I tried to stem the flood of grief with glowing descriptions of the bomb-proof shelters that honeycomb Berlin, and with stout conviction I protested that “of course the kids are okay ... why, sure they are ... Gosh!” What else could I say! But it’s an uncomfortable house, and I’m oppressed by the tear-stained faces that turn to me a dozen times a day for reassurances I cannot give.
April 13, a Friday.
Black Friday the thirteenth.
Someone shook me awake a little before dawn and told me the news—the President died last night. We cannot believe it ... we cannot. At once everything is changed. The high spirits of yesterday are gone and the taste of victory has turned foul upon our tongues. The town looks the same—there are the same American faces and American uniforms, the same vigorous litter of GI equipment on the streets, but now it’s a dead town. It belongs to the civilians today. No, we cannot believe it. It’s a loss with such staggering implications that even the ancient superstitions common to the day become suddenly real, hold a threat of real menace. Now we’re a little afraid of what else the day will visit upon us if we’re required to go out on a mission.
We sat soberly at breakfast talking in low voices... bitter, discouraged voices. We were convinced that one of the immediate effects of the President’s death would be a redoubled resistance by the Germans, a last effort to win a negotiated peace while a grief-stricken America wrestled with confusion and disorganization. As for the peace table—a peace table with an empty chair to mark the place of the one man who could command any situation, resolve any disagreement—we could not bear to think of it.
This is Black Friday for the world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Where the hell are the canaries?”
April 14.
I write this in a ditch near burning St. Andreasberg. It’s nearly midnight, but towers of flame from the burning town have turned night to high noon. The man next to me in the ditch is reading Stars and Stripes.
My fears of yesterday were realized—maybe not because Roosevelt had just died, and possibly witches’ curses and moldy superstition had nothing to do with it either, but it was that sort of a day. Such a day that when night came, the night of Friday, April 13, I could not sleep. The conditions were right for sleep: I was tired, I had a comfortable bed in a warm room, and I was curled up in my blankets and ready for sleep well before midnight. But I could not sleep. I lay tense and shaking, so precariously balanced on the thin edge of hysteria that the ticking of the kitchen clock was an added and intolerable torment, and I got up and fumbled through the dark room to stop the pendulum with my hands.
First platoon lost seven men on Friday the thirteenth, three killed and four seriously wounded. Geisbach had been worse and more men had died there, but none with such unwarned suddenness.
Yesterday after lunch the captain summoned me to his C.P. We sat at the big table in the dining room and he gave me a map and told me what we had to do. E Company, attempting to take the town of Lohnau, which was three or four miles away, had encountered stiff resistance in the mountains and halted short of the objective. It now fell upon us to go out and take Lohnau, after which we would return to Herzberg.
We started off, the first platoon leading, one squad spearheading the platoon and the remaining two squads deployed on either side of the road. Tanks followed us, and behind them trudged the rest of the company.
A digression now, while I talk of charms and amulets and chewing gum. Men in combat acquire curious superstitions, even those who pride themselves on their incredulity. I was a little ashamed of my own pet charm, but it was no longer private and secret. From a platoon joke it had become a company gag, and whenever we moved out on a push, I’d be sure to hear someone yell, “Hey, Gantter! Got your battle gum?”
I don’t know exactly when it started. I wish I could make this account as felicitous as fiction and say it began the first time I saw action, but it didn’t. At any rate, early in my combat experience I learned the value of gum. When there was no food, or when there was food but no time to eat it, gum helped to dull the edge of hunger. And of thirst, too: combat was thirsty work, and you always ran out of water at a time when it was impossible to refill your canteen. Not a gum chewer in civilian life, I soon learned to provide myself with a cud every time we moved out.
