He Gave His All - Stephen Ludlam: The Seven Mile Beach Teen Who Became an American Hero
The following story originally ran in our Memorial Day issue of 2012.
Note: For many of us, Memorial Day has always signaled the start of summer. After all, we’ve been programmed: Memorial Day begins the summer; July 4th is when the crowds arrive; Labor Day is when summer ends. The definition of sacrifice? For many, it’s a sacrifice to pack your car and head home early on an incredibly beautiful Monday of Memorial Day weekend.
Sure, like everyone I’ve attended the parades on Memorial Day, and you can’t miss the flags planted at
21st Street in Avalon and 117th Street in Stone Harbor. I do understand the sacrifices that others have made. I think that I’m blessed to never have had war affect my immediate family. I hope that’s true for you as well.
I’m not sure what, if any, expectations I had when I began work on this story. Like so many people, I often heard the name Stephen Ludlam – but it was always attached to the American Legion Post in Stone Harbor. From newspaper clippings, I understand that the post was named in honor of Stephen Ludlam to keep his memory alive. That’s been accomplished. But as I’ve learned, there’s much more to the person behind the name.
Writing this story has had an incredible impact on me. I’m not sure exactly why; maybe, because in some ways, it was so easy for me to relate to Stephen’s story. After all, I, too, grew up on the Seven Mile Beach. And so have my three sons. I remember growing up here, spending my summers in Avalon and Stone Harbor. And now that I have children who have grown up here, too, I can’t imagine having to send my 18-year-old son off to another continent to fight a war. It was hard enough sending them off to college. Or maybe I was greatly impacted because I got the opportunity to read some of Stephen’s letters home, more than 60 years later. They were handwritten in his own words. And those words were especially moving. If you spent any of your summers here as a teen, or if you have children of your own, the story of Stephen Ludlam may affect you in the same way that it did me.
As if the reality of war isn’t enough, what with daily casualty counts and live television reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, many of us still need to be reminded about the importance of Memorial Day. I know I did.
What’s especially hard is when the reminder that you’re using is a story about a kid who never got a chance to grow up, at least not the way that he should have. It’s obvious from his words and actions that Stephen Ludlam did grow up. But I’m sure you’ll agree he grew up too fast and too soon.
Hopefully, you’ll be as moved by the story of Stephen Ludlam as I was. More importantly, you’ll remember his name and the sacrifice that he made – and the reason why we celebrate Memorial Day.
-Dave Coskey
You probably don’t recognize his picture, but his name should be familiar. The old U.S. Life Saving Service and Coast Guard station at the southern end of the island has been home to Stephen C. Ludlam American Legion Post #331 since its inception in 1948. Growing up in Stone Harbor, chances are he might even have run up and down the steps of the old lookout tower as a child.
Stephen Ludlam was just a little more than a month past his 18th birthday in December 1943 when he received his draft notice and order to report for induction into the United States Army. The son of Jesse and Patience Ludlam, Steve, as his friends and family referred to him, was a popular senior at Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school in Chester County, Pa.
Steve also was a star athlete. He was a football and baseball player when he arrived at the school, but Westtown had no football program, so instead he focused on soccer in the fall. By the time he was a senior, he was moved by his coach from his position as goalkeeper to the front line in order to add a scoring threat. He ended up earning All-Philadelphia soccer honors.
“Steve was an outstanding athlete,” remembers James B. Yarnall, his friend from Westtown. “But he was more than just a great athlete. He was also a super human being. He had so many friends; he was handsome, possessed a great smile, a terrific sense of humor – and was a great flirt. He was such a special person.”
Steve captained the baseball team as a junior. “He played leftfield for us,” Yarnall says. “There was an orchard out there at the time. Steve was the only person who could catch pop flies through the trees. I still remember the galloping lope that he had when he ran. It was very distinctive.”
From all appearances, it seemed that Steve Ludlam was like any other teen growing up on the Seven Mile Beach – a happy, free-spirited kid who so enjoyed his life. He enjoyed his many friends and loved to sail his boat, a “Barnegat Bay Sneakbox,” around the Yacht Club Basin and fish. He kept his treasured boat just a short distance from his house on a floating dock.
