One weekend, a large group of soldiers, NCOs and all, went over the hill. They left quietly without passes around Saturday noon and reported back for duty Monday morning. I didn’t go: I was already on shale detail, and an AWOL charge would have been a double whammy. Rohaly reacted by submitting a request to the company commander for numerous NCOs to be reduced in rank. When the regimental commander got the request, he was smart enough to know that when NCOs go over the hill, a failure of leadership is the root cause. Following a brief investigation, he reduced the punishment for those who had gone AWOL and relieved the company commander. I learned a lesson I later used as an officer: never administer mass punishment.
Our new company commander, Capt. Gustav Hoffman, was ideal. He was very hard but also very fair. In my later career, I used him as a guide, and always looked up to him as a role model. One of the first things he did at company formation was make sure that everyone realized that he was the company commander, and that only he could administer company punishment under the regulations then in effect.
We began to get weekend passes. Leaving Indiantown Gap around noon on Saturday, we drove more than three hundred miles, cutting diagonally across Pennsylvania to get home by six or seven that evening, then started back around 2:00 P.M. on Sunday to arrive at base before midnight. If we had passes until Monday morning, we got back just in time for reveille. It was a fast, hard drive on curvy, two-lane roads though mountainous terrain. There were no bypasses or interstates; we went through every little town, often on the main streets or stuck behind a truck. When we got an open stretch, we really flew to make up for lost time. Very few of my friends had automobiles, and we paid those who did for the trip. The overloaded cars didn’t improve the quality of the ride.
Around this time, I also had some learning experiences in areas outside of military training. Being a new Army post, Indiantown Gap Military Reservation hadn’t entirely been cleared of brush and trees, and the word was that prostitutes were plying their trade between the regimental billet areas. I checked this out, and there was no doubt about it; the ladies had set up shop in the bushes. One of them, it was said, could take on the whole regiment. We called her Regimental Mary. I never did find out whether she was one woman or several. Of course, Regimental Marys have always existed. During the Civil War, General Joseph Hooker was so liberal in his policies about camp followers that we still use his name as a slang term for prostitute. In our case, the provost marshal soon added MP patrols and put an end to our adventures.
After completing basic training in April 1941, I was promoted to corporal. I was the leader of a machine gun squad, which at full strength consisted of eight men, including myself. That summer, the company received two groups of replacements from the Selective Service System. One was from Camp Wheeler, Georgia. I thought their training had been better than ours, and it was also much better than the training of the second group, from Camp Croft, South Carolina.
When the Draft first started, some draft boards took men in the highest age group first. The Camp Wheeler group contained a number of these soldiers who were assigned to my squad. There I was, a new corporal, sixteen years and five months old, with a group of fillers as old as thirty-seven, who were as well or even better trained than I was. I’ll be the first to admit I had some difficulties handling men twice my age. On the other hand, several of the fillers were from rural Georgia and Alabama. They were easier to handle than the Camp Croft group, but it was the first time in my life I had ever encountered adult illiteracy. I had to read and answer letters for one member of my squad. I even had to teach him how to tie a necktie. But they all turned out to be good soldiers, and added a lot to the company. I learned a lot from them, and a lot from the experiences I had as their squad leader.
When any soldier started bitching and complaining about Army life and all of its inequities and hardships, the standard reply was, “Quit your bitching, you never had it so good. You struck a home in the Army.” That was partly true for me, and even more so for some of the other men. Many had never had the opportunity to shower every day. I remember the weekly bath on Saturday night from my own childhood, when almost nobody could afford to keep a gas hot water heater going, and only started it up for laundry and bath day. Three hot meals a day was also a luxury for many of the men, although this was not my case. All these luxuries! And on the first of each month, they gave us money! For the time, it was a large amount—$21.00 to start and a raise to $30.00 after four months if we were good soldiers.
