Albert  T. HAYES

 

hayes albert 4
NUMBER OF SERVICE 
AGE- yo
DATE OF BIRTHDay Month Year  Country STATE
ETAT Country STATE
FAMILY

Parents:  FirstName LASTNAME

Siblings: FirstName LASTNAME

RANKRank
FONCTIONFonction
JOB BEFORE ENLISTEMENTJobAR
DATE of ENLISTEMENTDay Month Year  Country STATE
COMPANYCompany
BATTALIONBattalion
REGIMENT262nd Infantry Regiment
DIVISION66th Infantry Division
DATE OF DEATH24 Décembre 1944hayes albert tombe
STATUSMIA
PLACE OF DEATHAboard in USS Léopoldville, In Manche(Channel), off Cherbourg
CEMETERYNORMANDY AMERICAN CEMETERY from Colleville Map Normandy American Cemetery
GRAVE
PlotRowGrave
Wall of Missing
DECORATION

 Purple Heart 

World War II Victory Medal 

Combat Infantryman Badge

Photo FDLM

victory medal

combat infantryman badge

 

  

us army div 66 262ir

 

STORY

Woman lost dad she never knew when SS Leopoldville was sunk Dec. 24, 1944

Joy Hayes Norton remembers her Father Albert Hayes who died in the torpedoing of the USS Leopoldville on Christmas eve 1944 when she was 2 years old.
By Bill LandauerOf The Morning Callcontact the reporter
Joy Hayes Norton's dad died aboard the Leopoldville when it was sunk by Germans on Dec. 24, 1944
SS Leopoldville sank 70 years ago on Christmas Eve, killing Pfc. Albert Hayes and hundreds of other U.S. troop
Joy Hayes Norton looks like the father she doesn't remember.


He was a U.S. soldier named Albert Hayes. He was from Allentown. He could play the piano by ear.
Norton, 72, owes her "classic Irish beauty," as her daughter calls it, to Hayes. But Norton only knows the few details her family shared over the years, and they were tight-lipped about Albert. Mostly, the man she calls Father is a voice on a dusty phonograph or a guy in fatigues holding a baby in black-and-white photos. His eyes look like hers.
On Christmas Eve 70 years ago, Pfc. Albert Hayes was aboard the SS Leopoldville crossing the English Channel with the Army's 66th Infantry Division en route to the Battle of the Bulge. Early that evening, as the Leopoldville approached the French coast, a torpedo from a German U-boat slammed into her side.


hayes albert 1

 

Albert Hayes visits with his daughter Joy Margaret in the days before his deployment to Europe in waning months of World War II. Hayes died in the torpedoing of the USS Leopoldville when Joy Margaret was 2 years old. (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO, THE MORNING CALL)

Though Joy was 3,000 miles away in Allentown, the explosion sent her life spinning in a new direction. She'd just turned 2 years old. It would be weeks before the Army informed her mother that Hayes was missing, months before the military would declare him dead, and decades before his parents would ever put up a tree to celebrate the holiday.


Somewhere in between, Joy came to understand why her father went away.


He had his reasons.


The pianist


When she was 16 years old, a friend set up Dorothy Becker on a blind date for her junior prom at Allentown High School.
He was two years older than Becker, with wavy hair and a big grin. Albert Hayes had a knack for music. Though he couldn't read a note, tunes went in through his ears and came out through his fingers. On Saturdays, he played piano at a nightclub in Allentown called the Pelican.

Albert Hayes et sa famille

After the first date, Becker wasn't sure if Hayes liked her. Eventually, however, Hayes wound up sitting and chatting regularly with her parents at the Beckers' home on Church Street. On Saturdays, he would take her ice skating at 10th and Walnut streets or to Dorney Park. Often, they double-dated with Hayes' best friend, Floyd Masteller.
Hayes worked an office job at Bethlehem Steel. Becker was a clerk at Hess's Department Store.


When she graduated from high school, he bought her a ring. They married on July 12, 1941, her 18th birthday, in a friend's front parlor.
On Friday, Nov. 13, 1942, Dorothy gave birth to a girl — Joy Margaret Hayes.


Eleven months earlier, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and Hayes' life had changed.


Masteller went off to serve in the China-Burma-India Theater. Most of Hayes' friends and family members enlisted and headed off to Europe or the South Pacific.
As a worker at Bethlehem Steel, Hayes obtained an essential worker deferment. He didn't want it. Hayes wanted to go to war.

Discontented


"I noticed that your grandfather was growing more discontented," Dorothy said in a letter to her granddaughter years later.
At last, in early 1944, Hayes pulled strings and managed to obtain a waiver of his deferment, allowing him to enlist. Dorothy had to sign. "He was very happy and so proud," she wrote, "as if the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders."


