by Guy Stern
While Aunt Rae became my mentor, Aunt Ethel was my guide to the work-a-day life of America’s lower middle class. At dinner she would remind me of the difference between European and American table manners and, in general, prevent me from violating American do’s and don’ts. Her benevolence wasn’t perfunctory at all. She maintained a home for all of her family and sought to make our lives as comfortable and fulfilled as possible. Even with a five-year age difference, their son, Melvin, who lived with us for a while, and I often engaged in what can be termed “sibling rivalry.” It was rooted in part by his resentment that he, who had never finished high school, had to listen to my reports of my classroom achievements. By the same token, I felt that Ethel’s motherly allegiance was lying with her son. Of course, what Melvin had that I could only dream about was having his parents in his life. My focus continued to be having my family join me in my new world. There was really no competition in that. He won hands down! Uncle Benno and I, when we spoke together, frequently and in German, talked about his parental home. He asked me for every tidbit of memory of my days in Vlotho. Although I was most appreciative of his and Ethel’s generosity, they were no loco parentis, except for the emotional closeness of being biologically related. They also sheltered me when I became despondent about being cut off from all the persons loved in my homeland. They substituted their love and I shall never forget that. In addition they shared their vision of the American dream with me and under their tutelage and despite the occasional demurrers of Aunt Rae, I became a budding American patriot.
Yes, I was on the road to Americanization, a walk no one can ever complete, because America is not only different, as Carl Zuckmayer put it, but also because it is so many things; it is protean and unpredictable. As for me, Günther, I never became a completely American guy; I am, we all are a conglomerate of our experiences. But I am grateful to all those who pointed me in that direction toward America, from Mr. Tittel to the Silberbergs to Aunt Rae, and who gently chivvied me along. As those years of rapid acculturation drew to a close, “I Heard America Singing,” as Walt Whitman, the poet of its democratic spirit, had exulted. It is my hope that the song will not grow faint, in the years to come.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Ritchie Boy in World War II
Preparing for War
Curiously enough, the fact that I became a Ritchie Boy—the soldiers who were trained in military intelligence interrogation at Fort Ritchie, Maryland—in the US Army I owe to the US Navy. How so? After Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the war, the walls of my university, Saint Louis University, were festooned with posters. One was from naval intelligence. If a young man had special skills, if he spoke the language or knew the culture of our enemies, he should by all means come down, the poster said, to the Naval Intelligence Recruiting Station. I did. I went down there and mentioned my skills to the recruiting ensign. “Do I detect an accent?” he asked. “Are you a natural born American?”
“No,” I answered.
“Can’t use you!” he said.
Naval Intelligence would soon change its policy, though too late to affect me, and go on to recruit one of the most inventive Jewish refugees to come to the United States, in the person of the colorful journalist, theater critic, and cultural historian, Curt Riess. He brought some life into the staid and somnolent Washington establishment of Naval Intelligence. On his own initiative, he started to interrogate the first German prisoners of war to fall into American hands: the survivors of sunk submarines and surface vessels. He did not concentrate on the then standard military intelligence information, but instead elicited gossip about Germany’s naval officers, which ranged from sexual misbehavior to financial defalcations. Then he would broadcast these choice bits, along with some serious news, to German ships at sea. He heard subsequently from prisoners that these broadcasts created jealousies, suspicions, and several fist-fights among German naval personnel.
By a more circuitous road, I found myself enrolled in US Army Military Intelligence. Half a year later, I was drafted. With dozens of other recruits from Saint Louis, I was sent to the Induction Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and, after two weeks of idling there, to Camp Barkley, Texas, the training center for medical administration. I was in good physical shape; a year of lifting heavy trays in restaurants had steeled me for carrying a full field pack during long hikes under the broiling Texas sun. The classroom instructions were moderately difficult, but they increased my respect for American teachers. The camp commandant had recruited women teachers from the local high schools and they taught us the fundamentals of the paperwork necessary for keeping medical records, a patient’s case history, and other bureaucratic essentials. The teachers who faced us had done their (and also our) homework, as though it were their instructional forte. And they all came along to the most significant event during my stay in Texas.