“I certainly remember Steve,” says Marian Hornsby, a lifelong Stone Harbor resident. “He was very nice, a considerate young man. At the time, I was a teenager working during the summer at the Stone Harbor Pharmacy, at the soda fountain. After the movie let out, everyone would hurry over to the pharmacy. We served ice cream outside on a screened porch. Even after all of these years, I can still see Steve and his girlfriend – Annabelle, I believe that was her name – sitting there, sharing an ice cream soda with two straws. I also remember that he was very close with his mother.”
“Steve Ludlam? I could never forget him – he was my first love,” says the former Annabelle Morier, who lived in Kentucky at the time but often visited her grandmother at her home in Swainton.
“I’m not sure why, but we came to stay with my grandmother one Christmas and that’s when I met Steve. We were ice skating on Mill Pond on Route 9. Steve was wonderful. So nice. We were just kids at the time. We’d go to the beach down by the Coast Guard station in Stone Harbor and I remember how he’d often ride his bike to my grandmother’s house in Swainton to see me. We’d sit on the porch and listen to records and my grandmother would make molasses cookies. We had such good times.”
She adds: “Steve loved his boat and loved to play baseball. And yes, Marian Hornsby’s memory is right – we’d often go to the movies and then run over for ice cream.”
So how exactly does a kid go, in just a couple of months, from being full of life -- having an ice cream soda on a warm summer evening in Stone Harbor – to lying lifeless on a frozen, snow-covered battlefield in France?
Obviously, it was a much different time, in many ways. Everyone was affected by the “Great War.” On the Seven Mile Beach, there were mandatory blackouts and rationing was a way of life. Tar remover was a household necessity used to get rid of the sticky black goo picked up while walking along the beach, tar that no doubt washed up from ships torpedoed by German U-boats that prowled the coast of New Jersey. There were even reports of German spies landing on the Seven Mile Beach.
The Seven Mile Beach Reporter was the newspaper of record at the time. Each week the newspaper was filled with the names of local boys who had given their lives. For the most part, these were 18-, 19- or 20-year-olds who would never get to know the joy of seeing their own children run on the beach. How could they? They were only kids themselves. They were kids who should have been worried about getting sunburned on a hot summer afternoon. Instead, they dodged artillery shells and set out to save the world.
No period was deadlier for the Seven Mile Beach than the span from November 1944 through February 1945, when three Seven Mile Beach residents lost their lives. Second Lt. William Rommel and his family were longtime summer residents and Avalon adopted him as one their own. He was a graduate of the Alamo Scout Ranger School, the forerunner of today’s Special Forces. Rommel was killed in action in the Philippines in November 1944. Although he too is listed as a Philadelphia native, Cpl. Joseph Ferrigno’s family summered in Avalon for many years and had recently moved permanently to town. The Ferrignos operated the popular Black Eagle Café on 36th Street. Ferrigno was killed in action in the Netherlands in February 1945.
Although Stephen Christopher Ludlam attended grammar school in Cape May Court House before moving on to a boarding school in Pennsylvania for high school, he was still considered a local, born to an old Cape May County family. The Ludlams lived at 321 92nd Street and attended Our Saviour Lutheran Church, about a block from their home.
Things moved petty quickly for Steve after he reported for induction at 5:45 a.m. on Dec. 15, 1943, at the Massey Building at 8th and Asbury Avenue in Ocean City. His induction notice was dated Dec. 3. The Army didn’t give you much notice in those days.
Steve was a senior in high school and had just celebrated his 18th birthday in October, making him eligible for military service. He passed his physical and was one of only two 18-year-olds directed to report for duty that month in Cape May County.
“Most people at school were surprised that Steve was going into the service, I’m sure of that. We all missed him,” Yarnall says.
After spending the holidays with his family, Steve reported for duty on Wednesday, Jan. 5, 1944. According to detailed notes kept by his mother, Patience, a bitter northeast wind blew and a cold rain fell that day as she joined her mother in seeing off her youngest son. Steve’s father was on duty at the Stone Harbor Coast Guard station that morning.
A bus took Steve from Ocean City to Fort Dix. He was understandably “a bit frightened” but trying to adjust to his new surroundings when he wrote home his first night in the service.
