But at the same time Rommel was one of the greatest German generals, fighting for Hitler — or for Germany, anyway, but still taking his orders from Hitler. The American and British generals all seemed to respect him, but his Afrika Korps and the German tanks (panzers) led the way in killing thousands — tens of thousands — of our men.
Trying to make sense of it all made my head hurt. I sat there in the Kitchen Sink basement a little while longer, strumming my guitar, until I realized what I was playing without even knowing it: that Quaker song, “Simple Gifts.”
I still didn’t know the words, so I just quietly hummed along with the chords until I felt better.
Uncle Dex was still working, so I stopped to talk to him, even though it was late and I should have already been home.
“Practice going well?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Probably not. We need to learn another song. Julie says she’s going to write a rap song.”
Uncle Dex immediately started beat boxing, or what he must have thought sounded like beat boxing, making this spitting noise into his fist or something. He was such a dork. It made me laugh.
“And how’s the research going?” he asked when he finished.
“Research?” I repeated.
“Your soldier, the medic,” he said. “I figured from the way you were all so interested in the medic’s pouch and his identification card you were off on another research project, trying to learn about another ghost of war.”
I nearly choked. “Ghost of war? Uh, there’s no such thing as ghosts, Uncle Dex. I mean, really.”
It was his turn to laugh. “It’s just an expression. Or a band name,” he said, though from the way he looked at me, as if studying my reaction, I had to wonder what he was really thinking.
“We’re kind of stuck, actually,” I said. “I mean, you’re right, we are researching him. And we even found one of his relatives, his great-nephew, who lives in Philadelphia. We’re pretty sure he was a Quaker. And he fought in North Africa in World War II. Well, he didn’t fight exactly, but he took care of the guys who did the fighting.”
Uncle Dex nodded. “That’s quite a lot right there. Good work so far.”
“The relative, he’s sending us some of John Wollman’s letters from when he was in the war. So far, though, we don’t know what happened to him, and we’re trying to figure that out. We’re also trying to learn as much as we can about the war in North Africa. Like, I didn’t even know we fought the French in North Africa. Did you know that?”
Uncle Dex nodded. “I might have heard a little something about that.” The way he said it meant that he actually knew a lot about it, of course. I was prepared for him to launch into a long lecture, but instead he made a suggestion.
“You know who would be good to talk to,” he said, “is Reverend Simpson. He fought in World War II and I’m pretty sure he took part in the North Africa campaign.”
Reverend Earl Simpson used to be the mayor of Fredericksburg. He was also a minister at one of the churches in town — Bethel Baptist. Everybody knew about him because he had served four terms as mayor, starting out during the civil rights years back in the 1970s. Apparently it was pretty unusual for a town back then in the South, like ours, to elect a black mayor. He wasn’t a town political leader anymore and he’d retired as a minister, too. We learned about him in school during Black History Month. I never knew he had been in the army, though.
“He still helps out over at Bethel Baptist Church,” Uncle Dex said. “And he comes in here every now and then. He’s pretty interested in history, too.”
“Do you think he would want to talk to us?” I asked. “I mean about the war?”
Uncle Dex shrugged. “He’s very nice, and I’m sure if he didn’t want to talk about it, he would politely let you know. But you should drop by the church and see. He’s usually there. It’s over near the river, not far from here.”
The river he was talking about was the Rappahannock River. The Kitchen Sink and the two main streets of downtown Fredericksburg were just a couple of blocks away.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I said, not so sure about just walking up to Reverend Simpson out of the blue and asking him about the war. “I better get home for dinner. It’s getting pretty late.”
“Watch out for rubber chickens,” Uncle Dex said.
He was just kidding around, but the whole way home on my bike — especially going past the Masonic cemetery — I kept looking around nervously for signs of Belman and his friends and their potato cannon.
I made Greg and Julie go with me the next day, of course. I’d seen Reverend Simpson before — he spoke one time at an assembly when we were in elementary school, and in a small town like ours you’re bound to run into just about everybody once in a while — but I’d never actually talked to him. Plus, I’m not too good at talking to old people, even though it seems like we’ve been doing a lot of that sort of thing since meeting our first ghost and solving the first mystery.
When we got to the Bethel Baptist Church, we knocked on the front door. No one came to answer, but Julie discovered the door was open, so we let ourselves in.
Inside we ran into a woman who must have been cleaning the sanctuary to get it ready for that weekend’s service. “Can I help you children?” she asked. “I’m Mrs. Turner, the church secretary.” She was older, too, but not super old like Reverend Simpson was the last time I saw him. “Are you lost?”
“Oh no,” Julie said. “Sorry to interrupt. We’re here to see Reverend Simpson.”
Mrs. Turner studied us for a minute. “Is he expecting you?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “My uncle knows him, and he said we should come over and introduce ourselves to the reverend. We wanted to ask him some questions.”
“Is this about civil rights?” Mrs. Turner asked. “He gets a lot of folks wanting to ask him about that time.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “It’s actually about World War II. My uncle said Reverend Simpson was in the war.”
“In North Africa,” Greg added.
