Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Maneuvers: Kentucky to New York, April 1943–February 1944

  BY THE END OF FEBRUARY 1943, THE BATTLE OF GUADALCANAL HAD finally ended. It was the first major offensive by Allied forces against Japan. Griff’s brother Philip would soon be in the Pacific theater as a US Navy petty officer, and Griff’s brother-in-law, Count DeKay, would serve there as an admiral.

  On the other side of the world, the North African campaign had already been under way four months and was finally progressing—and the Army was nearly finalizing its Italy invasion plan—the first invasion of Axis-controlled Europe. In two weeks, the Allies would launch their scheme to deceive the Germans into thinking the Allied attack would start on Sardinia and Corsica, the Italian and French islands west of mainland Italy. In their scheme, they would plant the body of a man who appeared to be a British Royal Marine pilot in the waters off a Spanish beach, with an attaché case cuffed to his wrist containing top-secret documents, but it would actually be the body of a homeless man from Wales who’d committed suicide. The documents—an elaborate British diversion called Operation Mincemeat—succeeded in fooling the Germans into redirecting their forces to defend Sardinia and Corsica, but by the time they did so, the Allies’ invading force had set sail to come ashore at Italy’s largest island, Sicily.

  For Griff, his Fourth Armored Division had amassed good records as aggressive, disciplined fighting units with high morale, so General Walton H. Walker—the Texan from nearby Temple—relinquished command of the Desert Training Center and ordered the corps to move to Camp Campbell to undergo continued physical training and schooling in equipment, weapons, and tactics. He and his headquarters staff—including Griff, with his G-3 operations team—welcomed the change as a step nearer to shipment overseas. Griff used his desert training as a spark to transition into high gear to generate plans for field training to ready the corps for combat.

  Troops with gear-filled trucks pulled out at 5:00 the next morning to drive to Indio, California, where they boarded a troop train. Griff’s assistant, Eugene Schulz, relished the train’s Pullman sleeper cars, an upgrade from the tent cots and heat of Camp Young. The train passed through Yuma, Phoenix, El Paso, and Little Rock to cross the Mississippi at Memphis, on to Clarksville, Tennessee, where the men boarded trucks and buses with their gear for the ten-mile drive northwest to Camp Campbell, an area of more than one hundred thousand acres spreading across adjoining parts of Tennessee and Kentucky.

  The new camp had been built during the previous year, with capacity for 45,000 enlisted men and 2,400 officers. Griff, Schulz, and the others took up their spots in the barracks, two-story white frame buildings joined by paved streets. Each man would have a bunk bed, footlocker, and coatrack, improvements over the tent accommodations of Camp Young. The GIs and officers relished the prospect of mess halls, hot showers—finally with ample water, which desert camp had lacked—and dayrooms stocked with reading material, chairs, writing tables, and couches. Post exchanges offered a lineup of food, chips, chocolate, beer, and Coke. Posters announced movies coming to multiple theaters.

  The Fourth Armored Corps under General Walker’s command included five infantry and two armored divisions besides the corps headquarters general staff, which constituted an independent unit. Colonel Griffith, as the senior G-3 headquarters operations officer, was in charge of corps plans, operations, air support, and the situation map—issuing orders to subordinate commanders and seeing that they were carried out. The G-3 covered infantry, armor, artillery, cavalry, anti-aircraft units, and the G-3 Air Corps (air reconnaissance and tactical fighter-bomber air support). In short, the G-3’s primary responsibility was to administer the tactical plan by converting all steps of the plan into objectives and steps in detailed written orders to field commanders who would be charged with implementing the directives in specified sequence through available men and resources.

  Serving with Griff was young Major Melville I. Stark, who had been Griff’s deputy since his early days at Camp Young. Griff, Stark, and Lieutenant Lee directed setup of the G-3 office (called the “three-shop”) and map room, by its three clerk-typists: Sergeant Joe Messner—chief clerk—Gene Schulz, and Don LeMoine, together with John Massa, cartographer.

