D-Day: Victory, loss and a memory endure

BEDFORD, Va. — The memories are always there. On a day when hymns fill the air and old men snap to attention, those memories come front and center.

For Tyrone resident Burrell Sims, the memory comes back to Kelly. John Kelly. They last spoke 65 years ago.

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USS Rich DE695 Survivor's Association

The launching of the USS Rich from Defoe Shipyards, Bay City, Mich., in 1943.

Jason Getz / jgetz@ajc.com

D-Day veteran Burrell Sims of Tyrone, also shown in Navy uniform, is attending a memorial event in Virginia this weekend.

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On Saturday, Sims came face-to-face again with former shipmates M.H. Green and Berman Scott. All carry images that time hasn’t dimmed.

Crewmen on the USS Rich, they were part of the largest flotilla ever assembled, participating in the greatest assault in the world — D-Day.

On the 65th anniversary of that June 6, 1944 invasion, they and about 100 other survivors of the Allied offensive met at the National D-Day Memorial for an annual roll call. Who was here? Who was not?

Last year, five men from the Rich showed up. Saturday, the number was three.

“Not many of us left,” said Sims, 87. He flashed a grin at Green, 84.

“We went through the war together,” said Green, a retiree from Raleigh.

“The whole thing,” said Sims.

Sims wrapped a long arm around Green’s shoulder as they stood beside a plaque commemorating DE 695, the USS Rich. They said nothing.

Behind them, a line of wreaths stretched away.

A band played martial music and hymns. The veterans sat in the front rows while fat clouds tumbled over the Blue Ridge. Their caps announced who they were, so long ago —paratrooper, infantryman, sailor.

Green recalled watching the soldiers. They fell out of landing craft and came ashore to a hail of German artillery.

“All those bodies, floating in the water,” he said. ‘Nobody can understand that unless they are there.”

Scott, 83, of Chase City, Va., understood. “There was death everywhere,” he said.

More than 16 million U.S. servicemen and women returned to civilian life at war’s end. The Veterans Administration estimates that 2.3 million of them are alive today. Analysts say about 1,100 die every day.

The numbers in Georgia mirror the national findings. In 2000, according to the Georgia Department of Veterans Service, the state was home to about 98,000 World War II veterans. VA figures compiled last year concluded that the state had fewer than 50,000. No one, it seems, has an accounting of how many D-Day survivors remain.

Sims understands those figures as well as anyone.

“I guess this will be my last trip” to the memorial, Sims said earlier this week, before leaving for Bedford. The Virginia city lost 19 native sons on the first day of the invasion of Nazi-occupied France — more fatalities, per capita, than any other town or city in the nation. The national memorial here, which opened in 2001, notes that sacrifice.

The guests of honor won’t be around much longer. The youngest D-Day veterans were 82. Sixty-five years ago, they were 17.

“In 2001 [at the opening ceremony], there were thousands here,” said retired Army Col. William McIntosh, the memorial’s president. “Four years later [at the 60th anniversary], there were hundreds.

“Now there are fewer still.”

Sims was 21 when he joined. A Hiawassee boy, Sims had been a lineman at the power company. When he announced he was enlisting, in 1943, his boss pulled him aside.

“If you want to learn something, go in the Navy,” he told Sims. “If you join the Army, the only thing you’ll learn is how to shoot a gun and dig a hole.” Sims took a bus to Fort McPherson, where recruiters of every branch had offices, and joined the Navy.

Green got out of high school and promptly signed up at age 18. Scott, 83, enlisted before graduation; he was 17.

They met on the deck of a new ship, recently finished and headed for the open sea from New Orleans. Each was as green to the sea as the sea itself. They were hardly unique: of 219 men assigned to the Rich, 13 had been to sea.

The Rich, outfitted with torpedoes and depth charges, made several convoys in the late 1943 and early 1944. It escorted ships to the United Kingdom, watching for German U-boats that prowled shipping lanes. In May 1944, the ship was in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, preparing to return to the United States, when its captain received a message: Report to Plymouth, England. The Allies were taking the war to Hitler.

