by Tim Brady
Many of the companies in the division were formed primarily from the populations of individual Texas towns, who proudly organized units for service in the guard. Company A of the 143rd, the regiment that was chosen to march in the 4th of July parade in Rabat, had been founded in Rusk, Texas and had a lineage that stretched back to a cavalry unit in the Civil War; Company B hailed primarily from the small town of Mexia, just east of Waco, and was formed in 1928; Company C was also formed between the wars in 1926, and was comprised mostly of Beaumont men.
At the start of the war, the soldiers in the 143rd were almost all from the east central part of Texas between Dallas and San Antonio, where the I-35 corridor runs today. Here the rolling hills of West Texas met the greener landscapes to the east. The troops came from cotton farms and cattle ranches and towns that supported the commerce of agriculture. In those hard times of the 1930s, many had signed up for duty out of economic necessity, in some cases exchanging bunks in CCC camps for bunks in the National Guard.
There were no African American soldiers in the division and more than a few hints, in documentary evidence, that they would not have been particularly welcome by most if they had been included—not just by the Texans, either. The native Ohioan, Walker, records with a decided lack of sympathy, the story of incidents at Camp Edwards where members of the 36th had used the word “nigger” toward African American staff at the camp. In response, he writes in his diary “of the tendency of some Negro soldiers to make a great deal out of a little and to cry out like children when they feel offended.”1
Within each company, however, there was a mix of backgrounds and ethnicities, including a strong element of Tex-Mex culture and heritage. Hundreds of members of the Texas Division had Hispanic surnames and were descendants of Mexican families.
The units with roots in small-town Texas were formed by various socio-economic elements in those communities, from town leaders and sons of Main Street commerce, to laborers in local textile mills. They liked high school football and prayed, for the most part, to a Baptist God. Quite a few had been swatted hard by the Great Depression.
Company I came from Belton, Texas, near Killeen, just north of Austin. Belton was an agricultural community of a few thousand souls in the early ’40s, set in the hill country of south central Texas. It served as a sort of dividing line in the area: to the east were small farms, mainly cotton; to the west was ranch country. However, the arrival in 1942 of Fort Hood, a new tank unit training facility (which would continue to grow throughout the war), was fast changing the economics of the region as well as booming the population.2
Company I was organized by a town councilman named Harry Carden. He became the unit’s captain until it was called into active duty, at which time he gave way to an officer in the regular army.
Also a part of Company I was Jack White, son of a photographer in town, who had worked in his father’s studio, played trumpet in a the Belton High School, and graduated in 1939, before which he’d signed up to be a part of Company I.
Twin brothers from nearby Temple, Ray and Roy Goad, signed up for duty in the company soon after high school graduation in 1940. They were tough, 155-pound all-district guards for the football Wildcats in the fall of ’39.
Another group of brothers, the Waskows—August, John Otto, and Henry T.—signed up for Company I back in 1937. The men were part of a large tenant farm family of eight children—parents of German descent—who worked land south of Temple and north of Belton in Bell County.
