So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (12 page)

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The army encouraged us to smoke. Even during basic training, in the midst of the most demanding physical drills, whenever the instructors would say, “Take a ten-minute break,” they’d add, “Smoke if you got ’em.” Cigarettes were so cheap at the post exchange they were practically free, and every time we got C or K rations, during training or later in combat, there, along with the food, was a fresh supply of cigarettes.

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How did it feel to serve in a racially segregated army? I really never noticed it was all white. I’d sometimes see black units driving trucks or delivering supplies, but it never occurred to me I was part of segregation. And yet, both before and after the war, I was active in antisegregation political campaigns back in Los Angeles. I just had never noticed the army’s segregation. It all seemed so normal. I was quite political, but I never knew anyone who talked about, or cared about, the race issue. I think the first time I ever thought about it was long after the war, in 1948, when Harry Truman issued the executive order that ended racial segregation in the armed forces.

And gays? We didn’t use that word then. Never thought about it. Looking back now, it’s obvious I must have served with men who were gay. Some men seemed a bit “different,” but we never talked about them.

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The U.S. Army went through a lot of phases before it decided to concentrate on fighting World War II against Germany and Japan, with infantrymen, on the ground. As part of this, the army spent several months in 1943 in a massive effort to keep America’s colleges afloat and functioning, needed because most of the college-age men had either volunteered or been drafted. Thus, creation of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which pulled men from their army positions—mainly the infantry—and sent them to colleges across the country for intensive education in engineering or in foreign languages.

When I completed basic infantry training at Camp Roberts and almost all of my fellow trainees were assigned to infantry units, I was sent to an interview with a visiting lieutenant who said he would test my ability to speak French and if I scored well, I would be assigned to a college for advanced training in the language. With visions of a high-level intelligence assignment, interviewing Free French guerrillas returning from (or headed toward) heroic missions behind the lines in Europe, I resolved to do my best. It soon became clear that the lieutenant, luckily for me, had less awareness of the language than I and devoted most of the interview—in halting French—to a discussion of what I had eaten for breakfast. With silent thanks to Mademoiselle Hurlbut, a French refugee who had taught me three years of high school French (heavy on Racine and Molière and a lot of time learning when to use the subjunctive—but very little of the spoken language), I proceeded to reel off the French words I knew for bacon, ham, eggs (fried, poached, and boiled), toast, potatoes, and croissants, washed down with orange and grapefruit juice, coffee, tea, and milk. The lieutenant thanked me and sent me back to the barracks. Three anxious days later, I was told by the company clerk he had orders assigning me to foreign language training in the ASTP at, of all places, the City College of New York.

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Train travel had become “wartime train travel” and was increasingly difficult. Separate berths, compartments, and drawing rooms were all nonexistent or reserved for officers and other preferred folks. Upper and lower berths were at a premium, so my travel to New York was entirely by coach, two seats abreast, for four nights and three days. Luckily, seat assignments were reasonably haphazard, and I was often able to share a bench with an attractive girl. One reason travel took so long was competition among private railroad companies, which regularly made coast-to-coast travel include a change of trains during a stopover in Chicago.

Everyone knew the system made no sense, but no one fixed it. In fact, Robert Young, president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, ran a big national advertising campaign under the banner “A hog can cross the country without changing trains—but you can’t.”

Traveling by train cross-country was mostly not like in the movies. In the movies, you met Nazi agents, great poets out to replenish their souls, or men planning to kill their wives. Train travel in the movies also featured beautiful women. The most exciting trip I had was when I sat on a bench talking to a very pretty girl from Oklahoma. We had a great time and wanted somewhere to be alone together, but there was no place to go. So we just talked.

