by Frank Gannon
But he didn’t get to come home right away. He had to be in the Battle of the Bulge first.
When I was a kid I saw a movie called The Longest Day. It was a very famous movie starring almost every actor in Hollywood. I actually watched that movie all the way through. The movie gave the impression that after D-Day, the war was over and everybody could go home. That wasn’t the truth.
The Battle of the Bulge was Germany’s last big, all-out effort. Winston Churchill said that the Battle of the Bulge was “without any doubt, the greatest American battle of the Second World War.” My dad, a guy who wasn’t born in America and a guy who hated the army and enlisted only because he couldn’t get a job during the Great Depression, a guy who, according to his letters, marked off the days until his discharge like a man in prison, wound up his military career in Belgium with 250,000 Nazis. During 98 percent of my dad’s army tenure, the worst thing that happened happened in the mess hall. The food was lousy. The final 2 percent was a nightmare.
The death count in the Battle of the Bulge was amazing: Sixteen thousand Americans were killed. According to the records, a lot of them were, like my dad, first-generation Irish-Americans. They were fighting on the same side as England.
Adolf Hitler himself planned the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler, by December 1944, was a man with his back against the wall. Germany was clearly losing the war. The Russian Red Army was approaching from the east, while America was heavily bombing German targets. Italy had already been conquered, and the Allied armies were moving through France. My dad must have thought, rightly, that he was finally ending his hated army days.
But there was one thing left to do. The Battle of the Bulge. Germany’s battle plan was to create a fifty-mile “bulge” in the Allied lines and penetrate to the Belgian port city of Antwerp. Most historians think Hitler knew he was a loser by this point, but he might have wanted to negotiate from strength and get a favorable peace settlement. If nothing else, if he was successful in what was called Wacht am Rhein, he would buy a little time.
The battle that ensued was the bloodiest battle in American history. Those sixteen thousand Americans were killed, but another sixty thousand were wounded. Hitler had a lot of his so-called “People’s Infantry,” which was composed of kids, the wounded, and basically anybody left in Germany. But he also had his elite Waffen SS, who were a trained veteran fighting force.
My dad found himself in a horrible position. He was in the group that was trapped around the town of Bastogne, surrounded and outnumbered by Nazi troops. The American situation was so perilous, the Nazis asked for surrender. General Tony McAuliffe, the American in charge, when asked to surrender responded in a famous manner: “Nuts!” he said.
The situation was so bad, Roosevelt actually thought about dropping the still unused atomic bomb. Eventually, America didn’t have to use the bomb. The 101st Airborne Division was rushed in; they parachuted in a lot of supplies, and, eventually, they were able to drive the Germans back. Oddly, in driving them back, Americans lost more men than they had when they were under siege.
In what little I did hear of my dad’s stories about the Battle of the Bulge, certain details stayed with me.
My dad was operating a machine gun on a tripod. The guy who was supposed to be loading the long clips of bullets stopped. My dad started screaming at him. Then, out of the corner of his eye, my dad saw that the clip-loader had taken a bullet in his forehead and was lying on his side in the snow.
My dad had three bullets hit his metal helmet within a few seconds. (He hated the army, but, he said, he had to admit they made good equipment and uniforms. My daughter Annie still wears one of his World War II coats. It hasn’t lost a button.)
In the cold, my dad found that he couldn’t take his hands off the machine gun. When he did, he left a little skin on the gun controls.
One guy had just entered the army three months ago. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He was from County Meath, near where my dad grew up. After they met, my dad and the guy talked for a long time about Ireland. The guy from County Meath got killed the very first day of action.
A pretty spotty picture is what I got of the Battle of the Bulge. I also have one other detail.
Once in a while, once every few months, my dad would wake up in the middle of the night. He would wake up in an extreme state of agitation and he would jump out of bed and crouch in the doorway to the bedroom. He would crouch there for a second, then he would get up and go back to bed. He didn’t make a big deal out of this, and I wouldn’t even know about it if my mom hadn’t told me.
