Tragedy Strikes En-route to Camp Atterbury

The main body of the Division was scheduled to move out from Pennsylvania in two echelons. Troop trains of approximately 500 men each were slated to take the soldiers on September 10, 11, and 12. At the same time, all wheeled vehicles of the various units gathered at the four corners of the state to start the overland trip in conveys.

When the final days of leaving came, a similar scene was enacted in then thousand homes and a hundred towns and railroad stations across the state. Parting was an odd combination of joy and tears as bands played, banners waved, and local dignitaries made their long speeches while the men said 'good-bye' to sweethearts and families.

Less than 12 hours after the first train left, tragedy struck the entire state of Pennsylvania into a state of mourning. Early in the dawn of Monday, September 11, a train carrying nearly five hundred soldiers from the northeast Pennsylvania area had stopped along the tracks near Coshocton, Ohio, while brakemen inspected a broken air hose. Suddenly, despite warning flares that had been set along the tracks behind the last car, a crack passenger train crashed into the rear of the troop train at sixty miles an hour.

In an instant a peaceful scene had been transformed into unbelievable horror. Thirty-three soldiers were dead, and hundreds injured. Hardly a man on board the train was not bruised or cut by shattered glass.

The dead were members of Service and "B" Batteries of the 109th Field Artillery Battalion. At Wilkes-Barre and Kingston, the home station of the dead, a gloom descended over the communities, and lasted for ten days until the last of the dead had been buried.

The wreck occurred before the first troops of the main body had arrived at Camp Atterbury. As they poured into the camp in the hours after the wreck there was a noticeable seriousness in their attitudes and outlook. As one newspaper correspondent reported after the accident, "The blood of the 28th Division was shed (in the wreck) in the line of duty, as surely as though the men had died in combat." The troops knew this, and it made the seriousness of their task all the more apparent.

Korean vet recalls train wreck

Korean War Veteran Edwin Terrell of Galilee and his wife, Hazel.

By Tammy Compton

Wayne Independent

Tue Jun 02, 2009, 10:51 AM EDT

Edwin Terrell of Galilee served in the Army from 1950 to 1954, including an eight month tour in Korea.

His story starts with a terrible train wreck, the loss of 33 fellow soldiers and the knowledge that it could have been him.

“You talk to any of the boys that were on the train, everybody had the same feeling. I had it, too. We had a feeling something was going to happen to that train when we got on it,” Terrell says.
That eerie premonition would prove correct. The tragic Ohio train wreck — September 11, 1950 — would claim the lives off 33 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen, 21 of them from Battery B, 109th Field Artillery Battalion, Wilkes-Barre. They, along with Guardsman from Company H, Honesdale, had been on their way to Camp Atterbury, Indiana for additional training, prior to deployment overseas.

80 mph train wreck

Now 80 years-old, Terrell talks about that terrible day, nearly six decades ago. Twisted metal. Broken bodies. Unspeakable grief.

“We were standing still and a diesel come along 80 mph and rammed us in the back. Knocked the last car off on one side of the track, and the diesel went right up through the second car. That’s what killed so many,” Terrell said. “I seen them take one man out in three pieces. I couldn’t stand it no more, I had to get away.”

Terrell was on KP (kitchen duty) when the crash occurred. “I was in between two cars ...on the way back to the mess car when the train hit. Everybody in front of me, fell on top of me. So, I got up and I went down again. The second time, I said, ‘I’m gonna stay down,’” he said. “That was an awful thing.”

“My brother was in that same wreck,” he said of his brother, Allen, younger by a year. No one was killed in their company. “A chandelier came down and hit one of the cooks on his head and cut his head open, that was the only casualty we had,” he said.

Things could have turned out so much differently. His unit was to have been seated in the last two cars that fateful day. “If we had, that would have been our Company. But it was raining when we got on the train, so (1st Sgt. Mike Bates) put us in the first two cars, rather than the last two ...Had it been the last two, I wouldn’t be here talking about it,” he said.

Germany and Korea
From Camp Atterbury, the Terrell boys were split up. “The company went to Germany; I went to Korea,” he said.

“He was on guard duty over there. He had it nice,” says Terrell, with a laugh. He, on the other hand, entered the fray, joining the 131st Truck Company in Korea, 5th Army.

“I was in a motor pool. I drove a 5-ton Diamond T wrecker,” he said. He was a truck driver/ mechanic. “Fix them if I could. If I couldn’t, tow them in. I went out with one, one night, and came back with five (trucks),” he says.

“Oh boy, it was cold over there — 30 below zero. You go to work on a truck, and try to work with gloves on, you couldn’t do nothing. Take your gloves off, to go to take a bolt off, your fingers would freeze right fast to the bolt. You’d take it off, you’d pull the hide right off. So, that was cold,” he says.

As he drove the trucks, he could hear the bullets whizzing by. “They were firing right over our heads,” he said. “We were supporting the First Marine Corps. Taking ammo and k-rations to them.

“At night, we had to drive with black-out, ‘cats eyes’ they called it. You only got two little tiny lights on the fenders. You got two in the front and two in the back. And when you see the red ones come on, you want to stop. Otherwise, you’re going to ram him. Whites are all right, but when you see the red, you’d better stop.

“That’s where one guy lost his life. Put his headlights on when he shouldn’t have. Flashed his headlights on and they got him with a 30-calibre machine gun.” His death was instantly avenged when a GI stood up and emptied 250 rounds from a machine gun. “I had to go and get the truck ...I never looked to see if he was dead or alive. I just hooked on the truck and came back to where the ambulance was. The ambulance took him to the hospital. He was dead, but I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see him.”

Lighter times
He talks of lighter times and turkey hunting in Korea. “I remember one time, there was three of us. We was off. We wasn’t working. We had shot guns, and we went up on the hill hunting turkeys. And the MPs was after us, because we were right up above an ammo dump (where ammunition was stored)...because we had no business being there,” he says. “We wasn’t shooting that way, but they were after us.”

They also did some deer hunting, over there, he says.

He credits a young Korean boy, who acted as their interpreter, with saving his life. He’d shot a deer and was going to retrieve it, when the boy stopped him. “He said, ‘We don’t go that way ...GI walk along — boom. No more GI,” Terrell recalls. “He didn’t know how to say mine.”

“So, we went around the other way. I got a hold of the deer ...and took it back to the mess tent. The cooks cleaned it and cut it up. It lasted for one day,” he says.

Source: http://www.wayneindependent.com/news/x313668827/Korean-vet-recalls-train-wreck

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