War Buddy Lost--Then Found

LORAIN, Ohio —  What Roy D. Stump and Robert Adkins had was lost in the roar of a German land mine--a friendship forged between two West Virginia boys in the waning days of World War II, then blown apart in the lowlands of Holland in February 1945. All that remained for half a century was Adkins’ fading memory of a fallen Army buddy.

Adkins did not bring much home from the war--his winter uniform, a Purple Heart, a few honor ribbons. What he kept was soon burned to cinders in a house fire. There were no pictures, no letters, no totems of remembrance to remind him of his friend, only that foggy corner of the mind reserved for the past. It was there that Stump came alive still, forever the same hell-raising, hot-tempered, red-haired little squirt.

There were piercing moments when Adkins wondered what it would be like if old Stump walked out of the past and back into his life, alive as sunlight. It was the communal fantasy of an aging generation, never fulfilled, a reverie achingly familiar to Americans who saw fast friends die in Europe and the South Pacific. Adkins was among them--the generation of boys who became men too soon, who faced mortality then and face it again now, in old age.

At 71, his war memories were being crowded out by intimations of mortality. Last month, he sat in a hospital waiting room, fretting while his wife underwent cataract surgery. He fell into small talk with a white-haired man who waited while doctors tended to his brother-in-law’s arthritic hands.

The men found they had things in common. They were just over 70. Each had worked for the Ford Motor Co. And they both had served in the Big One in the same antiaircraft battalion. When the stranger asked if any of Adkins’ mates had perished in the war, Adkins mentioned “Little Red.”

“I hate to disappoint you,” the white-haired man said, “but I’m very much alive.”

Even after 42 shrapnel fragments sliced into his body, even after a medic had removed his dog tags--the silent battlefield pronouncement of death--Stump had survived. Half a century after he and Adkins parted on a narrow Dutch road, they found each other in the northern Ohio factory town where both had lived for more than two decades.

Now, two old men are trying to make up for lost time. After 50 years of silence, Adkins and Stump are renewing a friendship stilled by a distant war. A wealth of memories binds them. The course of two lives holds them apart. Each has a wife, a bevy of grown children, his own passages of joy and pain. They are unalterably different from the country boys who were separated in a spasm of thunder and metal on Feb. 16, 1945.

But among a graying generation of soldiers, Stump and Adkins have won the rare gift of another chance: a small allotment of time left to prove that, sometimes, there are second acts in American lives.

“Old friendship never dies,” Stump said as he looked over sepia war photographs with Adkins on a recent morning. “I found the one guy I went through hell with. And looka here, we come out OK. I know we can’t do the things we did back then--too old to chase girls, son. But we’ll do what we can do. Ain’t gonna lose this thing twice.”

“Amen,” Adkins said.

As the initial shock of their reunion has worn off, the men have lurched into a renewal of old ties. There have been missed connections, some bruised feelings and the realization that coming together means more than trying to top each other’s hoary war stories. But always present is the knowledge that, as Stump said, “We get to do it all over again.”

Showing Their Age

Neither man had ever imagined the other as a senior citizen. As Adkins aged--his fingertips yellowed with nicotine stains and his life encrusted with the barnacles of family and responsibilities--his mind’s image of the wise guy he remembered as Little Red stayed forever young. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, like the strains of “Begin the Beguine,” he was frozen in time.

Now, it was as if both men had donned new skins, young bucks hidden inside codgers’ disguises.

Stump was no longer a red-haired hellion. His hair was white. He wore glasses. He had put 50 pounds on his once-scrawny frame. He took nerve pills. And in Stump’s left ear, Adkins noticed right off, was a gold earring. Strange on an old man, but not, Adkins realized, if the old man was the Roy Stump he once knew, a tough kid always spoiling for a scrap.

“Must have put it on out of meanness,” Adkins reckoned.

Stump recognized in Adkins only the shell of his old friend. Adkins was now gray and bespectacled, his voice a hoarse rasp, frayed by years of smoking and an emphysematous cough. The mountain man who once thought nothing of filching a captured German motorcycle and roaring over the French countryside was now loath to leave his own living room. He called his wife “Mother.”

“He’s different,” Stump said. “You can see he’s feeling his age.”

Only his 6-foot frame and hunched posture gave Adkins away. His Army buddies called him “Big Stoop” after a platoon sergeant told him that he “was so tall that when I stooped over, my butt’d stick up and the Germans might shoot it off.”

For years, Stump realized, he had seen Adkins out mowing his lawn when he drove to the hardware store in Lorain. In this working-class town on Lake Erie, where factory retirees keep outboard boats in backyards for summer fishing, the men pumped gas at the same service station and ate breakfast at the same greasy spoon. Stump even recognized Adkins’ dinged old Lincoln.

“All those years,” Stump mused with regret. “I’d seen that man around town and here it was my best friend. And I didn’t know. . . .”

Something in Common

At VFW Lodge 1079 in neighboring Elyria, where Stump dances to old Glenn Miller tunes on weekends, the regulars who gather to play poker and nurse shots and beers mutter with envy. The celebrity is one thing. But Stump and Adkins get to fill the void inside that still gnaws at many of them.

“They’re a couple of lucky bastards,” said George Chorak, 77, who survived the bloody retaking of Manila with the 148th Infantry.

The lucky bastards met at Army basic training in Camp Hulen, Texas, in May 1944. Both draftees, Stump came from a farm on the western side of West Virginia, Adkins from coal country farther east. It was country that brought them together, the same lazy accents, a shared fondness for biscuits and gravy and squirrel hunts, a private hatred of their rural poverty. They took other soldiers’ KP duty, eager to peel potatoes for an extra $20.

