Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  For the history of the Bataan Death March and the American prisoners of war in the Philippines, I have relied heavily on an unpublished memoir by Dr. Gene S. Jacobsen, “Who Refused to Die.” I have also read other accounts by other survivors, and I have read Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific (Morrow, 1994), by Gavan Daws, and Prisoners of the Rising Sun (University of Kansas Press, 1993), by William A. Berry. These books added insight, but Gene Jacobsen’s account is the basis for most of Wally Thomas’s experiences.

  One of the best ways to understand a time is to read oral histories. Individual experiences can often explain much more than statistics and general descriptions. Edwin P. Hoyt’s The GI War: American Soldiers in Europe in World War II (McGraw-Hill, 1988) is an excellent collection of personal accounts, as is Russell Miller’s Nothing Less than Victory: The Oral History of D day (Morrow, 1993). For the Pacific war, a first-rate collection is Semper Fi, Mac: Living Memories of the United States Marines in World War II (Arbor House, 1982), by Henry Berry. The famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle also collected many moving accounts from the battlefront. His book Brave Men (Holt, 1944) is a classic work. For balance, another important work, but one that shows the great variety of attitudes toward the war, including home front experiences, is Studs Terkel’s “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (Random House, 1984).

  For information about the home front, a book that breaks the stereotypes and is replete with information is Let the Good Times Roll: Life at Home in America During World War II (Paragon, 1989), by Paul D Casdorph. There are also a number of pictorial histories of home front life. The one I often refer to is V for Victory: America’s Home Front During World War II (Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 1991), by Stan Cohen. An excellent account of life in London during the war is London at War, 1939–1945 (Knopf, 1995), by Philip Ziegler.

  Along with historical information, I seek books that give me a sense of the time. Paul Fussell’s Wartime (Oxford University Press, 1989), for instance, helped me comprehend the psychology of the individual soldier. Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country (University of Nebraska Press, 1942) provides some wonderful glimpses of Mormon life in Utah during the thirties and forties as seen by a brilliant and observant non-LDS transplant. R. Lanier Britsch’s Unto the Islands of the Sea (Deseret, 1986) helped me understand life among Mormons in Hawaii. Interviews also helped me prepare to write about wartime Hawaii, including one with Lowell H. Christensen, who lived there at the time.

  There are many other sources: family histories and stories; biographies of important generals, political figures, and LDS Church leaders; pictorial guides to uniforms, weapons, armaments, and so on; histories of particular battles; visits to historical sites; and conversations with the many people who remember the time. Yet, after all the research, the ultimate source for understanding another time is the empathy we can call upon as we attempt to place ourselves in another circumstance. However different humans may be in many ways, there is fundamental sameness in our emotions, our needs, our fears. I try to work my way into the time by experiencing what my characters feel. That may seem a circular process—since I made the characters up—but this is the power of empathy: to know someone else’s feelings by knowing one’s own. That’s why we tell stories—to create a life to look at, and then, in response, to reflect upon our own experiences.

  I have dedicated this book to Gene Jacobsen. I owe him a great deal for providing me with so much information. But more than that, we all owe him for his sacrifice. He was a prisoner for almost the entire war, and he suffered terribly. He has lived a rich and good life, but his health was compromised forever by the depredations he experienced. And yet, he harbors no bitterness, doesn’t look back. He has been a professor, a scholar, a fine citizen, and a positive force for good. He is one of those who helped ensure the freedom and then came home to work at healing the wounds and creating a better world. As I have looked to my own roots, I have come to appreciate a generation that gave up so much to provide what I now enjoy. I hope that in reading these books, others—especially young people—will be moved to feel that same appreciation.