  At Camp Campbell, training began with drilling, calisthenics, and an obstacle course and was followed by classes: first aid, fieldstripping and reassembling submachine guns and machine guns, driving jeeps and half-tracks, learning tank operation, employing maps, reading aerial photos, and identifying enemy aircraft. Each man dug a three-foot-wide foxhole chest deep in tank-wide rows and climbed in to experience a tank rolling overhead. Hikes with packs of gear and bricks figured prominently, of usually five to ten miles, some with time limits; each man had to complete twenty-one such hikes overall from April through mid-July. One afternoon, all headquarters personnel, including Griff, were ordered to undertake one such hike with pack and rifle, initially ordered to be nine miles, but after a short break, the order extended the trip to twenty-five miles, to be completed within eight hours of the earlier start. Any man not meeting that limit eventually had to make repeated attempts until successful—one requirement to qualify any soldier for deployment overseas.

  Corpsmen got accustomed to long overland trips, often in rain and mud, night marches under blackout, digging slit trenches in woods laced with thorny tree roots, and enduring rationing of water and food. Commanders usually intensified exercises by ordering the unexpected.

  By late August, after six months, the corps had completed its initial physical training and battle indoctrination, and so General Walker ordered eight weeks of simulated battle training, from September to October 1943, to be called the Tennessee Maneuvers, in which the corps headquarters staff and units from the Second Army would face each other in simulated combat.

  The maneuvers would take place in the bluegrass region near Lebanon, Tennessee, forty miles east of Nashville and ninety miles southeast of Camp Campbell, in terrain heavily wooded with red cedar trees blanketing hills and deep gorges with large rivers and streams, which would figure in most of the maneuvers.

  During the eight weeks of training, the two forces faced off in simulated combat, in a new operation each week: movement to contact, engagement of forces, attack and defense of a river line, coordinated attack of a prepared position, delaying actions, and breakthrough then withdrawal over a considerable distance.

  In mid-October, all units of the Fourth Armored Corps were renamed and modified to be known as Twentieth Corps for action in Europe.

  In mid-January, orders arrived for the corps to ship overseas, and early on February 1, Griff and the remaining corps headquarters staff—with the enlisted men and other officers in their Class A olive dress uniforms and jam-packed duffle bags in tow—boarded a fleet of six-by-six trucks for the drive to the Hopkinsville train station. There they boarded special trains. Exactly where they were going, and when, none of the enlisted men knew. Sleep came quickly on the train.

  Days later, in darkness, a jolt rattled the shade-covered rail-coach window Griff was leaning against, and he couldn’t sleep anymore. He raised the shade to look out. In the foggy darkness blanketing the train, the beam of a swaying flashlight shined on the ground. A switchman was walking toward him through the darkness, the light diffusing across the ground like waves of seeds spread on a lawn and illuminating his work boots, the crunch of his steps over oily, snowy gravel loudening.

  A sliding side door jounced open near the front of the coach. A conductor leaned in, announcing with muffled voice into the darkness that the train would be stopped for thirty minutes, for engine switching and taking on water, and cautioning the passengers against jolts from coupling of railcars, in case they cared to step out for a smoke. The train would be under way soon; meanwhile, lights would remain off.

  Few of the thirty or so officers in the coach were awake, many packed two to a bench. For Griff, at least one perk of being the G-3 was getting a seat to himself, alth
ough he still had to contend with the man stretched out in the seat facing him. He had to sleep upright but managed to get his legs under the facing seat diagonally to keep out of the aisle to avoid being awakened during the night by men tripping over his feet on their way to the can.

  He checked his watch. It was almost 03:00. Through the cold fog, lit by a solitary bare light bulb on a pole along the rails, he could see a half dozen switch posts and other rail lines parallel to his coach’s track. It seemed they were in the beginning of some sort of switchyard. All was quiet. He guessed the train had reached the middle of Pennsylvania by now, which would have put them about eight hours from the coast, where they’d be unloading to ferry boats to take them to Fort Slocum on David’s Island in Long Island Sound.

  Of the thousands of soldiers on this and the other trains that had left Fort Campbell early that damp, cold February morning the day before yesterday, only a few senior officers (including Griff)—not even all on his car—had been told where the train would be heading. All they suspected was that they would eventually end up somewhere in Europe, probably starting in the British Isles.

