Published May 21, 2001
Hendersonville Times-News

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20010521/EXTRAS02/105210318/0/search

Brothers in arms: Three went to war, two came home

By Mitch Sandos
Brothers Leo and Homer Levi of Tuxedo both served in the Army during World War II, but their experiences were vastly different.
Leo, a combat engineer, was within earshot of battles all across Europe during the winter of 1944-45. He not only survived bombing and strafing by enemy aircraft, but bone-chilling cold and snowstorms while building bridges, digging foxholes and looking for landmines. The nightmarish conditions still haunt him.
Homer, an anti-aircraft gunner, spent 34 months in the jungles of Panama guarding the Panama Canal. He never saw an enemy aircraft, but he had to endure 110-115 degree heat and 160 inches of rain a year. The dangers included snakes, insects and jungle animals, but the biggest danger was the unremitting boredom.
Both of them, though, are glad they survived the war. Another brother wasn’t so fortunate. J.C. Levi, a sharpshooter with the Third Army, died at 19 in Luxembourg. His death on Dec. 12, 1944, came four days before Hitler launched the counteroffensive known as the Battle of the Bulge.
J.C. had gone ashore in France on June 7 of that year, the day after D-Day. A month later he caught some shrapnel and was evacuated to England. He wrote Homer in October 1944 that doctors had removed five pieces of shrapnel from him but couldn’t get at two more, and once he was finished healing he would return to his unit.
Leo said in 1945, while he was in a hospital recovering from a broken foot, he ran into a soldier who had been a member of J.C.’s unit. He told Leo the unit had tried to hold a position against German tanks.
“He said those boys stayed in their foxholes and tried to fight those tanks with M-1 rifles until the tanks just ground them into the ground,” said Leo.
Leo crossed the English Channel on Christmas Day 1944, landing at Cherbourg, France. It was his first introduction into the surreal world of combat. Bombs were hitting all around his ship, guns were going off, ships were burning, bodies were floating in the water.
Although he was never directly involved in combat, Leo said he often heard the guns nearby as his unit accompanied infantry and armored units moving across France. Along the way the engineers did whatever the troops needed. They built bridges over streams, dug foxholes and gun emplacements, and cleared minefields. As his unit’s demolitions man, Leo manned the metal detector during searches for landmines.
On March 29, 1945, his unit threw a Bailey bridge over the Rhine at Stockstadt, Germany, in nine hours. Experts had said the bridge would take 36 hours. The span allowed troops, equipment and supplies to quickly cross the river as allied forces mounted the war’s final offensive in Germany itself. German defenses quickly collapsed and a little more than a month later, on May 8, the Nazis surrendered.
As Leo’s unit raced across Europe, he watched artillery shell villages and aircraft overhead engage in dogfights. And everywhere he looked, he saw bodies of all kinds – Amercian soldiers, German soldiers, civilians, some intact, some shattered, some even impaled by huge shells.
“Some of it seems like a dream,” Leo said. “Sometimes I just get to thinking about it and it all comes back. I can’t help it. I got to thinking about it last night and couldn’t go to sleep.”
The harsh European winter heaped on discomfort. The soldiers often had to sleep on the frozen ground or in frigid foxholes. Leo said the engineers often went out and cut cedar branches for the troops to put between themselves and the cold ground.
“We didn’t even have combat boots,” Leo remembered. “We didn’t even get them until after the war. I can remember having to get up in the morning and pour gasoline on the ground and light it so I could thaw out my shoes enough to put them on.”
Homer said his tour of duty was “very dull, boring, just boring.”
After training as a gunner, Homer was among troops sent to Camp Patrick Henry, Va., where they were issued heavy winter clothing in December 1942. He said everybody figured they were headed for Europe, but the day after Christmas the troops were loaded on Liberty ships headed south, part of a convoy bound for the Panama Canal on their way to New Guinea in the South Pacific.
His ship was anchored in Limon Bay off the Panama coast, waiting to go through the canal, when an explosion rocked the vessel. Homer said he believes a German torpedo struck the ship’s engine room, killing all the sailors in the compartment. Pumps kept the ship afloat, but the ship’s 2,500 soldiers had to be evacuated.
Room was found on the other ships for 2,000 of the men, but there was no place for the other 500, including Homer. They were put ashore to await new transportation, but in the crush of the war they were forgotten.