Chapter 3
Company, Battalion, Regimental, and First Army Maneuvers, 1941
After the German blitzkrieg of 1940, the Army made many structural changes in the infantry division organization, but the arrival of motorized weapons carriers most affected Company H, 112th Infantry. It was good-bye and good riddance to the hand-pulled carts. Each machine gun squad received a top-of-the-line, three-quarter-ton, four-wheel-drive truck. This meant each platoon had four trucks to carry the water-cooled .30-caliber machine guns, and the heavy weapons company had drivers, a maintenance platoon, and a larger company headquarters. The division as a whole was now called a motorized division. It wasn’t possible to move everyone at once, because there were no trucks down in the rifle companies, but there were enough vehicles to move one battalion at a time.
With the new table of organization and equipment (TO&E), the M1 became the individual weapon for everyone not on a gun crew—those in company headquarters, and drivers, cooks, etc. Those of us in the heavy weapons squad were now supposed to carry the U.S. .30-caliber carbine, except for gunners and assistant gunners, who continued to carry .45-caliber pistols. The .30-caliber carbine was a much better close-in weapon than the pistol, but it couldn’t compare to the M1. The carbine, however, was not yet available to us in 1941, so in lieu of it, they issued us the M1903 Springfield .30-caliber bolt-action rifle.
In the summer of 1941, we moved for about a month to A.P. Hill, Virginia, for company, battalion, and regimental unit training. It was a hot and dirty military reservation with very few roads. What roads there were were dust-covered dirt and gravel. Up until then, our field training had never lasted for more than a day or two at a time, but now we left base camp on Monday morning and participated in tactical exercises until Thursday or Friday of the same or even the following week. Everyone was more or less receiving on-the-job training, from division commander to squad leaders. We spent a lot of time in the field in very hot, dirty, dusty conditions.
We usually spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday at base camp, where we lived in pyramidal squad tents that housed six to eight soldiers. As soon as we got back from the field, the first order of business was the care, cleaning, and inspection of weapons and equipment, vehicle maintenance, and laundry. On Sunday, we wanted to relax, but our elderly regimental commander thought we should all go to church. There wasn’t a very good turnout at the Protestant services the first week, so the following Sunday he ordered us to fall out in the company street and march to the service. There was much moaning and groaning about obligatory church. This was the first and last time I ever heard anything about forced church attendance in the Army.
As enlisted men, we slept with no bedrolls and took whatever cover we could find during rainstorms. Sleeping bags were not an item of issue until mid-1943 or later: the rank-and-file had one blanket and a shelter half to use as an outer cover. One thing we did have was quartermaster shower units, set up some distance from our base camp. Sometimes we were even lucky enough to get hot water if they had a portable heating system. The engineers also had purification units to provide safe drinking water.
After three or four very dirty days in the field, we’d walk to the showers in the evening, about three quarters of a mile away, then go to see a movie. There was a large screen set up in an open field where we saw the latest runs, sitting on whatever we could find. While we waited for darkness to settle, the PA system piped popular songs out over the field. I distinctly remember Helen O’Connel singing
“Green Eyes” as I sat on a board in that field.
The excellent regimental band also put on concerts. In addition to marching music, it played all the popular songs of the day. In December 1944, the 112th Infantry Band was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and so my memories of these early concerts are particularly nostalgic. There were also other recreations, like large craps and poker games, and I learned how to play both. My personal philosophy on gambling was to take X dollars, gamble with them, and quit when they were gone. I didn’t go any deeper into my pockets if I lost.
I clearly remember an incident that occurred one payday that summer. We were lined up in the pay line outside the mess hall. The sun was beating down, so we changed configuration to take advantage of the shade offered by the mess hall wall. We had a couple of senior sergeants who were alcoholics, or very close to it. One of them, a bully of a man, about 6 feet 2 inches and 195 pounds, told us to straighten the line out. A friend of mine, Leslie Ford, murmured something under his breath. Without any warning, the sergeant hit Leslie right in the face with his fist and knocked him down. This was the first time I ever saw a man cold cocked.
