Time to shoot back—our first volley of World War II. The voice on our radio gives us the range and direction. No problem with the direction, but the range is another matter. Apparently no one has told Army Intelligence that rifle companies are armed with little short-range 60 mm mortars used for killing up close and personal. We don’t have the big, long-range 81 mm jobs weapons companies use. Bob Lewis, only eighteen but wise for his years, figures we can deal with this.
A mortar is a steel tube set on a base plate. The bomb it fires has a cone-shaped detonator fuse on one end and four tail fins on the other. Between tail fins a little square of TNT is attached. When the round is dropped into the tube, a shotgun shell in the butt end of the projectile strikes a firing pin in the base of the tube. That fires the shell, which fires TNT, which blasts the bomb out of the tube. Maximum range is about a thousand yards with all TNT in place and the tube lowered to forty-five degrees elevation. For shorter ranges, one removes TNT squares—all of them if the target is dangerously close—and cranks up the elevation angle.
For what Army Intelligence wanted us to hit, all four TNT squares and forty-five degrees wouldn’t come close to reaching it. We couldn’t see what we were shooting at, or where our shells were landing, but whoever was observing the shots was reporting our rounds short.
Lewis’s idea was to stick a couple more of the TNT squares between the fins. So Lewis strips the TNT from spare rounds and adds their squares to the rounds he’d be firing. I sit by my mortar and watch, thinking if it works and doesn’t blow up Lewis’s mortar, I might try it myself. Lewis finishes his task. He leans back, grinning, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He says: “Anyone got a light?”
Someone flips him a lit cigarette.
WOOOSH!!
Lewis is engulfed in a dense cloud of white smoke. The cigarette apparently hit one of the TNT squares, which ignited the fifty-three other TNT squares in the neat nine-round pyramid Lewis had arranged between his legs. End of experiment, end of Lewis’s eyelashes, eyebrows, and forelock.
That’s my the only vivid memory of the episode. We fired off a few futile short rounds. Someone opened his first aid kit and smeared ointment on Lewis’s face. Someone explained mortar range to the major on the radio and when darkness came we carried our stuff back down the hill again.
For those who try to understand war and Army Intelligence, I should add that when our battalion crossed the Meurthe and helped capture burning St. Dié, we noticed that there was neither a highway nor a railroad across the river from our farmhouse. Our side of the river had both. Was the major reading his map upside down? Was he having us attack ourselves? Apparently so, because the only railroad and highway ran down our side of the Meurthe. That seemed incredible at the time. A bit later it would seem perfectly normal.
To illustrate this, I’ll skip forward a few weary days to a hay barn in which our mortar and machine gun sections were enjoying a cozy night’s sleep in the hay. In comes our platoon leader. “Saddle up,” he says. “Let’s go.” I had violated orders by taking off my boots and still remember frantically sorting through the hay pile for the left one, which had gone missing. We straggle out into the predawn rain and head north up the road. The lieutenant tells us to load our weapons on the Jeep, a first for us, and a promising sign. One doesn’t put his machine guns and his mortars on a Jeep trailer if he is preparing to fight. Sure enough, word drifts down the column that we’re going into battalion reserve. Jubilation. We are going to hunker down in a little French town called Lusse long enough to get some hot food, dry out, and rest. Private First Class Tom Morick, another mortar man with a better sense of geography than most of us, mentioned that it seemed odd that we’re walking north toward trouble instead of south toward the rear. But then we were still relatively innocent. Why worry?
Captain Neeley, however, has had closer contact with Army Intelligence and is less sanguine. He has us halt beside a railroad track and sends a patrol of riflemen ahead to take a look at things in Lusse, which we can see just ahead. Why? Army Intelligence said Company A had captured the place yesterday. We wait, helmets adjusted so the water dripping from them goes somewhere besides down the back of the neck. Then through the drizzle comes the unpleasant sound of ripping cloth, which we now have been around long enough to recognize as the song sung by German MG38 machine guns. The lieutenant doesn’t have to tell us to extract our weapons from the Jeep trailer. Army Intelligence has neglected to notify the Germans that they no longer hold this little French village. They have our patrol, or what’s left of it, pinned down on a slope below their machine gun positions.
