Every Man a Hero

by Ray Lambert

  A once-elaborate dining hall belowdecks had been stripped and turned into a combination mess hall and dormitory outfitted with swinging hammocks. The fixed tables were meant to fit sixteen men apiece for meals; it was a tight squeeze.

  Aside from the waves and crowded conditions, it was a quiet passage for the first few days. Then came the night we heard shouts on the deck. A submarine had fired a torpedo at the convoy.

  Our escorts scrambled to the attack. Up top, I watched a destroyer dart out through the shadows and begin launching depth charges. The water rumbled below.

  Did we get him?

  I had no way to tell. The Bedford and the rest of the convoy continued eastward; there was no stopping for any reason, and lingering under these circumstances would have been foolhardy, as German U-boats often operated in packs. I heard later that the U-boat the convoy attacked had been sunk. But I also heard that it had been captured.

  Alas, though we’ve looked, I’ve never seen any hard proof that any of that happened. There are various rumors that the Bedford herself sank a submarine in 1942; probably best to take them all with a grain of salt.

  The submarine chase was our only excitement before we reached Liverpool on July 10. From there, we boarded a train for Tidworth Barracks near Salisbury, England.

  A marching band struck up a tune as we stepped off the train. We attempted to march in time to their beat as they escorted us to the installation. But their tempo was far faster than what we were accustomed to, and I finally told the guys to just walk.

  We saw there would be other things to get used to when we headed over to the mess hall. I’d no sooner sat down than one of the members of the women’s auxiliary that had come to help us prepare the barracks raced over to my table.

  “You can’t sit here,” she said sternly.

  I asked why.

  She pointed to the stripes on my shoulder.

  “You’re an officer. You need to go to the proper dining room.”

  At some point I’d been told that, to the British, noncommissioned officers or sergeants were officers, and were treated (and expected to act) as such.

  It seemed odd to leave my guys, most of whom I’d known for over a year. But there was no arguing with her; she could have intimidated Winston Churchill himself. I got up and headed to the adjoining room.

  I’m pretty sure we had the same food in both places; it was only the company that was different. Dinner that night was sausage and cabbage. The next meal, things switched up—we had cabbage and sausage.

  It went on like that for the rest of the time we were at Tidworth. The British had been at war for several years now, and food was not in great supply. I’m sure what they were presenting us was the best they had, very likely better than what their own soldiers were eating and certainly better than what many civilians could muster. I began to appreciate the sacrifices the British had made since the war began.

  Live Fire

  Our barracks were old two-story buildings dating from the turn of the century. The layout was a lot like the barracks we’d had in the States, with small offices on each floor and large open areas. The women who’d been assigned to assist us did a great job cleaning and helping us get new straw—yes, straw—into the bunks to provide a cushion for our bedding.

  They were also the first women most of us had seen for quite some time. Which explained why on the first morning after we got there, when I asked the man I’d put in charge of bed check—standard procedure at night, kind of a roll call to make sure everyone was accounted for—he explained to me that bed check had been very easy: no one was there.

  Apparently all the guys had been getting acquainted with our hosts.

  Not a problem, I decided, as long as everyone was present now and there had been no bad behavior.

  After things were set up, we left to join the rest of our unit, which was arriving in Scotland for training before going to Tidworth. We practiced amphibious landings and started doing live-fire drills—people were shooting at us, or in our general direction. It was the first time we’d had something more than firecrackers simulating battle conditions.

  You practice and practice and practice, trying to make everything automatic.

  The other thing we had a lot of in Scotland was rain. In my imagination looking back, it rains every day. I’m sure it didn’t, but it seemed that way even then.

  There were so many maneuvers, both in Scotland and the rest of Great Britain, that they blur together now. I do remember one time in Ireland, or rather sailing there. We were all on a ship, and the weather was so nice that a lot of us went up on deck and basked in the sun without our shirts—against orders.

  I almost got court-martialed for that. Because between the salt water and the sun, I, like a lot of other guys, ended up with sunburn and blisters. I’m pretty sure that if one of the doctors hadn’t intervened on my behalf, I would have gotten in serious trouble; there was no hiding the fact that I’d exposed myself to the sun.

  A small little thing for a civilian, maybe—a bad day at the beach. But imagine the effect if we’d been going into combat.

  * * *

  With all the training we were doing, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of free time. We did on occasion venture to a local pub. I remember one where the old guys were over at the far end, playing darts and drinking a light ale. I went over and talked to them a bit. When it was time for a fresh round of beer, they would go over to the fireplace, take an iron poker from the side, and stick it in the fire. When it was red hot, they’d plunge the poker into their drink with a sizzle.

  They claimed it made it stronger. I couldn’t say.

  Truth is, I’d never been much of a drinker, and if I’d even tasted anything stronger than beer to that point it would surprise me. I’d never seen my father or one of my uncles drunk, at least that I can remember. In fact, I can’t even picture them wanting a drink. That’s what growing up in the Bible Belt does.

