Bud Moore, An American Hero

   Young Bud Moore roused from a fitful sleep and decided to step outside for a breath of fresh air.

   What he saw in the dim light of dawn was so astonishing that it created a baseball-sized lump in his throat.

   In every direction, stretching to the horizon, there were ships.  Thousands of them.  Battleships, cruisers, destroyers and landing craft.

   Walter "Bud" Moore, a self-described "country boy" of 19 from Spartanburg, S.C., was aboard one of the latter.

   He remembers his ship vividly.  "LCI 149," he says.

   He remembers the date and the events surrounding it just as clearly.

   The date: June 5, 1944, sixty-two years ago.  The event, looming just hours away: D-Day, the Allies' invasion of France's Normandy coast.  The history-changing  "Longest Day" of World War II, the beginning of the drive to free Europe from the German Reich of Adolf Hitler.

   And Bud Moore, destined to become one of the top team owners in NASCAR during a racing career spanning five decades, was going to take a very active part in the battle.

      

   "I was in the 90th Infantry Division, 359th Regiment, D  Company, First Platoon," Bud, now 81, recalls with justifiable pride.   "I was a corporal.

   "We were attached to the Fourth Infantry Division, and we had boarded the LCI at Liverpool, England.  We moved only a few hundred yards from the dock and anchored.  We were told that a force was being assembled for an exercise assault somewhere on the English coast."

   During the night of June 4-5, LCI 149 began moving, but after a while stopped.  The ship was at anchor again when Bud stepped outside and saw all those ships on what he correctly assumed to be the English Channel.

   "I rushed back below and told my buddies, 'Boys, this ain't no exercise!  It ain't no dry run!   This is the real thing!'" remembers Moore.

   "Within a few hours a PT-Boat pulled alongside and these officers came aboard the LCI.  They pulled out this big map and informed us that tomorrow is going to be D-Day.  Our outfit's orders are to assault a place on the French coast code-named Utah Beach.  The attack was just a few hours away.

   "We didn't know exactly what to expect when we went in, but we figured it was going to be bad.  For years the Germans had been fortifying the Normandy coast.

   "At five o'clock on the morning of June 6 the front of our transport went down and we were off.  The ramp opened up 200 yards short of dry beach and we stepped out into shoulder-deep water.

   "I was a machine gunner.  I had a tripod for a 30-caliber machine gun on my back and it weighed 51 pounds.  My pack weighed 30-to-40 more pounds, so the going was tough.  I stepped into a hole that the German artillery--which was zeroing in on us--had blown in the ocean bottom.  I was in water over my head, and I thought I was going to drown.

   "But I swam a little bit and found footing.

   "About that time a boy near me got hit and just disappeared.

   "Finally, I got to the beach and right then I realized what war was all about.  It's crazy.

   "I had just turned 19 and here someone I'd never seen was trying to kill me.  My folks had raised me right, and I thought I was a decent human being.  I couldn't imagine shooting someone or having them shoot me.

   "But on that beach I realized those Germans in front of us were going to kill us unless, by God, we shot them first.  You learned pretty quick what it took to survive."

   Bud Moore sighed.

   "A lot of fellers got hit, some of them my buddies," he continues.  "We felt it was awful, and it was.  We had about 200 casualties.

   "Before long we found out the first wave at Omaha Beach, just up from us, had been pinned down and practically wiped out.  There were 4,000 casualties at Omaha Beach, and it made you wonder what would have happened to you if your outfit had gone in there."

   Nowadays, Moore generally prefers to evade specifics about the slaughter he witnessed on D-Day and during the weeks following as the battle for Normandy raged.

   "We had a job to do and a lot of good men died doing it," he says.  "After a time, you got immune to it."

   However, 22 years ago, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, Moore spoke openly of the personal pain he experienced in combat.

   "Once I left my machine gun during the early days following the invasion to join a pal in his foxhole for some K-rations," Bud said in 1984.  "After a little while I went back to my position.  I hadn't left him for a minute when an artillery round scored a direct hit on his foxhole.  I never saw any part of my friend again.  It was like he never existed."

   Moore also recalled during that interview of 22 years ago "The Big Push" of July 3, 1944 when American planes dropped personnel bombs "thick as rain drops" on a 10-mile strip near Periers, France.

   "Right after that, Gen. Patton broke through, made a hard right and hemmed in the Germans on the Cherbourg Peninsula."