I am tempted here to describe what happens to a rifle company in such circumstances as if I saw it all. All I saw was my friends in the Fourth Platoon grabbing machine guns, ammunition cans, mortars, ammo sacks, and so forth, out of the trailer and scrambling along the railroad and up the road, bent low, looking for positions. The rifle platoons were already doing their thing ahead of us.
It was just about now that Company A, one day late, arrived to capture Lusse. The riflemen on the Able Company point squad heard the gunfire, saw us running around in the drizzle, presumed we were Germans, and started shooting at us. I didn’t see it myself, being involved with setting up my mortar and locating the spot where the German machine gun fire was originating, but legend has it that Neeley put a stop to this intramural war by running down the railroad tracks, shooting his pistol, jumping, waving, and screaming imprecations.
Our little battle for Lusse will never rate mention in the military histories but it had a permanent effect on us. Neeley became a sort of hero to all of us, and we never again trusted A Company. (The lyrics of our marching song became:
Company A is always late, parlez-vous,
Company A is always late, parlez-vous,
Company A is always late,
they stay in bed and masturbate.
Hinky-dinky, parlez-vous.)
As for me, it was here that I began thinking of myself as a bona fide and skillful mortar gunner. As I remember this affair, my first round exploded directly on line, and just a little behind the machine gun position on the slope above the railroad. A twitch up of the elevation, and the next three rounds fell right into it. We captured Lusse, losing five of our men and bagging twenty-seven Germans, including fifteen prisoners. (Not very glorious ones, since they were goof-ups left locked in the town jail when their unit withdrew.)
Lewis claimed his mortar bagged the machine gun but neither of us wanted to walk up the hill and inspect our handiwork. Unlike riflemen we could usually keep our war impersonal—thinking of knocking out machine guns and not of killing the fellow teenagers behind them.
A few years ago a social historian released research findings suggesting that soldiers from the early nineteenth century through World War II didn’t seem to enjoy killing the enemy. I recall neither the book title nor the author’s name, but he provided a wealth of interesting statistics. For example, a high percentage of those engaged in the battle at Waterloo hadn’t fired their weapon and most of the muskets collected from the battlefield at Gettysburg were still loaded. Research following World War I showed the same pattern. The U.S. military had become aware of this shortcoming among combat soldiers and we were taught at Fort Benning the value of shooting if only to cause the bad guys to keep their heads down. The lesson seemed well learned when we were shooting at targets. Now, however, things have changed. I had seen that demonstrated dramatically on our fifth day in combat. That day saw the first of us killed.
By the clock the episode that converted me from boy to soldier lasted about forty hours or so, but I think of it as a seamless unit because it lacked the usual time out to eat, sleep, and get dry. It began a little after midnight. We formed on the road outside our farm with our full load of gear, were told to stay well spaced and keep it quiet. Going where? We’d learn eventually that the First Battalion was making a flanking attack on German units holding St. Dié and the hills around it, and Charle
y Company was the point. But to ask one’s platoon sergeant whence we were marching was not GI. The officers probably hadn’t told him. So off we went in the dark, both literally and figuratively.
The cold rain fell. The road was muddy. We walked at the standard pace—three miles in fifty minutes, a ten-minute rest, another three miles, another rest, on through the night. About two hours before dawn we stopped at the edge of a forest. Word came down the line that the company kitchen Jeep would show up with hot food. We wait. No Jeep. No food. Unfed, we descend from the high ridge we’d been climbing much of the night, slipping and sliding down the slope. We reach the level ground again—hearing artillery now. Some is ours outgoing, some incoming German, near enough to cause uneasiness, not near enough to cause fear. We hear the river, the Meurthe again we presume, noisy now with runoff and flooded far out of its bank. We march into the water—four or five inches deep—and stand in it. After perhaps an hour the word comes down the line. The German artillery had knocked out the pontoon bridge we were scheduled to cross. We wait as the water rises toward our boot tops while the Engineers repair it. Relentless rain drains off our helmets, off our ponchos, down the backs of our hands, our necks, our backbones. We are shod in snowpacks—boots with rubber bottoms and leather tops. Each boot comes with two felt insoles, one worn, one carried inside your underwear to be dried by your body heat and ready for tomorrow. But even these wonderful boots couldn’t cope with standing in deep water. Nor can our ponchos deal with the wind-driven rain. Dawn comes, still we stand. But not all of us. It’s axiomatic in the infantry that anything can be endured if you keep your butt warm and dry. Many of us haven’t managed that. Some of us admit it and rest our cramping legs by sitting in the muddy water.
