“I want the goddamn river up! Close or open the goddamn locks, but I want the goddamn river up three feet by four o’clock!” So went the imperial command, and angels trembled, second lieutenants wept tears of impotent anger, and two German civilians who worked in the kitchen went into the bathroom and tried to cut their wrists with the top of an old C-ration can.
The wheels of German progress moved slower that day, and German civilians balefully regarded their dim and flickering lights and wondered if the verdammt Amerikanische would ever get the electricity properly repaired. But the swimming was fine that day, the colonel smiled, and the party went down in history.
The following week the enlisted men were graciously permitted the freedom of the pool to have a party for their girls. But somehow the swimming didn’t seem very good, and many a platoon sergeant wondered why his lieutenant had called it “the best place in Bamberg for a swim.”
A few random notes:
Any officer, lowly company grade or exalted field grade, could buy drinks at the regimental club. But the Coca-Cola, cases of it, was reserved for the superior palates of “field grade officers only.” Ho hum...
A certain colonel had the unpleasant drunken habit of buttonholing lesser officers and questioning them fiercely: “You think I’m a sonofabitch, don’ ya? Don’ ya? Yalways think I’m a sonofabitch, don’ ya?” (He was, of course, in many ways.) If the unfortunate buttonholee was also drunk and thus tempted to the admission, “You betcha... sir! Tha’s jus’ what you are—a sonofabitch!” his head rolled in the gutter on the morrow. Drunk or sober, the colonel remembered. And if the miserable victim squirmed and evaded and uttered feeble negative bleats, he was met with the fierce rejoinder, “Yer a liar! I say, yer a goddamn liar! ’Cause ya do think I’m a sonofabitch, don’ ya?”
The code name for our battalion being “Dagwood White,” our battalion C.P. was called “White C.P.” In Bamberg there was a building known familiarly but quietly—it was supposed to be secret!—as the “Black C.P.” In it lived the mistresses of certain officers who liked their sex life on a somewhat permanent basis. It was a kind of apartment house love nest for officers and their frauleins. Everyone in the battalion knew about it, of course, but I never heard an enlisted man criticize the situation or speak of it bitterly. After all, every enlisted man who so desired had a fraulein of his own. (Sex, at least, was not reserved “For Officers Only.”) Maybe the enlisted man’s girlfriend was not installed in a private apartment, but he didn’t bitch or gripe because his officers enjoyed their sin a little more luxuriously. It was accepted, that’s all, and I imply censure in no direction.
The point is, the Black C.P. was put on the list as a regular guard post! Enlisted men were required to perform their prescribed military duties as guards around a building containing nothing more valuable than the German mistresses of their commanding officers. And that created bitterness, hate, and distrust.
But the ultimate humiliation, the crowning contradiction in this bitter farce, was offered by a certain officer who, his German mistress smiling arrogantly at his side, gave orders to the guards that they were to “regard an order from her as coming from me!” And American men who a few months before had been conquering this country with blood and steel were now required to take orders from the enemy, to be at the beck and call of women who found the soft life of whoring to American appetites more agreeable than the stern barrenness of German hunger.
MEN AND MONEY
I have already written of looting during combat. And I said that officers as well as men were guilty—guilty of a greed that rivaled the Nazi rape of Poland, Greece, France. Here are a few more stories on looting, money hunger, corruption. Most of these accounts concern officers, but that’s not to imply that enlisted men were less guilty. The opportunities merely varied in scope.
Shortly after our arrival in Bamberg, we were issued a weekly ration of cognac that was divided among the various officers’ clubs, the NCO clubs, and the enlisted men. It wasn’t always good cognac, but it was something to drink and it was cheap. Since the army controlled its manufacture—that is, we administered the German firms that made it, and even supplied them with the necessary sugar—and also handled its distribution (all of it went to the army: there was no cognac allotment for civilian use), it was, in theory, a nonprofit operation, and the liquor was supposed to be purchased at cost and sold at cost (In our own officers’ club we made a small profit over the bar because that helped defray other club expenses, but the warehouses and distilleries were supposed to supply our cognac at cost.)
As PX and liquor officer for the battalion, I drove to the warehouse for our allotments every week and unhesitatingly paid the sum demanded by the issuing officer. However, I began to wonder about the rising cost of living when the price inched upward each week, from an original five marks per bottle (a mark was worth ten cents) to eighteen marks a bottle. Quite by accident one day I learned the answer: the legitimate price was still five marks per bottle, and the other thirteen marks was being split three ways and disappearing into the capacious pockets of three high-ranking and well-known officers. This little graft lasted well over six months, and since my battalion—with a weekly allotment of 150 bottles—was only one of more than fifty units drawing their cognac ration from the same warehouse, you can get some idea of how much money was involved.
Officers lucky enough to be assigned to the right jobs made fabulous fortunes through dealings with goods-hungry civilians. The black market in gas, for one, made many officers and enlisted men rich. There was one of our officers who went home on leave, for instance, his duties during his absence assigned to other officers. His successor as steward of our quarters made an inspection tour of the building to discover the scope of his new duties. A locked room in the cellar aroused his curiosity, and when the door was broken open— the key had been unaccountably missing—an outrushing wave of gasoline fumes nearly knocked him out. Eighty-two five-gallon cans of gas were stored there, in an almost airtight room directly under our living quarters. Enough gas to blow us all sky-high. No one could account for the presence of the gasoline, but we began to remember the many after-dark excursions our former steward had taken in his jeep, and the many cans of gas he carried at all times “for emergency.”
