Autumn in Oxford: A Novel

by Alex Rosenberg

  Since everyone knew Negro soldiers would never be allowed into combat, no one worried that this lack of training could harm troops under fire.

  The second OCS class was only about twenty days from completing its training when we were sent to the live-fire obstacle course. The company, about 120 men, arrived in marching order, four abreast, with the first sergeant marching next to the company. When the company halted, the sergeant in charge of the obstacle course approached. “Sergeant, have your first squad man the machine guns. We’ll run the company through the course by platoons.” Then he looked over to the men. “Sorry, Sergeant. Your men are out of uniform for this exercise.”

  “What do you mean?” The company first sergeant followed his look.

  “No helmets, Sarge. All they got is the helmet liners on.” These were the much lighter Bakelite inserts on which the M1 helmets were placed. The M1 helmet was heavy, hot, and uncomfortable.

  “Been on a long march this morning. Didn’t want to carry them. Can’t reschedule. Training’ll fall behind.”

  “OK, Sarge, but tell your men to be extra good at eating dirt.” I heard all this from where I stood at the back of the line with Cullen and Wilson.

  Six machine guns had been set up in front of six twenty-yard-long ditches about two feet deep, across which five or six strings of barbed wire were stretched six inches aboveground. Our company sergeant ordered the first two squads—twelve men—to the Browning water-cooled machine guns, one to serve the ammunition belts and one to pull the trigger. The range sergeant warned them, “Check that the deflecting rings are tight.” Everyone understood that unless the rings were tight, a machine gun bucking in the hands of a soldier could dip and fire too low. “At my command, fire in arcs across the range.”

  Then the company broke into platoons. Two staff sergeants set each platoon into six lines and led them to the long trenches. Once the men of each platoon were ready to crawl down the trenches, the order to commence firing was given, and the men began to work their ways toward the twenty-yard mark, where each lead soldier would find a flag to hold up indicating that firing should cease. This would happen when all six were hoisted.

  Firing now commenced, and the men began to creep forward. It took each man about six minutes of writhing, clawing, elbow-churning, and knee-scraping to move themselves and their M1 rifles from one end of the course to the other. And since there were six squads in the three platoons of the company, the drill would take the better part of an hour.

  By the time the last squad came forward, the Browning machine guns had been firing on and off for about forty-five minutes. Their barrels were too hot to touch. They steamed as water leaked out of breaks in the gaskets between the cooling hoses and the large cylinder surrounding the actual gun barrel. The guns had been vibrating hard while being swiveled back and forth by relatively inexperienced men at the triggers, and served by equally inexperienced loaders feeding belts into their firing chambers.

  The last squad included Cullen, Wilson, me, and three other men. These were the least fit and most myopic, and therefore in the opinion of the company master sergeant, the most educated. We were actually surprised that the colored soldiers were being allowed to participate in this exercise at all. In the heat and the dust, I never noticed which of the officer candidates were at the machine guns. All I recall was that the two Negro soldiers were on the left side, I was in the third ditch, and the other three were to my right. We moved forward at about the same speed, all conscious of the fact that we were not wearing steel helmets as regulation required. But the trench was deep. Except for Wilson and Cullen, we’d all been through this obstacle course at least once before.

  The six of us were halfway through when suddenly I heard a gut-wrenching groan and then a second one next to me. That was the first time I heard a man take a .50 caliber bullet. I couldn’t look up immediately, and by the time I did, my platoon sergeant had moved everyone away from the machine guns and was checking their deflection rings. Later I asked myself if he were not tightening them back up.

  I rose from my trench. No one had moved to Cullen or Wilson. I tried to work my way to the wounded men in the trenches but got hung up in the barbed wire. “Help them!” I demanded. “You’ve shot them. You can’t leave them there.”

  I could see a couple of the men look toward the company first sergeant, who nodded. They ran along the ditches to where Wilson lay, now still, and pulled him out. Cullen was harder to reach because he was lying under two different strands of barbed wire. But it didn’t matter. Both were dead of wounds to the head. Their helmet liners had been splintered back to front by the .50 caliber lead.