The first time it happened it was scary for her. After a few times, she said, she got used to it.
I asked her why he did that and she said she didn’t know. She thought that maybe, back in the war, somebody bombed a house he was in and the only safe places were in the doorways.
I never asked him about it.
What would have happened if my dad had stayed in Ireland during World War II? Would he have gotten involved in the war anyway? In America, World War II is “the Good War,” real bad guys against real good guys. There was no other choice: You had to take a side, and once you took a side, you were in the war.
I read a reprint of an article that was originally printed in 1941. It appeared in The New Statesman that year, and I think it states the true Irish position:
“The most seductive Englishman will fail to convince the most amenable Irishman that the Allies are fighting ‘against aggression’ and ‘on behalf of democracy.’ The British cause, to the Irishmen, is simply the patriotic cause of Britain, in which certain other countries have become involuntarily caught up through German invasion. It is not a cause whose nobility or whose claim on British lives Irishmen would dream of questioning. Nor do they criticize those of their own number who cross the border to enlist in the British Forces. But it is not a cause for which one Irish parent in a hundred will send his son to die; or one Irish voter in a hundred consent to plunge the country into war.”
When he was old, when someone would ask my dad how he was doing, he wouldn’t say “fine” or “good.” He always said the same thing: “Getting through life with a minimum of difficulties.”
FOURTEEN
Dad
My favorite American movie is pretty much the popular choice: Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane still emotionally gets to almost everybody who watches it. I believe this is because everybody knows that they are, in a way, Charles Foster Kane. We are all enormous onions, complicated, almost but not quite comprehensible. We all walk around as these huge, multilayered onions. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we meet and fall in love with someone who wants to peel the onion all the way down to the core. Sometimes they get halfway in, discover a bad layer, and call off the project. Sometimes, with miraculous luck, we get someone who actually wants to go all the way into the giant Vidalia onion that is us. And we try to spend the rest of our lives with those people.
In my dad’s own personal Citizen Kane, the word he whispers before dropping the glass snow sphere to the carpet and falling to the floor in death and eternal silence is one single, mysterious word: “Athlone.”
Closeup on my dad’s lips. No mustache.
“Athlone.”
My father was not very much like Charles Foster Kane. Bernard Gannon was a mysterious guy, though, a giant onion. He didn’t live in a huge castle surrounded by wild animals, but he was a tough guy to figure out.
Athlone.
Two syllables. For all practical purposes, that was all I knew about my dad’s youth. He was from some mysterious place in Ireland called “Athlone.”
When I was a kid, I never wondered whether “Athlone” was a town, or a country, or a big city. It could have been a space station for all I cared.
“My dad’s from Ireland,” I would say.
Sometimes (rarely) the person I was talking to would ask, “Where at in Ireland?”
I would say, “Athlone.” That was usually enough. The per
son I was talking to would cock his head as if he knew what I meant. Next question.
But the older I got, the more I wondered. I looked up “Athlone” in a book about Ireland. “Athlone” was a city near the middle of Ireland. From then on, when someone asked me about my dad, I would say, “My dad is from Ireland. From Athlone. That’s a city near the middle of Ireland.”
Then, when I was in college, my dad died and therefore closed his book permanently. At his funeral no one mentioned Athlone. Instead there was a lot of talk about Atlantic City and South Philly and East Camden.
My dad died in 1974, and since then the enigma of “Athlone” has grown in my mind. I got a picture book of Ireland out of the library and I looked at some pictures of Athlone. In the pictures, it looked like every other Irish town: freshly painted little shops that looked like they came out of 1920. Cobblestone streets. Kids with funny hats. Bicycles.