Officers in charge of civilian housing could also do well financially, and some of them did. Officers in charge of construction, or in charge of razing damaged buildings, could do very well indeed. And did. Many a civilian who needed bricks, tin roofing, gutter pipe, lumber, lead, roof tiles, or steel beams could get what he wanted if he had the proper wherewithal to offer in trade.
The dirtiest racket of them all, however, was run by American officers who victimized not the civilians but their own men, fellow soldiers, fellow Americans. A cute little scheme, it worked like this:
During combat, many enlisted men had acquired German cameras, which was permissible loot during the war. Some of those cameras were Leicas or of comparable quality, and good cameras fetched fabulous prices in certain markets—Paris, London, the Riviera. Three officers of noble rank and ignoble spirit confiscated fine cameras from enlisted men on the street, using the pretext of an official order “from headquarters” (which headquarters was left somewhat vague). The cameras were to be “examined and licensed” and then returned to the enlisted men who were the owners. But once he’d submitted his camera for “examination and licensing,” it was the rare enlisted man who ever saw his possession again. It traveled southward the following week in a jeep or a trailer, along with other salable items destined for the Riviera trade.
Not all of the money was made by officers. I knew an enlisted man who averaged four hundred dollars a week for several months during the war. A fluent linguist, he served as the official interpreter in his outfit. With the agreeable connivance of two attendant guards, prisoners and civilians brought in for questioning were thoroughly searched and their money taken from them. Then, as soon as his outfit arrived in a town large en
ough to have a local bank, he would question the civilians until he discovered the hiding place of one of the bank executives. A private deal followed, and by threats, force, or merely the glibness of his tongue, he would arrange for the exchange of his stacks of marks for the English, French, or American bank notes that all banks had in their vault, or hidden away in some secret cache.
There was a constant traffic in army equipment, army supplies, army rations. Most officers wearily closed their eyes to the cigarette bartering, but the racket of stealing and selling GI blankets, to mention one item, reached staggering proportions and required stern official action to check it.
Across the road from our quarters in Bamberg was a vast rabbit warren of buildings, formerly a German barracks but now serving as an American “repple depple.” An endless stream of men flowed through it, many of them in the process of being routed home on furlough, rotation, or to permanent civilian life. Occasionally a former 1st Division man came through. One day, an unfamiliar buck sergeant drifted into my office in the battalion C.P., identified himself as a former 16th Infantry man who had been wounded, hospitalized in England for several months, and finally reassigned to an outfit stationed in Berlin. He inquired about some of the old officers, and I directed him to their quarters. Several days later one of those officers told me that the sergeant had called on him and made a strange request: he offered to pay one hundred dollars for every additional hundred the officer would mail to the States for him! He had made a small fortune in Berlin, the man said, but now, because of the declaration of finances the army had recently required of every man in the European Theater, he was stuck with it, unable to mail home the thousands of dollars in American bills that he carried on his person, and unable to obtain money orders because he couldn’t explain to a finance officer the source of so much money. A poker game or a crap game could always be blamed for a wad of several hundred dollars, but damn few poker games or crap games were of a scale that would enable a man to simper that he “won it” when the “it” happened to be twelve thousand dollars!
On the voyage home I heard about the enlisted man on board who had approached the officer in charge of his group and offered him a thousand dollars if the officer would appoint two men to act as his bodyguards during the voyage home. And he offered to pay each of the guards a hundred dollars a day. When the officer sardonically inquired what the hell he had that was so precious that it required the protection of guards, the man patted the swollen musette bag hanging at his side and said grimly, “The thirty thousand bucks I’ve got in here, sir.” And he did!
Fantastic? Improbable? I don’t know... ask anyone who was there, and he’ll tell you similar stories that he claims are true. And they are not beyond the realm of credulity if you can comprehend, even for a startled moment, the confusion that hung like shreds of storm cloud over Europe (and especially over Germany) in the last days of the war and the days immediately following, a confusion so great that the individual actions of individual men were obscured and lost in the frenzied teeming of millions. Europe was a fat corpse, white and naked and newly dead, and the ant hordes had found it. For the opportunist who was in the right place at the right time, for the ruthless—no matter where he might be—for the shrewdly dishonest who made opportunity where none existed, there were juicy pickings. And the marrow was so rich, the sprawled bones so heavy with fat, that the wonder is not that so many men were dishonest, but that so many men were not.
MEN AND WOMEN
Most men in the European Theater of Operations had one or more sexual adventures overseas. Some of these “adventures” were right and honest—right no matter how genuine the man’s love for his wife at home, no matter how happy his normal civilian life. I’ve already written of this—of the deep need of flesh for flesh in the dark moments, the yearning and voiceless cry of the male for the promise of life implicit in the embracing of a woman, the solace of consummation and the restless godhead quiescent. There’s no need to write further of this, nor of the days after the war when the longing for home was like a sickness in the bones, a malaise so desperate that for many men the long night hours were beyond endurance and the only opiates were liquor or women.
