A father he never knew

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Notes from Normandy

A father he never knew A trove of old letters and a D-Day journal started Walter Carter on a journey to fill out the once-sketchy portrait of his dad. On his way, he found a hero.

June 6, 2002

"Fernie, my sweetheart, I feel that I shall see you again. You and the boys. But if I don't, I want you all to remember that my love for you cannot be said or put on paper. It can only be felt. You have meant everything to me that is good and happy. Since tomorrow is D-Day (and we weigh anchor tonight), I won't be able to write for a few days. May God help us in our mission. I hope to return to you all. God bless you Fernie, you Tom, and you Walter Ford."

- Capt. E. Norval Carter's final journal entry, written June 4, 1944, on board assault ship headed for Omaha Beach

NEWTON, Mass. - Walter Ford Carter grew up knowing his father only as the dashing young Army officer whose sepia-toned profile sat on his mother's bedroom bureau her whole life.

He knew a few basic facts: His father, E. Norval Carter, was a family doctor who volunteered for the Army during World War II, landed at Normandy on D-Day and was killed 11 days later on June 17, 1944, at age 32.

He also knew that his mother, Emma Fern, or "Fernie" as his father called her, had been so shattered by Norval's death - they had been childhood sweethearts who lived across the street from each other in Huntington, W.Va. - that she would not even speak his name for several years. She never remarried. Never dated another man. And never told her two sons - Walter, who was 2 when his father went off to war, and Tom, 5 - about their father's life. Or his death.

Throughout his life, as he played football in school or sang in the church choir or held onto the secret hope that his father would some day walk through the front door, Walter had visions of that handsome man, in those golden tones that would fade with time, watching over him like his own personal God in heaven.

He picked up a habit of playing practical jokes, planting whoopee cushions in furniture and plastic insects in food, mainly because he had heard from family friends that his father had been a jokester. He looked enough like his dad for people to frequently ask whether he was Norval Carter's son, and then tell him what a "mighty fine" man his father was.

But, sensing his mother's pain at the mention of his father's name, Walter had made a silent pact with her not to ask for more details.

Whenever a school chum asked about his father, he dutifully recited what had become the family mantra:

"He was shot by a sniper while trying to rescue a wounded soldier on the battlefield."

"I grew up with those words," says Walter Carter, now a bearish, white-bearded man of 62 living in Newton.

Even into adulthood, he refrained from seeking information about his father - he read little about World War II and never tried to locate veterans who might have served with Captain Carter. Memorial Day was just a day off from work. Days like today, marking the anniversary of the epic invasion of northern France - the largest amphibious assault in military history, involving more than 150,000 service members and resulting in about 4,500 Allied fatalities - came and went without so much as a clink of a glass or a prayer.

"It must have been an extension of 'don't bring these things up to Mother,'" says Carter, a retired economist and father of two grown children.

But then, seven years ago, the 83-year-old mother whom Carter had spent his life protecting from her own memories died of cancer.

Because his brother had been killed piloting a plane in 1972, he alone went through his mother's belongings. Opening her safe-deposit box at a bank in Huntington, he found a lengthy handwritten letter dated May 4, 1944, that began "Dear Tom & W.F." and ended "Best regards, Dad."

With it was a small black notebook with 30 pages of neatly scripted entries in pencil dated May 31 to June 4, 1944.

Inside the front cover was the message of a serviceman who obviously feared his journal might see more sunrises than he would:

"Finder: Please send this letter to my wife. These are my thoughts of her that I have jotted down just before combat."

The page he had numbered 31 is blank.

Carter trembled as he flipped through the journal and the letter, and then put them both in an envelope to take back to his mother's home to absorb more privately and thoroughly.

"It shook him like an earthquake," recalls his wife, Bonnie Carter.

But there was more.

In his mother's attic were bundles of letters from his father - about 150 - to his mother, to his father's parents and more letters, too, to young Walter and Tom. Some of the last ones were written from foxholes with paper laid on a water can. With them were letters that had been written by senior Army officers to the fallen doctor's widow in the summer of '44.

Carter spent a week at his mother's West Virginia home going through the trove of letters with his wife, son and daughter and, at age 55, beginning to get acquainted with the courageous Elmer Norval "Doc" Carter - an adventure-seeking doctor who cherished what he called his first opportunity in life to "be brave."

"The letters hit me very hard," says Carter, whose reserved nature has given way to unbounded emotion since connecting with the parent he lost more than half a century ago, "telling me who my father was in a way I hadn't known before."

