Barney and Mom and Horst

I believe it was around the time of my dad's death that I became aware of Barney Cargile. Mom must have shown me his gravesite in the small, rural cemetery where we buried my father. Turns out Barney was the love of my mother's life (I found this out years later.) They grew up near one another and were crazy in love with intentions to marry when he got back from the war. I found a few pics of Barney a long time ago and became interested in him.

Just recently I found a nephew of his. I sent the pics to him and he responded with a few shots of Barney's funeral. He knew very little about his uncle and nothing about Mom. Barney had attended school at Auburn and done officer training at Notre Dame and Columbia. Apparently he was a pretty sharp dude. On Barney's headstone was a ship and mom told me he'd been killed in WWII off Anzio during the invasion of Italy by the Allied forces. His ship was actually an LST, which sailors said stood for 'Large Slow Target'...and it was an easy mark for the Germans. 

Noting the headstone's ship had a number on it, a friend and I wondered if it was actually Barney's ship designation or maybe a generic image used on lots of sailors' headstones. Simultaneously we Googled the info and were stunned with what we found: scads of information on the sinking of the LST, the rescue of survivors, and the German sub that sank her.

On the 20th of February 1944, Barney Cargile's LST was about 44 miles off Anzio when a German sub commanded by Horst Arno-Fenski fired a torpedo at 1:57 a.m. The torpedo ripped the bow off the ship. A second torpedo 20 minutes later split the LST in half and she sank to the bottom. 24 men on board died...Barney among them. Most of the 75 or so survivors were badly burned..

So the man my mother intended to marry wasn't going to come home. Since mom's death I've learned of how severely this affected her life. I guess we all wish we'd known more about our parents when we could have talked with them. Regardless, Barney's death apparently was absolutely devastating to my mother. 

Now the part of this story that gave me chills: when I was checking out info about the submarine commander, Horst Fenski, who sank the ship and killed my mom's husband-to-be, my eyes bugged out when I saw where he was born: Konigsberg, East Prussia. That's the home of my granddad. My father's dad came from there. The city is now known as Kaliningrad and is part of Russia.

Let me make this real clear: the German who killed the man my mother was to marry was from the same town as her future husband/my father's dad. At 2 in the morning, in the dark and the cold, a German who was from the same town as my dad's dad was slipping around under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and torpedoed the ship that my mom's husband-to-be was on. Clear?.

Holy smokin' penguin balls! How the hell does something like this unfold?!?! Now, do I owe a debt of gratitude to Fenski? If he hadn't killed Barney Cargile, I wouldn't be here. Yet I have this admiration for Mr. Cargile.

http://www.wrecksite.eu/wreck.aspx?13741

Horst Fenski.

Fenski's sub in northern Italy.

Barney and his brother, Robert.


Fenski (center), 25 years old...captured.