by Guy Stern
For me, several things contributed to the uniqueness of this religious observance. It was the first time since my fifth year that I participated in a Passover service with complete strangers. Rather than my father as the amateur cantor, there was a younger gentleman with a distinct Southern American accent in his Hebrew recitation. And the house to which we had been invited was far more opulent than any I had ever been in before. It was a celebration of the Jewish holiday that I believe none of us ever forgot. The melodies we sang, even the pronunciation of Hebrew words, were different than I had experienced either in Europe or in Saint Louis, but the tradition shone through and we soldiers enthusiastically participated.
After we returned to Camp Ritchie, the commander of each training company handed out certificates. I was promoted by several ranks, my document said, but by no means as high as some of my comrades-in-arms. Private Stern paid someone to sew the stripes of a staff sergeant on his uniform and was ready for war, he thought.
But first, in December of 1943, we found ourselves in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, for about a week. We were regaled with cultural events, among them a speech, or rather a put-down, by a nasty playwright, Lillian Hellman, who openly ridiculed questions by unsophisticated GIs. In my later years in academic leadership, I often thought back to her demeaning comments and told future teachers: “Never put down a student!”
No battle cruiser took us to England, but rather a banana boat borrowed from our Australian allies, named The Rangitata. The bowels of the ship had been readied for us; every inch of that fruit-and-vegetable boat was filled with hammocks for our nightly slumber. (Even our long underwear didn’t keep out the chilling winter storms blowing across the Atlantic.) A dining hall was not in sight; we sat on stoops and emptied Australian tins for meals. Many of us drew night watch. German U-boats were plowing the Atlantic. Equipped with field glasses, it was our task to spot the tell-tale telescope of would-be U-boat attackers. My imagination was running away with me. Because of an apocalyptic vision of being thrown into the icy ocean, my watchfulness, even though focused upon a monotonous body of water, was as intense as though my life depended on it. Of course all of our lives depended on it.
We made it to Birmingham and were housed at a make-shift army base called Pheasey Farms, already occupied by multiple British forces. There was no love lost between the two allies. When asked about their obvious reserve, our British co-inhabitants would spout their characterization of us: “You Yanks are overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here.” Their kitchen personnel found more imaginative ways to show their displeasure. At their request, enforced by the camp commandant, we Ritchie Boys were constantly put on KP (kitchen duty) and our allies as well as our antagonists pulled out, for assiduous cleaning, every quaint kitchen utensil, some of it probably dating back to the times of William the Conqueror.
Two weeks later we became part and parcel of an idyllic English small town. Broadway, England seemed unchanged from the time of Shakespeare; one of his comedies, perhaps The Merry Wives of Windsor, could have been performed on the streets without additional sets. And we, intelligence personnel, as a security measure against spies, were billeted with the private citizenry of Broadway. We were invited to outings, social occasions, and dances in the evening. But during the daytime our training continued, enhanced by a guest lecture delivered by a seasoned British intelligence officer.
It became clear to me and to my fellow Ritchie Boys that Great Britain had become an armed camp. While Broadway had been spared aerial attacks, many of the towns we passed through were severely damaged. A high-ranking officer at headquarters felt that our line troops should learn some useful German phrases. So we journeyed to picturesque English towns like Honeywell and Evesham, all bristling with American troops. And soon their quarters would be resounding, choral fashion, with such practical commands as “Hände hoch oder ich schieße,” asking Germans, none too politely, to raise their arms in the time-honored gesture of surrender.
The war came closer. Team 41, to which I was assigned, received orders in early 1944 to report for duty to Bristol, England. Unlike Broadway, Bristol, having been hit by German bombers, sported hundreds of captive balloons designed to hold off low-flying enemy aircraft. Again, as in Broadway, our quarters were scattered among security-cleared British families.
Each morning we mounted our jeeps at 6 a.m. We hastened to our destination, a British public school, according to the English designation. But to Americans, Clifton School in Bristol looked like a rather exclusive private school with a campus of manicured lawns that would have done credit to a small US liberal arts college. There were no students to be seen; Clifton School had been requisitioned by the US Army. But when we tried to enter the grounds, we were held back by formidable MP (military police) personnel. We suddenly had an inkling that we were going to report to an airtight security location. Also, letters from our “stateside” relatives had informed us that FBI agents had come around once again and had asked detailed questions about us. And we had been informed that we were given an additional security clearance, entitled “BIGOT” for reasons best known by the army. That designation ranked even above top-secret. We soon found out why. Team 41 had been assigned, albeit in a minor capacity, to be part of the planning of one of the greatest military operations ever—the invasion of Europe.
The once (and future) campus bristled with brass. The commander was General Omar Bradley, later General Courtney S. Hodges. General Eisenhower frequently dropped in. If you wanted to enter the planning room assigned to us, you had to pass several check points, and if you reentered the room after a break, the MP who had mustered you just a few minutes before acted as though he had never seen you in his life and suspected you of being a descendant of master spy Mata Hari of World War I fame or infamy.