Full daylight comes and still we wait. Finally the blessed shout of “Move out.” We splash through the water, run across the bobbing pontoon’s tracks, trudge up a long muddy slope into a cluster of small stone houses. Our platoon leader points to one, tells us to get inside and try to get dry. He tells us food is coming but not to take out our bedrolls because we’ll be moving right out again. We sprawl, dream of rest, warmth, dryness, but most of all we dream of hot food or at least C-rations, which are one step up from the usual K-rations. Instead, a Jeep driver from headquarters dumps a pile of D-bars on the floor.
The D-bar lurked at the absolute bottom of the military’s culinary scale—the nourishment of last resort. It was a cereal mixed with a protein concoction (possibly soybeans) and chocolate. This was compressed into a block the size and consistency of a flattened brick and wrapped in multiple layers of waxed paper. Given time, water, and a source of heat, one could soften this enough to bite it by boiling it in your canteen cup. Otherwise, you had to hammer it into fragments and let it dissolve in your mouth. The D-bars we received seemed to have been made in 1918 and stored since the end of World War I. About a third of them had been partially digested by mold, which made them much easier to eat with no noticeable effect on the flavor.
The good news was that we finally had something to eat. The bad news was that the sack contained exactly enough to provide two bars for each of us. That told us we’d go two days without real food—and for me it produced one of those oddities that proved I could be wrong even when I was right.
Our mortar section had just received two replacements, filling gaps in the mortar section caused by injury and illnesses. They knew each other, apparently having become acquainted in the replacement depot, but they were still total strangers in the unit. After one and all had managed to consume their D-bar for the day, these two fellows unwrapped their second one. Having had previous D-bar experience (and wanting to impress these recruits with my saltiness), I warned them that one would be all the stomach could tolerate for a good many hours and that if they ate the second one now, they’d be starving tomorrow. Good advice, but I noticed later they were both finishing off tomorrow’s ration. So much for unsolicited advice.
An hour later we are moving down a narrow trail on a grassy slope. Our dream of rest, warmth, etc., remains unrealized but the rain has finally stopped and the clouds are lifting. A German artillery forward observer sees us now and decides we are worth a few rounds. They were low-velocity howitzer shells, not the dreadful 88s, which arrive before you hear them coming. By the time these exploded on the slope just above us everybody has his face in the grass except the two replacements carrying sacks of mortar ammunition just behind me. Shrapnel got them both. Did they survive? They looked dead but I don’t know. I never learned their names and the company’s Killed in Action roster lists many such replacements—strangers among the men they died with. Whether they lived or not, clearly their idea of when to eat their D-bars in combat was sounder than my own. Tomorrow might never come.
We resume our walk. Fog lifts from the mountaintops. The sun is out now, warm enough on our backs to make our soggy field jackets steam, my own D-bar digesting happily in my stomach. Those endless hours of cold and hunger are behind me. About noon we take a break in a hillside woods. One of the scouts finds two beehives and tries to extract honeycombs with all hands furiously blowing cigarette smoke into the swarm. The bees win this skirmish. The riflemen return to the march with nothing but multiple stings to show for their effort and become the subject of humor. In rifle companies, even ones as green as we were that day, instant forgetfulness was already the policy. Walk away from the dead.