As time went on, the habit took on a new significance. Probably it started only as a subconscious anxiety to protect myself against possible hunger and thirst but as the months rolled by and I passed undamaged through scrape after scrape and saw my friends knocked off or wounded, my “battle gum” began to spell S-A-F-E-T-Y. I did not put my reluctant half belief to the test; I was never willing to go into an engagement without the gum to prove my intellectual scorn of superstition. I didn’t have nerve enough to take that chance. Murmuring my special private prayer and tucking the gum solidly in the pouch of my cheek, I felt well-guarded and safe, armored against mischief. If I exhausted my own supply of gum, I borrowed, begged, or chiseled from anyone who could supply me. That’s how my secret became common property: in a burst of gratitude I once confessed my private shame to the man who had just answered my cry for gum. And so it got around: “Hey, Gantter! Got your battle gum?”
As we left Herzberg I automatically explored my pockets, and then remembered that I had exhausted my gum supply two days ago. I asked Joe if he had any gum. “Nope.” I asked Evans. “Nope.” I asked Dettman. “Nope.” Feeling the first shiver of panic, I asked everyone near me. “No gum!” was the answer. I told the man behind me to pass the word back, inquiring if anyone had any gum. The word went back ... back ... back ... through the platoon and to the platoons following. Glancing anxiously over my shoulder from time to time, at last I saw a small something being passed up the line from hand to hand, and each man grinned and murmured a few words as he leaned toward the man ahead. When the gum reached the man behind me, he handed it to me with a mock courtly bow, saying, “Sergeant Gantter’s battle gum ... with the compliments of the third platoon!” I felt a little foolish, but I felt good, too. I had the gum and I was ready for the valley ahead. Spearmint never tasted so good. But I think my near miss on the battle gum was a bad omen for the day—it encouraged Loki and the evil gods to try new devices against us.
Herzberg was hardly a thousand yards behind us when we walked into an ambush. It was a little bitch of a spot in which to be caught: we were in a defile and the Germans were well- concealed on the hills around us. The next half hour was pretty bad. The Jerries had opened up as the platoon emerged from a little grove, and the men out in front were pinned down, unable to move forward and unable to crawl back to the shelter of the trees. Three hundred yards away, three hundred yards of open ground, was a thickly wooded hill. It was well-sprinkled with Germans, but we had no choice: we had to move forward, had to keep going.
Once again our tanks failed us. They hung back, made suddenly timid by the lone German bazooka shell that landed fifty feet from the lead tank. After some urging, however, the tanks were persuaded to come close enough to spray the hills with machine-gun bullets. Under cover of that fire, a blessed umbrella, we crawled forward until we crouched on the very fringe of the grove—that is, all except those who lay in the clearing ahead, their motionless bodies pressed flat against the ground. But the tanks would not keep pace with us. I’d order them up, and they’d move a grudging fifteen feet and stop.
I was scared. I knew we had to move out; the entire company was stalled behind us and Lohnau still lay ahead. As lead platoon, we had to get the hell out of there and in a forward direction.
On the left of the road was a shallow ditch, a fold in the ground that reached nearly to the foot of the hill ahead. Maybe that would do it... maybe. So we set out, crawling on our bellies in the shallow ditch and knowing that the Germans could see us, that portions of our anatomy were exposed. The top of my helmet protruded, and I knew it, and my tail was a quivering target, and I knew that, but I couldn’t get either of them an inch lower and s
till be able to move at all. I saw other men get hit, saw them wince and stop moving ... the wounded calling to me, calling for the medic... Charist, my first squad- leader, shuddering as the bullet struck him and I had to crawl past, rubbing against his body, and I gripped his shoulder as I went by and tried to tell him that the medics would be there soon, and he looked at me with wide, blank eyes, the sweat already standing in huge drops on his white face.