“Huh,” Mrs. Turner said. “Well, I don’t know him to speak much on that subject. Not in a very long time. And even then I know he wasn’t comfortable. I believe it upsets him to remember what happened back then.”
“Oh, we won’t ask him to talk about anything that he’d rather not discuss,” Julie assured her. It was clear to all of us that we were going to have to get past Mrs. Turner to get to Reverend Simpson, so I was glad Julie was making the case. “It’s just for a history project we’re working on. And we need as many primary sources as we can find. Having Reverend Simpson would be a great help because he’s such an authority on so many things.”
It apparently worked because Mrs. Turner carefully placed her cleaning supplies on a pew and motioned for us to follow her. “Just don’t make much noise,” she said. “In case he’s praying. Or taking a nap.” She smiled a little when she said that last part.
Reverend Simpson was taking a nap. Or that’s what it looked like, anyway, when Mrs. Turner led us back down a dark hallway behind the sanctuary to a small office that might have once been a big storage closet. Reverend Simpson was sitting in a chair next to a floor lamp, his eyes closed and head drooping forward. He had an open Bible in his lap that was threatening to slide off onto the floor. Mrs. Turner rescued it and quietly placed it on a tiny table. The only other thing on the table was a glass of water.
She pressed a finger over her lips and started to lead us away, but Reverend Simpson must have heard us because he sat up suddenly and opened his eyes.
“Someone is lost,” he said. I thought at first he was looking at me and Greg and Julie and Mrs. Turner, but the way he was staring, I realized he was looking past us.
I turned, thinking there must be somebody else there — maybe even John Wollman — but it was just the empty hallway.
“It’s some children, Reverend,” Mrs. Turner said gently, stepping back inside the office and touching his s
houlder. “They’re here to speak with you if you’re up for having visitors.”
Reverend Simpson kept staring past us for another minute. He squinted, then shook his head and looked directly at us. He smiled. “So sorry,” he said. “I thought there was someone else.”
“Just us,” Greg said.
Reverend Simpson considered Greg for a minute, then extended his hand, which trembled slightly, but enough to notice. Greg shook his hand. Next Reverend Simpson shook Julie’s hand, and then mine, nodding his head the whole time. His hair was white and thin, and he had a long, sad face, though the sadness that I saw there disappeared whenever he smiled. I could tell he was very tall, even folded up into the chair the way he was. He moved very slowly the whole time.
Mrs. Turner set up three folding chairs, squeezed inside the office so when we sat our knees were practically knocking into Reverend Simpson’s. He didn’t seem to mind.
“What can I do for you?” he asked once we were all settled.
“My uncle, Dex Carter, he has that antique store downtown, the Kitchen Sink,” I started. “He said we should come talk to you.”
Reverend Simpson nodded some more. “I do know your uncle,” he said. “I knew your grandfather much better, of course. We were good friends over the years.”
Pop Pop — Uncle Dex and my mom’s dad — died two years ago and I still miss him a lot. I liked it that Reverend Simpson knew him and said that about him.
Reverend Simpson brought his shaky hands together under his chin. “And now what’s the subject for the conversation you young people brought with you today?”
“Well, we wanted to ask you about your experiences in World War II,” I said. “Uncle Dex said you were in the army, and you fought in the war in North Africa, and that’s what we’re the most interested in.”
Reverend Simpson chuckled. “I’m afraid your uncle wasn’t entirely correct. I did serve during the war, but I didn’t fight in North Africa. None of us did.”
I was confused, and from the looks on their faces, Greg and Julie were, too.
“Uh, us?” I hesitated. “I mean, when you say ‘us,’ you mean, um …”
He chuckled again. “Back then the word was Negroes,” he said. “Or colored. Now it’s African American or black. Any word you use, though, it was all the same back then. At the start of the war — for most of the war — they wouldn’t let us Negro soldiers fight. They decided we weren’t good enough for it. Not disciplined enough. Couldn’t follow orders. Not brave enough. Not intelligent enough.”
The way he said those things, I thought Reverend Simpson might spit out something sour he’d just taken a bite of.
“But that was just wrong,” Greg exclaimed. “Totally ridiculous.”
Julie and I nodded in agreement.
“It was different times,” Reverend Simpson continued. “But that’s what they thought — the government, Congress, the generals. So we weren’t allowed. So yes, I was in North Africa for the entire campaign. Many of us were. Six long months in the desert and the mountains. But we mostly stayed in the rear. Drove trucks. Worked as mechanics, cooks, laborers. I even drove an ambulance for a time, which was as close as I was to the actual fighting. But they wouldn’t issue us weapons, and they wouldn’t let us fight. Not until much later in the war. And then there was fight enough for everybody, of every color, and they realized they needed every able-bodied man there was.”
Reverend Simpson looked down at his hands, still drawn together as if he was going to pray. “We were in France and Belgium by then. Pressing hard toward Germany. I was in the 761st Tank Battalion. They called us the Black Panthers. I was part of an all-black tank crew in an all-black company in an all-black battalion. And wondering every day, as we inflicted and suffered more and more and more casualties, why it was we’d been so eager to get let into the fight.”
