|
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
|
Preface: (An excerpt from
Tanker Jimmie Leach.}
From
a distance, across the tidal water channeling through the golden marsh grass, on
the straight causeway set on the embankment just clear of the high tide, an old,
white station wagon crawls along, taking forever to clear each evenly spaced
palmetto tree. At the end of the causeway where the road reaches the
island at a margin of insubstantial brush, the vehicle pulls off to the side.
Close in now. A man slowly opens his door. He rolls his legs out of
the car and pulls himself to standing. He is old and bent but his fine,
white hair is newly trimmed. In his right hand he holds a plastic ladle.
He shuffles to the back of the car, bracing himself with his left hand along the
roofline. He opens the rear window and scoops out dog food from a bag and
moves with it to an empty dish he has left in this spot for some months now,
just under the sign “2009 - Four Deer Hit this Year”.
A new
Marine hurries over to him from the guard station. We see her automatic weapon
pointed off to the side. “Sir?” she says. “Can I help you?” Her sergeant
comes up beside her. “Sergeant Bennett, here, Sir. What are you doing?” The
old man tilts his head and looks up at the Marines full on. He smiles a
lopsided smile and says, “Jimmie Leach, Sergeant. Col. Leach. Got to feed the
raccoons, you know.” He points to the sign. “And the deer. Have you seen any
deer today? How long have you two Marines been stationed here at Parris
Island? Where are you from?”
Later
that afternoon he returns home and sits at his computer. He has many emails but
opens one from a familiar name:
“Jimmie,
understand you had a bout with illness recently but are home now. So very glad
to hear that and wanted to wish you continued recovery at home.
Just a couple of things. Recently I had opportunity to meet with Ric Shinseki
just before he was confirmed as Pres. Obama’s VA Secretary. We both recounted
how you were the sole champion to allow many of us in Armor to remain on active
duty and how much all of us were grateful you did that. Now if course many can
continue. You were our champion in those Vietnam days. Forever thanks.
Second, this week in my Battle Command class we are talking about the relief of
Bastogne by all of you in 37th Tank in 1944. I have them read a passage from Bob
Sorley's book, Thunderbolt. Since you were there, any thoughts you want me to
pass on to my 16 Cadets?
All the very best to you and Marion.
Very Respectfully,
Fred Franks (Gen. US Army, Ret.)
This is a
soldier’s story told late in life; an armored warrior’s exploration of more than
seventy years of fearless, loyal service, always standing in readiness for the
unknown, prepared to do the next right thing.
The Gods
have removed from us so many of the warriors who moved from the 1930’s and its
depression and despair into the preparation for war and through the awful years
of Pearl Harbor and Midway and North Africa and Sicily and Omaha Beach and Iwo
and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These straight-leg warriors watched their comrades,
just an arms length away, drop or fragment or simply disappear. Tankers waited
inside their closeted realm and knew if they heard the ordnance bounce away they
were still safe. The airmen saw their squadrons fall from the sky, perhaps still
alive but nearing a moment of death as predictable in time and place as has ever
been ordained. Sailors bade good luck to shiploads of mates who then simply
disappeared. All of these men and a few women and all of the men and women of
our enemies may well be meeting still in that place of heroes that Gen. George
S. Patton believed was the jumping off place for reincarnation to another, more
powerful warrior.
But of
those men still with us, no one speaks with the clarity and vision and mission of
service that marks the life and story of Col. James H. Leach. His may be the
last detailed memory of the Greatest Generation.
(The
placid, modest, friendly exterior of this Officer disguises the fighting heart
of a lion and the tenaciousness of a bulldog, all seasoned with an engaging
personality. - Lt. Colonel Creighton W. Abrams, Dec. 31, 1944)
In this
chronicle Belgians and Frenchmen and Luxembourgs, gaunt and hungry, surround the
soldier’s Sherman tank as his company of George Patton’s advancing American 4th
Army liberates the villages of Europe. A few years later, Korean farmers walk
to protected compounds, safe from nighttime communist marauders as our soldier,
a liaison officer now for his Army and dressed in local attire, squats with his
Korean aide against a wall at the edge of the town and observe the peaceful
square go about this evening business. Our Captain is unmindful of powerful
forces that will soon stand Korean against Korean in island slaughter that will
be called genocide and blamed on his modest liaison mission. Two decades pass
and Vietnamese women and children wave little national flags of gratitude and
freedom and push out along newly paved roads to go to market and escort their
children to school under the protection of his 11th Armored Cavalry
Regiment’s flying gun ships.
