by Tom Blair
Billings kept talking. Told us that the engineers would be the first to wade in to blow up all the obstacles. Stone-statue-still we sat. He didn’t stop talking. Told us that after blowing up all the beach defenses, us engineers would be fighting next to the infantry, laying bridges and repairing roads and train tracks to keep the army moving. Finished off by saying that if we weren’t scared now, we should be. The price of my movie ticket went up.
Soon we was into training full steam. First month we had a lot of physical training, we had gotten lazy on the boat ride over. The guy in the bunk next to me in Ashchurch became a friend. A good friend. Tom Lane was from Pennsylvania, and he was like most everybody else I met in the army and pretty much like everyone during the Depression. Tom grew up in a family without much money, had tough times. Now he was just trying to figure out how not to mess up and hoping he wouldn’t get killed.
It’s funny, when people tell you the most about themselves. It’s not when you’re sitting across the table, looking them in the eye and talking. Mostly it’s when you’re both doing some job and not thinking so much about what you’re saying. Tom and I would be peeling potatoes or standing guard, all the time shooting the breeze. Real quick I figured out that Tom was an honest, up-straight guy. He always did a little more than his fair share of the work. Sorta like how I thought I was.
When things were going right with the army, and the captain, lieutenant, and sergeants weren’t having a hissy fit about something, we’d get a leave pretty much every Sunday. A few miles from Ashchurch was Tewkesbury Abbey. This is like the biggest church y’all ever saw. ’Course, they took a few hundred years to build it, so it shoulda been big. If I remember right, parts of it were started before Columbus bumped into America with his boat. Anyway, on a Sunday we’d walk over to the town of Tewkesbury, a real small town, but not Renfroe small. If the weather was nice, Tom and I would borrow or rent a rowboat and drift down the Severn River to Apperley, or row up the Avon River to Twyning Green, both with pubs serving warm ale and strange food. Strange to us, that is. I didn’t eat a lot of egg and eel sandwiches in Alabama. But the Brits probably didn’t eat all that much squirrel.
I need to tell y’all about pubs. They’re sort of like a diner and bar stuck real tight together. Musta been built by guys who were four feet tall. Ceilings of these pubs touched your hair, and a lot of ’em were really old. Back in Alabama if something was old it was like fifty years old. Tom and I gulped ale at a few pubs that were over two hundred years old. Walls leaned one way or the other, like they was standing at ease after centuries at attention. Wires and pipes ran pretty much all around. Guess they didn’t have pipes and wires when they built the places.
You and your buddies would go into one of these pubs and it was most always right happy. People were always laughing and the ale was flowing. And while there were a few Brits that you bumped into who didn’t like Yanks, just about everybody was real nice. Guess they forgot about 1776. Tom and I had to learn real fast how to speak English in a pub. The Brits used some of our words to mean different things, and they had some words I never heard of in Alabama or Virginia or New York or wherever. One night I’m standing next to this cute British girl in a pub and she was talking friendly with me. Real happy, she tells me she got knocked up the week before. Just about swallowed my teeth. Later I found out that knocked up meant a Brit had had too much to drink.
Another time Tom and I tried to order an egg and sausage sandwich and were told we’d have to queue up. I thought maybe Tom and I would have to hold hands or something. Felt okay once I figured out that for a Brit, queuing up meant lining up.
By the summer of ’43 training was getting pretty tough. Me, Tom, and the other engineers spent most of our time blowing things up. The army had bangalores. Think of a bunch of pipe sections. You’re laying down on the ground and on one end of a piece of pipe you have this explosive. Push the pipe forward till you reach the end of it, and then you take another section of pipe and insert it into the end of the piece you just pushed forward. Then you push that section forward. You keep doing this till the explosive is pushed out fifty to a hundred feet. Detonate the charge, blowing up a barbed wire obstacle or some Kraut land mines. We got real good at it. Problem was, we got real good at it on ground that wasn’t littered with dead bodies and the pipes weren’t slipping in our hands from some GI’s just-blown-out innards.
