Reader's Digest Soldier Stories

by Reader's Digest

  “It looks broken,” muttered the old man. “We’ll have to get you to Bern to a hospital. You sleep.”

  Jack hunkered down in the hay and tried not to think about his parents, tried not to see his mother’s face when she received the War Department telegram. His leg shaking with pain, he gave himself a second shot of morphine.

  The Frenchman woke him before daybreak. With Jack perched on the bicycle’s handlebars, they rode until they neared the Swiss border. “Go through the woods while I bribe the guards,” the Frenchman directed. “Walk quickly and crawl under the barbed wire. Keep straight until you come to a road. I will wait there.”

  Jack limped along, his ankle throbbing. Then he started second-guessing himself. What if he had gone the wrong way? What if they had arrested the teacher?

  It was his first lesson in underground trust. Ask no questions, do as you’re told, keep moving no matter what. Finally, he came to a clearing. There sat the old man. “You took a long time” was all he said.

  Two more days brought them to Bern. When they reached the hospital gate, the Frenchman vanished. That was Jack’s second lesson in how the underground operated. The French didn’t want thanks, didn’t want to know names or remember faces. That way, if they were caught, information couldn’t be beaten out of them.

  When Jack could travel, he and two other Americans were spirited across the mountains to Lausanne. They would then cross Lake Geneva to France and try to make it back to their units via Spain or Portugal.

  The first thing the French did was to split up the airmen. Jack was moved to Annecy and given instructions in hesitant English. “Never take a main road. Don’t whistle—French don’t whistle. Never walk into a town. Someone will meet you before. If not, go around. Never double back. If you come to a fork before you are picked up, take the right-hand path. Don’t rely on signs. We move them to confuse the Germans.”

  Next, they replaced his American shoes with hard, wooden-sole ones and blackened his sandy-colored hair with soot. He had to look like a peasant.

  His instructions were to follow a trail to a certain town. “You will be picked up after passing a farmhouse with red window boxes and a cow tied to the gate,” he was told.

  “How will I know my contact?” Jack asked.

  The Frenchman smiled as he left. “You won’t.”

  • • •

  What the French had not prepared Jack for was how self-conscious he would feel, how vulnerable. In the dark, the crunch of each step carried like the sound of a saw going through hard oak. He suppressed the urge to whistle to calm himself.

  Every sound he heard made his skin crawl—the breeze rattling leaves, the shift of a twig as an animal skittered away. Finally, at dawn, he thought he saw the farmhouse. But no one came out. What do I do now?

  Suddenly, a child appeared—out of nowhere. Don’t look scared. Keep moving. He’s just a kid.

  The boy was walking toward him despite the wide berth Jack was giving him. As Jack tried to pass with a tip of his cap, the child took his hand. Jack looked at him, ashamed that his own hand was trembling. The boy, who couldn’t have been more than seven, led him, without a word, to a house and hid him in the attic.

  • • •

  From then on, Jack walked and lived by night, and hid by day in haylofts and cellars. The sound of his own voice became alien to him. He was dirty, hungry and alone. As he passed under the windows of houses, his greatest fear was that his rumbling stomach would betray him.

  One evening, he spotted a German patrol. He had no choice but to head straight into the village he was trying to skirt. When he turned a corner and saw still more soldiers, he slipped into a cafe. Nauseated by the smell of food and cigarettes, he staggered to the bar. “Bière,” he muttered to the bartender.

  Jack could feel the stare of the man next to him. Trying not to return it, he reached into his pocket for a Swiss franc, the only money he had. The man closed his hand over Jack’s and laid a French coin on the counter.

  When the man left, Jack followed. “Keep going wherever they told you,” he whispered and disappeared down a cobblestone alley.

  German patrols were everywhere now. One day, Jack was forced to take a trolley. He was holding an overhead strap when he noticed a man staring at his arm and shaking his head. Jack looked up and saw the bracelet, etched with pilot wings, his mother had given him. He switched hands. The man smiled and went back to reading.