  I moved to my right, scrambling through the trenches now vacated by the last three men in my squad, slowly walked up to the platoon sergeant, and said in a voice I didn’t care who heard, “Why didn’t you kill me too?”

  The man looked at me with supreme hatred. Under his breath he spat out the words, “We’ve got other plans for you, nigger lover.”

  There was an inquiry, at which the two sergeants were reprimanded for failure to follow training regulations, the malfunction of the machine guns was attributed to inexperience by officer candidates, and the accident was described as regrettable. No records were kept, but everyone pretty well knew who had been assigned to the machine guns when Wilson and Cullen went into the trench. It was the two men they had fought in the barrack on Pearl Harbor Sunday.

  In early February 1942, I was awarded the rank of second lieutenant with what I can only describe as distaste on the part of the company commander. He joined General McNair’s staff and was killed along with the general in a friendly fire accident in Normandy in 1944.

  I immediately received my orders to join the 609th Quartermaster Service Battalion at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana. It was an all-black unit that would never get closer to combat than the underside of a latrine. So far as the OCS brass were concerned, I was their first colored officer.

  Tom’s cell door clanked open. The warder looked in. “Exercise time, Wrought. Take your jacket. It’s cold in the yard.”

  Tom was glad of the break. He’d been at it, writing for the better part of two days. He replaced the cap on his fountain pen and closed the composition book—now half-full—on the pen to keep his place. An hour later, cold but refreshed, he returned to the cell. Instantly he noticed that the pen was now on top of the copybook.

  An unannounced search? That was hardly shocking.

  But a screw taking an interest in his writing?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tom settled himself again, reread the last paragraph, and began again.

  For many of the soldiers on the bus from the New Orleans train depot to Camp Claiborne, the ride was a passage from the unfamiliar to the completely alien. My summer in the South in ’37 had prepared me for some of it. But this trip back into American history made me despondent.

  Sharecropper shacks, both white and black, leaned askew under corrugated metal roofs. Their broken windows were stuffed with newspaper. Through the screen doors you could see largely empty rooms. Before them were hand pumps over moss-covered troughs that overflowed brown water. No electric power lines ran to the roofs of any of these huts. Some did not seem to be accompanied even by a distant outhouse. For every dusty model T and model A Ford, there were a dozen mules hitched to wagons, buckboards, or just standing at posts swatting a cloud of horseflies. Every man seemed dressed in shirtless coveralls. The women were all in calico, bleached colorless by a generation of lye. There were differences between the races. The Negroes were visibly thinner and more careworn, but even the white women looked as though they’d posed for Dorothea Lange.

  The army bus stopped twice at general stores that were happy to serve up fluted bottles of Coca-Cola, five cents each, out of large red bins on their porches. We soldiers sat sweating in the shade, grateful for the stop. Every toilet, every water cooler, bore the words WHITES ONLY, even though there was not a black face to be seen in any of the hamlets.<
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  In the deeply shaded woods, you could reach out of the bus window and touch the Spanish moss hanging over the road. After a few miles, enjoyment of the exotic lushness gave way to feelings of claustrophobic oppression. By the time we were a hundred miles beyond New Orleans, I was expecting to see a lynched and burned body hanging from a tree by the roadside. I admit it wasn’t reasonable. It was pure emotion, driven by the sheer prejudice of a northerner, the growing anxiety of a city dweller, and a deepening feeling of regret for anyone who had to live here, black or white, but especially black.

  When I got there, in 1942, Camp Claiborne sprawled across a hundred square miles of rural Louisiana. Past the gate and the few permanent buildings, what you saw was a vast sea of thirty-foot by thirty-foot tents in square arrays on wooden platforms. Beyond this was an even larger expanse of flat fields, dotted by an occasional tree. At the gate when I presented my orders, no one seemed to know where my unit—Company Two, 609th Quartermaster Service Battalion—was. No one seemed to have even heard of it.