Henry, the youngest of the boys, and pondering either a teaching career (as his college friends assumed) or a career in the ministry (as his family thought), signed up last. He had attended a country school near the farm until it ran out of grades at the 9th. Henry matriculated to Belton High, where he graduated with top academic honors. He was quiet and serious; a country boy from impoverished circumstances, who according to one classmate, arrived at school as a freshman in a brand-new blue shirt and blue overalls and wore the same every day for his four years, until they were faded to the softest of baby blues by the time he graduated.3
Henry had the distinction of being class president, a member of the student council, and served, with Jack White’s sister, among others, on the student newspaper. Afterward, he earned a scholarship to Temple Junior College, where he was awarded a teaching certificate in 1937 and won second place in a statewide oratory contest. Instead of taking a teaching job, however, he decided to go on to a four-year institution, Trinity College up in Waxahachie, just south of Dallas. At the same time, to earn a little extra money, Henry joined his brothers in Company I and spent weekends training and drilling with the boys of Belton as he worked toward his degree at Trinity. He’d hitchhike between Waxahachie and Belton on weekends to make his guard duties.4
Henry’s ambitions and talents were evident in the Guard as well. He was promoted to corporal even before Company I was activated and ordered to report to Camp Bowie. He rose to lieutenant in camp and then was chosen for officer’s training, which sent him to Fort Benning, Georgia. He was now outranking older brother August. (John Otto had to drop out of the unit when he injured a shoulder). August, now at the age of 30, was six years older than Henry and had the full muscled-body and thickness of a mature man. Henry, on the other hand, looked young and slight. A portrait of him taken at the time suggests his cheeks even had a cherubic hint of color. Nonetheless, it was Henry who was promoted to Captain when the Division moved to Camp Edwards in Massachusetts. It was also in Massachusetts that Henry Waskow was transferred to the command of Company B within the 143rd, leaving his brother and the Belton boys for another Texas-based unit.
Company B was formed in Mexia, just northeast of Belton, back in 1928. Like Company I it had an assortment of young friends from town, people such as Willie Slaughter and Jack Berry. Berry was another Texas high school footballer—a halfback for Mexia High prior to enlisting in the Guard. Slaughter was a lineman on that same team. He had dreams of saving enough money to start a cattle ranch after the war. Slaughter was one of fourteen descendants of Will Skelton of Cedar, Texas—thirteen grandsons, and one great-grandson—serving in the armed forces across the globe.
Jack Gibson had served for several years in the Civilian Conservation Corps before finding a job at the Mexia textile mill prior to the war. He was nearly thirty years old and the eldest son of a farm widow who had five other children when the Guard called him up.
A number of Wadle family members, cousins and brothers, were part of the unit, including Arthur A. Wadle, son of Annie of Mexia. Flynn Durbin, son of a railroad worker in Mexia, had a brother in the Navy and one serving as an Army medic in England. Richard Burrage, son of a railroad maintenance man and a native of Waco, Texas, was a recent graduate of Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson’s alma mater in San Marcos, Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College.
Riley Tidwell’s mother had died when he was young, leaving her son, in his own words “essentially orphaned.” Riley was taken in by a farm family in Fairfield, Texas, just east of Mexia. He grew up working for both his foster family and a ranch near the town of Centerville, where he rode fence lines and got paid twenty-five cents a day plus room and board. He decided to sign up for National Guard service in Company B in 1939, after being turned down by the CCC. He needed the money and was hoping for the $30 a month offered by “the tree army,” but had to settle for the $21 given new recruits by the Guard.
Tidwell was just sixteen years old when he enlisted, but stood six feet five inches tall, a fact that helped him when he went to sign up for the Guard. “How old are you?” He was asked. “Seventeen,” he lied. “Got any kids?” Taken aback for a moment, Riley paused and said he had none. After the recruiter gave him a long look up and down, Tidwell was told he was a soldier.
He trained for a while in Mexia, but went to Camp Bowie after Company B was activated. Riley Tidwell went through maneuvers in Louisiana with the 36th, took his first train ride when the division was moved from Texas to Florida, got in
to a truck accident during more maneuvers in North Carolina, and then was shipped with his unit up to Camp Edwards, where he became the company runner under its new commander, soon-to-be captain, Henry Waskow.
They had met initially at Camp Bowie, where Waskow had served for a time as corporal of the camp guards. Tidwell had been one of his charges. They got along well, had some nice chats on duty, which probably helped Tidwell get the post of company runner. It was a job that required almost constant contact with the CO. The runner was the link between the captain and his various platoons, as well as battalion command. He also operated the radio for Waskow when called upon.
Tidwell had lean and lanky good looks and prominent ears accentuated by the military cut of his hair. He towered over his captain, who stood about five feet nine inches tall and according to Tidwell, came up to the runner’s armpit.5 Though Waskow was five or six years older than Tidwell, his smooth-skinned features and sandy blond hair actually gave him the look of a younger man. But despite this and his height advantage, Tidwell quickly began to look up to his commander and started to think of him like he would an older brother.
