by Alex Kershaw
Once in Corpus Christi, he searched without luck for a job. Hundreds of men with families waited in lines for just a few openings. The prospects were dire, so when he heard things were better out west he hopped another freight train and rode the high desert to Los Angeles, first glimpsing the Pacific from a rattling boxcar. But there again scores of men queued for every opportunity. Not knowing where else to go, he hung around for a few weeks, sleeping rough in parks, learning the feral habits of the urban homeless, getting by on just 25 cents a day: hotcakes for a dime in the morning, a candy bar for lunch, and a hamburger for dinner.
He decided to try his luck farther north, caught out again, and was soon watching the Sierra Nevada Mountains slip slowly by to the east. In San Francisco, he went to yet another hiring hall, this time on a dockside. There were jobs, but he would have to pay 15 to join a union to get one. He was down to his last couple of dollars. Again he slept rough. Then he ran out of cash.
One morning, as he was walking along Market Street, hungry and penniless, he passed a man in uniform.
“Hey, buddy,” said the man. “Do you want to join the army?”
Sparks walked on.
What the hell else have I got to do?
He turned around.
“Yeah, I do.”
“Are you kidding me, buddy?”
“No, I’m not kidding you—I want to join the army.”
The recruiter gave him a token and pointed at a streetcar.
“Get on that streetcar. At two o’clock there will be a small boat coming in from Angel Island.”
He was soon heading across the bay to Angel Island. From his boat, on a clear day, he would have been able to see the infamous Alcatraz prison, built on a craggy rock that rose from the riptides like an obsolete battleship, and where Depression-era killers like Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly were kept under maximum security. At the army post on Angel Island, he was sworn in and given a choice of wherever he wanted to serve. So it was that one fall day in 1936 he found himself on a troopship, passing beneath the cables and iron girders of the half-constructed Golden Gate Bridge. He went below to his assigned bunk amid hundreds of others stacked three high in the fetid hold. He couldn’t stand the crowding, so he grabbed his mattress and took it up on deck. The journey to Honolulu lasted a week. He slept every night under the stars and ate three square meals a day as he headed toward the land of lanais, perpetual sunshine, and coconut shell cocktails.
CAMP KAMEHAMEHA, HAWAII, 1936
THE BARRACKS WERE airy and spacious, with fans lazily circling on the high wooden ceilings. The palms shading the base, located at the mouth of a channel leading to Pearl Harbor, were taller than those back in Arizona, the air humid and the breezes warm. Sparks’s days began at 6 A.M. with the sharp call of a bugle, followed by training in how to operate huge sixteen-inch guns.
Army life suited him. He didn’t mind the routine and discipline, the hurry-up-and-wait bureaucracy and boring details, the endless hours mowing the grass and practicing drills on the parade ground surrounded by sugarcane fields. He was warm and well fed. There were no bums waiting to jump him in a boxcar or a rail-side jungle. His barracks had a library, a pool table, and a piano. His weekends were free and his days ended at 4:30 P.M., leaving him plenty of time to explore Honolulu, eight miles away.
One day, he bought a camera from a soldier for 2 and photographed the base as well as other soldiers. Then he discovered that the only place he could develop his images of fellow artillerymen and nearby beaches was at an expensive camera shop in Honolulu. Some men saved money and time by developing their negatives in the barracks latrine, but the prints were crude and faded. He quickly saw an opportunity. In Honolulu, he bought a book about photography and then asked his company commander if he could get him an appointment with the Post Exchange Council, which operated a large store on the base. He told the council he was an experienced photographer and suggested they set up a shop where soldiers could drop off film to be developed. To his delight, the council agreed to loan him money and equipment to set up the print shop. A week later, he was in business, developing roll after roll by hand, bent over developing trays in a red-lit darkroom. Soon, he had to hire a fellow soldier to help him. Within a month, he was “rolling in money,” he later recalled, earning more than the battery commander. He put it all in a postal savings account that paid 2 percent interest.