“When you’re far from home and hear somebody who talks and thinks like you, it’s natural you get together,” Adkins said.

Camp Hulen was a furnace when they arrived. Stump’s temper matched the temperature. He brawled with locals and fellow GIs. Only Adkins was immune. “Roy was always ready with his fists,” recalled Luther Kenfield, a fellow trainee who lives 12 miles from the two men.

Trained as antiaircraft gunners, they put in eight weeks at Camp Hulen. Their unit, the 787th Battalion, then moved with the 1st Army through France and after that into Belgium and Holland, assigned to protect the Belgian port of Antwerp from V-1 rockets that rained like metallic hail.

They were in separate batteries, but always stayed close. Adkins, in Battery B, drove a truck that ferried a 40-millimeter gun. Stump, with Battery C, manned a gun site. Nights, they shared foxholes and pup tents. Foraging in abandoned farmhouses, they filled canteens with cognac and wine.

Buzz bombs made deadly interruptions. When the German army launched its final counterattack into the Ardennes in December 1944, the start of the Battle of the Bulge, Stump and Adkins spent nights watching columns of German troops pass in the moonlight. They heard their own hearts beat.

Lethal Lesson

On Feb. 16, 1945, they were camped by a tract of frozen beet fields near the town of Odestille, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam. V-1s and V-2s had streaked across the sky all morning, droning over a row of abandoned windmills.

A munitions man, a second lieutenant, drove up in a jeep, looking for land mines. He found one partly exposed in the earth, dug it out and set it gently on the roadside. It was a long wooden box packed with explosives and a lethal pile of nails, bolts, screws and shaved metal.

Stump stood 15 feet away, Adkins behind him. The lieutenant decided to give them a bomb disarming lesson. He talked as he worked, snipping a wire and lifting a small latch. A second later, the largest piece of him hung from a telephone wire.

Stump heard the clap. Then his insides were on fire. His body was perforated by shrapnel flying into his skull, arms, chest, legs. One hunk lodged an eighth of an inch from his heart. He teetered, then tumbled into a bloody heap.

“I only felt it a moment before I blacked out,” Stump recalled. “It was the most god-awful feeling a man can have.”

Fragments struck Adkins, but he felt nothing as he ran up to Stump. He knelt down and cradled his head on his knees. Adkins took a khaki handkerchief from his pocket and held it on Stump’s ragged head.

A Canadian medic ran up, listening to Stump’s liquid chest with a stethoscope. The medic slipped off Stump’s dog tags. Adkins knew what that meant.

“The tears come all over me,” Adkins recalled. “I couldn’t say nothing.” He watched as they loaded his friend into an old Dodge ambulance and drove off. It was the last he saw of Roy D. Stump.

Stump was in a coma when he reached a field hospital. He was transferred to a medical unit in Brussels, underwent half a dozen operations and was sewn up with 500 stitches. It was a month before he came to.

Word never filtered back to Adkins’ unit. When the war ended, he returned to West Virginia and found work in a coal mine. Some days, alone in the pits, he thought about his lost mate. But he had no way of reaching Stump’s relatives, even to offer condolences. He did not know their names.

“It just wasn’t something you did,” Adkins says now. “We were scared all the time. You didn’t talk about ‘what if.’ ”

After a year’s convalescence, Stump came home. He drank until his money ran out, worked odd jobs. He thought of Adkins at times, but figured he had died in the mine blast. Like Adkins, he had no names to go on. A decade on, when the promise of a good factory job lured him to northern Ohio, he tried to look up old Army friends in Cleveland. The phone book yielded nothing.

The war grew distant. Stump settled in Lorain in 1958, finding steady work on a Ford assembly line and moonlighting as a bouncer at a country bar. His thoughts returned to the war only when buried pieces of shrapnel worked their way toward the surface of his skin, requiring more surgery. He finally married, at 65, after a lifetime of skirt-chasing.

Adkins married the year after he came home from the war, moving north to Ohio to work with a brother-in-law driving Ford cars from warehouses to dealerships. He and his wife, Juanita, found a place in Lorain, raising three boys and a daughter. The boys all served in the Marines. Their daughter was murdered.

Cementing Friendship

In the weeks since the two men embraced and “cried crocodile tears” in the crowded waiting room at Lorain Community Hospital, they have learned about each other’s tragedies and tiny victories. They have tried to remain patient as Juanita Adkins and Jean Stump contend with the intruders in their lives.

It is not easy. Juanita Adkins sometimes grimaces when Stump calls. She gets piqued, her husband says, at the attention he pays to his newfound buddy, and she is preoccupied with her health. Jean Stump is “happy as can be” to add the Adkinses to their social set. But her husband knows “some of our other friends ain’t so glad.”

They are on the phone most every day, Stump cajoling, playing the angles, much like he did 50 years ago. He has dragged the Adkinses out to lunch and dinner. He dreams up fishing trips, hunting expeditions, a night at the local speedway. He plans car treks to see the Amish country, an animal park in northern Ohio, the world’s biggest clock out on Route 70.

“He never stops schemin’,” Adkins said, “one of the things I always liked about him.”

Sitting in his cigarette-smoke-fogged living room, Adkins drew out his pocketknife. It was an old Barlow, a small token Stump had given him on the same day early this month that Adkins handed Stump an antique German pocket knife. It was a wordless exchange at first, but both men knew it meant something more.

West Virginia boys still, they both knew the trade was a small cementing of their friendship.

“It’s a country thing to do,” Adkins said. “You give a man a knife and he gives you his. We told each other, whoever dies first gives the knife back to the othern’s wife. But the way we figure it, we’re gone keep these knives awhile.”