About five miles from Ashchurch was Cheltenham, a pretty big town about the size of Alexandria. Smack-dab in the middle was a town square with flower gardens all around. At one end of the square was the Queen’s Hotel. It wasn’t as big as the hotels in Washington, but just as fancy. Off the lobby there was a bar to the right and a dining room to the left. It was the Queen’s Hotel where Tom met Hazel, a waitress in their dining room. Hazel was seventeen then, with black hair, a pretty face, a nice shape, and long legs. She was always smiling, always had something nice to say. She’d just say it in that funny English way.
On one weekend pass Tom and I figured we’d explore London. After a good two hours on the jammed-tight train we pulled into Paddington Station. It was pretty much like the station back in Washington, really big with a booming, echoing voice announcing train arrivals and departures. Out we went. First thing we did was come real close to getting killed. Started across the street looking the wrong way and a lorry almost smashed us. London sidewalks were crowded with people, all walking fast. More people were wearing uniforms than in New York.
Tom found a USO, and we plopped ourselves down and made friends with some warm beers. Asked around and decided that we should see Big Ben. Off we went, a three-block walk and we were standing in a big square with a statue that looked like George Washington way up on top of a marble post as tall as three or four telephone poles sitting on top of each other. Wondered why the Brits would have George Washington way up there. Hundreds of people milling around the square, thousands of pigeons flying around. Half a mile walk down from the square we came to this really big old church on the right that made me think of Tewkesbury Abbey. Later I found out it was Westminster Abbey.
Right past the church was Big Ben with a clock face that must have been fifty feet across. I wouldn’t have wanted to arm-wrestle the fellow who had to wind it each morning. So we were standing there gawking, probably looking real dumb with our mouths open, and this Brit came up. An old guy. ’Course, Tom and I were just twenty then, so old may not have been that old. Anyway, he asked if we’d like him to give us a first-class tour of London for a pound, plus he’d throw in a free ale. A pound being worth maybe five dollars. Tom and I figured that worst case we’d be paying a pound for a couple of ales, so we said yes. I was real glad we did.
Following our guide—Cecil was his name—we trudged back up to the statue on top of the pole. Stopped and gaped up at this fella covered in pigeon shit. Cecil told us he was a most special hero. Told us about Nelson and a big boat battle with the French. But Cecil didn’t call them French, he called them frogs. Never did ask why he called the French frogs. Then Cecil marched us down Piccadilly, and pointed out the Ritz Hotel. Said it was so posh that guys like us couldn’t get past the doorman. Couple blocks past the Ritz we turned left, marched to Buckingham Palace. Maybe ten or twenty times bigger than the White House, home to the king, queen, and their two daughters.
Bad luck, we just missed the changing of the guard. Hiked down to the Thames River and turned upstream past Parliament and Big Ben. We kept going for more than a mile to the Tower of London. Here Cecil told us all about this King James guy and a bunch of queens, and dungeons. Too much to remember. But I do remember he said that prisoners brought to the Tower for execution would be given free mugs of ale as they passed by the pubs. Before we left, Cecil showed us where one wall of the Tower had crumbled after hundreds of years—thanks to a Nazi bomb.
Then back to Paddington Station and we found ourselves a pub. True to his word, Cecil bought Tom and me an ale. Best part of the tour. We talked and drank, and after an hour o
r so he got us some fish ’n’ chips. Fried fish and fried potatoes served on a page of old newspaper. The ink stained the potatoes, potatoes that weren’t long like french fries, but shaped like real small bricks. I’m not sure why, but we dipped them in vinegar. So after a couple of ales I asked Cecil, why Limey? Is it an insult to your average Brit if a Yank calls them a Limey? He thinks for a spell, then says no and yes. Turns out the name came from British sailors eating a slice of lime a day so’s they wouldn’t get scurvy. Now it meant a not-so-smart bloke.
I liked the British. For the most part they were real nice to us Yanks, always saying “Good day” and smiling, always polite, ’cepting some of the Tommies, Tommies being the name of their soldiers. I never had one be mean to me, but they sorta had a look, like they’d be happy to punch me in the face. Can’t say I blamed them. Us GIs made more money than an average Tommie, plus we were buying their women drinks at the pub. They never had a shot at our gals.