He also taught himself how to take high-quality portraits and began snapping officers, their families, and the various tourist attractions. He scanned newspapers for details about arrivals of Hollywood stars at the pink-hued Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu, so he could capture them lounging under sunshades. The musical star Alice Faye, a twenty-two-year-old natural blonde, was one of several actresses who agreed to be photographed, despite the protests of a boyfriend. He promptly sold the pictures as pinups back at base. By the time his enlistment was up, he had saved 3,000, more than enough to finance a college education.
He returned the same way he had arrived, by boat, passing beneath the now completed Golden Gate Bridge, which stretched 4,200 feet across the Pacific, making it the longest suspension bridge in the world. In San Francisco, he treated himself to his first suit, tailor-made for 15. He then visited nearby Palo Alto, where he toured the campus of Stanford University. The facilities impressed him, but the cost of tuition was too much, even with three thousand in savings. So he took a bus home, back to Arizona, where he was joyfully reunited with his family. Soon after, he enrolled at the state university in Tucson. The fees for a semester were just 25.
He studied hard and was popular with the other freshman students, almost all of them two years younger. Two students in his class were from his hometown of Miami: Mary and John Blair, brother and sister. Eighteen-year-old Mary was easygoing and studious, majoring in Business Administration. She had a slim, attractive figure and strawberry blond hair, and loved to dance to swing music. Mary had first set eyes on Sparks four years earlier outside Miami High School and had not been overly impressed. He’d been in a fistfight the principal had to break up. Now he was taller, his thick black hair swept back, and clearly ambitious, worldly compared to the callow freshmen her own age. He was going somewhere, just like her. They began to date and soon fell in love. In a photograph Mary would always treasure, they pretended to be characters in a great romance, she looking like Juliette, perched atop a boulder, he professing his love like Romeo, the Arizona desert as their backdrop.
At the end of his freshman year, Sparks returned to the summer training camp for prospective officers he’d attended during high school. After his time in Hawaii, he was quickly rated an outstanding cadet and received a much-coveted Pershing Award, which entitled him to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Washington, DC. In early 1940, he and eight others visited Congress and met George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, who pinned an award to the bespoke jacket Sparks had bought in San Francisco.
Over the next months, he followed events across the Atlantic with growing concern as Hitler’s superbly equipped and highly mobile forces stormed through one democracy after another. By July 1940, most of Europe lay under brutal Nazi repression: France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Norway, and Denmark. The British were holding out, but only just, thanks to the English Channel and the brave fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force. America began to re-arm in earnest and build up its military forces. That September, when he returned to college, he received a letter from the U.S. Army that began with the word “Greetings” and went on to inform him that he was being called back to service. He could finish his fall semester but would have to report for active duty for a full year before he could return to his studies. Instead of walking off a stage with a bachelor’s degree, his dream of becoming a lawyer within reach, he found himself where he had started before college, back in a uniform.
He reported in January 1941 to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, where he would serve as a second lieutenant in the 157th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Infantry Division, a Nationa
l Guard outfit that had been mobilized. The regiment’s motto, he learned, was “Eager for Duty.” He was willing to play his part but hardly eager.
Fort Sill was notable for being where the last great leader of the Apache, Geronimo, had died in 1909. It was easy to understand why the last of the great braves had been banished to this godforsaken corner of the Dust Bowl. Through the flaps of his tented barracks, Sparks could see nothing but yellowed grass, dusty brush, and ugly scrub for mile after mile. Local bars posted NO MEXICANS AND INDIANS signs, much to the fury of the many hundreds of such men in the 45th “Thunderbird” Division, so named because of the shoulder patch each soldier wore showing the image of the mythical Thunderbird. It was a far cry from his last base in Hawaii.
