|
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 ARVN division,
then, in 1969 assumed command of the 11th Armored Cavalry, replacing George
Patton IV. 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.
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."
His story will unfold in time across this special
place.
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 2010 Matthew E Hermes
|
2. Depression
Boyhood
(An excerpt from Tanker Jimmie Leach. In this brief
segment Jimmie Leach describes his family's response to the depression and his
ascendance as the man of the house.)
T
he
tension we might assign to the uncertain parentage of young Jimmie Leach is not
borne out as he relates his story. The reunited Leach’s were comfortable
with a small home at 1123 Panama Street in Houston. David Leach worked
regularly and the union had gained a $1/hr union wage and work was steady.
David and Lena Leach lived comfortably; David was able to purchase a small
habitation on Galveston Bay for family visits on the weekends. They drove
off in one of David’s two Model T Fords. Jimmie’s father made home brew-
the fermentation period was 11 days - and once in a while, the bottles capped
ingeniously but not professionally would explode under his bed where they were
stored. But that was just beer. And this was Prohibition. His
father arranged to buy his liquor from a bootlegger some seven miles away.
And Jimmie would bicycle there with a quart bottle and a stopper wrapped in tape
and pick up the bootleg. “The bootlegger would ask, 'light or dark, I think your father had light last time,’
and he would add some brown sugar to make it dark. Sixty cents a quart.”
David
took Jimmie with him when he went to play cards with his cronies. One night at
the smoky alcoholic card game the bottles got put away and their place was
cleaned up just before the constable arrived looking for the liquor. There was
none in sight of course but when Jimmie was asked where the liquor was hidden,
“Under there” he answered. Jimmie tells this with a smile as if it may be a
story developed over time rather than a real memory.
Houston
was a hot and steamy place to grow up. The house on Panama had a small yard in
front, open to the street and a fence around the side and back with a gate to
the driveway. Daddy kept his Model T’s – two of them, there. There was no
grass in the back. Jimmie’s mother always kept 30 head of chickens right
there. And she piped the water from the melting ice in the icebox out to water
the chickens. Jimmie said, “Daddy was a carpenter and carpenter’s houses are
always falling apart. But he built this little shed for me. It was under the
live oak tree in the pasture on the other side that hung over the back yard
fence. We always had eggs, and we had enough to eat in those days. The pasture
behind us had a dozen or so cows on it but they stayed down the other end by the
dairy. Some of our neighbors had cows too and they took them to the commons and
staked them down while they fed off the grass there. Then they would walk them
back home. This was right in the middle of Houston but the house is gone now.
I always thought I was an urban child.”
"I
didn't attend church regularly as a child," Jimmie said. "I went to the
Black churches to hear the singing, though." But at nine, Jimmie tells us,
he attended a Presbyterian revival meeting and he marched to the altar at the
call
and was baptized with others on the spot with water cast from
a rose that had been dripped in the Baptismal font. “I was a
Boy Scout at twelve,” Jimmie said. “But I had a couple of conspirator friends
who weren’t scouts and I didn’t always follow the Boy Scout oath. I had a
coaster wagon and we would put a gunnysack in it and go out at night and swipe
the empty milk bottles off people’s porches. The bottles were out there so the
milkman could pick them up for a deposit on the next day’s delivery. I would
pull the wagon. I wouldn’t go up to the houses. I figured only pulling the
wagon wasn’t stealing.
“We would
haul the wagon full of empty bottles over to Spears dairy, on Quitman between
Panama and Hardy, and sell the bottles back to the night watchman for a few
pennies. Then we went around back of the dairy – we weren’t worried about the
night man – and we would push under the leather flap at the loading gate and
load up on milk and chocolate milk for our evening snack. We lay out back of
the dairy content and full of sweet milk.”
The
Leach’s Bay House was an unpainted shack with a porch up on short pilings under
the new Causeway between Houston and Galveston Island. They built the Causeway
at Virginia Point and to get to the shack the Leach’s got off the causeway just
before the bridge and turned left under the first arch – under the road. The
shack was right there, right on the flats of Galveston Bay. “When the tide
was out Mother and Father and I walked way out through the flats to some
concrete rubble. We sat up on the top and the three of us, and Don the dog,
would serenade the drivers going across the causeway. Mother and I had to watch
Daddy pretty close. He would start drinking every Friday night when we got
there and wouldn’t stop until we left on Sunday,” Jimmie said. “Mommy drove us
home. We had friends there. Arthur Underwood lived two shacks down. ‘Uncle’
Art was very kind to me. When the World War I soldier’s bonus was paid in 1936,
Arthur bought me a bicycle. It was a Western Flyer. Uncle Art’s bonus was
probably about $400 but he spent some of it on me.”
“The heat
bothered me but I got used to it,” Jimmie said. “I couldn’t imagine Daddy,
working all day in his carpenter’s apron. It was white, full length and had
slits where he could reach inside and get his hammer and nails and level. He
always wore a jacket and tie to work and had his white apron and tools in a
bag. He would change clothes for the job. He was working inside some building
or out in the full sun. He was a union carpenter with the United Brotherhood
of Carpenters and Joiners of America. At first he always had steady work. And
the pay was good. The Brotherhood negotiated a $1/hour contract back around
1920 and that wage never changed for twenty years– they never made a fuss about
it.”