“I have now completed one day in this rough and ready place and I do feel that my morale is on the upgrade,” he wrote. He hoped that an IQ test, which was given to all soldiers, would help to place him with a group of men closer to his own age and background. Steve was perceptive enough to know that he came from much different background than some of the others in his barracks.
“As it is now I only can talk with the young guys cause (sic) I’m not vile enough for the others. They are all swell but have lived a different life than I,” he wrote.
It was noon on Jan. 27, 1944, when Steve boarded a train that was to take him to his basic training camp. The final destination was kept a secret, but as the train made its way south he learned from others that Florida was most likely where their trip would end. He marveled at all of the new places that he’d seen on his trip but was disturbed by the poverty he witnessed from the train – poverty like he had never seen in Cape May County.
Steve arrived in Camp Blanding, Fla., on Jan. 28 to begin 17 weeks of basic training. He graduated May 26, with special training as an intelligence observer. In a letter to his parents on May 30, he wrote that he was excited by “…The news of news” that he’d be coming home for a 10-day furlough before being assigned for duty.
“It’s so wonderful I don’t know what to do. Home at last and of course Patty and the boat,” his letter read.
His furlough in June 1944 would be the last time that Steve would ever be in Stone Harbor. On June 13, Steve and his parents traveled from Stone Harbor to the Ben Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia. According to Patience’s notes, Steve and Patty Riter, Steve’s girlfriend, attended a “ball game” on that day before going to dinner. Steve returned to the hotel at midnight after taking Patty back to her home in Rosemont, Pa.
Today, nearly 70 years later, Patty Riter, now Patty Lander, still remembers that night. “I went to Shibe Park with Steve,” she says. “We met his parents for dinner at Micheau’s Restaurant. Later, he wrote a verse, as he sometimes did, substituting the words of a current popular song, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It went like this; ‘I’ll be seeing you, at Micheau’s Café, Shibe Park across the way,’ and so on. When we took the train to my house in Rosemont, we said goodbye, and I still can remember watching him as walked back down the road in the dark to take yet another train back to town … he looked back and waved.”
Less than a month later, on July 5, there were record crowds reported on the Seven Mile Beach for the holiday weekend. Chances are that any celebrations at the Ludlam home were subdued as Steve boarded a ship bound for Italy. At 18, he should have been off to see the world, but not like this. His high school classmates had just graduated from Westtown. Steve wasn’t given that opportunity. Instead, his graduation was from basic training. Now he was off to war.
What goes through the mind of a teenager so far from home? In late August 1944, somewhere in the south of France, Steve’s mind wandered to home, school and the things that he missed, and even some he didn’t.
“Well I guess the birds are gathering on the wires between Court House and Stone Harbor,” he wrote to his parents. “That always was a sign that summer fun was over and school again. Of course school to this … is a bit of heaven except for those report cards that always caused alot (sic) of heartaches.”
As September rolled on, he again longed to be home. “I sure miss school and all more than ever. Too (sic) me it’s sort of a fog that I’ll adventually (sic) walk out of and into home and all that goes with it.” Like most soldiers so far away, Steve longed for home.
Steve Ludlam was now PFC Stephen C. Ludlam and a member of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division. The 3ID including Steve, landed on the Mediterranean coast of France on Aug. 15, 1944, and drove 400 miles north up the Rhone River Valley to the city of Besancon in less than a month.
It didn’t take long – only a couple of months – before the kid from Stone Harbor was wounded in battle. Steve was hunkered down in a foxhole when a “treeburst” – an artillery shell that unexpectedly explodes by hitting tree tops – sprayed him with shrapnel, possibly near the city of Remiremont.
Wounded in six places from his head down his side, he managed to walk nearly a mile before being evacuated to a base hospital where he would stay for nearly two months. Afraid to burden his mother with details of his injuries, he wrote instead to his older brother John, who was stationed in England serving in the Army Air Corps.
“I don’t want to tell Mother or Patty, but I’ve simply got to tell someone ... I’d never dreamed all this could happen to me,” he wrote from his hospital bed. Despite the seriousness of his injuries, Steve recovered and was sent back to action on Jan. 2, 1945.
