Twenty-One: Coming of Age in World War II. James Holland
calm. They’d always been pretty easy-going people, about as laid back as it is possible to be in a time of war. ‘Being a soldier was our life at that time,’ says Dee. ‘I know some guys that worried about getting home to their wives and all, but we didn’t have that. We really just had each other and the battalion, and we knew we weren’t going to get back to the States until the war was over.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘So to me the invasion was just another job. Neither of us worried too much about it.’
By May 1944, Tom and Dee really were on their own. They had lost both parents, and although there was a kid sister and five much older half-sisters from their father’s first marriage, from the moment they joined the army they considered it as home. Identical twins, they were from America’s Deep South, in north west Alabama. Life was tough, very tough, during the Depression-hit 1930s. The family was poor, although both Dee and Tom claim they were happy enough, with always plenty to eat and enough going on to amuse themselves. There was sadness, however. Tom and Dee were no exception, losing first a brother and then their mother when they were just twelve years old. Their father was a farmer, growing fruit and vegetables that he would then load onto a cart and sell in town, but being a smallholder at that time was hardly lucrative in the Depression-era Deep South was hardly lucrative, and so soon after their mother died, the family moved to the cotton-mill town of Russellville. The twins left school and went out to work – the extra bucks they brought home made all the difference.
By 1940, however, the cotton-mill in Russellville was already in terminal decline, even though the rest of the country was lifting itself out of the Depression. ‘We wanted to go to work,’ says Tom, ‘but there wasn’t no work around.’ They’d applied for places in the Civil Conservation Corps – a scheme set up by President Roosevelt to try to combat massive soil erosion and declining timber resources by using the large numbers of young unemployed. But they were turned down. Instead, in March 1940, two months after their eighteenth birthdays, they decided to enlist into the army. Of the two, Tom tended to be the decision-maker, so he was the first to hitch a ride to Birmingham in order to find out about joining up. Since they were only eighteen, their father had to give his consent. ‘I remember his hand was pretty shaky when he signed that,’ says Tom. Four days later, on 9 March, Dee followed. ‘We hadn’t heard from Tom,’ says Dee, ‘so I told Dad I was going too. He said, “Son, make good soldiers,” and we always tried to remember that.’ After being given three meal tickets in Birmingham and a promise of eventual service in Hawaii, Dee was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia, one of the country’s largest training camps. He still wasn’t sure where his brother was – or even if he had actually enlisted – until eventually he got a letter from his father with Tom’s address. It turned out they were only a quarter of a mile apart, and that both were in the 1st Infantry Division, even though Tom was in the 18th Infantry Regiment and Dee the 26th.
In 1940, the US Army was still a long way from being the huge machine it would become just a few years later. There may have been some thirteen million Americans in uniform by June 1944, but less than ten years before, there were just over 100,000, and by the time Tom and Dee joined, the US Army was still languishing as the nineteenth-largest in the world – behind Paraguay and Portugal – and much of its cavalry was exactly that: men on horseback. Tom even has a photo of the cavalry’s horses massed in a large pasture at Fort Benning.
Unsurprisingly, their basic training was pretty basic. On arrival at Benning they were told to read the Articles of War, then were given a serial number and told to make sure they never forgot it. After eight weeks training – drill, route marches, occasional rifle practice, and plenty of tough discipline – they were considered to be soldiers. They were living in pup tents, but eating more than enough food and surrounded by young lads of a similar age, so as far as the Bowles twins were concerned life in the regular army seemed pretty good, and a lot more fun than back home in Russellville, Alabama.
Training continued. More marching – three-mile hikes, then ten miles, then twenty-five miles with a light pack and eventually thirty-five miles with a heavy pack. A mile from home, they were greeted by the drum and bugle corps who played them the last stretch back into camp. But while this was doing wonders for their stamina and levels of fitness, they had little opportunity to train with weapons. Their kit was largely out of date too: World War One-era leggings, old campaign hats, and Tommy helmets, and although most in the 1st Division had now been issued with the new M-1 rifle, they rarely saw any tanks and the field guns mostly dated from the First World War. In July 1941, they were carrying out amphibious training in North Carolina when they received telegrams that their father was critically ill. Given compassionate leave, they were put ashore and hitch-hiked back home to Alabama. ‘Daddy died on July 31st, 1941,’ says Dee. He was just fifty-four; he had suffered his third stroke.
Soon after, their younger sister joined the air force, and Tom and Dee rejoined their units – in time for the Big Red One’s participation in the Louisiana Maneuvers of August 1941, the largest military exercise ever undertaken in the US, in which two ‘armies’ were pitched against one another. They were designed to test staffs and the logistical system as much as anything, but having seen the National Guard divisions still carrying wooden rifles and lorries with logs on that were supposed to simulate tanks, both Dee and Tom began to realize just how unprepared America was for war.
They were both on leave when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. There had been talk of war for some months, but now they were in it for sure. They also knew that since the First Division was one of the few pre-war regular army units, they were likely to be among the first in action – although they didn’t have the faintest idea when or where that might be. And for the first half of 1942, they remained in the US, moving from camp to camp, practising amphibious landings, carrying out more marches and exercises, sometimes on sand, sometimes in the snow. ‘All we were doing was moving from one location to another and getting ready to fight,’ says Dee.
Not until 2 August, 1942, did the twins finally find themselves steaming out of New York en route to Britain. Like most young men heading off to war, it was the first time they had ever left home shores. The entire First Division was crammed onto The Queen Mary, one of the great pre-war transatlantic liners, but as Tom and Dee discovered, there was little that was luxurious about the great ship now. It had been designed to carry two thousand passengers, but on 2 August, 1942, the Queen Mary was carrying 15,125 troops and 863 mostly British crew. ‘It sure was crowded,’ admits Tom. They were given hammocks, four banked on top of each other along each wall of a cabin. Although still in different regiments and in different cabins, they managed to see plenty of each other, and despite being packed like sardines, they didn’t find it too much of a hardship. ‘Well, to us it was rather like being on a vacation,’ says Dee. They were given plenty of hot meals, each eaten at a table and served by waiters. The threat of U-boats was ever-present, and there were not nearly enough lifeboats for the number on board, but it didn’t worry the Bowles twins too much: the ship was fast, and it continually zig-zagged all the way to avoid the German submarines. As they approached the British Isles, aircraft arrived to escort them over the final part of the journey into Gourock in Scotland.
They docked on the morning of 7 August, beneath the dull-grey barrage balloons that floated above the harbour. The division was quickly ushered off the ship past a line of women handing out cups of tea and then led straight onto waiting trains. The Bowles twins, separated once more into their respective regiments, still had no idea where they were heading, but it soon became clear the final leg of their journey was not a short ride. British officers appeared, demonstrating in each compartment how to pull down the blinds; the blackout was something new to the American troops. The train chugged on through the night, past nameless towns and villages, until at around seven the following morning they finally reached their destination. Tidworth Barracks, some ten miles north of Salisbury in southern England, was shrouded in early morning mist as the soldiers stepped down onto English soil for the first time. On Salisbury Plain, one of the British Army’s largest training areas, the Bowles twins and the rest of the division would begin preparing for the largest seaborne invasion the world had ever known – not D-Day, but the Allied landing in Northwest Africa.
Shortly before the TORCH operations in Africa, Dee had managed to transfer regiments and was now with his brother Tom in the 2nd Battalion of the 18th