Among our planning tasks was the selection of future sites of the POW’s enclosures beyond the initial ones on the beach heads. They had to be close but not too close to First Army Headquarters, the unit to which our team had been assigned. Camps had to be accessible to major highways for speedy evacuation of the prisoners and yet yield enough space for our bivouac area and that of ancillary units, such as MP guards. Our relatively minor task demonstrates the exquisitely detailed planning preceding the invasion.
Team 41, like everybody else, was often overwhelmed by thoughts of that impending invasion. Would everything go as planned? Yet we did not ignore the few chances for recreation, badly needed as a diversion from the reality awaiting us. We clustered around our Bristol host family. Their son, about fifteen years old, prided himself as an accomplished cricket bowler. He taught me how to twirl a cricket ball; in exchange, I showed him how a baseball pitcher executes a curve ball. We took mother and daughter along when we went to orchestra halls and theaters that were kept open in defiance of the German bombing attacks. Both women were delighted by the diversion. We once went on our own to a less classical performance on the initiative of our wheeler-dealer team member Paul. There we discovered, while the actresses divested themselves of their outer garments (and some otherwise invisible ones), that their delicate undies had given way to more robust textiles, a wartime exigency.
The high point of our theatrical experiences came shortly before D-Day. Trucks were made available to take any Bristol-based GI to Stratford-on-Avon. We theater aficionados returned at midnight from a riveting performance of Much Ado about Nothing. That first visit to Stratford is one that stays in my mind till today with every detail retained. I, of course, internally cheered the exoneration of the heroine, Hero; but as a lover of language, I was inordinately amused by the malapropisms of Constable Dogberry. I had been well prepared by my parents for the sophistication of this performance through our visits to the Hildesheim Theater.
Another leisure activity, more athletic in nature, sticks in my mind as well. At one point, I had the privilege of joining into competition with our British allies. Someone at USO Headquarters had hit on the less than innovative idea of turning the obvious rivalry
between Brits and Yanks into a friendly sporting duel, through an international (hands-across-the-table) table tennis match between the two Allied forces stationed in Bristol. In my spare time I had played at the local USO; my non-existent fame must have preceded me. I, a newly minted US citizen, was to help represent the Red, White, and Blue against its former colonial masters. I won my match; in fact, we resoundingly beat the Brits. Then they asked for an immediate return match—with darts and dartboard. In that competition we were blanked.
D-Day snuck in by surprise. As history now records, General Eisenhower made up his mind to launch the invasion on June 6, 1944, only after hearing the latest weather forecasts. Team 41 got its first orders; three of us were “to go in” the next day, on D+1. The other three team members, I among them, were on stand-by orders. To stand by meant being glued to the radio and trying to interpret every remark overheard at our listening post at Clifton School in Bristol. In the afternoon of D+3, I wanted to escape the tension. A large tent near our private headquarters had been converted into an army movie theater. I went in to see the hyped-up film Shine on Harvest Moon, starring Ann Sheridan, who pretended to launch into the title song within the first twenty minutes. More I do not know about that saga of romance under the lights of the harvest moon because, shortly, the very real lights in the tent went on. A voice came over the loudspeaker, “The following officers and enlisted men will immediately report to their quarters and be ready to join a convoy within a half-hour or less.”
We were on the road to the seaport city of Southampton; I was driving one of our jeeps, the first time I did long-distance driving on the left side of the road, “not on the right side, as God had intended,” one of us wisecracked. One street in Southampton had apparently been cleared of vehicles in anticipation of our serpentine convoys. I parked. Ahead of me was a jeep driven by a dapper captain. He seemed to be the only US soldier not beset by anxiety. He calmly took off his helmet, went into one of the houses, came out with his helmet full of steaming hot water, and calmly started to shave. The proprietor of the house appeared, watched the intrepid captain for a moment, and provided a commentary for us onlookers: “I am sure this fine-looking gentleman never thought that one day he would be shaving in the streets of Southhampton!” The convoy started to move again. Vehicle by vehicle, we drove our jeeps onto a landing craft. The invasion had started for us.
CHAPTER FIVE
Going to War
Several of us GIs, standing shoulder to shoulder, managed to hide our fears; none of us was free of them. As for me, not only did I share the anxieties of the soldiers all around me, I had a few special ones of my own, too. Naturally I painted a bleak picture of my future if the Germans were to capture me, a German-born Jew. Also, ever since boyhood, I was unreasonably squeamish. A cut finger chased me out of a room, and I refused to listen to records of songs or fairy tales with tragic episodes. How would I fare ashore with its predictable remnants of carnage?
The landing craft dumped us close to shore; our water-proofed jeep covered the remaining distance. I looked around. Yes, there were the expected vestiges of warfare. Corpses were lining the beaches. And surprise upon surprise: the me who shied away from a cut finger was utterly unfazed by the grosser sights. Even to this day I can’t explain my childhood idiosyncrasy nor my recovery from it during the Invasion. One psychologist said that I must have had an unfortunate experience in childhood and that I banished it from my subconscious during the Invasion. But he failed to explain why it returned when I was a civilian again.
