So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (13 page)

My particular group of buddies consisted of nine men. None perished in combat, and right after the war we promised ourselves and each other we’d remain close forever. I stayed in touch with just one, Dan Murphy, and in all the decades since then, with all the reunions and possibilities of establishing contact, I never wrote a letter or made a telephone call to any of my other war buddies, nor did I receive any.

*   *   *

When my infantry unit landed in France, a story was going around I must have heard ten times. It went something like this: A sergeant gathers his men before sending them on patrol. “This is an extremely important patrol, men, crucial to our operation,” he says, “but it is very dangerous, and probably only one of you will come back alive.” So everyone in the patrol looks around at his buddies and thinks, “Too bad about the guys. I’ll miss them.” Of course, our infantry unit heard different versions. Sometimes it was a large patrol, sometimes small. Sometimes the sergeant expected only half of the patrol to be killed. But the story always ended the same way.

*   *   *

Christmas came just a few days after the surprise German offensive in what came to be known as the Bulge; many U.S. forces were killed and captured; some whole divisions were taken prisoner. The result was a theater-wide call for replacements—riflemen—from divisions training in England. At our company headquarters, the call went out; each platoon leader (there were three) had to name four or five men to leave at once for the front lines as replacements. At headquarters platoon, where I was a jeep driver and occasional (I hoped) .50-caliber mounted machine gunner, our platoon sergeant had to select three men, and I was one; I had taken off Christmas Day as a holiday instead of Yom Kippur (I wanted to socialize with my pals, and Sergeant Irwin Nayer was no pal).

So there I was—ticketed for a new company, as a rifleman (and probably a patrol leader), for which I’d had no training beyond basic; I was a heavy-weapons man. After the first shock, I thought there might be someone in Company D who hadn’t been picked but who wanted out; perhaps I could persuade him to take my place. I went first to our company commander to get his approval to look for a substitute. I made a good pitch to stay with Company D; after all, I’d already turned down not just a chance for officers’ training school but even an opportunity to go to West Point. I’d turned down both opportunities because it almost guaranteed I’d spend the war years in college, and some peacetime years in the army, just the opposite of what I wanted. I reminded Captain McNulty I really wanted to stay and go into combat with these guys. Amazingly, he gave me permission to seek out someone to go in my place. So I spent Christmas Day going from tent to tent, seeking some malcontent who badly wanted to leave. I found one that afternoon from one of the machine gun platoons, with a fair amount of “bad time” built up and eager to get out from under leadership he had come to despise. So early the next morning, I stood and watched as “our” replacements answered their names and got into a truck for the ride to the Bulge. Luckily for me, my last-minute substitute was among them.

As war continued and then peace came, I’d often wonder what had happened to him; he had volunteered and had seemed quite happy to take my place, but it was impossible not to wonder if a bullet or mortar fragment meant for me might have found him. Years later in Los Angeles, I saw his family name on a shoe store. It was a pretty unusual name, and I stood outside wondering if I should go in. Finally, I inquired of the woman behind the counter if the family had a son or brother—69th Infantry Division—who had fought in Europe. Yes, indeed, was the reply: “He came back from the war, and now he goes to school in New York.”

*   *   *

Our company commander, Captain McNulty, was a regular army guy who’d been our commanding officer through all our days and months in Camp Shelby, then in England and into France and Belgium. As we moved out to real combat the first day, he stayed in the mess tent, and we never saw him again. “Deserter” was the word used as we wondered about his fate, especially after the end of January when we heard about the execution of a private named Slovik for the same action—refusing to go into battle when ordered. (Slovik, it turns out, was the first American executed for desertion since the Civil War and the only American executed for desertion during World War II.) The guys even heard rumors our former captain had been spotted as the commander of a leave train bound for the Riviera. But remembering his role on Christmas Day in what I still think might well have saved my life, I never joined in any of the denunciations of our former captain.