Jimmie
got to know the Depression slowly but he got to know it firsthand. There was
less and less work for David. Jimmie knew the family was having trouble with
the bills. “My first bike, before Uncle Art gave me the Western Flyer, was a
Stawana that Daddy bought me,” Jimmie said. “It was shiny and had a horn and
was very fancy and I think it cost him $50. But I remember the bicycle man –
Mark Collimore – saying, ‘Hey Dave, how about a little money on that bike you
bought?’” And then it was gone, back to Mr. Collimore.
The
depression was subtle. “I knew we were in trouble yet we still had a black
maid,” Jimmie said. “Cal Humphries, daddy’s black bootlegger, came around
regularly. I had a Houston Post paper route and made about $35/month to help
the family. Daddy helped me with the heavy papers on Sunday. But I lost that.
I was in grade school when Roosevelt became President in 1933, after Hoover.
He began the CCC – Civil Conservation Corps and the WPA – the Works Progress
Administration. I tried to join the CCC but they wouldn’t take me because I was
an only child and they were limiting the participation to those who had more
than one child. We went around to Spears dairy and got day old milk for ten
cents a gallon.” David Leach was soon pulling Jimmie’s coaster wagon from
Panama to the Hampshaw building to pick up free canned food. They were packing
food nearby but they didn’t put labels on the cans – they just stamped the cans
with an ink stamp but often you couldn’t read the contents. “Those mystery cans
were what we would get at the Hampshaw building and we didn’t know what we were
going to be eating until we opened the cans,” Jimmie remembers. David dug
ditches for the WPA. But he still arrived at work in his jacket and tie. The
government man would size up his workers each day. “You, you and you,” he would
say. “You work here.” “And you,” – he pointed at David Leach in his coat and
tie – “you are the boss."
“My
father lost his dignity when he drank,” Jimmie said. “We had a boarder, Brad.
He was a fellow carpenter of my daddy’s, he was married to a lady on Panama St
where we lived in the house we lost at 1123 Panama. His wife had remarried and
lived a few doors down the street but Brad`was unmarried a few years and he was
our roomer and took his meals with us and momma did his laundry along with mine
and my daddy’s. Momma took in laundry and ironing during the depression. She
only had a third grade education but she was a tremendous woman. She wrote
pretty good hand. You would not judge she was illiterate by looking into her
writing or his speech. In my youth I can remember Uncle Brad on Panama St
reading to me the funnies, he would help me with my homework more than daddy
did; he was a member of the family. And when we lost our home and moved out
Uncle Brad went with us and he and daddy were both out of jobs and looking for
work. Daddy and Brad had a habit of going to Wills drug store – where they sold
beer. And Daddy had a habit of mouthing off about how tough he was. Brad and
Daddy got in a few fights at Wills. The dairymen there would always beat them
up and Daddy would arrive home all knotted and bloody. And Mama would mop them
up. One day he was telling Mama how tough he was and she said, ‘Why don’t you
go down and tell Tracy Beeks that?’ Mr. Beeks was a sizable longshoreman. So
Daddy’s drunk and he goes down in front of Tracy’s house. He shouts, ‘Tracy,
you’re a no good son-of-a-bitch.’ I was trailing him. Tracy stuck his head out
of the house and said, ‘Why are you saying that, Dave?’ Daddy repeated it and
Tracy decked him. I don’t think Daddy ever won a fight.”
Jimmie
had been able to walk to all his schools from the house on Panama. But there
was no money for clothes and shoes, Jimmie’s wardrobe was worn to near rags.
“My mother swallowed her pride,” Jimmie said. “She wrote a letter to Mrs.
Brown, ‘Jimmy needs new clothes. Please refer us to the proper authorities.’
Mrs. Brown sent me to another school that was serving as a commissary and I got
clothing. Roosevelt’s programs had men making clothing and shoes. But all the
shoes were the same. Same yellow rubber soles sewn onto black uppers. Right
and left weren’t different. They were one size. Wearing them made you look
like you were on welfare. I wouldn’t take those shoes and I asked the woman if
there was anything else. She directed me to a shelf of used shoes. But some of
them were good shoes and I got shoes and I got some nice used clothing. Wearing
them, that gave me a little dignity that I think I had learned from my father,”
Jimmie said.
In
Jimmie’s first year at Jefferson Davis high school in 1936, he had one job, and
then another that helped out. Over at Chiddix Service Station near Hardy
Street, he made 25 cents an hour changing oil and filling gas tanks. “Do you
remember the pictures of those old gas pumps?’ Jimmie said. “There was a long
glass bulb head high and you would use a hand pump to push the amount of
gasoline the man wanted up into the glass reservoir. Then you put the nozzle
into the gas tank of the car and opened a valve. The gas drained out into the
tank. You had to get that hose completely emptied out, or, oh my, the hose
would soon crack and the gasoline would spill onto the ground.”
