Before Their Time: A Memoir

His Master’s Voice

Sea Changes

The Boardwalk

Somewhere Else

IN 1943, I was a pre-med day student at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland. Half the student body at Hopkins during World War II was pre-med; it was a respectable way of evading the draft. But I was a fraud on campus, and not the only one. I didn’t want to be a doctor. I had no interest in medicine, or in science of any kind. And so, even though I was a smart kid, my school marks showed mostly C’s and D’s and enough F’s to put me on probation. At eighteen, which was how old I was then, this record almost paralyzed me. I knew in my bones that I was going to flunk out and that there was nothing I could do about it. Maybe I even wanted to flunk out.

The Army soon intervened. With my lousy marks, they drafted me right out of the classroom. I was there one day, gone the next. Naturally, I rationalized the process, to soothe my pride. I told myself that it was better than being blatantly tossed out of college, for all the world to see and judge, better than being humiliated at home, where my
embarrassed parents had grown used to a near-lifetime of straight A’s as I made my way through the Baltimore public schools. And besides, I believed in the war. It seemed just and righteous to me. In my simpleminded, adolescent way, I hated the Nazis. I knew that terrible things were happening everywhere. I understood perfectly well, however many courses I may have failed, that I was living in a murderous century, one without pity and probably without precedent.

I was ready to go.

On the morning I left my suburban home for the Army, my family gathered on the front porch to say good-bye. Mother, father, kid sister, aligned in a row; and I facing them, hungry to be off. We were all almost unbearably self-conscious. My father, I remember, hesitantly covered his eyes with one hand, unable to look at me—a strange and powerful gesture that stays with me to this day. My mother stood rigidly still, her lips thin, suffering in silence. Poor beleaguered parents, ever stoic. Alongside my mother, my sister, who was almost seven years younger than I, stared up at me, worshipping her hero through allergy-swollen eyes.

I danced around in excruciating pain for a couple of seconds in front of them, mumbled a few words of farewell, and, in another moment, was gone.

FOURTEEN months later, in October of 1944, I was stationed on the outskirts of the city of Nancy, in France, in a dilapidated old Alsatian warehouse that was filled with hungry rats and pools of dirty rainwater. I was on guard
duty at the time—an ignoble occupation chosen for me by my superiors—keeping an eye on the duffel bags that belonged to the infantrymen of the 26th Division. (I had recently been one of those infantrymen myself.) The 26th was then at the front, several miles away, where it had replaced the Fourth Armored Division in the Fourth’s old dug-in positions.

I shared the warehouse with three other GIs, all of whom were strangers to me. Together we slept on a filthy straw pallet that was stretched across the floor of what was once a receiving room. The straw smelled of urine and cow dung and we smelled of soiled underwear; a pungent crew, trapped in each other’s sweaty company. To keep warm, we burned sooty coal in an antique stove that threatened our mattress with flying sparks whenever it flared up. We were always putting out small fires in the middle of the night, cursing the stove and the warehouse and the indifference of fate in general. None of us had ever lived this way before.

We survived. We had heat, food, and shelter, everything that was needed for a bitter winter to come, including the long woolen underwear that hung on us like potato sacks. But the underwear kept us warm when keeping warm was the point. We knew we were among the lucky ones that year, to be stationed in Nancy behind the lines.

At the time, the front stretched about ten miles northeast, toward the Vosges foothills. Not far from those protective ridges, the feverish American race across France after D-Day had come to a halt when the armored divisions of Patton’s Third Army ran out of supplies. By mid-October, the weary tanks and half-tracks sat dormant,
waiting for fuel, and the front itself barely moved. The newly arrived American infantry, which had come up to replace the armored divisions, was dug deep into foxholes that pockmarked the French soil like a skin disease, while the Germans, who had been on the run for months—a shocking new experience—faced us at last in an exhausted defense line. It was a near-static confrontation, marked by restless forays by both sides. But the Germans were not demoralized—far from it. The closer they got to the Reich and their own homes, the fiercer they fought. Possibly as a result, they sometimes behaved with the demented logic that often lies at the heart of lost causes.

The lines then were only a couple of hundred yards apart, still partly the stuff of World War I; this unnatural closeness had created a kind of perverse intimacy between the two sides. At the time, I remember hearing crude Teutonic obscenities being shouted at Yank outposts in the middle of the night; sometimes they even sounded weirdly amiable. Were they meant as a joke? Or as an attempt at midnight torture for the terrified Yankee riflemen who couldn’t leave their exposed positions between the lines until just before dawn?

