An Alabama Family in World War II, Part 40

Three Holliman Sons in Route to the Invasion of Europe

by Glenn N. Holliman

The sons and daughters of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman of Irondale, Alabama wrote hundreds of letters to each other during World War II.  The contents of this correspondence are now a precious history of one family and the travail of that global conflict.  Thanks to the sharing of my cousins and late father, I have scanned and saved them in one folder, available to all descendants. GNH

In early February 1944, Melton P. Holliman (1908-1958) oldest of the seven children of Ulyss and Pearl Caine Holliman of Irondale, Alabama, finished his medical corp training at Camp Barkeley, Texas and traveled three days and four nights by train to Camp Reynolds near Greenville, Pennsylvania.  The huge train had 18 Pullman cars and carried 492 men. 

Below, Bishop and Melton Holliman in 1942, the year before Melton entered the Army at age 35 leaving behind wife Ida and daughter Patti.  Bishop, single, had joined the Navy the month before Pearl Harbor December 1941.

Melton arrived to 18 inches of snow and temperatures as low as 5f, quite a change from the Texas plains where he had spent five months learning to be a soldier in Uncle Sam’s rapidly expanding Army. According to Melton’s very home sick letters, the food was terrible and the weather, for an Alabama native, even more so. 

Camp Reynolds was a way station, a temporary posting for those troops about to be sent to England, an island said to be groaning of the weight of weapons, tanks, an Army Air Corp and a million or so G.I.s.  They were there for the forthcoming invasion of Nazi Europe, to topple Hitler and to liberate a broken Europe. 

Camp Reynolds, Greenville, Pennsylvania was potato field  in 1942.  By 1943, up to 75,000 troops at a time were passing through this replacement center awaiting transfer from training to assignments in either the Pacific or European Theaters.  Today the location is an industrial park, after briefly serving as a P.O.W. camp in 1945/46.

It was ‘hurry up and wait’ until early March 1944 when his group moved near to the transport docks in New York and Brooklyn.  There for yet another three weeks, Melton and many others waited for a ship to take them overseas.  There was leisure to see New York City for the first time and to write home about ‘the most wonderful view I have ever seen’ from atop the Empire State Building and the delicious steaks at Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant.  

He toured the then new Rockefeller Center, home of NBC Radio and Music Hall, and took long walks with his buddies along the side walks of New York, marveling at the diversity and size of the largest city in America. 

Once headed back to the deployment barracks, he marveled that the black soldiers did not sit in the rear of the bus and later that a Negro chaplain had preached to an audience of mainly white troops. 

His younger brother, Ralph (1925-2017) had arrived in England  in the autumn of 1943 after a rough ride on a troop ship over the North At antic.  While he could not tell the folks where he was in England, we now know he was an clerk with a headquarters company of the 9^th Army Air Force.  First he was based in Bournemouth near the English Channel and later near Oxford, England.  As duty stations and work went in that WWII Army, Ralph, an enlisted man, all 19 years old, was fortunate to log flights and keep company records of transports, airplanes that on D-Day would haul parachutists to Normandy and later fly supplies to the continent. 

Ralph wrote the folks back in Irondale of his trips to London and seeing Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace and other sights. He promised to take his young wife Motie to see the same some day (and he did so decades later).

Right, Ralph in 1941, age 16.  

For my father, Bishop (1919-2018), he spent most of the winter of 1944 at sea on the USS Barker, Destroyer 213, a radioman who listened for German U-Boats signals.  Christmas 1943 was spent at sea, and again in January convoy duty took him from Norfolk to Africa and Bay of Biscay and then back to Boston. 

He wrote “Our mission was to sink subs but as far as I know we didn’t sink any.  However, there aren’t that many left out there.  We had several exciting experiences and one or two narrow escapes.  All in all, it was a rough trip, and I am certainly glad it is over.”

Above, Bishop in Boston on liberty at the Bunker Hill Monument.

After ten days off the New England coast for sea trials and firing practice, it was back to Norfolk and another convoy in mid-February, this time to the Mediterranean to escort supply ships for General Mark Clark’s Army which was slowly pushing up the mountainous terrain of Central Italy. 

For Melton, classified a pharmacist now making $80 a month, almost all sent home to Ida and Patti, he wrote that he had a job to do and the sooner he got to it, the sooner the war would be over. 

“I hear the Allies bombed Rome and the monastery (Monte Cassino).  They shouldn’t have waited so long to do it.”

March 29, 1944 Melton sent a V-Mail that he had arrived in England.  Now three sons of Ulyss and Pearl were in the European Theater and the invasion of France was only months away.

How a World War Changed an Alabama Family, Part 27

by Glenn N. Holliman

A World War II Train Ride and Another in 1989....

In January 1943, while waiting assignment to a radio school in Maine, my father, H. Bishop Holliman, was granted seven days leave from his destroyer, the USS Barker DD-213, then tied up in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 

 In his 1988 hand written memoirs, he wrote of rushing to his Irondale, Alabama home by train.  Recently he expanded his story of that twenty hour train ride in which he shared a coach seat with a little girl from Brooklyn. He entitled the article 'The Girl from Brooklyn' which he sold for $25 to the Good Old Days magazine.  After decades of writing, this is his first payment ever for a published article.   You can find the expanded story in thus month's publication, the cover of which is pictured below. Not bad for a 95 year old!

 In case you can't find a copy at your newstand or on line, from his memoirs, we have this:

"One experience I recall.  In New York, a young girl and her mother were in the coach I was in.  The girl sat by me and her mother in front of us.  All the time I thought the girl was 14 or 15 (I was 23 at the time).  Just before getting to Birmingham, the girl went back to the ladies room and soon reappeared and was an 18 year old beauty.  She had passed for a child to save on fare.  She and I laughed about 'lost opportunities' and I wanted to bang my head against the side of the train."