Patty remembers reading Steve’s name on a list of killed and wounded soldiers on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “The lists went on and on and contained nothing but wounded and dead. I wonder if people who pick their paper today can even imagine that,” she says. “After he was wounded, I tried to make a deal with God. I prayed that he would be wounded just enough to be sent home for good. I guess that was the kind of a wish that a teenage girl back home would have to make.”
It’s hard to comprehend in today’s world of instant communication, but families sometimes went weeks and even months without hearing a word from loved ones. And when letters finally arrived, the news was often old and outdated. Communication from the front was brief and needed to cleared by military censors before moving on.
Patience Ludlam was a Quaker and the proud mother of two soldiers serving their country. She held the distinction of being the first female chairperson of the Cape May County Red Cross and was a state Democratic committeewoman. She would often read letters from Steve to groups throughout the county as an illustration of how important the mission was here at home. Each town had its own Red Cross chapter. They’d knit clothing; roll bandages, sell war bonds – anything to support the boys overseas. Ironically, Patience addressed a large group with the Sea Isle City Chapter not knowing that her own son had already been mortally wounded.
No one knows for sure how long Steve had been back in action. One newspaper report suggested that it was less than a week. The last letter his parents received was dated Jan. 21. In it, he wished his mother a happy birthday; told of a Frenchman who shared his wine as a sign of appreciation; and signed his letter, “I send my love to you, Steve.” That was the last Jesse and Patience heard from their youngest son. On Jan. 23, (the date was initially incorrectly reported as the 25th; the official Army military citation for the DSC listed it as the 23rd) 1945, near Ostheim, then considered part of ally-controlled France, PFC Stephen C. Ludlam – just 19 – was killed in action.
On or about Dec. 15, 1944, the 3ID turned south from Strasbourg. Colmar, and the area around it was the last piece of territory in northeast France still in German control – and the Germans were trying very hard to retain that control. By Christmas, the division had pushed south along side of the Vosges Mountains until it reached the towns of Sigolsheim and Bennwihr, located near the Fecht River about 10 miles northwest of Colmar.
By Jan. 2, 1945, when Steve returned to his unit, both towns had been taken. A gauge of the ferocity of the fighting is that two 3ID soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their actions on Dec. 26 and 27.
The next couple of weeks were spent in preparation for an offensive that would result in the taking of Colmar and the closing of the Colmar Pocket. As the 3ID was moving south, the French I Corps that was advancing north from the city of Mulhouse, about 30 miles south of Colmar. The plan was to squeeze Colmar and the Germans in between the 3ID and the French.
The orders of the 7th Infantry in this operation were to advance south and force a crossing of the Fecht at Guemar. The first battalion proceeded south to Ostheim, which it entered from the north and fought over with the Germans until it finally took the town about 5:30 p.m. The third battalion went past Ostheim and engaged the Germans southwest of the Ostheim. The actions of the second battalion and PFC Ludlam can perhaps best quoted from the unit history of the 7th Infantry Regiment, From Fedala to Berchtesgaden:
“…By 230140 [1:20 a.m. January 23] all Second Battalion troops were across the river and were moving to the south. At 0435 the forward elements were at the southern edge of the Fôret Communale de Colmar. Company ‘E’ [Steve’s company] pushed on across the flat, open, snow-covered terrain separating the Fôret Communale de Colmar from the Bois dit de Rothleble, and encountered concentrated enemy automatic fire.”
In the early morning, the point-blank fire of about 100 Germans equipped with rifles and an estimated 20 machine guns wounded approximately 30 members of Company “E.” Captain James F. Powell rallied the scattered elements of “Easy” Company. It was then that Private First Class Stephen C. Ludlam displayed the extraordinary heroism that merited a posthumous award of the Distinguished Service Cross. With his company thus caught on the open, snow-covered field by withering point-blank automatic and rifle fire, he and seven others advanced in the attack. Enemy bullets riddled his snow suit as he poured out M-1 rifle fire from exposed positions against a dug-in enemy force but 25 yards away. Three of his comrades, Privates First Class Richard F. Albus, William L. Catts and Philip Di Mura, were killed in the action. With his four remaining comrades, Steve fought intrepidly against insurmountable odds for 45 minutes. Displaying extreme courage, he is credited with saving the lives of others by somehow silencing the machine-gun battery that may have been as close as 25 yards. He personally killed seven Germans before he was mortally wounded. Some soldiers must have survived the fight, to recount and attest to his heroism for Steve to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
It took more than two weeks for word to reach the Seven Mile Beach. The news arrived as it often did in those days -- via Western Union. On Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, Marian Hornsby was working at Mixner’s News Agency (today the site of Ocean Galleries), where the Western Union Office was located, when word of Stephen’s death arrived.
