By Bill Archer
ABBS VALLEY, Va. — When he looked down at the rubble of the floor beneath near his combat boots, Roy Williams spotted something shiny. He reached down, picked it up and looked at it for only a moment.
“I didn’t really have much time to look at it,” Williams said, recalling that moment in 1944. “It didn’t have a chain on it, but it looked like it would fit on the chain with my dog tags so I put it in my pocket and moved on. Where we were, you really didn’t want to stay in one place very long.”
Williams was an 18-year-old private in the 88th Infantry Division at the time, advancing northward through Italy. “I knew it was a church because the steeple was still standing,” Williams said. “The rest of the building had been bombed. German snipers used places like that steeple to shoot at us when we came upon their position. I didn’t have much time to look at the medallion.”
The medallion is small — smaller than a dime. It has a pair of wings, like angel wings, on top with an image of Jesus Christ surrounded by an Orthodox-style halo on one side, and the image of the Madonna and child, almost in the style of the walking Liberty on American half-dollars on the other side. Years of handling the medallion have erased the words from it, but Williams said the message was: “Sacred heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.”
After he got out of school in the summer of 1943, Williams lied about his age so he could get a construction/maintenance job working on company houses in Bishop, Va. He just wanted to work a couple of months before he received the inevitable letter from his draft board when he actually did turn 18. The war was raging when Williams was called up. He was only in basic training for a few weeks before he got his assignment to the 88th Infantry Division. The 88th was the first division created from scratch, and was made up entirely of draftees. The division adopted a clover leaf as their sleeve insignia and had the nickname, “Fighting Blue Devils.”
Williams wasn’t thinking about being a Blue Devil when he boarded a troop transport ship in Newport News, Va., on Dec. 17, 1943. “We landed in North Africa on Christmas Day,” he recalled. “Boy. I was a homesick boy. I just wanted to do my job and come back home.” He landed in Casablanca.
The 88th didn’t do any fighting in North Africa, according to Williams. “We did more training, went to Sicily for a while and moved on into Italy.” Williams came across the medallion somewhere near Leghorn (Livorno, a port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany). He was in a forward “spearhead” unit that was taking heavy losses from intense enemy resistance.
“I remember one day when we were in the spearhead position and we had just finished digging a little slip trench that was just big enough to get away from enemy fire,” Williams said. “We started taking artillery rounds, and one soldier left his rifle outside of the slip when he dove in to find cover. When the barrage ended, he reached back up to grab his rifle, shrapnel had cut the but off of his rifle as clean as if it had been sawed off. He lost it right there and started shaking. A couple of medics came up and helped him walk back to the rear.”
Although the 88th had some brief breaks in the fighting, the division was in combat for 10 straight months and suffered incredible losses. There were 14,000 in the group of draftees that landed in North Africa in December of 1944. After 344 days of combat, the unit sustained 15,173 casualties killed, wounded or missing. Williams was in his 10th month of continuous fighting when he was wounded for the second time.
“All of the men I came over with were gone by then,” he said. “The only ones who were with the original group were the cooks. We were starting the attack on the Poe River Valley. I always wanted to see the Poe Valley. They tell me it was beautiful. But I got a million dollar wound — a wound that would get me sent home, but one I could get around with after I got better.”
He spent 10 months in a convalescent hospital in Martinsburg, Va., came back home to Abbs Valley and started working as a carpenter. The memory of finding the medallion and surviving 10 straight months of combat as an infantryman was fresh in his mind, and he told a few friends about it.
In the early 1950s, Johnny Motley, from Bishop, Va., heard the story from a mutual friend, and tracked Williams down. He was in the Army, and was headed into the Korean War. Motley asked Williams if he could carry it in combat with him.
“I was glad to let him carry it,” Williams said. “I told him one thing. When he got back, I wanted the medallion back. I told him: ‘Don’t make me come over there and get it.’ He got back home, and returned the medallion to me.”
A few years later, Williams’ nephew, Kenny Williams, was in the Army, and preparing to be shipped off to Vietnam. “I went to him and asked: ‘Do you want to take it to ’Nam with you?’ He said he did. I told him what I told Motley that I wanted it back when he got back home. He was there for 13 months, but he brought it back home.”
As soon as Kenny Williams got back home and returned the medallion, Roy Williams’ next door neighbor, Jerry Clark, knocked on his door. He was headed to Vietnam as well, and asked if he could carry the medallion with him. “I told him what I told the other two,” Williams said. “He was there for 13 months, came back home and returned it to me.
“I don’t think it would be worth a whole lot of money,” Williams said. “It’s not for sale,” he added quickly and emphatically. “It looks like it’s made of silver, but I don’t know. If I knew of someone who was going to Iraq and wanted to carry it with them, I wouldn’t mind. I’d tell them what I told the others though. I want it back and don’t make me go over there to get it.”
He never found out what the medallion had been used for. “When you’re in combat like I was, you don’t have time to investigate stuff like that,” he said. “If you can just get out alive, you’re doing something.
“We were just kids back then, 18, 19, 20 years old,” Wlliams said. “A lot of the guys I went in with didn’t make it back. I’d like to think we made a difference.” Williams is proud of his service and proud of his country. During the course of about an hour-long interview, he subconsciously rubbed the tiny medallion with his thumb several times, as though he was scratching the chin of a pet cat or scratching behind the ear of a pet dog. It was obvious that the medallion made a difference in his life, and he was proud it had helped other soldiers as well.
– Contact Bill Archer at barcher@bdtonline.com