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In New York City, I found myself assigned to a bunk in what had been the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, at Amsterdam Avenue and 137th Street, in uptown (way uptown) Manhattan. The army had requisitioned the orphanage for “the duration.” The sinks and toilets, and what passed for shower stalls, were all scaled way down for little kids, but otherwise it was quite habitable. I went to my assigned classroom—in a high school adjacent to the orphanage—and in due course the professor arrived and began to address me and approximately twenty or so classmates in Spanish, a language they all seemed, more or less, to understand. Needless to say, I couldn’t comprehend a word of what Señor Enrique Ramos was saying, so I excused myself (with some difficulty because Señor Ramos couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak a word of English) and headed for the orderly room. There, after I said I’d clearly been put in the wrong language class, I was told that I had indeed been assigned to a class in Spanish, because the army had a rule that no one who spoke a foreign language fluently could further study that language and, sure enough, the lieutenant who had interviewed me back at Camp Roberts had classified me as “fluent” in French. I went back to the Spanish class.

The ASTP was a laboratory for the Modern Language Association’s new techniques in learning a foreign language; it involved no writing, no drills or declension of verbs, and our class hours—for several months—consisted entirely of informative dialogues, presided over amiably by Señor Ramos, who, like the rest of the faculty, spoke very little English and, like many of his colleagues, was a veteran of the elected government of Spain, overthrown by General Franco. We went to Spanish movies, ate in Spanish and Spanish-speaking restaurants, and kept up our dialogues and invented new ones with visiting experts. That, plus afternoon lectures about Spain, its history, geography, and customs, took up all our days, and after several months I was indeed fluent in Spanish. Being taught Spanish to help defeat Hitler and the Japanese? None of us stopped to think if it made sense. The army told us what to do, and we did it.

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The end of ASTP came suddenly but not unexpectedly. One morning in the spring of 1944, classes did not meet; indeed, the rooms and offices were empty, and army bulletins posted on the doors told us ASTP had been terminated, and we were all to await orders to transfer to other units. Beginning the next day, for me at least, advanced infantry training would resume in Mississippi. This came quickly, and I was assigned to the 273rd Infantry Regiment in Camp Shelby, Mississippi. It was to be my unit until I was discharged after the war ended. On arrival at Shelby, I was put in Company D, designated a heavy weapons company—part of the 273rd Regiment, one of three regiments in the 69th Infantry Division. This was classic infantry, and a look around made it clear that we new arrivals constituted an infusion of about twenty replacements in each of the infantry companies.

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The heavy weapons company consisted of three platoons, two armed with .30-caliber machine guns and one platoon with six squads, each manning an 81 mm mortar. Each mortar squad required a jeep and a driver (who was also an ammunition and weapons carrier); it was to this Company D motor pool the new ex-ASTP arrivals had been assigned. We quickly became comrades within the company, 20 drivers (two jeeps for company headquarters) in the larger community of 154 men in Company D. There, almost by natural selection, three of us became special buddies, Bob Gardiner, Dan Murphy, and me. Gardiner was a Cornell student and the son of an authority on foremanship. He had a fiancée back home—family name of Stover—who then quickly became “Smokey,” after a popular comic strip,
Smokey Stover
. Daniel Murphy, another ASTPer who had been studying at Newark College of Engineering, was Urban Man; his view of life, his friends, and his culture was pure New York. Dan and Bob were assigned jeeps for mortar squads, and I was given the number two jeep in headquarters. I drove the company commander occasionally, the executive officer more often, and reported to a staff sergeant who had the oxymoronic title of intelligence sergeant. Company D traveled by jeep, almost always in a carefully disciplined motorcade—D-l through D-20, first the machine gun squads, then the mortars—all under the command of Captain McNulty. (I don’t think any of us ever knew, or bothered to find out, his first name.) The captain (also known, true to form, as the Old Man) was a peacetime regular army guy, thought of by us college men as “a man who couldn’t make it on the outside.” He was an old-fashioned commander; he once busted his first sergeant down to PFC for coming back to the barracks one night drunk and, worse, after curfew. He even broke me, Murphy, and Gardiner from PFC to private one night in England, when he found us in the ladies’ room of a British pub where none of us were supposed to be (our rank was restored before the next pay period, thus ending the possible embarrassment of a question as to why the Old Man himself was at the forbidden place).