Huddled on the other side of the road was most of the second squad, under the leadership of a man named F. I’d named him squad leader only a few days earlier on the strength of his two and a half years’ service in the Pacific Theater. (The Lohnau business proved that appointment to be a mistake, and I remedied it the next day.) F. and his men were safe from the raking hill fire because the meadow in which they lay was several feet lower than the road bed. From my position I could not see F., but I knew he was there and I called to him to “move ahead, get your men moving up!” His answer was, “I can’t!” No matter how I yelled, that was his only answer. “I can’t” And he didn’t
What was left of the first squad finally reached the shelter of the woods, and we kept going. Some of the Jerries on the hill had been knocked out; the others fled as we advanced. We crossed to the other side of the road after a while and waited for the third squad to catch up with us. The second squad, which was supposed to be out in front of the first and third, meekly brought up the rear.
We kept moving. I expected the tanks and the rest of the company to follow closely, but it was soon apparent we’d moved too fast. We were so far out in front that we’d lost contact with the company. I told the “300” man to contact the captain and inform him we’d lost physical contact with the company but were going to keep moving anyway. (A platoon runner is also the platoon’s radioman, carrying a sort of “walkie-talkie,” a small set we call a “536.” The 536 has a limited range, and we’d long since outstretched the distance it could reach. However, on operations where units might tend to be widely separated, an extra radioman, carrying a larger set, called a “300,” is attached to the forward elements. We had a 300 man from Headquarters Company with us, and when the 536 failed to reach the captain, I turned the job over to the 300.)
We followed the road, wading the icy mountain stream that bent and twisted across our path. Once we passed two dead doggies, lying at the side of the road, and I was struck anew by the ivory pallor of the recent dead. Their presence on this lonely road surprised me because I thought we were the first American troops to enter this sector, but I later learned that they’d been in a jeep that went on reconnaissance the day before and was ambushed. There was no sign of the jeep.
During a cigarette halt by the side of the stream, we spied a German soldier striding jauntily down the road toward us, and we crouched deep in the weeds to wait for him. He was badly shaken when we jumped up, surrounding him, and he babbled freely. He said there were no German soldiers remaining in Lohnau, but he sounded a little glib, a little insistent. He did “protest too much.” I relieved him of a fine pistol and sent him to the rear under guard.
When the first buildings of Lohnau were but 150 yards away, I gave the men last-minute instructions and radioed the captain once more to tell him we were moving in. Then we swept upon the town—not quite a Mongol tide, perhaps, but doing our utmost to persuade the townspeople that we were. A brief skirmish or two, a sizable haul of prisoners, and the town was ours—the first platoon’s town all the way. Lohnau was solidly in our possession before the rest of the company arrived, and we were intolerably vainglorious. I set up a strong defense post at the forward tip of the village and relaxed.
Presently, one of the guards rushed to me in great excitement to report that a car was approaching the village from the direction of the German lines. Hastily, I reinforced our guard positions, and we waited. Soon we heard it—the laborious chugging of a German civilian automobile. In a moment it came into sight—a miniature sedan, larger than an Austin but a helluva lot smaller than a Ford. We could distinguish three figures in it but could not tell whether they were civilians or enemy soldiers. As the little car drew nearer, we recognized the occupants as soldiers and tensed ourselves for the ambush. Waiting until the split second when the car was directly in front of my C.P., we swarmed from our hiding places and surrounded it. It came to a jerky halt and three astonished German faces stared at us, three faces frozen in—well, hell, forgive me, but it really was “stark consternation.” Their surprise was so genuine, we grinned in spite of our best efforts to appear grim and implacable.
Booting them out of the car, we searched them and shooed them down the road toward the company C.P. and the prisoner cage. I climbed happily into the car and drove along behind them, honking the horn loudly and blowing extravagant kisses toward the grinning faces of my friends. I felt hilarious and damned cocky. The officers at the C.P. were adequately impressed by our prizes, but my personal triumph was shortlived—I was refused permission to drive the civilian car back to Herzberg because it was “against army orders.” Later in the day I was to taste the bitterness of seeing one of our officers driving my car—back to Herzberg, naturally!
