THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406060117
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940606 LENGTH: DOVER, DEL.
Walter ``Bud'' Moore, tall, skinny and a couple of classes shy of a diploma at Spartanburg (S.C.) High School, was right in the middle of it, streaming toward Utah Beach in a landing craft, his heart in his throat and sheer amazement in his eyes.
{REST} Shells were screaming overhead - in both directions.
``The big Navy guns on the big battle wagons began blasting with the 16-inchers, and you could see the shells land,'' Moore remembers. ``The way they were firing the guns, and the way all the stuff was flying and everything else, you'd have said nothing could stay alive up there.
``It was the doggondest sight you ever saw.''
Today, at 69, Bud Moore is legendary in NASCAR as the owner of the No. 15 Ford Thunderbird, a builder of stock cars that win races no matter who steers them - Joe Weatherly, Buddy Baker, Bobby Allison, Dale Earnhardt Ricky Rudd, Geoff Bodine. . . . But perhaps his greatest contribution to mankind, and one he is fiercely proud of, is his service as a foot soldier in the U.S. Army who was baptized in combat on June 6, 1944, on Utah Beach.
Southern men have been uncommonly fierce and courageous warriors, and Moore was no exception. He won two Bronze Stars at a price of five Purple Hearts. He was shot through the hip, blown out of a jeep, hit while huddled in a foxhole. And he still managed to come home in one piece.
Fifty years later, he still has nightmares of the war.
``I've had more in the last couple weeks since the 50th anniversary came up,'' he said.
Moore does not care to describe them.
``Well, it's just a situation,'' he says. ``Certain things. You sort of halfway wake up. Something pops in the mind. It just happens, that's all.''
His war memories are vivid and detailed, but some stories remain private. They still hurt too much to tell.
``I don't really like to talk about some of the battles we did do and some of the guys we lost,'' he said.
The United States was already 18 months into World War II when Moore was drafted in June 1943. He was supposed to take algebra and trigonometry in summer school to get his high school diploma, but the Army took him instead. And after 13 weeks in basic training in Mississippi, they said he was a soldier.
By April 1944, he was in England. Around the first of June, he learned that his unit would board an LCI landing craft to participate in a dry run of an amphibious landing.
``When we moved out into the (English) Channel, all I could see was ships just as far as I could see - thousands of them, just thousands of them,'' he says. ``I told some of my buddies, `Boys, I can tell you one thing: This ain't no dry run. This is the real thing.' ''
The assault was delayed several days by weather. But on the morning of June 5, officers came aboard the ship and told the troops they would hit Utah Beach at 5 the next morning.
``I didn't get much sleep that night,'' Moore said. ``None of the guys did that were on that boat, because we knew what was coming that next day.''
Sometime that night, the LCI started moving. By daybreak, the men could see the shore of France.
About 200 yards from the beach, the LCI stopped, dropped its nose and disgorged Bud Moore into his first battle.
``All these German shells were coming in there, all hell's breaking loose,'' Moore said. ``The water was up shoulder-high. We had probably 150 yards before we got to water that was knee-deep.''
Right next to him, a soldier took a direct hit.
``He just disappeared,'' Moore said. ``All this stuff flying, and I was so scared.''
On the boat, he had thought how strange it was that people were really out there trying to kill each other.
``These people are crazy,'' he thought to himself. ``Something's wrong.''
But now, struggling in the surf, he wasn't thinking anything except how incredibly scared he was, and how hard it was to make his legs run in water. On his back, besides his backpack, was a 51-pound tripod for his crew's water-cooled machine gun.
Only a few steps out of the LCI, Moore stepped in a shell hole. He went under. Salt water swept into his eyes. They burned so badly he had to stop right there, with German shells still coming in, and clear them. Finally, he was moving again.
Today, he looks back on the experience and estimates it took him five to seven minutes to wade through the water, run cross the beach and find a relatively safe place at the edge of the bluff.
The landing at Utah Beach was far milder than at nearby Omaha Beach. Thousands of Americans fell at Omaha; only a few hundred went down at Utah.
But this was only the beginning.
Moore and his unit advanced abut a half-mile on June 6. And they kept advancing for the next 11 months, until the war was over, fighting from town to town. War was a daily ordeal.
``The only thing I can say is, when you were out there fighting all day long, it was real thrilling for nighttime to come because everything sort of stopped,'' Moore said. ``And when you dug your foxhole and laid down in that foxhole, you praised the Lord you made it through that day and hoped you were going to make it tomorrow.
``But it wasn't no real comfort. Sometimes we got harassing artillery. We got very little sleep.''
It was four or five weeks before he bathed, Moore remembers.
``We didn't shave. I don't even remember whether we brushed our teeth. But nobody got to shave, there were no clean clothes and no clean socks. And all the clothes had all this salt in them, and your legs got raw where it rubbed. I remember I was so bad, at one point I just took off my underwear and throwed them away.''
He was wounded five times. His most serious wound was a gunshot wound in the hip. Right after he got out of the field hospital for that, ``I got blowed out of a jeep by an artillery shell and I got shrapnel (wounds) all over,'' he said.
He was wounded three more times by shrapnel.
``One time, I was at the field hospital for about an hour and a half for shrapnel. They got it all out, put some methiolate and Band-Aids on me in about 25 or 30 places, and sent me right back out,'' he said. ``But I was fortunate for as many times as I was blowed out of foxholes. I never really had a major problem, although I had both eardrums busted and I can't hear very well. ''
Moore received one bronze star for being on the front lines for nine months and 14 days without being evacuated. And he won the other when he and another soldier captured a German regimental headquarters with four officers and 15 enlisted men.
This happened in the fall of 1944, after he had been promoted to corporal and given the job of positioning the machine gun teams.
He and another soldier named Hess were sent off in a jeep and almost immediately captured a German soldier trying to flee a farmhouse.
``Then we went on up the road,'' he said. ``We were supposed to turn right and go up over a hill, but we went straight on. We must have went another 200 or 300 yards and there was this little red brick building. Someone started firing on us and I started firing back. I shot out the windows and everything. And all of a sudden I stopped firing and they stopped firing at me. And about that time, a white flag came out of one window.''
Moore and Hess sent their prisoner in. Hess, who knew a bit of German, told the soldier to tell his comrades that if they didn't come out, they'd call in artillery and blow the place apart.
``They all came piling out,'' Moore said.
If the Germans were surprised they had been captured by two foot soldiers, Moore's commanding officer was even more amazed when he and Hess returned with 20 prisoners.
``What was all that shooting over there?'' the lieutenant asked Moore.
``Well, we was having a little trouble,'' Moore replied.
Moore said he hasn't talked to any of his fellow soldiers in about 10 years. And he's never been back to France.
``I'm going back pretty soon,'' he said. ``I'm hoping to go back and start from where I hit the beach and just drive and go all the way back to Czechoslovakia, where I was when the war ended. I'd like to see all the towns we blowed slap off the map.''
``It means a whole lot to me to be recognized,'' he said. ``I'd like to see that everybody else in that war is recognized in the same way. And I'm just glad to be here to celebrate the 50th. I don't know how I survived.''
{KEYWORDS} D-DAY WORLD WAR II NORMANDY
by CNB