by Ray Lambert
Stillman’s may have been a pugilist’s palace, but it was also a gym, a real gym, which meant it smelled of sweat and probably blood. You didn’t want to eat there, off the floor or anywhere else. But it was a thrill to be in the place where the famous names of boxing past and present had learned their craft.
The bout I remember best pitted me against a guy from another unit in the division who turned out to have been a pro and held a championship belt in his life before the military. He didn’t knock me out, but he got me pretty good. I may still have the bruises to prove it.
And then there was Smokey.
Smokey was a friend of mine in our unit, an Italian American who, for all the world, looked like a character right out of the funny pages—what we called the newspaper comics back then. He was short and fought as a flyweight; he was probably punching up a weight class or two even so. He always had a sawed-off cigar in his mouth and reminded us of the sparring partner of a famous cartoon fighter, Joe Palooka. Who of course was named Smokey, which is where his nickname came from.
Tough little guy.
Smokey and Palooka, by the way, would follow us to war. But while there were premonitions, we didn’t know what lay ahead.
* * *
I’m not sure what we would have done if we did. Despite the buildup of the army, the country wasn’t ready for real war. People didn’t think about our position in the world anywhere near the way we do now. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans seemed like immense barriers, and even folks with relatives in Europe and Asia tended to think the U.S. was immune to the problems over there. Europe was the “old world.” We were the new.
Maybe so, but that wasn’t going to protect us too much longer. We were about to find out that you can’t hide behind an ocean when the rest of the world is at war.
I know from our perspective now, the war should have seemed inevitable. By the fall of 1940, London was being bombed nightly. The attacks were gruesome. A reporter I later met and admired, Ernie Pyle, described one of the attacks with words that sound almost like poetry, yet are awful in their grim reality:
London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines.
How could anyone imagine any corner of the world would be safe after that?
Romance, Then Love
There were plenty of other things to focus on, at least for me.
Like love and romance.
Soldiers were popular with the girls, and wherever we were stationed, the USO or some similar organization would put on dances and the like. We were moved up to Fort Jay on Governors Island in New York City, and that was a gold mine for dating. Girls would come over and we’d meet for the dance at the USO building. Unfortunately, they had a strict rule—once inside, no girl could leave without a chaperone. And there were MPs at the door to enforce it.
That cut down on the “necking” for sure. But you could get the girl’s phone number and maybe a date for later on.
Manhattan was a ferry ride away. We’d go over to Times Square and have our pick of the ladies. And the entertainers and big shows were pretty good to servicemen. I remember the time we all got tickets to see an up-and-coming singer. The tickets were free, on the condition that we bring a date. The young singer’s promoters wanted the girls to sit in the front rows and scream.
Really. Someone would hold up a sign on the stage telling them to do just that. The show was being broadcast live on the radio, so to the audience the screams seemed spontaneous. So we had hype as well as sex back then.
The singer’s name was Frank Sinatra. I guess those promoters knew what they were doing.
But it was actually in Denver, when I was sent for training at Fitzsimons, that Cupid’s arrow first found its bull’s-eye in my heart.
We had a day off, and three or four of us went out to a riding stable where we could take out some horses and picnic. We were near the barn when a group of girls came over and started chatting. They were pretty and easy to talk to. I hit it off with a girl whose name was Helen.
“What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m a singer.”
“That’s nice. Maybe I can hear you sing sometime.”
“How about tonight?”
She told me she was singing at a club nearby that evening. Naturally, my friends and I had to go to the club. I didn’t quite realize that the young woman I’d taken a fancy to was a celebrity, the lead female singer in the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.
Helen was Helen O’Connell. Not that the name meant much to me when we first met. Nor did her fame. What mattered was that she was fun to be with, as good a listener as she was a singer. Smart and vivacious, pretty—I could go on for quite a while with all the adjectives and still not describe her quite right.
Is it any surprise that “Green Eyes,” a song she made popular with Bob Eberly and the Dorsey band, is still one of my favorites?
Between her sets that first night, Helen came and sat with us. Over the next few days, while we were both in Denver, we spent as much time with each other as we could. If it wasn’t love—and I’m not saying it was or wasn’t—it was certainly an infatuation on both our parts.
It continued when I went back east. The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra is not as well known today as the outfit of a similar name led by Jimmy’s younger brother Tommy Dorsey, but in its day it was headline material, with a string of hits from 1939 well into the war years. The musicians went all over the country, performing for full houses. Jimmy Dorsey played clarinet and saxophone, and a number of jazz greats credit him with influencing their style. The band’s swing-style jazz often had a strong, very danceable beat, and duets between Helen and Eberly were both innovative and extremely popular.
Helen’s travels took her not only to New York and Massachusetts, where my unit was later assigned, but the South. We were able to see each other several times. But time and distance work on love affairs like acid on metal. By the fall of 1941, our passions had cooled, or maybe the reality of our different directions had set in.