Bob, Dan, and I became fast friends. Once a week, we would catch a bus ride to town (Hattiesburg), eat a steak dinner at the only restaurant in the place, drink a few beers, smoke cigarettes, and go back to camp, and once every month we would get a weekend pass, catch the train to New Orleans, book ourselves into a cheap hotel, and do the town, which meant dinner at a famous New Orleans restaurant, a stroll through the Garden District or down Bourbon Street to hear some jazz, brunch the next day at another famous restaurant, and catch the train back to Hattiesburg. Not a very exciting life, but the war, as well as the imminence of overseas combat, was a constant presence, along with our life stories and, from me, whatever Hollywood gossip I could recall.

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I was performing kitchen police duties early one morning for the mess sergeant, who, like many West Virginians, had only initials and no first name. L. W. Godfrey sent me to the special service office early that morning and asked me to pick up all the broken and used Ping-Pong balls that were available. Being a good soldier, I did not ask to have this explained, and when I returned with six or seven used and in some cases cracked Ping-Pong balls, Sergeant Godfrey handed me a mallet and asked me to break them into little pieces, “the tinier the better.” Finally, I asked him what he was going to do with the broken Ping-Pong balls, and he, being simultaneously a mess sergeant in charge of preparing breakfast for 154 reasonably ravenous infantrymen and, secretly, a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, told me he was going to put the tiny fragments of Ping-Pong balls into the powdered scrambled eggs, which might convince a few of the soldiers—with luck, most of them—that they were eating fresh eggs with little pieces of eggshell in among the scrambled eggs. I asked him why he was doing it, and he answered, with a perfect line from
The Mikado,
which made us pals and exchangers of key Gilbert and Sullivan lines thereafter, and this, from a relatively uneducated West Virginian, “Merely to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

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Overseas finally came, after D-day, and I was pleased we’d be going to Europe rather than the Pacific. The war with Japan was in places I’d never heard of, impenetrable jungles or, worse, well-defended beaches that, we’d heard, had terrible heat all the time. In Europe, at least we’d be fighting in places we’d all heard about—France, Belgium, maybe Germany—somehow a more civilized set of dangers. And best of all, there would be, we were told, some time in England (more training) before heading for the fighting areas.

Army life is totally different from life as a civilian—and it absorbs everything. The U.S. Army was our life. We had no idea when the war would end, and we always knew it might end badly for any of us at any time. We were in military service for “the duration plus six”—which, of course, helped keep us motivated to win.

We were trucked, finally, to a loading dock somewhere in New York Harbor, from which we sailed (an old-fashioned word) on a typical troopship, a converted Victory ship, small, crowded, cramped, troops on narrow canvas “bunks,” triple-decked so as to leave no space for anything except sleeping, makeshift communal bathrooms, and a typical army mess. Victory ships were amazing. Made from prefabricated sections and welded together, a new ship was being turned out by U.S. factories in about 40 days—down from 230 days when the United States entered World War II. It had only a few guns and relied on escorting destroyers for protection from German submarines. Back then, the ships were a splendid source of great patriotic pride. The trip took fifteen days, partly because we were dodging submarines and mostly because the ships were small and slow. But we could gaze over the railings during the day and see comforting American warships accompanying us and other troop and freight ships in a convoy.

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I was offered officer candidate school shortly before we left England for France, but I declined because I did not want to leave my buddies. We’d been together through a huge amount of training, and we’d grown close and I wanted to be with them. Becoming an officer was no small thing, but I could not imagine not being with my friends in Company D when they hit the front lines. I was sure we’d all survive, and back in civilian life we’d be friends for years; we’d be old men together.

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The time in England, on the Salisbury Plain somewhere between Basingstoke and Winchester, was indeed a pleasant prelude. We could get weekend passes to London, which meant great sightseeing—the Tower, London Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussauds—and, of course, roast beef at Simpson’s. We even became accustomed to warm beer. But by September, we were on our way across the Channel, and for us scared twenty-year-olds the real war was about to begin.