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Colonel James H. Leach -
"The sweetest man who ever lived,"
Marion Leach, 2007
Colonel James H. Leach was born in Houston, TX on April
7, 1922. He began US Army service when he joined the Texas National Guard
on June 19, 1938 at the age of 16.
When Gen. Patton began his summer dash across France in
1944, Jimmie Leach was commander of Company B, 37th Tank Battalion, 4th Armored
Division, serving under the legendary Lt. Col Creighton Abrams. He had
trained for four years as a tanker. He was uniquely prepared.
Jimmie was wounded five times in Europe, received the
Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism at Bigonville on Dec 24, 1944 and
three days later he captured and guarded the entry of the 37th into Bastogne in
relief of the 101st Airborne.
After WWII, Jimmie served in Korea on the island of
Cheju, moderating the angry wrath among island natives, off-island Koreans and
returning Koreans who had served in the hated Japanese Army.
He married Marion Heirs Floyd in 1951 and spent four years in
Germany guarding the Fulda Pass against the seemingly inevitable roll of Russian
tanks west into the Rhineland.
He assumed Armored Brigade Command as a Colonel in
the late 1960's, was assigned to Vietnam as senior advisor with the 5th ARVIN division,
then, in 1969 assumed command of the 11th Armored Cavalry, replacing George
Patton III His aggressive leadership of the 11th is still remembered with
awesome respect by his subordinates and his peers. For the second time, in
his second war he heard the report that, "Jimmie Leach is the bravest man I ever
knew."
Jimmie Leach led the Army's Armor Branch with skill and
compassion in the early 1970's, managing the portfolios of some 6000 Army officers.
Men like Gen Fred Franks and the current Secretary of the Department of Veterans
Affairs, Gen Eric Shinseki, report that Jimmie was responsible for their very
careers as he fought to keep these future General Officers in the Army although
each had lost a limb to wounds in Vietnam.
His defense of one young officer earned him the enmity
of Gen William Westmoreland and he was passed over for promotion as General
Officer. His son describes the scene at his home, with great friend, Gen
Creighton Abrams on hand offering support, but not interfering with this final
decision, as a wake.
Jimmie Leach retired from the Army and worked for
Teledyne for 13 years from 1972-1985. He kept his service to the Army
paramount and carried out the legislative and financial work leading to the
United States Armored Forces Monument near Arlington National Cemetery.
Jimmie Leach now lives in South Carolina where, over
the last twenty-plus years he has supported the causes of soldiers and
soldiering with unflagging zeal. He has visited the battlefields of France
and the Ardennes more than ten times, placing monuments and memorials to the men
who came there with him - and never came home. He has made peace with his
enemies in Germany - and Vietnam and traveled through both South and North
Vietnam to relook at the places and events there.
Jimmie works hard still to effect the expansion of the
Beaufort National Cemetery in Beaufort, SC, a cemetery established under
President Lincoln whose growth is threatened by neighborhood encroachment.
In 2006, Jimmie Leach spoke at the James H Leach
ReadinessCenter, a new SC National Guard facility built with funds wrested
from Congress through Jimmie's unremitting pressure on the late Sen. Strom
Thurmond. He reminded the local Guardsmen, who were on their way to
Afghanistan, that they continued a proud National Guard tradition of more than
two centuries, to which he had been attached for nearly 70 years. And his
message was clear: soldiers must train for war and never become complacent
with the present situation.
Jimmie Leach and I have spent hundreds of hours
recording his story. In September 2007 I was with him in the Galt Hotel in
Louisville when a middle aged man approached me and said, "Is that Col. Leach?"
I said yes and he said to Jimmie, "I want to thank you for saving my life in
Vietnam."
Col. James H Leach died at 87 on Dec. 17, 2009.
He was driving his car near his home in South Carolina when he suffered a heart
attack. He was with us for 32031 days. Very few of them were wasted.
jimmieleach.us.
Matt Hermes
Copyright 2009 Matthew E Hermes
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5. Lieutenant
Leach Heads for War
(An excerpt from Tanker Jimmie Leach. In this brief
segment new Lt Jimmie Leach describes tanker training across the US and in
England waiting for the coming war in France.)
J immie
Leach graduated in the ninth 1942 Ft. Knox Armored Officer’s Candidate School.
