If You Survive

by George Wilson

  One day we toured the Maginot, entering this massive underground defensive line through huge doors in the rear. The French captain guiding us admitted that the Germans had taken that sector of the impregnable line simply by going through a gap and approaching from the rear, which was not defended.

  The fortifications of the Maginot Line were four stories of concrete, with two stories below ground and with the excavated dirt being piled on the sides and on top so that it looked like a long, low ridge. There were apertures for small arms fire, for machine guns, and for cannon. Large gun turrets facing the front were retractible and had periscope sights so the crew could operate entirely behind the cement walls. What amazed me, though, was that the largest guns behind all these elaborate, expensive turrets were only the old 75s of World War I.

  Other features that impressed me were the conveyor systems for feeding ammunition to the guns, the comfortable living quarters for the crew, and larders with enough supplies to withstand any sort of siege for at least three months. Overall it was a tremendous engineering feat, of which the natives still seemed quite proud. It was an even more outstanding example of military futility. The old French generals had still been planning on static trench warfare. Even if they’d been able to stop the Germans from breaking through a gap, it would have been easy for the Germans to drop paratroops and take the undefended rear.

  And yet the Germans—the inventors of the modern warfare that obsoleted the Maginot—themselves built a Siegfried Wall, which we were able to break through in only one day.

  In addition to touring the Maginot, we were also allowed to visit a nearby town of some five hundred folks. One thing that should be said about France, and probably much of the Continent, is that they openly accept as matter-of-fact and part of normal life some institutions that more strait-laced nations endure, if at all, more discreetly. Thus the local sin emporium was flourishing, in no small way supported by Army personnel, and the base commander recognized it to the extent of sending in Army doctors to examine the girls.

  Then all of a sudden some higher Army commander ordered those spas closed at once, and it became the job of the current guard—led by me—to execute the orders and evict the madam and about twenty girls. Our orders did not require us to follow through, however, so the girls were soon out on the streets enterprising.

  Finally, after so many long, bleak years for the natives and pain and suffering for all of us, Victory in Europe—VE day—arrived! May 8, 1945: The population exploded into the streets and danced and drank the night away amid fireworks and everything else they could cut loose with. Some of us got a little homesick. All of us celebrated on this happy occasion.

  The balance of our trip to Nuremberg was interminable, slow, and unpleasant, for we no longer rated anything but the infamous 40 & 8 boxcars—forty men or eight horses—and I wouldn’t treat a horse that way. Occasionally we were sidetracked for supply trains headed east into Germany and for long trainloads of pitiful Frenchmen who had been slave labor for four years and who were headed home to France. Their faces were thin, and their eyes were set in deep, dark sockets. They were jammed in worse than we, with barely enough room to stand. Though dirty and helpless, they still were going in the right direction, and they waved in wild excitement as their boxcars crawled past.

  I couldn’t help thinking of the awful shock some of them might be facing—houses in ruins, wives who had fraternized, children fathered by the enemy, no money, no jobs, no prospects, and nothing but the shakiest government.

  Nuremburg, which we went through on trucks, was my first view of a major city bombed by the Allies. Besides being an important railhead, it was also a highly emotional target as the sacrosanct heartland of the Nazi cult, the wellspring of Hitlermania, the breeding ground of the Third Reich plague.

  British and American bombers had attacked day and night, hitting it with everything from incendiaries to blockbusters. Fires had raged out of control, and we heard that casualties on one night’s raid reached 75,000. Blocks and blocks were level acres of rubble. Now and then we would see a building with some outer walls gone, the inner floors still suspended in midair with furniture, rugs, and bedding standing intact, looking like a huge dollhouse.

  The old walled inner city was completely demolished. Nothing was standing, nothing moved. It was all broken bricks and dust.

  The rail yards were a mess of shattered boxcars, steam engines, and roundhouses. Heavy rails were bent like wires, some being twisted into giant corkscrew spirals thirty or forty feet in the air. Wooden ties were splintered or burned, and even the heavy steel supports under boxcars were melted so they sagged to the ground.