*   *   *

We landed at Le Havre and from there went in freight cars (labeled, true to form, “Quarante et Huit,” French for “Forty and Eight,” still believed to mean Forty Men and Eight Horses, a leftover from World War I) to a place in France called Soissons. From there, we transferred to General Motors 6-by-6ers (the basic troop and supply carrier for the army) and were driven to somewhere in Belgium. Aachen, Malmédy, and Bastogne had already been secured, but their rescue was only a few days old, and citizens hailed us as heroes as we drove through; it was a most enjoyable status.

Due to the unexpected onslaught of Germans in the Bulge, security was tight, with elaborate codes to be memorized, forgotten, and new ones learned each day. It was reported, and believed, that the Germans were using the uniforms of captured American troops, hence the need for very American codes. The code for our first night in the line was to ask any passing soldier to name which teams played in the World Series that year (1944). Most GIs had no idea, and we had to take their ignorance almost on faith, although they were able to tell us about Joe DiMaggio—and maybe Dizzy Dean.

*   *   *

The first dead soldiers I ever saw were dozens of mangled GIs in a concrete bunker; one of them had accidentally pulled the pin of a grenade. An officer ordered us to go into the bunker and carry them out. The next dead I saw were Germans by the road. As we kept moving east, sometimes freed Nazi political prisoners and Soviet POWs filled the roads. We never stopped or slowed down.

*   *   *

During the first day of combat, or one of the first days, we all threw away our newly issued gas masks (too heavy and hard to carry). We each kept our gas mask pouch and would fill it with whatever we thought we might need, like extra rations. Of course, we knew all about extensive German and Allied use of poison gas during World War I, but its use during World War II seemed an impossibility. Each side, we knew, would not use it out of certainty that the other side would—a prelude to the mutual assured destruction that seems to have prevented use of nuclear weapons during U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cold War confrontations. Never once did we discuss gas or regret we hadn’t kept our masks. Nor did we ever see or hear of any Allied gas stockpile in readiness to respond to a Nazi gas attack.

*   *   *

In training, the lieutenant in charge of weapons had told us there were two types of mortar shells used as ammunition: “Your AP, or armor-piercing shell, and your antipersonnel shell, that’s your AP.” In combat, when firing our mortars, we turned this into a running joke, saying things to each other like “Thanks for the AP shell. I’m glad you didn’t give me an AP.”

*   *   *

A photograph I have shows me and Dan Murphy about to enter a German house, not knowing if there would be any resistance. Dan was in the lead, and I was covering him. We both had our rifles in hand. Another photograph shows the two of us relaxing in the courtyard of a German farmhouse, comfortable in the late spring sun, but with weapons at the ready. Obviously, one of our comrades had taken the photographs, but how? Did he carry a camera all the way across France and into Germany? And when were they developed, and how did I get a print? I have no idea.

*   *   *

Bob Gardiner, Dan, and I dug and shared a three-man foxhole most nights. When the front line briefly stabilized just short of the Siegfried Line (a pale German imitation of the Maginot Line), we spent three or four nights on patrol in one forest, and we had dug and created a splendid three-man dugout, with room to sit up alongside three sleeping bags. We built a small stove from a large can and a bit of stovepipe and cadged enough lemonade (heated, it was delicious), coffee, and C rations from the mess tent to enjoy what we counted as splendid meals. With our jeeps camouflaged nearby, and a headlight from one hung inside our dugout but of course blacked out with a spare tent as a cover for the logs of our makeshift roof, and one of the three of us on rotating guard, it was probably our best three days of combat.

*   *   *

At night, we would talk, mostly about the end of the war and what it would be like to go back to the States. We never—ever—doubted we would win; nor did we doubt, at least in what we said out loud, that we would still be alive when victory occurred.

*   *   *

One morning, we were mustered for roll call, and the Allied supreme commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself came to review us. “Do you men need anything?” he asked. “Dry socks,” someone shouted. We could hear Ike say to one of his aides, “Get these men dry socks.” Later that day, enough dry socks for all of us arrived and were immediately distributed.

*   *   *

I still have no idea if I killed anyone. We’d mostly fire our mortars over a hill, get into our jeep, and drive forward. We’d see dead Germans but had no idea if our mortar shells or fire from someone else had killed them. This was fine with me. I did not want to see the people I was shooting. Some guys said, on seeing Germans, dead or prisoners of war, “They’re just like us.” “No,” I would respond, “they are not just like us.”