  Now, it might have been that there were a bunch of drunks in every house I stopped in, all hiding their booze under the kitchen sink. But I didn’t see it.

  Getting back to England, we did take one sightseeing trip, or at least it was something like a sightseeing trip. The battalion marched out to Stonehenge at some point, and while there, got a brief, informal lecture on the purpose of the ancient stones.

  Not exactly a package tour, but it was a bit different from the usual maneuvers. And I still admire the ingenuity of the people who built it.

  * * *

  My responsibilities had increased to the point where I was doing the work of the detachment’s staff sergeant, the highest-ranking enlisted man in the unit. While each detachment was led by a doctor, who was generally a lieutenant, as a rule they left most of the day-to-day operations and direct supervision of the men to the ranking NCO. The doctors were highly trained in medicine, but most if not all had been in the army for only a very short time. And I guess from their point of view, they had more important things to do than watching over some thirty-odd medics.

  We did have a staff sergeant, who was supposed to be running things. To put things in the kindest way, he wasn’t much good at his job. But honestly, I didn’t mind doing the work. My attitude was simply to get things done. If that meant taking responsibility for the others in the unit, what was the problem?

  My brother Bill, in the meantime, had been promoted to staff sergeant, heading the medics over at 3rd Battalion. He had the rank—and the pay.

  He was also, like me, a married man.

  He’d broken his arm back at Devens. Sent to the hospital, his recovery seemed to take forever, but I eventually learned why. The nurse taking care of him was an intelligent and beautiful young lieutenant, Una Curran. By the time he was discharged, and probably well before that, they had fallen in love. Una resigned her commission to marry him.

  Bigger and (Maybe) Better

  The army and navy were growing, adding men and equipment as quickly as they could. The draft had been ins
tituted in 1941, and by Pearl Harbor, there were 1.6 million men (and a few women) wearing army uniforms.

  Sounds like a lot. But consider this: By April 1945, there would be over three million American soldiers in Europe alone. The U.S. Army totaled five million soldiers—3.5 percent of the entire population. Account for the fact that women, children, and older men were largely excluded from service, and you get the picture—the odds were that you knew someone who wore khaki fatigues to work every day. It may well have been your brother, your dad, your uncle—or you.

  (Today’s numbers: the army has less than half a million men and women, about .3 percent of the population.)

  My job as a leader—with or without the staff sergeant stripe—was to build our unit into a team that could work together under the worst possible conditions. To do that, the men had to know and trust each other. They also had to be put into positions where they could succeed.

  Living with them, especially later on when we got into combat, I came to see them as family. You know, you live with guys and you get to be very close to them. You’re concerned about them. You know that the slightest bit of a problem they may have could become serious when you go into action. So you get to know your people.

  I spent as much time as I could getting to know every man, asking about their families, their backgrounds, finding out what they liked and didn’t, watching them in the drills and later in the field. I have to say that most of them were top-notch. A few might be better adapted for one sort of role or another, but pretty much without exception they strove to do their best.

  Aside from the staff sergeant.

  The only other exception had been transferred out while we were at Devens. He wasn’t a bad person, really, but he was always finding his way into some minor trouble or coming up short in an assignment. To put it in contemporary military terms, he wasn’t squared away.

  I am being kind.

  The fellow spent a lot of time on KP duty—“kitchen police,” where he’d have to do things like peel endless sacks of potatoes as a disciplinary action. Eventually, the commander saw fit to have him transferred out of the unit.

  I heard later he eventually became a major. I’d like to believe that means he straightened himself out, but it may be a more accurate assessment of how hard up the army was for officers.

  Not to mention ample justification for the ordinary enlisted man’s view of the officer class, exceptions duly noted.

  * * *

  As summer turned to fall in 1942, the regiment started receiving new equipment. That was the surest sign we were going into combat, though at that point we had no idea where it might be.

  In a sense, it didn’t matter. Most of us were eager to get in the fight. We’d trained for years, some of us, and we were eager to put our skills to use. While there may have been a few men with reservations, most of us thought we were ready.

  More than ready.

  I certainly felt that way. I may even have been a bit cocky about it. I felt I knew what to expect, and was sure I’d do well.

  But there are things that you can never really know until you experience them. And as we were all about to find out, war is one of them.

  Four

  Lighting the Torch

  Lights

  The glow surprised me. It seemed unreal, to come from a time and place that had passed out of memory. I stood on the deck and stared, stunned for a moment.

  We were off the coast of Spain. The lights were on because Spain was not at war; it was one of the few places in Europe that had not only remained neutral but had managed to escape combat or occupation, at least partly because its dictator and his government had close ties to Germany and Hitler. It was still recovering from a bloody civil war, and divisions and hatred no doubt still split the population, but compared to the open violence and deprivation common in the rest of Europe, it was a relative paradise.

  With its lights on.

  Of all the things I’d seen since joining the army, the last thing I would have expected to shock me would be the lights of a city. But they did. We’d lived in blackout conditions, not only in Great Britain but the U.S., for so long that electric lights at night were an alien thing.

