by Tom Blair
At Belvoir the barracks talk was mostly about three things, home, women, and war. Y’all probably think we talked about how much we missed home. Well, we didn’t. I don’t mean to tell you we didn’t miss home, we just didn’t like to talk about it. Usually when we talked about home, it was about all the great things we’d done. Some guys, the more they talked, the greater the things they did.
But when women came up we agreed that if you’re gonna get killed, you might as well enjoy life with the time you’ve got. I mean, what are you saving yourself for? Another question was, should you get serious with some girl? Should you start talking about love and marriage and all that stuff, the danger being that they’re just gonna break your heart when you’re thousands of miles away, sleeping in mud while some second lieutenant or 4’Fer with money in his pocket is picking her up for a night on the town. I figured that you probably shouldn’t get serious with a gal. This was real easy for me, ’cause I didn’t know any gals who wanted to get serious. But I did get to know some Victory Girls on sort of a regular basis. This was easier after I made corporal and my pay went up.
There was a lotta talk in the barracks about the war—how we were doing. While I was in Benning, Doolittle bombed the Japs and we all felt pretty good. Then in Midway we sunk three or four of their carriers. Things seemed to be going okay in the Pacific.
Europe was still a smelly barn. The Brits won the Battle of Britain, but the Nazis were kicking the crap out of the Russians. Americans were in Italy, but nothing seemed to be moving real fast, we were bogged down. Word was that the Germans were real good—they had good equipment, and the scary part, they were real tough killers.
’Course, you know that some bigmouthed GIs in our barracks talked hero talk. Reminded me of my first day on the bus heading out of Alabama, when some guys bragged they wanted to go straight away to Berlin and win the war. I thought about it a lot. I was in the army and I needed to do the right thing—whatever the right thing was. When we graduated from Benning the colonel told us that a lot of us would be killed. But if I could do the right thing and live, I figured that was better than doing the right thing and dying. I mean, if you make like a hero and run up a hill and blow up a Nazi machine-gun nest and kill ten of them, and get killed yourself, is that better than sneaking around the hill, shooting some Germans, and living another year while you kill two or three more each month? I didn’t know. Still don’t. But one of the things we told ourselves was that being in the engineers, we probably wouldn’t be the first to get shot at. We would be building things and tearing things down. Told ourselves the infantry guys would be doing the real fighting.
Never been more wrong.
Ten months of training at Belvoir went pretty fast. When we graduated we figured we would be going to Europe. Europe was army and Army Air Corps, the Pacific was navy and marines. A letter from Billy showed up right before I graduated from Belvoir, he joined the navy, said he wanted to see the world. So my kid brother was headed for the Pacific.
In April of ’43 our unit got orders to go to England, leaving out of New York. GIs who had been to New York told a lot of big stories. I’d seen King Kong at the base theater and was itching to go to the top of the Empire State Building. Then we learned the truth of it, our destination was Camp Shanks, thirty miles or so north of New York. Crammed in a train heading north past the city, we all strained our eyeballs looking out to the east for the skyline. Didn’t see nothing.
Pulled into camp around supper time, detrained, and shuffled off, hauling equipment like Alabama mules. By dark we’d pretty much settled into our barracks, the walls were scrawled with a lot of writing from guys who’d been there before us. Guess they wanted to leave their mark in case they got their asses shot off.
Next day we got some good news and some bad news. Good news was that one of the escort ships was running two days late, so the troopships would be delayed in sailing. Because of the delay we would get one-day passes, enough for the thirty-mile dash south to New York. Bad news was the shots. Neither the devil nor Hitler had come up with any sickness they didn’t give us a shot for. Our arms hurt like hell, and just about everybody got real bad headaches.
After a long day of being pricked by pricks, our sergeant dealt out eighteen-hour passes. Said anyone late getting back would be headed straight for the firing squad. Camp buses shuttled between Shanks and New York City pretty regular. I sat with Emory and two other guys in the front of the bus, didn’t want to miss anything. After a half-hour or so we pulled onto the biggest damn bridge I’d ever seen, the George Washington Bridge. We crossed over the Hudson River and into New York City. Maybe for a mile the bus rode south along the river. To the left, buildings seemed to touch the clouds. Then we turned into a dark valley of windowed cliffs. People, people everywhere. Squeezed together, all rushing like a bunch of Alabama fire ants after you stomped their mound. A lot of good-looking broads too.