When the 36th finally moved out of Camp Edwards on April 1, and boarded ship for their journey overseas, Tidwell, as company runner, had to learn the ins-and-outs of the transport ship upon which they were sailing, so that he could pick up and deliver messages to Waskow while on board. No one found out they were going to North Africa until they were well out to sea. That night, the ship’s mess served turkey—a meal that was not a favorite fare of Riley Tidwell anyway—and he and everyone else in the company got violently ill from salmonella.
Much like their stay on Cape Cod, more amphibious training continued when they arrived in Rabat, Morocco, where the division was only about a dozen miles from the Atlantic. There was time for sightseeing and collecting souvenirs. Jack White sent home a cigarette lighter, a compass, some French francs and Italian lira. He sent French cigarettes and a guide to the customs of North Africa to his parents in one package; in another, he mailed a pair of hand-sewn camel-hide shoes for his sister and a knife for his dad.6 Henry Waskow sent watercolor postcards home to his younger sister, Mary Lee, with whom he’d always been particularly close.
While in Morocco, Company B spent time doing guard duty on the beaches near Port Lyautey. One day, they found barrels of North African brew washed ashore, presumably from a shipwreck. According to Riley Tidwell, Captain Waskow gained many points with his men by allowing them to open the kegs and fill their canteens with the local quaff. They weren’t sure if they were drinking wine or beer but it didn’t really matter.7
Both Jack White and Henry’s brother, August, were assigned the duty of accompanying Italian and German P.O.W’s from the North African campaign back to the U.S. After their stateside voyage they were quickly back at Rabat.
War news dominated the front page of the Belton and Mexia papers in early August 1943. The battle for Sicily was of prominent concern, but so, too, were actions in the Pacific and the Soviet Union. Inner pages of the paper kept people informed about the price of cotton and a week’s long revival meeting. Soldiers and sailors kept their families abreast of their circumstances and those families sent news to the local papers. Both Mexia and Belton editions had weekly features that described the doings.
August Waskow wrote what he knew would be the last letter from him that his mother would receive for awhile, letting her know that he’d earned a good conduct medal in North Africa, and that the Red Cross was doing a wonderful job helping troops there. Jack White echoed that salute to the Red Cross in a letter to his parents. He said the aid organization had shown a movie the night before that “gave me more laughs than I’ve had in a long time.” White also seemed to confirm Walker’s comments about watermelons and Texas soldiers. “I help eat from about one to six or seven [watermelons] every day. That’s just about all we have to spend our money on around here. They are pretty high-priced unless you can out argue the Arabs and they are pretty good at arguing.”
Of course none of the letters published in the local paper mentioned what was coming next for the soldiers of the 36th. There was a military proscription against those sort of loose lips. Beyond that, the T-Patchers themselves weren’t absolutely certain where they were bound.
An awfully good guess, however, was Italy itself.
5
Pyle in Sicily
D-DAY FOR PYLE and the 3rd Division, which he was accompanying to the shores of Sicily, came on July 10 and was a relatively quiet affair. Lucian Truscott, the commanding general of the division, had been placed on the far western sector of the invading force near the city of Licata. He and his men were greeted by light resistance. The Italians, if they’d been there at all, had largely vanished, either down the coast or into the body of the island. While the 1st Division, about fifteen miles to the east of 3rd Division, was facing a stiff opposition, and the 45th, even further to the right of the 1st, faced rough seas and abysmal beach conditions, Truscott’s troops fairly walked into Sicily and started unloading.
Pyle came in about six hours after the first wave. He found soldiers digging foxholes in hard ground, actually grousing about the fact the Italians had evaporated. We didn’t even get a chance to fire a shot!