The rest of us were in no position to defend Leslie. But he had a twin brother, Ed, a corporal and the company clerk, who was working at the pay table. After the pay line was over, he approached the sergeant. Now Ed was about 5 feet 9 inches and weighed about 140 pounds. He actually had to reach up to tap the sergeant on the shoulder. “I want to see you tonight in the rec hall,” he said. “We’re going to put on the gloves.” He looked like a midget challenging Goliath.
Both men went to the rec hall after duty. They took their shirts off to fight on equal terms, not sergeant to company clerk. What the sergeant didn’t know was that Ed and Les both had taken boxing lessons for years, and were very good at it. It ended up that Ed beat the shit out of that sergeant. He’d go down, then get up, and Ed would pound him some more. If Les had pressed charges, the sergeant would have been court-martialed. As it was, Les more or less forgave the sergeant, but his twin brother really did a job on him.
Later, as an officer, I applied a lesson from this—never look favorably on the physical enforcement of orders. I never touched a subordinate, to the point of never even straightening a shirt pocket when inspecting in ranks. I told the man to straighten his pocket himself. I felt that strongly about seniors being in physical contact with their juniors in rank.
After we returned to Indiantown Gap Military Reservation, we were given short furloughs. I went home and was introduced to my new stepmother. I hadn’t even realized my father had remarried. I spent most of my furlough at the old farmhouse my sister and brother-in-law had bought in Belle Valley, southeast of Erie. Little did I know this was the last time I’d ever be able to visit with my sister.
On the evening of August 1, 1941, we had just been paid, and I was shooting craps, when the CQ handed me a telegram. It was a message from my father saying my sister had been in a serious accident and I should come home immediately. I packed a small suitcase and picked up my pass. Our duty officer drove me to the Harrisburg train station. The train to Erie was dubbed the milk run, because it stopped at every milk can across the state of Pennsylvania. The trip took almost twelve hours and was so trying I felt like getting out and pushing the train.
My brother Vern and I arrived home within hours of each other to discover that Vangie had been mortally wounded. Her husband had been sighting in a .32-caliber rifle, shooting off the back porch where he had a range set up on a dirt bank, then returning to the kitchen table where he had laid out tools to tinker with the scope. On one trip he accidentally discharged the rifle, hitting Vangie, who was sitting near the door. It was a hollow-point bullet, designed to fragment on impact. She received a low back wound that took out a kidney and part of her liver.
Vern and I did get to see our sister, although she was no longer conscious. I said good-bye to Vangie in a ward, behind a curtain a nurse had drawn for privacy. Afterward, I sat for a couple hours with my brother, neither of us saying a word, out on the lawn in front of the old St. Vincent’s Hospital, waiting for her to die. My brother-in-law was very broken up about my sister’s death. It was a long, sad affair attending her wake and burial.
When I returned to Indiantown Gap, many good friends tried to cheer me up and help me through this very hard time. A close group—Elmer Carlson, Dick Hertel, Alby Price, and several others—were very kind to me, and I really appreciated their efforts. Once they took me out to Lebanon, Pennsylvania, for a dinner at a good restaurant. I’d gone to a few lunch counters in high school, but this was one of the first times I’d ever eaten out in a restaurant. They all ordered steak, and so did I. I was sixteen, and it was the first steak I’d ever eaten. I’m sad and humbled to say I didn’t know how to use the silverware. My friends quickly clued me in.
From late September through November 1941, the whole 28th Division and smaller units, along with most of the active Army divisions in the eastern United States, concentrated in North and South Carolina, where the famous First Army field maneuvers took place. Our base camp consisted of squad tents, but we didn’t spend too much time there. We didn’t have the luxury of cots, but we were allowed to cut tree limbs and saplings to construct our own beds.