  No, this was an “eyes only” operation. Except for those few senior officers, including Griff, not even Griff’s own clerk-typist knew where the train was headed or what their orders would be when they unloaded.

  What excitement would lie ahead, Griff wondered. Finally, the real fight, a shot at recognition. Three years into the war, and all those years of training might actually pay off. He had wanted to tell Nell what the plans were. Why the hell not? She has no contacts in Brooklyn with any military. But if the troops themselves weren’t allowed to know, then he couldn’t rightly tell his wife and daughter. So he hadn’t. He’d written Nell a letter a week ago saying that he expected to be on the East Coast soon, but that was all. Even though he was bursting to share with her his excitement and fears.

  He imagined the two of them at dinner somewhere in Brooklyn having a quiet conversation—just the two of them. He wished he could spend a night at home with Nell, alone. He missed her touch and her voice and the fragrance of her hair and neck. They could sit together on the porch in the evening, in the lull of the Eighty-Sixth Street Brooklyn traffic and trolley shuffling past in its normal orderly slowing from the daytime bustle. He longed for his dog too, the way its red hair shimmered in the afternoon sun as it lay next to him on the porch, its snout on his leg, after chasing the ball around his in-laws’ small backyard.

  He leaned back against the window for more shut-eye, having settled finally into a relatively comfortable position. Silence returned to the car, but it was soon interrupted by a revving of the engine at the front, another thump from railcars connecting, more screeches, and finally resting silence.

  His daughter, Alice, came to mind. He wondered how much she’d grown since he’d seen her last. His thoughts turned to selecting a few limited facts to share with her about his deployment. Maybe he could tell her he’d be leaving soon by ship, heading to England. But that notion didn’t sit well. What good would it do for her to know, anyway? And how could he expect a thirteen-year-old to keep that kind of secret, especially on Governor’s Island, where she was surrounded by children of other officers? Surely she’d get the impression that it’d be okay to share the information with her friends. And then for sure her grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Torrey, would find out—either from Alice or from others—that I’d shared the information with her. Then it could get back to Twentieth Corps. And Griff’d be in the soup.

  Nope. Operational security won’t permit it.

  But . . . really?

  Random flickering lights filtered through the car, illuminating the sleeping officers. Griff thought about the sleeping men spread throughout the coach. This was the brain trust of Twentieth Corps, he thought. Fine officers, most of them. And they were also just a group of fathers and husbands, brothers and sons, each probably missing his family too.

  While darkness abided, Griff absorbed a few more hours of sleep. The sound of muffled conversation eventually woke him, some of the men pulling out their mess kits and working their way back to the kitchen car to bring coffee and breakfast back to their seats.

  He wasn’t quite ready. He kept his eyes closed and thought through a plan to call Nell from Fort Slocum. He would propose to take both her and Alice together out for an evening of dinner and dancing at a New York hotel, something first class, like the St. Regis or the Plaza. First he’d call Nell and sound her out on the idea. If she were keen, he’d call Alice to arrange it. But little Alice would have school tomorrow. So he’d have to plan for Saturday, the day after, since the pullout to the ship would have to be completed by the following Friday, the tenth.

  If things weren’t too crazy at the fort, maybe he could take Nell home to Brooklyn, to spend the night with her before returning to Slocum. If not, he’d just have to take her home, say goodbye, and return to Slocum. He thought about it and decided it sounded good.

  So he took his mess kit back to the kitchen car for a cup of coffee and a plate of powdered eggs and bacon and toast and then worked his way back with it to eat in his seat.

  After another few hours of the coach’s rattling and jostling, he ate a box lunch in his seat, and then, finally, at 14:00 hours, the train pulled into the station in New Rochelle.

  For now, there was work to be done.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Goodbye to Both: New York City, Early February 1944

  LATER, ON FEBRUARY 3, GRIFF FOUND AN EMPTY OFFICE WITH A PHONE, and he put in a call to Nell, who was at home, and told her he was at Slocum and perhaps could come into the city on Saturday and spend some time with her and Alice in Manhattan. Nell thought that was a good idea.

