Do you remember when we bought Robert the electric train the Christmas we were stationed at Sykes and Bob didn’t know he was going to get it, in spite of the carpenter setting up the table and Gooding working on the electrical gadgets? Do you remember how Bob looked, just as though the train and the tracks had dropped out of the sky, and how he kept walking around and around in a sort of daze as though he couldn’t believe it and then how we couldn’t pry him loose from that electric train for weeks? Well, that’s how I feel about this Thing and all the lovely gadgets that go with it. I feel just like a kid at Christmas and maybe sometimes I act that way. I keep getting up in the middle of the night and hopping in a jeep just to see it’s all pinned down and hasn’t moved somewhere else. I keep wanting to go right over across the street and try it out on the other gang. Believe me, it’s going to be good, and I think I’m going to know how to work it. I ought to after that Italian business, even if I finally bust a gut. Well, you go and ask the Chief, and you might tell Bob and Charley that they really handed the old man something. It won’t hurt them to know that the old man has kind of made good on his own and that some people think well of him for all the scrabbling around he’s done out here. I sort of wish you were here to see it.
Old Baldy is the number one in these parts, as maybe you can imagine if you’ve been talking to the Chief. The other night he asked a couple of us to his little shanty to dinner—it looked as though it belonged to a duke or something—to show us off to the Big Boy himself and some of the little big boys who were with him. I hadn’t seen Big Boy since North Africa and he’s grown some. Funny our paths never crossed, but you remember what Pershing said about him? He’d never known him either. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know he chewed the fat with me for several minutes and asked me to look him up if I was ever around the big city. I won’t if I can help it. I’m an outdoor boy, and the high echelons always make me sweat, and when I sweat I stink. I can just hear you saying I always get coarse when I’m with troops. Everybody sends you their love, though, and a lot of them remember old times.
I laughed to read about you and Enid and the picture puzzles. Life is quite a picture puzzle in itself, isn’t it?—one you never finish because something’s always jiggling the table. Just take it easy now. I’m doing fine. All that worries me is that this island may sink with what we’ve got on it, even with the barrage balloons to hold it up, but that’s an old one, isn’t it? I’m glad Bob’s moving out. I wish I might have seen him, but tell him from me I know he’ll be good. How could he help it, considering who his mama is? The washcloths will come in handy the next time I have to hit the dirt. Give Charley a slap in the pants and tell him I’ll write him tomorrow.
With love,
MEL
There were some other letters, too, but this one seemed pretty well to cover the situation. Anyone who had been in preinvasion England could add in all the color himself. Old P. T. Barnum should have been alive to have seen it because it really was the greatest show on earth. It was something to be a part of that show and to have been right in the first team with the Silver Leaf Armored and with the teammates. It was a page of history, and if he was just one of the punctuation marks, still he was on the page, and anyone could read it without his doing much further talking. However, in case anything more was needed, he did have a newspaper clipping which he could show for what it was worth. He never suspected at the time that he was talking for publication, since he was not one of those field runners who made the papers, and there were too many stars anyway on that all-star, all-American team. Yet maybe this was not accurate—the British were on the team, too. At any rate when a newspaper correspondent named Al Crouch came around, Mel Goodwin never thought seriously that this would mean any kind of feature article, and after all, it only appeared in the Sunday supplement of a newspaper in upstate New York, but it might as well be included in the record.
Actually it made me a little homesick for the great days when I read it. Its journalistic language was characteristic of those days, and I had participated in many similar efforts when I had been in Public Relations. I could remember no correspondent named Al Crouch, but then, accredited correspondents were as thick as flies before the invasion. It was utterly characteristic that he did not call himself Albert Crouch, but just plain Al. All those correspondents were always abbreviating their first names. They had to be tough even if they were 4–F and wore glasses. The dispatch was simply dated “Somewhere in England, 1944,” and it had appeared in print only after the invasion. The headline was “Al Crouch Looks Them Over.…”
Your correspondent took a busman’s holiday today, spending his time visiting, instead of an Air Force outfit, an American armored division on a wind-swept English moor. He had the good fortune, on dropping into its headquarters, an uninvited guest, to ran smack into its commanding officer, Major General Melville A. Goodwin.
Some division!
If you have been around for a while on this tight little island you get hep to an outfit that’s ready and rarin’ to go, and, oh brother, this one was prancin’! And when you’ve rattled around enough among the big brass hats, you get to know when a man’s a real guy.
Some guy, this cocky young fighting divisional CO, with his words that hit you like a punch in the midriff and his infectious, boyish smile!
Some guy, this Mel Goodwin, right from the top of his battle-buffeted helmet with the two stars riveted on it, down to the toes of his GI shoes. No funny business—all fight and a yard wide!
Maybe you folks around Syracuse have never heard of Mel. It’s your loss if you haven’t, but the Mel Goodwins that make this army strut its stuff aren’t the kind you see at peacetime tea parties or handing out E award pins. In case you haven’t heard of Mel Goodwin, here’s the pitch, as Colonel “Long John” Gooch, his chief of staff, handed it to me hot off the griddle.