By the fall of ’43 I’m thinking our brigade’s looking pretty good—like we know what we’re doing. We got ourselves some confidence. And with confidence we were just getting better. Everybody was standing taller. Then one day we had our first exercise with the navy guys. We actually went to sea, did an about-face, and charged the beaches. ’Course the navy brought the boats.
I gotta tell y’all about these navy boats. They were called “Higgins boats,” built especially for putting GIs on the beaches. These Higgins boats had flat sides, a flat bow, and a flat aft. Think of a big bathtub, maybe thirty feet long and ten feet wide. A navy guy, the coxswain, would stand in the back with a big wheel and steer. Us GIs would be hunkered down in the bathtub with our equipment, the boat gave us our own little floating bunker. The Higgins would go right up onto the beach. When you pulled a big lever, the front of the boat would drop down to make a ramp. A GI could drive right off with his equipment, like a jeep pulling a howitzer.
Some army equipment got big-eyed attention—made me feel that maybe I could pay for the movie ticket. The army took these Sherman tanks and put this big rolling-pin thing out in front of it. This steel cylinder hung maybe eight feet off the ground, ten feet or so in front of the tank. On this big metal rolling pin were maybe twenty or thirty big hunks of chain, ten or so feet long. As the tank moved forward it would spin the rolling pin and whip the chains out, slapping the ground in front of the tank. When they hit the ground the chains would set off Kraut land mines. Because it was only the chains setting off the charges, the tank wasn’t damaged. A few of these tanks could clear the way for an entire battalion.
The other thing was—and you’re not going to believe this—they made the Sherman tanks swim. A Sherman tank weighs like 50,000 pounds. It’s got armor plating four inches thick. I gotta give it to the guy who came up with how to make it float. They put a canvas skirt around the tank that went upward, not downward, so you had a Sherman tank that was the bottom of a canvas boat. The tank’s engine pulled in the air from a stovepipe-looking thing that went maybe two or three feet above the tank. You had to see this to believe it.
Sometimes when you have a tough decision to make, you let something else that has nothing to do with it make the decision for you. Sorta like saying I’ll have eggs for breakfast if it’s not raining in the morning. The good Lord makes the decision whether or not you have eggs. This is how Tom decided whether he should marry Hazel.
Army chaplains warned us that British girls just wanted to marry GIs so they could get to America. I knew Hazel, and I didn’t think she would be that way. She was just like the rest of us. She came from a poor family, but they all worked real hard. Tom liked the idea of having a wife close by who loved him, somebody special who would be worrying about him when he was in combat. Tom figured if he bought the farm, it would be in the next couple of years. Hazel would still be young, and all the Tommies would be coming back from overseas looking for a date, so she would be okay. Plus, the army gave us a $10,000 insurance policy. He thought that if he left half to his ma and half to Hazel, they’d both be all right.
I put Pa’s name down for my insurance. Smiled when I imagined Pa fainting dead away if some army guy showed up holding $10,000. ’Course, I’d be in the ground dead.
But let me get back to telling you about Tom and Hazel. Tom and I were both pretty broke ’cause we were both sending money home each month. Tom was helping take care of his ma and younger sisters. I was sending Pa money orders by Western Union since he didn’t have Billy or me helping in the fields. Neither one of us had a lot of walking-around-Saturday-spending money. And, no GI was going to lend another GI money. Not when the fella that owed you money might not be breathing much longer.
Tom had an older sister in the United States, Dorothy was her name. I met her a couple of years later. She was married to a guy with a real good office job in the Midwest somewhere. Tom wrote his sis and told her that even though he knew all the reasons it was crazy to get married, he really loved Hazel, and could he borrow $100 from her for a wedding. Sure enough, a month later $100 showed up at Western Union. His sister sending $100 made up Tom’s mind to ask Hazel.
The wedding was in October at All Saints Church in Cheltenham. Tom asked me to be his best man. I said yes, but I didn’t know what a best man did. Never heard of a best man. Hazel’s mother, father, a grandmother, two sisters, and a brother were all there, dressed nice. In the States when someone is poor, most times their clothes are tattered and dirty. In England even the poorest folks seemed to dress okay. Clothes might be threadbare, but they were clean and pressed.
