Weller's War

by George Weller

  Chicago, Illinois—May 1, 1944

  The hardest thing for people at home in wartime is to transfer themselves imaginatively to the front where their fighting men are engaged. It is always difficult to move oneself imaginatively through time and space to an unfamiliar place. When the unknown element of battle comes into the equation, it seems nearly impossible for those at home to realize what war is like.

  The first characteristic of war is not its hardship nor its danger, but the overpowering monotony. There is time for thought, for self-questioning The question underlying much of a soldier's thinking is: “What are we fighting for?”

  From Asia or Africa, from the stony villages of Italy or the wind-torn atolls of the Pacific, America comes to appear to the lonely soldier a great and amorphous creature. It is not only far away; it is unreal. News from America is complete in the sense that no important event is omitted. But it is incomplete in that the whole phenomena of American life are only sketched in.

  Little mimeographed or handprinted newspapers come up to the front and they give some account of the major events at home. But the background of how people are feeling and what they are thinking is remote from the soldier.

  As nearly as a war correspondent who has visited many American camps all over the world can determine, the G.I. “Sad Sack” is fighting the war for a picture. The picture may be a stained photograph of his family, or of his fiancée, wrapped and re-wrapped in a waterproof tobacco pouch at the bottom of his kit. Or it may only be a picture printed in his memory, changing and growing sharper or fading as he is buffeted about by the fortunes of war.

  Field Marshal Wavell once wrote that war consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear.

  The pictures in a soldier's mind undergo changes due to both these causes.

  Fear is not nearly so important as boredom. Fear affects only that aristocracy of our troops who go into battle, and they by no means compose the major part of the Army. It is probable that in the Pacific campaign not more than one per cent of the troops have ever seen living, non-captured Japanese. Probably not more than three per cent have ever seen General MacArthur or Admiral Nimitz.

  The dispatches of war correspondents, coming usually from headquarters or the front lines, give the impression that this participation in the greatness of the war—its generalship and its fighting—are the lot of every soldier.

  But they are not. The lot of the soldier is to obey orders whose meaning is unexplained to him, to dig foxholes and move on and have to dig them again the next day, to whip his bivouac into order for a visit of the general who does not turn up, to put in a request for a transfer that he cannot get and then to be transferred someplace else where he does not want to go. About the only time he is able to find himself as the individual human being and enter his own place is in his dream world of that photograph, mental and real, for which he is fighting.

  The clarity of these photographs is affected by two elements: the experiences of the man in the forces, and what he hears from home. The first lies in the hands of the armed forces to shape. The second lies in the hands of people who communicate with him from home.

  In relation to these two forces the soldier, though armed to the fingertips and trained to the eyebrows, is almost as helpless as a baby. He is acted upon rather than acting. What the strife of battle will make of him nobody can say. The image of the home front he gets overseas is similarly impossible to control.

  There are soldiers who get nothing but oblique penciled scrawls in the shape of a letter, never any photographs, never any newspaper clippings. Never anything real to knit them up with the homes for which they are fighting. The image of the home front in their minds is most imperfect and they are more imperfect soldiers for that reason.

  Men are coming home with the tidings of far places in their eyes and in their words. But while they are out overseas, there is little that they can offer in return for what they need so much from home. The writer once spent some time with an American naval outfit which had fled from the Philippines to Western Australia, part of the Asiatic Fleet. It was the beginning of the war. The men who wrote home could not say where they came from, nor where they were, nor what kind of duty they had, nor what battle action they had experienced, nor whether they had been wounded, nor where they were going next. These censorship precautions were reasonable and necessary from a military point of view. But they gave the people on the other end little to go on. And it is hard to maintain a one-sided correspondence.

  One boy at Guadalcanal grew so exasperated at not being able to write home that he decided to send the family a jeep for a gift. He managed to purloin a jeep and sent it all home, part by part, wheels, chassis, hood and windshield. They caught him when he was trying to mail back the cylinder block; it was too big to go into the mailbag. Apparently he got so disgusted at himself at not being able to write anything and not having any Japanese battle flags or swords to send home that he felt he must discharge his duty in some way.

  What the soldier needs most at a distance is a sense of true and undying affection for him at home. Affection does not mean pity. A moaning, slobbery letter full of misplaced anguish about danger will land in most cases in a camp where no shot has ever been heard fired in anger since the war began. It sets the soldier thinking on a vein of self-commiseration, an unhealthy note for the Army. There is something ridiculous about being in a perfectly safe place (as are nearly two-thirds of our soldiers at any one time) and receiving a letter in outrageously bathetic language.

  Do not judge the quality of the soldier by the number of his decorations. Most decorations are earned and well deserved by their wearers. But many, especially in the infantry of the Marines and Army, earn decorations which they never receive. This is not because of any deliberate injustice, but simply because witnesses are required to all acts of heroism.

  Often the witnesses to heroism are killed off or so badly shocked they do not remember what happened. In such cases affidavits are not forthcoming. There is no deliberate injustice about this. War, for the individual and the non-influential, is simply a great game of chance.