  I was sweating and my duffel was beginning to force my shoulder into a permanent list when I spotted a Negro soldier. He wore what looked like a prison uniform, blue denim with a sort of a pork-pie denim cap, and he was hauling a large metal trash barrel. I approached, dropped my duffel, and spoke to him. “Soldier.” He stopped, but neither came to attention nor saluted. I was indifferent to military courtesies myself, and so I said nothing. I just asked for my unit. The man pointed to the end of the line of large platform tents. Without a word he went back to his work.

  For another ten minutes, I walked down duckboard between the large taut lodgepole tents squared off with military precision. The walkway ended in a quagmire of ruts and tire tracks. I was confronted with about fifty pup tents, before which stood a very badly erected headquarters tent. There were a few dozen men milling around these tents, all dressed in the denim I thought of as prison garb, no unit designation of any kind.

  Nothing much was happening in the company headquarters tent. I walked in, put down my duffel, and addressed the white corporal sitting at the desk but apparently not engaged in any work. He put down a well-worn copy of Argosy magazine, rose slowly, and made a slovenly salute.

  I began, “Lieutenant Wrought. If this is the 609th Quartermaster Service Battalion, Second Company, I’ve been assigned to it.”

  “It is, sir.”

  “Where’s the captain in charge?”

  “Officers’ quarters, sir.”

  “I see. Company first sergeant?”

  “Transferred, sir. No replacement yet. Never did much anyway.”

  “Well, can you show me around, Corporal . . .”

  “Manion, sir.”

  We began a tour of the pup tents pitched randomly on ground wet from winter rains. Five feet wide and seven feet long, not very waterproof to begin with, from each of them came a waft of mildew and body odor. Poking my head into an unoccupied tent, I found the basic army mummy sack, without its canvas water-resistant shell, moldering in the damp earth, surrounded by GI—government issue—detritus. A few of the men in the area rose, and one assayed a salute, which I returned. We moved on to the latrines and showers, which showed no signs of the maintenance to which so much emphasis had been placed in OSC.

  “Where’s the kitchen and mess for this unit, Manion?”

  “I don’t know, Lieutenant. I eat at the white troops’ mess.”

  We walked back to the company command tent.

  “Corporal, I am going to billet in this tent. Get a cot in here before I get back. I am going to see the captain in charge of the company. What is his name?”

  “Captain Smythe, sir.”

  I had one and only one interview with Captain Smythe. When I finally found him in a wooden frame building near the quartermaster’s stores building, he was packing his bag.

  “Lieutenant Wrought reporting, sir.” I saluted, and he returned the salute in a perfunctory way.

  “Just in time, Wrought. I have been reassigned to another unit. White men.” He said it with satisfaction.

  “When will your replacement arrive, sir?”

  “No idea. Nobody wants the assignment, uh . . . Wrought, is that your name? How did you draw it?”

  I felt like saying, “Nigger lover.” “Don’t know, sir.”

  “Well, Wrought, it’s your unit now. Maybe you’ll get a captain or maybe not. Till then you’re in charge.”

  So, a fresh second lieutenant with an entire company to command. “One more question, sir?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Who’s my immediate superior?”

  “Well, there’s no captain, no major. Probably a light colonel somewhere in Headquarters Company of the new division being formed.”

  “Which one?”

  “Eighty-Second Airborne.”

  “Corporal, assemble the men.” It was my first company order.

  “How, sir?” The corporal seemed to be at a complete loss.

  “You mean the unit doesn’t fall in for roll call every day?”

  “That’s a sergeant’s job. Not mine.” The corporal’s tone was not insubordinate. It was resigned.

  Suddenly I realized that I was going to have to use everything I’d learned in OCS immediately and without any advice or practice.

  I walked out of the tent and placed myself among the fifty or so pup tents behind it. In a few minutes, I was surrounded by about eighty-five men, most of them looking decidedly unmilitary, in varying states of dress, many needing a shave, and a few who were either hungover, sick, or very despondent.