The Army OCS program was huge. From 1940-1947, more than 65,000 officers, were commissioned through the Army’s
Infantry OCS at Fort Benning. Four hundred and forty eight batches of
“ninety-day wonders", officers who would soon become indistinguishable from
West Pointers as they were fed out into the battlefields on three continents and
oceans. Armor and Artillery had their own, separate OCS schools from infantry; Armor
formed its officers with its own rigorous twelve week program at Ft Knox. “Now they worked
our butts off, I want to tell you,” Jimmie Leach said. “It was as tough a ninety days
as I ever had in my life.” Jimmie was never a good academic student.
Classrooms and study inhibited action. Jimmie says that during OCS, “I went
before the board twice for academic failures. I failed military engineering and
I failed military law. And I had to go before the board whether to bounce me or
not. Well they knew that I had a good background, I already had three years as
a non commissioned officer, sergeant, acting platoon leader.”
At the
end, Lt. Leach was offered a choice of units that needed tankers: light tank
battalions, medium tank battalions. He listed five choices – four of them
would return him to Texas, at least temporarily. The fifth was the 4th
Armored Division located in the forests of northern New York at Pine Camp. “All
of them were light tank units and I was smitten with the light tanks – they
could move 45 miles an hour – shoot and scoot,” Jimmie said. “My roommate, a
fellow named Castine, a New Yorker serving in the 35th of the 4th
Armored Div before he came to Ft. Knox, kept bragging so much about this new 4th
Armored Div so I put it in as my last choice and when the orders came out they
flipped my list upside down and the 4th Armored became my
assignment.”
This
would have been Jimmie Leach’s first cold winter. Snowflakes were falling when
he arrived in September 1942 after a ten day’s leave in Houston. But on October 2
the newly constituted 4th Armored left for the 1942 I Corps Tennessee
maneuvers, never again to return to Pine Camp. “We had eight officers in the
Company, we had more officers than we were authorized, and we were authorized
five. So there were two officers for each platoon leader’s job. So what they
did they would rotate us. One day one officer would go out on maneuvers and the
next day another one would go out. We were in the Telehoma area, Nashville
area. Because of the traffic problems in the metropolitan areas in these big
towns we maneuvered through the area villages and towns at night to avoid civil
traffic so we would attack in that manner,” Jimmie said. Eight officers in
the tank company. It must have seemed foolish to have so many men training
as tank company officers. But in just two years the fates would select
Jimmie to be fighting in France as a Company Commander - and be the sole
surviving officer in the Company.
As the 4th
Division left Tennessee in late 1942 the state of US ground war across the Atlantic
was much as it had been since the entry of the United States into the conflict.
The US Army was not on the ground anywhere in Europe or Africa. After six weeks
in Tennessee the 4th Armored was on the move again, and so was Gen
George Patton. While the 4th was entrained for the Mojave Desert, the US
Army was finally marching in Africa; Patton had landed in Morocco and taken
Casablanca. The 4th Armored Division was working toward its fateful
linkup with Gen Patton in 1944. It was in a base near Needles, CA, a base camp, a tent city in
the desert. The 4th Armored Division spent six months in the
Mojave. Much of the simulated warfare pitted Gen Bob Grove’s 6th
Armored Division against the 4th Armored commanded by Gen John
Shirley (P) Wood. Jimmie Leach called them, “great maneuvers, we had a
wonderful time, we fired real bullets.” The cannons shot blanks but the
buttoned up tanks pelted each other with real ball ammunition from their machine
guns. Night and day, it was delightful, macabre, play, the bullets pinged off the armor; they knocked off an antenna or smashed a periscope but the
pockmarked tanks kept the young soldiers safe from injury. A platoon of tanks
from Jimmie Leach’s new 37th Tank regiment went off to the south,
toward the Salton Sea on a secret mission. They helped Humphrey Bogart and his
film crews make the movie, Sahara. Later the movie makers filmed the
energetic combat between the 6th and 4th Armored for use
in the film.
Jimmie’s
unit was now the 2nd Battalion of the 37th Armored
Regiment. Just after Sept. 9, 1943, when Jimmie Leach’s old Texas National
Guard unit, the 36th Division went ashore at Salerno on the Italian
Coast, the 4th Armored was in Texas, arriving at the potential home of the 36th
at Camp Bowie, TX. Texas land was cheap. In 1940 the government purchased
120,000 acres of central Texas soil for Camp Bowie. That’s 200 square miles: 20
miles long, 10 miles wide. At times there were up to 60,000 men training on the
huge, temporary encampment. Texas was a new environment, nothing like the
Mojave. Trees, lots of trees at Camp Bowie, and the tree tops were in
blossom. Unfortunately these small treetops were the same height as the turret
of the tank. The commanders couldn’t see very well so the tankers had to rely
on the drivers and bow gunners to maneuver through the wooded areas. “At
Bowie we maneuvered against each other in this scrub oak area,” Jimmie said.