Around the same time, a German took a couple of potshots at me when I clambered out of my foxhole in order to defecate—for once out in the open. The German deliberately mis-aimed, I thought, and missed twice as a result. A humane act? A show of sympathy? Or again, a subtle form of torture? I didn’t have the answer then and I still don’t. And there were other experiences like that; everyone had a story of some kind, the stuff of reassuring anecdotes, what you chose to tell your children later on, if you chose to tell them anything.

Mostly, however, there were more conventional episodes, panic-driven routs for both sides, devastating fire-fights, cunning ambushes, at which the Germans excelled, small-scaled massacres. That kind of thing was common in the fall of 1944. Its chief purpose, at least for the Yanks, was to maintain the military status quo, while the Red Ball express rushed fuel and ammunition to the front, where the Third Army was waiting. Nobody was going anywhere without supplies, anyway, certainly not the Americans. The American Army rarely made a move unless its supply lines were in near-perfect order. In any conventional strategic sense, all was relatively quiet in Alsace-Lorraine, as the bulletins used to state with such fatuous serenity. All was quiet northeast of Nancy.

I HAD come to the 26th Division a year before through the Army Specialized Training Program, the ASTP, along with a thousand other teen-age troops. All of us were smart kids. Our arrival was intended to bring the division up to full strength before it shipped overseas. It didn’t seem to matter that we were untested for combat, even though we had trained for the infantry during the previous summer, just after our induction into the Army, on the scorching sands of Fort Benning, Georgia. That bothered few in the 26th. Live bodies that moved were what the division seemed to want; their credentials were less important. One of the ASTPs I knew, a painter who later became nationally known, was reported to be blind in one eye; no one, to my knowledge, ever questioned the fact or worried about it, except possibly the artist himself. When it came time for him to fire his rifle, he aimed it just like everyone else.

Nevertheless, the 26th had a reputation to uphold, in the way of most infantry divisions. It was actually the New England National Guard, famous as the Yankee Division in its home territory, with a celebrated World War I record that included action at both St.-Mihiel and Belleau Wood; for its bravery on the Western Front, the 104th regiment of the division won the Croix de Guerre, the first ever awarded an American unit by the French. This record was patriotically nourished by the division between the two World Wars. There were ongoing reunions, banquets, meetings, and publications to reinforce morale. All this was more than a matter of upholding simple pride. Something essential, involving caste and status, was also part of it. For some veterans, contact with the YD represented one way of finally being able to feel like a real American, of feeling comfortable at last within a rigid society that had long been run—sometimes ruthlessly—by Puritans and Brahmins. That was New England then.

But by 1944 there were no longer many true Yankees in the Yankee Division. The New England Irish held on, strong as ever, but with the onset of the draft other ethnic and national groups had begun to infiltrate the roster: provincial Italians, for example, who in those days spoke to no one but other Italians; Armenians, Greeks, Hispanics, Maltese, other ghettoized Mediterraneans. Tagging along was a substantial cluster of despised WASPs, who didn’t yet know that they were a symptom of the future, as well as a handful of isolated Jews, who were also despised; but, unlike the WASPs, the Jews were quite used to it. The point was that they were all Yankees now, by regional fiat—Irish, Mediterranean, WASPs, and Jews—and they
were slowly becoming passionate cultural egalitarians as well, especially when it came to their own.

AFTER surviving infantry basic at Fort Benning, my ASTP class was sent north to the University of Maine in the winter of 1943 so that we could continue our academic careers. (They, too, had all been drafted straight out of college.) The Army’s idea was to turn us into professional engineers in time for the invasion of Japan. Whatever the Army had in mind for us, it turned out to be an easy and comfortable war up there in the heavy snows of Orono, Maine, totally without hassle or anxiety or even hierarchical distinctions. I don’t remember any officers on campus, for example, although there had to be a few around. We all went to class happily, we studied, and we never looked back. I was even maintaining an A average in every course, including advanced calculus, a subject that I had already failed at Johns Hopkins. I was even less interested in engineering than I was in medicine, but, of course, in the ASTP it was engineering or nothing. In any case, the war was elsewhere, far from Orono, Maine, and that was how we preferred it.