BERT KEMP
A Reluctant Warrior with a Deadly Gift
Bert Wilson Kemp was a fairly typical product of the time and place into which he was born: a family farm in rural West Tennessee, in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet he was more than that – much more – for he was born with an amazing ability for precision, almost supernatural, marksmanship with weapons. And this gift, this ability applied to weapons of virtually any kind: catapult, bow and arrow, pistol or rifle. The choice of weapons didn’t seem to matter; he was equally gifted, and comfortable, with any of them. Whatever that rare combination of genes is that creates such a marksman, Bert Kemp was one of the tiny fraction of 1 per cent of the human population who are born with it. He had electrochemical circuits, almost cybernetic programmes, hard-wired on the surface of his brain, that naturally calculated, at lightning speed, such things as distance, trajectory, motion, wind and time, determining the sight picture and aiming point, sending the perfectly timed impulse along the neurological pathways to activate the flexor muscles in his trigger finger, bringing about the perfectly timed squeeze.
Bert also had exceptional vision and depth perception. This gift gave him an additional ‘edge’ because, when hunting, he usually saw the game animal before it saw him. And later, in the war, when scouting ahead or when he was stalking a designated German, Bert could consistently see his target before the target saw him. His grand-nephew, Odie Kemp, who became Bert’s protégé and hunting companion in his later years, expressed this advantage succinctly and emphatically: ‘He could see like a hawk.’
Combine these gifts with the ongoing need for food on his family’s table, in the years before and during the Great Depression in rural Tennessee, and the rare product is a Bert Kemp.
Bert was born in 1919 on a remote farm in Weakley County, Tennessee, the son of Whit Allen Kemp and Ludie Jean Nichols Kemp. The nearest town was the village of Cottage Grove, about four miles away, in adjacent Henry County. Bert was the next-to-youngest of six children; in a pattern typical of that time and place, only three of them would live to adulthood. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was six years old; his father never re-married. He grew up on the farm where he was born, learning early that survival depended on hard work, careful use of available resources, and self-reliance. Like the other children, Bert worked hard on the farm, where there was work to do the year round. But in the autumn and winter there was also time for hunting; this became his passion, and pre-determined much of what his life would become.
Hunting for food (and money)
As was the case with most remote farm families in that hard-scrabble time and place, there was little disposable cash in the family, and the rule when something was needed on the farm, was ‘make it, make do, or do without’. Being something he could make for himself, with no cash outlay for materials, the catapult (or slingshot as Kemp and his family knew it) was very naturally his first weapon. He would later take one to war, and it would serve him well. Even after the war, and for the rest of his life, he never lost his fondness for the slingshot, and it was always with him. It became a family proverb that ‘if Bert had his trousers on, he had the slingshot with him’.
A major source of meat for the family table was wild game. At the time, deer were scarce, and reliance was heavily upon rabbits and squirrels. Growing up in the forest, Bert quite naturally learned to move through it as if he were a natural part of it, disturbing nothing, making no noise. He learned early to kill a squirrel high in a tree, or a rabbit on the run, with his home-made sling shot. Under those circumstances he would get only one shot, and he had to make the first shot the killing shot, which meant a head shot. Although he could never have imagined it, this also contributed to what he would become in 1942.
At age 9 he was given his first gun, a single-shot, bolt-action, .22-calibre rifle, and it dramatically altered the economy of his life. He killed squirrels and rabbits at an increasing rate, and sold his surplus kills to Mr Miller, owner of the local country store. Other boys in the community did the same thing, but used shot-guns or made body shots with rifles. Bert was paid more for his game because they were all taken with head shots, and the meat was not damaged. He then used the money to buy more .22-calibre ammunition, for killing still more squirrels and rabbits. What money was left over, he gave to his father to help support the family. With the expending of each box of fifty rounds of ammunition, Bert’s God-given ability to hit small targets in difficult situations developed to still higher levels. ‘I hunted just about all the time when I was a boy growing up around Cottage Grove,’ he would tell a reporter for the county newspaper after the war, ‘It was the Depression, and rough times, and you had to learn to adjust your sight picture carefully to add food to the table.’
Another ability with which Bert was blessed was in baseball; he was a natural. He could play any position, and he could throw a natural curve ball; but the need for his help on the farm ended his school days, and baseball, in the elementary grades. When he could get away from chores, he would walk to the one-room school at recess time, play baseball with the boys there, and walk back home; but even that soon ended.
His love of baseball would never leave him, and in later years he would watch his children and grandchildren play, quietly teaching them things that their coaches probably did not know.
Learning to look for ‘What shouldn’t be there’
As he grew to manhood during the Great Depression his woodcraft skills and amazing marksmanship continued to improve. His father taught him to spot game standing still in deep cover. When scanning ahead, he was taught to look for things that should not be there – perhaps an ear, a leg, or a foot of a game animal, not quite concealed. When the forest was quiet he could sometimes hear a deer walking, even though he couldn’t see it, and at times he could even smell one.
Bert’s ‘small game business’ prospered as he continued to kill squirrels and rabbits, selling the meat and buying more cartridges at such a rate that by the late 1930s and up until he was drafted into the Army, he was firing 500 rounds a week at small, distant and quickly moving targets.
