Stewart Barr: In His Own Words

Stewart Barr in uniform

Stewart Barr:  In His Own Words

Stewart Barr was interviewed by Erwin Fullerton on February 20, 2002.  In the following excerpt, Stewart — with his wry humor and keen insights — shares a few of his remembrances from serving in the Army during World War II.

Well, I went in on May 12, in ’43, and I was in the States training for about five months… I believe it was November 16th when we left the United States and went to England… I was in the Army and reason number one was while I was in the Army, we did have the right to pick the type of service we wanted to be in, the branch of service. And being a farm boy and scared to death to ride in even a rowboat, I certainly would not have picked the Navy. Consequently I ended up in the 517th Port Battalion and most of my three years was on a boat, so I did my fair share of getting rid of my breakfast, dinner and supper at times…

Our job when we got overseas [was] unloading the ships for the troops. We were on the water June 7th actually, so we had a front row seat of what was taking place on [Omaha] Beach. And some of my outfit went in on the 7th and the rest of us kinda drizzled along in, and finally I went in on the 11th, and even then it was a sad sight to see because of so many bodies and stuff that still remained on the beach… The Rangers had to go up over the steep cliffs... That was the worst, as they sent them up, they kept shooting them off and shooting them off, so what it all amounted to is the more backup you got; this is how we won the war…

When we hit the Normandy Beach, the Omaha, we worked maybe three days straight. We worked day shift and night shift, and I do recall one time when we were allowed to sleep on the job. What we had on the ships to unload in one particular case was barbed wire, and believe it or not we curled up and went to sleep on rolls of barbed wire, and it didn’t seem to bother us any…

We were armed. We had our weapons, but we were not a fighting outfit. We had to get the food and the supplies, the ammunition to the boys on the front lines. That was basically our job. But while we were on the beach, we couldn’t use any lights to go from shore out on the ocean to unload the ships. We had to go in the “duck” to transport back and forth, and in the darkness, of course, you would see these landmines floating all the time, and once in a while a “duck” would go up. But as I recall there was only two of them out of our outfit that hit a mine….

The above photo shows a DUKW vehicle that was commonly referred to as a “duck.” A “duck” was a 2.5-ton, six-wheel, amphibious vehicle that was used during World War II. The name “DUKW” was derived from naming conventions used by the General Motors Corporation. “D” referred to the production series, which was 1942. “U” stood for “Utility.” “K” stood for front wheel drive; and “W” stood for dual driven tandem rear axels.

Public Domain image taken by a U.S. solider as part of that person’s official duties.

But I think the most threat was after we had left France, believe it or not. We were in Antwerp, Belgium. The Germans were trying to take that back again, and that’s where we got hundreds of hits a day from the V-1 Buzz Bombs as they called them… Once they got the radar set up, then they could either down them or cripple them, so they wouldn’t achieve their targets. But that was almost worse in a way, because then they’d be up there going around in circles and they’d land just about at random anywhere…. I have pictures in my album here of a soldier, that was found by a Belgium civilian, that took a picture of the Buzz Bomb coming down and he had no way of getting away from it. So he got pictures of it as it was coming down and it hit him. So that was a big seller over there in all the stores and stuff at the end of the war…

Stewart Barr noted the danger from V-1 Buzz Bombs. This is the photograph that was taken by the soldier as the buzz bomb was descending toward him. Later, a civilian found the solder’s camera and had the final pictures that he took developed. They were sold in the stores in Belgium, where Stewart acquired this image.

I was told by my company commander one of the biggest morale boosters that the company ever had [was my guitar]. Believe it or not, most of my outfit were Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky fellows. There were very few, you could count them on the fingers of one hand, that was from Vermont and Maine, and the rest of them were southern boys. So I would pick up my guitar and start playing and all those fellows would chime right in. Somebody had a violin, and I learned to play a violin quite a lot from him, and he learned to play guitar quite a lot from me, and that was quite a morale booster. The fact is, what happened when we’d land on the beach, our personal property like the guitar and stuff came in later. We just carried what we could carry on our back because we had to go into the water and off the landing craft, the LSTs.

