Munson: 70-year reveal of a Christmas Eve tragedy

Each Christmas Eve, Doug Raymond marvels that he's even here to circle around the tree with family.

Raymond, 67, spent 36 years as pastor at Rising Sun Church of Christ and now serves as a staff chaplain for Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines. He wields the calm demeanor of somebody you would expect to create a protective bubble of serenity as tragedy unfolds in a hospital emergency room. Raymond considers it a blessing to minister to patients and their families "at very key, vulnerable places in their lives."

The signature crisis in the pastor's past predates his birth. It happened on the other side of the globe during one of the least recognized events of World War II. A new national effort is underway to unite the victims, survivors and families of the disaster.

Raymond's father, Gerald, boarded the Belgian troop ship Leopoldville 70 years ago today at Southampton, England. The 30-year-old Army private was a feed salesman from the small town of Bayard with two kids at home. He was a relatively old draftee, among 2,235 soldiers with the 66th Infantry Division to be ferried across the English Channel to Cherbourg, France.

The converted passenger liner was loaded with Allied reinforcements for the "Battle of the Bulge" in what would turn out to be the war's closing months.

But just 5¹/₂ miles off the French coast, a German submarine fired a single torpedo that sank the ship.

Gerald heard the explosion below decks. Water rushed in and swirled around his feet. He reached for his life preserver, but another guy grabbed it.

Once he was on deck, Gerald struggled up the steep incline of the listing vessel. Soldiers were ordered to abandon ship and jump feet first into the water. Some men with their steel helmets still strapped tight broke their necks as they hit the water.

But Gerald made a fortunate leap, landing in a life raft. He and fellow soldiers eventually were rescued by another ship.

Of the 763 American soldiers killed that frigid and bloody Christmas Eve, 493 of their bodies never were recovered.

Gerald convalesced in a French hospital.

"I spent Christmas that year listening to German sniper fire in the distance, and to men all around me coughing and gasping for breath," Gerald told his son decades later. "My mind frequently wandered back to the snowy roofs of the small Iowa town where my family was spending Christmas. I felt sick and helpless and alone, yet I was glad to be alive. I thanked God for sparing my life."

The Iowa soldier already had sent money home for his family to buy his wife, Fern, a ring.

"Mom wore that ring every day the rest of her life," said Raymond, who was born 2¹/₂ years later, in 1947.

The first vague news briefs of the Leopoldville's fate didn't appear until weeks after its sinking.

The Bayard News on Jan. 18, 1945, reported that Gerald had received a Purple Heart and was in a hospital in France: "The letter was written in a very cheerful note, and he said that he was not injured seriously."

Gerald clutched a pocked-sized New Testament issued to him in the hospital as he became a more deeply devout, observant Christian. Raymond still has that Bible, as well as the Purple Heart.

The Leopoldville was "more pivotal in his life than I ever imagined," Raymond said of his father.

The tragedy's influence rippled through Gerald's entire family as his two sons both became ministers.

But not until Raymond was a sophomore in high school did he hear his father discuss the Christmas Eve of 1944 that would haunt him the rest of his life.

It was prompted by the 1963 book about the Leopoldville, "A Night Before Christmas." The author, Jacquin Sanders, was aboard another nearby troop ship that night in the channel. (The first American documents on the Leopoldville were declassified in 1959, while British records didn't surface until 1996.)

Register columnist and war correspondent Gordon Gammack wrote about the book for the newspaper, prompting a request by Raymond's high school history teacher for his father to give his firsthand account.

Gerald's opening remark to the class as his son remembers it was, "War is hell," the quote made famous by Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

Only gradually has there been recognition — let alone commemoration — of the Leopoldville.

It wasn't so much that the sinking was controversial. But the Allies had been embarrassed by the Battle of the Bulge and didn't want to emphasize that a single German torpedo had killed nearly 800 Americans. The survivors were ordered not to discuss it.

"There was no outright villainy during the Leopoldville disaster," Sanders wrote in his 1963 book, "though there was cowardice and stupidity."

"You have a Belgian ship with a Belgian crew under British escort with American soldiers going to France — what could possibly go wrong?" is Allan Andrade's sarcastic summary of a debacle that included the Belgian crew (but not the captain) abandoning ship.

Instead of calling it a cover up, Andrade explained, "I prefer to say it was allowed to be forgotten."

Andrade, 77, a New York City police lieutenant-turned-historian, began researching the Leopoldville 20 years ago for what became his 1997 book, "S.S. Leopoldville Disaster."

He interviewed survivors whose wives of 40 years were astonished to hear a full account of the sinking for the first time in their lives.

"A lot of people went to their graves not knowing what really went down," Andrade said.

Andrade's book includes the names of 21 Iowans killed in the sinking. (Densely populated New York, with 80 deaths, and Pennsylvania, with 72, suffered the most casualties among states.)

Among the Iowans was William "Billy" Carew of Dubuque. He had been drafted as a high school senior before he could graduate.

"It was never, ever brought up," said Carew's niece, Jacquie Rose of Dubuque. "It's my understanding that the family never knew how he died. They just knew he was missing in action."

It wasn't until the 1990s that another of her uncles, Maurice, who served on Gen. Omar Bradley's staff during World War II, was more forthcoming about what he had known about the Leopoldville for decades.

The 70th anniversary of the Leopoldville, or perhaps the 75th, is likely to be the last major anniversary of the disaster with some significant number of World War II veterans still alive. So there has been fresh urgency to connect Raymond and other family members to preserve the collective memory and create a network to ensure the sinking is more than a historical footnote.

Don Nigbor of Texas didn't learn how his uncle Henry from New York had died on the Leopoldville until half a century later. Now he's leading the effort to rally the families around Leopoldville.org, a site that also includes Andrade's research.

"We're not trying to focus on the cover up," Nigbor said. "We're trying to really focus on the men."

After the war Gerald went on to sell minerals and feed for livestock for 35 years. He died in 1999. As his eyesight was failing in his final months, his wife read to him the Tom Brokaw book, "The Greatest Generation."

Gerald's son, Raymond, dreams of boarding an aircraft in Southampton to fly across the English Channel and trace the path that his father's ill-fated ship sailed 70 years ago. The sinking of the Leopoldville and the faith it stirred in Gerald certainly established a path for Raymond to follow.

"More than anything else," Gerald said to his son years later, "it taught me that Christmas is more than decorations and relatives and gifts. Christmas is 'God with us' — through every circumstance."

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook (/KyleMunson) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).

For more information on the Leopoldville disaster of Dec. 24, 1944, go to leopoldville.org.