   Bud Moore hemmed in some Germans of his own in December of 1944 during the Battle Of The Bulge.

   "We were attacking a little town that we had swapped back and forth with the Germans about five times," he recalls.  "My platoon leader ordered me and this kid driver to take a Jeep with a 30-caliber machine gun on the hood up this trail and check out some houses near patches of woods.

   "We saw this German soldier run into a wood hut.  I sprayed the building with a couple of bursts and the tracers set it on fire.  A white flag waved and the German came out.

   "We loaded him on the hood and took him with us.  A little bit further along we saw two more German soldiers sprint into a rock house.  We took heavy fire from the house, and I returned it, blowing out the windows and doors.  They showed a white flag, but wouldn't come out.

   "The kid Jeep driver spoke a little German, so we sent the one we'd captured in to tell the others if they didn't surrender we'd call in artillery and blow 'em off the face of the earth.

   "The Germans started coming out.  They kept on coming.  And coming!

   "When we got them all lined up we had 15 enlisted men and four officers.  We'd captured the area headquarters.

   "We started marching 'em back.

   "My commanding officer said, 'Boy, what in hell was all that shooting over there?'  I said, 'Well, we was having a little trouble.'

   "He said, 'Where did all these Germans come from?'  I said, 'We happened to get them out of a building over there.  You only sent two of us and we had to capture a whole army.'

   "It was funny afterward. But we were lucky." 

   Moore was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service and promoted to sergeant for his outfit's continuing fight across France, into Germany and on to Czechoslovakia.

   En route, he got a second Bronze Star, with clusters.  He had been on the front lines nine months and 14 days without being evacuated or being hurt seriously enough to miss combat.

   "I guess it was bound to happen," says Bud.  "We were pulling into an abandoned complex, which I think had been a hospital.  We got into a heck of a fight.  I took three slugs in the left thigh."

   These wounds brought the first of five Purple Hearts that Moore eventually received.

   Bud's outfit was near Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, meeting a Russian force, when he learned of Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945.

   Victory came 11 months and two days after Moore and thousands of other Allied soldiers fought their way ashore on the beaches of Normandy.

   Bud left Europe for home on Nov. 1, 1945 aboard the USS Excelsior, named for Excelsior Mills in Union County, S.C., not far from his Spartanburg home.

   He has never returned to the European battlefields.  He was tempted to go for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, but his team was racing in a Winston Cup Series event at Dover Downs in Delaware, and Bud felt obligated to stay with his crew and driver, Lake Speed.    

   "When racing is your livelihood, you have to be there," he explained.

   Officials at the Dover track held a touching ceremony to honor Bud in '94.

   Seven of the many drivers who had wheeled Moore's cars took part, including Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, Brett Bodine, Geoff Bodine, Dale Earnhardt, Ricky Rudd and Morgan Shepherd.

   Bud, a member of several motorsports halls of fame, is a NASCAR pioneer.  He started fielding cars in 1950 and continued to "go racing" until 1999, when he sold his operation and retired.

   Among his other drivers through the decades were Fireball Roberts, Darel Dieringer, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough,  Darrell Waltrip and Joe Weatherly, all hall-of-famers.

   Moore was the crew chief for Buck Baker's NASCAR championship run in 1957.  He owned the cars that Weatherly drove to titles in 1962 and '63.  Bud took a NASCAR Grand American championship in '68 with Tiny Lund as driver, and a Sports Car Club of America Trans-Am title in 1970 with Parnelli Jones.

   His colorful career includes some significant accomplishments.  Dieringer won Darlington's Southern 500 in a Moore-fielded car in 1966.  Buddy Baker won three straight 500-milers at Talladega Superspeedway for Moore in 1975-76, and in 1978 Bobby Allison drove a Moore-owned machine to victory in the Daytona 500 and the National 500 at the track then known as Charlotte Motor Speedway.

   Overall, NASCAR credits Moore with 63 wins and 43 poles as a team owner on what's now the Nextel Cup level.   

   Several years ago, just prior to a Firecracker 400 on July 4th at Daytona International Speedway, an event which had a pre-race show based on the military and patriotism, Bud heard an announcer ill-advisedly say that "the drivers are getting ready to go to war."

   Bud winced and shook his head.

   "That man doesn't know what he's talking about," he said.

   "Racing ain't war...Real war is hell on this earth."