But I had set my sights on another young woman, one just as pretty: Estelle Saunders.
Estelle
We were on maneuvers in North Carolina, camping amid the peach groves in the rolling hillsides west of Fort Bragg near Biscoe. Sunday came along, and I headed over to a local church. It had a small, friendly congregation, and when the service was over the deacon invited a group of us to his house for Sunday dinner, the big midday meal.
It turned out the deacon had two daughters—Estelle, about my age, and Becky, a few years younger. Estelle was a knockout. That wasn’t just my opinion; she’d been a runner-up in a Miss North Carolina contest not too long before.
There was a lot more to her than looks. She had a friendly personality, a forgiving nature, and a lot of patience. I found her very easy to talk to. Something sparked between us almost immediately—love, whatever that is.
When the time came for us to get back to camp, I asked her if she minded if I called on her.
She did not mind. On the contrary, she rather liked the idea.
I went back two days later. We quickly became an item. I saw her as much as I could while we were camped nearby, and then kept in touch as much as possible over the next weeks and months. It was a quick, intense courtship, but not without its hurdles. I think it’s fair to say that Estelle’s mom was not thrilled with the idea of a soldier seeing her daughter. She assigned Becky as our chaperone anytime we wanted to go out. Efforts to get around this were unsuccessful; the single time we managed to sneak off alone to a dance place—more like a small roadhouse out on a country road—Mrs. Saunders found out and sent her husband to fetch us home.
Worse, she arranged to sit in her front room every time Estelle and I sat together—or almost together—on the porch at the front of the house. Hard to steal a kiss with Mom glaring t
hrough the window at you.
As far as I can remember, I managed it exactly once.
As sweet as that kiss was, I wanted more. With my unit now assigned to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, the prospect of seeing Estelle on a regular basis was pretty dim. Unless, of course, we married.
Now, here I was, in the army, no job beyond that. No money to speak of, beyond Uncle Sam’s paycheck. What right did I have asking someone to marry me?
None. But I did love her. And I was sure I would spend the rest of my life with her.
I guess she cared a lot about me, too, because she looked past the negatives and said yes when I asked.
The deacon advised against it—in fairness, we hadn’t known each other all that long, and I was making the not-too-princely sum of twenty-one dollars a month in the army, a poor wage even then. But Estelle persuaded him to approve. I don’t know if it was me he valued, though I like to think that I cut a good figure as a prospective son-in-law: I didn’t smoke, I rarely drank alcohol, and in fact to that point in my life had never been drunk. I went to church, and I was advancing through the enlisted ranks in the army. I was from the rural South and had worked hard all my life.
Then again, Estelle could be very persuasive. In any event, her father not only gave his blessing, but promised to bring her mom around as well.
We started talking about wedding dates.
Then, right around the time we were planning to get married, our world changed dramatically: the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Three
Infamy and England
“Real War”
Your mind plays tricks when you look back. Things that should be sharp and crisp blur. Odd events, people you barely knew and places you rarely visited, suddenly become sharp.
It’s not just age, though that’s there. It’s just how the mind works.
So when I say that I’m not exactly sure of where I was when I heard the first news of the Japanese attack, or the circumstances that brought me there, I hope you’ll understand.
I think I was in Selma, possibly for my grandmother’s funeral. I know Estelle and I were planning on getting married right around that time. It was undoubtedly a normal, quiet Sunday in every respect, right up until mid-afternoon. The first we heard was probably from neighbors, telling us to turn on the radio and hear reports similar to this one, which came from Honolulu:
Hello, NBC. Hello, NBC. This is KTU in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am speaking from the roof of the Advertiser Publishing Company Building. We have witnessed this morning the . . . full battle of Pearl Harbor and the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done . . . It is no joke. It is a real war . . .
My brother was with me in Selma, and our first thought was that we would be immediately called back to the regiment. As best I can remember, he called headquarters that afternoon and managed to talk to someone in charge, who said no orders had been given to return. Estelle and I went ahead with our plans, and married on January 8, 1942. There was no honeymoon. I headed back to Massachusetts and Fort Devens right after the wedding.
1942: World at War
The winter of 1941–42 was the low point of the war, not only for the United States, but for the Allies in general. America declared war on Japan December 8, 1941. Germany declared war on the U.S. a few days later, and of course we returned the favor.
Japan was on the move, taking Singapore in mid-February and the Philippines by May. Singapore was British; the Philippines, an American commonwealth pending a transition to full independence. The American army and Philippine soldiers fought an extended campaign against the Japanese, who though outnumbered steadily increased pressure and tightened the noose around the defenders over time. Douglas MacArthur’s famous “I Shall Return” speech sounds thrilling now, but at the time it was only a bunch of very brave words, and very possibly an empty prediction.