For many men, longing only for the familiar embrace of their wives, the choice was not easy. Hunger that made each day a fresh torment, or the agony of remorse? And there were so many opportunities, the girls were so available, the urging of the starved body so relentless... (“Ah, she wouldn’t blame me... she’d understand... I’ve got to get some sleep tonight... she’d forgive me, she’d understand…”)
It was during the dreary months of occupation that many men, chaste till then, finally succumbed. One of them, a man who was young and vigorous, deeply in love with his wife, had been overseas for three years. Throughout all that time he’d been chaste, but the end of the war came and the long months of waiting followed, and there wasn’t enough to do in the day-long, night-long hours. He began to drink, and one night he went home with a girl. It was one night only and never again, but he hated his body for its treachery.
Several days after his fall from grace he reported on sick call and asked the medic to check him for syphilis. The examination revealed no taint and he was sent back to his outfit. He reported on sick call again the following week and said, “Doc, I’m pretty sure I got syph. Will ya check me again?”
Another examination. Another report. “You’re okay, soldier. Clean as a whistle!”
A few days passed and then one morning he was there again. Patiently the medic made another Wassermann, and patiently he talked to the soldier, attempting to persuade him from this incipient neurosis. The Wassermann proved negative, the effect of the talk was dubious, and the man returned to his outfit.
A week went by before he reappeared, his tormented face revealing the flame consuming him. He had a theory, a pathetic and desperate “out” for his agony: “But, Doc, this is a different kind of syph ... kind of a ‘galloping syphilis’! It shows up every now and then, but after a while it goes away, and that’s why you can’t find it when I’m here!”
The amused but patient medic tried to explain the impossibility of this theory, tried to assure the man that he revealed no trace of any sex disease, but it was no go.
Then the whole story spilled out: the man had cheated on his wife, just once, and now he had enough points to go home and the captain said he’d probably be in the next shipment for the States, and supposing he had syphilis and went home and gave it to his wife, and he did have it, he knew he had it, and what in Christ’s name was he going to do?
The medic kept him at the aid station that night and sent him to the regimental hospital in the morning. Calling the hospital, he explained the man’s case history and recommended treatment by a psychiatrist. The soldier was kept at the hospital for a week, and a series of gravely conducted tests and examinations were made to lull his fears. The negative findings were shown to him and patiently explained in simple terms. The psychiatrist talked to him at length, and at the end of a week he was returned to his outfit, pronounced cured and his foolish fears at an end.
They were not ended, however—not until he himself put an end to them. The night he got back he put the muzzle of his M-l in his mouth, pulled the trigger with his toe, and blew the top of his head off. “Better death than dishonor; better the grave than the death of love.”
Sex behavior in Germany ranged from joyful cooperation to rape. The crime of rape seemed doubly bestial at this time and in this place: the frauleins (and fraus) were man-hungry and greedy for luxuries, and with so much easy stuff, so many pushovers, there appeared to be little excuse for unnatural or brutal sex behavior. Of the two most sordid cases I know, one concerned a nine-year-old girl who was raped and subjected to indignities by a soldier while his ever-lovin’ buddy stood guard at the door of the barn to halt intruders. The criminal was caught and sentenced to death—later commuted to life imprisonment—and the man who stood guard was given ten years at hard labor.
The other case concerned a fifty-one-year-old woman who appeared at the local AMG office one morning, pointed to her toothless jaws, and asked a judgment of damages against a certain GI in order to get some new teeth. Assaulted and raped—a thing horrible to envision because, like all peasant women, she appeared even older than her years—she complained little of the act of rape. The loss of honor was small in comparison to the loss of the teeth the soldier had knocked out in his brutal attack. Sex she could take or leave alone, but she had to eat! (She got her new teeth and he got life.)
En route home, I listened to the raw laughter of a group of officers as they reminisced over their sex adventures in Germany. Two stories—two techniques, rather—struck me as a new low in mass male behavior. In the town where most of them had been stationed they devised a cunning scheme to secure a forever fresh supply of female flesh for the satisfaction of their appetites:
When a member of this inner circle noted an appetizing fraulein on the street, he would halt her and demand that she present her civilian papers for his inspection. Examining them, he would declare something out of order and cart her off to jail. That night he would return to the jail and offer to arrange her release if she would “put out.” If she spurned his offer, she stayed in jail. Indefinitely. If she complied, she spent the night in his bed in full expectation of being released the next morning.
But ah, that’s where the really subtle part comes in! The morning after her bedding down, she would be taken back to the jail with the promise that by noon she would receive the proper papers and be freed. All day she would wait and that evening a new officer would come to the jail and regretfully inform her that the other officer had suddenly been transferred and he was now in charge, and what was she in jail for, anyway? Upon the recitation of her tearful story, he would make a proposal with a familiar ring—release on the following morning if she would put out And so on through the ring, available to any officer interested until they wearied of her and of her tears and did release her.
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