James A. Malloy
C Co., 175th Inf., 29th Division
The Only Scottish Soldier Buried in the American Cemetery on Omaha Beach
(Printed in The Twenty-Niner, March 2010. The 29th Division, also known as The Blue and Gray, has a long and storied history in Maryland and Virginia. The motto of the 29th Div. is: “Let’s Go“.)
Known world-wide as the “Major of St.-Lo”, Major Tom Howie is probably the most famous 29er in history. Among 29ers, the name of Medal of Honor winner Tech. Sgt. Frank Peregory is equally well known and revered. Both these soldiers were D-Day veterans who lost their lives in the Battle of Normandy and both are buried – in close proximity to each other – in the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-Saint-Laurent in France.
Nor far from their final resting place on that bluff overlooking Omaha Beach lies another 29er whose name should not be lost to history. James Alexander Malloy of the 175th Inf. is listed in the Normandy American Cemetery archives as the only Scottish soldier interred on this hallowed ground. His life and service with the 29ers is both typical and extraordinary – as ordinary and as unique as any 29er, famous and anonymous, who fought and died on the battlefield of World War II – and for that reason, I want to put his story “on the record” among his fellow 29ers.
I first visited Pvt. Malloy’s grave in 2005; I was in France with my husband for a month-long road trip and, since we were stopping off to tour Omaha Beach, my friend from Long Island had said to me, “You’re going to the American Cemetery? You should stop and visit my father there.” My friend, a Korea War vet named Joe Molloy, gave me his father’s name and I promised that we’d pay our respects when we went to Colleville.
This was not my first visit to the Normandy American Cemetery but it was the first time that I had a specific grave to call on, so I headed for the Visitor Center and waited in line at the information desk. When my turn came I gave James Malloy’s name to the polite but slightly harried young lady in charge of the thick reference books where the 9,387 graves in the cemetery are registered. She scribbled the name down, and then she asked for the name of James Malloy’s home state. As soon as I said “Scotland” she sat bolt upright and exclaimed “There’s only one soldier here from Scotland!” and quick as a blink she had a map of the cemetery in her hands and she circled the place where I could find Block J, Row 24, Grave 23.
It turns out that James Malloy is something of a tourist attraction at the American Cemetery – I have a souvenir map that I bought in Bayeux which features his grave along with 33 other notable interments. The fact that his father was notable for being the only Scottish soldier buried with the Americans surprised Joe Molloy – he’d only been twelve years old when his father was killed in the war and a lot of his father’s life story had been lost to him in the aftermath of the war (for good reasons that I will explain presently). I was, at the time, very involved in writing a book, so it was not until two years later that I could begin to do the research (tracking down orphanage records and requesting military files) that filled in many missing pieces to the James Malloy story.
James Malloy’s parents, Thomas and Marion Molloy, emigrated from Scotland to the United States in 1908 and with their young sons Robert and Hugh, they settled in New York City. In 1909 the first American-born child Thomas was born, joined in 1911 by James and finally, in 1913, by the last child, named Joseph. Tragically, Marion died in 1916 and the examiner’s report from the Department of Public Charity for Brooklyn and Queens states that:
Family has no relatives in the U.S. Father will keep youngest child with him. Home is broken up.
Admittance records of June 12, 1916 from the Saint John’s Residence for Boys state that “ the Father will board with Mrs. Johnson of Manhattan Avenue [in Harlem]; will keep youngest child…Oldest child to go to Otisville.”
Otisville was a sanatorium run by the New York City Department of Hospitals. Opened in 1906 and located 90 miles north of Manhattan in the Hudson Valley, it was the “healing center of choice” for tuberculosis patients evacuated from the city. Robert Molloy was 14 years old and on his own in Otisville; he disappears from the family records (Otisville closed in 1955).
The middle boys – the Scottish-born Hugh, age 8; and his two American-born brothers Thomas, age 6 and James, age 5 – were to spend 10 years in the Saint John’s orphanage in Brooklyn. Their father’s petition to re-gain custody of them in 1917 was rejected because he did not have a wife; by 1918 Thomas Molloy disappears from the boys’ visiting records at the orphanage (according to the family, this is because Thomas, a seaman possibly in the Merchant Marine, dies that year, “lost at sea”).
On June 10, 1922, the three Molloy boys were discharged from the orphanage and sent, along with their baby brother Joseph, (probably with funds raised by one of the many charitable aid societies of the era) across the Atlantic Ocean into the care of their paternal grandmother in Glasgow, Scotland.
When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the Molloy boys were split in their loyalties. The two oldest boys, Hugh and Thomas, joined up with British units; Hugh trained with the Royal Air Force to fight in the Battle of Britain and Tom joined the 7th Armoured Division and became one of Montgomery’s Desert Rats.
The two younger boys, both New Yorkers by birthright, held out. James and Joseph knew that the Americans would be pulled into the war eventually and they both waited until the time came when they could join the United Stated Army. James Molloy volunteered as a fire warden until the U.S. declared war against Germany on December 11, 1941. (Joseph, the baby of the family, served in Europe with General Patton’s Third Army.)
