insearchofbud

In reading “Night of the U-Boats” by Paul Lund and Harry Ludlam published in Great Britain in 1973 by W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd I learned about the fate of an allied convoy, SC-7 that lost more than 20 ships on Oct. 18, 1940 to submarine attacks.  Of interest to me was the attack method.  In the movie “Das Boot” the submariners moved silently at moderate depth, then rose to just below the surface in daylight to attack ships with torpedoes, using their periscope for aim.  Then to escape depth charges they ran deeply, rivets popping from their hull from extreme water pressure.

This book debunked parts of that scenario.  The German submarine captains in 1940 soon discovered the more effective way to destroy allied ships was attacking at night on the ocean’s surface, free from detection by asdic sonar.  Because the U-boats were quite streamlined and speedy on the water surface, and if they struck on moonless or cloudy night, they were difficult for ships to see in the gloom.  Moreover when the subs were bearing down on the ships the former presented a small silhouette.

Another effective tactic was for U-boats to cut engines and wait silently underwater; this was the method employed by captain Gerhard Meyer of U-486, the one that sunk the SS Leopoldville Christmas Eve, 1944.

Here is the trajectory of my story:

I had been told about Carl (Bud) when I was perhaps 6, but I was 55 when I finally learned the fate of my uncle Carl whom I had never met, but I knew that he died in WW II.  In the next 10 years I researched his life through reading survivors accounts, poring over materials in various cities in Montana, meeting Carl’s buddies in Florida, and making friends with a French diver who had visited and photographed the doomed ship in the English Channel.  At last I pieced together and narrated the last of Carl’s 21-year life.  

Briefly, Carl lived in Kalispell Montana, then went to college in Missoula.  He suddenly had to leave his fraternity in Missoula and travel to Butte for induction into the US Army.  After boot camp he took a difficult examination for the Army Special Training Program and was assigned to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.  He spent about 3 or 4 months there before the A.S.T.P. was dissolved.  

Carl found himself assigned a private in the infantry, at camps in Arkansas and Alabama for more training with the 66th Infantry Division.  After almost a year of marching and bivouacs that included a final train trip back to Montana for leave, the Division took the train, first class, to New York, then to England aboard the USS George Washington.  

From there the story gets more fleshed out when Carl and his buddies arrived in England.  I have copies of letters his friends wrote.

The stay in England seemed peculiar to Carl and his friends, but the got used to the straw mattresses and the people with their English accents.  Carl was close with his friends, had been for a year or more.  They lived in a brick barracks at Camp Piddlehinton near Dorchester until December 23, 1944, when they were ordered to abandon the camp and march most of the night to a train that took them to Southampton.  They waited hours and then boarded a ship.  Then off the ship.  Wrong ship.  Then onto a rusty ship, the SS Leopoldville.  

The story gets even more detailed because so many accounts exist.  I here change to the present tense.

Carl and his Company E are assigned to a low compartment beneath the water line on the starboard side.  The story soon pretty much ends for Carl because, exhausted and perhaps seasick, he sleeps all that day, weary from the march the night before.  Then the torpedo ends Carl’s life, ultimately along with 762 others.

The story of German submarine U-486 intersects the story of Carl and the SS Leopoldville at 6 pm Christmas Eve.

At 8 pm, when the Leo sinks to the bottom of the Channel, the few remaining men of Company E are already en route to Cherbourg, rescued by the HMS Brilliant.  Soon they meet up on the docks and an experience with some generous black US soldiers inspires several to become very religious Christians.  (These 2 men jumped from a great height to the deck of the Brilliant to safety.)

Weeks later the 66th Division travel to 2 Nazi submarine bunkers on the Bay of Biscay where they meet up with other soldiers assigned to contain the Germans.  At the war’s end Carl’s buddies became more or less successful adults.  Several of Carl’s friends were traumatized because they were aboard the SS Leo.  The others not so much if they went to France that Christmas Eve aboard the HMS Cheshire, a companion ship that carried about half of the 66th Division.

I want to leave the story of Carl and his buddies to posterity, so I struggle with writing it.

Mark and Steve Fryberger’s mother died just about 2 years ago at her home at 710 Cook Avenue.  

Mark told me when I phoned about 5:30 so Penny and I drove over.  Steve greeted us at the door and we told him we were sorry.  Mark was sitting in the kitchen and we talked about how people need to hang out with each other at times of great loss.  We spoke for a few minutes.  I remembered that Steve told the joke about the French Legionnaire who got lonesome for women.  The new soldier asked an older one who winked and took him around the back of a tent where he said the men “took turns with the camel.” 

The young legionnaire shrugged and later tried to have “intimate relations” with the camel.  However, the older man saw him and cried out in horror.  Then he chuckled and said, “I meant that most of the guys take turns riding the camel into town where the women are.” 