I assiduously read the camp newspaper, and there, nearly hidden by announcements like the one that a group of Don Cossacks would be singing for us, was an item that would change my sense of identity. “Noncitizen personnel at camp are ordered to report to their respective headquarters for possible naturalization.” I ran, not walked, to the command post, the newspaper in hand. “Request permission to talk to the First Sergeant,” I said to the company clerk. That worthy came at a leisurely pace, complimented me on my close reading of the newspaper, and ordered our drill sergeant to join us. “Do you think Private Stern will make a good citizen?” he asked. Of course the sergeant didn’t know me from among any of the other fitful recruits under his charge and mumbled something reasonably affirmative in response.
In 1942 I was asked to join a hundred or so other foreign-born GIs for a trip to the Northern District Court of Texas in nearby Abilene. In a mass ceremony, dignified and somehow awesome, we became US citizens. I, the outcast from Nazi Germany, had suddenly found a new national identity and simultaneously embraced a fervent new allegiance. I also officially made “Guy” my first name. Did anyone share this emotional event with me? I glanced at the gallery of the courtroom. Those women instructors who had guided me for the past months were watching, handkerchiefs in hand. When I came back to class, my admired teacher of Army Medical Reports broke military protocol and ordered me to stand up as a “freshman American.” My new status didn’t lighten that enormous field pack during those forced marches, but it surely helped me find my new identity as an American soldier. It seemed to me then that my perfectly fitting uniform also mirrored my inner attitude. My German citizenship seemed to be a thing of the past; after all, it had been taken away from me even when I was still living in my homeland.
After almost finishing basic training, I was called to company headquarters. “Orders are waiting for you! You are being transferred,” said the first sergeant. “Where to, Sergeant?” I asked. “Can’t tell you, confidential,” he said in a Texas accent. In my time there, I’d also begun to acquire a bit of Texan authenticity. I packed my duffle bag and was off to a destination and destiny unknown.
The train traversed Texas. I found myself in the company of two other German-born GIs. Obviously during our conversation we tried to ferret out what the army had planned for us. Our hypotheses ranged from being discharged to being on the way to Officers’ Candidate School. My guesses didn’t include that last possibility. My classroom performance, I felt, had been pretty decent, but my skill at putting hospital corners on my bedding or carrying out similar mechanical tasks had often drawn severe criticism from the inspecting officers of our barracks.
Three hours into our travel, we opened our orders, as instructed. “Change trains in Baltimore for a local to Martinsburg, West Virginia. A jeep will be waiting.” The mystery continued, though not for long. Toward evening our driver left us off at the gate of a Maryland army camp. Unlike our sandstorm-swept camp in Texas, it was studded by lush green lawns with a lake at the center—resembling a country club more than an average military base. A huge sign spanned the distance between the entrance gates. It said laconically, �
��Military Intelligence Training Center,” less than an epiphany for us three. In the following weeks though, the mystery would yield to insight.
Camp Ritchie, named after a former Maryland governor, had been converted from a national guard post into the first subrosa intelligence training ground in the history of the United States. (During World War I the secretary of war had declined such an operation on the grounds that “reading other people’s mail is ungentlemanly.”) But George Marshall, then the US chief of staff and holding no such antiquated convictions, had given direct orders to convert Camp Ritchie from a National Guard camp into a training camp for future intelligence personnel.
When I first entered the barrack to which I was assigned, I felt I had joined a successor organization to the League of Nations. Through the constant babble of European and Asiatic tongues, we were encouraged to talk among ourselves in the languages of our enemies. Ritchie slowly bared its secrets. They were not to be shared beyond the grounds of the camp. Its new and temporary residents had been sent there because of those linguistic skills, cultural backgrounds and knowledge and, well, because of our presumed intelligence. All that personal information was hole punched in a soldier’s ID card upon induction and spewed out again when the need for certain qualifications emerged and the Ritchie selectees had passed the security checks of the FBI or other government agencies.