  When he finally reached the Pyrenees, Jack was reunited with the two airmen to cross the border with a Spanish guide. Halfway over the pass, the traitorous guide led them to a waiting German patrol and collected his reward.

  • • •

  The Germans put their three prisoners onto a train heading north. After riding for hours, they heard a loud explosion. Air raid! Their guard was looking out, aiming his gun upward, when the Americans overpowered him and escaped. Jack never saw his companions again.

  Once more, he had no idea where he was or what to do. Suddenly, a German soldier appeared. Then two more, guns drawn. Jack was driven to a house on the outskirts of a town and locked in an unlit cellar.

  He lost track of time in the Gestapo interrogations he endured. He was grateful that everything had been kept shrouded; he couldn’t betray his saviors, even under torture. Maybe a week went by. Maybe ten days. He wondered how long it would take him to die. Then one night—or was it day?—he and his cellmate decided to attempt escape. They communicated their plan to each other with gestures.

  Jack feigned sickness. His cellmate killed the guard who came to investigate Jack’s cries, then put on the Nazi’s uniform and dragged Jack out to “shoot” him. The guards jeered as Jack pretended to sob and plead for his life. Once in the fields, the two split up and ran.

  Hurrying down the road, Jack saw an elderly lady struggling with an umbrella and two Germans coming on motorcycles. Jack walked up to her, opened the umbrella, and held it over her head as the Germans rode past.

  The lady smiled at him. She had the sweetest face and smelled of lilac, like his mother. She nodded toward a steeple, clasped her hands in prayer and said, “L’église.” She squeezed his hand as she took the umbrella and tottered away.

  • • •

  Jack followed the sound of an organ to a small Catholic chapel, where people were gathered for Mass. Please help me, was all he could think to pray as he knelt in a side pew and bent his head.

  Behind him, he heard the rustle of stiff material. A uniform? No, a nun—a beautiful nun. He carefully mimicked her genuflections.

  “Come,” she whispered at the end of the service. Behind the church were a hay cart, a mule and two men. They grinned and poured wine on Jack as the “nun” yanked off her habit. The church’s bells began to ring joyfully, and she pulled Jack into the hay.

  “Bonne chance,” the men called, running alongside the cart as it carried the supposed newlyweds out of town. Jack was convinced he was still in his cell, dreaming.

  He came to know the woman as Renee. The Germans had murdered her parents and sister, and she now ran the most ruthless underground group Jack had encountered.

  • • •

  In late November, Jack was crouched by a creek, trying to grab a fish. Then he felt the earth begin to tremble. He watched a dozen tanks roll by before he realized they were American. American! My God! He ran toward them. Idiot, he suddenly thought, stopping short. Want to be shot now after all this? Shriveled to 90 pounds, covered in grime, dressed in a French beret, torn civilian pants and jacket, he hardly looked like an American pilot.

  Jack raised his hands and forced himself to walk. “Hey,” he called to the soldiers following the tanks, “am I glad to see you.”

  • • •

  Early on December 15, 1944, Jack Elliott arrived at Washington’s National Airport. He caught a cab to his sister Lee’s home in Fairfax, Virginia. She nearly fainted when she answered the door.

  “Let me call Mom,” she said. “No,” Jack said. “It’ll be to
o much of a shock.”

  Lee and her five-year-old daughter boarded a bus for Richmond with Jack. The girl darted along the aisle telling passengers, “Uncle Jack’s home. We’re going to tell Granny and keep her from having a heart attack.”

  They got off the bus and hailed a taxi. To Jack the eight-mile ride to the farm took an eternity.

  Inside the house, Martha heard the sound of car wheels on gravel and wondered who would visit so close to dinnertime. Then she froze: the Army delivered death notices in person. She walked to the door. Don’t cry in front of a stranger, she told herself, and looked out.

  Jack’s aged pointer, Speed, was dancing around a terribly thin man bent over trying to pet him. Strange, thought Martha, I haven’t seen Speed act that way since Jack left. Oh, my Lord.

