Sons and Soldiers

by Bruce Henderson

  Driving on Place de la République, Victor had a sudden vision of Dany Wolf, her dancing eyes, full lips, and brushed-back brown curls. This was her neighborhood. Although he had never visited her here, he still remembered the address to which he had written her so many letters from Deauville following the summer of their love. Pulling over abruptly, he asked his team member to wait in the jeep.

  Victor knew that Dany and her parents had moved from Paris, as had his own family, to the relative safety of the unoccupied zone. After his family had relocated to Nice for a year, he had learned from a mutual acquaintance that the Wolf family was in Lyon, and that Dany was married and had a child, news that was not shocking but was still bittersweet. That was the last he had heard. He knew that Lyon, the scene of mass arrests even before the Germans occupied all of France in late 1942, had become a dangerous place for Jews.

  He walked the short distance to her address on boulevard Voltaire and rushed up the stairs to her family’s old apartment. He rang the bell and a gray-haired woman opened the door. Behind her, an even older woman wrapped in a black shawl looked up from an armchair. She looked like a familiar member of Dany’s family from the summer in Normandy: a more shriveled-up version of Dany’s grandmother.

  He told the grand-mère his name, then asked, “Où est Dany?”

  “Déportée,” said the old lady in a hollow voice. Dany had been taken away to a camp with her child, the grandmother added, in words that lacked emotion, as if it had all been wrung out.

  Victor knew what that meant. He had long understood what the white-gloved ladies of the Republican women’s club in Harrisburg did not want to acknowledge when he told them of the roundups and deportations of Jews, and of Nazi concentration camps. But hearing about Dany was not something he could accept or fully take in—especially not today, with the liberation of their city finally at hand after years of occupation.

  Left numb and speechless, he turned from Dany’s grandmother without another word and fled from the building.

  Back behind the wheel of the jeep, he drove frantically to the center of Paris, desperate to lose himself in the celebrations of the youthful quarter. He went down the boulevard Saint-Michel and stopped at the Jardin du Luxembourg, which he knew was a favorite meeting place for students of all ages. He knew this because he had once been one of them. When he arrived, a large crowd had already gathered, and to the joyous cries of Vive la France! Vive de Gaulle! Vive les Américans! Vive la victorie!, Victor was handed an opened bottle of wine and received many kisses.

  He was told that the exiled leader of the Free French, Charles de Gaulle, had entered Paris the day before and led a triumphant parade down the Champs-Élysées all the way to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame even as some Nazi holdouts scattered sniper fire on them from the rooftops.

  Soon, Victor, drunk on wine and the joys of liberation, was standing on the hood of the jeep, holding forth with a speech, the theme of which he would never recall. Some in the crowd were confused. Is he French? Or American? He wears an American uniform but speaks as a Frenchman. He stopped long enough only to take another swig of wine.

  The next thing he remembered was lying on a leather bench in a café with his head in the lap of a woman stroking his hair. Even before he opened his eyes, he had smelled the strong scent of her perfume.

  Hours later, Victor and his buddy left Paris nursing the start of sizable hangovers. When they reached the division’s bivouac, it was empty, with only a few soldiers still packing up. They said the 2nd Armored had hurriedly crossed the Seine in pursuit of Germans.

  Victor and his buddy looked at each other, and without saying a word understood their dire situation. Although interrogation teams operated on their own, their situation was highly irregular in that not even the officer in charge of their team knew their whereabouts. As they had no authorization to be gone and had been given explicit orders to stay out of Paris, they were technically AWOL. Now that the division was back on the move, that could mean serious trouble if they were reported as missing.

  Victor gunned the jeep down the bumpy road after Patton’s hard-charging Hell on Wheels to catch up with a war that had left him behind.

  8

  HOLLAND

  Manny Steinfeld, the serious-minded boy from the hamlet of Josbach, Germany, was listening to a Chicago Bears game on the radio as he did his homework one Sunday when the broadcast was interrupted with news that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

  When Germany declared war on America a few days later, Manny’s first thought was of his mother, Paula, and his sister, Irma, who was now eighteen. How would they get out of Nazi-occupied Europe? He had heard nothing from them in the months since his mother’s letter that said they might be deported to the Lodz ghetto, and the lack of further news made him fear the worst. He was sure the best chance to save them was defeating Hitler and the Nazis. The more Manny thought about it, the more he realized the best thing he could do for them now was to join the U.S. Army as soon as possible and help his adopted country defeat his homeland.

  Manny had been living with his aunt and uncle in Chicago for a little more than three years. He had excelled in school, more because of a photographic memory and an ability to speed-read than any great study habits. When he graduated from Hyde Park High School in June 1942 and discovered that as an “enemy alien” he would have to wait to be drafted rather than enlisting, he thought that going to college was the next logical choice. He enrolled that fall at the University of Illinois, intending to remain in school until his draft number came up. He moved out of his aunt and uncle’s crowded apartment, where he still slept on the couch, and found a room near the school and a roommate, another student, to split the fourteen-dollar-a-month rent with him. Manny held down two part-time jobs to support himself; he worked behind the counter at a drugstore during the week, and on weekends, he was a busboy at a Greek restaurant where he earned thirty-five cents an hour and all he could eat. In spite of his newfound independence, the nineteen-year-old was not contented; every day he thought about being in uniform and doing his part in the war in Europe. Finally, in early 1943, he got his wish when he was drafted into the U.S. Army.