As basically serious, if not grim, as life was in that time and place, there was always time for fun. On one occasion when his Aunt Bertha was gathering eggs she found an unusually large one, and it was briefly a conversation piece. Bert showed her a nickel (a significant amount of money then) and bet her that if she would throw the egg up in the air a few feet above her head, he could hit it with his .22 rifle before it came back down so she could catch it. He said that if he missed he would give her the nickel. Being a good sport, Aunt Bertha tossed the egg up, higher than her head. Bert easily shot the egg dead centre at the top of its flight, but Aunt Bertha had made a slight mistake in trajectory: the egg was higher than her head, but it was also directly over her head when Bert’s little projectile smashed it, and the contents of the large egg drenched Aunt Bertha’s hair. She gave Bert a scolding that could have peeled the paint off the henhouse, but he heard little of it for he was rolling on the ground, convulsed with laughing. And he kept his nickel.
Bert could make a game out of his shooting and, being a boy, he often did. His nephew Odie (son and namesake of Bert’s oldest brother), who was only eleven years younger than his Uncle Bert, had a baseball of which he was very proud. Bert told him to go around on the other side of the house where he would be safe, and Bert could not see where he was. He told Odie to throw the ball up, from anywhere, in any direction, and he bet that he could hit it with his .22 rifle. Odie went to the other side of the house, threw the ball up above the house and Bert hit it. Then Odie threw the ball up, from a different spot and at an angle, and again Bert hit it. This challenge was repeated, over and over. Bert was totally focused on hitting the ball and, in the excitement of the contest, it did not occur to young Odie, until it was too late to matter, that Bert was shooting his prized ball to pieces. Nephew Odie, not quite sure whether to laugh or cry, joined Bert in his laughter and a family legend was born.
One memorable summer the three Kemp boys decided to make some wine – in clear violation of their father’s rules and the law during Prohibition. Clandestine wine-making was pretty simple in that time and place: there was plenty of fruit juice, the very air contained yeast, as did the skin of the fruit, and there were plenty of places to hide most anything in the surrounding fields and forest. So Odie, Chesley and Bert gathered wild grapes in the forest (muscadines were the best), crushed out the juice, left it open for a day or two to allow plenty of yeast to add itself to the brew, and then hid it until fermentation was complete. But the amateur vintners made two mistakes: they decided to hide it under the house; and they corked the bottles too soon. Fermentation was not finished, and the process was accelerated by the heat of the summer night. The carbon dioxide produced in the fermentation process built up until the corks could no longer contain it. Corks began to fail, each with a loud ‘pop’ as it left the neck of the bottle and thumped against the underside of the floor, eventually waking their father. They lost their wine, got a sound whipping, and another family legend was born.
The outside world comes calling
By 1940, at age 21, the reputation of this obscure farm boy from the Tennessee back country had spread, without benefit of advertising or promotion, from the cracker barrel and checker board culture in Miller’s store and the shady, dirt streets of Cottage Grove, until it reached the Remington Arms Company in far-off New York state. A Remington recruiter was sent to find the young phenomenon and offer him a lucrative job as an exhibition shooter. This would not only bring him more money than he had ever dreamed of, but would also make him famous in the world of guns and hunting. But Bert was a quiet, private person. His world consisted of the family farm, the familiar hills, valleys and forests around it, Johnson Chapel, their little Methodist Church, and the village of Cottage Grove. The thought of travelling to strange places and being on display before strange people was not appealing. Also his brother Odie, thirteen years older than Bert, had already married and moved away. His other brother, Chesley, was slowly dying with tuberculosis, and Bert was needed on the farm. Bert declined the offer from Remington, and stayed on the farm.
But not for long.
War comes to Weakley County
On 7 December 1941 the Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and other places in the Pacific, plunged the U.S. into the war. A month later, in January 1942, the war had reached all the way into Weakley County. Like Sergeant Alvin York of the First World War, another country boy from the hills of Tennessee who had become a reluctant warrior, Bert Kemp was drafted for Army service. Both Tennesseans were remarkable for their God-given talent for accurate shooting; also, like Sergeant York, Bert’s religious training and gentle nature made him reluctant to kill. Unlike Sergeant York, Bert would capture few German soldiers; but in terms of killing them, Sergeant Kemp would far outdo his famous Tennessee predecessor.
But all of that almost didn’t happen. When Bert reported for induction he didn’t pass the physical examination. One of the examining physicians, however, knew Bert and his family, and knew of Bert’s amazing accuracy with weapons. He was re-examined, and this time no fault was found. It was 18 January 1942 and Bert Kemp was Private Bert W. Kemp, Serial Number 34 185 517, Army of the United States.
‘Get this man off the firing line!’
The medical problem that was ‘overlooked’ at his induction physical was apparently a hernia, for shortly after beginning basic training he underwent surgery for hernia repair, and missed the training on the rifle range. After Basic Training he joined the 1st Infantry Division at Camp Blanding, Florida. On the rifle range, as the division prepared for combat, an officer watched Bert as he reduced the target’s bull’s eye to tatters, with a group so tight that individual hits could not be scored. ‘Get this man off the firing line’, the officer said, ‘and get someone up here who needs to be here.’ Army authorities were beginning to take official notice of Bert’s amazing skill with the rifle, the skill that would force this gentle, kind man from rural Tennessee into becoming a killing machine of seldom seen efficiency.
One soldier in Bert’s unit became aware of his uncanny ability to shoot and, for a while, it made him prosperous. Unknown to Bert, the man was taking bets on Bert’s ability to hit small targets – bets he knew he could not lose. Bert found out what he was doing and put a stop to it – he strongly disapproved of gambling, especially when the victims could not win.