Here was a husband who obviously adored his wife, a father who, sensing he might never get to play ball or go hiking with his sons again, wanted to impart last-minute lessons for life, such as "learn to enjoy conversation" or "learn to correct your errors."

Here, in many ways, was the voice of the heroic World War II generation, fueled by a sense of duty even while engaged in some of the most treacherous combat of the past century and made up of men and women brave beyond their years and experience.

And here, Walter Carter would begin to discover, was a hero.

A son's obsession

Despite the hundreds of thousands of pages that have been expended telling the story of the Allied forces' invasion of Hitler's Europe, a moment that helped nudge history toward the side of freedom, there are still new stories being told and discovered on this 58th anniversary of D-Day - some newly unlocked from the hearts of those who were there, some, like this one, retrieved from dusty attics and safe-deposit boxes. They continue to reverberate through generation after generation.

Walter Carter learned that his tall and trim, fine-featured father, restless at the Army's 110th Station Hospital in England where he was assigned as chief of psychiatry for 15 months, had requested a transfer to the famed 29th Infantry Division. A National Guard outfit from Maryland and Virginia, the 29th had been training next to the hospital for the Normandy invasion.

His request granted, Captain Carter became the battalion surgeon, or chief medical officer, for the 1st Battalion of the 115th Regiment in March 1944. A fighting unit of about 800 men, the 115th came ashore onto the western half of Omaha Beach on the morning of June 6, right behind the storied 116th Regiment, which suffered some of the heaviest casualties of the war.

Captain Carter had been a calming, reassuring presence to the young, scared and at times bewildered soldiers, his son would discover. But most of all, the doctor would be renowned, and beloved, for serving alongside the troops on the front lines, where he could quickly tend to injured soldiers, rather than waiting at the aid station, as battalion surgeons typically did, for medics to bring the wounded to him.

"One feels very close to these men and I want to do my best for them. We realize we are fighting for a way of life that is fundamentally right in the eyes of God and man, and the ideals of the enemy are wrong," he wrote in a letter home just before D-Day.

Walter Carter was overwhelmed, consumed really, by the sudden, imposing presence in his life of this once-mysterious figure.

"He became absolutely obsessed with going through the letters, getting them in order, piecing it all together," says his daughter, Catherine Carter, 30, a bartender in San Francisco.

In fact, the letters made him want to know more, and sent him on a journey to fill out in meticulous, vivid detail the sketchy portrait of his father. When he was laid off from his job as an economist with Standard & Poor's in 1999, he decided to retire and devote himself fully to reconstructing his father's life and preserving his memory.

He placed a notice in the newsletter of the 29th Division Association, asking for any information about his father, and has since befriended veterans across the country who knew or served with Captain Carter.

He has attended 29th Division reunions, joined the 29th Division Association, visited the 5th Regiment Armory in Baltimore to comb through maps and records, learned to speak French, and taken several trips to England and Normandy, retracing his father's path from the 110th Station Hospital to Omaha Beach to the spot 18 miles inland where he was shot.

In July, he will make his sixth trip to Normandy, this time to study French for a month.

Most important in piecing together his father's life - and in grappling with his own decades-old scars that have more recently become fresh wounds - he contacted and has developed a poignant friendship with the once-anonymous figure known in his family lore only as "the wounded soldier" whom Dr. Carter was tending to when he was fatally shot.

"It was this incredible blessing," Walter's son, Norman, 33, says of finding the man. "It was like fate."

Norman Carter, named for a grandfather he never knew, has been awe-struck by his father's discoveries. When his father showed him the journal, Norman couldn't sit still to finish reading it. Instead of a myth, there was a man, "an intelligent, funny, infinitely caring and compassionate man," says Norman, a Philadelphia schoolteacher. "He is a hero. I thought this was the most important document the world had ever seen."

Beyond call of duty

Doc Carter's daredevil streak revealed itself at an early age when the red-haired, blue-eyed only child of a freight train conductor would horrify his relatives by performing acrobatics on the railings of hotel balconies.

Such a sense of adventure and risk-taking probably contributed to his willingness to leave the successful private practice he had established in Huntington as well as his wife and two children, and enlist in the Army, Walter Carter believes.

That, and the fact that "it was in the air to be patriotic," he says.

After basic training at Camp Pickett, Va., Dr. Carter crossed the Atlantic in August 1942. His year of work at a state mental hospital in West Virginia was enough to earn him the post of chief of psychiatry at the Army station hospital in England.