Our physical training was as demanding as those marches through the unvarying Texas landscape. At dusk a random team of three of us Ritchie Boys was handed a map in an unfamiliar foreign language and a compass, before being unceremoniously tossed out of a truck somewhere within a twenty-five-mile radius of the camp. “Our assembly point is marked on your maps. Be there by eleven or you will have a bit of a walk to get back to camp.” That meant if you didn’t get oriented with the aid of the map and compass, you might reach camp just in time for breakfast.
There were other challenges and hazards imposed on us trainees: an obstacle course, close combat instructions, a rifle range (I barely passed rifle training with an M-1 on my third try), a forty-eight hour continuous set of problem-solving activities, such as putting a listening device on a telephone wire. Those duties didn’t excuse us from the usual BS of routine army duties. But all those physical activities were topped by intellectual demands.
There were few aspects of up-to-date intelligence work that were not covered in our classes between reveille and taps. We studied German and Italian army organization; learned how to read aerial maps and to draw contour maps (I am surprised I passed that course given my lack of ability at draftsmanship). Also we became skilled at sending and absorbing messages in Morse code, and recognizing the significance of a prisoner’s attire and equipment. Those sartorial details ranged from the piping on a cap to the stripes, medals, and inscriptions on the prisoner’s “blouses.” We learned how to quickly extract vital information from documents composed in the legendary German bureaucratic style. We memorized whole passages from a newly published reference work, German Order of Battle. It had been composed by Ritchie Boys, posted to the Pentagon, and charged with assembling a roster of German armies and divisions likely to be our opponents during the invasion of the European continent. The book also spelled out the current strength of a unit and the names of its commanding officers.
The acquisition of those skills was just a beginning. Sooner or later, we knew we would interrogate German POWs. A lawyerly major told us the rules and techniques. “First off, you never touch a prisoner! That’s a violation of the Geneva Convention on Warfare,” he began. “There are four basic techniques to extract information,” he continued: “One: You overwhelm him with the info you already have, such as the name of his superior officers. Many prisoners will simply think, why needlessly defy the Americans when they know everything anyway? Two: If they are dying for food or a cigarette, eat something, or light up, and if they ask for a handout, say they can have it if they cooperate. Three: Play on their likes and inclinations. If your informant is a soccer fan, talk soccer to him till he forgets that you wear a different uniform. (One of my most successful interrogations during our advance through France used precisely that ploy. The prisoner’s favorite team had frequently played against mine.) Four: Find out his anxieties and fears and make him think they will soon become a reality.”
We were encouraged to practice interrogation on one another until, by way of surprise, a group of newcomers arrived at Ritchie. They were real German prisoners of war, taken during the African campaign—and they became our guinea pigs. They were briefed by high-ranking officers, in clandestine sessions, how to conduct themselves during scripted interrogations. If we, the trainees, asked the right questions and used the right techniques, they would answer. If you showed yourself inept, they were told to clam up. Such interrogations conducted under the watchful eyes of our examiners were a standard part of our final examination.
All that learning, thrown at us in a little over a month, left us dizzy and fatigued. It was a course that rivaled anything I had to face in postwar life as a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University. And yet we welcomed that challenge. This was our war, both as haters of the powers that had deprived us of our countries and by virtue of the fact that here we could help our new country, through our past upbringing and education. Many of us would not become skilled warriors, but we felt confident that we could hold our own in a battle of the mind with our adversaries. A team spirit developed among us; we became possessed by a missionary zeal.
The time for finals arrived. We were tested, sometimes only cursorily, on every subject we had been exposed to. But when it came to interrogation, our performance was observed by some of the highest brass at Camp Ritchie. The first of my two tests was designed to really confuse me. The prisoner had been told to play an utter ignoramus, disguising his huge storehouse of information. I unmasked him by using a very sophisticated German vocabulary word, the understanding of which he failed to disguise.
And the ultimate test has occasionally recurred in my dreams. We were led to a huge meadow in the midst of the camp. For this occasion of mental torture, it was specially decorated with fifty items of enemy equipment, uniforms, weapons—you name it. Our torturers had carefully numbered them, one through fifty. Then my fellow examinees and I, spaced apart, were handed sheets of papers, speared on a clip board with corresponding numbers. The instructions were terse. “Identify each object!” I don’t think anybody scored fifty out of fifty; I certainly didn’t.