  At one point we passed the massive, deserted stadium Hitler had built for his mass rallies, and I remembered the newsreel shots of the sea of rabid, uniformed, chanting disciples responding to his posturing and ranting.

  Our trucks continued out of town toward Bamberg, present home of the Fourth Division, and I couldn’t get used to the sight of former German soldiers still in uniform, for that’s all they had to wear, straggling homeward. They were walking; even the few who had bicycles just walked beside them as though afraid to ride on the highways with all the American trucks. They didn’t eye us directly, and their appearance was most ragged and dejected. Nevertheless I had the feeling they were deeply relieved that it was all over.

  The other civilians we happened to see were mostly women, and their expressions were uniformly stiff and unsmiling. In addition to the usual fear of conquering invaders, still an unknown quantity, they must have had their worries about whether any of the stragglers would turn out to be sons or husbands.

  I reached Bamberg, headquarters of the Fourth Division, about May 10, and soon I was in a jeep headed for Rothenberg and the Twenty-second Infantry Regiment. Colonel Ruggles, our new regimental commander, greeted me warmly and told me Colonel Buck Lanham had been promoted to brigadier general and transferred.

  We had a pleasant chat about all the changes in the Twenty-second and in my Second Battalion during my absense. Then I asked if he knew what had happened to my promised promotion to captain. He told me that all promotions for the Second Battalion had been scrapped. I gathered that for some reason Colonel Lanham had gotten mad at the entire Second Battalion, had discarded the suggested promotions, and had even replaced Lieutenant Colonel Kenan. I was never able to learn why.

  I told Colonel Ruggles that it didn’t seem fair to penalize those who had earned and deserved promotions, and I asked him to recommend me for a captaincy based on his personal knowledge of my record. This may seem pretty pushy, but I knew I deserved a captaincy and was gradually learning to speak up for myself.

  Without hesitation, Colonel Ruggles said he would be happy to put my name on the list but that he couldn’t promise anything now that the war in Europe was over. As it turned out, the Army had frozen all promotions. He tried again once he reached the States, but that, too, was denied, so I remained a first lieutenant.

  A jeep now took me to Dinkelsbühl, headquarters of Second Battalion, where I reported to our new commanding officer, Major Clifford “Swede” Henley. I had heard of the big Swede and had seen him a time or two but never had met him. His welcome was warm and pleasant, and he introduced me to several of the new officers. I also shook hands with some of the veterans, including Captain George Kerr and Captain McClain.

  Major Henley was extremely decent to me, and I could tell by his somewhat uncomfortable manner that he was most reluctant to have to tell me he had no company commander positions left in the battalion, that the best he could do was offer me a job as company exec. What I replied, in effect, was, “From all I can see, sir, my experience alone makes me senior to almost any company commander in this battalion. I want a company here or in another battalion. If you really can’t make enough changes to give me a company, then I’ll go back to Colonel Ruggles and ask for a transfer.”

  I can’t imagine myself having said anything remotely like that a few short months ear
lier, and it’s a wonder he didn’t throw me out. Instead he just said, “Well, give me a couple of days to see what I can do. Hang around battalion headquarters and maybe we can work things out.”

  So I was given a room in the small hotel that served as battalion headquarters, and a few days later Major Henley sent for me and asked if I would agree to take command of H Company. That’s about the way he phrased it. I told him a heavy weapons company (water-cooled machine guns and 80mm mortars) would be new to me, but I was sure I could handle the job.

  So it was arranged. Charles Pillard, H Company’s commander, went to battalion headquarters as an Assistant S-3, and I became commander of H Company.

  In H Company’s area of operations was a German military hospital filled with wounded German soldiers, and this had to be guarded. I assigned Sergeant Flipowitz and two squads of men to the job. They had no trouble at all keeping things under control.

