I explained as quickly as I could about who Reverend Simpson was, and about him being in North Africa, too, and about the African American soldiers and the Double V Campaign. Then I racked my brain to remember the names of all the battles in Tunisia that Reverend Simpson had told us about.
John kept nodding. “Those do sound familiar,” he said when I finished, meaning the names of the battles. “And the African American soldiers — is that what you called them? — that’s the same as the Negro troops, I’m guessing. That’s the word they used back then, though some used worse terms, unfortunately.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We use different terms now for a lot of things.”
“We had a standing order about who we were supposed to treat,” John said. “I do remember that. If it was a choice between a wounded German or a wounded American or Brit, we treated the American or the Brit first. And our commanding officer also told us medics that if it was a choice between treating a white soldier or a Negro, we were supposed to treat the white soldier. They said it was because white soldiers on our side were the ones in combat and we needed them the most But if it was a German or Italian, then we could treat the Negro soldier first.”
“So what did you do?” I asked. “Do you remember?”
“I guess I just went on ahead and treated everybody I could,” John said. “They were all God’s children. At least that’s what they taught us at the Friends meetings my whole life growing up.”
“Were there very many?” I asked.
“Very many who?” John responded. “White soldiers, German soldiers, Negro soldiers?”
“I guess all of them.”
John studied his hands as if he might start counting on his fingers. “I can’t really say. Every day just seemed like more and more and more of the same. You mentioned those places: Tebourba and Longstop Hill. I kind of remember those, like I said, but what I can picture is the bodies. Some of them still alive. A lot already gone. I remember running from one to another, and another after that. Trying to stop their bleeding. Carrying them off the battlefield when we could — which wasn’t all the time, because plenty of times the Germans had us medics pinned down, too. Or those German Stukas attacking from the air and we were hugging the ground like everybody else, praying we wouldn’t get hit. And I remember any time we saw those big tanks of theirs coming at us, everybody wanted to turn and run. Those were the Tigers, the new ones that the Germans started sending into the field. Shells from our little Sherman tanks couldn’t penetrate their front armor from point-blank range, but they could knock out one of ours from a mile away.”
He paused and shook his head, remembering. “I guess a lot of it’s coming back to me after all, but it’s like those newsreels we used to see at the movie theaters back home, before I went to the war. Lots of bombs and explosions and shooting and men running around and torn up flags still waving, but you couldn’t tell what exactly was going on if it wasn’t for the announcer telling you. And when you’re in the real war, in the real battles in those places you said in Tunisia, there’s no announcer except your officers yelling at you all the time.” He paused again. “And those poor soldiers yelling, too, only not giving you orders, just yelling, and screaming, and begging for help. The only worse sound than that was when they went quiet. Then you knew they were beyond any help you could ever give.”
I hated how quickly my conversations with John turned so dark like this, and I had to think he hated it, too. Not talking to me about stuff. He seemed to like that. But the way we always ended up talking about all the casualties, which made sense, of course, since John had been a medic and it was his job to try to save them. Plus, I knew we had to keep exploring that stuff, and everything else we could, until we discovered what happened to him in the war, and how he ended up AWOL, and how he died.
I decided we should take a break from talking about all that, though, and told John about my plan with Greg to do music downtown and make a bunch of money.
He laughed, though not as hard as Mom and Dad, and not in quite the same way. “I’d love to see something like that,” he said, not seeming to mind me changing the subject at all. “They used to have a lot of that sort of thing when I was a boy. I remember me and my brother, we had jobs running to the Italian Market over on Ninth Street for people in our building where we lived in Philadelphia. Older folks, women with too many little kids, anybody too busy. We got to keep whatever change there was, usually. But we always gave some to guys playing accordion with their dancing monkey, or jugglers juggling fruit — especially if they dropped a melon and it split open on the ground. Then we got free eats.”
John talked about growing up in Philadelphia for a little while, mostly about his younger brother, Aaron. Aaron had polio when he was little, and one leg was shorter than the other as a result, which was another reason John thought he probably wasn’t ever drafted into the army. “He had to stay home and take care of Mother, too,” John added. “We’d already lost Father by that time, and Mother never really got over it. So somebody had to be there with her.”
“He must have really loved you,” I said. “To name his own son John Wollman Jr.”
“Yeah,” John said. “He did love me, and I loved him. He even said it to me sometimes — that he loved me. Not something a lot of guys in our old neighborhood would be caught dead saying to their brother or their friend or anybody. He was always so close to Mother. It’s a blessing that he actually met somebody and married her and had a family of his own. I was glad to learn about that. And that he had a boy of his own, too.”
“Hopefully we’ll get your old letters home from the war tomorrow, or sometime this week,” I said. “Then we’ll get to learn more about you, too.”
I went to the library the next day at school during study hall to read more about the war in North Africa and the Tunisian campaign. We’d already learned a lot, but it still felt disjointed — bits and pieces of a war, like John said.