It was that kind of a day, all day. The battle gum, the ambush, the simpering timidity of our tanks when we needed them. The sourness of my regard for that tank outfit was not sweetened by their behavior after the danger was over. Long after Lohnau had fallen, the tanks rolled in with a roar of triumph, and we watched the tankers tear the town apart in search of loot. To hear their shouts and howls as they raced through the streets, it would seem that this was Rome and they were the Visigoths. They roistered and looted while we stood at dreary guard posts; then, clutching bottles of wine, they climbed into their tanks and returned to Herzberg. Watching the drift of dust that marked their passage, we bitterly concluded that they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—fight their way out of a paper bag, but they sure as hell were acting a tough war.
Late in the afternoon, E Company arrived to take over Lohnau, and we returned to Herzberg. And that night I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t unreel the piano-string tension of muscle and nerve, couldn’t forget the seven men who had fallen that afternoon.
A footnote on the Lohnau casualties: one of them was a man named Allen. Not Leo Allen, the man from Watertown, New York—Leo was not a runner attached to company headquarters. This Allen was from North Carolina, a snuff-chewing southerner. North Carolina Allen was missing when we reached Lohnau and someone told me he’d been killed. Several weeks later Watertown Allen told me that he had been reported missing in action, and his wife so notified by the War Department. Fortunately for her peace of mind, on the day the official notice reached her, she also received a letter from Leo, a letter written on a date later than the one mentioned in the War Department telegram. The hope that there had been an official mistake sustained her through some very trying hours, and presently the War Department notified her that through a regrettable error it seemed that her husband was not dead after all.
But the real denouement to this story didn’t come until nearly a month later, some hundreds of miles from Lohnau. We were in a mountain town where I had acquired a pleasant little house for my C.P. Planning on a bath, I dragged an ancient copper bathtub from the cellar, filled it with pails of warm water heated on the stove, and popped myself in. As I soaped myself in a luxury of comfort there was a knock on the door and I yelled, “Come in!”
The door swung silently open to reveal a specter, the sight of which turned my steaming bath to a glacial pool. The grinning face at the threshold belonged to a man who was supposed to be dead and buried and food for German worms. Without further greeting he plunged at once into the matter that seemed most urgent to him: “What squad am I in, sir? Where do I report?” It was North Carolina Allen, and the flesh on his bones looked healthy.
Through suddenly nervous teeth I quavered, “How come? Why aren’t you dead?”
His story added the last ironic twist to the tangled tale of the two Allens. North Caroli
na Allen had been wounded in the valley of Lohnau, a head wound that looked nasty but wasn’t. When Watertown Allen was discovered alive and unhurt after having been reported missing in action, it was decided that by hell someone named Allen was missing or dead and no one knew the whereabouts of North Carolina Allen so it must be he. North Carolina regained consciousness in a rear area hospital and learned that he’d looked so dead on the field that he was now officially listed as KIA; killed in action. It had taken him nearly a month to convince assorted clerks and brass hats that the paper reports were wrong and the flesh was right, and when could he go back to his outfit?
Every day, Captain Wirt reveals another facet of his character that enlarges my respect for him. The Richard Rodgers song “Blue Moon” is his favorite tune, a choice that I, perforce, salute.
The first platoon of G Company has acquired a reputation. (Since this is a highly personal document, vanity has a rightful place in it.) We have so frequently spearheaded hazardous operations that when we do not lead off, there’s a ribald comment from the rest of the company: “Whaddya doin’ back here? The war over?... Must be nothin’ but a coupla dead cows in front of us today. Hey, get out in front! Ya layin’ down on us?... Whatsa matter, ya nervous in the service? Crackin’ up from shackin’ up?”
We puff ourselves on this rough tribute, and maybe our stride gets a little too cocky, but it’s a good thing to look at the men of the first platoon and see the confidence on their faces, the unhurried, easy sureness of their movements. It’s a good thing to see.
Another and less comfortable reflection: the civilians inform us that the 1st Division is called the “American SS.” They say it’s because we are like the true SS—the same savagery in combat, the same rapacity in looting!
Roll Me Over Page 35