  Also nearby, though not my company’s responsibility, was a large prisoner-of-war stockade filled with German soldiers. As might be imagined, German officers and noncoms kept the strictest discipline within the stockade. These Germans were still official prisoners, and it must have been odd to them to see former comrades-in-arms who had lain down their arms at the end of the fighting walking about freely on the outside as they straggled homeward. As a matter of fact, there was some irony in this, for we American conquerors were still indentured to the military while our vanquished paraded around as instant civilians. Of course, we had another war going on halfway around the world in the Pacific, and some of us worried that MacArthur might be aware of the fine combat record of the Fourth Infantry Division. He was, we learned later.

  Another thing we kept a wary eye on was an old camp for a few hundred displaced persons just released from slave labor. These poor people had existed in long Quonset huts where they were packed in like animals, being forced to sleep on the floor in rows. They had been imprisoned in filth, and the first steps in their emancipation were hot showers and delousing, a clean set of clothes, and burning of the old rags. After a few days, they were sent on their way home, which for most was in the Balkans.

  As for our relations with local civilians, there weren’t supposed to be any. The Army had set up a strict ban against what it called fraternization, which was emphasized with a 9:00 P.M. curfew. That seemed the safest rule, considering the number of irrepressible mischief makers among our ranks and the newness of the peace.

  One of my men soon proved the value of the rule. He finagled a jeep and driver from the motor pool after the curfew and, with the generous help of a Lithuanian refugee, located a friendly place where he could load up on local moonshine. After a while, delightfully drunk, the man pushed the driver into the passenger seat and took over the wheel. Soon he had up enough speed on the gravel road to miss a turn, totally wreck the jeep, send the driver to the hospital with a back injury, and kill the refugee. Apparently totally relaxed, the cause of it all walked away with a few bumps and bruises.

  His luck didn’t end there, either, for the battalion commander let him off with a severe reprimand and even classified the jeep as our final combat loss to make it expendable. A few weeks later, and the fellow would have had to pay for the jeep. Given Army pay in 1945, that might have stretched out a while.

  Another disturbance in our routine was the arrival of some replacements directly from the States. The group had been lucky enough to hit the end of the war, but one of their number at once ran into combat with our first sergeant. The veteran top sergeant, a virtuoso in the art of chewing out GIs, had been getting a little out of practice due to our humdrum duties, and he pounced lovingly on one of the new men. This unfortunate had been a “saltwater” corporal, one appointed unofficially and very temporarily for the duration of the journey. He had decided unilaterally to keep the rank and sew on real corporal’s stripes. He also had some whoppers on his service record, and when this form finally reached the first sergeant there was something of a verbal explosion. After the sergeant had run out of words, he scratched a six-foot-by-six-foot square on the ground, presented the new private with a pick and shovel, and had him dig down six feet. Many, many hours later, when the excavation was completed, the sergeant was quite pleased with it, and as a reward he let the man fill it up again.

  As for living quarters, we were practically in garrison. One big school building housed the whole company. Our only continuing problem was the electricity, for we never knew whether we were plugging into A.C. or D.C., 110 volts or 220. Several of our people blew up radios before we figured out the system.

  The geography there was reminiscent of Michigan farmland, with its rolling hills, wide fields, and patches of woods. Another link to home was the type of storage bins in common use, which were very similar to what we called fruit cellars when I was a boy in Michigan: mounds of earth lined with straw to hold potatoes, carrots, turnips, cabbage, etc. The vegetables kept well all winter and could be dug up as needed.

  Peacetime duty in Dinkelsbühl was most pleasant; our most serious overall business was recreation. Some of us became pretty good at pitching horseshoes. At first we were handicapped by having to use what was available, and this meant the huge old iron shoes of local farm horses. After a while we acquired the regulation shoes used in competition and soon were holding tournaments.

  Although we had to be mindful of fraternizing, we didn’t think this applied to the local trout; some of us picked up some of the best trout fishing ever in the small river that ran right through town. The Burgermeister managed to come up with old cane poles, lines, and a few hooks. We then dug up some worms and headed for a bend in the river about a mile out of town, where he had suggested the fishing was exceptionally good. Lee Lloyd and our driver went along, and after about three hours we came back with almost a hundred nice ten- to fifteen-inch trout for the cooks.

