A lucky soldier

A silly Christmas card James R. Beveridge received while serving in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II.

Part V: On the edges of combat

By Scott Beveridge

My father arrived in Le Havre, France, during the second week of February 1945 with shattered nerves.

James R. Beveridge was then just 22 years old and assigned to perform office work for the U.S. Army’s 38th Infantry Regiment’s Quartermaster Corps. His unit would later set up tents to feed soldiers, as well as starving German refugees, sometimes serving baked beans for breakfast from clean galvanized steel garbage cans.

His unit soon marched across a U.S.-secured Normandy as more than 1,200 Allied bombers raided central Berlin. Dad said he worried all along that he would soon be called into combat.

“If the troops were trapped, you had to put down the typewriter and grab a gun and fight,” he said.

“If they overran that front line, then everyone was fighting, no matter who you were.”

Dad said he witnessed bombers en route to Germany so thick overhead that he could barely see the sky. He cheered the planes on, hoping they would bring a quick end to the war.

On April 4, 1945, his unit was dispatched to Dinslaken, a small industrial city in the Ruhr area of western Germany, a distance of two miles from the front line.

Meanwhile, American troops were marching through Germany, greeted by Germans waiving white flags of surrender.

The nights were frightening, pitch black with practically every window blind pulled shut in the houses and buildings. Frequent bombing raids had also taken out the electricity in many areas.

“You could see the shells like fireworks in the next city,” he said.

In a last-ditch effort to protect the Ruhr pocket, Nazi troops were sending “buzz bombs” across the sky toward England, dad said. “They sounded like motorboats.”

Many of the bombs malfunctioned and fell to the ground, hitting the wrong targets.

But, within a month, the war with Germany was over.

“The surrender traveled by word of mouth,” dad said. “Everybody cheered. They wanted to go home.”

Yet, President Harry S. Truman warned America the war was only half won because heavy fighting was taking its toll on U.S. troops stationed in the South Pacific.

Looking back on his life, dad said he sometimes suffered a guilty conscience because he survived the war physically unharmed, having known that was not the case for many veterans. He often overlooked, too, the value of his unit, brushing it off as woman’s duty.

The Quartermaster Corps was under the command of Maj. Guy I. Rowe, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism in France during World War I. The Corps’ main mission in dad’s war involved feeding, clothing, and equipping the troops.

Its members also were trained to fill specialized roles in every theater.

By the end of the war, the corps had handled 70,000 different supply items and prepared and served nearly 24 million meals.

It also had been assigned the grim task of burying nearly 250,000 bodies in temporary graves. Meanwhile, 4,900 corps soldiers were killed in battle.

Dad said he found himself sorting mail in England, refueling vehicles and clearing out houses in bombed out houses in Holland and Germany to make them temporary barracks for his commanders.

“If the platoon sergeant said he wanted that house to stay in, we threw out all of the furniture, put the furniture in the yard to make room for cots,” he said. “We destroyed it. The American people didn’t give a shit.”

He said he never fully understood how the army determined which soldiers carried weapons into battle or how others like him were spared such duty.

“I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now,” he said in 2005. “I was lucky. That’s the only word for it.”

After Germany fell to the Allies, he relaxed in the South of France where he was able to swim daily in the Mediterranean Sea.

The vacation wouldn’t last long because his orders soon called for him to board The Ainsworth on July 15, 1945, to backup troops a world away. The merchant ship was about to join a massive convoy of military vessels to assist in a war halfway around the globe against Japan.

(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part VI: The second war ends)

(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

The moose mobile

P6 parking lot at Newark (NJ) airport, originally uploaded by Julia Manzerova.

Pennsylvania rifle deer season starts tomorrow. Here's hoping none of us end up with a set of whitetail antlers on our vehicles' hoods. I've hit seven over the three decades I have been driving in this neck of the woods, and don't want to add another trophy to my car fenders.

Granny Sheila needs her meds

What good would the holidays be without such kids as Kenzie and the kooky and creative things she pulls out of her head?

A lucky soldier

Part IV: Dad's secret World War II letter

By Scott Beveridge

My father in declining health gave me a stack of letters he saved from World War II with a warning there might be something embarrassing in them.

James R. Beveridge was approaching 82 that summer of 2005, and I responded by saying he didn’t need to worry about being ashamed at his age over anything the yellowed letters might contain.

So we went on talking for hours about his service in the U.S. Army, as I took notes without ever mentioning the one startling letter written by his mother holding a secret dad carried with him to his grave in March 2007.

His mother, Madge, had intercepted a bill he received in the mail in January 1943 from a physician in Monongahela, Pa., for delivering a baby he fathered to a married woman living in that small city south of Pittsburgh.

Madge Beveridge was writing her son, a private stationed in Danville, Ill., to proudly announce that she had solved this problem.

Mrs. Beveridge, who became my grandmother 13 years later, was not regarded for having been graceful, compassionate or genuinely kind to others.

She stated in the letter that he could not have fathered the woman’s full-term baby delivered July 15, 1942, because they hadn’t known each other long enough.

“So I told this Dr. she wanted a ‘goat’ and thought to pick on a 19 year old boy, who had lost his Dad, but she forgot the boy had a mother who knew her son was worthy of a good woman,” she stated in the letter.

Mrs. Beveridge further stated she visited the physician and told him to forward the bill to the mother’s father. “So Jimmy, I had never (really) been quite happy until I found out for sure that the Beveridge blood wasn’t in that baby.”