  Far from Home

  Far from Home

  Children of the Promise: Volume 3

  Visit us at DeseretBook.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hughes, Dean, 1943—

  Far from home / Dean Hughes.

  p. cm. – (Children of the promise ; v. 3)

  ISBN 1-57345-406-0 (hardbound)

  ISBN 978-1-59038-447-3 (paperbound)

  1. World War, 1939—1945–Fiction. 2. Mormons–History–Fiction.

  I. Title. II. Series: Hughes, Dean, 1943— Children of the promise; vol. 3.

  PS3558.U36F3 1998

  813'.54–dc21 98-27381

  CIP

  Printed in the United States of America

  Banta, Menasha, WI

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  For Tom, Kristen, and Steven

  Chapter 1

  Alex and Anna’s days together in Windermere were nearly perfect. But a honeymoon now, in August of 1944, was like a pastoral landscape in rich, warm colors painted over the surface of a battle scene, all in black and red. Alex never lost his awareness of the deeper reality, the one that waited just beyond the dreamscape they were creating for each other. Anna was beautiful, and lovely to be with, but she was also ephemeral, and so her loveliness brought him as much pain as it did joy.

  Lying close to Anna, Alex went to sleep rather peacefully each night, but then the nightmares would begin: the thumping sound of machine-gun fire, explosions, bodies torn apart, and always the color red, in flashes and streaks and spatters. He would sit up sweating and gasping, shaking, and Anna would hold him and stroke his hair until he calmed. Then he would sleep again, but warily, half awake and afraid the dreams would return. The days were exquisite, Anna’s softness impossible to get enough of, but the truth was always looming. Alex would soon go back to his unit, and after that he would return to the continent: to battle, to the scenes in his nightmares. What he never told Anna, but what he couldn’t forget, was that if he kept making parachute drops, his chances for survival were poor.

  Clinging to this time together, of course, only frightened the days away, and Alex and Anna were soon taking the train back to London, where Anna was to stay with her parents. At the Stoltzes’ apartment Alex packed his bags as though he were carrying out a script someone had written for him. The reality that had been lurking, trying to assert itself, still seemed unthinkable. Later, when he stood with Anna on the platform amid all the people and noise and the heavy smell of coal dust in Victoria Station, he clung to her until the last second, and still something in him kept insisting, “This can’t happen.”

  “I’ll try to get a pass if I can. Maybe I can get to London for a weekend.”

  “Oh, yes. Or maybe I can come there. Even if I can only see you for an hour–or a few minutes.” She pressed her face to his chest, his uniform, and she began to sob.

  “I’ll let you know. I’ll write as often as I can. Please write to me every day. I need some way to . . . ” But he didn’t know exactly what he meant. He felt as though he were slipping into darkness. His tears were falling on her hair.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t miss a day. We’ll tell each other everything. It won’t be like before.”

  “Anna, I love you too much. I don’t know how I can do this.”

  The conductor was making his last call. Alex kissed Anna one last time, felt her body fit against his, and it all seemed too much to give up. But he turned, threw his duffel bag on the train, and jumped on after it. Then he stood on the step, looked back, and said, “Go ahead, Anna. Don’t wait and watch the train.”

  But the train began to roll, and Anna stood there watching him. She was wearing a little print dress, with daisies–one she had worn when they walked by the lake in Windermere–but no lipstick, no makeup, just her own flushed prettiness and her
soft blonde hair around her face. She waved and then brought both hands to her cheeks, her blue eyes magnified in her tears, and then she slipped out of view.

  Alex thought the pain couldn’t get any worse, but halfway to Aldbourne his desolation struck him full force. He had never felt this alone in his life, not even at the beginning of his mission or during those hard days in Georgia at basic training. He sat in the noisy, jiggling train, with people all around him, and he felt as though the dark had swallowed him. He thought of getting off at the next stop, going AWOL, and running back to her. The idea seemed entirely reasonable, and it was only something automatic in him–a sense that he had no choice–that kept him moving forward instead of turning back. But he didn’t think of the flag or the defense of freedom. Abstractions were for people back home who got the war from the radio.