“We lost one man, a tank went across a bridge and the bridge collapse and we
lost the tank commander in my unit. He was not in my platoon but in my
battalion.” More training, new lessons, the war would be three dimensional.
At times the tank commander, standing in the turret well, his head 10-11 feet
off the ground, would carry a great sight advantages distance and
perspective. At other times it might not be convenient to roll through town
with the commanders eyes at the same horizontal level as a German soldier at a
second story window with a rifle in his hand.
At Bowie
the Division reorganized its components. The 37th Tank Battalion that
Creighton Abrams would command was realized in its war-fighting form from the
combination of three medium tank companies equipped with the new Sherman Tank,
one light tank Company, three Sherman tank assault guns in the headquarters
company, a service company that would take care of the food and lube and fuel
and everything else the tankers needed. “The
assault gun platoon was commanded by Bernard Souixsavage, an old OCS classmate
of mine and the recon platoon was commanded by Marion Harris, a Tennessee boy, a
crackerjack and both of them were killed in the war,” said Jimmie.
It was at
Bowie that Creighton Abrams directly entered Jimmie Leach’s life. Jimmie knew
Abrams as a Captain and adjutant of the 37th when it was a Regiment.
Abrams was promoted to Major to command the 3rd Battalion of the
regiment. On Tennessee maneuvers in September 1943, two of Abrams tanks went
overboard on a pontoon bridge across the Cumberland River. This
rapidly assembled field bridge was designed to hold up to 40 tons. But as with
any water supported structure that would bridge a flowing stream or river, there
would be risks, particularly in rapidly moving currents. Even with the pontoons
extending far from the two tracks across the obstruction, the
upstream side might be lifted – or it might be pressured into the stream under
these dynamic conditions. Or the bridge could twist in sinuous fashion with one
of the tracks breaking loose. The rubber pontoons could rip or be fired into
accidentally. A tree or log or even a boat could wash into the pontoons, or it
could be rammed or blown by enemy action. And any load, particularly the
concentrated positioning of one or even two 30-ton tanks guided by commanders and drivers
who might be inexperienced, who might have limited visibility because of the
hatch being down, the sighting prisms being dirty, heavy rain and weather, or
nighttime, on this unsteady bridge, any load could be steered or drift to the
low side, off the narrow gridded running surface and all too easily the center
of gravity of the mass could move to the outside, and once that started it might
well be impossible to correct the rolling rotation of the bridge and its load so
that the tanks would slide away and now be underneath the bridge. In fact eight
of the men were unable to free themselves from the overturned tanks and the men
drowned. Jimmie remembers the pall of mixed grief and reality that hung over the
division and, more particularly, Abrams’ battalion as result of the accident.
It was at night; they were crossing the Cumberland River, Jimmie said.
He
said his unit faked a nighttime crossing later on and waited until daylight.
This accident was more serious than Jimmie's turning a tank over a stump. Army officers
like Abrams and Leach must expect the unexpected, they must be ready, and they
had to understand the obstacles they would encounter in war. We guess Abrams
learned to evaluate, to think through this difficult and complex warfare in a
superior manner, Leach, too, learned to avoid the nighttime hazard. There would
be thousands of these “treadway” pontoon bridges in Europe within a year. One
Engineering Company, the 989th, set more than 60 treadway bridges
across France and Germany from June 1944 to April 1945. Major Abrams and
Lieutenant Leach would perform extraordinary feats of heroism with skills honed
in the pain of death by error, death by foolishness and carelessness, sometimes
even death by design. Who can determine if Abrams or Leach thought back to
the Cumberland disaster as they drove across three successive bridges to ford
the Moselle River in France on Sept 13, 1944, crossing directly into a field of
German fire. The significance of a crossing mishap that 1944 September day
would not have been limited to the involved tanks. The bridge could have
been destroyed, trapping the bridgehead with no means of supply or retreat.
Jimmie
Leach remembers that when the 4th Armored got to the Mojave Abrams,
whom he describes as a “fair haired boy” quickly moved to executive officer for
the regiment and then at Bowie to commander of the 37th Tank
Battalion. That Battalion; Major Creighton Abrams, Battalion Commander, 1st Lt
George Tiegs, B Company Commander looked almost like the unit that would fight
across France, Germany, Belgium and Luxemburg from July 1944 until March 1945.