Our bus pulled right up in front of a USO club, I think it was on Eighth Avenue. The pimple-faced corporal driver tells us that buses leave every two hours back to the camp, and the last one would be at 2300. We all spilled out, with big grins and bigger eyes. Me, Emory, and two buddies went into the USO, bellied up to the bar, and gulped some dime beers. Emory had me drinking by then. Asked around on how to get to the Empire State Building, GIs stared at us like we had corn mash for brains. Back out, we walked a few blocks and saw an old fella, wearing baggy green pants and a strange cap, standing next to a booth selling newspapers and stuff. We bought ourselves a city map from him. It wasn’t all that easy, the baggy pants fella spoke a real strange English. Not sure for certain what he said.
So anyway, Emory took the map and studied it real hard, like it was a chart for buried treasure. He found the Empire State Building marked real clear, figured we had fifteen or so blocks to walk. We were off, with Emory leading. Strange sights, strange smells. More restaurants than I thought were in the whole country, serving foods I’d never heard of. Just walking and talking, not a care, our heads on a swivel. Finally, I asked Emory if he was sure he knew where we were. A real slow and low yes.
“Okay,” I said. “Should we be going north or south?”
Emory pulled out the map and looked at it real careful, then in almost a whisper, “North.” I told him that unless the sun was setting in the east, we had been marching south. I grabbed the map and we marched back over our footsteps, thinking that if the Germans could see us lost in New York, they would be sleeping real easy.
There it was, the tallest building in the world. Up the elevators, switching between floors, and then the observation deck. I’d never been so high, never seen so much. South was the Statue of Liberty, maybe two or three miles away. Big ships were crawling past. We’d be on one soon. To the west was the Hudson River. North up the river was the George Washington Bridge. It didn’t look so big anymore. If you stood close to the railing and leaned just right, you could see all the way down to the street, people like moving dots on the sidewalks. We stood and gawked. The sun was setting past the river in the west. Looking back to the east, toward Europe, it was gray turning to black. I wondered what was waiting for me there … wondered if I’d ever be home again.
Back down on the street, Emory said he wanted to eat supper in a Chinese restaurant. Didn’t know why, I guess he just thought it would be different. One of the corn mash GIs in our little squad got the Japs and Chinese mixed up, said he wouldn’t eat no enemy food. Anyway, we wandered into a back-alley Chinese restaurant with bright-red cloths on the tables, white napkins, each with a red dragon. At a table in the back, two schoolkids were hunched over their homework. A tiny woman, maybe four and a half feet tall, came by with menus. She probably spoke English, but not for us. So we sat there looking real hard at the menus. I saw some words that I knew, like chicken, beef, and egg. But each of these words was leaning against words I’d never heard of. So we were all squinting like our eyes were going to burn a hole in the menu.
The tiny Chinese woman
circled back to us. There we sat, all stupid quiet. Then Emory speaks up, orders egg rolls. I didn’t have a dumbass clue, so I ordered egg rolls. So did everybody else. When she left, I looked at Emory and asked him what the hell an egg roll was. Said he didn’t have any idea. So’s I asked why he’d ordered them. Real easy, he said, they was the cheapest thing on the menu. I knew Emory was no dummy. They were pretty good, kinda like fried chitlins in a greasy crust.
Next morning at Camp Shanks we packed our gear back onto the trucks. After a short jaunt on the trucks, a train to Weehawken, then a ferryboat. Couple of corn-mash-brained GIs thought we were going to sail to England standing on its deck. A half-hour later we were off the ferry, walking a few hundred feet down a dock, past a half-dozen troopships, rusted and looking pretty tired, and then up a steep gangway.
