At 10:35 a.m. the engine blasted into the cul-de-sac at the end of the line at St. Valery at about 60 miles an hour. It tore through the metal guardrail and crossed the sidewalk into the brick station. Shattering the near wall, it hurtled through the empty waiting room and poked 4 feet of its boiler through the opposite wall. The coal car fell into the station basement, and the whole train came to a sudden halt.

The force of the crash caused wooden boxcars to splinter and pile up on each other, hurling wheels and couplings about randomly. Sliding doors slammed shut on soldiers’ legs; cars accordioned into one another behind the coal car, crushing men and pinning them in the wreckage. One bumper tore loose and flew into a mass of injured men at the bottom of one car. The relief crew, still wrapped in their bedrolls, was thrown 30 feet clear as their car crashed.

For Sergeant Sell, the airborne sensation came to an abrupt stop. ‘I sat stunned for a moment, not knowing what happened,’ he recalled. ‘A large chunk of iron had come through the front end of our car, right between Stafford and me. It was either the coupling or a buffer from another car in front of us. Stafford and I had both been hit on our shoulders, but we both said we were OK. I saw French people running toward the train, most of them with wine bottles. I could not see down the right-hand side of the pile, but I could see to the left. We were high up on the top of six or seven cars. As I climbed down, I saw bodies and much blood. But I kept on climbing down. I felt helpless!’

At Camp Lucky Strike, muffled shouts and the thud of running feet woke me. My shelter half, thin as a sheet, had worked its way from under me, and I felt the frozen ground chilling every joint. The sun was beginning to warm the tent. I was alone. As the adjutant, I knew the colonel would expect me to know what the commotion was about, so I struggled up, scrambled to my feet and went outside.

As one of the doctors, Captain Edward Boone, rushed by, I asked, ‘What’s going on, Ed?’

‘There’s been a train wreck in the town,’ he said, ‘and they’ve called for a bunch of doctors and nurses to help with the casualties. Our equipment is still on the ship, so it will be rough trying to treat them. Someone said they were troops from our transport. Maybe we weren’t so unlucky to be brought out here on those trucks after all. See you later. They’re ready to go.’

I hurried on to the headquarters tent, where Sergeant Nester was cutting temporary orders for all 35 doctors and 40 nurses. The authorization was from the Base Section commander, so I signed the orders and made it official. When the colonel came into the tent, I tried to learn more about what had happened.

‘We don’t know,’ he told me, ‘but they’ve told us that 45 French boxcars filled with troops from our ship jumped the track and went through the station. It is the end of the line in a village called St. Valery-en-Caux. They say it’s not far from here on the English Channel.’

When we reached St. Valery, the scene we encountered was one of chaos and horror. Pinned men crawled from the debris as they gradually freed themselves. Ten cars were piled as high as the station roof, while wreckage to the rear formed an even higher pyramid. Some unfortunate men dangled from splintered cars by their damaged legs, while others had suffered spontaneous amputations and crushing injuries. Eight men in a forward car were dead of no visible injuries.

The engineer and fireman, though injured, were saved by the bulk and weight of the engine. The stunned relief crew survived with mild concussions. Some men were untouched, but were stunned to find neighbors on either side dead or dying.

The French villagers did what they could. Monsieur Cherfils, the mayor, and Monsieur Brouard, the head of the local police, rushed to organize local assistance. Fortunately, the station had been empty. Even the stationmaster’s wife was on an errand in the downtown area of St. Valery. So there were no civilian casualties. Military police were dispatched from nearby camps, and a cordon of security surrounded the accident scene.

Uninjured medics from the units on the train used their aid kits and syringes of morphine to help the injured. Military doctors and nurses rushed in from the 134th Evacuation Hospital and went right to work. Captain S.J. Beale, one of our doctors, later recorded his impressions of what he found: ‘News of a wreck. They need help. Stirred to go to help. Horror! Brain churned with disbelief. Clumsy boxcars piled in a tangle of wood and wheels three tiers high. A poor GI starting to jump from the top car — left arm, left leg and head outside — middle of him crushed as doors closed on him, staring through sightless eyes. A small fire between ties and a rail of the railroad under a helmet with boiling water. Nobody else near it. Who to help? Crawling under the wreckage and over a crushed body dressed in GI twill.

‘A voice, `Jim, you’re here to help!’ A guy from the tank battalion with whom we had played cards on the ship. His legs were pinned in wreckage — fully alert and mindful of his situation. A useful corpsman had started an IV. Another voice from behind, `We’ll be getting him out soon.’ `So long.’ `So long, Jim.’

‘Outside, utter dismay at the helplessness. A journey to the local hospital, to follow French doctors and some of our senior medical officers observing injured personnel who survived. I couldn’t do a damn thing to help anybody!’

Sergeant Albert Lufburrow of the 1471st Engineers escaped without injury. In his efforts to give help, he cradled a GI with head injuries. The man looked away and said, ‘It’s getting dark. I want to go home.’ Then he died. Eight or 10 men from the 1471st supported the side of a demolished car while Captain Boone crawled underneath and finished a partial leg amputation with his penknife.