Other than Tom and me, there weren’t any other Yanks. Hazel’s aunt brought a bottle of sweet wine that we shared at the Council housing after the ceremony. When I’d woken up that day, I thought Tom was making a mistake. By lights out that night, I figured he had done the right thing.
And Tom wasn’t the only one getting married. I got a letter from Billy. But first I need to tell y’all about the letters we got during the war. They weren’t like regular paper letters, they called ’em V-mail. What the government did was take pictures of everybody’s letters. So if Billy wrote me a letter with the right army address, somebody in the army opened it up and took a picture of it, then tossed the letter. Now they got this roll of film with maybe a thousand letters on it. They ship a bunch of this film to England, and some private prints each letter as a picture, but big enough so’s you could read it. Same with our letters going back to America. For sure a lot of work, but film took less space than paper on the transport ships.
Let me tell y’all something else. The army was always thinking some corn-mash-brained GI would put something secret in a letter home. ’Course, nobody would tell us any real secrets, but some officers got to read everybody’s letters to make sure we weren’t telling nothing we shouldn’t. Bet you these officers got some laughs.
So I get this letter from Billy saying that he’d married some gal. Could have knocked me over with an acorn. Could you believe? He’d met her in San Francisco, got to spend three days with her before he shipped out of Oakland, heading west. Heading toward the Japs. I can’t remember her name. You’ll know why later.
I told you I didn’t know just how poor we were. We were just like everybody else in Renfroe. Even at Fort Benning I was pretty much like everybody else. But up at Fort Belvoir I started to think I really wasn’t like everybody else. Most of the GIs had pictures of their families and would show them around to the other guys. But my family, we never had any photographs. We never had a camera, didn’t even know anyone with money enough for a camera. When most guys in the barracks talked about their tough life back home, it sounded real good to me.
Same with Tom. I told you he came from a poor family. I knew he musta been poor ’cause he and his ma and sisters got thrown out of their apartment when they couldn’t make rent. Tom’s family had to walk down the street dragging almost everything they had and ended up living at an aunt’s house till all the kids were grown. But other things made me think he lived in a
real different place than Renfroe. Tom told me that he played on his high school basketball team. We didn’t play basketball. Never even touched a basketball. Never touched a football. We didn’t play anything. We worked, did some schooling, worked, slept, worked, and worked some more. In Renfroe we was for sure bad poor, not good poor.
In ’44 training got sledgehammer hard. Sunday leaves became half-day leaves every other Sunday. Five-mile marches with packs went to ten miles, then fifteen. Even a few killer twenty milers. More and more training. I probably lit off a thousand pounds of explosives, and this was using ten-pound charges. Show me something, I’d blow it up. ’Course, as engineers, we weren’t just blowing things up. We were also going to construct supply dumps, plus keep any supply lines open by building bridges and repairing roads. If we all got mowed down on the beach we wouldn’t need to worry about the other stuff. So we trained mostly to blow up beach obstacles and get our asses off the beach.
There was one thing they tried to teach us that we just couldn’t get right. Some Air Corps staff sergeant briefed us on aircraft recognition. He had black profiles of all the U.S. and German aircraft on flash cards, probably twenty or more. He wanted us to be able to recognize each type, so’s we wouldn’t be shooting down the guys on our side, only Krauts. Problem was, the planes all looked much the same to us foot soldiers. Most every plane had a Hershey bar–shaped wing and a propeller in the front. I could only recognize one, a P-47. It had curved wings.
One morning our sergeant told us that Lieutenant Clyde was gone. We didn’t miss him. Then Lieutenant Johnson showed up. He’d been in Italy with Patton’s guys. Had a scar that was red and ugly, all the way across his forehead and down to an ear. We figured he didn’t get it milking cows or playing checkers. Johnson was tough, real hard. Every cross-country trek we made, he made. One day some guy was sorta cheating on push-ups during calisthenics, the lieutenant went over and kicked him so hard that this sorry-assed GI walked bent over for a day or so. After he kicked this fellow, Johnson went down and did five one-armed push-ups, got up, and walked away.