His letters over the 15 months he served there - with little to do - show increasing homesickness and loneliness, with depression that "bordered on the pathological," as he wrote in February 1943, and even bouts of drinking. He complained of struggling with the military mind-set, noting, for instance, that when a lieutenant colonel came in with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, he recorded it as an accidental, line-of-duty injury to save the officer from repercussions.

"That isn't being a good officer perhaps, but I just can't get the 'civilian doctor' out of me, and I hope I never will," he wrote to his wife in August 1943.

"You know we are supposed to be officers first and doctors second, and rather stern ones too, but I am not built that way. ... Only yesterday, an inspecting major called me down for being nice to my patients and for having comfortable chairs for them in the ward. I let him have it 'with both barrels.' (But I might have to get rid of the chairs.)"

Longing to observe the stress of combat to better treat his patients, Dr. Carter began accompanying units of the 29th Division as they trained for the Normandy invasion. His letters reflect his growing attraction to the 29th, the valiant infantry unit that would be depicted more than a half-century later in Saving Private Ryan. And while he wrote to his wife that senior Army officials had reassigned him to the 29th Division, he confided to a friend in a letter - which was given to his wife after he was killed - that he had requested the transfer but knew it would enrage Fernie.

Once he joined the combat unit and began to prepare for D-Day, his letters took on a new tone - one of excitement and awe tinged with anxiety. In April 1944, he wrote: "This division is one of the best trained & most capable in the army and I am proud to be with it."

One month later, as D-Day approached, he wrote to his parents of his growing fear that he might not come back. He asked them to stand by his wife should she want to remarry in the event of his death: "It would be the best thing for her and my sons. I'll never mention it again in future letters because it hurts me inside to do so, but please remember what I have said."

His final journal entry before D-Day, though somber and grave, reflects the pride of the American soldiers and the confidence that helped steel them as they exited the ramps of the landing craft - some to the forbidding clatter of German machine guns - off the Normandy shores:

"Everyone is deadly serious. We realize that we are to hit soon and on D-Day (early). We have been chosen very carefully & found to be the best troops in the army today. This is no idle boast; it is fact. Another division goes in with us who are equally well trained & their advantage is they have seen combat. To bed with minds too heavy for thinking. Everyone sleeps, but restlessly."

On D-Day, the 115th Regiment landed on Omaha Beach at mid-morning, shocked to see the carnage that had befallen the 116th Regiment that went before it. Although the 115th did not take the same pounding by German gunfire as it fought its way up the beach, it would suffer enormous casualties in its push inland, engaging in savage fighting in the tall earthen hedgerows of the Normandy landscape.

On June 13, in Captain Carter's first letter to his wife after D-Day, he wrote:

"The morale of the men in my battalion is high even though the losses of officers and men have been heavy. We are very tired physically and mentally. Sleep is a rare elixir. Hot meals are non-existent. A bed is a memory. I haven't had my shoes off my feet but once in 10 days. We have been under heavy fire but are giving more than we receive - in other words, we are winning. ...

"D-Day and yesterday were our toughest battles, but each day has been hard. We shall probably be sent to a rest area soon - we need it. Yesterday casualties were heavy. ... Some of my best friends are no more.

"I love you Fernie and think of you each day. Pray that we shall soon be together again. N."

Three days later, his unit rested in an apple orchard just north of the vital Norman crossroads town of St.-Lo, which the 29th would liberate in mid-July. Snipers were 100 yards to the south. In his last letter to his wife, written June 16, he noted: "We have not had 1 hour of freedom from the sounds of nearby gunfire since landing."

The next day, a soldier in his unit who had been sent to scout the enemy position was shot in both legs and the stomach. Over a period of hours, the soldier crawled on his belly back to the American position until he got close enough to call out - "Medic! Medic!" - for help.

Two medical aides went to the soldier's rescue. The battalion commander warned Captain Carter to stay back - the wounded soldier was in full view of the enemy - but the headstrong battalion surgeon had made a habit of ignoring such warnings. He ran to the soldier and started to examine his wounds when a German sniper shot and killed the doctor and the two aides.

"As a resource allocation matter for the people responsible for the war, what Dad did was an irresponsible thing," Walter Carter says, noting that the battalion surgeon was a valuable asset and shouldn't have gone on a medic's mission. "But the soldiers loved it and admired it and were grateful that he would extend himself in that way."