“Mike Mixner immediately called Steve’s father at work in Court House,” she remembers. “He told Jesse that he needed to come home right away. There wasn’t any need to say anything more. Jesse knew that the news wasn’t good. He had been through this before, when he learned that Steve had been wounded. Mike met Jesse and delivered the news.”
Patty Lander still remembers when she got the news of Steve’s death. “Steve’s dad called me around lunchtime,” she says. “He simply said, ‘Steve has been killed.’ I cried and cried.
“On Valentine’s Day, a florist came to my door carrying a beautiful bouquet of flowers. It was weeks earlier, he [Steve] had arranged through the Red Cross to send flowers to his mother and me.”
Steve was initially buried as many American soldiers killed in action overseas were – at a U.S. military cemetery on foreign soil. He was interred at the U.S. Military Cemetery in Epinal, France.
The Ludlam family was devastated. Patience wanted her son brought home. After the war, the Ludlams took advantage of an opportunity from the U.S. government to return soldiers to their home soil and arranged to have Steve buried in a family plot at the Union Cemetery located on Route 47 in South Dennis in April 1948.
“Steve was my father’s little brother,” said John Ludlam Jr., who resides in upstate New York. “It was a terrible loss to the family – it had a great affect on them. Years ago, I remember going to the Legion Post with my father and we’d stop in front of my uncle’s photo that hangs there. My father would look at the photo and then say to me, ‘It’s a sad thing about war: Old men send young men off to die.’ ”
Stephen was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart for what the Army called “extraordinary heroism in action” in a special ceremony broadcast live by WFPG radio in Atlantic City in April 1946. A news photograph from the ceremony shows a stoic Jesse and Patience receiving the medal from Major George C. Abbott Jr., while Steve’s grandmother looks on. To this day Steve holds the distinction of being the only Cape May County resident to ever be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross – an honor exceeded only by the Congressional Medal of Honor. How rare is the Distinguished Service Cross? Consider this: Since 1975 and the end of the Vietnam War, only 22 have been awarded through April 2012.
Both of Stephen’s medals now hang in the American Legion Post named in his honor.
Following his death, Jesse and Patience Ludlam made a gift of chimes to Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Steve’s memory. The bells were set to toll every day at noon as a reminder of the ultimate sacrifice that Steve made for his country.
The Ludlams eventually left Stone Harbor and moved inland to Cape May Court House. Perhaps they moved because it was closer to the family’s business interests. However, there are friends of the family who say that they left, at least in part, because of the bells and the constant reminder of the son that they lost after just 19 years.
Here on the Seven Mile Beach, the last Monday in May will continue to mark the start of the summer season. But it’s also important to remember what Memorial Day is really about. It’s about people like Stephen C. Ludlam.
Isn’t it amazing how fast a boy can become a man? Steve knew that he had a part to play but amazingly viewed his sacrifice as small. Could it have been a premonition?
“… there is something bigger than I am at stake and though I hate this small part allotted to me – it never the less is my part,” Steve wrote. “I shall do my best and though I’ll never be really happy, I again won’t really mind. My sacrifice is small.”
Too fast … too soon.
Special thanks to Dr. Judith Brown, unit historian; Maj. Michael Sullivan and General MG Cucolo of the Third Infantry Division of the United States Army for their assistance in researching and verifying some of the facts in this story.
How can you help to keep the memory of Stephen Ludlam alive?
The American Legion Post named in his honor is actively seeking to have its building added to the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. It also is attempting to restore the 111-year-old Life Saving Station. You can aid in both processes by making a tax-deductible contribution and mailing it to:
Stephen C. Ludlam
Post 331
P.O. Box 232
Stone Harbor, NJ 08247