Our base camp was near Wadesboro, North Carolina. We maneuvered through many a similar small southern town near the Pee Dee River. The main reason for these maneuvers was to ensure that commanders and their staffs were trained to plan for the movement, feeding, and logistical support of large bodies of troops. The larger unit staffs may have learned a lot, but down at our level, the most we got out of the maneuvers was the experience of living in the field without all the niceties of a base camp. They kept us out in the field for up to a month.
As usual, we didn’t know what was going on most of the time. We’d go for two or three days at a crack with very little sleep, moving from one position to another, going into defensive positions, and trying to simulate the conditions of combat as closely as possible. Often, we’d get into position and start unloading in the dark, then suddenly have to change positions. The one thing I did learn was how to keep up with my personal equipment, my squad’s equipment, and my squad members so I could put my hands on them in any condition of visibility and move in a hurry.
Motorization solved a lot of problems, but it created others. It was one of the first times that a unit as large as a field army had ever maneuvered with the motorized infantry configuration, and there were monumental traffic jams. Few people in the Army knew how to schedule large motorized units from one part of the front to the other, and no one had experience in getting the vehicles to move more quickly in the field. It was jokingly said that any lieutenant colonel who could stand out in the middle of the road and successfully direct motor traffic would get a promotion. We were all issued goggles for the dirty, dusty roads.
One of the problems of living in the field for such extended periods of time was personal sanitation. Whenever we had a few minutes near a source of water, we’d bathe and wash our clothes as best we could. I took lots of baths in the Pee Dee and whatever creeks we could find. For laundry, each squad had a canvas bucket. We often had to jump back in the truck and move before the laundry was done.
During one of the breaks, our battalion commander assembled us in a big open area and had a soldier demonstrate how to take a bath without the use of a bucket. He dug a hole, put in a shelter half to make a catch basin, then poured water into it. The man stripped and took a sponge bath out of the water in the hole, to the great catcalls of most of the men in the battalion. Later, when the Army issued the new steel helmets, we took out the liner and used our helmets to take a bath. We also used them as cooking pots to stew many a liberated chicken.
The Carolina maneuvers also introduced us to “tactical feeding.” Especially in the rear areas near the front, we often took our meals in blackout conditions. Eating under cover of total darkness needed a lot of getting used to. We went through the
chow line with five-yard intervals between men. It was necessary to take the cook’s word for what we were getting, as he slopped it into our mess kits. We spread out as much as we could because a shell hitting a group could take many lives at once. It was challenging to eat in the dead of night, especially in the summer, when we ate sitting down in the field with grasshoppers, beetles, and other insects of every description whirring all around us. Without a doubt, we sometimes got an additional ration of meat. Our Thanksgiving dinner in 1941 was also served in the field, although not in blackout conditions. Our company commander even had a menu printed with all our names and the items in the meal—turkey, dressing, and all the fixings.
We were all up and down the Carolina woodlands and backwaters, and for us northern boys, this was our introduction to the rural poor in the South. It opened our eyes, especially to the abject poverty among black families, who lived in shanties two or three feet off the ground, supported by logs. There was a door and a few windows, and that was about it. Electricity and plumbing were unknown. A heavy, fetid odor hung over all, and I am sure the sanitary conditions were appalling. The crossroad general stores where black families went for supplies stocked only the bare necessities. Given these conditions, it is not surprising that African-Americans tried to avoid us. They were very reluctant to approach or have a conversation.
The white civilians were mostly very friendly. If we had a break near their homes, whole families would come out to talk to us. Sometimes they brought guitars and banjos, gathered around, and treated us to homemade wine along the road. We’d get a couple boys playing guitars and have a pretty good time for an hour or two. They also had wine for sale, and I developed a taste for it. All in all, I thought they treated us as fairly as could be expected, given the fact they were being overrun by soldiers and military vehicles. I’ve heard that in other places in the South, civilians posted signs in their yards saying, “No Dogs or Soldiers Allowed.” I imagine they removed them after Pearl Harbor.
Descending from the Clouds Page 3