Captain Carter was one of 20,000 members of the 29th Division killed or injured in combat during its 242 days in action, from D-Day to the end of the war in Europe. The Army posthumously awarded him the Silver Star for gallantry in action.

His battalion commander, Maj. Glover S. Johns Jr., wrote to Fernie Carter in August 1944: "(H)e was so intent on rendering really necessary medical aid to severely wounded men that he placed too much faith in his Red Cross markings and got too far out in front - thinking only of the boys and never of himself."

One of the company commanders in the battalion, Capt. Bill Kenny, wrote to her that same month: "To those of us in the infantry it was an incentive to push forward under any situation, because we knew that the medics were right there with us and would render assistance at all times, led of course by 'Cap'n Carter.'"

D-Day historian Joseph Balkoski, who had heard about Norval Carter from veterans and has helped Walter Carter in his research, was struck by the battalion surgeon's willingness to go beyond the call of duty, time after time.

"He couldn't carry a weapon. He couldn't participate in the task at hand - destroying the Germans," says Balkoski, author of Beyond the Beachhead, a book on the 29th Division. "But he not only went into a combat unit, he took it one step further and routinely gave secours to people in 'no man's land.'

"He only survived for 11 days, but boy! What an 11 days. Today, you still hear the survivors talk about him."

Telegram in July

Word of Captain Carter's death did not reach the town of Huntington until July 6, one month after D-Day, and while Fernie Carter was still writing letters to the husband she thought was alive.

"Your letters of June 13 & 16 arrived this morning and they were like a drink of water to a man caught in the desert and dying of thirst," she wrote July 1 in the last of four letters that would come back to her stamped "Return to sender."

"I really believe I am the happiest person in Huntington, just to know that you were still OK, sugar," she wrote.

Walter Carter says he doesn't remember the day in July that the telegram arrived. It is not among the cache of letters his mother had saved. "I suspect she tore it up," he says.

But he does remember finding his mother sitting in the kitchen one morning, sobbing with her head in her hands, as the 4-year-old came to ask whether he could go outside to play. He suspects his mother's grief was exacerbated by her anger at learning that her husband had volunteered for combat duty.

Fernie Carter never got over her husband's death. Even 40 and 50 years later, as news reports were full of D-Day anniversary commemorations, the still-grieving widow kept her television off and refused to pick up a newspaper or magazine.

Walter Carter's life, however, was a relatively normal and happy one, he says, with the sadness of growing up without a father tucked beneath the surface. He was a good student, played a number of sports, became an accomplished trombonist and was elected his high school's student body president.

As a teen-ager, he wore his father's Army field jacket that he had found in a closet - somehow his mother didn't protest. And he tried to squeeze into a pair of his dad's shoes only to find out that the senior Carter's feet were long and narrow.

With the help of a scholarship fund that a group of Huntington doctors established in Norval Carter's name, Walter enrolled at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1958, studied history and met Bonnie Holden, a classmate who would become his wife. He later earned advanced degrees, went to work as an economist and, on the side, pursued what he calls his "fantasy life," playing trombone with the Newton Symphony Orchestra.

His brother, Tom, who had their dad's red hair, extroverted personality and taste for derring-do, followed far more closely the roadmap of their father's life - all the way to its tragic end.

Tom Carter eloped as his parents had, went to medical school at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond as his father had, joined the Army as his father had and volunteered to serve in Vietnam, where he spent two years. Upon his return from the war, he asked to be stationed at an Army base in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he indulged his passion for adventure and the outdoors - skiing, camping, fishing, even buying a team of dogs for sledding, and taking flying lessons.

On Feb. 11, 1972, he took off in a four-seater Bellanca plane that he had bought and headed toward Canada's Yukon Territory. When the plane failed to reach its destination, Walter and the older two of Tom's three sons joined the Canadian air force's search and rescue mission, but to no avail. Tom Carter's remains and the wreckage of his plane would not be found until the summer of 1974.

"He was kind of reckless," Walter says of his older brother. "Reckless and unlucky - like Dad."

A 'shadow' with him

Deep into his research in early 1997, Walter Carter pulled a red-spined book of D-Day remembrances off the shelf at his local library. Flipping through it, he stumbled upon an essay that was dedicated to Doc Carter and the two medics who had died with him.

He couldn't believe what he was reading. This vivid first-person essay, which included an account of his father's death, was written by the wounded soldier his father had been trying to help when he was shot.