The news caused a sensation on the Rich, whose crewmen were accustomed to slow convoy duty. “We thought we’d get some real-life action,” said Scott.

On June 6, 1944, the Rich joined a 5,000-vessel flotilla that filled the English Channel. It served on the first day and second day without incident, providing support for the USS Nevada, which shelled German emplacements.

The third day — June 8 — was different.

That day, the Rich’s chief decided that Sims, an electrician’s mate, would go to the third deck, to the engine room. His friend, John Kelly of Louisville, Kty., would take his place in the aft steering room.

Kelly laughed, then grabbed Sims in a headlock. It was like a terrier biting at a retriever. Kelly was a short guy; Sims easily reached 6 feet. They tussled for a few moments, then quieted. “Simsy,” said Kelly. “I’m scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

“We’re going to get killed.”

“Oh no,” said Sims. “We’ll be all right.”

Sims went below, where 2,000-horsepower engines pushed the Rich through the channel, cold even in June. Sims, in his dungarees, bent to his task.

Topside, the channel churned. Shells fired from ship and shore screamed in both directions. Ships laid smoke screens to avoid detection. Geysers erupted in the green swells — mines, hammering at hulls.

At 9:20 a.m., a mine exploded 50 yards from the Rich. The force tossed sailors from their stations. In the engine room, the ceiling lights flickered, then died. Sims reached for the breaker switches, threw them. The lights came back on.

Three minutes later, the Rich passed over a mine. The blast broke off a 50-foot section of the 306-foot vessel’s stern, tearing it away as easily as someone yanking a chunk from a bread loaf. The Rich’s main deck sagged like the floor of an old house.

Sims labored in the dark. The shock shattered the light bulbs.

The killing blow came two minutes later. The Rich struck another mine near its bow. Metal screeched, bulkheads collapsed, the ship’s tower fell. The grated flooring in the engine room snapped like old sticks. Sims and the other guys tumbled into the dark, to the bilges, the very bottom of the ship.

Sims blacked out for a moment. Coming to, he looked up through destroyed metal and saw a slice of heaven — the sky, illuminated through an open hatch. “I started climbing.”

His head popped up on the deck. Crewmate Frank Doody came by and stared at Sims, who hadn’t crawled out of the open hatch. “What the hell are you doing there?” he asked.

Sims’ right collarbone was broken; he couldn’t lift himself to the deck. Doody yanked him out. Sims and another sailor watched as a PT boat roared toward the Rich. “There was about two feet of deck showing when I stepped off,” he recalls.

The Sims sank in less than a half-hour, killing 92 men.

Like Sims, Green and Scott and suffered broken bones in the blast. Scott also sustained burns. Witnesses told Scott the force of the third mine explosion blew him 75 feet through the air. “I don’t remember any of it,” he said.

Scott was sent to a series of hospitals in England and the states. The Navy discharged him honorably in 1945.

Green and Sims went to British hospitals, where doctors pronounced them fit. The Nary assigned each to the battleship USS Texas, where they served until war’s end.

A retiree from Ford Motor Co., Sims spent the rest of his working life in electrical trades — skills he learned in the Navy. That long-ago career tip from his boss, said Sims, “was good advice.”

Green came back to Raleigh, founded a grocery store and invested in real estate, had children. He claims he has lived longer in his neighborhood than anyone else.

Scott went to college on the G.I. Bill and became an educator in Virginia public schools. On Saturday, his grandson guided his wheelchair to the spot where the old men gathered.

The three shipmates know that their deeds may live forever, but they will not. While they can, the old men meet. They share a bond made in the hottest of forges, war.

And as he does most days, Sims said, he thought about Kelly.

The mine that blasted the Rich in two 65 years ago demolished the aft steering room, the spot where Burrell Sims should have been. John Kelly, who took his place, lives only in memory.