“They should have known that all along, though,” Greg said. “That the black soldiers could fight just as well as anybody. My dad said it wasn’t that way in Vietnam. He said everybody fought together, white and black and Hispanic.”
“The world does change, son,” Reverend Simpson said. “But sometimes it seems to take a lot longer than it should. And at the time, in North Africa, the generals, they didn’t want much to do with the black soldiers. Didn’t mind if we cleaned their latrines, slopped their chow, changed oil, greased axles, unloaded ships, carried off those who died. But that was the long and the short of it.
“Black Americans like myself called the war the Double V Campaign. The first V was for the victory we all wanted over the Germans and the Japanese and the Italians, of course.”
“What was the second V?” Julie asked.
“Victory for civil rights,” Reverend Simpson answered. “We figured we’d prove ourselves in the war, and when they saw how we served and sacrificed the same as every other American, they would be hard-pressed not to change the laws back home — for equal rights to vote, to own a home and live anywhere we wanted, to ride the same public transportation, to go to decent schools with everybody else.”
“Did that happen?” Greg asked. “I mean, I know there were the civil rights laws they passed, but didn’t those come a lot later?”
Reverend Simpson nodded. “It took them another twenty years after the war, it’s true. And there was a whole lot of struggle, which I hope you are learning all about in school. But eventually they came around.”
“The Double V Campaign,” Greg said. “Wow. I never heard of that.”
Reverend Simpson held up both hands and made victory signs with each. Or maybe he meant for them to be peace signs since there’s no difference between the two.
“Lot of people, when you say North Africa, they think it’s all desert up there,” Reverend Simpson continued. “And there’s plenty of desert, and there was plenty of fighting that went on in the desert. Most of the sandy desert, from what I understood at the time, was over in Egypt and Libya, where you have the sand dunes and the oil fields and the pyramids and such. But the Americans weren’t over there. That all was between the Germans and the British. They had the India Army fighting over there against the Germans, too, but you don’t hear much about that.”
“And the Italians and the Australians,” Julie added. “The Italians were with the Germans, and the Australians were with …” She trailed off — not because she didn’t know the Australians were on our side, but because she’d interrupted Reverend Simpson. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
He laughed. “No need for that,” he said, waving his hand. “You were right to correct me there. I had forgotten about the both of them.”
Reverend Simpson shook his head, as if trying to clear some things up. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The desert. Well, like I said, the sand desert was over in those countries mostly. Where we were — the Americans, but we were fighting right alongside the English folks and the French fellows — was a rougher kind of terrain. Had your desert there, too, plus your mountains, your high ridges, your hills that just looked to grow straight up out of the ground. Seemed like the Germans had control of every one of them and we had to fight our way to the top of one after another. Except when they stopped us, which was plenty of times. And even if we took one of those hills, no telling if the Germans would hit us in a surprise attack and take it right back.”
“Why?” Greg asked. “Why not just surround them on their hills, or go around them?”
“That would have been one way to do it,” Reverend Simpson said. “Only if the Germans had artillery on those hills — and they usually did — they could just take aim and wipe us out as we passed. And that did happen, too, I’m sad to say. Too many times to count. We lost nearly as many men going up those slopes, too. And then sometimes they just all-out ambushed us when we were crossing flat land in their valleys. This was all in Tunisia I’m talking about, by the way. The smallest country up there in North Africa, but big enough to hold most of the Africa war. And they got graveyards there that still
hold most of our men who didn’t survive it.”
Reverend Simpson had begun speaking in a more halting sort of way. Every now and then, he paused, taking a deep breath. I wondered if it was getting harder for him to talk about this part of the war. Probably it was.
“We read that you had to fight the French first,” Julie said.
Reverend Simpson nodded. “That was a terrible surprise, and a big disappointment. Never understood what they were thinking, getting in with the Germans like they did. But thank goodness they came around quick. Wasn’t quick enough for all of our boys. I didn’t see it. We were back on board the transport ships when they sent in the battleships to the harbors, and the landing boats to the beaches. By the time they set us truck drivers down on shore — I was in Algeria, but there were others back in Morocco — the French had already turned around and joined our side, the Allies.”
“The Germans and the Italians were the Axis, right?” Greg asked.
“Them plus the Japanese,” Reverend Simpson said. “Not that the Japanese were in North Africa, of course, although they did invade China. And we were going after them all over the Pacific.”
“We studied a lot about that,” Greg said. “The war in the Pacific. Especially the Battle of Midway.”
“That was the big one,” Reverend Simpson said. He paused for a moment and took a few breaths before continuing. “Ours was big, too — all of the Tunisian campaign. Wasn’t just one battle. Seemed like it was a bunch of different battles going on just about all the time once we got there and the fighting started. We had to cross Algeria, and many had to travel even farther, all the way from Morocco on the Atlantic Coast, and get all our men and supplies and trucks and tanks and artillery landed and hauled a thousand miles before we saw the first German panzer tank. They knew we were coming, all right. And they had their reinforcements and they were all dug in by the time we made it to Tunisia.”
AWOL in North Africa Page 7