  His basic training was at Camp Roberts in California, and he did well enough on the intelligence and aptitude tests to be selected for the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), which was offered at hundreds of universities around the country and provided training in fields such as engineering, foreign languages, and medicine to meet the wartime mandate for officers and soldiers with technical skills. Considered more demanding than West Point or the Naval Academy, these programs expected students to complete a four-year degree program in eighteen months. In July 1943, Manny was sent to the City College of New York, where his courses included a new language for him, Russian. While he was there, he became what he already was at heart: an American. On November 15, 1943, he was sworn in as a U.S. citizen, something he had coveted since he first sailed past the Statue of Liberty as an immigrant boy of fourteen.

  At its peak in December 1943, ASTP had 150,000 soldiers enrolled in school. But criticism mounted that the program was keeping too many young men with leadership potential in school and out of combat. As Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair put it, “With 300,000 men short [in combat units], we are sending men to college?” So ASTP began to trim enrollment. In February 1944, more than one hundred thousand student-soldiers were notified that they would be transferred to regular units. Manny was one of them.

  While most of these men were sent to join conventional fighting forces, Manny’s fluency in German triggered a different set of orders. From the campus he went directly to Camp Ritchie, where in April 1944 he graduated in the Seventeenth Class with 150 other German-language interrogators. Receiving his highest grade in Enemy Armies and laudable evaluations from his instructors, he was selected to join thirty other students for a special four-week, post-graduate Order of Battle course that covered the organization of the German army and its war strategy. Once again,
his retentive memory served him well. Upon his second Camp Ritchie graduation, he was promoted to staff sergeant, and was soon aboard a troopship crossing the Atlantic on D-Day.

  In London, he was assigned as an OB specialist to the headquarters of Allied Intelligence, located at 40 Hyde Park Gate, where he collated and analyzed intelligence gathered by the French Resistance on the movements of German troops in occupied France. His job was to identify every German unit fighting in western France: its structure, commanders, armament, equipment, and fighting capability.

  One month after D-Day, Allied Intelligence issued an urgent call for German-speaking GIs with any specialized knowledge of the German army to volunteer for the airborne divisions. Although these were skills that Manny possessed, he had never even been in an airplane, and he couldn’t imagine jumping out of one in flight. Yet, believing he should go wherever he was most needed, he answered the call. On his first practice parachute jump over rural England, he was at the front of the line and boarded the plane first, which meant he would jump last. They took off, and Manny was plenty nervous already when the jumpmaster, who would remain on the plane after the trainees jumped, came down the line and stopped in front of him.

  “Steinfeld, give me your watch.”

  Manny took off his watch and handed it over.

  “Give me your wallet.”

  Manny gave him his wallet, too, then asked why.

  “There’s a chance your parachute won’t open,” said the jump-master. “One in every hundred thousand chutes has a malfunction. If that happens to you, I want to have your watch and your wallet.”

  Manny was trembling too much at that moment to bother asking the jumpmaster if he planned to keep them for himself. By the time the jumpmaster gave him a strong shove out the exit door, he was shaking with fright. He was unable to breathe until he felt the reassuring jerk of the harness and saw the canopy open safely above him. He got terrible skin burns from the tight harness straps but was so relieved to be alive, he didn’t complain. There were four more practice jumps to come. Manny was just as scared for each one and struggled to control his anxiety. Stepping out of a plane in midair never became routine for him. Somehow, it seemed even worse to Manny than the prospect of being shot at by Germans. He wondered if the other jumpers were as frightened. He knew when he gave up his cushy job at headquarters he had gone against the popular refrain throughout the ranks: Never volunteer for anything. But he had not joined the U.S. Army to sit out the war behind a desk.

  He made all his required practice jumps, got his wallet and watch back, and received his Parachutist Badge, commonly known as Jump Wings. Now a fully qualified paratrooper, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne, which he was told would soon be returning to England from Normandy. When it did, rumors swirled that the all-American division—so called because its predecessor in World War I, the 82nd Infantry Division, comprised soldiers from every state in the union—would take part in other airborne operations over Nazi-occupied Europe.

  Unlike other Ritchie Boys he knew, Manny had not changed his name when he became a U.S. citizen, and he hadn’t requested new dog tags before going overseas. “H” for Hebrew was stamped on the metal ID tags attached to a long chain around his neck.

  Ich bin ein deutscher Jude.

  Manfred Steinfeld would live or die in this war as a German Jew.