  The camp at Aldbourne was nothing more than Nissen huts with their rounded corrugated steel roofs, set in rows on a soccer field. The village was quaint, picturesque, with cottages built of rock, a single pub called the Mason’s Arm, a little collection of stores at the center, and, all around, green hills and pastures divided by stone walls. In peacetime it would have been a sleepy country village, but now the narrow road through town was filled with troop trucks and Jeeps, and when Alex walked past the pub, with his duffel bag over his shoulder, he saw that it was full of soldiers from his regiment. The whole village seemed a garrison, not an English town, and he hated the feel of it.

  Alex had hoped to report to Lieutenant Summers, but he found out that Summers was a captain now and the new company commander. A lieutenant named Lewis Owen had been transferred from D Company and was the new platoon leader. He was sitting at a little desk just inside one of the huts. When Alex saluted and gave his name, Owen stood up and shook his hand. “Thomas, I’m glad to get you back,” he said. “I’ve heard what you did in Normandy.”

  Alex didn’t want this. He still didn’t understand what had happened to him on the morning of D-day, when he had fought so ferociously, but he really doubted he could repeat that performance, and he hated to have it expected of him.

  “I’ve been using Corporal Duncan as the temporary squad leader, but now that you’re back, you’ll take over again, and Duncan will be your assistant. You still don’t have a full squad. We got three replacements in, and now, with you, you’ll be up to ten men–about the same as our other squads. You may pick up one or two more at some point.”

  “That sounds fine, sir,” Alex said. A year ago the combination–he and Duncan–would have seemed impossible, but now Alex knew that the two of them would work fine together.

  “Can you jump yet?”

  “The doctor said I shouldn’t for another month or so. I only have ‘light duty’ papers. But if we make a drop soon, I’d rather go than get left behind.”

  Owen grinned. “I like your attitude,” he said, “but I can’t ask you to do that.”

  “It’s not that I’m eager to get back into battle,” Alex said. “It’s just that when I do go, I want to be with my own unit.”

  Alex couldn’t have explained all his feelings about that. Three men from his former squad were dead, killed on D-day, and two more had become serious casualties. So the squad was hardly the same. But the troopers he had fought with–his friend Curtis Bentley, and Duncan, Campbell, Gourley, Pozernac–these were men he had faced death with. When he went up against the enemy again, he wanted the same guys alongside him. “How soon do you think the next drop will take place?” Alex asked.

  “No one knows. Rumors go around every day. Twice now we’ve been scheduled to go, but our infantry troops overran the planned drop zones and made the missions unnecessary. Right now Patton is pushing across France so hard that the Germans are constantly falling back. No one needs us.”

  Alex followed the war news carefully. He knew that Allied troops could reach Germany before winter, and Russia was driv­ing hard from the east, now having taken Warsaw, Poland. The Allies were also making progress in Italy, approaching the German Gothic Line, and the Seventh Army had landed in southern France. Meanwhile, German cities were being pounded into oblivion by Allied bombers. If Hitler had any sense, maybe he would see the handwriting on the wall. A group of German generals had already tried to kill Hitler that summer, and they had almost got the job done. It seemed crazy that German citizens didn’t rise up and demand a halt to the war, but reports were that Hitler was killing anyone who opposed him and tightening his grip on the country.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be back in it,” Owen said. “From what I hear, ol’ General Taylor is going nuts. He says the Screaming Eagles are the best division in the army and we shouldn’t be sitting around in England. You know how generals are. They don’t add stars to their shoulders when their men are sitting around in garrison.”

  Alex liked Owen already. He was a big man, with a beefy neck and jowls, and he had a way of hunching his shoulders when he talked so he looked like a boxer ready to throw a punch. But he seemed to be a decent guy, and realistic. Alex could always tell the citizen soldiers who had come to do a job but looked forward to getting back to their lives: college, or a farm, maybe a family. The career guys–Regular Army–were the ones more anxious to earn rank by showing off for the big brass.

  “Are we doing much in the way of training now?” Alex asked.

  “Oh, sure. Field problems. Marches. Target practice. Just no jumps. We don’t have the airplanes for that. But we have lots of replacement troops–green as horse manure–and they need work. In a way, the veterans need it too. You can’t let men sit around all day. Everyone’s on edge as it is.”