Our ship was the Williams, one of a dozen troopships that were crossing the North Atlantic, with three destroyers as escorts. Back in ’41 and ’42 the U-boats were killing us. More stuff was getting sunk than was getting across. By ’43 things were a lot better, but still “drowning in burning oil” dangerous. More than two thousand of us were packed sardine-tight on a ship that probably held five hundred during peacetime. Most cabins had three sets of three-tier bunks. Some had two sets of three-tier bunks with maybe a half-dozen hammocks strung between. About half of us had our own bunk or hammock. Other guys had to share, in shifts. They called this “warm bunking,” ’cause when you got into your bunk, it was warm from the last guy.
Life was simple on the boat. We only did a few things, ’course most of them took a long time. Had two meals a day, stood in line pretty much for an hour to get food and then you had ten minutes to eat it. First few days the lines were short ’cause of seasickness. Depending on what time of the day it was, you waited in line for an hour to use the head (the navy’s way of saying latrine).
Another hunk of our time was burned up with boat drills and fire drills. Everybody was assigned a lifeboat station in case we got torpedoed. We figured that they gave us a boat number to feel good—there sure couldn’t be enough boats for everybody. Most every day physical training on deck in a cold, damp wind, maybe blowing twenty-five miles an hour or more. Or, as they said in the navy, twenty knots or more, four knots being equal to four and two-thirds miles … learned the conversion at Belvoir. Most free time was spent talking. Same things as always: home, women, and war.
A few days before we reached England we got another army manual. Us GIs got manuals for everything, how to have sex without getting VD, how to blow up a Nazi Tiger tank, or whatever.
Anyway, this manual explained to GIs how they should act in England. Started off by saying that the average Brit had been bombed for the last three years, so we shouldn’t come over and tell them how we’re gonna win the war for them. It said that Brits were gracious, and if some family invited a GI for a meal, we shouldn’t eat everything put on the table, ’cause they might be using a week’s ration of butter and meat for their American cousin. A couple other things caused me to grin. One was that we shouldn’t say bad things about their coffee, because they could always say our tea was worse. The most important advice came last. For certain a big warning that no American should ever, ever say anything mean nasty about their king or queen. I don’t mean this to sound disrespectful, but after a year over there I came to understand that your average Brit didn’t see the king as we saw our president. He was their grandfather, Jesus, and Superman, all rolled together. Piss on their king, you were pissing on their grandfather, Jesus and Superman.
You know who complained about the manual on how to act in England? Emory, saying that any manual on England should tell a GI about pubs, tell a GI the difference between beer and ale, tell him what he should drink and what it should cost.
After a while the Williams began to smell like the inside of somebody’s old boot, so I tried to spend more time above decks. I started to peer east when I was up there, like I was Christopher Columbus looking for land. ’Course, he was looking west. The day before we docked, it was maybe 60 degrees. But it was not the temperature that made the day, it was the wind—I mean the direction of the wind. Usually you had a pretty fair breeze across the deck. The Williams cruised at fifteen knots. This day the wind was coming from aft, at right around fifteen knots. So even though the ship was plowing through Atlantic waters at fifteen knots, the air on deck was about still. I climbed to the top of what they called the forecastle, sat myself down, and leaned back against some kind of radio mast. If I tilted my head back just a little, I’d only see sky and clouds. With the still air and the view, I could’ve been leaning against a tree along Harkins Creek. Thought about Ma, Pa, Billy. Thought about home. Wondered if I’d be back.
It was close to midnight in a heavy rain when we docked at Liverpool. Right away I knew we was in a real different place. When we sailed from New York the skyline was carved against the night sky with millions of lights. England lived in a blackout. Nary a light to be seen from the harbor, even though daylight showed us we were nestled in a good-size city. A few years of night bombings had taught ’em to draw blackout curtains and drive with lights off.
By midday we were offloading. A line of GIs snaked down several decks in the Williams, then onto a steep gangplank to the dock below. Halfway down the gangplank something in the water caught my eye. A dead cat floating in the black oily water. Hello, England. An hour or so to sort things out, then we loaded onto four-by-fours. It was bone cold and damp so the canvas flaps were kept shut as we pulled out of Liverpool. After a few hours we stopped for a latrine break. I looked around. British cars and trucks—later on I learned they don’t have trucks, they have lorries—were for sure smaller than ours. Everything seemed smaller over there. I guess if you’ve got a small country, you need to make things small so’s everything fits.