Alas, my father also failed to obtain her phone number!  But that is my Dad....

After his leave was up, he was off to the Navy Station at Cosco Bay, Maine for five months, but that is another story.

The 1989 Excursion

My father has had always a love of trains and with the collapse of the passenger train after World war II, he had precious few times to indulge his passion.  However, in 1989 the opportunity came to travel on an excusion from Birmingham to Chattanooga.  Several of the children of his niece, Mary Daly Herrin, traveled with him. Here he sits with his great-nephew David Herrin, forty-five years after the train ride with the pretty girl from Brooklyn.

 

Clayton Herrin, brother of David, and son of E.C. and Mary Daly Herrin, took pictures from the train that day as did Mary from the ground when the train rolled through Irondale headed north.  Here are a few phtographs of that April day in 1989.

Mary Herrin took the first picture as the train roaring through Irondale.  The second picture, Clayton took from the train window looking toward the Irondale Cafe and the VFW Hall.  The store fronts of Irondale have changed a bit in the past quarter century.

Below, Bishop and his great niece and nephew, Phyllis and Clayton Herrin in April 1989.
 

 The train drives north in these two dramatic pictures.

Next posting, more of World War II and perhaps some more pictures of the Alabama family after the War.

Have questions about Holliman family history? You are invited to join the Hollyman Email List at Hollyman-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the Hollyman Family Facebook Page located on Facebook at "Hollyman Family". Post your questions and perhaps one of the dozens Holyman cousins on the list will have an answer. For more information contact Tina Peddie at desabla1@yahoo.com, the list and Facebook manager for Hollyman (and all our various spellings!).

There is also a massive Ancestry.com Holyman and Associated Families Tree available for review.  For an invitation to this collection of over 20,000 individuals, please write glennhistory@gmail.com.  

Also one will find additional Holliman history at http://hollimanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/ .

I also have a collection of associated family manuscripts and research collected by the late Walt Holliman, Cecil Holliman and Rhodes Holliman.  Happy to send these materials by email and to insure their research is available.  The surnames: Alexander, Baldwin, Barham, Bass, Beall, Blakeney,  Baker, Bond, Bostick, Brewer, Bryan, Bryant, Bullock, Calvert, Carter, Champion, Chew,Cofer, Cole, Crafford, Crockett, Curtis, Dale, Daniel, Davidson, Davies, De Mallpas, Douglas, Duckett, Edwards, Edgerton, Emerson, Fitzhugh, Fowlehurst, Fox, Gains, Garrison, Gonson, Graves, Gray, Guyton, Guins, Hall, Hamby, Hawkins,Hendrix, Hill, Hogg, Holliman, Holt, Howard, Jackson, Jones, Judkins, Love, Lucas, Maget, Mansfield, Manwaring, McBee, McComas, McCurdy, McNewsome, Nicholson, Norsworthy, Noyall, O'dell, Oliver, Pearce, Peerce, Pettigrew, Petway, Pitman, Plow, Plyler, Porten, Prather, Petite, Ridgely, Riggan, Roberts, Smith, Spencer, Sprigg, Standley, Stanyard, Swan, Strother, Thompson, Thornton, Thrope, Trelawney, Turpin, Underhill, Underwood, Wallace, Walters, Weedon, Whitherspoon, Whitten,Williams,Wilmot,Wilson, Whitaker and Yerby.  These are mainly Alabama families and their ancestors from the Carolinas and Virginia. Materials vary from one page to 200. - GNH at glennhistory@gmail.com.

My Grandmother's Wall Photographs, Part 4

by Glenn N. Holliman

I have been writing about my Grandmother Pearl Caine Holliman's corner wall at 2300 N. 3rd Avenue, Irondale, Alabama.  Informal indoor photography was still expensive in 1945, the year World War II ended.  For some reason four photographs were taken of the tree that Christmas, perhaps to capture, at least in part, the photos on the walls.  In this picture, one can observe that Grandmother Holliman has placed a new picture against the wall on table.  That new photo is of my mother, Geraline Stansbery Holliman, one of the three war brides of the Holliman family, and the only one from out of state - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Here's a close up of that picture.  Bishop Holliman met 'Gerry' in 1942 while in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he was trying to rendezvous with Irondale soldier, Charles Pugh.  Bishop never found his boyhood friend, but he did sit behind Gerry and her Mother while at a show on the famed Boardwalk.  They exchanged addresses, wrote for several years and lo and behold, the Alabama boy married the Philadelphia girl June 26, 1945.  And so Gerry's picture, if not on the wall, was propped up under Bishop's, the Irondale sailor man.

Below is the photo of Bishop, blurred in the top picture, the young sailor in December 1941, the month of Pearl Harbor.  He was in boot camp in Norfolk, Virginia when the Japanese attacked.  The war was on, and two other Holliman men, Melton and Ralph, also answered the call to service.  Euhal Holliman was not called to duty due to being the father of four children by spring 1944.

Bishop served as a radioman on two destroyers and saw action at the Invasion of Sicily in 1943 and in the North Atlantic in 1944.  The last photo on the wall  (top picture) is the one pictured below of Bishop (difficult to see seven rows back, left center, approximately 8 from the left with his hat pushed back or three to the left of the gun barrel nose) on the USS Barker.  As a young boy, I would stare at this picture of my father and wonder.  It is now in my possession.

Alas, two of the three Holliman war time marriages ended in divorce.  Virginia and Walter Cornelius in 1973 and Bishop and Gerry Holliman in 1988.  However, five children emerged from these marriages, and numbers of us would not be in our present DNA composition if not for these young couples falling in love in terrible times.

Next posting, more photos from another wall in the Holliman Irondale home....