, go on.''
""All right. I guess I can't get in any trouble now.''
The
Whitchers, who married on Oct. 12, 1943, said they were in Boston the next spring, living in a small apartment on Beacon Hill.
Jim Whitcher, an Army pfc, had finished his basic training and was assigned to a unit that
loaded and unloaded ammunition and supply ships. Around Easter time, in late March 1944, he got his orders.
Only hours before he was to be shipped overseas, Whitcher said he left his base late that night to say
goodbye to Ruth.
""I was thumbing a ride to Beacon Hill,'' he recalled. ""You won't believe this. It was a CO (commanding officer) that picked me up.
""He was asking lots of questions.
I played dumb, you know. Anyhow, I got there.''
""I was so surprised to see him,'' Ruth Whitcher recalled. ""And he was so nervous.''
Whitcher said he arrived home at midnight, returned to his
station at 2 a.m. and boarded a ship for Europe at 4 a.m.
Eventually, Whitcher and his unit, the 300th Port Company of the U.S. 1st Army, 1st Engineering Brigade, spent 28 days on Utah Beach in the aftermath of
the D-Day landing.
""We were on the beach for 28 days,'' he said. ""We dug in the sand and lived in foxholes. We were like stevedores, unloading Liberty ships.''
Ruth Whitcher had returned to North East by D-Day.
""When he went overseas you knew he was going to be in the war,'' she said. ""But we knew nothing about the invasion coming. At least I didn't.
""I waited a long time for a letter,'' she said. ""I didn't hear from Jim for over a month. Finally I got a little V-mail and I knew he was alive, at least.''
Ruth Whitcher said she'd done office
work for the government and for a lawyer in Boston.
""Back home in North East I was working - but not doing much,'' she said. ""I was too nervous. I was jerking sodas and working in the North East
drug store.''
Ruth Whitcher said she spent many days with other young women whose husbands were at war.
""Most all of them had babies but me,'' she said. ""We'd get together, play cards and chew
the fat.''
After the war, the Whitchers raised two children. Photos of their grandkids decorate the den of the Hudson Road house.
""There were so many guys who didn't come back,'' Jim Whitcher said of the
war in Europe. ""They're the ones who should do the talking, if they could.''
""Dig there,'' the GIs were told.
So a couple of Pfcs, Jim Whitcher and Bud Graybill, dug a hole in the sand of Utah
Beach, almost within spitting distance of an anti-aircraft battery.
That foxhole was Whitcher's and Graybill's home for almost a month after D-Day while they unloaded Liberty Ships bringing supplies for the allied
armies pushing inland through France.
""The two of us dug in the sand and lived in it for 28 days,'' Whitcher, now 73, recalled during an interview at his home on Hudson Road in Erie.
""We lived
on K rations for 28 days,'' he said. ""Our helmets were our bath. You shaved out of your helmet and brushed your teeth out of it.''
Whitcher and Graybill, both of whom ended World War II as U.S. Army Tec 5s,
then belonged to the 300th Port Co., part of the 1st Engineering Special Brigade.
Once the D-Day invasion gained a toehold in France, a dozen or so of the port companies unloaded supply ships on Utah Beach.
""We were like stevedores,'' Whitcher said.
Whitcher remembers they averaged a ship a day, five holds per Liberty Ship, mostly boxes of ammunition and guns.
""You worked until the ship was
unloaded, simple as that,'' he said. ""You worked around the clock, if that's what it took.''
Whitcher said the infantry faced much more danger than his outfit did, yet there was still combat all around
them. Some of the men in his neighboring company, the 299th, were killed on the beach.
The beach was shelled by German artillery and German observation planes flew overhead at night.
""I don't know how,
but some nights we slept pretty damn good,'' Whitcher said, laughing. ""Then again, I can remember some nights when we had the hell scared out of us.''
Whitcher said he had his closest brush with death
because of an overlooked mine buried in the sand, possibly a truck mine.
""A couple of planes flew over and everyone hit the deck,'' he said. ""As I was getting up, I saw the cap of a mine.
""It was right under my stomach,'' he said, ""but I didn't put any weight on it.''
""You were skinny then,'' kidded his wife of 50/4 years, Ruth Shields Whitcher.
""There was an angel on my shoulder, too,'' Whitcher said.
Supplying the largest invasion force in history was a matter of planning and improvisation.
For weeks the embattled beaches were the main supply
source. The railroads were shot up from the bombardment preceding D-Day. Finally the port city of Cherbourg was secured but Cherbourg was a smallish harbor.
Whitcher remembers that the bigger ships stayed offshore at
first, unloaded by landing craft or 30-man amphibious vehicles called Army ducks.
Later the LSTs landed right on the beaches at high tide, dropped their front gates on the sand, and sailed away again at low tide.
Whitcher said his engineering brigade also built floating docks and unloaded some ships at artificial harbors made of sunken cement barges.
He also worked with the Army truck companies of the Red Ball Express, a
special convoy so named because the trucks had red circles painted on them.
Like some wartime Rad-O-Lite, the Red Ball Express trucks, many driven by black GIs, got priority on the roads so they could keep up with the
rapidly-advancing armies in the summer of 1944.
""They used to drive at night with only one small light on - or completely in the dark,'' Whitcher said.
Whitcher said one of his best memories of the war is
the cameraderie, a time when teenagers and young men in their 20s got a job done that was unpleasant, often dangerous, but vital.
Once the vacationing Whitchers visited Bud Graybill and his family, who live outside
Lancaster.
The engineering brigade followed the combat to the railhead at Mannheim, Germany, until VE Day in 1945. They were preparing to go to the Pacific when Japan surrendered and World War II was over.
""There were so many guys who didn't come back,'' Whitcher said. ""They're the ones who should do the talking, if they could. I was just doing my job.''