The offending peep sight
On the troop ship carrying him to England, Bert decided to improve the sights on his M1 Garand rifle. He was accustomed to open sights; and the small, circular peep sight at the rear of the barrel bothered him. It seemed to limit the sweep and scope of his peripheral vision. He didn’t like it, and he knew that he could shoot better without it. It had to go. Unacquainted with the realities of Army ways, he made his way below decks to the ship’s machine shop where he borrowed a file. Back on the weather deck, he sat and filed on the peep sight until it was completely gone.
Everything was fine until an officer saw what he had done to his rifle. He stared with disbelief at the vacant spot where the peep sight had been, unable for a moment to comprehend what Bert had done to this piece of government property. Then he exploded, threatening every punishment conceivable, short of the gallows. When he calmed down, he asked Bert why he had done this terrible thing to Mister Garand’s masterpiece. Bert replied, simply and honestly, ‘It gets in my way.’ This answer caused another eruption, and Bert was promised disciplinary action when they landed. Charges were filed against him and, after arriving with his battalion in Dorset in England on 7 August 1942, his case was set in motion. The charges were serious, but before they could be carried out, a senior officer who had heard of Bert’s amazing shooting ability, said ‘Leave him alone – he has demonstrated that he did the right thing.’ The charges were dismissed.
The 1st Division trained in England for three months, went back aboard ship and sailed for North Africa, landing at Oran in Algeria on 8 November 1942. After a brief defence, the Vichy French forces surrendered; but the rest would not be so easy. From there on it would be heavy, sometimes vicious, combat with Erwin Rommel’s German and Italian forces at places like Maktar. Tebourba, Medjez el Bab, the bloody disaster at Kasserine Pass, Gafsa, El Guettar, Béja and Mateur. They would fight in North Africa until May 1943. And after that there would be Sicily.
Bert’s first kill
At times Bert fought with his rifle company, Company L, 3rd Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, as a scout-sniper, sent to advanced positions from where he could see the enemy dispositions, provide timely intelligence, and kill selected targets (usually officers) at long range. It was on such a mission, in the North Africa campaign, that he got his first kill. He spotted a German soldier in an observation post, and had a clear field of fire, but he couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger. Finally the German spotted Bert and fired; he missed. He fired again and missed. The German fired eight times, with each round coming closer. When his eighth round spattered dirt in Bert’s face, he squeezed the trigger, fired one round, and the German dropped. Bert’s deeply ingrained reluctance to kill another human being was not a thing easily overridden.
At times he functioned as a distant point man, scouting far ahead of his advancing unit, seeking always to see without being seen by the enemy. This was the case as his regiment approached a 5-kilometre gauntlet called Kasserine Pass, where the Americans would suffer a major defeat at the hands of Erwin Rommel, and learn some hard lessons at a high cost in lives and careers. This battle was actually a series of battles in which poor American leader ship and training led to a major disaster. On one of those hill sides overlooking the pass Bert, with his keen vision and common sense, could see clearly what his unit was walking into, and he radioed his command post to warn them. The commanding officer said he wasn’t going to change his battle plan based on the opinion of a low-ranking enlisted man. ‘We know what we are doing,’ he said. But they didn’t. And Bert could only watch and grieve as Rommel’s forces chewed them up.
It was cold that winter in the mountains of North Africa, and on one occasion this proved to be Bert’s redemption. Taken by surprise by a German column coming from an unexpected direction, Bert had no chance to run and no place to hide. In desperation, he buried himself in a snow bank and lay still, something he had done for fun as a boy. The Germans passed by so close to him that he could hear them talking and coughing. When he was sure they were far away he carefully emerged from the snow, and looked around. They had passed, he was now behind them and they were taking no care for their own security. He could easily have killed several of them, but was glad just to get away and continue his patrol. Remembering that day he said it wasn’t so bad under there. ‘If you stay under the snow long enough, you get warm.’
A ditch, a tank and a great many Germans
On one occasion Bert was alone, well in advance of his unit, concealed in a ditch. He was watching German units assemble, when he was apparently spotted. The German infantry opened fire and began to attack the ditch. With no place to go, and the Germans closing in on him, he began to take a deadly toll on the advancing infantry. To reload he would shove a new clip in his M1 with one hand, while continuing to fire with his pistol, then resume his deadly rifle fire. Because he favoured head shots, when the Germans went down they stayed down. So many Germans were dying in front of his ditch, they could not believe that they were fighting only one man. They called up a tank. As the huge machine rumbled towards him Bert knew that he couldn’t fight a tank and win, so he began to run down the ditch towards some woods. The German infantry were now up to the edge of his ditch, and every time a head appeared above the rampart Bert, still running, fired and the head disappeared. Unintentionally, it became what amounted to an amazing slaughter of a locally significant force, but by only one man.