My 92-year old hospice patient, himself a WWII veteran, whom I visited twice weekly for 2 years, told me that was the best joke I told him.  

I felt I owed Steve and Mark a visit when their mother died.  

Mark stood up and said that his mother Leona “has a cute little smile” and looked very peaceful and did we want to see her?  Or not?  

I and the others followed Mark back to his mother’s bedroom and sure enough, with the unmistakable pallor of death, looking as if she were carved from very fine white marble, was Leona, her small hands clasped.  Her fingernails were the same white as her wrinkled little fingers.  I was struck by the infinite detail, all white, bloodless.  A long cobweb hung down from the plaster ceiling, caught in the golden light of afternoon sunlight, directly over Leona’s body.  I imagined myself swinging my arm at it to get rid of it.  Of course, I did not.

Leona did have an impish little smile.  She had always worn makeup before, but not now.  Mark caressed her wispy hair, on her little round white head, remarking that her hair was still blond.

It wasn’t like her death was a surprise to them, because Mark had taken indefinite leave from his job in Missoula to be with his mother “for the duration,” meaning, “until she died.”  Turned out, his mother required quite a bit of care, even after she was enrolled in the hospice program.  The past few days Mark’s younger brother Steve stayed at the house with Mark and Leona.  Mark said he had gotten enough sleep the night before, but he felt very tired.  Emotionally, perhaps.

Mark, Penny, Steve, and I stood at Leona’s bedside for perhaps 10 minutes, talking about this very intelligent woman’s life and that she had birthed Mark and Steve.  Is that where the musical talent came from?  Also Steve said that earlier the same day she died the boys played guitar and sang for her and she waved her hand in time to the music [As a director might].  Mark said she died while Steve was taking a shower in the basement.  They phoned the hospice nurse who came to Leona’s house and she cleaned her up and changed her nightie.  Mark said he wanted to wait until nightfall to call Dahl’s Funeral Home to come and take Leona’s little 89-year-old body away.  

He said she would not want to be seen by the neighbors leaving her house [in a bag, on a gurney] and being loaded into a hearse in daylight.

We sat back down at the dining room table and talked about other deaths, their father, Don Fryberger’s in Missoula at Mark’s house and Tom Struckman’s.  Mark discovered Tom’s body in Missoula the end of August in 1997.  Mark looked through the back door window and saw what looked like a scarecrow’s leg on the floor.  He peered through the window and could see Tom’s arms sticking straight out from the sides.  He went to the police.  Mark said the officer who entered Tom’s house returned looking ill and white and holding his stomach.  

Then we talked about how my son Todd helped clean Tom’s remains from the floor, saying it was an intimate experience and an honor.  Todd was also traumatized to some extent and phoned us in Billings the next morning asking us to drive to Missoula as soon as possible.  (We did.)  Mark said he needed to make the obligatory telephone calls, so Penny and I departed for home.  We had planned to exercise, but we both felt kind of pooped out.  So we watched a movie.

Concerning my uncle Bud:  yesterday when I encountered someone with a birthday in 1923 I felt intense sorrow and loss.  Bud was born Sept. 15, 1923.  Bud (Carl R. Bonde Jr.) died in 1944 on the SS Leopoldville near Cherbourg, France.  He might just as well have survived and I might just as well have gotten to know him.  We might have gone deer hunting near his home in Kalispell, Montana.  He loved to play chess.  So do I, with my grandson.  If Bud had taught me I might be able to beat my grandson today at chess.  I went hunting last fall but I didn’t get a good shot.  Might have been different if Bud had helped to raise me.

As a child my mother taught me at bedtime to say my prayers including praying for dead people like my dad and my uncle Carl.  I puzzled about this because they were gone, weren’t they?  Why pray for them?  Mother said yes they were dead but their spirit was still with us.  Yeah, I thought.  Spirit.  That’s the spirit.  I found that easy to believe.  Mother was well educated, intelligent, honest.  My dad died of cancer in 1953 so I had memories of him.  I never met my uncle Carl, or Buddy, but I grew up with the things a young man left behind.  You know, Boy Scout stuff.  Shotgun shell collection.  I believed the stuff about their spirit.  I still do.  On the other hand I find it easy to believe that inanimate things have spirits too.  I’d like to tell more about that some other time.

Carl’s army buddies in the 66th Army Infantry Panther Division who survived that Christmas Eve torpedo spent the last 4 months of World War II in the relative safety of emplacements in France in Saint-Nazaire and L’Orient guarding the Nazi submarine bases.  The bases proved to be impenetrable pockets that remained after the rest of the Nazis had been pushed out of France following D-Day.  After a couple tries to break into the massive 10-meter thick concrete bunkers the allies decided it was more strategic to keep the enemy contained.  A coalition of British, French and the US did just that. 