  Late the next afternoon, he reached Alice at the Torreys’, where she lived with his ex-wife and her grandparents, Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs. Torrey, on Governor’s Island, where Lieutenant Colonel Torrey served as adjutant. Alice was happy to hear from her dad and thrilled about the plan for dinner and dancing. “At the Plaza? Really?” He asked her to be ready by 4:30 Saturday afternoon. He’d come to the island to pick her up.

  He called Nell again to confirm the plan with her and asked her to get herself to the hotel where he and Alice would meet her for the early sitting. She seemed a little off during the call—almost as though she was taken aback by the prospect that Griff seemed unsure when, or maybe even whether, he could spend time at home with her. She didn’t know where he was being sent, but his coming to the East Coast made her think he might be heading somewhere in Europe, maybe sometime soon. Griff didn’t think much about her reaction. His focus was on getting through the next few days. There’d be time eventually, he was sure, to get things squared away with Nell.

  After a full couple of days of meetings, Griff got back to his quarters at 14:00 on Saturday in time to shave, put on his dress uniform, and have a driver take him to catch the 14:45 ferry to New Rochelle, where the other passengers were waiting in the cold for the train to Grand Central. As he waited on the platform, he felt the energy of being back in New York—people shuffling about to their offices or to theaters and other entertainment, with determination and deadlines—where during his West Point summers with Uncle Tex he had been exposed to a life sharply contrasting with the slower pace of Dallas, not to mention Quanah.

  When the train arrived at Grand Central, he found his way onto a subway to get to the Battery dock to catch the ferry to Governor’s Island. Sailors and soldiers were passing through, probably heading to bars and dance halls. Groups of girls looking for fun were flirting and hand-holding with sailors and soldiers, eager for Saturday night. At the Battery dock, upon boarding the ferry for the twenty-minute run to the island, Griff a took a seat indoors after confirming the boat would be running back and forth until late, and he thought about where he’d want to sit with Alice after picking her up. From the landing dock, he spotted the driver waiting for him in Lieutenant Colonel Torrey’s green military sedan for the short drive to th
e Commander’s House.

  The car pulled up to the red-brick three-story residence, surrounded by tree-shaded lawns and fronted by a long service walk leading to its white-trimmed front porch, guarded by six two-story white columns, with its chandelier suspended from an iron chain over the front door. Griff stepped up onto the flagstone porch, and his ex-mother-in-law—also named Alice Torrey, like her daughter and granddaughter—emerged from the door in her prim skirt and jacket over a white blouse, as though she’d just returned from her bridge club, with her welcoming smile, reaching for a hug. Griff kissed her on both cheeks as she led him into the foyer.

  “It’s so great to see you, Griff. Little Alice will be down in a minute. She’s finishing her hair.”

  There was no sign of Griff’s ex-wife.

  When his daughter, little Alice, bounded down the stairs in her sequined formal dancing dress, she rushed to her father and gave him a warm hug.

  “I’m so excited to see you, Dad. I’ve been dreaming about this evening since you called. You look so tall and important in your dress uniform.”

  Griff straightened his shoulders. “You look wonderful, too. Wow, what a dress!” After glancing at Mrs. Torrey, he told Alice they could catch up on the way to the hotel, and he assured Mrs. Torrey that Nell was looking forward to seeing them both—that Nell would be coming from her parents’ Brooklyn home herself and meeting him and little Alice at the hotel. As he helped Alice with her coat, he apologized to her grandmother for moving on so quickly: “The car is waiting, and the ferry won’t.”

  Mrs. Torrey said not to worry; she wanted him and his daughter to have as much time together as possible. She showed them to the door and walked them to the waiting car.

  At the dock, Griff led Alice to an indoor bench, out of the wind, on the starboard side, next to the windows. The boat got under way from Governor’s Island toward the city, and the bow aimed toward lower Manhattan, whose building shadows stretched toward them like long fingers, reaching through the water, pulling the bow toward the Battery dock. Lights glimmered in downtown building windows, now in the dusk beginning to increase in intensity through the buildings’ shadowed east faces.