The 157th Infantry Regiment was no instant infantry, cobbled from draftees. It was drawn from Colorado and had a storied past, having fought with distinction in the Indian Wars and in the Spanish American War of 1898, when it had stormed the beaches near Manila and then raised the first American flag above the walled city. It had then clashed with Pancho Villa’s raiders in 1916 on the Arizona-Mexico border and served in the trenches in World War I. In September 1940, the regiment had become part of the 45th Division and had then been mustered into service at Fort Sill.
Sparks loathed Fort Sill but quickly came to admire his regiment’s commander, a straight-backed and extremely strict Washington, DC, native called Colonel Charles Ankcorn, who had seen combat in World War I. Everyone on the base seemed to be afraid of Ankcorn, who rarely spoke to him other than to issue crisp, short orders. One day, Sparks learned that he was to be in charge of training 60mm mortar crews. In silence, Ankcorn watched as he put trainees through drills. Sparks wondered if he had done a good job; Ankcorn gave no indication. But several weeks later Ankcorn announced suddenly that Sparks was now his adjutant, responsible for the organization, administration, and discipline of the regiment. He simply showed him a desk and told him to get on with it, having also promoted him to captain. It was clear that Ankcorn’s silence over the months had been a way of testing and teaching him to think for himself and act decisively. In the heat of battle, there would be precious little time for consultation. On the killing fields of Flanders in 1918, Ankcorn himself had learned that lesson fast.
CHAPTER TWO
OFF TO WAR
Felix Sparks and his future wife, Mary, in the desert near Tucson, Arizona, 1939. [Courtesy of Mary Sparks]
CAMP KAMEHAMEHA, HAWAII, DECEMBER 7, 1941
THE NAVY ZEROS ZOOMED low, spitting bullets, dropping bombs, ending peace, the red suns on their fuselages, soon to be known as “meatballs,” flashing by in the early Sunday morning light above Pearl Harbor. The massive sixteen-inch artillery guns that Sparks had operated for two years were utterly useless as the Japanese bombed and strafed, sinking four battleships and two destroyers and killing more than two thousand men. The surprise attack on Hawaii had come not from the sea but the air.
Just four days later, on December 11, in an eighty-eight-minute-speech before the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler dramatically announced that the Third Reich was also going to wage war on the United States. Sparks was only a few days from completing his year’s call-up to active duty. There was no way now he would be able to go back to school. Like others serving, he would have to stay in the army until the war was lost or won. He soon received yet more bad news, this time from a college friend: Mary Blair was socializing with other men. He called her immediately. She was at a party. It was a bad line. All he could hear was young men’s voices, swing music, and laughter. She was clearly having a good time. He couldn’t bear to lose her.
“Let’s get married.”
What was he saying? Mary couldn’t hear him properly. Annoyed she had not immediately agreed, he asked again.
They tied the knot at the end of her junior year, on June 17, 1942, in front of their families and some of their college professors in Tucson, and then shared a car with another couple, driving west to the Pacific, and honeymooned in San Diego for a few days. They had made a deal. He knew how much finishing college meant to her, and how hard she had worked, so he insisted she complete her degree, then join him at whatever base he was on.
In September 1942, having finished college, Mary arrived in Massachusetts in time to experience a spectacular New England fall. Gold and orange leaves piled up in front of white clapboard houses and churches while Sparks and his regiment practiced landing on the pristine beaches of Cape Cod. Like many other young wives who had joined their husbands that autumn, Mary became pregnant. But then, in November, the relative idyll ended and the division moved to Pine Camp in upstate New York, where it encountered its first blast of a true New England winter: four feet of snow and a temperature of minus fifty-four degrees. The men had not been issued winter gear, and frostbite became a problem. Thunderbirds took out their frustration in fistfights in local bars, and two disaffected soldiers even held up a bank with tommy guns, earning five-year jail sentences.
Much to the relief of local bar owners and banks, in January 1943 the division moved to the balmier climes of Virginia to train in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Morale was soon restored with the help of a powerful local moonshine. Rumor had it the division would ship out soon for Europe or the Pacific. The odds of surviving combat began to weigh heavily on the minds of soldiers and their families. Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds knew with certainty that many of them would never return.
