Buddies Again
BUDDIES AGAIN
German artillery separated war comrades; reunion caps man's decades of doubt over whether friend survived
By WILLIAM B. TREML
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
YPSILANTI - A couple of old artillerymen stood in the living room of a small home in southeastern Pennsylvania recently and embraced and laughed and cried.
It was a reunion story which Hollywood writers dream up. But this one was true.
The friendship which Morton Kelley and Ray Bowles shared was forged almost 40 years ago, first in the army camps and on the training bases in the States, and finally, in the fire of World War II combat. They were close, Kelley and Bowles, two young men from different backgrounds and different states, thrown together by the fortunes of war. They got along well, looked after one another went on pass together. Before they went overseas Bowles asked Kelley to be his best man when he was married to a Pennsylvania girl near the army base at Indiantown Gap.
In Europe their artillery outfit became part of the massive American force which, in late 1944, was shoving the Nazi juggernaut across the Low Countries and back into the German homeland. But the enemy was exacting a price in blood for the American advance.
Near Sourlouten, Germany on Dec. 17, 1944, Kelley and Bowles were sent out from their lines to patch together an artillery communication wire which had been severed by sharpnel. A Nazi artillery barrage erupted just as the two GIs reached the wire.
“Ray must have been hit by shrapnel from one of those German 88s,” Kelley, now a worker at the General Motors Assembly Division plant at Willow Run, recalls. “He got hit bad in the legs. I didn’t think he was going to make it. Later, after we got out of there, someone told me he hadn’t made it, that he’d passed on. I was lucky. I got away without a scratch.”
Bowles estimates more than 15 rounds of German artillery landed near him and Kelley before he was hit in the legs. Carried to the rear, surgeons went to work on Bowles’ shattered legs. In the next 18 months doctors would perform a dozen more operations on Bowles and the army would finally discharge him with a 70 percent disability. During his hospitalization his weight dropped from 210 to 135.
But he lived.
And finally Ray Bowles returned to his wartime bride in the tiny village of Paradise. There, in the flat-lands of southeastern Pennsylvania, hard by the Susquehanna River, Ray Bowles began rebuilding his life.
The years sped by, Kelley still believing that Ray Bowles had died under the fierce German artillery barrage eight days before Christmas in 1944. And Ray Bowles never stopped wondering what had happened to his old army comrade.
Three years ago Bowles decided to stop wondering and begin looking. He launched a determined search for Morton Kelley. He checked records, made phone calls, wrote letters.
“All I really knew was that he had grown up in Central City in western Kentucky. I followed every lead I got. Finally a lady who works for a newspaper down in that area of Kentucky gave me information about Morton that led me to Michigan. I called him up on the phone and really surprised him, After that we corresponded, exchanged pictures. Then we arranged a visit,” Bowles says.
Kelley and his wife, Martha, who live at 1324 Delaware Street in Ypsilanti Township, made the trip across Ohio and to the Bowles’ home just east of Lancaster in southeastern Pennsylvania. The reunion of the two old comrades was a joyful, a tearful one.
“It sure was nice to see him after all these years,” Kelley says. “Especially when I had thought for so long that he hadn’t made it.”
There was a lot of talking, laughing, reminiscing that night the Kelleys arrived at the Bowles’ home. The two old army buddies stayed up until 2 a.m., catching up on the good times and the bad from camps and bases and battlefields.
Catching up on a lifetime.
When their world was young.
NEWS PHOTO - CECIL LOCKARD
Martha Kelley recently went with husband Morton to joyful, tearful reunion