Implausible as it seems to me now, I remember the afternoon that follows as my happiest hours of the war. I am dry now, warmed by the sun, walking along a grass slope through beautiful landscape. The Alsatian version of meadowlarks are out, singing their farewell to summer. A disorderly little gaggle of crows fly out of the woods, having characteristic crow disputes exactly as they did over our alfalfa field in Oklahoma. Having been missed by shrapnel a couple of hours earlier has confirmed in me the knowledge that I am invincible.
Even better, I am making history. It is clear now that Charley Company is the point of this advance to wherever we are going and I am with the point rifle platoon. Thus every step I take affects the military map of Europe—moving back the margin of Nazi conquest a tiny fraction of a millimeter. The grass ahead of me is occupied territory. The grass I have just trod upon is free. Adventure at last.
Joan Didion told us in one of her essays that memory is often an effort to get acquainted with the stranger that was you a long time ago. That is approximately what I am doing right now, as I try to re-create that day in my remarkably vivid memory of it, and my reaction to the brutal fate of the two boys behind me, and to what happened next.
A STRANGE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY was the headline it received in Reader’s Digest when I wrote about it forty years later—and strange it was.
“It was early afternoon,” I wrote then, “when our platoon neared the ridge where we were to await the two trailing platoons. Our two scouts moved cautiously through the granite outcrops, stopping to see what lay ahead, then motioning us forward. Suddenly one signaled ‘take cover.’”
That remains now just the way I remembered it then. We scattered among the boulders. Our platoon leader hurried up to join the scout. I hear the sound of a harmonica drifting up through the still autumn air. I look down the steep slope into a narrow, grassy valley and see beside a small stream a stone hut. Smoke from its chimney was forming a blue haze across the meadow in front of it and drifting into the dark fir forest beside it. The lieutenant was scanning this with his binoculars and the scout was pointing at something below shielded from my line of vision by the trees.
“Then two men came into sight below us, strolling along a cow path toward the cabin. One was bareheaded, his blond hair looking almost white in the sunlight. The other wore the cap of a German enlisted man. Both were draped in the long gray overcoats of the German infantry. The blond was tapping what must have been a harmonica against the heel of his hand, talking and gesturing . . . He played his harmonica again—a tune I now recognized as ‘Lili Marlene.’ The soldier with
the cap walked with his hands clasped behind his back. He looked young and small, perhaps a teenager like ourselves.”
As the long paragraph above suggests, the point platoon of Charley Company did not spring into the instant action this situation required. Twenty or so young men carrying M1 rifles and two Browning automatic rifles stood looking down on these representatives of the enemy for a long, long moment. The lieutenant gives the hand signal to fire. We fire.
This was not a job for my mortar. I popped away with my pistol—comfortable in the knowledge that the two were out of the range of this ridiculous weapon even if I aimed at them. For the riflemen it was another matter. Each had qualified as marksman to win his infantry badge. Most of them qualified expert. Any one of them could have killed both of the young men below us with one shot each. Fate has made each of them a one-man jury in the death sentence case. They blaze away. But they were still young then, not yet soldiers.
The Germans run frantically up the path to the cabin. The boy with the cap falls, scrambles to his feet, and runs again. A bullet clips a limb from a birch. Bullets scatter the yellow leaves beside the path. Splintered shingles fly from the cabin’s roof. The enemy disappears through the cabin door. The shooting stops. In the sudden silence I hear the BAR man chuckling. Moments later, we see the two dash from the back of the cabin, disappearing among the firs through another flurry of rifle fire.
Was the blond boy carrying a machine gun from the house? Some of the riflemen said he was. I couldn’t see but judging from German tactics we would repeatedly encounter later I guess he was. The two were probably “harvesters” left on an outpost with a MG42 machine gun, a can of ammunition, and orders to kill as many men in the attacking unit as feasible, and then escape to fight again.
Another rifle platoon soon replaced us on the point at that ridge and ran into a firefight in the woods across the valley. I have only one clear memory of that, in which I am sprawled on my stomach behind a fallen tree with rifle bullets snapping overhead and a wounded German soldier behind me repeating alternate cries of “Wasser, Wasser,” and “Mutti, Mutti,” which we guessed meant “Mama.”
Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir Page 8