  This simple, pastoral life couldn’t go on forever, and in June, 1945, we entrucked for the first leg of our move home. Soon we bivouacked near Furth. Our entire company stayed in tents on the edge of a big hayfield, and without much else to do we watched interestedly as the German farmer, his robust wife, and his strong-armed daughter cut the entire field by hand using cradle scythes. Then they used huge rakes with wooden tines to get the hay in rows to dry. The farmer in me noticed the hay had to be turned a couple of times in the next few days.

  When the hay was finally dry, they loaded it onto a wagon drawn by a big draft horse and a milk cow hooked up side by side. The farmer stayed on the wagon, and the two women pitched all the hay up to him.

  It was a crude, old-fashioned way of farming, but it worked. I supposed that Hitler could not spare the metal for farm machinery and that many of the workhorses had become military casualties.

  After a few more restless weeks with plenty of horseshoe pitching, we were happy to board the trucks again for the final overland leg as we followed the autobahn to Metz and then traveled clear across the rest of France to reach the English Channel at Le Havre.

  Our ships were not yet in the harbor, and this meant a few more days to kill in a tent camp nearby. Practically all my time went into tedious paperwork, for Customs required a declaration to be made out for each nonmilitary item a man wanted to bring home, and the company commander had to examine every piece of paper and then sign it. Later, when we reached the States, the Customs people didn’t look at a single thing, and all that paperwork had been for nothing.

  Finally, on July 3, we boarded the famous Liberty Ship, the U.S.A.T. Excelsior, and sailed for the good old USA.

  For several days the seas were high, and the ship pitched and rolled and vibrated severely when the stern came up and the propeller was out of the water. Our speed was cut to about five knots, and we didn’t think we’d ever get out of the Atlantic. I didn’t feel too well most of the time, and once I was knocked flat on the deck by a sudden pitch. Many of the men were very seasick and spent most of their time below deck and away from the mess hall. Then, ten days out of L
e Havre, we landed at Hampton Roads, Virginia, along with M Company, while the rest of the regiment was landing in New York.

  We were given thirty days off, but that wasn’t too much for all the things on my schedule. From Le Havre I had written Florine, my bride-to-be, that she should go ahead with the wedding arrangements. I estimated my arrival home at about July 15. As it happened, I missed it by two hours, arriving home in Grand Ledge, Michigan, at 2:00 A.M. on July 16. No one was at the station to meet me. I had wired, but they never received the message. So I phoned from the station in Lansing and that brought everyone to attention. Soon they all arrived to drive me the last twelve miles home.

  I had been gone fifteen months, over half of it in combat, and there is no describing the delicious feeling of being home again. The feeling doesn’t last long, and it has to be earned, but during its fleeting moments it is absolute bliss. I couldn’t believe it; I was home!

  On July 21 we had a nice church wedding and a big reception, which was what Florine wanted. My dad loaned me his 1937 Hudson Terraplane, and a friend at a Shell station got me some gas coupons for the short honeymoon trip to Grand Rapids and Half Moon Lake, near Stanton. We rented a lakefront cottage, and our honeymoon was beautiful.

  News of the first atomic bomb dropped on Japan came while I was still on leave, and a few days later came the tremendous news of Japan’s complete surrender. At that moment I happened to be in Grand Ledge, and I could not control nor was I ashamed of the tears that suddenly flooded my face. I now was a married man, and the Fourth Division would not, as rumors had insisted, be part of the invasion of Japan. I was flooded with relief.

  Just as I was beginning to adjust to the incredibly pleasant civilian life my thirty days’ leave ran out, and I had to report back to the Fourth Division, now at Camp Buckner, outside Durham, North Carolina. Florine soon joined me, and we came upon a small two-room apartment in Durham for $40 a month. It had a kitchen equipped with a kerosene stove, a portable tin oven, and an ice box. I also picked up a 1942 Hudson and shared rides with other officers back and forth.