Before he left home, Hayes contacted Masteller. If anything happens to me, Hayes told his friend, take care of Dorothy and Joy.
Hayes had always imagined himself as a pilot and had at first signed up with the Army Air Forces. But later in 1944, Nazi Germany was being forced out of the countries it had occupied and seemed near defeat; more Allied ground troops were needed. So after Hayes went to Texas for flight training, the military sent him to Camp Rucker in Dale County, Ala., to join the infantry.


One night in November 1944, Dorothy, who along with Joy was living with her parents, received a phone call.
"Please meet me under the clock in the Hotel Governor Clinton [in New York]," Hayes said. "And bring our marriage license."
Hours later, Dorothy and Albert checked into the Drake Hotel in New York. After two days, on Nov. 12, 1944, Hayes sailed out of New York harbor aboard the SS George Washington bound for England and the war he worried was passing him by.


Dorothy never saw him again.


"I knew not to ask"


The telegram arrived Jan. 15, 1945. "The Secretary of War desires to express deep regret …"


Albert was listed as missing in action. For a few weeks, the family was desperate for word. What had happened to Albert? Then, on March 7, Dorothy received a second telegram. "… with deepest sympathy …"


After the torpedo hit, 515 soldiers went down with the USS Leopoldville. Two-hundred-forty-eight others died of injuries. At the time of the attack, Dorothy learned from a letter that May from her husband's commanding officer, Hayes' platoon was in a portion of the ship that had been struck directly by the torpedo.
A number of men from the region were aboard that Christmas Eve. Kenneth Kline of Upper Gwynedd Township, Montgomery County, and George Reisteter of Bethlehem were among the survivors. Albert Hayes of Allentown and Wayne W. Gable of Walnutport didn't make it.


They never found Hayes' body. At a graveyard in Freeland, Luzerne County, the family planted a marker. With it went most conversation about the son, husband and friend they'd lost.
In those days, "people just didn't talk much about that kind of thing," Joy said. "I knew not to ask."
She never knew a different life. In 1948, when she was 6 years old, Masteller made good on his promise. He married Dorothy, and the family moved to Forksville in Sullivan County. Joy said she was also raised by her grandparents.


As Joy grew up, she listened to Albert's voice on an old phonograph he recorded on a trip to San Francisco. She thumbed through the old photographs. Who her father was and what he was really like were a mystery she knew she'd never solve.


Joy's grandparents didn't celebrate Christmas; it had died with her father in the years before Joy's memory begins.


That changed only once. In 1965, Joy was a mother living on a military base in Kentucky. Her husband had been deployed to Vietnam. That year, Joy's grandfather bought plane tickets for Joy and her children to visit Pennsylvania. In the house, for the first time since 1944, he put up a Christmas tree and gave gifts.


Today, Joy lives with her daughter in Leesburg, Va. Every Christmas with her children and grandchildren around her, Joy celebrates the holiday.
"I've always thought of my dad, especially on Christmas Eve," Joy said. "I wonder how life would have been different."

The reason


Over the years, Joy and her son, Kirk, attended SS Leopoldville reunions and memorials. At each one, they learn about the wreck and the men who'd been aboard the ship with Hayes. Every time they ask if anyone remembers an Irish guy named Hayes with a wide grin and ear for music. No one has.
Dorothy Masteller died in 2003. Once, Joy's daughter, Valerie Kaufman, asked her about Hayes.


Dorothy, who by then was nearly 80, responded with 26 handwritten pages. It was the story of the couple's short time together, and the young man's reason for leaving home to die in a war he could have avoided.


"He felt he was being unfair to Joy by staying home,"


Dorothy wrote "When Joy grows older, what will she say? My daddy didn't go to war."
Seventy Christmas Eves later, Joy doesn't know everything about her father. But "I'm proud of my dad," she said.


"I will always love him."

Arrived on November 26th, 1944 in England, the division polishes up its training until December 24th

In the daytime of the departure and the crossing towards France and Normandy.

The division embarks on two ships of which the SS Leopoldville which receives 262th and 264th regiment Infantry and leaves Southampton in training(formation) accompanied with four escort ships.

Arrived unless 5 miles from Cherbourg, a German submarine U-Boat 486 is in ambush and sends a torpedo to the ship.

He is touched on the starboard beam before.

802 soldiers over the 2235 which he(it) transported are killed in this drama.

Leopoldville is marine cemetery today.


memorial plaqueSee History of Leopoldville (Click on the picture)


SOURCE INFORMATION & PHOTOClive TIRLEMONT - Frédéric LAVERNHE - Leopoldville.org
PROGRAMMERGarrett, Clive, Frédéric & Renaud
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