Not that we soldiers felt that way. We were eager to fight, angry that we’d been attacked, and sure that we could beat anyone. Maybe too sure.
In Europe, Adolf Hitler had launched an invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. His armies had stopped just short of Moscow. The long Russian winter would take its toll on the Nazis, but that wasn’t clear in the first half of 1942. The German army went back on the offensive once the weather cleared. The Russians suffered immense casualties, far greater than the U.S. or any of its allies eventually would. The battle for Stalingrad, now seen as the turning point in the war on the eastern front, was far in the future.
Half of France was occupied by the Germans; the other half was a puppet state. Jews were being rounded up and taken to be slaughtered. The Germans were still bombing England.
They were also waging war in northern Africa, working with their Italian allies. Since 1940, they had fought back and forth with the British in the desert and high hills. With the arrival of German general Erwin Rommel and the relatively well-equipped units that would form the Afrika Korps in early 1941, the Germans began building momentum. In January 1942, Rommel shocked the British by launching an offensive just at the point where they thought his forces were depleted. Helped by newly arrived American tanks and other equipment, the British avoided total catastrophe, but only just. In June, they would lose Tobruk and 351,000 men would enter the rolls as POWs. This defeat, known as the Battle of Gazala, ranks as one of Great Britain’s worst in all its history. It would turn out to be Rommel’s greatest victory and his high-water mark.
With war waging on both sides of America, President Roosevelt, Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, and our other leaders debated where to put our country’s priorities. While they decided the U.S. would fight a two-front war, taking on Japan and Germany at the same time, Europe became the main priority for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that Hitler seemed very close to total victory there.
Stop him now, while Great Britain was still in the fight and could be used as a base and staging area, or never stop him.
A Last Night with My Wife
I, of course, had nothing to do with those sorts of decisions; as a T-4 and then a T-3—“Technician 4” and “Technician 3,” ranks roughly equivalent to and usually called sergeant—I worried about my job and my unit, and little else. At the same time, there were plenty of rumors about which way we were heading. Mostly, they predicted that we’d ship out to Great Britain.
We kept training. I wangled my way into special rifle training, qualifying as a marksman and earning a badge. Ordinarily, medics didn’t carry weapons, not even pistols; our job in combat was to help the wounded, and according to the Geneva Conventions we were not supposed to fight or be fired upon. In combat, our helmets would have large red crosses; we would have armbands with the same very visible insignia.
I took the course anyway. It’s possible I was the only medic who did that, at least in the 16th. Since I’d hunted from the time I was a boy, the course wasn’t all that difficult; I imagine a lot of guys who’d grown up in farm country found it a breeze, especially when it came to firing the M1 Garand. The rifle was a revolutionary battle weapon, a semiautomatic firing a .30-caliber bullet from an eight-round clip. You could fire as quickly as you pulled the trigger, a great advantage in combat over the earlier bolt-action Springfield and the rifles used by other armies at the beginning of the war. The recoil was light, and the iron sights on the gun allowed an experienced rifleman to adjust for conditions with good results out to a few hundred yards.
I earned a Marksman Badge with Rifle bar when I was done. Being good with a gun was a fine skill to have, no matter what your actual job was. If nothing else, it gave you the confidence that you could defend yourself if things went really bad.
* * *
At some point in late spring, around the beginning or middle of June, we were sent to a camp in Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania and put under quarantine. The time had come to ship out. We were headed for Great Britain, and I w
as selected to lead an advance party of medics.
As excited as I was to do the job, I had one reservation: I knew we’d be gone for a long time, and I wanted to see my wife before I left.
Impossible.
But nothing is truly impossible, not in the army. I had a talk with my commanding officer.
He was sympathetic but made no promises. The next day or thereabouts, he told me that I would be allowed to meet my wife in town for one last good-bye.
“Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone else,” he ordered.
“Great,” I said. “But if I can’t leave the base to make the arrangements, where are we supposed to go?”
He frowned. I guess he hadn’t gotten quite that far in solving the problem. But he soon took care of it. I got word to my wife to meet me in town, and on the appointed day an MP showed up at my barracks and took me to an apartment that had been set aside for us.
We thoroughly enjoyed our hours together. So much so, in fact, that my son Arthur was conceived. Not that either of us knew it for certain at the time.
England and All
We left for England on June 30, 1942, in The Duchess of Bedford, an impressive two-smokestack cruise ship that had been converted for use as a troop carrier by the British. Before the war, the Canadian-owned steamship had gained a reputation not only for luxury but for rolling in heavy seas, earning the nickname “Drunken Duchess.”
The 20,000-ton liner was one of eight troop and supply ships that sailed with sixteen escorts in the middle of the night from New York Harbor for Liverpool. There were between twenty-five and thirty guys with me, assigned to various tasks. Two or three were medics, who were to help me scout out the facilities and get ourselves ready for the full regiment, which was due a few weeks later.