Reaching the end of the ditch, he still had a space of 50 metres ahead of him before he could reach cover. He burst forth and sprinted for the woods. The tank’s machine gunner opened up on him, with the bullet strikes spraying mud on him, and he was still only half way to the woods. He thought he was a goner, when a P-38 fighter suddenly appeared behind him at treetop level, making straight for the tank. Bert had never seen an aircraft fly so low; when it passed over him ‘it was so low that it nearly jerked my topcoat off’. The P-38 killed the tank, and then went to work on the exposed German infantry. Bert made it to the woods without being hit and never looked back. His rifle barrel was still so hot that when night fell and dew settled on it, the oxidation process was accelerated and it rusted overnight. His unit moved out the next morning with Bert scouting in front; and when they reached the ditch they found so many dead Germans in front of the ditch that they covered the ground. Bert remembered, ‘we could have walked for 40 yards without stepping on the ground’.
But soon Bert would find a sniper team-mate and he wouldn’t be operating alone any more.
A sniper partner and lifelong friend
Bert was promoted to private first class, and then to corporal. It was in an assault on an enemy-held hill that he found the man who would be his sniper partner, and lifelong best friend.
The hill was prepared by artillery and mortar fire, and the assault platoons moved in. Casualties were heavy, and the assault platoons were driven back several times. Finally, in a last attempt to take the hill, Corporal Kemp was the senior man standing and he led the assault. Throwing grenades, he made it to the top and hit the deck. Knowing that he must immediately set up a hasty defence against a German counter-attack, he looked around to see how many men he had with him on the hill. There was only one. That man was Wesley Holly of Mississippi; the rest of his men had either gone down as casualties or stopped short of the crest and turned back. He and Wesley hung on to the top of that hill until reinforcements could arrive, and it was the beginning of a friend ship that would end only with Wesley’s death forty-five years later. In the months of fighting that followed, the two would be inseparable, and each would save the other’s life at least once.
The sniper team concept as we know it today, with a designated shooter and a spotter with a spotting scope, had not been fully developed in the North Africa and Sicily campaigns of 1943. The teaming up of Bert and Wesley was more of their own design, more out of necessity than established doctrine. They knew that they could trust one another, and they came to know one another so well as to be able to communicate at times without words.
Like Bert, Wesley had grown up on a remote farm – his in Noxubee County, Mississippi. And, like Bert, he had grown up in the forest, hunting to put meat on the table. Quite naturally Wesley, like Bert, had developed the skills and patience necessary for a sniper to function effectively and stay alive. In this sense, they were a matched pair.
After the Kasserine Pass disaster, many commanders were relieved, and tactics were quickly re-thought to match the terrain, German tactics and circumstances. It is fair to say that when Bert’s division landed in North Africa there was no established doctrine for the use of snipers. They were thought of as ‘scout-snipers’ and were called upon, when it seemed necessary, to do a variety of things, but sniper doctrine and training as we know it today was still far into the future. In the First World War, sniping had been developed to a high degree in the static years of trench warfare, but it was abandoned after the war. In the Second World War the same was true in static situations, such as the battle for Stalingrad, but in the fast-moving combat in North Africa and Sicily, it was more a matter of multi-faceted improvisation. Bert and Wesley were making it up as they went along; and it was only the grace of God and their experiences growing up in the forests of Tennessee and Mississippi that kept them from being killed early in the game. They had no spotter scope and no telescopic sights; they had only their sharp eyes, easy familiarity with the outdoors, and their marksmanship skills.
No surrender for Bert and Wesley
Both Bert and Wesley were acquiring reputations for success in the kills count, and they both felt very strongly that they must never allow themselves to be captured, for they had heard that, if they were captured, the Germans would torture and kill them. This, of course, was not necessarily true, but it was what they heard – it was ‘the word’.
They were often well in advance of their attacking units, in established, concealed positions, from which they could observe enemy activity for several days. And from these positions they could fire on selected targets. On one occasion, when they were preparing to move out, they were told that there would be a third man going with them. A new lieutenant had joined the company and he was being sent out with Bert and Wesley to gain some experience. The patrol did not go well. Spotted early by the Germans, they came under small arms fire which steadily increased in volume as the German unit moved into the attack. The lieutenant, who had never before been under fire, panicked and said that they should surrender. Without taking his eyes off the enemy, Bert merely said, ‘No sir’ as he continued to fire. When he next glanced at the lieutenant he saw him absorbed in tying a white handkerchief to the barrel of his M1 carbine. When the lieutenant looked up, he was looking into the muzzle of Bert’s rifle. Turning mutely to Wesley for support, he found himself looking into the muzzle of Wesley’s rifle. With that the lieutenant collapsed, curled up in the bottom of the hole and began to weep, as Bert and Wesley turned back to the fight. Soon Bert heard firing to his right; looking around he saw that the lieutenant had regained his composure and re-joined the action. The fighting grew fierce as the Germans brought up a light machine gun, firing so close that the muzzle flash briefly blinded Bert before it was put out of action. Finally, punished by the deadly rifle fire, reinforced by the lieutenant with his carbine, the Germans withdrew to a covered position and Bert’s three-man team disappeared to the rear, into the forest.
Back at the unit, Bert told the lieutenant that nothing would be said about his attempt to surrender. But he hoped that he would never again have to go on a patrol with an inexperienced officer, where he might have to risk a mutiny charge to keep from being captured.