There was always in Pyle a bit of the Indiana farm boy, back at the Brickyard, marveling at quality engineering. On the beaches he found that quality in how quickly and efficiently engineers set about turning the beach into a great dock for the unloading of the thousands of tons of ammunition, weapons, vehicle, and supplies needed to be brought ashore in the next few hours and days.
A mild contempt for the Italian defenders pervaded the setting. “We’d come prepared to fight our way through a solid wall of mines, machine guns, artillery, barbed wire, and liquid fire, and we even expected to hit some fiendish new devices. Yet there was almost nothing to it. It was like stepping into the ring to meet Joe Louis and finding Caspar Milquetoast there. The Italians didn’t even leave many booby traps for us.”1
Even the countryside was vaguely disappointing. Having brought a romanticized notion of Mediterranean isles to Sicily, both Pyle and the troops were disappointed to find a drab brown landscape, largely treeless and dull. The one splash of color, however, proved immensely popular: fields of ripe tomatoes were soon picked bare by the infantry.
GENERAL GEORGE Patton’s Seventh Army, including the 3rd, 45th, and 1st divisions, quickly burst out of the beachhead and steamed one hundred miles north toward Palermo. Ernie Pyle hustled after them, though he was starting to feel the many months he’d spent in the field. In fact, he was so deeply and obviously fatigued that one press colleague actually wrote to Lee Miller suggesting that Pyle be pulled home for a rest.2
Just a couple of days later, Pyle checked himself into a medical station run by the 45th Division, where he was first diagnosed with dysentery, then malaria. But the doctors decided later it was something they labeled “battlefield fever.”
When Pyle confessed to his readers that for all his life, he actually liked being in hospitals, he was being only partially facetious. This was a way to slow down, to be cared for, to have someone else force you to take care. “On the third day I was scared to death for fear I was well enough to leave,” Pyle wrote in his column. “But the doctor looked thoughtful and said he wanted me to stay another day. I would have kissed him if he had been a nurse instead of a man with a mustache and stethoscope.”
Of course, Pyle continued to report while there. He wrote about his doctor, about medical care in the field, about the wounded soldiers who arrived and shared the station with him. An admirer and keen observer of well-run army logistical operations, Pyle described the triage that took place in the succession of battlefield medical stations. “The idea all along the way is to do as little surgical work as possible, but at each stop merely to keep a man in good enough condition to stand the trip back to the hospital, where there are full facilities for any kind of work.”3
Pyle wro
te about gruesome wounds and a trench outside the station that was filled with the bloody bits of clothing snipped from patients in the hospital. He wrote home about getting woozy looking at some of the injuries; but for the folks back home, he usually took a reassuring step back, telling, for instance, how one doctor, who’d practiced in New York prior to the war, “had never seen a body so badly smashed up in Sicily as he had in traffic accidents back in New York.”4
It was obviously not that he was unaware of the horrors of war—in fact, that, in part was what was draining him and had sent him to the hospital in the first place—but like almost every Allied correspondent in the theater, he continued to hold a dual responsibility. Not only was he there to report on the war, but he was also there—professional responsibility or not—to support its goals and purpose. He was just too close to the men and women on the frontlines. He shared their interests, and at least early in the war that meant shielding the folks back home from the worst of what was happening—including the pair of incidents that happened when George Patton visited medical stations similar to the one Pyle was in.
The first occurred on August 3, 1943. A young private attached to the 1st Division had just been diagnosed with exhaustion, when General Patton, on a tour of the facility with a group of medical officers, happened by. After visiting with several wounded soldiers and commending them on their bravery, Patton saw the private slouched on a stool. He asked what was the matter, and the young soldier told his commander that he was nervous, that “he just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Patton immediately grew irate and slapped the private with his gloves, grabbed the soldier by his collar, and pulled him to the tent entrance. He then deposited the man outside, calling him a gutless bastard, and ordering him back to the front.
Just a week later, Patton repeated the exercise at another medical station. This time, he actually knocked the helmet off the solider, pulled out one of his ivory-handled pistols, and threatened to shoot him.