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| Private William Ash served in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy on D-Day. (References below) |
Private William Elza Ash never had a chance to reach 100 years old today. Instead, he was killed in action at age 23 on D-Day, June 6, 1944, when he parachuted into France and was shot by German soldiers.
Born August 2, 1920 in Crooked Creek, Rockcastle County, Kentucky, he was the eldest of five children of McKinley Ash and Ida Allen Ash. His father was a farmer in the tobacco-growing region of central Kentucky. In 1925 the family moved to Middletown, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, and the father took a job at the Wardlow Thomas paper mill.
In the 1940 census, 20-year-old William was working at a paper mill, the Sorg Paper Company. His sister Millie also worked there. His draft card completed February 16, 1942 listed his employer as Sam Painter’s Garage in Middletown.
William entered the service on August 17, 1942. His enlistment record says, “divorced with dependents,” and the newspaper report of his death said he had a son. Records indicate the son was born in 1940, grew up in Middletown, and passed away in 2007.
He was assigned to the Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. The 506th is the unit featured in the HBO series “Band of Brothers.”
A Dayton, Ohio newspaper article in April 1944 reported that he was one of 15 trained parachute and glider troopers from southern Ohio who have “arrived in England and are preparing to cross the English Channel to the Continent in the assault on Hitler’s Europe.”
A copy of a letter he sent his sister, Dorothy, from England in March 1944 showed up in an antique store in 2012 and someone posted an image on the internet. The letter was just small talk, as most such letters were. He wrote, “send me that picture of me and Bette and my car,” and “have some of those pretty girlfriends of yours write your lonesome brother a letter.” He signed it “Elza,” his middle name.
On D-Day, planes carrying the 506th departed England at 1 a.m. Bad weather and anti-aircraft fire caused the planes to get scattered. Only nine of the eighty-one aircraft found their designated drop zone (DZ), with some paratroopers landing as far as 20 miles off course. As recounted in a unit history: “The Germans set a strategic trap and in less than 10 minutes managed to kill the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Wolverton, his executive officer, Maj. George Grant, and a large portion of the battalion. The only part of the battalion that survived were those who were dropped in the wrong DZ.” Of the battalion’s 2,000 men who jumped into France, 231 were killed in action, 183 were missing or POWs, and 569 were wounded.
Private Ash’s final hours are described in the book “Parachute Infantry” by David Kenyon Webster, a member of the 506th who survived the war and died in 1961. Kenyon was portrayed in “Band of Brothers” by the actor Eion Bailey. He wrote that he encountered Ash when the two of them landed in a flooded field behind Utah Beach. Kenyon moved on; Ash stayed. This is what Kenyon wrote:
“Ash was many things: a voice (sort of Southern); a song, “Galway Bay,” which he sang soft and sentimental, with tears in his eyes; and a favorite saying (‘We’s goin’ tuh combat, and we ain’t never comin’ back.’) He was right about that, for in the end, and as I had feared when I left him behind in the swamp, Ash stayed in Normandy. Ash and 250 others.
“I looked for him the first night when the 2nd Battalion, which was the first to be organized – 150 men out of more than 500 – set up a defensive position and dug in, but he was nowhere. He still hadn’t shown up a week later. Well, I thought, maybe he made it back to England on a hospital ship. But when I asked the men returning from Normandy a month afterward what had happened to him, I learned that his luck had run out only a few yards from the place where we had met. Apparently, he had changed his mind about staying on the hummock and had forced himself to swim to the big ridge.
“The move was his undoing, for there were still plenty of Germans left in the woods after the rest of us had gone on. Ash went to the stone stable where I had rested briefly and lay down with the wounded men collected there in an impromptu aid station. Here the Germans found him and the others, and swarming in without mercy, killed them all.”
Due to the large number of dead and missing on and after D-Day, it was late July before his family was notified that he was missing. In early August, a telegram informed his parents that he was dead.
His remains were returned to the States after the war and interred at the Woodside Cemetery in Middletown on November 19, 1948. His grave is in the “Memorial Plot,” a section of the cemetery set aside for those who died in World War II. According to a newspaper report, he was survived by his parents, a son, one brother and three sisters. His father died in a traffic accident at age 58 in 1956, and his mother passed away at age 84 in 1981.
Thank you, William Elza Ash for your sacrifice. Let's Earn It for William.
(References below)
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This profile was written by John F. Schlatter (whose birthday is today!). “I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee and a retired corporate public relations manager, living in Las Vegas. I served as an active duty and reserve Army officer 1974-82. I’ve written two books about veterans. One tells the stories of WWII veterans through postcards they wrote to the folks back home, and the other honors about 50 of the 168 Americans who died in Vietnam on the Fourth of July. I’ve also been a volunteer in the effort to find photographs of all 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. Researching and writing the stories of those who died to preserve freedom has gone from a hobby to a passion for me. If we don’t honor and remember, who will?”
This is one of the final 50 stories (32) to be written as part of this project which ends on September 2, 2020, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. At that time more than 1,370 men and women will have been profiled. The project will live on in an expanded program to write the stories of all 400,000+ US World War II fallen. Visit www.storiesbehindthestars.org to learn more. We welcome your continued support and interest and encourage you to help write some of these stories.
Last year on this date I profiled B-25 mechanic Stanley Pearson. You can read about Stanley here.
On behalf of the fallen, if you would like to see more people become aware of this project to honor the WW2 fallen, be sure to share with others on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Thanks for your interest!
I created this video to explain why I started this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXt8QA481lY.
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https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/99567064/william-e_-ash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/506th_Infantry_Regiment_(United_States)
https://www.506infantry.org/library/official-documents/wwii-506th-parachute-infantry-regiment/
https://www.ww2-airborne.us/units/506/506.html
http://old.506infantry.org/hiswwii/his2ndbnwwiiarticle07.html
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