  “I don’t care about this ‘light duty’ status I’m on. It ­wouldn’t look good if I got out of marches and night problems. I’ve got to earn the respect of the replacements.”

  “Thomas, that’s exactly what I wanted to hear you say. But don’t push yourself too fast. I don’t want you to go down with an injury that would keep you out of action.”

  “All right. But I’ll try to get back into shape.”

  “I understand you just came back from your honeymoon.” Owen’s big cheeks rolled into plump balls. His front teeth were divided a little, giving him the look of a big kid. “I hope you’re not too softened up.”

  Alex smiled. “I’ll be all right,” he said. But that wasn’t what he was feeling. As he walked from the hut, he wondered about himself. Why had he taken on a military manner so readily? Why had he been so quick to give up his light-duty status? He hadn’t planned that; in fact, he had come back wondering whether he wouldn’t be better off to miss the first jump his regiment was likely to make. But something was changing in him quickly, a sense of the soldier’s life coming back, and he did want to be with his men, not left behind. When he thought of Anna, however, he wondered whether he had sinned against her. Above everything else, he should do what it would take to stay alive.

  As Alex walked between the rows of Nissen huts, he was amazed at how easily he could tell the experienced men from the replacement troops. He recognized a lot of faces, of course, knew the men from his own company. But he also saw the difference. The replacements looked like American boys he remembered from home: a bit of a swagger in their walk, confidence, even arrogance, in their eyes. The veterans weren’t necessarily grizzled old warriors; they were almost as young as the replacements. But they seemed resolute at best, and sometimes distant. Alex remembered how these same men had bragged and bellowed–and cut their hair in Mohawks–on the night before D-day. All that was gone now.

  He found an empty bunk in the hut he was assigned to, and he began to unpack. There was a mustiness in the place, and the smell of men. The humidity was high inside, even though the air wasn’t all that warm. He thought of his week with Anna, just the two of them in the cottage they had rented by the lake. How could he go back to living like this, with a bunch of soldiers? He could tolerate the language, the crassness; but the absence of everything gentle and delicate seemed to rend life in half and le
ave out the things that brought the best out of him.

  Alex was settling in when his squad came tromping through the door. Duncan bellowed out a welcome and then announced to the other men, in his southern drawl, “Okay, boys. Now you got yourself a real squad leader. I’m jist happy to let him take over, too.” Then he reached out and grabbed Alex’s hand.

  Alex shook hands with the other men he knew, joked with them, and took some teasing about his honeymoon. Campbell said, “Bentley told us you married the prettiest girl in the world, and we all have to look for second best from now on.”

  “The trouble is, there’s no close second,” Alex said. “You’ll have to settle for a regular girl–a human being.”

  “That’s all right,” Duncan said, “I don’t want no angel. She might want to limit my beer intake.”

  Gourley and Pozernac were both from Philadelphia and had gone through basic training together. They hardly looked like twins, with Gourley half a foot taller and light-haired, opposite of Pozernac, but the two were always together. “I’m glad to have you back, Deacon,” Gourley told Alex. “I like to be around a guy who gives away his cigarettes.”

  The replacements didn’t come forward immediately, but once the noise calmed a little, Curtis waved them over, and he introduced them one at a time. There was a young boy from Maryland, not more than five-foot-five, named Earl Sabin. Another stout, serious young man, with glasses–Royce Withers–was from Chicago. He had been a chemistry major at Northwestern before he got called up. Delbert Ernst looked a little older but probably wasn’t more than twenty-two or so. He was from Tennessee and sounded not just southern but “country.” “He speaks the mother tongue,” Curtis said. “But not in its purest form, the way it’s spoken in Georgia.”

  “Nass to meet yuh,” Alex said, trying to sound southern. Then he shook hands with the last boy. “My name’s Howard Douglas,” the soldier said. He seemed pleasant enough, but shy. He didn’t really look Alex in the eye. He wasn’t a lot taller than Sabin, but he was built much stronger.