Melville A. Goodwin, born in the tiny town of Hallowell, New Hampshire (ever hear of it? I hadn’t), where his father was for many years the local druggist and where young Mel once jerked a few sodas himself (but maybe this ought to be off the record!). Young Mel got out of West Point just in time to knock out two German machine guns personally in World War I, and win the DSC and Croix de guerre with palm. He may not mention it himself, but he got all these things again in World War II and a shoulder wound for refusing to be evacuated in a little mix-up with some of Rommel’s bad boys, and then a couple of swift one-twos at Salerno.
“Hell,” he says, with that smile of his, “forget about the ribbons, son! I think perhaps they shower down a little easier when you get pushed up to the top of the heap.” Anyway, no GI in that armored outfit would agree with him. As Staff Sergeant Milton I. Hawker (Rochester, N. Y.) put it, when I brought up the subject, “That guy doesn’t look in mirrors. He doesn’t have to use mirrors.”
At any rate, I ran smack into “that guy” just as I reached headquarters, and the word is you run into “that guy” everywhere. This division is definitely his baby, and every one of its GIs is one of Mel Goodwin’s kids. Don’t ask me how.
“Well, son,” he said to me, “tag along if you want to look around.”
We just hopped into a nearby jeep. The General did the driving himself, a lot of it on two wheels.
Funnily enough, everybody seemed glad to see “that guy” whenever he stopped the jeep. He just fitted in naturally with the GIs. For instance, there was Pfc. Martin J. Flynn (Albany, N. Y.) taking a BAR to pieces.
“Here, son,” General Goodwin said, “let’s see if I can still do that.” A little group gathered around him just like kids watching teacher. “I haven’t fussed around with one of those things since Africa,” he said, tossing the BAR back to Pfc. Flynn. “It’s nice to know I can still do it. It may be useful to me where we’re going in case I see one lying around.”
This one got a good laugh.
With all that automatic fire power—the General pointed out to that serious-faced little group—all you had to do was to spray it out
in front of you and keep walking.
“And I’ll be walking with you,” he said, “whenever we aren’t riding. We’ll just stop now and then and stretch our legs this summer. Summer’s a great season over in France—in case we should be going there.”
This got another laugh. He could really tickle the boys.
“Of course it might be that one or two of us may sprain an ankle,” he said, “but there’ll be nurses to massage it and you can take it from me, a lot of very sharp-looking nurses are coming over.”
And so it went for three hours all up and down the line. Hard-bitten, tanned, alert Mel Goodwin had the old army “pro” stamped over every inch of him. In spite of that quiet kidding manner, he always had the authority. He had so much that he could handle it carelessly, just as I have seen an old bar fly hold a glass. That was why he could rub shoulders with the toughest GI in the outfit, drop into a company mess hall as we did, scrounge a cup of hot java and sit exchanging salty wisecracks with the mess “sarge” and the KPs.
As Corporal Wally Sterner (Bath, N. Y.) laughingly confided: “You kinda don’t mind the fact he’s got stars and all the chicken gut over his left pocket.”
A private with a paintbrush was stenciling initials on the side of a truck—RTA.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Mel Goodwin regarded the truck quizzically.
“It’s sort of alphabet soup,” he quipped, “but it’s the division motto—Right There Anyhow—RTA. Maybe it sounds simple to you, but combat is a pretty simple thing. In fact you can sum it up in just one word.”
“What word?” I inquired curiously.
His eyes looked cold and icy blue. Maybe his mind was moving across the Channel to the Great Adventure.
“Guts,” he said, “four letters, son. Don’t laugh at it.”
I did not laugh at it because it sounded all right coming from Major General Mel Goodwin on that wind-swept British moor.
“American troops when handled by competent command are in my opinion the best soldiers in the world,” he said. “I think I know how to lead troops, with God’s help. Sometimes in battle you get pretty close to God. What was it the Marine said? There ain’t no atheists in foxholes. Yes, son, you wake up sometimes at night and think a lot of lonely thoughts when you wear stars and face the fact that you’re in charge of all these men, with no excuses and only yourself to blame. I hope I know my business because I think I’ve got the best damned division in the world. I mean I know.”
Then his mood changed. First he smiled and then he laughed.
“Hell,” he said, “I wouldn’t swap my job for Eisenhower’s. You see, I like it here.”
You had the feeling that everything in General Goodwin’s division was squared away—oh, oh, I didn’t mean to use navy talk.
Well, anyway, come D day, H hour and M minute, this scribe knows one rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ outfit that’s going to hit the beach and one general who isn’t going to do his fighting in any dugout. When I left them the sun was going down, the bugles were sounding retreat, and Mel Goodwin was saluting his flag. There was a lump in my throat when I drove away from there, but my chin was a little higher. I was a little prouder that I was an American and I was good and mad, too, mad at that army doctor who found that I had a heart murmur and flat feet. You see, really and truly I wanted to go Right There Anyhow, too! I wanted to throw in with that swell bunch! I wanted to hit the beach with Goodwin!