  “I’m your new lieutenant, men. My name is Wrought. We are going to be together for quite a while.”

  From somewhere in the mass of men came a Northern voice. “Does that mean a week?”

  “No. I’m staying with you for the duration.” There was a ripple of appreciable laughter. At least I had their attention. “The first thing this company needs is a top sergeant and four master sergeants. Hands up, everyone with a high school diploma.” Nine men raised their hands. “Who’s the oldest one of you?” One of the men stepped forward. “Name?”

  “Private Jenkins, sir.”

  “First Sergeant Jenkins now. Pick four master sergeants out of the high school men and form up in squads.”

  Manion now spoke quietly. “You can’t do that, Lieutenant. Coloreds ain’t allowed to be noncoms.” I thought at least he had the decency, or was it prudence, to keep his voice down.

  I turned to him. “That’ll be all, Private Manion. Take your gear to Headquarters Company and tell them to find you another billet. But first take the stripes off and cut the demotion order.” I turned to the men, whose attention my demotion of Manion had now secured. “Anyone here type?”

  “Took a typing course in school, sir.” It was one of the high school grads.

  “Alright, Corporal . . .” It was another instant promotion. He volunteered his name. “Simeon. You’re company clerk now.”

  The new noncoms had no trouble forming the men up into squads and platoons. I addressed Jenkins, the new top sergeant, in words everyone could hear. “Have all the tents struck. I want them arranged by squad and platoon in military order. All bedding is to be aired. Then report to me.”

  I was in the company headquarters tent unpacking my gear when Jenkins arrived a few minutes later. “You gonna sleep here, sir?” His question came with a hint of incredulousness.

  “Yes, Sergeant. I am. Now, what is the first thing this company needs?”

  “Lieutenant, we need cots. We’ve been sleeping on the ground for weeks, and now the rain’s comin’.”

  “Jenkins, cots won’t fit in pup tents. Why is the company sleeping on the ground in pup tents anyway?” My question was rhetorical, and the answer was obvious. Before he could reply, I had an idea. “As soon as the tents are set up again, form up platoons one and two.”

  A few minutes later I had sent the first platoon to the quartermaster construction depot, with inst
ructions to draw four gross of cinder blocks. Meanwhile I led the second platoon to the Eighty-Second Airborne Division military field hospital unit. At the command tent I asked for the medical officer in charge, hoping he would be a conscripted northerner unschooled in Southern ways. His name was Major Goldberg, MD, and he was.

  “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  “Sir, I have a company of 120 men, all sleeping on the wet ground. Pretty soon they are going to start filling up the sick bay . . . if there is one for colored troops.” He looked over my shoulder at the platoon I had brought along. “I’d like to borrow 120 field stretchers, sir. Your unit won’t need them till the division leaves Claiborne. I’ll sign a receipt for them and have them back to you in good order when you need them.”

  “What are you going to do with them, Lieutenant?”

  “Open them up and rest them on cinder blocks to get my men off the ground and keep them dry.”

  Major Goldberg turned to his company clerk. “Corporal, take this platoon to the depot and tell the quartermaster sergeant to issue these men 120 collapsible stretchers.”

  That evening I began to cut new standing orders for the company: battledress fatigues at all times, no more prisoners’ denims, all work details by squad or platoon only, to be approved by lieutenant commanding, unit march to mess, work detail, inspection and roll call daily. And finally, all platoons without service duties to fall in for close-order drill mornings and afternoons.

  “That’s pretty rough, sir. We don’t even have rifles.” Jenkins was shaking his head.

  “Those are my orders, Sergeant.” I couldn’t believe I was talking like this—me, the anarchist, the subversive, the former party member.

  The next day I denied several requests for fatigue parties from noncoms of white units. “Sorry, no men available for labor today,” was my reply. I was counting on the fact that the white sergeants wouldn’t challenge the refusal of an officer.