BARs and German machine gunners
Sniping came naturally to Bert and he established his own tactics and techniques as he went: a combination of what he had learned in the forest growing up, and the hard lessons of on-the-job training on the battlefield. One thing he quickly learned concerned the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and German machine gunners. The BAR was a product of the genius of John Moses Browning, an 8-kilogram automatic rifle – in effect a lightweight machine gun – which could be fired from the shoulder standing, lying prone with a bipod, or from the hip on a sling. Like all Browning weapons, it was utterly dependable. The Germans learned to fear it, and Bert learned about this fear. As a result of the BAR’s effectiveness, the BAR men became a target of choice for German machine gunners. Realizing this, Bert and Wesley learned to move, when they could, into a position well off to both sides of a BAR man, find a place with concealment and a field of fire, and wait for the Germans to bring up their machine gun. As they set up their heavy gun, with their attention focused on the BAR man, Bert and Wesley would pick off the German crew, leaving their gun un-manned and the BAR man, for the moment, a lot safer.
Fighting in hedgerows and thick brush, Bert profited from a lesson that his father had taught him in hunting when he was growing up: to stop, be still, and ‘look for something that shouldn’t be there’. Back home in the Tennessee forest, hunting game, that ‘something’ might be a part of a leg, a rabbit’s exposed ear, or a squirrel’s tail. In combat it might be a boot tip, the edge of a pack or helmet, or a flash of light reflected from a binocular lens or telescopic sight. A German soldier might be still, thinking he was completely concealed, and therefore invisible; but when something ‘that shouldn’t be there’ showed, it usually cost him his life.
‘Light up and die’
Wesley was an expert marksman, but not in the sense that Bert was. Wesley was deadly at long-range sniping, when he had time to study the target, estimate windage, elevation and effects of light. He could squeeze off such a shot with deadly accuracy. Bert, of course, could do the same; but Bert was also deadly as a snap-shooter. That rare electrochemical circuit board that was naturally wired into his brain made him able to perform all those calculations in a fraction of a second and hit a small target that was visible only briefly and then lost in darkness. This was the case when, at night, a careless German would light a cigarette or his pipe. During the one or two seconds that the German’s face was illuminated by the flame Bert could fire, and the soldier would pay with his life for his moment of carelessness. Telling of this after the war, Wesley would swear that, in the flicker of time that the light existed, the German’s head would disappear, leaving just a glimpse of ashes, suspended in the dying light. Did he exaggerate? Maybe – stories have a way of growing with the retelling over the years, even when we don’t intend it. But I wasn’t there, and Wesley was, and I will give him the benefit of any doubt. At any rate, it is a fact that in combat, in the dark, the rule has been, for a very long time, ‘light up and die’ – especially if there is a Bert Kemp on the other side, watching.
Stalking key targets
At times Bert was assigned a specific target – usually a certain German officer. The loss of such an officer, especially in his own rear area where he was supposed to be safe, could create command confusion, undermine morale and, at least temporarily, make that unit less effective. These missions could take several days, just to get into position without being seen, where the target was expected to appear. And then, after the kill, it was even more difficult to escape unseen and return to allied lines.
Bert had been told, not necessarily correctly, that the typical German soldier was trained to obey, not to think and act independently; as a result, a unit would often become confused when its immediate commander was killed. One such mission left a particularly vivid picture in Bert’s memory: a German lieutenant, leader of a special operations unit. The man was good, and his excellent performance and resulting reputation became his death sentence. When Bert, from an unseen firing point, dropped the officer with a head shot, his men reacted immediately; they scattered. Instead of reorganizing and moving aggressively in the direction from which the shot had come, those around the dead officer remained for critical minutes in confusion, while Bert was escaping. He found this kind of mission the most difficult, in every way. In addition to the patience required and the danger, it was very personal – it seemed like murder. He would find these kills the most difficult to forget, especially one of them.
The kill that Bert would never forget, the one that bothered him most, occurred in the fast-moving, sometimes confused and poorly coordinated fighting in the desert. Bert’s battalion found itself isolated, temporarily cut off from the regiment, and completely surrounded by German infantry. The Germans did not have sufficient forces to overrun the Americans, and a stalemate ensued. With neither force able to break through the other, the Germans called up an English-speaking soldier who had been educated in the U.S. With a megaphone, he launched into an ongoing effort to convince the Americans that their situation was hopeless, and that they should surrender. After a long time, with the propaganda speeches more or less continuous, Bert’s commanding officer walked up to his position on the perimeter and said, ‘Kemp, I’ve heard all I want to hear from that guy. Take care of him.’
Bert moved out, crawling up shallow gullies, using desert shrubbery where it appeared, and rock outcroppings for cover and concealment. It took a long time for him to reach a vantage point from where he could see the German speaker without being seen, and with a clear field of fire; when he did, he was looking at him face-on. He really didn’t want to kill the man, but orders, as the saying goes, are orders. He lined up his sights for a clean head shot and the German’s last surrender speech was cut off suddenly in mid-sentence. Slowly, reversing his path to the firing point, Bert made his way back to his unit and resumed his position on the perimeter.
For the rest of his life this one kill bothered Bert. He would say, ‘That man had done me no harm. He was just making speeches. He was a threat to nobody – not to me or to anyone else – he didn’t even have a weapon.’
Bert’s reputation spread to the allied armies and, at times, they requested his help. He was assigned to temporary duty with both the British and with the French. For his outstanding service to the French he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre. It has been reported that he was recommended for a high British decoration, but if so it was lost in the administrative confusion of the battlefield, for no record of it has been found. It is interesting that, on a large and confused, rapidly changing battlefield, Bert’s reputation spread outward, all the way to the high levels of command in both the French and British Armies. Some have even reported that Adolf Hitler, through Rommel, became aware of this deadly sniper with the American 1st Infantry Division. There is no record to substantiate this, but a sniper who could stalk and kill key officers at a great distance without being seen and then escape was a very great threat.