Early that May of 1943, Sparks held Mary in his arms. The baby was showing. She had been told she could not travel after seven months and had to return to her family in Tucson, where she would have the baby. They clung to each other and kissed good-bye, knowing they might not see each other again. Would he get to see his child? What would happen to Mary and the baby if he didn’t make it back? In a May 19 letter, he asked his parents to take care of the baby if anything should happen to Mary in birth. “If ever there was a time in my life that I wanted to be home, it’s now,” he added. “It can’t be done.”
He would be back one day, he vowed, when the war was over in Europe.
HAMPTON ROADS, VIRGINIA, JUNE 3, 1943
THE DOCKSIDE WAS filled with a long, snaking line of men in green uniforms. Towering above Sparks was the USS Charles Carroll, a five-hundred-foot-long attack transport bristling with twenty-two antiaircraft guns. There was much debate as men filed up the gangways. Where were they headed? Some thought they were going straight to France to open a second front. Others insisted, though they were on the Atlantic coast, that they were bound for the Pacific via the Panama Canal. To some of Sparks’s exhausted fellow officers, it didn’t matter where they were going, so long as the fifty-mile marches, day and night, and the endless packing and repacking and checking on equipment were finally over.
For brothers Otis, nineteen, and Ervin Vanderpool, twenty-nine, as with most of the men, it was the first time they were departing the United States. When the brothers had left the cornfields of Olathe in Colorado to join the regiment at Fort Sill, where Sparks became their platoon commander, it had been the first time they had even ventured beyond state lines. Ervin thought it best if he went to war with his younger brother, hoping he might be able to protect him in some way. Like dozens of other brothers serving side by side in the 45th Infantry Division, they dared not imagine returning alone.
It was 0800 on June 8, 1943, when whistles sounded, anchor chains clanked, and the convoy transporting the 157th Infantry Regiment moved slowly out of Hampton Roads. Men crowded railings to watch America recede into the distance. Some felt strangely empty as they headed out into the Atlantic. The convoy zigzagged southeast, with several destroyers providing escort, to avoid U-boats before heading north toward Gibraltar.
Sparks remembered listening to Axis Sally radio broadcasts from Berlin as he drew closer to North Africa. “You boys in the 45th Division know you are on the high seas and I’m going to play a song for you,” announced Sally one day. “It’s ‘The Last Roundup’ and it’s going to be the
last roundup for many of you.” After two weeks at sea, he had learned to block out Axis Sally but not the popular music she played.
On June 21, 1943, the convoy passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean was a bright blue and so clear that the men could see deep into it when they leaned over the rails and looked down. Dolphins played in the ships’ wakes. The convoy then approached the crowded harbor at Oran in French Algeria. To their great frustration, the Thunderbirds were kept cooped up on their crowded, foul-smelling troopships for four more days. The reason became clear on June 25, when the whole division moved ashore in a practice landing on nearby beaches, with the 36th Infantry Division playing the role of defenders. It proved a fiasco, largely due to the absence of many experienced coxswains and ensigns who had been reassigned due to chronic shortages of landing craft crews in Europe and the Pacific, just minutes before the 45th Division had left the States.
What would happen, corps commanders and senior Allied planners wondered, when the green Thunderbirds actually landed on a foreign shore under enemy fire? On June 27, the anxious Seventh Army commander, George S. Patton, assembled all of the division’s officers for what was clearly a much-needed pep talk. Sparks was among a crowd of several hundred who listened to Patton from a hillside, looking down on a stage set up in a dry riverbed.
“Gentlemen,” said Patton, “in a few days we’re going to hit the mainland of Europe for the first time. Most of you have never been in combat before and you may be afraid. But don’t be afraid! You can stick a red feather up your ass and run around in front of them and they can’t hit you.”