D-Day Stories, Near and Far

A statue of Gen. William C. Lee outside the Airborne museum bearing his name in Dunn, N.C.

© By Tim Peeler, 2019

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Bill Lee, the football player

At 12:48 a.m. on June 6, 1944, thousands of Allied paratroopers, using a plan developed by Dunn native, one-time Wake Forest student and NC State graduate William Carey Lee, began jumping behind enemy lines in Normandy, France. Thus began the long-anticipated Operation Overlord, 75 years ago today.

I found the Gen. William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn fascinating. Lee played football and baseball at both Wake and State and is rumored to have hit the longest home run in Riddick Stadium history. Here’s a story I did for this week’s worldwide commemoration of the 75^th anniversary.

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This is the story I did while working for NC State athletics as the managing editor of GoPack.com. Someone told me: “No one wants to read these stories.”

Fine, but I always like this sentence about Lee, a former NC State and Wake Forest football and baseball player: “And, no doubt, the paratroopers [Bill Lee] trained scored the most successful touchdown in world history when they landed in the hedgerows of France shortly after calling out his name.”

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Here’s a story the NC State Alumni Magazine did following a trip to Normandy, led by associate editor Chris Saunders. It mentions most of the NC State alumni who were involved in the D-Day invasion, both on June 6, 1944, and the weeks that followed. Many of them were buried in the Normandy American Cemetery.

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This letter from NC State forestry alum and former football player Warren W. Wooden of Baltimore was penned in England the morning after the D-Day invasion to his wife and two young children in Raleigh. Wooden was a captain in the U.S. Army, training in England on D-Day.

Darling,

Guard Warren W. Wooden

Just a few words to let you know that I am OK. Imagine things at home and in the states in general are really humming now that the invasion has started. Personally, and I believe speaking for the average officer, I am very glad to see the invasion start…

Yesterday morning at about 6 a.m. there was so many planes in the sky and they made so much noise that I was awakened from my sleep – went outside the hut and just marveled at the sound – knew something was cooking.

I am still in England at school and am enjoying school and England very much. Most of the people here are relieved to know that the final offensive is underway…I should have some interesting tales when I get home and do not have to worry about the censor. Please don’t worry about me darling – just take care of yourself and the babies for me.

Really would have liked to have been in London last night. Understand there was quite a bit of celebrating.

Stay sweet and remember I love you.

Yours,

Woody

Capt. Wooden was a star guard on the Wolfpack’s varsity football team in 1936 and ‘37, also lettering in wrestling and track. He landed at Normandy’s Utah Beach on July 9, a month after the initial invasion. He was killed in action among the Saint-Lo hedgerows of France on July 26, 1944, just a few days after this letter from England arrived in Raleigh. Wooden is buried at the Normandy American Cemetery in France.

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Maj. Gen. Clarence B. “Red” Shimer, a former 145-pound wrestler at NC State College and co-captain of the 1938 Wolfpack wrestling squad, was commissioned as a 2nd Lt. through State's ROTC program. During World War II, Shimer survived the invasions of Africa, Italy and France, including the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach, as a member of the U.S. Army's 30th Infantry Division. He returned home afterwards to work at the Pentagon and as a military science instructor and ticket manager for athletics at his alma mater.

Red Shimer

Though he survived the biggest military conflict the world has ever seen, he was unable to navigate something even more troublesome: the NC State-UNC football rivalry. Apparently, Shimer was in charge of distributing tickets for the game when it was annually played at UNC’s Kenan Stadium, when the teams alternated being the home team on the Tar Heels’ home turf (Riddick Field was too small and crumbling to host the popular game).

It appears that UNC allowed its students free admission to games even when it was the “visiting” team and always charged NC State students to attend the game even when it was the “home” team. The student government addressed the situation at a heated meeting before the 1948 game.

Maj. Shimer left the university shortly thereafter, but eventually spent more than three decades in state government. After 28 years of service, he became the Adjutant General of the North Carolina National Guard, serving as the state’s top military officer from 1975-77.

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U.S. Navy Lt. Commander C.A. "Tim" Temerario stood in the sands of Omaha Beach on D-Day, sending troops--many of them to their deaths--from their landing craft through the impenetrable beaches to the bluffs ahead. Having already survived the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Temerario was one of the few decorated men to survive action in both the Pacific and European Theaters in World War II.

When he returned home, the Lorain, Ohio, native continued his prewar profession: assistant football coach. He had coached at Denison and Indiana before the war and back at Indiana afterwards. In 1950, he helped the Cleveland Browns win the 1950 NFL championship.

In 1952, he joined head coach Horace Hendrickson's coaching staff at NC State, spending two years coaching the ends for the Wolfpack.