So it was probably a month or two after we were in France, that we went to the nearest farm house. We were stationed in an old barn at St. Laurent. When we first arrived, we were in open ground in fox holes, but we had to move because they was unloading tanks and that’s the path they was going to be going through. And we were quite pleased to move from there anyway, because we had our fox hole dug right in the hedgerows where the Germans were buried, and that wasn’t a comfortable place to sleep. So we ended up in this old barn, anyway, and the house next door is where we’d get our canteens of water, sometimes cognac or calvados. And we were there one day, a buddy of mine, and a man from another outfit came with his canteen and my buddy says, “that looks like your guitar” ‘cause my guitar never did arrive. And I went over, and my girlfriend at that time was Margaret Waters so I had her initials on the guitar, and I had some little cheap inlaid pearls all ove,r and I had my mother’s name on it. It was a beautiful, big, blonde guitar I got from Sears Roebuck, before I went in the service. So I went over and asked him, told him that was my guitar and he wanted to know what made me think so, and I says “It has my name on it, my mother’s name and everything.” And “Well,” he says, “sorry, I can’t let you have it because it don’t belong to me.” But he did give me the information where this outfit was.

So the next day, my company commander or the orderly guy, who were running the thing at the time, give me a pass to go to this company. And so I went over to this company. I walked. I remember it was quite a little ways. I walked and it was on a Sunday, and at the orderly room there, their company commander wasn’t there, but he told me where this guy’s tent was. So I went to the tent, and they were playing cards. They was all Mexicans. Well back then, we all had a knife, carried a knife on our belt. And I went in there, and they was playing cards and here was my guitar laying on a kind of a bunk up there. So I introduced myself and told them I wanted my guitar. Well they were truck drivers. They were guys that was unloading our personal stuff off on the beaches, and it was supposed to come to us, and he was a guitar player and he kept it himself. Well, in my disgust that he weren’t going to let me have it, I put my hands on my hips and he thought, I guess, that I was going to draw my knife or something. So about six of those fellows got up from their chairs, and they had their knives out, and I said “no guitar is worth that to me.”

So I went back to my company, and my company commander asked if I got my guitar, and I told him what had happened. Well, next morning we fell out for reveille. It was still dark. He announced to all the troops from the company there, “Who would like to have a Goddamm, good rough-and-tumble fight, if necessary?” Nobody raised their hands, because you didn’t volunteer for anything like that. And he said “Let me tell you the reason why,” and explained the situation with me and he says “that guitar of Stewart Barr’s has built the morale in this company as long as we’ve been in here, and I think we should go over there and get it.” Then everybody raised their hands. We all marched over and the company had moved out. There was nothing there but garbage cans, and so that was the end of my guitar story. But then my own company went and got me another one, so we continued on with our music…

Yep, my biggest thing I think that goes on record in my mind anyway, while we were unloading the ships on the Normandy Beach. What they do is, when they load the ships lots of times they put a layer of complete crates, a bottom layer completely crated with wood, but Jeeps. Jeeps are all completely crated, weren’t no slats or anything. So they get them in there first and then they put axle grease on that layer, so then when they drop other stuff in, they could skid it back with pullers to the back of the hull of the ship to get them in there.

Well, this one particular day, there was a terrible storm, and we shouldn’t have been unloading stuff anyway because it was so rough. Waves was probably fourteen feet high, slapping up and down, and I was a foreman on the ship. I had my area to unload and my signal man which gave instructions to the winch drivers to lift the cargo out of the hold of the ship over the edge and down onto a big flat barge. Well, we had already got a layer of Jeeps on there that had this axle grease on it. Then, unbeknownst to me, up out of the hold came this big open crate that you could see through. And it was an automobile. An army green automobile, and quite a deluxe looking thing. Well, in the absence of my regular signal man, I was taken over at the side of the ship to get this stuff... I had two men on the barge that would uncouple the cable when it got down there. Well, we lowered the car down on the barge and they were slipping and sliding on the grease, trying to get up there and unhook it. When the barge went down, when the waves went down, and the cable come tight and they couldn’t unhook it. So it come back up and they tried to unhook it again and the cable went down and it was tight again. The third time the cable broke. In the meantime, the barge has shifted out away from the ship a little bit, and so this big box or whatever it was, this car, kinda tipped up on its side and went down between the barge and the ship and that was the end of that. It didn’t even make a bubble.

About two weeks later I had to sign a report where General Patton’s Cadillac went because I was responsible for unloading that particular day. So I always felt that, after the war, it was a kind of a joke because in ’45 he was killed in an automobile accident in Germany. So I felt that I did him some good by drowning his first car, and then he went and got another one and that’s what happened. Nope, I thought I was gonna be court marshaled for that, but all I had to do is make a statement what name to it, and that was the last. Never heard more about it.

Stewart Barr’s oral history is but one of the many fascinating recordings in the Woodstock History Center’s collection. To hear or read the transcripts of other oral histories, or if you are interested in volunteering to help with the collection and recording of oral histories, please contact Jennie Shurtleff at education@woodstockhistorycenter.org.