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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Sunday, July 05, 2009
WWII Vet's Wife Recounts Meeting Her Husband
By Phil Parker
Journal Staff Writer
Clyde Earl Reed's World War II uniform hangs today in the office of John Garcia, New Mexico's Cabinet Secretary for the Department of Veterans' Services. It was donated by Reed's daughter Stephanie Reed, along with some official documentation of her father's service and a 10-page story typed about 11 years ago by Irene Taylor Reed.
She wrote the story at the behest of her daughter. It's titled "The War Years: 1939-1946, A Recollection of Love and War."
Irene lives now in the Rosemont Assisted Living Community on the south side of Santa Fe. She's warm and friendly and likes having visitors (particularly male visitors). Recollections come with a bit of gentle prodding.
One is of a tiny wedding in a bombed-out London church, where only the altar stood intact. Surrounded by rubble, she married Clyde Reed, an American soldier she'd spent only four days with, on February 8, 1945. They were together for the next 63 years.
Irene has difficulty remembering the details of her life, but she remembers this: "He was a good husband."
Life during the war
Her recollection of love and war begins with bombs falling.
The war was underway and 20-year-old Irene Taylor worked in southeast London, in the office of a massive munitions plant for the Royal Army. "We started getting air raids, but they were what we called nuisance raids," she wrote. "Just a few planes would get through and follow the River Thames and drop their bombs and return if they didn't get shot down."
It was busy where she worked; there was a shopping area as well. "One Friday I left work and was walking down main street when I heard this terrible noise. I looked up and saw these planes which were flying very low and suddenly one came down and started machine gunning the street. Everybody started to run and some people were getting shot and just laying there in the street.... There were a lot of people killed that day and many were wounded."
The raids became more frequent as time passed ("We would sometimes go to the morgue after an air raid and count the dead bodies"). In May 1941, Irene's house was destroyed by a bomb at noon on a Friday. Thankfully, no one was home. "The bomb went right through the house and ended up in the cellar."
Sirens would sound daily, and Londoners would scramble to air-raid shelters. "It was always reassuring when the anti-aircraft guns ... would all fire at the same time and put up a huge barrage. It looked like a curtain of fire and nothing could get through it."
Irene also wrote of emerging from a shelter one day: "Everything in sight was nothing but rubble and fires."
After that raid, Irene was relocated by the British government to a city outside the attack zone. She could finally sleep through the night ("no more getting up and rushing to the shelter"), but Irene didn't fit in well at her new home: "I remember we would be getting dressed up to go out on a date and the people who we lived with would be going to bed." She went to London after about 18 months.
The bombings grew more devastating. So did the toll they wrought: "The Germans attached screamers to their bombs, so when they would be flying a plane over London, they would release the bombs and it would scream this terrible noise as the bomb came down. Raids were more frequent, the bombs were much larger, and the devastation was frightening. Both my mum's parents were in a terrible air-raid when they dropped a land mine and it devastated one square mile. We never found anything of my grandparents. Their home was completely demolished. They never had a funeral (because) there was nothing to bury."
Irene's father died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly afterward. That same night came another awful barrage of bombs. "My mum was crying as we were laying in the ... shelter because my dad was in a coffin ... and she was frightened he might get bombed."
Irene was dating throughout this time. She was with a soldier named Georges Chalameau for six months before he went to North Africa to fight. "He started mailing me packages with pure silk stockings and all kinds of goodies, which we could not get in London during the war."
She later dated another man, a pilot from Canada named Ernest Gares ("We dated for several months and I really liked him"). When his plane was shot down over the English Channel, she wrote, "I was devastated. Took me quite some time to get over that period of my life."
A chance meeting
Irene Taylor wasn't crazy about going out the night she met Clyde Reed, "but it was better than staying home."
She'd relocated to Devon, England, where she lived with a friend, far from the air raids. She could sleep in an actual bed there for the first time in four years.
"When we arrived downtown, I was amazed to see a lot of American soldiers. They were everywhere."
Irene was sitting in a dance hall when she noticed one soldier in particular. She watched him walk across the room. He asked her to dance. "That was the beginning. The most amazing thing was that he had just arrived in England from the United States and ... in four days would be shipped out with his company to Germany. We went together for the next three days. He asked me to marry him and I said I would."
It took six months.
Not much is known about Clyde Reed's experience during the Second World War. Documentation from his awards and honorable discharge is vague, nondescript. That uniform hanging in John Garcia's office bears a cluster of seven small service ribbons over one breast, colored bars including Bronze Star, Silver Star and Purple Heart citations.
He was shot in the arm at one point; his children know that. His souvenirs from the Allied campaigns in Europe include a German Ruger pistol, a copy of "Mein Kampf" written in German and a German soldier's uniform.
"I vaguely recall asking him about the pistol," said Hamilton Reed, Clyde's son. "He just said he found it. It's a policeman's pistol. He used to have a German colonel's uniform; he said he found it in an abandoned building where some officer changed into civilian clothes to avoid capture."
When Hamilton broached the subject of war with his father, it was met with scant success. Later in life, Hamilton came to understand why.
"I talked to my dad a couple times and brought the subject up," Hamilton said. "He was very reluctant to talk about it. I guess I can relate now. I served in Vietnam, and I never talked to my son about it. It's sort of a mixed feeling. You feel you did right, but it still feels wrong.... It seems remote until you stand there and see it going on around you.