  Werner Angress shipped back across the Channel from France to England with the 82nd Airborne in mid-July. In its thirty-three days of combat since D-Day and without relief or replacements, the 82nd had engaged five German infantry divisions and was credited with destroying two of them as fighting forces. But these victories had come at a terrible cost. By parachute, glider, and landing craft, 11,770 men of the 82nd had gone to Normandy. Fewer than six thousand were on the return trip to England.*

  After surviving combat, his capture, and his time as a POW, Werner was thankful to be among those returning. Soon after arriving at the division’s encampment in Nottingham, he was awarded the Purple Heart, for the leg wound he received in action, and a Bronze Star. The latter citation read (in part):

  For meritorious service from 6 June to 12 July 1944, in NORMANDY, FRANCE. At all times, Sergeant ANGRESS carried out his work in a superior manner and was highly aggressive, showing a high degree of initiative in gaining information from prisoners of war that proved to be valuable to tactical operations. Many times, Sergeant ANGRESS went forward into the front lines to secure prisoners to expedite the receipt of valuable information. On one occasion, when a prisoner surrendered and told Sergeant ANGRESS that others were waiting to surrender near our front lines, but were afraid of being shot by our men, Sergeant ANGRESS took four men to the designated spot without regard to his own personal safety and caused 24 men of the enemy to surrender.

  After Normandy, England felt like a glorious homecoming, and the men of the 82nd enjoyed the break. Half the division was given five days’ leave right away, and when they returned, the other half took off.

  On his first day of leave, Werner took a train to Broadway in the Cotswolds, where more newly arriving Military Intelligence teams were gathering before receiving their unit assignments. He was greeted with a hero’s welcome, as the first interrogator and first paratrooper who had returned from Normandy, and also the first to come back after being taken prisoner by the Germans. This gave Werner a measure of authority and notoriety. He was asked to give a lecture to the newcomers from the States about D-Day, the fighting in France, his experiences as a POW, and his own work as an interrogator, which he did to a rapt audience, many of them recent Camp Ritchie graduates.

  When his leave ended, Werner was sent on his next assignment: a week at a POW camp in northern England to gather information from captured Germans about the Normandy campaign that might be useful in planning future operations. As soon as he announced himself at the gate, the MPs shot him suspicious looks because of his accent. Next, just inside the camp, he ran into the German corporal who had surrendered his men to Werner in Normandy and then saw them nearly shot by the U.S. lieutenant until Werner intervened. Werner and the prisoner shook hands like old friends and chatted in German, resulting in more dirty looks from the MPs.

  Werner Angress, paratrooper. (Family photograph)

  Werner told the corporal he was there to speak to the prisoners about their experiences in Normandy, and the corporal offered to round up volunteers. Soon, it seemed every German soldier in the camp wanted to be interviewed, and the long line of prisoners willing to talk kept Werner busy for the entire week.

  One German paratrooper, after describing a new antitank weapon first used in Normandy, told Werner that when the war was over, he thought that “paratroopers on both sides should pressure the International Olympic Committee to include parachute jumping in the next Olympic Games.”

  By the time Werner returned to Nottingham, the 82nd Airborne had received some new equipment and replacement troops to fill their depleted ranks. This mandated more training, and to his extreme frustration, Werner found himself participating in maneuvers dressed in a German army uniform. The IPW teams took turns portraying the good guys and the bad guys in war games. Those in Wehrmacht uniforms were instructed to speak German exclusively after they were “captured” by their American comrades. The Ritchie Boys all hated masquerading around the countryside dressed as Third Reich soldiers. They thought it was particularly appalling that they, as Jews, were made to wear the swastika-adorned uniforms of Hitler’s legions for any reason, and it was a dangerous act as well. The omnipresent British Home Guard was more determined than ever to keep the hated Krauts from setting foot on their home island or die trying, which made the dangers of being outfitted like the enemy quite real.

  On a hot and humid day in August, Werner took part in a parade to honor General Eisenhower at a military airfield thirty miles away in Leicester. In his speech, Ike thanked the assembled troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborne for what they had accomplished in Normandy, and he said that very soon they would
be needed for further airborne missions in Europe.

  “Like you,” Ike told the troops, “I’d rather be home going fishing. One of these days when we have beaten the Nazis, that’s what we can do. But in the meantime, I will have more work for you. And it won’t be long.”

  Werner’s excitement at the promise for new action was heightened later that month when the 82nd got a new commander, James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, the same general (and former assistant division commander) who had given Werner permission to jump on D-Day even though he wasn’t a qualified parachutist. Werner’s respect for Gavin had only grown since then. Unlike many generals, he treated his subordinates well, doubtless a result of having been a seventeen-year-old army private before attending West Point, from which he graduated in 1929. Any man who dealt with Jim Gavin could be sure of receiving his full consideration. As a result, he was very popular with the troops. At thirty-six, after being a general officer for less than a year, he became the youngest U.S. two-star general to command a division since the Civil War.

  As the paratroopers nervously awaited their next call to arms, Werner used the short lull to type an overdue letter to his longtime mentor, Curt Bondy, in Virginia. He knew that Bondy had been told when Werner was missing in action at Normandy and that he hadn’t heard until weeks later that he was alive.