  It becomes apparent to one who visits all the fronts that most of the talk about courage and cowardice begins about 200 yards back of the fighting line and increases in volubility until one arrives at rear headquarters, possibly several hundred miles away. Nothing like this talk is heard much at the front. Nobody wants to die for the most glittering medal that was ever hung. But everybody is willing to do his duty, not because it is brave but because it is necessary.

  As the war wears on, one question lifts itself more and more often in the minds of the troops. The question is: “When shall I be going home?”

  This question provides its own answer, which is: “After the victory.”

  Another question follows: “What do we have to do to gain the victory?”

  And this question is finally succeeded by a third: “How shall we know when we have won the war?”

  The new worldwide American soldier knows that he will not have won the war simply when the enemy surrenders. He knows that a sound peace must be enforced to be durable. And he is becoming more and more concerned about the terms of this peace.

  The American soldier is perhaps the least educated politically of any soldier in the world today. All of his ideology is in the two photographs. But he is eager to learn more about what he is fighting for.

  It is therefore necessary for civilian defense volunteers at home not only to see that metal, paper, fats and tin are salvaged, that plates are scraped clean, that gas is not wasted. It is necessary to do one thing more: be vigilant about the political terms of the peace. No soldier who has spent two years of his life defending an air field in Assam or a wharf in West Africa, or a listening post on a Pacific island, is indifferent as to what will happen to these places after the war. Having been fought for, built, or paid for by Americans, he is eager that they shall remain American.

  Stories of new ma
gical weapons that will end the war in 45 days amuse him, but he mistrusts them. What the soldier would like to know is how much political vigilance is being demonstrated on his behalf, in keeping with the fact that the American burden has been greater in terms of expenditure of resources than any other nation? What has been done, in the face of warnings that “We cannot oil another war,” to guarantee that our oil resources will be replaced? How is the man fighting overseas to know that the strong points for which he has fought will remain American, and that his son will not have to fight to recover them again because of the frailty of his allies?

  All these questions are political matters which interest the fighting man overseas more than which of two men is going to be president of the United States.

  There are three things which the home front can offer to support the man overseas. They are: 1) material support, 2) affection, 3) political vigilance.

  Of the third element the soldier, like the citizen, knows all too little. It is part of the duty of the home front to send the soldier articles, newspaper clippings, and all other information about the political direction the nation is taking in international affairs and the degree of alertness of its leaders in holding all gains made.

  The next question for the home front will be re-employment of the fighting men. But at present, with the nation's alertness dulled by a domestic presidential campaign, postwar employment can wait temporarily.

  Political vigilance for our international interests must come to the fore. It is overdue. The soldier overseas, while working and fighting, counts on the home front worker to let him know that America is awake and his peace is to be permanent.

  This news is the best he hopes to receive.

  XVI

  Flak over Italy

  Hoping to get back to the Pacific and what he later called “the battles of the U.S. Navy versus MacArthur,” Weller returned the long way round: first via Italy, where for about three weeks he was much hampered by British censorship. Having lived there in the 1930s—the Russian writer Gorki was his neighbor on Capri—Weller had an acute sense of how much the country had changed.

  The invasion of Italy, which ultimately cost sixty thousand Allied lives and fifty thousand German, began in Sicily in July 1943. Shortly afterward, Mussolini was removed from power to a secret prison, and an armistice was signed between the Allies and the new government, which was battered between the Nazis and various partisan factions. In September, Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and installed as head of a second government in the north. Until the war's end in Europe, in May 1945, Italy would be caught in shifting, violent retributions and small civil wars.

  The Allies worked their way slowly northward, and liberated Rome around D-day, in June 1944. Later that autumn, Weller arrived in time to witness part of the unsuccessful attempt to take Bologna; in the end, that important city did not fall until the following April.

  NAZIS EXPERT AT CONCEALING MINES IN ROADS,

  YANKS FIND

  Rome, Italy—October 10, 1944

  Singapore was lost in large part by the inability of the engineers to mine its single vertebral asphalt highway, which runs the length of the Malay Peninsula. But German engineers find similar Italian highways no obstacle to their ingenious job of frustrating the Allied advance. “Don't go there” and “Don't touch anything” are still directions which must be observed even far behind our lines.

  By anticipating their own retreats far ahead of time, the Germans are able to bury mines and let nature and time aid them in concealment. When a pie-shaped hole has been cut in a highway and is sufficiently weathered by mud and rains, the hole becomes indistinguishable, even though a mine may lie beneath.

  Exploiting this uncertainty, the Germans also make fake holes in the sidewalk. A tester approaches and may lose his life examining an innocent hole when the actual mine waits below his feet.

  When you see a football game this fall, think of Livorno's athletic stadium, where the Germans have sown the ground thickly with mines and encouraged the turf to grow over it. From what would be sideline to sideline in the first 12 yards from the goal posts alone, engineers have dug up 64 mines of the deadliest sort.

