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Remember...Bulah Smith
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Bulah Smith was born at Sandstone, West Virginia, on October 18, 1917. Bulah's parents were Jacob Charles Smith and Irene Hume Smith. 1920, 1930, and 1940 Federal Census listings show the family to be living in Richmond, Raleigh County, although at the time of Bulah's death, they were living in Glade. In 1920, Jacob's family was living with his parents, Sam and Lucinda Smith. At that time, Jacob and Irene had two children: Lillian (age 4) and Bulah (age 1). Determined to adhere to conventional nomenclature, the census taker spelled Bulah's name "Beulah" and registered him as a "granddaughter." But all other factors indicate that clearly this was our subject.
Bulah's mother Irene died in 1930, and she does not appear in the census listing for that year. Jacob was the head of the household, where his mother still resided. Joining the family in the decade prior to 1930 were son Jessie and daughters Arebell, Allie, Verna, and Dorothy. By 1940, only Jacob, Bulah, and Jessie remained in the Smith household. The census of that year shows Bulah to have worked 60 hours a week in the year prior to the census, working on his own account, and referring to himself as a farmer. He stated that he had completed seventh grade.
The next record we have of Bulah Smith is his registration for the draft in October of 1940. Again, there is some conflicting information, as the registrar printed his name on the form as "Beulah" and listed his birth date as January 28, 1918. [It appears that the October date is correct for the birth and "Bulah" is the correct spelling, according to a preponderance of public documents.]
The world changed rapidly for Bulah on December 7, 1941. Just two days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and one day after the declaration of war, he had made his way to Fort Thomas, Newport, Kentucky, where he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was branched as a warrant officer. His ultimate destination would be Europe, where members of the 66th Infantry Division (the "Black Panther" Division) were set to relieve troops wearied and depleted by the Battle of the Bulge. The movement of the 66th after leaving the States is chronicled in several places. According to one account,
. . . the three regiments of the 66th Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. H. F. Kramer, Lincoln, Nebr., had sailed from New York harbor on Nov. 15, 1944, aboard the Army transport George Washington, and the Navy transport George O. Squier. They had disembarked at Southampton and Plymouth, England, Nov. 26 and were billeted in barracks and towns in the vicinity of Dorchester, Dorset County.The balance of the division left the States Dec. 1, arriving in England on the Brittanic 12 days later. The time in England was spent filling shortages in equipment and preparing for combat. Vigorous last minute training was conducted for small units.
This was the final step in one and one-half years of training. Activated at Camp Blanding, Fla., April 15, 1943, with a cadre of officers and NCOs from the 89th Inf. Div., the Black Panthers spent three months in individual training before moving to Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Ark., for unit exercises. There, under XXI Corps, Fourth Army, it completed division problems, including rigorous "D Series," and transferred approximately 5000 fully-trained men to ports of embarkation as overseas reinforcements.
Camp Rucker, Ala., was the next stop for the division. There, personnel underwent further specialized training including small-unit infantry-tank tactics. Seven thousand reinforcements from ASTP training centers, Army Air Forces and the AAA Command were brought into the division. Sailing orders came in October and the division moved to Camp Shanks and Camp Hamilton outside New York City to prepare for embarkation. ("66th: The Story of the 66th Infantry Division," in G. I. Stories booklets, Lone Sentry website, accessed 17 March 2023, https://www.lonesentry.com/gi_stories_booklets/66thinfantry/index.html.)
Unfortunately, Pvt. Bulah Smith would ultimately succumb to the fate of the many U.S. soldiers who were casualties aboard the ill-fated ship, the SS Leopoldville. He was killed on Christmas Eve 1944, when the Leopoldville was sunk off the coast of France by a German U-boat (U-486).
A detailed account of the sinking of the troop transport Leopoldville is told in Part 9 of The Sea Hunters: True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 2nd ed., pp. 305-325). Adventure novelist Clive Cussler and his co-author Craig Dirgo write compellingly about the tragedy as they weave a tale of fact and supposition about the events that led to the loss of the ship. It is a story of an operation gone wrong, fraught with disorganization, miscommunication, confusion, and chaos. Intended to reinforce troops exhausted by and decimated in the Battle of the Bulge, the 262nd and 264th Regiments of the U.S. Infantry finally received orders on December 23 to move out from Southampton, England, to Cherbourg, France. The Leopoldville and another troop transport, the Cheshire, began boarding at 0200 hours on the 24th.