2nd Lt. Jimmie Leach had a few more steps to take before he took his
place on the trains and steamships that would bring the 37th to
Europe.
That fall
of 1943 Jimmie Leach became communications officer, a staff officer, away from
the tanks. He applied for entry to gunnery school at Ft. Knox and was sent for
this new training component. It was at Knox that Jimmie learned of the
reorganization of the Division and the establishment of the separate
medium/light tank battalion. “Please don’t leave me out,” he wrote Maj Ed Bautz,
Adjutant of the 37th Reg. “I want to stay with the 37th.”
He was ordered back to Bowie and installed as platoon leader in B Company of the
37th Tank Battalion, under Lt Tiegs. Jimmie was platoon leader along
with a fellow National Guard soldier, Sgt. Preston Buret Mixon, and two
Lieutenants, Bill Bohn and Moose Marston.
By
December 1943 the 4th Division was on the trains again. Just the
soldiers, not their equipment. They arrived in Taunton, MA at Camp Myles
Standish on Dec. 20 and waited for the day they would board a ship for England.
This meant home leave for the many men from New England and New York but for
Texan Leach, Christmas 1943 was a cold holiday season, requiring patience to stem
building anticipation. Jimmie remembers one of the other platoon leaders
tussling with Lt. Bohn for the honor of Company tough guy. It was a serious
battle, to a draw, Jimmie says but it had the effect of subduing this young
Lieutenant’s preening attitude. Every soldier knew he was but one of more than
a million men who were being funneled to England. Each knew he would then, in some as yet
unknown fashion, have the opportunity to ferry tanks and guns and
themselves to the European mainland where awaited the Army of Germans reinforced
by millions of conscripted or enslaved men and women from the overwhelmed
mainland.
On Dec
29, 1943 the Division steamed away on the USS Barnett, a 460ft long troopship
that was built in England in 1928 and had served as a passenger liner under the
name Santa Maria. The Navy had bought the ship in 1940 and reconditioned it at
Norfolk. The Barnett was a typical workhorse of naval transport and carried men
and equipment first from Guadalcanal in 1942 and then until the end of the war. It was a
patched up Barnett that carried the men of the 4th to Europe. The
ship had been damaged in September 1943. Fortunately the list to starboard from
the hole in the bow after a bomb blast in Salerno Harbor raised the blast hole
above the water line and the Barnett was repaired and returned to service. The
Division reached England on the Barnett at Swansea about Jan 11, 1944.
Jimmie
Leach said, “We did not take any equipment at all. We were separated from our
equipment, we were bare-assed. Just soldiers with our personal gear and that
was it. We were issued trucks, tanks and equipment in England. First we had to
draw these tanks. And the tanks because they had to cross the ocean to get there
were coated with a heavy grease called Cosmolene and every damned exposed part
of the tank was covered with Cosmolene, the guns were Cosmolene, the machine gun
was dipped in that stuff so we had to boil the stuff off the machine guns and
the tanks the same way so preparing the tanks to use them took a couple of
weeks. We were on the outskirts of Devizes and Devizes had the Wilshire Regiment
of the British Army. But all the British troops except a rear guard watching
over the barracks were overseas fighting. So we moved into their billet areas,
we moved into the Prince Maurice Barracks.
We occupied wooden one story barracks of the Wiltshire Regiment which was
serving as I recall in Italy. We officers, five or more, shared a single room
with one wash basin and a single wood stove. Our tanks to the three battalions
were parked on concrete hard stands with ample wash racks. The town of Devizes
was a mile or so from Prince Maurice Barracks.
The
barracks were prefabricated huts with a small cast iron stove in each room. The
stove took off the chill but the soldiers were cold and wet most of the time.
The British had one room they called the drying room, the British were smart in
this respect, it was damp and frequently you got your clothes real wet and they
had this room about 4 times the size of a car and you could go in there and put
your clothes around and dry them out and warm yourself up. So after these
exercises, it was so damn cold you would get chilled to the bone and we would
pile into there to get warm. That was Prince Maurice Barracks,” Jimmie Leach
said. “We stayed there the six months before we landed in France. We did a lot
of maneuvers.”
The
soldiers practiced war on Salisbury Plain, the chalky grasslands in central
England that have been populated since ancient men built Stonehenge and Romans
built roads through the plain. By the beginning of the war, English military
units had been training on Salisbury Plain for more than 40 years and Jimmie
says, “But it also had real beautiful grass that the horses of the cavalry and
the civilian fox hunters used so we were told to avoid those trotting areas, we
were told it was the King’s property.”