This spreading reputation as a sniper is reminiscent of the way the reputation of an unknown farm boy, in the back country of rural Tennessee, once spread all the way to high levels of executive authority at Remington Arms in New York. It seems that when one is that good, the fact cannot be contained.
A slingshot on the battlefield?
The slingshot, the first weapon Bert mastered as a little boy, remained a favourite for the rest of his life, and he was almost never without one. He carried one with him all through combat in the Second World War, and at times it was a critical part of his armament – not for killing Germans but for killing rabbits. Many times, when he and Wesley were on extended patrols behind German lines, or long stays in an observation post, they needed food. On Sicily they found the Corsican hare, a relative of the rabbit, but much larger than the cottontail rabbits they had hunted as boys. And they seemed to be everywhere. When they were behind enemy lines and in need of food, Bert’s slingshot and the large Corsican hares provided it, because the slingshot made no sound that would give away their presence. When they were in a place where they could build a small fire without being seen, they cooked the meat and feasted, or cooked it and carried it along with them. Remembering his boyhood ‘meat business’ with Miller’s store, Bert thought about how much more money he could have made if he had been bringing in these big Corsican hares.
A Silver Star in Sicily
In ferocious fighting on Sicily Bert, by then a sergeant, found himself in a key position in the savage battle for some vital terrain. Bert, as usual in an observation and firing point in advance of his unit, saw a major German attack on his unit developing, and his firing point became the key to saving his comrades. His citation for the Silver Star medal reads:
Undaunted by an intense enemy tank, artillery and machine-gun barrage, Sergeant Kemp fearlessly remained in an exposed vantage point, and with accurate and rapid fire skillfully covered his comrades’ withdrawal to more advantageous positions, mortally wounding a number of Germans, and destroying a hostile strong point, thereby contributing immeasurably to repulsing a determined enemy counter-attack.
The expression ‘mortally wounding’ in the citation is interesting. Because Bert always preferred head shots, virtually all that he wounded were indeed ‘mortally’ wounded – dead before they hit the ground.
The presentation of this medal made it all the more meaningful to Bert because it was made by Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, son of the 26th President of the United States. After pinning the medal on Bert, General Roosevelt told Bert to turn about, facing the formation, and told the massed soldiers to ‘look at this man’. He said that he had plenty more of those medals, and challenged all of the other soldiers to perform as Bert had performed. Bert was mortified. He was always embarrassed by praise. After the war he consistently objected to being called a hero; the heroes, he said, were those who died. But that moment with General Roosevelt was nonetheless a treasured experience that he never forgot.
Five wounds take their toll
Bert was wounded five times: three times in North Africa and twice in Sicily. On one occasion he was knocked unconscious and left for dead. In the confusion of the battle, he had been separated from Wesley, and those around him had left him among the corpses. When Wesley discovered what had happened he returned alone, through a hail of fire at great risk to his life, to that corpse-strewn hilltop. He found Bert and dragged him back to a place of relative safety. From there Bert was carried to the aid station, thence to the field hospital. Had it not been for Wesley’s courage, and his refusal to leave his friend among the corpses, dead or alive, the wound would have been fatal. Each had saved the other one’s life at least once. Neither was decorated for these heroic acts; but they never forgot.
Each time Bert was medically evacuated to a hospital for treatment he felt guilty for leaving his buddies to fight without him, a common emotion for wounded combat infantrymen. Finally, severely wounded, he refused to leave his unit and continued fighting, saying he was needed where he was; but that fifth wound would end his career as a master sniper, and, in time, as a soldier. In savage fighting on Sicily a piece of shrapnel hit him just behind his ear, fracturing his skull, and penetrating five centimetres into his brain. This wound, with suddenness and finality, ended Bert’s combat service, for it left him with permanent brain damage, double vision, migraine headaches, and deafness in one ear, and it made the recoil and muzzle blast of firing .30-calibre weapons painful. Hospital treatment was needed, first overseas and later nearer home. He would wear glasses for the rest of his life to correct the double vision; when he didn’t wear them the migraines returned.
Bert and Wesley, as a scout-sniper team, were no more, and they would lose track of one another. Their friendship, however, would be renewed unexpectedly years later, when Wesley, again facing death, would call out to Bert for help.
Aftermath
Bert’s career as a combat infantryman and master sniper was over. There would follow months of surgery and hospitalization before he was finally returned to the States, where there would be still more hospitalization before he was able to return to duty. He was briefly assigned duty as a military policeman, guarding German prisoners of war in Georgia, but he was too badly broken, and really wasn’t up to it. It is the nature of severe head injuries that our mental mechanisms for controlling emotions are greatly reduced. Without such injury we are, as Bert put it, ‘able to kill by staying mad 90 per cent of the time’, by trivializing the horror, or simply by burying it somewhere deep inside. But in Bert’s severely weakened condition the emotional toll of all the killing, and the death and mutilation of his friends, descended upon him like a cloud of lead.
He wasn’t mad any more – just exhausted – and vulnerable. He remembered his dead friends and worried about Wesley; and the cumulative weight of it all, in spite of his inherent toughness, over whelmed him. The quiet, gentle, sensitive man, whose amazing gift had forced him into the role of master sniper, stalker and killer, began to crumble inside. To paraphrase Mark Antony, master snipers should be made of sterner stuff.