“We became the lost troops,” laughed Homer. For six months, the men “kicked around Panama,” mowing grass and doing whatever else the Army could find to keep them busy while they awaited new orders. Their records had gone on with the convoy, so even their pay was in limbo. During that six-month period all they got was $5, Homer said. It wasn’t the only foul-up he would encounter: Homer served 37 months without getting even one day’s leave time.
Finally, the Army decided to use the men to relieve soliders who had been stationed in Panama for a long time. Some had been there as long as four years, he said.
Mostly, the new troops replaced gun crews whose job was to guard the canal against enemy attack. Homer said he spent part of the time relieving gun crews so that they could go to a firing range and practice. The rest of his time was spent at a gun emplacement on an island in Gatun Lake.
The lake’s altitude and the elevation of the gun emplacement enabled soldiers to see several miles out into the Caribbean Sea. Homer said there wasn’t a week that passed, especially early in the war, that he couldn’t see a ship or two out there, burning and sinking after being attacked by German submarines. But that was the closest he came to seeing any combat.
“They’d blow up our potato (supply) ship and we’d eat rice for a couple more weeks until another one could get through,” he said.
Homer said he complained the entire time he was in Panama, but he realized how fortunate he was when word arrived of his brother’s death. That thought was reinforced when some of the troops he had shipped out with came through the canal on their way back from New Guinea.
“Getting put off the ship in Panama was an act of God. Those boys who got sent on to New Guinea got shot all to pieces. I can’t help but think that’s what would have happened to me if I had gotten to New Guniea,” said Homer.
He said he decided to do his time and not let the boredom get to him. Others in the unit couldn’t take the monotony and cracked. One man shot his hand off and another shot himself in the foot. Several others developed mental problems that got them sent home, he said.
Homer said most of the troops, though, used humor to break the monotony much the way Leo says troops in Europe used humor to relieve the tension.
“One time we were stationed at the canal locks,” Homer recalled. “The Navy boys aboard the ships would holler at us about ‘you draft dodgers guarding a ditch.’ One old boy on a machine gun had had enough. He dropped the machine gun down on them and said, ‘still think we’re guarding a ditch?’ They said, ‘yes, and we’re glad you are, too.”
Leo remembered coming across some German bodies in Europe. The fellow he was with, a man from Tennessee, told him not to yell for the rest of his unit just yet, then went over and laid down next to one of the bodies.
“Then he told me to go ahead and holler. I yelled, ‘there’s some bodies over here,’ and when the other boys came over, he jumped up and ’bout scared them all to death,” laughed Leo.
Some of the humor could be macabre. Leo said when planes would strafe his unit, he and some fellow soldiers would dive under the unit’s demolitions trailer, which carried explosives. When someone would point out the danger and ask why they sought cover there, Leo said they would reply, “At least, if it blows up, we won’t get sent home crippled.”
He said American troops are always doing something aimed at keeping their spirits up. “When we’d meet, we’d be telling jokes, singing or playing the banjo. There would be some Englishman nearby who’d say, ‘Please don’t do that.’ But the Americans didn’t care,” said Leo. They believed they had to do something to keep from being overwhelmed by the war, he said.
Homer was the first of the brothers to go into the service, enlisting in 1942. J.C. followed in the fall of 1943 and Leo in the spring of 1944. Homer said he tried to get sent home after learning of J.C.’s death, but his commanding general wouldn’t approve his application. He was discharged nearly three months after the war ended. Leo became a part of the occupation forces in Germany and didn’t return home until March 1946.
Both brothers went to work at Cranston Print Works in Fletcher. Leo retired in 1978 and Homer in 1984.
Homer said his time in the Army was unheroic – endless hours sitting an a gun emplacement guarding against an enemy that never came. Some Japanese planes managed to get near Panama’s west coast and drop a few parachute bombs, but that’s as close as they got.
Leo deflected any praise of his service, too, even though combat engineers often had to perform their work under fire. The only members of his unit to get killed were a captain and his driver who somehow got trapped behind enemy lines. His one war injury, the broken foot, he caused when he dropped a piece of a bridge he was unloading on his foot.
“We weren’t the ones,” said Leo. “All the heroes are dead.”