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June 3, 2004
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June 3, 2004 |
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Charles Benning returns to France, finally honored for WWII service
When Yellow Springs native Charles Benning volunteered for military service in March 1943, he was turned away because he was black. Drafted three months later, he feared being sent to the South for training. And throughout his one-and-a-half year tour of duty, he and his black company mates endured harassment by white officers, who made the experience of World War II more difficult for minorities than the long and bloody battle already was. As the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy approached, Benning recalled details from his tour in Company C of the 428th Ambulance Battalion, an all-black battalion. He remembered his pride at being tagged officer corps material in the first month of training, the Kaiser Victory ship he sailed to England, the wounded he transported from landing-ship tanks and the first dead body he encountered. The memories of the 81-year-old veteran will become even clearer as Benning travels with five other black veterans to Normandy, France, this week to be the focus of a documentary film about the experience of black American soldiers during WWII. Benning left on May 31 for a 10-day tour organized by French filmmaker Sam Wooten, whose father was an African-American veteran turned expatriate. Every 10 years since the war ended, Wooten’s family has participated in Normandy’s D-Day anniversary celebration, but this is the first year that black veterans have officially been asked to share their experiences. Wooten’s proposal indicates he intends to try to sell his film The Forgotten Brothers of D-Day to the History Channel. Benning said that he balked at Wooten’s first invitation last year. “At first I said I wasn’t going because they waited 60 years, what happened to when I was younger?” he said. “But then I met Sam Wooten. Sam wants me to be there, so I’ll be there, providing the good Lord’s willing.” Benning has relied on the Lord’s guidance for many decisions, including the one he made as a 20-year-old in the Central Chapel AME Church sanctuary, where he decided to join the war with his brother Chester, Charles Hull and Carl Cordell Sr. The Lord was good to him, for instance, Benning said, when he was sent to Lyons instead of into the Battle of the Bulge. And someone must have been rooting for their entire company, from which just one person was injured in an auto accident, he said. His body may have escaped unscathed, but the sights and sounds of war remain fresh in his mind.
Benning recalled seeing his first casualty as he mounted Utah Beach on June 7, 1944, the night after the big invasion. A German soldier with severe shrapnel head wounds lay still in the sand, and Benning covered him with a cloth before driving through the night, strafed by German aircraft, to his post near Avranches, in the broken farm fields of the Hedgerows. Benning’s job as an ambulance staff sergeant involved directing 21 men who transported the wounded from the battlefield back to the Army hospital. His platoon picked up soldiers from the 4th Army Division, and every night at midnight they “caught hell” from the German artillery they called “bed check Charlie,” he said. Then on some mornings, surprise rockets from Messerschmitt fighters would skim the heads of the Allied troops. “We scampered under those ambulances and cried like babies,” Benning recalled. “The ground was vibrating, and I tell you what, that scared the daylights out of me.” Everyone in Benning’s company survived the summer and followed the Allied push east toward Germany under General George S. Patton. By mid-August the 428th hit France’s eastern border, where Benning’s company camped one night in a farmer’s field. After a long summer of canned C-rations and cardboard-like K-rations, the men felt entitled to steal a pig and roast it. The following morning Benning had the misfortune of meeting General Patton, who, fresh from speaking to the irate farmer, admonished the entire company and made each man give the farmer 5 francs. Benning said he will always remember General Patton for using his crop to adjust his cap and for charging him for the most expensive pig he’s ever eaten. In the fall Benning headed south to Nancy, where during the Battle of Metz he and his company carried such a large number of wounded they were eligible for a citation in the U.S. military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. But when he and another black staff sergeant went to submit their company’s statistics, Benning recalled, the corporal told them, “Boys, you’re too damn late.” It was yet another example of the discrimination blacks faced during the war, Benning said. Since then he learned that his company, and the two companies his Yellow Springs mates served in, evacuated a total of 1.2 million casualties out of the theater, including German soldiers. “You knew the count had to be high because you were working day and night,” he said. “Our company paid for itself.” The following winter Benning’s company went to Lyons, where they sank deep in their foxholes and suffered severe cold and rain. When the war finally ended in August 1945, Benning said, he spent another four months hauling bodies off the battlefields. His company was under the watch of Lieutenant Walsh, who, according to Benning, “did not like blacks.” It was Thanksgiving Day and his last day in the field, Benning recalled, when Walsh left his company working in the field while he enjoyed a holiday meal with his former men. At the end of the day, Benning handed in his stripes and said he quit. “I often thought what would have happened if we had black officers,” he said, shaking his head with regret that things didn’t work out that way. While in Normandy this week and next, Benning will join a small group of black veterans, including two area men, Harry Johns of Xenia and 95-year-old Thomas Taylor of Dayton. The filmmakers will shoot the men visiting the former battlegrounds where cemeteries and memorials to the troops are now constructed. The entire trip is paid for by the French government, which will also decorate the former soldiers with medals and honor them with speeches by state dignitaries, including President George W. Bush, French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder and Queen Elizabeth. Benning said that the greatest excitement of the trip was preparing for it, as he gathered black veterans and recalled the memories of those two years that remain like no others in their lives. His main objective now is to continue to meet with the veterans who live nearby so they can keep sharing their experiences. He also hopes to be able to bring back medals for his friends who could not travel to France to be honored so many years after their time of service, he said. His brother Chester, Charles Hull and Carl Cordell Sr. are all deceased. “I kind of wish I could get together with those guys I served with because you don’t realize you’re so important until something like this happens,” he said. “There’s something in the back of my mind telling me this is going to be the last Normandy anniversary.”
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