By Billy Davis

It’s a special thing, the Purple Heart.

U.S. Army Private William S. Bankston earned his in France, when a German shell exploded next to him on November 18, 1944.

The shrapnel missed his body but he suffered a severe concussion, which has never completely gone away. But the injury was his ticket home, first to a hospital bed in England, then to a hospital bed at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

Sixty-eight years ago this week, Private Bankston landed in Normandy, France with the 90th Infantry Division. It was June 7, a day after the famed D-Day invasion. The 90th landed on Utah Beach and military historians have reported D-Day fighting was much more fierce at Omaha Beach than Utah, but of course a bullet doesn’t know that and doesn’t care.

The private from Mississippi, wading through warm English Channel water up to his chest, saw the bodies at Utah Beach the next morning.

“There were a lot of bodies,” he remembered. “They were taking them off the beach but there were a lot of them, Americans and Germans, and they were still moving them when we came ashore.”

It was the first time Private Bankston, then 20, had seen dead men. “It was terrible,” he said.

How did he feel seeing those bodies, a reporter asked him. “Like I might be next,” he replied.

“I tell people I wouldn’t take a million dollars for that experience again. I wouldn’t give fifteen cents to go back,” Bankston, who turns 89 on July 20, said last week.

Bankston is originally from Union, Miss. He enlisted in the U.S. Army there on August 23, 1943.
Bankston and wife Lou moved to Batesville in 2004 to be closer to their daughter, Beverly Ferrell. A second daughter, Deloris Linam, lives in Tennessee.

Mrs. Bankston is now ill. But she was waiting for her husband, 68 years ago, when he returned to the States.

“They told her I was slightly wounded but I was OK,” Mr. Bankston recalled. “That was mostly true, I guess.”

Mr. Bankston moves through their home on Acorn Lane with the aid of a walker, apologizing for his slow movement to a reporter who — what do you say, really, to a living war hero? — thanks the World War II veteran they’re not speaking German.

D-Day is a generic military term for a date chosen for a military operation. But the Allied invasion of northern France, officially known as Overlord, changed all that, forever linking the word “D-Day” to only one day in time, June 6, 1944. That’s because Operation Overlord was the largest military invasion before or since — more than 5,000 ships, 10,000 aircraft and 150,000 men.

It spelled the beginning of the end for Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. But it was a bloody beginning, first for the D-Day invaders and later the reinforcements who came days and weeks later.

Mr. Bankston remembers crawling in the dirt in a French hedgerow, unsure where a bullet that whizzed past his ear had come from. A second bullet was close enough it kicked dirt in his face.

The German was hiding in a tree. Bankston, armed with an M-1 rifle, remembers firing at him. A soldier named Oakley fired, too, and the second soldier claimed he had fired the shot that killed him.

“I didn’t care who killed him,” Bankston said. “I was just glad he wasn’t firing at me.”

Bankston said he was on the front lines at the Mozelle River in France, when he was sent back with others to get supplies for their unit. That’s when the shell landed, sparing his life but ending his time with Company L, 358th Infantry, six months after Operation Overlord.

The shell that injured him earned Bankston a Purple Heart. But it almost never made it to the deserving veteran.

Bankston remembers receiving a letter from the War Department, with the stated intention of sending the medal, but somewhere between Fort Sam Houston and Mississippi he lost the letter.

Deloris Linam said she was a teenager when she heard her father speak about a medal that never made it home. Even as a teenager she knew her father deserved the medal — whatever it was — and told him so.
It was decades later when Linam was flipping through a history book, Neshoba at War, when she found her father’s brief biography among other veterans. The author, Steven Stubbs, wrote that Private William Stafford Bankston was wounded in combat and received a Purple Heart for his injuries.

“She told me I deserved it and she was going to make sure I got it,” Bankston recalled.

Linam began making phone calls. Bankston credited James Webb, the veterans’ service officer for Panola County, for helping him prepare the paperwork.

Bankston received official correspondence in February 2010 that he had earned the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the Campaign Medal with two bronze service stars and an arrowhead, the Combat Infantry Badge, and the Good Conduct Medal.

“Mr. Webb told me I must have been one tough hombre to get all that,” Bankston recalled. “I just remember I was scared.”