German
projectiles penetrate his body. Shrapnel in his calf in July, 1944; a broken
nose and a lacerated left eye an hour apart in November then a crease across the
buttocks from an artillery fragment. Later he stands, exposed, in the turret of
his surging Sherman tank, Blockbuster 3, scratching across the ice on Christmas
Eve in 1944. His troops struggle to capture the tiny French village of
Bigonville. He is part of a dramatically important action, General George S.
Patton’s winter forced march 120 miles north to relieve the encircled airborne
and armored infantry trapped at the Belgian village of Bastogne and more
importantly to cut off the westward surge of German armor moving to Antwerp and
the Sea.
Armor is
supposed to move fast and he is in the advanced guard of the 4th
Armored Division attack as commander of Company B, 37th Tank
Battalion under Lt. Colonel Creighton Abrams. But the infantry units
accompanying his tanks are hunkered down in the village. The infantry Captain
is dead and their Lieutenant refuses to advance. Their leadership has failed
them.
Now
Captain Leach himself is knocked to the deck of his tank with a wound in his
arm. Gunnery Corporal John Yaremchuk, an immigrant US soldier from Ukraine
pushes him back up into the turret. Capt. Leach is hit again by rifle fire
directed by a sniper in the trees along the road. This time he is hit in the
head. The projectile has penetrated his helmet and dropped to the floor of the
tank. The commander is on the floor, too, unconscious and bleeding. Cpl. Yaremchuk wafts a capsule of ammonia under his nose. Leach awakens in a few
minutes as his crew tends to his bleeding head. Yaremchuk hands him his
punctured helmet. He says stand up in the turret, Captain! You belong in
command of this tank.
But
almost immediately the commander leaps out of his tank. He dismounts and runs
into the village. He joins Captain Whitehall. They are the surviving Battalion
officers and they stride through the pockets of infantry still holed up in the
buildings. They prod the soldiers forward to attack. The troops move out.
This
wound earns Captain James H. Leach his fifth and final Purple Heart. His action
marshalling the infantry to attack earns Captain Leach the Distinguished Service
Cross. The next night, with head, cheek and calf bandaged, Leach leads his
tankers overnight 30 miles to the east from where his Battalion will fight north
to enter Bastogne on Dec. 26, 1944 and relieve its encircled command.
A quarter
century later and again leading daily combat, now Col. Leach lands his
helicopter in the middle of the Michelin rubber plantation in a Vietnam
firefight to save the life of his Air Squadron Commander, Major Jim Bradin,
after his battered helicopter twisted itself into a water-filled crevice already
carved deep by artillery blasts.
Thirty
seven years later Bradin says to Col. Leach, “When you landed to help me, you
were still under fire. You really didn’t need to do that and saving me was a
really fearless thing to do.” Col. Leach’s response was automatic. “I saw you
get hit.” He turns to me. “Oh, you don’t even think about it. You just do it.
No, sir. Here’s your troops in trouble and you just go do something about it.
My pilot and I ran up to the helicopter and saw that Bradin and his pilot were
out. The two gunners in the back were buried in the ditch the helicopter fell
into and they burned to death. And Bradin tends to exaggerate.”
Loyalty
is confirmed as Col. Leach journeys in the autumn of life back to the winter of
a village in France to celebrate a small and inconclusive 1944 tank engagement
that is still etched in the memories of its survivors. He unveils at a small
memorial to the seven tankers he lost there 62 years ago. The monument bears
each of the names. Col. Leach is joined by another American tanker from that
small battle and they invite those few German soldiers who might remember the
cold, gray day, the smell of the steamy manure piled high along the main road,
the surprise encounters with each other that came as they maneuvered among the
high garden walls of the little village.
Col.
Leach remembers that Dec.6 at the red-roofed hamlet of Singling during Gen.