There was no time to absorb the French landscape. From somewhere in the distance, my teammate, Kurt Jasen, already two days on French soil, was hollering at me: “Get the hell over here, Stern! We’ve got too many f-ing prisoners.”
Five minutes later I was confronting a tough-looking German noncom from an artillery unit. Abandoned crates had to do as interrogation chairs and tables. Like the makeshift furniture, I too, must have looked improvisational. At any rate, my first prisoner responded to none of my questions. He’d obviously been thoroughly briefed on his rights. “I’m only obliged to reveal my name, rank and serial number,” he replied to one of my first questions. He repeatedly invoked the same agreement during subsequent questions. I felt utterly inadequate, stripped of all my Camp Ritchie skills. My subconscious hammered me with the words “failure” and “loser.” Then a German shell came over; we both ducked. But I rapidly got up before him. Perhaps my opponent attributed that random act to a spirit of death defiance rather than my inexperience. He, of course, knew that artillery weapons were usually fired in successive spurts. I regained all my Ritchie resoluteness. My questions became more menacing. He answered, dammit and hallelujah, he answered—and in detail. I had won my first battle and felt that I towered over my prisoner, who in reality was a good bit taller than I.
Team 41 was together again. Two other IPW (Interrogators of Prisoners of War) teams joined us and pitched their tents at the same bivouac area. The next morning, our commanding officer, Captain Rust, who had learned German in Brownsville, Texas, gave out assignments. “Sergeant Stern, by all reports, you are supposed to be good at sorting out people. You’ll be one of our screeners. Go pick out POWs who appear knowledgeable and who seem to be ready to spill the beans. We’ve gotta work fast!” His implied compliment assuaged my disappointment of being merely a screener rather than an interrogator. I followed orders and did my best during the first month in Normandy. Judging by the reports of the interrogators who had to question my selectees, I did pick some live POWs, though there were occasional complaints as well, pointing out that I had also hit on some real duds. My telltale mark was the readiness of the POWs to answer some revealing questions at greater length and their use of a more sophisticated German.
After about three weeks, the work became repetitive. Of course I knew better than to ask for a change of assignment. Chance encounters once more came to the fore. They took the form of three veterans of the Spanish Civil War, captured by the Germans and put to work for the Nazi cause. They were Spanish engineers who had fought for the Spanish Republic, escaped to France after Franco’s victory, had been captured there after the German invasion of France, and were finally shipped to the Channel Islands to help fortify them against an Allied attempt to retake them.
Captain Rust briefed me: “They seem to know a lot about the fortifications of Jersey and Guernsey. They don’t speak German or English, but then you are touted as our Spanish speaker. Go interrogate them!” It was the easiest interrogation I ever had before or after. They were delighted with my college Spanish and only asked for large notepaper, pen, pencil, and eraser. I brought them food and drink as well. They were off sitting at a makeshift table and were drawing for hours. I occasionally watched; there was no gun emplacement nor underwater obstacle they left unrecorded. Finally, they turned several legal-size sheets over to me. Waving them in triumph, I rushed over to Captain Rust. He was awestruck. “Quite an interrogation, Sergeant Stern!” he commented in his slow Texas drawl. I did not disabuse him. His face became pensive. “I think I can make better use of you as an interrogator. I have something specific in mind. We are getting all these questionnaires from higher and lower headquarters. I’ll show you.”
Indeed, there was no shortage of them. Challenging questions were being showered on us: How did the Germans manage to repair bombed-out railroad tracks and rolling stock in record time? Were any infectious diseases rampant among the Germans that could, upon contact, also afflict us Americans? How did we estimate the morale of German line troops? What were our most and least effective propaganda leaflets? “I need a survey section,” Rust concluded. “I will reassign some of our interrogators to report to you. And you’ll be in charge, Sergeant Stern, of preparing reports in answer to those questionnaires.”
I rushed back to my three Spaniards to share the captain’s praise and asked them one final question: how had they managed to escape? But on that one they balked. One careless word and they would endange
r the islanders who had obviously helped them. I sent them on their way, loaded with C-rations, to a camp for liberated allies. “If we are ordered to retake those islands,” commented Captain Rust, “we are damn well ready, Stern.”
I gloried in my new assignment. This was something I felt sure I could do. As a high school and college student, I had loved writing term papers, semester reports and reviews, pulling information together from multiple sources. My new task was essentially no different, except I would now gather data not from printed sources of reference but from unwary or willing enemy soldiers. Oh, yes, we did it: over the following months my comrades and I would answer all those queries essential to the war effort. Railroad specialists told us that the Germans’ rapid repairs rested on the manufacture of prefab tracks and other railroad parts. Medical personnel, from lowly medics to a one-star general, assured us that the German troops harbored no epidemic diseases. German line officers, with a bit of pressure, told us that the morale of German troops could undergo sudden shifts, depending on such vagaries as supplies, casualties in their ranks, and the availability of good leadership (that only they themselves were able to supply).