After we thought that we had now passed each ordeal, we were told to assemble in the camp auditorium: “You will get your test results upon your return to camp. You are all going on maneuvers in Louisiana.” In later years I have visited that state upon numerous occasions, toured the musical and culinary offerings of New Orleans and the lovely landscapes around the bayous. But that was not the setting that greeted us. We were clustered around Camp Claiborne and banished to the rural areas along the Sabine River and to swamps abutting such metropolises as Many and Natchitoches. We slept in pup tents, anchored in the mud, and were visited by an aggressive breed of pigs called razorbacks and by unfriendly tarantulas.
The pigs were our “extras” when we undertook a picaresque act of revenge on one of our comrades: Our ranking noncom, Kurt Jasen, became the victim of our wish for egalitarianism—oh hell, let’s call it by its right name—he was a victim of our jealousy. Kurt came from a very rich family, and when we arrived at those miserable camping grounds in Louisiana, he wired his parents for relief. They promptly sent a hammock, via special delivery, so that he didn’t have to sleep in the mud and muck and among the tarantulas. He would undress at night, don a nightshirt, and stretch out comfortably, while the rest of us slept on the ground in our underwear. We thought of a scheme to break up his privileged nocturnal rest, enlisting the help of those pesky Arkansas razorbacks. The pigs constantly foraged for food; our mess sergeant had to cover garbage with rocks and even pour kerosene over all of it to prevent the garbage from being dug up again by th
e voracious porkers. While Kurt was on an assignment at headquarters one day, we dug a slit-trench underneath his hammock and filled it with garbage. Before his arrival we managed to keep the pigs away. Then we took cover in our tents when we heard Kurt return.
He had scarcely laid down in his hammock when his rest was interrupted by a hungry pig. He tried to scare it away by throwing his helmet at the beast, which availed him nothing. A single file of about a half-dozen pigs, led by an alpha boar, rushed toward the hammock, shaking it up. Out jumped our dear comrade, running ghost-like toward our tents shouting, “The pigs are after me!” For obvious reasons I never shared our secret with Kurt, not even during our long postwar years of friendship.
As for our work in Louisiana, it turned out to be a win-win situation. Each one of us was assigned to an interrogation team, part of either the red or the blue army. We had to interrogate the prisoners taken during the maneuvers. When we failed to get our “adversaries” to divulge any significant information, the line troops were praised for their security-mindedness. If we did break a prisoner, we were praised for our skill as interrogators. The maneuver in Louisiana led us Ritchie Boys back to our Jewish past and present. Until then the war had brought few such reminders. One day all Jewish soldiers were asked to report to Operational Headquarters. “I have some good news for you fellows,” said a lieutenant colonel. “We have received orders that you have been excused from duty on the first day of Passover and you are authorized to take your vehicles and drive to Shreveport for services.”
We were pleased by this sign of the fair-mindedness of our high ranking officers, and the next day our team cleaned up with particular care. We drove for about two-and-a-half hours to Shreveport, a town with a thriving Jewish community. Prior to leaving Ritchie, I had learned how to drive—that is, like the other neophytes, I was told to get into one of our jeeps, turn on the ignition, and try my luck. Now in the sparsely settled backwoods of Louisiana, I could solo without much danger of hitting a cow, a chicken, or a razorback. We arrived in good time for the public Passover observance, the service that takes place on the eve of the Passover holiday. When we filed out of the synagogue, the entire membership of the congregation had lined up on the steps. Whenever a soldier left the building, someone tapped him on the shoulder and invited him for the Seder service and dinner. For a few hours we became civilians. The highest-ranking officer who accompanied us was Lieutenant Victor Didinsky. We thoroughly disliked him because there wasn’t one army regulation that he didn’t enforce on those of lower rank. Consequently, we referred to him only by his unflattering initials. But for this occasion, he made one utterly unmilitary remark prior to the Seder: “Fellows, on this evening, there are no ranks; we are just a gathering of Jews at this nice house to celebrate Passover.” Our dislike melted.