*   *   *

Debunkers are worse than useless. They take whatever is the accepted view of history, or a story, or the truth and then write an article or a book debunking it. Mostly, it’s historians trying to draw attention to themselves. You can always find something to pick at; that doesn’t really mean anything. Sure, Ike and Bradley and others made mistakes. Maybe D-day should have been at a different time or even a different year. Maybe the port at Antwerp should have been seized and used more effectively. Maybe we should have been able to end the war before the winter of 1944–1945 hit. Maybe we should have known the Germans would attack through the Ardennes. Maybe. Maybe. Sure, but the German generals made mistakes, too. All that matters is the GIs did what was necessary. Stupid things are a large part of every war. And while we’re on the subject, that goes for things like civilian deaths, too. Americans kinder and gentler in combat? Wartime brutality is mindless.

*   *   *

Some dicey days lay ahead in the forests and elsewhere on our route, which took us eventually to Leipzig, in what soon became East Germany. I often had to run my jeep with lights out, at top speed at night on a muddy, single-lane road, back and forth from an ammunition dump to a squad of our company near the top of a hill. German artillery would shell the road, with shells landing right and left. Luckily, none hit their target (as far as I was concerned, me), and none even made the road impassable. We would have a battle every few days, in Kassel, on the west bank of the Rhine River, and it was a thrill, if only somewhat less dangerous than the infiltration course back at Camp Roberts, to cross the Rhine on a hastily built pontoon bridge. Many nights we would spend in small German towns, cleared of their residents. Three or four of us would take over a house, often after a day of minor skirmishing, and find enough onions, eggs, and potatoes to put together a meal—anything to avoid the army’s K rations or C rations—and perhaps a glass or two of wine. Often, we would free the Polish or Russian field workers. The Germans routinely took slaves—there is no better word—from Poland or Russia and brought them back to Germany, where they were parceled out to farm families to bring in the crops while the men were off fighting the enemy. We’d send these “workers,” happily, east on the road to their homes.

*   *   *

The last battle for Company D (in fact, for the U.S. Army) came in Leipzig, and we took some serious casualties in fighting around a large monument in the middle of the city. Not until later were we told, unofficially, that some of those casualties had come from “friendly fire,” a battle with another U.S. division, coming from the west.

*   *   *

Russian troops were not far away, and it became a race with other units to make the historic linkup. One day, Lieutenant William Robertson, from another company in our regiment, came by the motor pool, looking for a jeep to “go on a patrol, looking for Russians.” Bill Robertson was a UCLA guy I knew slightly, and I would have gone with him in a minute, but, alas, I was busy replacing two tires on my jeep, and he couldn’t wait. So off he went, and it turned out his casual patrol did in fact meet the Russians, at the Elbe River in a town named Torgau, a name, the
Stars and Stripes
newspaper told us the next day, that “would live forever.” It is difficult today to find it on the most detailed maps.

Missing the historic event because of my tires was not, it turned out, an unmixed deprivation for me. All the guys on Bill Robertson’s patrol were sent on a triumphant tour of the States and received a special medal. All to the good, until it turned out the travel was paid for by a Communist front, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Probably cost some of them, one day, a government job.

*   *   *

With the fighting over, we spent some time fraternizing with the Russian soldiers just across the Mulde, a tributary of the Elbe. We even did a brisk trade with them, selling watches the owners (or at least the former occupants) of “our” occupied houses had left behind. But what struck me most strongly about these Russian soldiers, who appeared to be living off the land and, indeed, seemed to have
always
lived off the land, was their agitprop, their extraordinary political action material. On the day after FDR died, a twenty-foot-high poster of Harry Truman had replaced that of FDR in the Russians’ display of the Big Three at the bridge we shared, at a time when hardly anyone on our side could even
name
our new president. And, sure enough, when the returns came in after the July 5, 1945, British elections, there was, of all people, a full poster of Clement Attlee. They couldn’t afford cigarettes, and their boots differed from man to man and often from foot to foot, but the Russians sure knew their politics.