Patton’s advance toward Germany. Leach dismounted from Blockbuster 3 into ice
and mud and walked ahead of the tank. He was firing his automatic weapon at a
German Self-Propelled gun turning its aim at him from the little town square.
He ordered his tank to shoot its cannon past him and at the Germans but the
gunner, Corporal Yaremchuk, did not fire and the German vehicle escaped for the
moment. Leach berated Yaremchuk for his refusal to fire. Yaremchuk yelled
back that his captain had been in his line of fire and the muzzle blast from the
shell would have killed him.
In the
spring of 2006, Col. Leach’ wife, Marion, drove him 600 miles to Washington, DC
so he could speak the eulogy at John Yaremchuk’s memorial service at the
Arlington National Cemetery and tell how his Corporal had dressed him down for
spoiling his opportunity to destroy that German SP.
We seem
to treasure some stable memories and we have developed such extraordinary tools
to explore the rest. The Corgi company in England made zinc die-cast models as
collectibles. Their military series includes a 1:50 scale Sherman tank. And
they wrote, “This tank belongs to the Company B commander, Captain James Leach,
and was named Blockbuster 3D. This was the third Sherman that Leach had operated
since 1944.” Colonel Leach’s son Jamie gave him one of these models. Before
taking his winter return to Singling, Col. Leach examined the images of the town
taken by satellite and displayed on command on Google Earth. The same red roofs
strung out for a few hundred meters along the road. Leach mused. “My, the town
hasn’t changed a bit. They haven’t built more than four or five houses since
the war.”
This is a
story, then, of a warrior’s life whose sights and sounds and tastes and smells
still reach to touch us. Do not be misled by the absence of the continuing,
bloody horror of the battles. It was what it was. Let us choose to get all
that carnage revealed, here and now, all at once.
His
battlefields were hot and they cold and they were hot again. Inside a tank wet
hands stuck to frozen tank armor and the vapor of breath froze on its steel
shell. Gun barrels recoiled and crushed fingers
and scorched skin and left acrid odors that tore at the nose and teared the eyes
and offered up headaches that ground on and on. Inside a fighting tank there
was scant light day or night but in the 4th Armored it was tradition
to fight with the hatches open and the tank commander exposed waist up in vulnerable full
view of the enemy. Jimmie Leach remembers Lt.Rayratt, a tank commander he talked
to one night. He was watching him the next morning on the phone. His tank was
but a few feet away. Lt. Rayratt started to speak into the phone and his head
disappeared. Just a few spurts of blood before his body disappeared into the
hull of the tank.
Tank
crews loaded and fired and lived blind in a bouncing, shaking sarcophagus that
for many would offer their last sentient memory of life on this earth. When
they stopped for a moment they scurried off to shit or piss and came back to do
the never ending maintenance to guns and gears and drive wheels and turrets and
radios. It was important just to keep the exterior ports cleared of mud. By
night the painful odor of the dead impregnated cold clothing as the crew
attempted a few hours of sleep in a corner of steel, remembering the sight of a
soldier accidentally crushed by a Sherman or severed by an incoming Panzer
round.
In
battle, soldiers ignored pain: cold feet, lice and worms, trench foot,
toothaches, burns, chafing clothing, skin rubbed raw carrying guns and
ammunition and food and fuel and supplies to maintain the tanks and
half-tracks. Their hands were crushed by falling hatch covers, burnt by
accidental fuel fires, cut by barbs, bayonets and burrs on the edges of
equipment. They focused on the constant physical work and lifted, carried,
walked, ran, crawled, loaded, pushed, pulled, climbed, fell, aimed, fired,
pissed, shit, ate, farted, cried, laughed, and for some few, shivered
uncontrollably in fear, lying out of sight, drawn into the fetal position.
Massed
tanks growled and whined and fired cannon that deafened and the sound was
majestic when these were your sounds and the sounds crawled up the spine and
deep-fried your brain when the sounds were the Panzerfaust and cannon and burp
of rapid fire from the enemy upon you. You could see your outgoing
ordnance, follow it to its target. Incoming you never saw, you heard them
if you were lucky as they flew by. High explosive shells detonated;
eardrums transmitted pain. Some shells bounced and rolled and did not explode
but came slowly to rest after a mile’s travel and nudged up gently against a
grateful and lucky soldier’s leg. Smoke covered the field as phosphorus shells
clouded the countryside with acidic vapors.