It was hard to see why this cracker-barrel sage had not driven Mel Goodwin nuts in May 1944. The General could not have been courting publicity. If he had been he would not have shot the works to an unsyndicated correspondent like Al Crouch. I could attribute part of his compliance to the respect and apprehension with which some high-ranking officers regarded the press, and also, perhaps Mel Goodwin had been lonely out there on his moor, not that I believed it was a moor. He may have leaned on this Al Crouch as he had on me in Paris, desirous of talking to someone who was out of the chain of command, someone to whom he could explain some of the things that everyone around him took for granted.
In spite of his clichés and ephemeral journalese, Al Crouch did have perceptive sensitivity of a sort. Despite the lapse of time, Al Crouch could make you see something of what he saw. Those direct quotes of his, one of modern journalism’s greatest banes, he had doubtless drawn from his memory, but they sounded so real that I could hear Mel Goodwin’s voice. In the end you began to distrust your own sophistication. If I had been there with Al Crouch, I, too, would have wished that I could throw in with that swell bunch and hit the beach with Mel Goodwin, even though I would have been of no great help had I hit it.
When Myra Fineholt read that piece aloud, I had the feeling that she, too, wanted to hit the beach and so did Phil Bentley. Naturally Phil concealed his emotions, and, as he had a good ear for prose, the piece must have hurt him even more than it did me.
“Well,” Phil Bentley said, “Mr. Crouch certainly gave you all he had.”
Mel Goodwin looked at Phil Bentley self-consciously.
“Well, frankly,” he said, “I know you can do better than that, Phil. That Crouch, now I come to think of it, was a funny sort of Joe, but he liked the old Silver Leaf, and anybody who liked the Silver Leaf goes down all right with me. Maybe I’m a ham actor at heart. There’s always that temptation in front of troops.”
I could see Phil Bentley’s face light up, and Myra was writing it down. It would make a good caption under one of the photographs—a ham actor at heart.
“Frankly,” Mel Goodwin said, “I was surprised when I saw that clipping. He sent it to me and asked me for my photograph. I don’t believe I said all those things, but just the same, it gives you a sort of working idea.”
I saw Colonel Flax squirm uneasily.
“You’re right,” Phil Bentley said, “I’d have done it differently, but it does give you an idea.”
“Well, there it is for what it’s worth,” Mel Goodwin said. “If he’s shot the works, so have I. I’ve been shooting them all over the place for you, Phil, and you’ve got me pinned right down. I keep living things all over again.”
Mel Goodwin paused, and we could see him thinking, half happily and half sadly, with much the same expression I must have worn when I told Camilla about my roller skates.
“You know,” he said, “if I say so myself, I used to be a good pistol shot, not that I’m so bad right now. In fact I believe I could have made the army team once if Mrs. Goodwin hadn’t discouraged it. She always had an idea it didn’t get you anywhere going around to shooting matches. Well, I used to have the sweetest forty-five. It fitted into my hand so that every line of my palm seemed to fill some part of the grip. I really think I could have plugged the head out of a dime with it snap shooting. It got to be a part of me, that forty-five. I left it back in Washington when I went out on ‘Torch’ because I wanted Bob to have some personalized gift from me, even though he isn’t any better than an average shot. Well, Bob mislaid it somewhere around Leyte. That’s all right, but I still get thinking about that gun. Sometimes I wonder where it is now … all rusted somewhere in the bush, I guess.”
The General held his hand in front of him as though he were gripping the memory of it.
“Now that gun,” he said, “is sort of like the old Silver Leaf. Of course nothing can be precise that’s made up of a number of thousand human beings all suffering wear and tear, but by and large the Silver Leaf was an efficient unit according to any set of standards. At any rate my greatest moments were with it. I guess I was made to head a division like the Silver Leaf. Everybody’s made for something, and maybe the better you get at doing one thing, the less good you are at coping with other things … maybe.”
The General’s face had a sad, half-empty look. It was the first time I had ever seen sadness in him, and the first time also that he seemed to be face to face with a situation that he could not quite estimate.
“Well,” he said, “where’s the old Silver Leaf
now? It’s all in pieces like one of those alarm clocks I used to disassemble when I was a kid. It isn’t anywhere. What’s going to happen to people like me? Sometimes I think of all the casualties and dollars it cost to turn me into what I am. Maybe I was useful once, but what’s the point of it now, when I’m not really wanted any more? Oh, yes, I’ll get something. Maybe I’ll even be a permanent colonel, pushing or hauling on something, but maybe—I don’t mean to bellyache—but maybe I ought to be pushing daisies along the Rhine along with a lot of the old Silver Leaf crowd.”
Melville Goodwin stopped. It seemed to me that his voice had ended on a note of surprise when he reached that logical conclusion, and the worst of it was I found myself thinking that he might have been right. The power and the glory were gone, evaporated into a thin haze of memory.
Colonel Flax looked uncomfortable. From the Public Relations angle such a conclusion indicated an emotional instability that was not for the good of the service.
“Now, General,” he said, “you don’t mean that.”
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 44