What I read helped pull those pieces together a little better. There was the invasion, of course — an armada of our ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Norfolk, Virginia, which was just a few hours from Fredericksburg. And they did it in secret, which was a pretty amazing thing. The Germans were busy fighting the Soviet Union by that time, since they had already dominated the rest of Europe (except for England, of course). They were supposed to have what they called a nonaggression pact with Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, so neither would attack the other, and so the Soviet Union wouldn’t take the side of the Allies. No big surprise, though, that Hitler broke the pact and decided to try to take over the Soviet Union. But it ended badly for Hitler and Germany, because they had to send so many troops and weapons and equipment and supplies and planes there — and they still couldn’t defeat the Soviet Union. On top of that, they ended up with millions killed in the fighting on what they called the Eastern Front.
But even with the Germans bogged down fighting the Soviets, the Americans and British got bogged down fighting the Germans in North Africa. So what was supposed to just take a month turned into a whole long frozen winter of waiting to attack them again in Tunisia. That was where Reverend Simpson had left off telling us his story.
It wasn’t until February 1943, three months after the U.S. landed in North Africa, that the Allies launched another offensive, but instead of us sweeping the Germans and Italians out of Tunisia, things got even worse for us. At first it looked like the surprise attack might finally mean some movement deeper into Tunisia, but then it turned into a major counterattack with the Germans chasing us almost all the way back into Algeria at a place called the Kasserine Pass. That was the place where the Americans and British and French forces had to retreat into the mountains as the Germans — with their better tanks and better-trained army and better tactics and better just about everything — threatened to end the invasion altogether, and destroy our airfields and supply dumps, and force us all the way back, maybe even to Morocco.
I got really depressed reading about all of
this — and reading again and again about how unprepared we were for war with the Germans, who’d been fighting all over Europe for three or four years by then, with nobody able to stop them, except the British, sort of.
And every time I read about another battle, and more of our soldiers getting wounded or dying, I thought about John Wollman with his medic’s kit, running from one man to the next, tying tourniquets, pouring sulfa powder over wounds, pressing on gauze, giving morphine injections, yelling for litter bearers to carry another casualty — another American, another Brit, another Frenchman — to ambulances sometimes hidden far from the fighting, and surgeons’ tents even farther in the rear. Too far for many of the casualties.
And John and the other medics were doing this with bullets and bombs going off all around them, and with German Stukas shooting from above while the German tanks rolled across the battlefield.
The Kasserine Pass. That name got stuck in my head and for the rest of the day it stayed there, like a song you can’t stop from playing over and over in your mind, even if you don’t particularly like it. It was the biggest battle in the whole war in North Africa, and it was where we got our butts kicked the worst and ended up running from the enemy in a full-on retreat.
But right after the Kasserine Pass disaster in February 1943, they brought in General Patton to lead our army and somehow or another everything turned around and we actually started winning. One thing I read said that the Germans had made a huge mistake fighting the Soviets and us at the same time. They didn’t have enough troops to defeat both enemies. Plus, they were horribly unprepared for the bitter cold Soviet winter. Which meant that in North Africa, after the Kasserine Pass, the Germans couldn’t hold the Allies off. The Allies were finally able to defeat the Germans and Italians and force them to retreat back into Tunisia.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it, though. There were more battles through March and April 1943 — a lot more battles, at places whose names I had never heard of and could barely pronounce, like Mareth, and El Guettar, and Maknassy Pass, and Fondouk Pass. But finally, in May that year, we won, forcing the Germans and Italians all the way back to the two major port cities of Bizerte and Tunis. We bombed Bizerte so bad that there was literally nobody left alive there, and not a single building left standing. I was glad we beat the bad guys, but I still felt kind of awful when I read that.
Since we now controlled those two cities, our planes were able to bomb any ship trying to cross the Mediterranean to bring fresh troops or weapons or supplies over from Italy, or to ferry Germans or Italians trying to escape from Tunisia. And that was the end of the war in North Africa, except for the problem of what to do with three hundred thousand German and Italian prisoners of war.
There were seventy thousand Allied casualties — nearly twenty thousand of them Americans — but that chapter of World War II was finally over.
Only we still didn’t know what happened to John Wollman.
We got our answer — part of it, at least — that afternoon when Julie burst into our practice room at the Kitchen Sink, waving a large envelope.
“I got them!” she exclaimed. “Finally!”
“The letters?” Greg asked, as if it wasn’t totally obvious.
Julie opened the envelope to show us, jumping up and down with excitement.
I was disappointed, though, because all she pulled out were a few pieces of really old paper so thin they could have passed for tissues.
“Uh, how many are there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, now looking a little disappointed herself. “Just a few.” She counted them and then revised her figure. “Six. But some of whatever was written has been blacked out.”
She held one of the letters up to the light, then shook her head. “Still can’t see what’s blacked out.”
“Well, let’s just read them,” Greg suggested. “There might be something important.”
Julie looked around the room. “John’s not here?”
“Haven’t seen him,” Greg said. “Anderson talked to him last night. He said he remembered some of those battles that Reverend Simpson told us about, but he said mostly it was all this giant blur of running from one soldier to the next, trying to save them.”