  Alert action by Lieutenant Robert Johnston of the highway transport office and an engineer friend prevented the Hotel Parco in Naples from being blown sky-high. Johnston found a loose tile in the floor of the room which was charged. The engineer then arranged a careful search and found a garbage can full of refuse, inviting immediate emptying because of the vile odor. The can, however, was riveted to the floor and 1700 pounds of TNT had been hooked up to it. Whoever lifted that garbage can would have lifted the entire hotel with it.

  DAILY NEWS MAN WELLER IN RECORD RAID! FORTS WADE INTO FLAK

  Stricken Ship Limps Home on Two Engines After Attack Near Bologna

  Advanced Bomber Base of the U.S. 15th Air Force-October 12, 1944

  Across the blue Italian sky, dirty with thousands of puffs of vicious Nazi flak, Flying Fortresses and Liberators this morning led a cavalcade of Allied Mediterranean air power against Nazi emplacements around Bologna. It was the greatest number of heavy bombers ever directed against a single objective in the Mediterranean theater.

  As the only civilian correspondent participating in the raid, I rode in the glass nose of a Fortress, which was among the earliest to run the gauntlet of German flak. Scheduled to be first over Bologna, our Fortress reached the well-camouflaged German bivouac area after two earlier waves had laid initial carpets of bombs. By that time German flak had found the range, too. Before the eyes of Navigator Lieutenant I. C. Heffrom of New Orleans, a Fortress of the first wave caught fire from flak. The pilot put it in a perpendicular dive to extinguish the flames, pulled out miraculously without snapping the plane and finally disgorged seven parachutes. “I saw them floating down into the streets of Bologna,” said Heffrom later.

  Our Fortress, too, was already in distress as it entered its bombing run. Though the flak until then had been light—German gunners were waiting until the giants committed themselves on their final run—one engine suddenly died.

  “A small piece is torn from the left wing,” scribbled Heffrom in his log as we exchanged glances over oxygen masks.

  At that moment the inside engine on the same wing stopped. Its blackened propeller motionlessly confronted us from the side window. Our pilot and co-pilot fought to keep the ship in formation not only for protection against an unexpected fighter attack, but so our bombs should fall at the chosen point in the smoking carpet which had been German encampments.

  Hardly had the affected engine been feathered and the ship begun to groan with an effort to hold its place, when three Messerschmitts appeared, readying to attack. My untrained eyes never caught them, but over the shoulder of Heffrom—who also was on his first raid in this theater—I saw him scribble: “One enemy fighter has been engaged by a P-38.”

  Though I have flown against Italian anti-aircraft fire, this was my first experience with the high-powered flak which today is Germany's chief weapon of aerial defense, as its factories labor to replenish its fighter reserves.

  From the moment the first black blossom bloomed near us, it seemed as though the Nazi gunners had chosen this ship.

  During the long, high-altitude ride—our oxygen masks were on for more than four hours and this was only part of the flight—I had figured that our Fortress would be on the flank nearest and most exposed to the flak surrounding Bologna.

  This prediction unfortunately proved true. Though not a single black puff penetrated the heart of the formation, the sky ahead of us and beside the window was stippled with deadly black fists. Most menacing of all was a giant cauliflower-cloud of hundreds of bursts which the Nazis erected over their troops as soon as the first Forts struck.

  With scant regard for the fact that their flak's constant winking might betray them to the artillery of Lieutenant General Clark's Fifth Army, already raining shells into Bologna's outskirts, the Nazis kept up a thick, compact
cloud of defiant smoke puffs. The moment we crossed the Nazis' hideout the flak intensified, as though the gunners were trying to throw black dust in our eyes. We crouched lower in our metal helmets. Handfuls of thick smoke appeared ahead of the nose, seemingly as near as tobacco rings to a smoker's face. Others pockmarked the blue just above us while another set appeared and disappeared like black porpoises beside the ship.

  Once I felt a sudden double bump below, approaching Bologna. Through the bottom window between my legs, I saw two strong black puffs fading to frustrated wisps of grey as the propwash blew them under the eyrie of the ball turret gunner.

  Oxygen use is denoted by a black-faced dial which has a semi-human mouth with cold white lips. These lips open and shut with each breath you draw through the mask, as though the instrument were also inhaling. As the flak bloomed around us, breaths came faster and white lips parted even more rapidly. The heat of fear made our electrically-heated flying suits sweaty and the rubber mask moist inside.

  Not a single bomb of the hundreds I saw cascade down through yawning bomb bays landed among Bologna's medieval skyscrapers, though its yellow walls were nearby and the Grand Piazzi visible, indenting its center. The bulk of the bombing fell between General Clark and the city—an area less than 10 miles broad.

  The military motive for this gigantic effort could be read easily from the skies. The Fifth Army's artillery, looking down from the Apennines, dominates the approaches to most of the Po Valley. But these roads all intertwine at Bologna.

  If the chief Nazi force entrenched between the two rivers and two roads entering Bologna is deprived of a foothold by this carpet of death, the Nazis must either withdraw or fight for the ancient city, house by house. If the latter, Bologna's beauties may succumb to war's necessities as did those of Florence.