"I remember the first time I was in combat, the thing that flashed through my mind, which seemed so absurd, I said 'God, this is just like the movies.' It's the only thing you can identify with because it's so strange. ... I don't think you can talk to a layman about it and have them feel the same empathy. It's something you get, a feeling you get only in the moment."
According to his Certificate of Service, Clyde Reed was an infantry unit commander for the 175th infantry regiment in the 29th infantry division. The 29th's motto since World War I has been "29, Let's Go!" and the shoulder of Clyde's uniform bears the half-blue, half-gray patch of the 29th, the two colors merging in a circular yin-yang symbol.
The 29th landed at Omaha Beach and spent 242 days in combat, fighting in campaigns throughout Europe. More than 20,000 men bearing that blue-gray patch on their shoulders were killed in the war.
"My dad would say they met the Russians at Elbe River," Stephanie Reed said. "That's where my dad was a captain."
The meeting of Russian and American forces along the Elbe River in 1945 was profound, a joining of eastern and western fronts that split Germany in half. There are accounts of the two armies breaking bread with one another and toasting over vodka and bourbon. Within the year, the war was over.
Getting married
Irene wrote of that Elbe River meeting in her story. "Eventually, he met up with his regiment, which was the 29th infantry division. Clyde was a company commander and it was his company that led the first Americans to meet and join with the Russian troops on the Elbe River — that was big news during the war."
First, though, there was a wedding to be. And a honeymoon.
Clyde Reed and Irene Taylor had gotten engaged and parted ways in quick succession. Six months later, Irene met Clyde at a hotel in Exeter, England.
"I worked downtown and on my lunch hour I walked to the hotel and was standing there waiting. I was trying to remember what he looked like because I only knew him for four days — this was now six months later. I never had any photos of him either. But suddenly I saw this Yank walking toward me and I knew it was Clyde and we both ran together and he put his arms around me and swung me around two or three times saying 'I have waited so long for this moment.' "
They needed to find a church where they could be married. "The only one that we could get was bombed out, but the altar was there. No roof — just the altar." Her brother Tom gave her away. Members of Irene's family toasted the newlyweds with champagne at a nearby pub.
"We stayed at the Russell Square Hotel in the West End and we walked in the door and Clyde had to sign the register. I walked over to the lift and was just waiting for Clyde. Clyde walked over and pushed the button for the lift, and the fellow at the desk said to Clyde, 'Excuse me, sir, you are not allowed to take women up to your room.' Clyde turned around and shouted at him, saying 'This is my WIFE!' 'Very sorry,' said the man. We stayed there for four days on our honeymoon. We saw the top best shows in the West End, but Clyde had a hard time understanding what they were saying, and he kept saying to me, 'What did he say? What did she say?' "
Then he went back to Germany and led his troops to that fateful meeting with the Russians.
In London, Irene and 10 other English wives of American soldiers were selected to have tea with Eleanor Roosevelt. "She talked about how different it would be living in America. When I was leaving, I walked over to say goodbye and Mrs. Roosevelt took my hand and clasped it with both her hands and said to me 'Irene, when you go to America, you won't drink tea — you will drink coffee.' My answer was 'I don't think so,' but I was so wrong and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt was so correct."
Irene was pregnant when she boarded a boat with other British wives of American soldiers and headed toward her new life in America.
When the ship arrived, the wives were identified by labels they wore bearing the names of the states where they were headed. Clyde's home and family were in Nebraska.
"(A) fellow asked me where I was going and I had to read my label, and quoted 'Nebraska.' And the docky shouted out 'Hey Bill, where is Nebraska?' and his answer was 'That's not in the USA!' My instant reaction was 'Oh my, I got on the wrong boat!' We never realized they were just kidding. We were not used to the American sense of humor."
Irene wound up joining Clyde in Iowa, where he was attending Iowa State University. Upon graduating, Clyde went back into the service and became a captain in the Army. He was stationed in Washington, D.C., then Baltimore, where Irene became an American citizen.
Life after war
Hamilton Reed doesn't believe it takes particular toughness or guile to survive brutal warfare.
"I always say it's fate," he said. "I mean, you don't have really any control over where you go or what you do. It's just sort of divine guidance. There was another purpose for your life, and it wasn't to expire in combat."
After the army, Clyde worked a long career as a chemical engineer. He was a prolific reader who devoured whatever nonfiction he could get his hands on, and his first computer was one he built himself. He and his family moved around the country, and he finally settled in Farmington with Irene, then in Santa Fe.
When he was in Farmington, Clyde established a program at San Juan College to teach people how to read. That program, Stephanie said, "was his baby, and he told me it was the most rewarding thing he'd done in his life, serving people that way."
Late in life, Clyde and Irene both began to develop Alzheimer's. Hamilton said before then he'd always considered his parents' marriage very "proper."
"I never really saw any affection between them until they both got Alzheimer's and then it was like two little kids," he said. "It was amazing ... when a sort of senility settled in he loved her more. There were no inhibitions."
On October 26, 2008, Clyde sat down to breakfast and Irene walked into the kitchen. Clyde made one of his uninhibited compliments to his wife of more than 60 years. A caregiver was with them that day, and she next heard Clyde's head hit the table.
He was suddenly gone, at 89.
Clyde Reed's last words to Irene were, "Oh, there's the most beautiful woman in the world."
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