“He still couldn’t say what happened to him,” I added. “We talked some about him growing up in Philadelphia, though. He remembered some stuff about that. He remembered his brother and where he lived and his parents and everything.”
Julie laid the envelope down on her keyboard and selected one of the letters. “This one is the first he wrote,” she said. Then she started reading.
“Dear Mother and Aaron, Thank you for your letters. All the guys here read their letters to one another because we all miss home and it’s nice to hear about home, even if it’s not your home. I can’t tell you where I am right now and even if I did the censors would black out what I wrote, plus I would lose mail privileges and I don’t want that to happen. But we’re on the move and up to something big, although they haven’t told us what yet. At least with something to speculate about nobody’s been giving me a hard time about being a conscientious objector, so that’s one thing for me to be grateful for. The food is terrible as usual. It’s hard to keep anything down, though, so I guess it doesn’t matter. I hope you are both keeping warm and staying well and in God’s embrace. All my love, John.”
We were all so intent on listening to her read that we didn’t even notice that John had joined us until she finished.
He spoke first. “I wrote that on the troop ship, crossing the Atlantic,” he said. “I remember. By the time they received the letter, we had already crossed, and the invasion had started, and we were deep into it in Tunisia. It was the dead of winter and I was treating a lot of frostbite.”
“Should I read another one?” Julie asked. “Or do you want to read them yourself first?”
She offered the letters to John. He started to reach for them, but then stopped.
“No,” he said. “You go ahead. Please.”
So Julie read the second letter, or tried to.
“Dear Aaron, Once again I can’t tell you where I am except that it’s in North Africa but besides that I’m not allowed to say anything except …”
She looked up at John. “The censors blacked out the next couple of lines, so I guess you weren’t allowed to say that, either, whatever it was.”
He smiled. “Who knows? Anything we said that made any reference to geography they told us they were going to delete. Anything about our positions or plans or casualty figures or the enemy’s movements or tactics. Well, you get the picture.”
Julie nodded, then turned her attention back to the letter.
“One thing I can tell you about is the French had some of the Algerians fighting with them, wild-looking fellows on horseback, all decked out with swords and rifles and bright costumes and feathers and such. A company of them rode down into a valley to attack German tanks, thinking they could outmaneuver anything armored. Only a squad of Stukas swooped in with their machine guns blazing. The poor Algerians didn’t have a chance. By the time we got to them not a man or horse was left alive. We had to leave them there on the field. No way to get near enough to get the men. No way to do anything for the poor horses. But enough about the war. I don’t know why I even wrote about that incident. There have been so many. I should write instead about the beautiful sunsets here, especially in the desert. And about the kindness of men. Some of our medics, they’ve been donating pint after pint of their own blood for transfusions to soldiers who need it, even though it leaves them weak and exhausted, and even though they can’t stop to rest, because if they did it might mean one more life lost on the battlefield that could have been saved.”
I watched John’s face as Julie read the letters and wondered if he was one of the medics who donated blood. I bet he was, though I could tell he was the kind of guy who wouldn’t just come out and tell us. He was too humble for that.
He nodded t
houghtfully the whole time but didn’t say anything. Julie paused when she finished the second letter and we all waited to see if it would spark any memories, or anything John wanted to share with us, anyway. But he stayed quiet, so Julie picked up another and we crowded around this time, reading silently to ourselves.
Dear Aaron,
Sorry I haven’t written in a while. We have a new commander, Colonel , and he doesn’t seem to like me very much. The good news is he doesn’t seem to like anybody very much. The bad news is he doesn’t like me even more than he doesn’t like anybody else, which is really saying a lot. Once he found out I was 1-A-O, he decided I needed to be on the worst details, so now I’m the body parts guy, which is about as terrible as it sounds — finding what’s left of some of the casualties and putting them in body bags. Actually, it’s a lot worse than it sounds. Please don’t tell Mother about any of this as I know it will upset her. I’ll write her a separate letter that won’t mention anything about what I’m doing. Colonel also sends me out into the worst fighting. Once to help some of our guys who were pinned down so badly that three other medics were already casualties trying to get to them. I got some shrapnel in my leg, but it was shallow and I was able to dig it out okay. Colonel calls me Corporal Chicken , which would bother me more except it’s not very original. I must have been called that a thousand times when I was in training. The only thing Colonel hates worse than me — and I guess the Germans and Italians — is the Negro troops on our side. I don’t understand it, but it’s how a lot of guys feel, unfortunately, and they say things I won’t repeat in this letter or in any letter.
“Wow,” Julie said, interrupting the silence.
“All pretty terrible,” John acknowledged.
“What is a 1-A-O?” Greg asked.
“Sort of like a conscientious objector,” John said. “It means that my religion prevented me from fighting, but I was still willing to serve in the army, just not in a combat role. So I didn’t have to learn how to fire a weapon. Instead I agreed to serve in the medical corps.”
AWOL in North Africa Page 9