Capt.
Leach’s feet sunk into frigid mud and warm blood; he wondered if the sticky mix
of flesh and bone and dirt blown across his body was his own or the remnants of
another soldier. Five times in Europe the blood was Jimmie Leach’s blood.
Calf, buttocks, nose, eye and finally head. But under Col. Abe you didn’t go
home for a flesh wound and his fighting went on. A shell penetrated the hull of
a Sherman and Jimmie Leach held the wounded crewman in his arms. His leg was
gone at the hip and the few gauze pads Leach applied became a spiritual token of
care for the dying man. Another soldier died in his arms. “He died of shock,”
Jimmie Leach, says. “He just had a small dark hole near his groin but he was
pale and gray and he said to me, ‘I am so sorry, sir.’”
A quarter
century later in Vietnam the shell that penetrated his HUEY helicopter went
between him and his pilot and blew off the leg of the radio operator. The blood
shed in his service in Vietnam was the blood of others, but his Command Sergeant
Major Donald Horn writes, “Many times I saw him go off by himself and cry.”
Jimmie
Leach, as so many soldiers before and after has taken those memories of terror
and packaged them and sent them off into a proper place where they are
acknowledged but seldom reopened. He says without further comment that Clint
Eastwood’s extraordinary “Flag of Our Fathers” was the best war movie he has
ever seen. We can watch that movie and for every image of bloody Capt.
Severance leading doomed men and then dying at Iwo Jima we can see Capt. Leach
in the hedgerows of France, in Lorraine and across the Ardennes Forest and above
the rubber plantations of Vietnam, leading men whose ineluctable fate was
death. But perhaps by chance, Jimmie Leach came away from those places among
the living.
And so
for this work we pack up the horror, here, and walk from it now. Let it be.
This is a
story of the life of a man who chose to be a warrior and became a warrior with
all the honor and tension, loyalty and disappointment that soldiering implies.
But he is now living a long and elegant life. We tell his life as best we can,
acknowledging there are some things that we will approach no further. What we
will do is recognize and honor the life record of an intuitive soldier who has
anticipated in word and acted out for nearly three quarters of a century, in
deeds of loyalty, love and service, the processes that the United States Army
looks at today in defining its 21st century mission.
When we remove ourselves from the individual warrior and his daily task, when we
back off to look at the Battalions, Divisions, Corps, Armies, Nations and the
global vitalities and visions that lead to these world-encompassing conflicts,
we may see that the personal warfare in life and death that surrounded Jimmie
Leach is a trifling concern on the world's stage. What then are we to make
of Jimmie Leach's service, if on the planet, taken as we see it on Google Earth,
as a blue orb with oceans and landscapes, Jimmie's service is invisible.
This is the valuable gift of Jimmie's life. The liberation of these French
and Lux and Belgian citizens from the Germans. And as usual he recognizes
that value through decades of consistent behavior. He returns again and
again to Europe, to France, to Lorraine, to towns like Luneville and Arracourt
and Bigonville
and to Singling and to Bastogne in Belgium and he celebrates with their
citizens; he celebrates liberation; they honor him for his great gift of
freedom, unselfishly given and individually accepted.
As I write this Preface, Jimmie Leach is 87 years old and he and his wife Marion
are in France and Luxembourg and Belgium to celebrate the 65th anniversary of
the liberation of the towns near Lorraine. He spoke at Chancenay. He
spoke at Luneville.
He made remarks at Valhey. He said a few words at Arracourt.
He offered remarks at Bezange la Petit. He visited old friends at Singling
and at Bigonville. He visited the military museum at Diekirch in
Luxembourg where is displayed a faded newspaper that states simply, "Luxembourg
is Free, The Americans are Here."
And I am traveling with them. This is Jimmie Leach's gift to me.
(An excerpt of a work in progress)
9/27/09
Questions or comments: Contact Matt
Hermes
|