As we all know, 29ers began flooding into the UK through the port of Greenoch, Scotland, in September of 1942. Greenoch is less than twenty miles, and on the same rail line, as James’ hometown of Glasgow; Records from the War Department show that James Molloy entered active service in the United States Army on March 11, 1943. So it seems to have taken James six months to battle red tape and bureaucratic paperwork before he succeeded in securing the un-heard of exception to protocol that let him, finally, to become the only known 29er in history to have enlisted in Europe. James Malloy was 32 years old when he joined the Blue and Grays. This is also when, thanks to an Army clerk’s misspelling, James Molloy became James Malloy.
James’ young son Joe, growing up in the rough city of Glasgow and living under harsh war-time conditions for four years, remembers his first impression of the American G.I.s: “They were very round,” he says, laughing. Well fed, happy-go-lucky, and generous, the 29ers spoiled the boy on his visits “down south” to visit his father in the barracks of C Company, 175th Infantry, in Devon and Cornwall: “Oh yes, I liked hanging around them – they gave me comic books and chewing gum and it was like holidays when I was there,” Joe says.
James Malloy’s C Company leader, Tech Sergeant Bill Doyle of Baltimore (and Known to many of us as an active member in the 29th Division Association), told me that he remembered “Scotty” quite well: “He was a good soldier, a good man,” Bill says; and even after 60 years “I still remember the Scottish songs he taught us.”
But James Malloy’s best friend in C Company was a nineteen-year old draftee from Queens, New York named Harold Beukelaer. As one of the “old men” in the unit and a fellow Catholic, James wrote to Harold’s parents that he was looking out for the teenager during the year and a half that they trained together in England for the invasion of Europe.
Having survived D-Day, James and Harold were still fighting together on June 16, 1944. The 175th Inf. was making its way towards Hill 108 – Purple Heart Hill – and James Malloy was one of the first casualties in the battle for which the 175th would be awarded its Presidential Unit Citation. “I saw Scotty get shot,” Bill Doyle told me: “Scotty jumped over a hedgerow and a German sniper shot him down.”
“He died in my arms,” Harold told me, in a conversation I had with him about that day. “I was the worst day of my life,” he said. Harold Beukelaer was severely wounded in St. Lo on July 3, 1944, and evacuated to a hospital in England to await his transport back to the U.S. (he would undergo numerous surgeries and a year-long convalescence in army hospitals in New York). Said Harold: “Betty [James Malloy’s widow] found me in a hospital in the Midlands and wrote letter to my parents for me. She also told me that she wanted to raise Joey as an American.”
In fact, the reason that James Malloy was so insistent about joining the American Army in the first place was because he hoped it would enable him and his family emigrate back to America after the war, and Harold had made a promise to James that, if James were killed in action, that Harold would do everything he could to bring his wife and child to the United States. “I had to keep that promise,” Harold says, even though Harold was still underage when he returned to civilian life in 1945. So it was Harold’s father who had to fight with the authorities to sponsor Betty and Joe Molloy’s immigration in 1946.
The Beukelaer family welcomed the Scottish immigrants into their family – Betty and Joe Molloy lived with Harold’s parents and sister in Brooklyn and Harold taught the young boy how to become and American: “Joey has such a strong Scottish accent!” Harold’s sister Lorraine remembers about the newly-arrived 14-year old boy from Glasgow, “and he used to show the neighborhood kids his soccer tricks.”. Joe remembers that Harold gave him a copy of Studs Lonigan (“Racy stuff for a fourteen-year old boy,” Joe says) and that the Beukelaers took him to Coney Island on his first day in America: “I remember thinking that life was going to be pretty good in New York after all,” he says.
Like so many whose lives had been interrupted and devastated by the war, Betty and Joe threw themselves into a busy post-war life that left little time for dwelling on the past. A year later, Betty Malloy re-married (she would have two daughters and another son). Her new husband, a bartender in Brooklyn, was a Pacific veteran of the war and a cousin of a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers – “I met Hugh Casey!” Joe told me, who had by then totally lost his Scottish accent (and his interest in soccer) and become an All-American boy and a baseball fan. Until Joe and I began to research his father’s life, Joe had not re-connected with the Beukelaers in over 50 years.
Harold Beukelaer died on March 3, 2008, just three months after I was able to interview him about his war memories. “Harold never talked about the war,” his sister Lorraine told me when I interviewed her, but Harold opened up for the first time in decades to talk about James Malloy: “Jimmy Malloy was my best friend,” Harold told me; “He wanted his son Joe to be an American, to make Jimmy proud.” I have no doubt that “Jimmy” would be proud, both of his son, and his friend, and his 29ers.
Joe Molloy does not have any children that carry the Malloy name and Harold never married. So it is up to the 29ers to preserve the story of James Malloy, the only Scottish soldier buried in the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-Saint-Laurent. It is up to us to remember how the orphan boy from Glasgow became an American G.I. and made the ultimate sacrifice to save western civilization, and how a sacred vow was kept to bring that soldier’s little family “home”.
So if you go to that bluff overlooking Omaha Beach, to Block J, Row 24, Grave 23, give a salute to Pvt. James Alexander Malloy, C Company, 175th Inf., of New York and Scotland, and know that you are paying respects to “a good man, a good soldier”, but also to the promise that one 29er made another. Let’s Go.
My Book