Bert, in spite of his innate gentleness, had risen to the occasion, answered the call of duty, and performed superbly under the most difficult circumstances. Now, privately, he grieved and wept and prayed, and in time found the peace he needed in the God he served. He was finally discharged for disability; his discharge document lists his character as ‘Excellent’ and his physical condition as ‘Poor’. He was spent – no less courageous than before, but used up.
He returned home, thin and weary, still suffering from migraines, dizziness and double vision, and deaf in one ear. The gentle, kind, sensitive man who never wanted to hurt anyone, wore the Silver Star, five Purple Hearts, the Soldier’s Medal for heroism, the French Croix de Guerre with Fourragère, the Good Conduct Medal, the European, African and Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with three bronze battle stars, the gold-framed blue ribbon for two Presidential Unit Citations, and the blue and silver Combat Infantryman’s Badge.
Bert returned to Weakley County and the farm where he had been born and reared; it was Christmas 1944. His father needed help with the farm work, and Bert moved easily back into his role there. He spent time in the woods, and found it to be a peaceful, friendly, healing environment, but he didn’t feel like hunting.
Shortly after his return he attended a basketball game at Cottage Grove High School (the high school he didn’t get to attend), and here he met Thera Peale. Their meeting was unexpected, sudden and violent. She came running around a corner of the building at just the wrong time, and crashed into Bert, literally knocking him down. She was a senior at Cottage Grove, and she had bowled him over in more ways than one; they were married the following November, 1945. She was 18 and Bert was 26.
They bought a farm near Thera’s father’s, and in December 1947 the first of four daughters, Ludie, was born. Two years later their house burned and all contents were lost. They sold the farm and, like many others in the South, moved north, to Chicago, to find work. The climate was unhealthy for Ludie, and both Bert and Thera were unhappy in the industrial North. They returned to Henry County, bought a house in Paris, the county seat, where Bert worked for Holley Carburetor. Thera had a natural gift for mathematics and book keeping, and they conducted several small businesses from their home. In 1955 twin girls, Vanesia and Theresia were born.
Crisis reunites Wesley and Bert
When the twins were eighteen months old, a telephone call during a Sunday lunch changed their lives. Bert took the call, and when he returned to the table he was weeping. The call was from the local police, who had received a call from a woman in Mississippi. She was trying to reach a man named Bert who had served with her husband in the war. It was Wesley Holly’s wife. Wesley had been critically injured in a farm accident, was near death and delirious, and continued to call for someone named ‘Bert’. The attending physician said that he believed this Bert must be someone who had been with Wesley when he was in trouble in the past, and it would be important to find him and have him come to the hospital. Mrs Holly had heard her husband speak of a close friend in the war named Bert, but she didn’t know his last name. She only knew that he had once lived near Paris, Tennessee. She called the police in Paris and told her story, and thus their call to him.
Bert left immediately. He stayed by Wesley’s bed, held his hand, and talked to him for several days before he finally regained consciousness; and he stayed with him until he was convinced that Wesley would recover. The friendship that was born in crisis on a faraway battlefield was re-born in crisis in a Mississippi hospital, and they would be close until Wesley’s death, thirty years later. The relationship was so close that Bert’s children came naturally to call Wesley and his wife ‘Uncle Wesley’ and ‘Aunt Mattie’; and they refer to them this way today, although both are long dead.
In later years
In October 1962 Tammy, the fourth, and final, child was born to Bert and Thera. In 1966 Bert’s father died, and in 1969 his younger sister Gertie died. His brother Odie was all that was left of his family. During these years Bert and Wesley enjoyed frequent hunting and fishing trips together, and various of the children joined in. They were times they never forgot, and times that their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews continue to talk about today. Those times together with Wesley and the children were Bert’s happiest.
Bert killed his first deer at age 39, with a bow and arrow. In spite of his late start he still set records for deer kills in both Mississippi and Tennessee. For gun hunting he used small-bore rifles because they were easier on his injured head. His favourite rifle was a .223 made in Finland. And he killed many deer with his .22-calibre pistol, with a 14-inch barrel and telescopic sight. Most deer hunters try for a heart or a neck shot, but Wesley still preferred a head shot (except for trophy specimens). His grand-nephew Odie says that when he wanted to ‘show out’ he would make a called eye shot.
There were long-standing problems in the marriage which Bert approached with his characteristic patience, hoping that things would improve; but they didn’t. By 1977 the divorce was final. Bert never allowed the girls to say anything critical about Thera; ‘Remember,’ he would say, ‘she is still your mother’.
During those difficult years, Bert had become both mother and father and, without complaint or comment, had moved smoothly into cooking, laundry and all that was necessary to keep the home running. According to Ludie, his oldest, ‘He could iron a dress as well as any woman, and he was world-class in braiding pigtails or making a pony tail.’ She marvelled that hands as rough and scarred as his could be so gentle in caring for his daughters.
Dealing with his memories
At times, when questioned, Bert would speak of the war to close friends; but otherwise he internalized it. If with a group of family or friends and a war movie came on the television, he would quietly leave the room without a word. When his daughter Ludie learned in school of the Kasserine Pass battle, she came home and asked Bert if he knew anything about it. He stood looking at her, wordless, for what seemed like a long time; and then his eyes filled with tears and he left the room. When he returned he continued with what he had been doing, as if her question had never been asked. He never spoke of the war with his daughters, except to assure them that he was not a hero.