I consulted my atlas and found exactly where “Athlone” was. It turned out to be a little dot about 150 miles west of Dublin. So we expected to get to Athlone from Dublin by the afternoon. The drive is not particularly picturesque and we drove in silence, listening to the American top forty. We expected Athlone to be pretty much like the other Irish towns we had encountered, the two-pubs-a-pharmacy-and-some-bed-and-breakfasts town. It wasn’t that way. Athlone, while not a metropolis, is actually much bigger than, say, Milltown Malbay or Ballyhaunis. Athlone is also a lot more modern. In some places Athlone could pass for the city my dad spent a lot more time in, Camden, New Jersey, the city of eternal love.
As expected we cruised into Athlone about lunchtime. We parked by the River Shannon, which flows through the center of Athlone. We got out of the Punta to explore a town we had heard of but never seen. When I was getting out of the car I almost tripped over a crushed sixteen-ounce Budweiser can lying on its side on the sidewalk. A group of multipierced young people walked past. They were listening to American rap music, something I hadn’t missed up until now. It seemed pretty odd to be standing on a cobblestone street next to a river in Ireland listening to “All About the Benjamins.”
A tall man in a thousand-dollar suit was walking along with a short man in a thousand-dollar suit. They were talking, but not to each other, muttering into their tiny black cell phones.
Almost immediately, Athlone started to transform us. As we talked, our answers got shorter and shorter. Athlone, against our wills, was turning us back into Americans. We might as well have been back there in the land of the free. We found ourselves acting what might be called “the American Way.”
As we walked in our sullen way through the streets of Athlone, it was hard to imagine my dad as a kid hanging around in Athlone. I couldn’t picture my dad walking around in an urban Ireland. Somehow it just didn’t seem to ring true. But we were walking around in an urban Ireland, and it wasn’t doing us any good. It wasn’t killing us, but it wasn’t doing us any good.
I started to hear some music from a store, drifting out in front. The Boss. “The Streets of Philadelphia.” It seemed to be almost appropriate. Then we happened to pass a store. There was a big sign over the door: GANNON’S.
Paulette didn’t want to go inside. She felt we should keep walking. I thought that I had to try Gannon’s. Actually, I was looking for a little “meditation time.” I went in alone.
It was empty except for a young man behind the counter. I looked him over. He was about twenty-five. He was an inch or so shorter than I was, about my weight. He was a round-faced, clean-shaven, red-haired, friendly sort of guy. He looked really Irish. Duh.
“Can I help you?” he said.
“Yes.” I started on my stumbling introduction. I was from America. My name was Frank Gannon. I knew that my father had grown up around Athlone. His name was Bernard Gannon. He was born in 1908. He lived near Athlone until he was about twenty. Then he went to America. That’s about it. Could he help me?
I can’t remember the man’s first name, but his last name was Gannon, which was comforting. He didn’t know whether he could help me. He called into the back room. An older man came out. He looked like a man who had just woken. I told him my story. He shook hands with me. He paused and looked puzzled.
One of the Gannons said, finally, “I have some people for you to meet.”
He motioned for me to follow him.
I followed him down a narrow hallway. There was a sort of living room back there. There were chairs and a rug and a refrigerator and a television. It looked like the set for a sitcom. There were several people sitting around drinking and watching television. Mr. Gannon introduced me to a young woman and an older woman and a heavy man in his sixties and a tall skinny man in his thirties. They gave me a drink. I tasted it. It was whiskey. It tasted very good.
I got introduced to everybody. He said the name of the person, and then he said, “This is Frank Gannon.” He said it as if it meant something. And the person who was named “Gannon” acted as if he or she was very pleased to be meeting Frank Gannon.
“Frank Gannon,” they’d say. They smiled warmly and shook my hand.
I drank the whiskey and talked. Everybody was very friendly. We laughed and talked about this and that. It soon became clear, however, that I wasn’t related, even faintly, to anyone in the room. I wasn’t even possibly anybody’s third cousin twice removed.
I was just some guy who wandered in off the street.