" We
maneuvered against each other and again we had live fire from the machine gun.
But we also dual trained to support the artillery which we never did. But they
trained us to shoot indirect fire with our tank guns; a round disc to get your
guns fired in the right directions, and we had a compass to get the elevation
and we fired indirect fire. An embarrassing thing happened to me and Col.
Abrams. We traveled 35 miles to get to this area and the three medium tank
Companies went on line one behind the other. This was going to be a grand
maneuver, the 8th and the 35th were to make the tank attack with the
infantry and we were to augment the artillery, the 37th. Major
Abrams set it up for all the platoon leaders and Company Commanders to come to
this hill he was on and he said when I raise this flag I want you to load and
when I lower this flag I want you to fire and we’ll do that until I wave the
flag horizontally which means cease fire.
“Well, I
had the 1st platoon and I was at the far end of this thing and I
guess we were 25-50 yards apart – each tank so it was about half a mile up to
this hill and then run back to the tanks. Well, rather than wisely assembling
all my other four tank commanders and repeat Abrams instructions once and then get
any questions, I ran to all four tanks and issued the instructions. When the Col
raises the flag you load, when he lowers the flag you fire, BOOM. See?
All together we will fire. Three Companies, 17 tanks each all shooting. Well
believe it or not when the Abrams raised the flag, Sgt Kobiela and Sgt.
Fitzpatrick fired. Boop, boop. Then he lowered the flag and BOOM went the rest
of them. This was just in my GD little platoon of five. He raised the flag and
these two sergeants went boop-boop. He lowered the flag and WHOOM. And that
went on for five goddam minutes and those characters never got the message in
their minds. And I think I tried to radio and get them ceased but I never got
to them. Abrams sent for Tiegs and chewed Tiegs out very well but he never once
reprimanded me or talked to me about this incident. Tiegs chewed my butt out
because I had made a mistake. I repeated my instructions four times after
running about a mile and I was out of breath. The other two platoons did it the
same damn way but they got it right, I didn’t,” Jimmie said.
There was
a war in England, too, but there were moments of relief. “Yes, sir. London. I
saw some buildings collapsed here and there. They ordered us to go into the
cellar of the hotel during the bombing. I stayed at a Red Cross billet. Fred
Eyle our motor officer and I went to London. British whores there, how bout
it? How much? Few pounds, you mean a few 5 dollar bills? That was big money
you know. We did not take them up on it. We had our offers.”
“Pat
Donnelly, my OCS classmate told me one day he had a date with a girl back in
Bristol or Bath, and he was going to stand her up and I felt bad for her and I
told him I’d lie for him and say he had duties and couldn’t come. Well, thank
you Jimmie. So I met the girl and thank God I went. Because she was there with
her father and he had his gas mask and his WWI helmet on and he was ready to go
on duty as a skywatch and we had a drink together and the girl and I went on to
dinner and she took me home and I met her brother at her house and we had a nice
little family visit. And I went there by Peep, we called them Peeps. Rest of
the Army called them Jeeps. And Jim Farese drove me, he was the first man I
gave a battle field commission to. We only had 2 Peeps in England and they
would lend them to us on the weekend. Farese drove me around.
“Coming
back from London one time, separate from Fred Eyle, as I go through Paddington
Station to get on my train, a young female Air Force enlisted person heard me say I was
going to Devizes. She says, ‘I say sir, you are going to Devizes?’, ‘Certainly
am.’ ‘Well, I am, too. Maybe we can sit together in the train.’ ‘Fine, lets do
that.’ Well what she really wanted was a ride from Devizes to her airbase
two miles out of Devizes. Well when we got there, and there was a mile and a half
walk to my base from the train station and she kept putting coppers in the phone
trying to get help for a ride to her place, she was unable to break through.
Well, I said I may be able to help. If you walk with me to my base I will see
what I can do. And when we got there, she couldn’t come in, she stayed at the
MP station and the duty officer that night was Preston Mixon so I prevailed on
Mixon to loan me the guard vehicle with Hoffman as the driver and we did that
and I never saw her again. It was a risk. Hofmann, Mixon and I could have
gotten in trouble but we did the good deed, took the young lady home to her
gate. Officers were not supposed to drive but usually the officers had a
driver,” Jimmie remembers.
(An excerpt of a work in progress)
8/31/09
Questions or comments: Contact Matt
Hermes
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