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American Morning

Two World War II Veterans Finally Attach Faces to Memories

Aired June 06, 2001 - 09:54   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Above all else, this 57th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe is about people.

LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: In London, an American soldier and a British woman who worked in the allied war effort finally met this week. It was a meeting neither one of them expected would happen.

CNN's Margaret Lowrie has more on this.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MARGARET LOWRIE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Kept apart up to the last minute, like contestants on blind date TV show, Stephanie Batstone and Jack Campbell finally came face-to-face in a photo-op, 57 years after they first communicated by Morse code; a meeting engineered by time and circumstance, and ultimately, Britain's Imperial War Museum on the eve of the 57th anniversary of D-Day.

QUESTION: What did you think when you finally met?

STEPHANIE BATSTONE, WRNS VETERAN: I don't know. I haven't really got used to the idea, really.

LOWRIE: It was May 1944, the month before the allies invaded Normandy. Stephanie Batstone was in the WRNS, the Women's Royal Naval Service, at a signal station on Scotland's west coast.

JACK CAMPBELL, WORLD WAR II VETERAN: She was calling another ship behind me and I noticed that she wasn't making communication or contact. I answered her signal and told her I would relay her message, which I did, and then we started short messages back and forth.

LOWRIE: American signalman Jack Campbell was in a convoy of merchant ships anchored a few miles away. Using Aldis lamps, they flashed messages in Morse code across the sea. One day, the convoy disappeared, heading for Normandy and the allied invasion. Stephanie Batstone assumed he was dead. It would be more than 50 years before she learned otherwise in a phone call from his daughter, Nicki.

NICKI CAMPBELL, JACK CAMPBELL'S DAUGHTER: Last year, he gave me an article that one of his friends from the Navy had sent him, saying he wasn't sure if he was the Jack Campbell that was listed in this magazine article that Stephanie had been looking for him for all these years.

LOWRIE: Jack Campbell's wife and children came with him for this reunion, an occasion also used to launch the paperback edition of Stephanie Batstone's "War Memoirs," first published five years ago.

ELIZABETH IMLAY, PUBLISHER, PARAPRESS: There were bombs falling. Your friends had been killed. All that's brought home when you read this book. And also, the lighter side, the comradeship and the friendships they made which have lasted all this time.

LOWRIE: Theirs was never more than a flirty friendship -- literally ships passing in the night, although it would be 57 more years before they'd actually meet. For Stephanie Batstone, Jack Campbell today is still to her what he always was: a symbol of all the anonymous young men sacrificed to war.

Margaret Lowrie, CNN, London.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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