He returned to the NFL and spent 18 years with the Washington Redskins and, serving as director of player personnel, was the person responsible for telling players they had been cut, traded or were no longer needed. After a man has sent thousands of soldiers into the hellfire of Normandy, telling a player to clean out his locker isn't so hard.

Temerario died in 2001 at the age of 95. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Read more about his NFL career in this Washington Post piece.

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While 156,000 troops landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, more than 195,700 Naval personnel worked on the ships that delivered them to the beaches of France. Only three of the 1,213 naval combat ships were sunk on D-Day: the USS Corry, a destroyer which was downed either by a German artillery shell or a mine (the official report has discrepancies); the USS PC-1261, a submarine chaser that was also hit by German gunfire; and the Norwegian destroyer HNoMS Svenner, which lost 32 Norwegian and 1 British sailor from its crew of 219 after it was hit by a German torpedo.

The Svenner was the only Allied ship sunk by German naval activity on that day.

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Troops who ate breakfast on D-Day were more likely to die on the beaches and in the surf at Normandy than those who did not. Rough seas caused much seasickness on the transport ships and landing craft. The men who spent much of their Channel crossing vomiting were weakened by the time they tried to go ashore, as they tried to fight through the surf and cross 200 yards of sand under a hail of bullets. Served on the landing craft just before landing: coffee and doughnuts.

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The first battle won at the invasion of Normandy was by Allied weathermen. The invasion had to be near a full moon for tidal purposes. It was originally scheduled for June 5, but storms in the Atlantic forced Eisenhower to delay. Most German meteorologists, who had less information than their counterparts because of Allied control of the Atlantic, predicted that heavy storms would continue, so they either left their posts to attend war games in Rennes, France, and sent their men on leave.

Allied weathermen predicted a short break in the weather on June 6 and Eisenhower gave the go-ahead to storm the beaches at Normandy. Had he not, the next available dates were June 16-19. On those dates, the beaches at Normandy were pummeled by heavy storms that would have pushed an invasion into July. Stalin, whose troops were taking a horrible beating on the eastern front, had been promised May, and he would not have accepted another month-long delay in the invasion.

Sometime today, thank a weatherman for helping to save the world.

Goodbye to My Favorite Groucho Marxist

 

A makeshift memorial to longtime media relations assistant and official scorekeeper at the 2019 ACC Championship at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. (Photo by Ethan Hyman.)

© By Tim Peeler, 2019

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads.


Memorial Service for Bruce Winkworth

I remember distinctly the first day I met Bruce Winkworth. It wasn’t in person. It was in the pages of Technician, the NC State student newspaper. I was a freshman in engineering, from the western territories of the state. He was an older student who wrote about baseball, his version of humor and left-leaning politics. In one of the first editions of the newspaper I ever read, he wrote about North Carolina’s change in legal drinking age from 18 to 19. Obviously, it was an unpopular legal move on a college campus, especially among the freshmen and sophomores. But Bruce was all for it, and he said so in an Op-Ed column. “The last thing I need to do is fight with some sniveling 18-year-old know-it-all redneck drinking his first beer for a spot at my favorite bar.” Wait a minute, I thought: I'm a sniveling 18-year-old know-it-all redneck having my first beer.

How dare he? Bruce was a cantankerous columnist, a Hippie leftover in his 30s at that time writing to mostly Reagan-era teenagers. But he made me laugh. He wrote a column once about not being able to swim. He said the only thing he knew how to do was the brickstroke. He hated Jesse Helms, Richard Nixon, the acoustics at Reynolds Coliseum and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He loved Mark Twain, and a well-written sentence.

He called himself a Groucho Marxist. To his credit, though, he was always accepting of others’ opinions. He once wrote: “I don’t mind if someone disagrees with me, no matter how wrong they may be.” I didn’t agree a lot of times, and I always assumed I wouldn’t like the old geezer wearing that Brooklyn Dodgers hat in his column mug if I ever had a chance to meet him in person. I was wrong. Bruce couldn’t have been nicer to this sniveling 18-year-old hayseed from Lincoln County. We worked together on the Technician sports staff for years, hung out at parties and tolerated each other’s eccentricities. He helped me, criticized me and told me when I was flat out wrong. I still disagree with him about that. When I left NC State to write for various newspapers, I would often run into Bruce at games or events. We talked baseball, music and NC State athletics. When we worked together in the NC State media relations department, he was my hypercritical editor. He would red-line every other word, write an explanation of why I broke every grammatical rule in the AP Style book and dispute every conclusion I made in writing. But he would send it back to me in an email, always with the same words: “Great story…” After Bruce retired and I left media relations, we tried to have lunch every other week or so, to talk about baseball, music and NC State athletics. He always showed up with a handful of home-burned CDs.I probably have 500 or more of them in my office.