His amazing gift for shooting never left him. The twins have happy memories of times when they were five or six, and Bert would have them throw two pennies up in the air at the same time. He would shoot centre holes in both, and they would excitedly search until they found the pennies. Only recently, twin Theresia’s daughter, Mika, told her own story. She told her mother that she too had played that game with her grandfather, only he had her throwing dimes into the air, making for a much smaller target. Neither the twins nor Mika had ever known him to miss.
That ever-present slingshot
Since boyhood, Bert and his slingshots were inseparable. He always had one, made of dogwood, and it was always with him. Not infrequently wild animals (‘varmints’) would get into the carburettor plant where Bert worked. Killing them with a firearm was too dangerous; but Bert would solve the problem with his ever-present sling shot.
At the wedding of his daughter Ludie he and she were photographed as they knelt at the chancel rail for prayer. Looking at the photo after the wedding, she noticed a bulge under his suit jacket. It was his slingshot, in the hip pocket where he always carried it!
Losing Wesley and brother Odie
In 1988 Bert lost Wesley to cancer. He sat by his bed, as he had after the accident, talked to him and held his hand until he died. His brother Odie died the same year, and Bert was without both his brother and his best friend.
In time, Wesley’s son Jimmy, Bert’s grand-nephew Odie Kemp, and David Bumpus, a young Paris policeman, became his fishing and hunting buddies. Although David was much younger than Bert (who routinely called him ‘Boy’), he became more than a hunting and fishing companion to Bert; he became a friend and confidant. When David was on midnight patrol he always drove past Bert’s house; and if the kitchen light was on, he knew that ‘the war was bothering him’ and that Bert needed a friend. Not infrequently what was bothering him was that unarmed, English-speaking German with the megaphone. Bert would cook something special for them to share, and he would tell David things he didn’t tell anyone else, now that Wesley was gone. Bert’s daughter Ludie accurately observed that, ‘Jimmy, Odie and David were the sons Daddy never had.’
Requiem for a reluctant warrior
Cancer, which Bert had survived earlier, returned in 2000 and there was no stopping it. Knowing his end was near, Bert prepared. He asked David to see to it that the girls were spared as much pain as possible. He made it known to the family that he wanted to die at home, and that he wanted a ‘no-resuscitation order’. His daughters watched over him during those last weeks and Theresia, who is a nurse, saw to it that his wishes were carried out. Bert was comatose during the last two weeks and the twins stayed by his side. He was moved from the hospital to his home on a Wednesday afternoon; and on the following Saturday morning, 23 September 2000, with Theresia by his side, Bert Wilson Kemp, the reluctant warrior with the amazing gift, stepped quietly into eternity.
Maybe, somewhere beyond the sunset, Wesley was waiting for him.
References
Books
Martin Blumenson, Kasserine Pass (Boston, 1967)
Kenneth Macksey, Crucible of Power: The Fight for Tunisia 1942–1943 (London, 1969)
U.S. Army Center for Military History, The Sicilian Campaign (Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC, 2009)
James Scott Wheeler, The Big Red One: America’s Legendary 1st Infantry Division from the First World War to Desert Storm (Lawrence, Kansas, 2007)
Periodicals
[Anon.], ‘Henry Infantryman Has Five Wounds’, Paris Post Intelligencer, Paris, Tennessee, 1 September 1944, p. 1
[Anon.], ‘Sgt. Bert Kemp Wins Silver Star Award’, Paris Post Intelligencer, Paris, Tennessee, 28 March 1945, p. 1
Ken Clayton, ‘Living Rifleman Ranks with Tennessee Legends’, Post Intelligencer, Paris, Tennessee, 6 November 1987, p. 1B
——, ‘Bert Kemp a Local Hunting and Shooting Legend’, Post Intelligencer, Paris, Tennessee, 15 January 1988, p. 1B
Jim Dumas, ‘Army Sets Its Sights on Bert Kemp’s Uncanny Marksmanship’, Paris Post Intelligencer, Paris, Tennessee, 11 May 2000, p. 6A
Documents
Honorable Discharge Certificate and Summary of Service, Sergeant Bert W. Kemp, Serial Number 34 185 517, Army of the United States, 22 December 1944
Internet sources
Charles R. Anderson, ‘Tunisia’, www.history.army.mil/brochures/Tunisia/Tunisia.htm, 2003
‘Battle Analysis, Kasserine Pass’, www.usaiac.army.mil/cac2/csi/docs/MHIC_Link04a.ppt277,13,Basic Battle Analysis.
Andrew J. Birtle, ‘Sicily1943’, www.history.army.mil/brochures/72-16/72-16.html, 2009
Wikipedia article, ‘1st Infantry Division (United States)’, www.wikipedia.org
Witnesses interviewed
Roland Alexander, Paris, Tennessee
David Bumpus, Paris, Tennessee
Theresia Kemp Gregory, Greenbrier, Tennessee
Vanesia Kemp Hill, Cordova, Tennessee
Jimmie Holly, Shuqualak, Mississippi
Ludie Ann Kemp, Memphis, Tennessee
Stanley Kemp, Paris, Tennessee
Crockett Mathis, Paris, Tennessee
Tammy Kemp Wimberly, Paris, Tennessee