His name was Frank J. Wawrynovic, Carter learned that day. He had survived the war, having managed to crawl toward the American line after his rescuers were killed. He lived in Clearfield, Pa.

Carter went home and called information for Wawrynovic's number. That night, "in one of those short-of-breath states," he says, he called and introduced himself as "Captain Carter's son."

The two arranged to meet a few months later at a 29th Division reunion in Danvers, Mass. And Wawrynovic - a Bronze Star recipient who had been to Normandy in 1984 for the 40th anniversary of the invasion and had visited Captain Carter's gravesite there - urged the captain's son to join him on a veterans trip to Normandy in September.

"He told me that hardly a day of his life passed by without thinking of my father," Carter recalls of their first conversation. "He sent me a photo of him at my father's grave."

Carter, his wife and two children joined the veterans of the 29th Division and historian Balkoski on the trip that fall. With the help of Wawrynovic and trip organizer Frances Sherr Davino, Carter traced his father's journey from Omaha Beach to the spot by the apple orchard where he was shot. Carter says he felt as if he were attending his father's funeral after all these years.

Wawrynovic and Davino, daughter of the late 29er Melvin Sherr of Baltimore, arranged with local French officials to rename the road that ran by the field where the battalion surgeon was shot. On that trip, the group huddled together for the unveiling of a new Normandy street sign - Captain Carter Road.

"I never was so moved as the day I was on the bus with Walter and Frank," says Balkoski, who lives in Baltimore. "It was a combination of painful and wonderfully glorious, having that closure."

Indeed, as they have forged a bond that is not quite father and son - more like uncle and nephew - Wawrynovic, 85, and Carter have helped each other to heal.

Wawrynovic's postwar life, it turned out, was more personally traumatic than his war experience. After spending nearly two years in hospitals recovering from his gunshot wounds and going to college on the GI Bill, he returned to his hometown to marry his childhood sweetheart, an Army nurse who had been stationed at Fort Meade.

The couple had three children, all of whom died young - one at birth; one, at age 4, from leukemia; one, at 17, from cerebral palsy.

Overwhelmed by grief, they threw themselves into work and formed a successful forestry company.

Through it all, says Wawrynovic, the events of June 17, 1944, have stayed close to his mind and his heart - a "shadow" that was always with him.

Whenever his work took him to West Virginia, he looked for Carter family acquaintances and stopped at cemeteries there. But he had been too apprehensive to seek out the doctor's wife or sons, fearful of opening doors the family might have wanted to keep shut.

"I always felt guilty that I was responsible for his father's death," says Wawrynovic, the son of Polish immigrants. "It has meant a lot to me to know we have established this good, close relationship, that he doesn't hold anything against me."

Three years ago, the Wawrynovics, generous donors in their community, gave $250,000 to the scholarship fund that had been established in Dr. Carter's name, "so that a record of your father's memory and dedication to the wounded should live on," they wrote to Walter Carter.

Such a record, Carter says he has come to realize, is exactly what he has been seeking in his journey over the past seven years. "I have this feeling of not wanting his life to disappear," he says.

But resurrecting that life, rewarding as it has been, has also meant confronting his loss - in a way, for the first time.

Since he began his quest to discover his father, the symphony trombonist has had trouble playing or listening to music without breaking into tears. Music, he says, has been an outlet for the emotions he had contained for so long.

No longer finding solace in religion or God - or the references to "Thy Father" that comforted him in childhood - the Presbyterian has become agnostic. He has sought therapy instead of religion to help him deal with his time-delayed grief or what he calls "the turbulence" that churns inside.

"I have a feeling I know my father," Carter says, flipping through four thick albums of photos and letters in his century-old, brown-shingled home. "I feel I know my father better than a lot of people know their living fathers."

But the more he has come to know his father and the more his impression of his dad as a "lovable hero" has been confirmed, he says, the more he has realized how much he missed in life.

"Yes, he was wonderful," Carter says, dropping his forehead into his hand as he fights to finish his thought. "Damn! I missed it."

"This is D9, or the 10th day of the invasion & progress seems satisfactory. ... I have had bullets all around me but my luck is good. ... The country over here is beautiful & the French people for the most part are friendly & glad to see us. The land is even more pretty here than in England. Save some newspapers for me to read when I get home. ...

"Tell all my friends 'Hello' & give them my best regards. Take good care of Fernie & the boys.

"Love to you both, N"

- from Captain Carter's final letter to his parents, written June 16, 1944, the day before he died.

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