  “Jack!” she cried out, throwing open the door.

  Jack stood and opened his arms. They held each other for a long time, not saying a word. Finally, Martha pulled away and put her hand over her heart. It hurt in the most wonderful way. She was sure it was the first time she had felt it beat since Jack left home.

  • • •

  Jack Elliott is my father. I’ve always admired his tenacity, his gutsiness during a crisis, his kindness to hurt or sick people, and his unflinching belief in the potential for good in mankind. In writing his story, I understand better what shaped those qualities.

  Daddy stayed on active duty for three more years after 1944 and was in the reserves until 1969, leaving the service as a lieutenant colonel. In civilian life, he became a missile engineer. He is now retired.

  He doesn’t talk about the war much, but I can tell that little else in his life has had such an impact. His voice still grows husky, 49 years later, telling about the people who helped him and about one of his first duties stateside.

  For a time after his return, Daddy served as an escort for funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. One was for a soldier who had died while being flown back to Walter Reed hospital for treatment. Standing by the grave were the dead soldier’s mother, wife and two small children. As the honor guard fired its salute, the littlest one looked heavenward and said, “There goes my daddy.”

  Every few years, my father picks his way through all those tombstones to pay his respects to that mother’s lost son, that child’s daddy.

  Those Navy Boys Changed My Life

  BY CARL T. ROWAN

  My history professor, Merl Eppse, stepped into the classroom and said crisply: “Rowan, come with me to the dean’s office.”

  I was flustered by the request. I hadn’t done anything bad enough, I thought, to be hauled before the dean. Warily, I followed the professor. This was in 1943, near the end of my second quarter at the all-Negro Tennessee State College in Nashville, Tennessee.

  “Rowan,” the dean said, “we have a chance to help crack the ban on Negro officers in the Navy. Some of Tennessee State’s young men are being allowed to compete in national examinations for the Navy’s officer-training program. I want you to take these exams and volunteer.”

  “What?” I asked in disbelief.

  The Navy, one of the most strictly segregated institutions in the nation, had for the past 20 years used Negroes primarily as mess attendants and stewards. Aware of this, I hesitated, but when the dean repeated his request I reluctantly agreed. I took the exams and passed them; then after interviews by a panel of officers I was accepted for training.

  Nowadays, as I watch the bitterness and strife in many communities, I think of those tense years I spent as a sailor and later as an officer. Men like me were trying to convince the Navy and the nation that it was possible—with firmness and common sense—to wipe out segregation and other social injustices without rancor and bloodshed.

  My first Navy assignment was to the officer-training unit at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. I was the lone Negro in a unit of about 335 sailors. Almost all these young men had grown up in states where tradition decreed that the Negro was anything but their intellectual and social equal. Yet, my first night at Washburn, a chief petty officer and a lieutenant gave me a warm welcome. When young Charlie Van Horn, of Coffeyville, Kansas, learned that I was to be his roommate, he quipped: “I’ll be too damned busy trying to pass this physics course to notice the pigment of your skin.” And that is how it was.

  I was learning for the first time that the things young men share in common far outweigh racial differences. We all hated drill, calisthenics and Saturday inspections; we all loved the weekend liberties and the endless bull sessions. Still, there were difficulties. One day as I walked into the guest room of the house in which I lived, a trainee from Ohio was sounding off about his low regard for “niggers.” There was sharp silence. I just stared at the young man for a few seconds. Then I turned to a piano-playing boy from Texas named Noah Brannen and said, “Noah, I’ve got a new tune called ‘Star Eyes.’ Let’s give it a try.” Noah walked eagerly to the piano and a few moments later a dozen of us were bunched together trying to sing harmony.

  I still remember Brannen, the Texan, sharing with me his love for music but at the same time revealing all the conflicts created within him by his background. “Where is that overpowering odor they tell me all Negroes have?” he asked one day. He seemed happy to be told that a shower has the same cleansing effect on a Negro as on a member of any other race.