One of the Panther soldiers told me that they didn’t fire their weapons at the Germans in the submarine bunkers.  Wouldn’t help anything and it would expose them to enemy fire because they’d give away their position, he said.  The Germans had 88’s.  They didn’t have to hit you to kill you.  They just needed to come close.  

Wally Merza, the veteran who told me about the 88s, did not seem like one traumatized by war.  He had good memories of supervising German prisoners of war.  Wally and his buddies fed the Germans after VE day.  Or, rather,  the Germans fed each other and Wally and his fellow soldiers watched them.  Wally said that once a POW ran up to him to give him his rifle.  The POW urged Wally to take it because the POW was afraid he would get into trouble.  Wally or the POW? I wondered.  Probably either or both. 

About then when Wally was telling me about the POWs, he looked around at his 80+year-old veteran friends and asked, “Did any of you guys go to Arles?  Man!  I really liked Arles.”

Before that when I visited Panther veteran Bill Moomey he said he believed my uncle and the 762 others who died from the 66th Army Infantry Division that night saved him and the rest from being sent to the Ardennes Forest to counter Hitler’s military strikes.  The 92nd Infantry was sent instead to the Battle of the Bulge and many died.  Bill cried during the visit when I met him.  He said he felt strongly that God had saved his life and expressed grief that he survived. My uncle Bud had just turned 21 when he died.  

I just joined a facebook group that enthuses.  They enthuse about lever action rifles.  What does that mean?  I suppose their faces light up with enthusiasm.  They smile.  Their eyebrows arch and they say enthusiastic things, like “sweet.”  And “I am enthusiastic.”  Or maybe, “I really like lever-action rifles.  

I really like the lever action rifle my son gave me for Christmas, a Rossi 44-40 lever action rifle.  It is in my garage as we speak.  Actually as I write.  I’ll buy some ammunition later this year.  It is much too cold and snowy to head out of town and fire the rifle.  My nephew Jon Angel and I will enjoy trying the rifle out.  I have some targets and we can put them 100 yards downrange.  I’ll use the sandbags that are in the back of my pickup (thawed by then) to steady the barrel so that I can accurately sight in the rifle.  This will be reminiscent of my uncle Carl Ralph Bonde, Jr. and his 30-30 which my brother sold at age 18 so he could hitch-hike the Western US and find himself.  I will not forget when my mother asked him how he would have money to travel.  “With this!” Tom said, holding up a bunch of cash bills.  

Jan. 21, 2014

I thought by now that I would have gotten over my late uncle Carl Bonde’s death on Christmas Eve 1944 in the cold waters of the English Channel near Cherbourg, France.  I have not.  I still await news.  Emerging information can change history in profound ways.

Example: in 2007 while Penny and I visited the English Channel to visit the SS Leopoldville my older sister in Nebraska had crashed her Toyota at high speed into the side of a moving train.  Yes she was badly hurt:  broken jaw, rib, other painful injuries.  They had extracted her with hydraulic cutters and a photo was in the Scottsbluff paper.  

I knew the situation was avoidable.  She was bipolar, had just been released from a psychiatric ward, and was starting on new medications when she crashed her car.  Her daughter said the speedometer on her car showed she had been going about 60 when she swerved around 2 cars waiting at a railroad crossing.  She then crashed into the empty coal train car from the left lane.  My niece said speedometers these days stick on the max speed in a wreck.  My sister was not cited by the police which also griped me.  

My sister was unrepentant.  She would not confess to a suicide attempt.  Instead she said she couldn’t remember anything.  She said she was going to a bridge game.  Naturally I thought she was lying and I did not want her ever to drive again.  She needed close supervision while she recovered, then she needed to be in an assisted living place.  

Amazingly she said she intended to drive again.  My nephew promised to rip the wires from any car she might get.

Her daughter said she had gotten a bill from the railroad for damage to the coal car.  She threw it away.

My nephew and I drove her and her 2 dogs to Billings to stay with us.  Boxers Agatha and Duke.  Duke got loose in Buffalo, Wyoming, and my sister called him back to the car through her wired jaw:  “Dookie!  Doookie!”  

Here’s the amazing thing.  A couple of years later reports of other people wrecking their Toyotas at high speed because of malfunctioning accelerators made the news.  People in other parts of the country said their car would simply leap forward on its own.  Big scandal for Toyota.  Lawsuits.

I marveled at how the news of the Toyota malfunctioning changed my view of my sister’s mishap. Would she sue Toyota?  No, she said, adding that she could remember nothing of the wreck.