Soon
Jimmie got another job he liked better right next-door at Mr. Sayres’ tiny feed
store. Mr. Sayres had corn and seed and fertilizer and all the supplies the
local folks like his mother needed for their animals and little gardens. He
would mix up special feeds himself. He wasn’t very prosperous at first, though,
and when he sold a sack of grain or a barrel of corn he had to run to the
supplier to replace his inventory. Jimmie minded the little store for him by
himself
for 25 cents an hour while he did deliveries and got supplies. He had chickens
and made capons; he actually operated on the chicken and got rid of the balls to
get a very husky chicken. He had an 1100 pound funnel-like food mixer. “I was
15 years old when I went to work for him and I would dump in the 1100 pounds to
make horse feed and chicken feed and I would bag it up. He a stencil made and I
had to stencil, ink stencil and I sewed up the bags and in those days I could
muscle a 110 pound bag of oats over my head; at 15 or 16 years old I was in
excellent shape handling those big bags,” Jimmie said. Jimmie
noticed Mr. Sayres never ate any lunch and one day he didn’t ask him why, but
just said that I think Mama would make him a plate of lunch every day if he
desired it. Mr. Sayres said that would be fine and he would pay her 25 cents
for the lunch. “It was plain fare for Mr. Sayres, but it helped us out, Jimmie
said.
“The end
of my world came quickly. First one Model T was sold, then the other. The
shack at the beach – sold. Even my Western Flyer was gone. Then one day the
letter came from the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation. They were calling the note
on our home and we were going to be evicted. The bank was taking the house. We
hadn’t paid and couldn’t pay the mortgage. We were going to be on the street
within days.”
Lena
Ellen Curry Leach wouldn’t be evicted. She was too proud to have her family and
her belongings spread on the dirt in front of the house so that all her
neighbors would see her failure. She found a rental for $15/month in the
country about two miles up the road from the Chiddix and Sayres places. It was
not quite a shack, but it was unimproved. It had one spigot in the kitchen, one
spigot outside and outhouse out back. It bordered on a swampy pasture. One of
David’s friends, a black man with an old Model T stake truck moved our three
loads of belongings out to the new home. Lena Leach paid him $15 and that was a
lot of money in those days. The Leach’s stayed there from 1937 to 1941.
“I
couldn’t walk to school from there so I quit school,” Jimmie said.
“You know
we didn’t have the sensitivity we have today about things like ‘depression’.
This was Texas, rural Texas, 1937. For us survival was the issue – food,
clothing and shelter. I think we were all depressed some. I thought it was the
end of my world, but it wasn’t. When I look back on those days I can see that I
could have figured out a way to stay at my classes. I was clever enough.”
Jimmie
tried to get a job by going down to the Houston Ship channel and signing on as a
mess boy on one of the ships. The Southern Steamship Lines had the State of New
York, the State of Louisiana, the State of Texas, all coastal freighters.
Nobody would hire him, he was too young and they didn’t have work and he didn’t
have a Copeland Card. Nevertheless, Jimmie went to the Union Hall and there
were many, many sailors there. They were all older and out of work. He asked
the man at the desk what a Copeland Card was and how he could get one. The man
kind of smiled – he was nice to Jimmie - but he said, “You don’t want to get a
Copeland Card. These union men won’t want to work with you.” The card had a
record of where you had worked and if you got fired and if you got drunk or
arrested, and it would give information so a ship could choose one man over
another. The union seamen didn’t want that; they wanted to get on a ship just
through the union hall. “I never got on a ship,” Jimmie said.
Jimmie
kept on working for Mr. Sayres and Mr Chiddix. Mr. Sayres was actually
prospering some. David Leach helped him build a new place about two miles from
his little place near Hardy St. Mr. Sayres was a Texas A&M graduate and had
been an engineer in the first war. He began branding his feed products as
“Hearty” – a take off on the name of Hardy Street. Then Mr. Sayres bought
Jimmie a new bicycle and offered that Jimmie could pay him back over time. “And
I could get from the new home in the country to my job at his feed store down
the road," Jimmie said. “I would stay there sometimes. We had visitors who had
cut through the floor and stole feed from the new store and put a bag of feed
back over the hole. One friend and I sat with a shotgun over that hole through
a couple of nights. We never caught the culprit.”
“And I
could get back to school. At school I rejoined the Junior ROTC and I got my
first military training. It was all about military government, discipline,
dress codes, courtesy and citizenship. And in 1938 I went over to the armory
and signed up for the National Guard. I was 16 and I lied about my age.”
“So we
were a family that fell into poverty through no real fault of our own. I hated
to go to the commissary for the free shoes and clothing because of the shame I
felt at being poor. My father hated to do WPA work because he was proud to be a
carpenter. My mother, remember, she did the hard things as my father became
less able to support us; she wrote and asked that I get clothing, she moved us
out of our house so we wouldn’t be homeless on the street, but the place we
moved to out in the country was little more than a shack. I am certain my
parents felt shame and guilt and depression. But these were decisions they made
and the things we had to do.”
(An excerpt of a work in progress)
3/4/09
Questions or comments: Contact Matt
Hermes
|