Remembering the contents of my own bedroll, I searched frantically for it. I wanted blankets, whiskey, a first-aid kit — anything to relieve the suffering that lay all around me. Most of the bedrolls had been torn open and ransacked as villagers and soldiers tried to help the wounded. During the frenzied search, I came across that dismembered leg still shod in its boot.

Sergeant Sell remembered Captain Brown getting the 1471st together. I started hunting for Bob Luginbill of the 565th Quartermaster Railhead Company, and finally we found each other. Fortunately, his company had been riding close to the rear of the train, where most of the cars were still upright. Some had slipped off the tracks but were otherwise all right. I finally got back in formation with the 1471st.

When the noise, dust and confusion died down around the railyard, Lieutenant Morse discovered he was ‘hanging upside down by one leg and unable to reach the ground.’ He later recalled: ‘Blood was running down my leg to my belt, and a long sliver of wood was through my upper leg just above the knee. I reached up and pulled it out. During the hour I was hanging, I talked with one of my brother officers who was pinned but otherwise uninjured, and one of my 17-year-old soldiers whose chest was crushed and who kept asking me to help him. I reassured him as much as I could, but he died in the hospital two days later. I hung there for over an hour, feeling no pain and in such intense shock that one of our medics I met some years later told me he thought I had died.

‘It was a scene of complete horror, a total shambles. There was just about every conceivable injury among the men who died and the injured: heads snapped off, single and double amputees, much crushing of heads and bodies.’

Nurses from the 134th followed the injured to a local hospital. Despite language difficulties, they worked alongside the French staff to aid and comfort the injured.

Brief news articles about the disaster appeared in the Herald Tribune’s European edition, The New York Times, the Chicago Sun Times, the Chicago Tribune and the French Normandie on January 18 and 19. The French newspaper’s description of the accident incorrectly indicated that an American engineer had been at the controls and that the brakes locked the wheels of train. In fact, it had been the 580 tons of men and equipment that overrode all efforts to slow or stop the train.

French rail authorities held an immediate investigation and delivered their findings on February 21, 1945. They concluded that the brakes were inadequate and that the absence of a speedometer had hindered the engineer. The investigators also determined that the crew operating the engine was relatively inexperienced on the St. Vaast-to-St. Valery grade and that there was no cause for further inquiry.

In his summary report to French rail headquarters and the U.S. Army years later, Lucien Maffiers, representative to the French Railway System, stated: ‘A lack of judgment and evaluation of speed would never have existed on a locomotive provided with a speedometer; it was a convoy unfit for transporting men, but we were at war.’

Eighty-nine soldiers had been killed, and 152 were injured. The 85-man ambulance company in the first four cars lost 33 dead and 28 injured. Despite their losses, all the units were filled with replacements and sent into action. It took the 782nd Tank Battalion until April 23, just weeks before the German surrender, to move to the front. The 553rd Ambulance Company was outfitted with 10 ambulances and put to work within one week of the disaster. The 1471st Engineers and the 565th Quartermaster Company were operational by mid-March.

Although the French had conducted an inquiry after the accident, the U.S. Army did little to investigate the tragedy. The Transportation Corps’ meeting minutes of that time only mention the wreck at St. Valery twice in passing.

Minutes of the Transportation Corps meeting held in the office of the chief of Transportation of the ETO on January 18, 1945, under the Military Railways classification, read: ‘Twelve ammunition trains (5,500 tons) were moved out of Le Havre yesterday. The discharge of ammunition is around 2,600 tons, resulting in a decrease in the backlog of approximately 2,000 tons. Military Railways reported on the train accident at St. Valery yesterday.’ Minutes of the meeting for January 19, 1945, discuss the weak points in the supply plan, namely barge loadings at Antivey and rail movement out of Le Havre. This sentence is in the middle of a lengthy paragraph: ‘Military Railways reported that the French at Le Havre sent all of their mechanics to the scene of the accident at St. Valery and were therefore unable to operate the freight trains out of that port.’

The logistical history of the Normandy Base Section, dated June 12, 1945, gives the only concrete reference to the tragedy: ‘A troop train wreck occurred at St. Valery in District `A’ on 17 January 1945, at 10:30 hours in which 89 were killed and 152 injured.’

It is evident that the train was overloaded for its braking capacity and was driven by a relatively inexperienced engineer without the benefit of a speedometer. Despite two protests, the engineer was ordered to continue his trip by U.S. Army Transportation Corps officials under pressure from higher authority. It was a tragedy based on ignorance and poor judgment, for which there was no alternative or satisfactory outcome.

On January 17, 1945, 10-year-old Jean Claude Vigreux watched in horror as the train tore through his town. Years later, as mayor of St. Valery, he headed the effort by townspeople to memorialize the 89 Americans killed in the wreck. On September 11, 1994, the citizens of St. Valery gathered at the rebuilt railroad station and dedicated a plaque that reads: ‘To the memory of the American soldiers come to free the soil of France who were killed accidentally at St. Valery-en-Caux. The 17th of January, 1945.’

While those killed at St. Valery have been remembered in France, there has not been any recognition of the incident by the U.S. government to this date. Some survivors of the wreck have even been refused treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals in recent years on the basis that there was no train wreck involving U.S. soldiers at St. Valery. It never happened.

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This article was written by Russell C. Eustice and originally appeared in World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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