She was humored at having solved such a serious dilemma. Meanwhile, the date she indicated her son became intimate with the woman also made it quite possible he could have fathered the child.

The subject of the letter quickly turned to dad’s mother shopping for new shoes and making plans to visit his military base. The problem was forever behind them; so she thought.

Never knowing the full truth about the child would trouble my father for the remainder of his life, according to my mother – the former June Hart - who didn’t meet or marry him until well after the war ended.

His indiscretions before they married were not a concern to mom, she said, yet he never told her about his receiving the bill for the baby. She had been told two versions about the pregnancy from people they knew in Charleroi in the 1950s. One story involved the baby – a son - dying following a premature birth while the other had him being put up for adoption.

The woman’s parents had visited the Beveridge home in Charleroi, Pa., while she was pregnant, demanding a shotgun wedding. The pregnant girlfriend had left her husband in 1941, taken back her maiden name and was living with her parents when she met my father, according to the stories he later told my mother.

“He said he told his mother he probably should marry (the woman),” mom said last week. His mother asked her son if he wanted to get married. “He said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘Don’t worry about it then, I’ll take care of everything,’” said my mother, who turned 80 this summer.

Like me, mom has been expressing interest in finding out the truth now that I have made this letter known to our family.

In some ways I believe dad was trying to relieve some of his guilt by giving me those letters as age was weakening his heart and eyesight. He surely knew then, that as a curious reporter I would feel compelled to dig further into the story.

But, in 2005, I was under a tight deadline to write dad’s oral history of the World War II era for an assignment to finish graduate school.

We turned the clock back to February 1945 when he arrived to a war torn Normandy, France, as Allied forces were advancing on Germany.

(Note: At this time, we have decided not to reveal the identity of the woman whose physician billed my father for fathering her child. The obituary of her brother indicates she died prior to 1986. However, little else exists about her on ancestry.com or other Internet searches. By revealing her name, it might cause embarrassment to any children she might have had after my father left for the war, never to hear from her again.)


(Click here to return to Part 1: Preparing for a battle dad would never see)

(Click here to move on to Part V: On the edges of combat)


(This oral history was written in 2005 to fulfill my graduate studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. It is being edited and published here as a series.)

Spreading around Thanksgiving

Josh Smith of Bethel Park, Pa., was among a core of caring volunteers who prepared nearly 500 Thanksgiving dinners at St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church for the poor and lonely in the Monongahela area. The leftovers were then shared with police officers and ambulance service employees who left their families on the holiday to go to work. These cooks and servers even went to a dive bar to feed the local drunks.

Blue crab for Thanksgiving

Crab meat, originally uploaded by Scott Beveridge.

By Scott Beveridge

PITTSBURGH, Pa. – A stranger turned to me this afternoon while shopping at the local fish market for canned blue crab meat and asked if I knew the difference between the brands.

It was a strange encounter for me, a guy who was raised in a humble blue collar family that associated good seafood with Tuna Helper or Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks.

“It all tastes the same,” I responded. And then I pointed to the more-expensive cans of lump meat and said, “That just looks better in a crab cake.”

He appeared to be relieved by my advice, buying every bit of it as I grabbed what was on special – if you could call it a deal at $13 per 16 oz. can. He then picked up a can of the lump meat that cost an additional $10.

Now I confess to not being anything close to an expert on blue crab meat. I spent just one afternoon several years ago crabbing along Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and watched with amazement while a local kid plucked every last bit of meat from our catch of while I fumbled over the few crabs I attempted to gut.

When it all went together as stuffing for fresh-caught flounder, no one was dissecting the dish to identify the backfin. Blue crab, whether canned or fresh, is always a delicacy.

Our family long ago bought the story about the Pilgrims dining with friendly Indians during their first harvest celebration on turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie. That story defined our Thanksgiving dinners even until the day a decade ago when my young niece told us a story about the Pilgrims arriving in America aboard “The Sunflower.”

Historians today know better, and assume that seafood was plentiful and typically on the menu when those honored settlers dined before, during and after the first Thanksgiving in 1621. After learning that lesson, I decided to honor the Pilgrims by introducing the blue crab to our Thanksgiving meals several years ago, first in a she-crab soup and later in a simple snacking dip.

Tomorrow, we will try crab-stuffed mushrooms while giving thanks for those of us who have weathered this recession while still being employed. A few of the kids don’t know it yet, but they will be stopping by a soup kitchen to make a donation.

Here is the recipe for the mushrooms that will be on our table:

Ingredients

2 packages of large stuffing mushrooms
½ can of beer
2 tablespoons of butter

Stuffing mix:

1 16 oz. can of blue crab meat
1 small yellow onion, finely chopped
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
1 5 oz. package of garlic and cheese salad croutons
½ pound of shredded domestic Parmesan cheese
2 small packets of mayonnaise
Juice of ½ lemon
Season to taste: old bay seasoning, chili sauce or ground red pepper – whatever floats your Mayflower

Instructions

Remove stems from mushrooms and set them aside

Smash croutons and combine stuffing ingredients into a medium sized bowl. Save some of the crouton dust to sprinkle atop the mushrooms after they are stuffed. Generously stuff the mushrooms and place them tightly, face up, into a lasagna dish. Add around the cold butter and pour in the beer to a depth of about ½ inch. Cover with foil and cook in a 350-degree oven for about hour or until you think they look done. Tip: form leftover stuffing into cakes and freeze them to cook and eat at a later date