He always talked about his wife Rita. She had been one of my first writing teachers at NC State, and she was always kind to me. He always referred to her as "your former teacher" in our conversations, letting me know that she still had an interest in the stuff I was writing. She had been his teacher as well, and they were married on Nov. 1, 1986, a date we all remembered because he missed the end NC State-South Carolina football game when Danny Peebles caught the game-winning catch after time expired. Bruce listened to almost all of that game on the radio standing outside the church with his brother Doug, but finally had to be coaxed down the aisle before the game was over.
 
Two Christmases ago, I knew something was wrong with Bruce when he went nearly three weeks without returning my phone calls. Rita eventually emailed me telling me there was some bad news, that Bruce had been in the hospital after being diagnosed with lung cancer and having a tumor removed from his brain.

Initially, it was sad because he couldn’t remember how to use his ipod, or his computer or his phone. Bruce without music was like baseball without innings. It just wasn't right. I found him a simple MP3 player and we started loading songs from his vast music collection, an effort to return life to normal. He fought really hard, improving every day and eventually returning to his old curmudgeony self.

He worked so hard because he knew he needed to take care of Rita, who dealt with breast cancer for more than 35 years. Nothing made Bruce happier than walking with her in the Parade of Survivors at NC State's Hoops 4 Hope/Play4Kay game. When Rita died just a few weeks ago, however, Bruce had a choice. To fight his cancer or mourn his wife. Subconsciously, I think he chose to mourn, realizing that life without her was too empty.

I think that was a beautiful thing, for both of them, to be so connected after more than 30 years of marriage.

NC State baseball coach Elliott Avent.

I have only one regret about my time with Bruce. He promised me that one day we would sit down one day and he would give me his list of Top 10 Elliott Avent baseball ejections. I knew a few of them: the time Elliott was recovering from a concussion, was thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes and didn’t know it until some three innings later. The time he got ejected at home plate – while turning in his pregame lineup card. And everyone knows the famous limping spin move. Bruce said none of them would be in his Top 20, and I was anxious to save those for posterity. Until his last few days, Bruce tried to keep me straight. He hated that I wrote correctly, but still sometimes spoke like that hayseed from Lincoln County. He was at Duke Raleigh Hospital, in a rapid decline and we were talking about some things, like one of the falls he endured while still at home.. “It was the morning I woke up and found you laying on the floor.” “Lying.” “No, it’s true, Bruce, you had fallen and I tried to help you get up.” “I know that, goddammit, but I was lying on the floor, not laying.” The last night he was able to really communicate with me, he called me both Nancy Pelosi and Davey Johnson. I don’t know which one hurt most. As I was about to leave, his nurse came in to check on him. She could tell he was in real pain, unable to move, not happy to be in an adjustable bed. “What’s bothering you the most Mr. Winkworth?” “That Donald J. Trump is president.” That was the last sentence I heard him say, and it makes me laugh every time I think about it. The act of mourning, I think, is mostly about regret. Of not saying something you should have said. Of not being a good friend. Of wishing you had done just a little more. I don't think I have any of those regrets with Bruce, who was my friend whether I saw him every other day or ever 10 years. So I am not going to mourn him, but I sure as Hell will miss him. I'd like to say something about the people who time with Bruce in his final weeks. Obviously, his brother Doug, who came down from Cape Cod after Rita died and for Bruce’s final month. The concept of brotherly love runs deep in their family.

And Tonia Jackson, a former co-worker of ours in athletics media relations. She lived nearby, and was willing to help on a moment's notice. Bruce told her many times over the last few weeks, "You're my ace."

Annabelle Myers, who became more than Bruce's former boss over the last six weeks. She was a devoted friend and comforter when he needed it. She gave him a kiss on the head when she left one morning, and he told her “I want another one of those after dinner.”

And Coach Avent, who Bruce called his "brother in baseball." Elliott visited him before practice and after games.He made sure Bruce knew that all he had done for the baseball program over the last four years was appreciated and that he was loved by many. One day, he had three of his senior players take Bruce lunch at Transitions, to talk a little baseball. It was the last sandwich he enjoyed.

The four of us texted each other every day with updates, observations and concerns, which allowed us to make sure Bruce was rarely ever alone while in the hospital or at Transitions LifeCare. But thank-yous are not in order for any of us. We were only repaying Bruce for the many things through the years, in his own unique and crochety way, to make us better, to make us smile and to make us think.