  Under other circumstances, maybe they would have been a treat. But we were heading to real war, and the reality of that had begun to slowly sink in since I’d boarded the Bedford a few days before. It was mid-October 1942, and not counting a few skirmishes, most notably a Ranger attack on the northern French port city of Dieppe in August, the U.S. was about to spill its first blood in the European theater’s ground war by invading Africa.

  Once again I was part of the battalion’s advance team, though this was a very different mission; instead of brass bands, we expected to be greeted by bullets from French Vichy soldiers under the direction of their German masters.

  We—I, especially—were still cocky and edging for a fight.

  * * *

  I’d set up our aid station on the upper deck, which gave me more room to work and somewhat better conditions than most of the soldiers crammed below. I shared a cabin, small but comparatively comfortable, with one of our company aid men.

  Captain Samuel Morchan, our doctor, headed our contingent. Just thirty years old when I met him, the doctor would prove a steady and calm presence, not only while treating wounds but under fire as well. That wasn’t just my opinion—the army ended up pinning Silver and Bronze Stars on him. He’d joined the medical department in 1940 after a few years of practice and studying in Switzerland as well as the States.

  The upper echelons had feared submarine attacks or even action from Spain as we passed through the Strait of Gibraltar. But the passage was quiet, and the entire armada of over two hundred ships made it offshore of Africa without incident. If we were detected, neither the Germans nor the French made any effort to stop us.

  The passengers who’d sailed on the ship in its earlier incarnation would have leapt overboard if they’d had to eat some of the food being served in the cramped galleys below. Stories later cited not only the endless servings of chewy mutton, but also the liberal sprinkling of weevils and other bugs in the flour and bread. Soldiers broke out their emergency candy bars in self-defense.

  My position as medic and my office above came with some perks. I may not have gotten any better chow, but I didn’t have to snake through the seemingly endless lines. The galley—the navy’s word for kitchen—provided food whenever we wanted.

  Sorry to say, the cabbage and mutton didn’t grow on me.

  * * *

  The candy bars were standard equipment—D-Rations. They weren’t candy; the idea was that they would perk you up when you needed a boost. In fact, they’d been formulated to be a little bitter to prevent soldiers from treating them as candy and snacking on them rather than saving them for when they were truly needed. That didn’t work all that well. They were still sweeter than just about anything else a guy had eaten for weeks.

  C-Rations were more substantial. These were canned meals that were supposed to substitute for hot food while you were in the field. They came in three varieties: meat and beans, hash, and stew; others were eventually added, including my “favorite,” franks—or whatever that meat was—and beans. That was probably the favorite of quartermasters as well, since those always seemed in short supply at the front.

  These main courses were supplemented by crackers, juice powder, instant coffee, and salt and pepper. Early on, there were “energy tablets”—dextrose or sugar—as a dessert; this got switched to candy and then cookies as the war went on.

  We also got halazone tablets to clean drinking water, chewing gum, and of course cigarettes as add-ons. The gum and the smokes were more popular than the canned food.

  Order of Battle

  The area of northern Africa we were heading toward had been in Axis hands since the fall of France in 1940, though not directly held by Germany.

  The days of empire had faded, but the European powers had retained colonies in Africa
, and before the war France had occupied a large portion of northern Africa, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. These colonies (technically, Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates, but it amounted to the same thing as far as we were concerned) sat now under the control of Germany’s puppet, Vichy France. The troops there were all Vichy. While we expected at least one high-ranking commander would defect to our side and many troops might not fight, there was no way to know how stiff resistance might be.

  Beyond those countries sat plenty of German and Italian troops, and they certainly would fight. Libya, just to the east of Tunisia, was an Italian colony. Bordering Libya to the east was Egypt, which though in theory independent had been occupied by Great Britain since 1882.

  The Axis and the British had been fighting in the Libyan and Egyptian deserts since June 1940. The British, under General Harold Alexander and Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, had recently withstood a push by the Germans eastward; they were now in the early stages of a drive against the Axis aimed ultimately at Tunisia. The idea of our operation, code named Torch, was to take over the weakly defended French colonies and come eastward toward Tunisia, pressuring the Germans as the main British offensive continued to the east.

  Besides defeating the German forces and neutralizing the French Vichy assets, Torch was intended to help tie up German troops and resources, hopefully draining them from the fight with the Soviet Union in Russia. That was a strategic play far beyond the concerns we had on the ships as we sailed. Always for us the war was an immediate affair; the only strategy that counted was the one that kept you and your buddies alive.

  * * *

  Nearly 60,000 men and some 250 ships were involved in the overall operation. They were divided unevenly among three task forces, west to east, with landing areas near Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. The 16th Infantry was part of Center Task Force, a group that included the 1st Ranger Battalion as well as our sister regiment the 18th Infantry. Starting from beaches along a fifty-mile stretch of the Mediterranean, the main objectives included two airfields as well as the city of Oran in French Algeria.