Anyway, we didn’t talk to any Brits that first day. At dusk we pulled into an army base that was nothing more than a bunch of barracks on a field with a few GIs in a guardhouse. Inside the barracks cots, but no bedding, and a few cases of K rations … our supper. No electricity, no lights. So we built a fire outside of one of the barracks. Stood close around trying to steal some warmth, rocking from foot to foot. I was sorta thinking, I don’t like England.
Next day we were off in the four-by-fours after more K rations for breakfast. Drove the whole morning, then we met our first Brits when we stopped for a latrine break. Them I liked right off. Said hello and told us they were glad to see us. For sure they talked a little different, but not as different as the baggy pants guy who sold us the map of New York City. It was raining like buckets, a real cold rain. The captain spoke with somebody and we went into a big hall where we sat on the floor eating cold K rations, griping that we couldn’t get a hot meal. Didn’t know it then, but the next year I’d be in a foxhole in Belgium with my ass froze to the ground praying for a K ration meal after days of eating nothing but snow.
The rest of the day and into the night we were crunched in the back of the four-by-fours. In the pitch black we pulled into Ashchurch, some old English city where the army had built a base, ’course all English cities are old. The base was called Ashchurch too. By the time we got processed the mess was closed, so we plopped ourselves down in bunks with our stomachs complaining. I didn’t go right to sleep. Thought about a lot of things. In a year and a half I’d gone from walking around in my bare feet pulling out cotton stubs to learning to drive a jeep, touching the Washington Monument, meeting some Victory Girls, going to the top of the Empire State Building, eating egg rolls, drinking beer, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, and sleeping where Robin Hood lived. I figured that if the war ended tomorrow I was really one lucky guy. Problem was, the war wasn’t going to end tomorrow. The last year and a half had been like one big long movie, but I hadn’t paid for the ticket yet. Hoped the ticket wasn’t gonna cost too much.
It took us a spell at Ashchurch to get sorted out. The sergeants and lieutenants had to figure out who would be doing a
ll the stuff that made the army work—peeling potatoes, cleaning latrines, standing guard, leading calisthenics, and hurrying up to wait. After some “what the hell is going on” confusion, we got broken down into groups and reorganized. I got assigned to the 5th Engineer Special Brigade. Emory went to another brigade. There wasn’t one face in the group that I knew from before. Above us was Sergeant Gibbs and Lieutenant Clyde. The sergeant was okay, but not the lieutenant. He was a ninety-day wonder. Being hard up for officers, the army took college guys and within ninety days made them soldiers and officers. Anyway, we didn’t see much of the lieutenant. We figured he was just scared of us, or scared of the job or something. He hid in his office, pushing paper around.
We’d only been at Ashchurch a few days when the whole company was formed up and addressed by Colonel Billings, a big guy with a deep voice. This colonel said that we’d be winning a lot of medals because a lot of us were gonna die. ’Course, he didn’t start off with this, he started off with the good stuff. We were the best-trained and best-equipped troops, and we had God on our side. He told us the Russians were complaining that they were carrying all the water. For two years they had been slugging it out with the Nazis and had already lost over ten million civilians and soldiers. Billings said that the Russians wanted the Americans and Brits to get their asses into Europe so’s the Germans would need to pull troops out of Russia. That wasn’t any big surprise.
But then the colonel got to talking about engineers. Our whole company was engineers, so it was about us. This colonel told us that nobody knew when or exactly where, but it was a dead cinch we’d be landing in Europe, and the Germans were going to try and stop us on the beaches. Then the scary, “You’re going to die” shit. Billings said the Krauts had already built ten thousand beach obstacles, most with Teller mines attached, with some underwater just to make things interesting. Told us they had probably buried half a million land mines, built bunkers with three-foot-thick walls, and scattered maybe a few hundred pillbox emplacements on the bluffs. It got real quiet.