Originally a Belgian passenger liner, the Leopoldville had been under charter to the British Admiralty since the beginning of the war. Though the Leopoldville had been retrofitted to be a troop ship, it had a tired and worn appearance to the troops. The ship was under the command of Flemish Captain Charles Limbor, who had spent a quarter century with the Belgian Lines and was considered a quiet, but competent, seaman. The Leopoldville had crossed the Channel many times and transported many troops without incident. But this crossing would be different. There was no great enthusiasm among the men for moving into the European theater; after all, it had been more than six months since D-Day, and many assumed that the action was winding down. Skipping a partially prepared Christmas dinner, they were rushed onto the boats and then had a lengthy wait before setting sail. Boarding was particularly chaotic; first, a company of paratroopers had been boarded and then taken off. Cussler calls the boarding "a further omen of the tragedy to come" (p. 307). The two regiments were mixed together, and instead of boarding by platoon, the men simply boarded in the order in which they appeared. There was no plan for providing sleeping space for the troops, despite the fact that they would be on ship for eighteen hours before disembarking. In addition, they had not been trained in how to launch the ship's lifeboats or how to wear lifejackets.
The Leopoldville had never before crossed in a zigzag fashion, but was ordered to do so this time because of known submarine activity. At about 1754 hours, the ship suffered a torpedo strike. Most of the men in the lower compartments were lost at this time, but a few escaped and made it to the upper deck. Among the survivors of the initial strike, there seemed to be little panic. But then a series of miscommunications began. Captain Limbor made the assumption they were sinking swiftly and ordered all but essential crew to abandon ship. Abandon ship they did—the American troops watched in shock as the Belgian and Congolese crew left ahead of them on the lifeboats. Cussler calls the behavior of the troops waiting on deck for rescue "one of the finest examples of discipline ever observed." He adds: "All stood in blind obedience awaiting orders that never came" (p. 322). Though rescue ships would eventually come from Cherbourg, they were in no hurry to get to the ship due to the delay in communications. And because of Christmas celebrations, the rescue ships were lightly manned. The loudspeaker was no longer working, so Captain Limbor walked around the ship giving orders to the remaining men—in French or Flemish—which added to the confusion about launching lifeboats.
Men began jumping into the icy water of the Channel in full gear; they did not know to divest themselves of their heavy clothing and gear and did not know how to activate their life jackets. Of those who did not die of hypothermia in the water, some died ashore at Cherbourg because medics overlooked signs of life. While 1,400 infantrymen had survived, nearly 800 U.S. infantry were dead.
Although the German media broadcast details of the sinking as early as January 7, 1945, a month passed before it was acknowledged in U.S. newspapers, and even then, it appears that the account was deliberately inaccurate. On January 25, the Philadelphia Inquirer Washington bureau quoted Secretary of War Henry Stimson as saying "the ship sank swiftly . . . and 248 men were killed and 517 are missing. The rest, over 1400, were saved."
We now know, of course, that the ship did not sink swiftly, and the missing men were, in fact, dead. Subsequent investigations criticized Commander John Pringle, Commander of the Brilliant, lead ship of the convoy. Pringle received an official reprimand but was allowed to continue his naval career. Captain Limbor, the only officer not to survive the sinking, went down with the Leopoldville. Investigations also faulted him and his crew: He failed to accurately assess the damage to the ship; had he done so, he would have known they were sinking slowly, not rapidly. The ship could have been towed. He could have facilitated better communication with the troops and given better instructions for using lifeboats and other equipment.
There were a number of reasons for the cover-up of the actual details of the sinking, one having to do with maintaining the morale of the troops. The silence was comparable to that which withheld details concerning the losses during the Battle of the Bulge, potentially demoralizing and embarrassing the Allied forces at the time.
Of the nearly 800 U.S. troops who perished on the Leopoldville, 493 were never recovered. Of those who were recovered, many are still interred in St. Mere Eglise or Normandy American Cemetery, even though in 1947 the United States allowed their families to bring them to the states for burial. (Summary based on Part 9 of the Cussler/Dirgo book and Tonya Allen's article "The Sinking of the SS Leopoldville," http://uboat.net/history/leopoldville.htm [accessed 11 November 2011].)
| Pvt. Smith's remains were among those recovered, and in 1948 he was returned to the States, where he was buried in Richmond Cemetery in Raleigh County. |  |
Article prepared by Patricia Richards McClure
June 2023
West Virginia Archives and History welcomes any additional information that can be provided about these veterans, including photographs, family names, letters and other relevant personal history.