  The Washburn University campus was an oasis of democracy set in a community of many social contradictions. I could ride unsegregated on city buses, but I was barred from entering most theaters, restaurants and bowling alleys with my fellow-trainees. On several occasions my buddies took me into drugstores and other places, saying simply by their actions that I was one of the gang. In this way, they made me the first Negro ever served in these places.

  I wondered how the other “guinea pigs” in other units were making out, and later when I got to Midshipman School at Fort Schuyler in New York City, I met two of them—Theodore Chambers and Clarence McIntosh. We were pleased that there was no attempt to put us together. Everything was strictly alphabetical, with the result that the midshipman in the bunk next to mine was a white fellow from Pascagoula, Mississippi.

  He and I commiserated with each other throughout the days of close-order drills, the running from class to class, the frantic cramming for tests in navigation, gunnery and so on. Fort Schuyler was tough—midshipmen at other schools called it the Laundry, because so many candidates washed out.

  Soon it was obvious that my Mississippi bunk mate was on the verge of washing out. One night as our company studied gunnery problems, he offered me half of his candy bar.

  “Rowan, you know that I’m flunking out of this heah damned rat race,” he said. “But there’s one thing I gotta git off my chest first—just sort of one Southern boy to another.”

  Other midshipmen rolled their eyes uneasily in our direction.

  “Just wanta tell you,” he continued, “that a little while back, if somebody had told me I’d be sitting beside a Nigra and not minding it—I mean, appreciating it—I’da knocked his teeth out. But here I am, and I just wanta tell you and wish you luck.”

  I avoided washing out, as did the other two Negroes, and at the age of 19 became an ensign in the United States Naval Reserve—on what ranks as one of the triumphant days of my life. The three of us from Fort Schuyler, along with Ensign Samuel Gravely from the Midshipman School at Columbia University, were the first Negro officers with the training that qualified us for duty on ocean-going vessels.

  The next test would be integration aboard ship, and here the Navy moved very cautiously. They picked auxiliary craft—fleet tankers, troop transports and so forth—for the first mixing of Negro officers and seamen (who now sported the insignia of signalmen, electricians, boatswain’s mates) with whites.

  I was assigned to a fast tanker, the U.S.S. Chemung, and given command of the communications division, a group of about 35 men of whom only two were Negroes. Several of my other men, including the chief petty officer, were South
erners. What the Navy obviously wanted to know was whether white Southerners would take orders from a Negro officer. They did, and they executed them without the slightest hesitation.

  Much of the credit must go to the captain, an Annapolis graduate. One icy, windy night in the North Atlantic as I stood the midnight to 4 a.m. watch, he came to the bridge and uttered the only sentences about race that I heard from him.

  “I’m a Navy man,” he said, “and we’re in a war. To me, it’s that stripe that counts—and the training and leadership that it is supposed to symbolize. That’s why I never called a meeting of the crew to ‘prepare’ them, to explain their obligation to respect you, or anything like that. I didn’t want anyone to think you were different from any other officer coming aboard.”

  The skipper had shown an acute understanding of what I—and other Negroes—wanted: no special favors, no special restrictions, just the right to rise or fall on merit.

  Still there were many crew members who figured that since I was a Negro I must have been sent aboard the Chemung primarily to look out for the Negro crewmen. It took an unusual incident to destroy this idea.

  Christmas of 1945 the Chemung pulled into Baltimore for holiday port. Most of the seamen dashed ashore to celebrate and only a skeleton force was kept aboard. A petty officer in my division, while on communications duty, took advantage of the situation to sneak a blonde aboard—a gross violation of regulations. It was his luck to have the captain return aboard unexpectedly.

  The petty officer was summoned to Captain’s Mast and crew members speculated that he would get a summary court-martial. There was scant ground for a defense, but it’s an officer’s duty to look out for his men. So I went before the captain with my petty officer—who was white—and helped in a stirring, though shallow, defense. The culprit escaped with a mere warning. Later I proudly accepted congratulations from the men in my division, who now realized that I was for all of them.