But we still had a nice talk. I finished my drink. They offered me another, or maybe some tea. I said I had to be going. How about a scone? No, I can’t. Are you sure? They’re very good. Nice and hot. Fresh-baked. No, no, I can’t, sorry. We have a busy day planned.
I said my goodbyes, walked to the front of the store, opened the door, and walked into the sunny day.
Paulette was standing there. Her arms were folded in front of her. She was not happy. I had been in there almost twenty minutes. We started walking.
“Well,” she said, “what happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
We walked along and, for the next twenty minutes, neither of us uttered a single syllable. But I felt a little better.
We wandered around for a while. Then we went where all confused people in Ireland have traditionally gone: to the Catholic church.
There are two huge Catholic churches in Athlone: Saint Peter’s and Saint Mary’s. Saint Peter’s was the first church we came across. I opened the door and we walked inside.
Saint Peter’s was quite a place. It was a beautiful, huge, elaborate church with amazing stained-glass windows and polished marble and beautifully carved wood everywhere and soaring ceilings and startling, elaborate gold tabernacles. It was completely empty except for one little guy who was kneeling in a back pew all alone. He turned around and noted our presence, then turned back to his praying.
Paulette and I tentatively made our way up to the altar. We went in different aisles because we were still in the midst of the aforementioned American-Alienation-Athlone experience. Our steps echoed in the huge space as we made our desultory way up our separate aisles. I looked over and saw that she was a little in front of me, so I started to walk faster. She saw me inching ahead and increased her speed. Although she was in better aerobic shape than I, I am bigger. My stride is longer. I tried to get to the altar first, and I barely made it, beating her by about two lengths. I looked at her smugly. I could see she was “less than thrilled.”
I was very happy to notice that there was a woman in back of the altar. She had been invisible from the rear of the cavernous church when we entered. She stopped what she was doing and turned. Our eyes met.
“Excuse me,” I said. I began my pathetically lame, stumbling spiel. It was slightly more fluid because of the whiskey back in Gannon’s. I started to think, wistfully, of Gannon’s. Maybe I should go back there. I was liked and respected there. I was an “insider.”
The woman turned around. I had been using the time-tested stare-at-the-back-of-the-person’s-head-until-they-turn-around method.
“I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m from America and I’m over here looking into my father’s past because he was born here in Ireland but he later moved to America, where I was born, and I just wondered whether you could help me find out anything about his life over here in Ireland before I was born…”
I paused and noticed that my words were having absolutely no effect. Was it possible that she was not an English-speaking person? In the middle of Ireland, it seemed very unlikely that she could be a non-English-understanding person. Maybe it was just my American accent. Or maybe (which seemed like the best bet) I was just being really lame.
I paused again. The silence in the big church was very heavy. It made me a little nervous. When I get nervous, I have a tendency to babble, so I started to babble again.
“So they always say, in America, that if you are really confused about something and you are in Ireland, the best place to go is a church…” I looked at the lady. She didn’t think my “church” comment was amusing. As a matter of fact, she looked as if she found me both unamusing and stupid. I looked over at Paulette. She looked just like the lady. They could be bookends.
The lady spoke. Her voice was very flat and emotionless, like someone announcing train schedules.
“Sir,” she said, “I’m the florist.”
She went back to her flowers. I thought Well, the fact that you’re the florist doesn’t mean you can’t be helpful.
At that point, Paulette walked away. Great move, babe. Then I realized that she had seen someone, another lady, in the little room behind the altar. This lady looked like someone who knew what was going on. I followed Paulette, who didn’t acknowledge that act in any perceptible way.
When I walked into the room, the lady was looking through a shelf of books. These were major-league books. They were bound in red leather and they looked big enough to contain all known Irish knowledge. Each one of the books was thicker than a Manhattan white pages. The lady removed one of the books from the shelf. She brought it over and plopped it on a table. This was a strong woman. The thing must have weighed thirty-five pounds.