Prior to boarding ship, we each were issued two .30-caliber M1903 bolt-action rifles. As usual, they had been stored in a wooden box full of cosmoline, and it was a heck of a hard job cleaning them. As we found out at the end of our journey, the whole process was just a way of getting the rifles over to North Africa in clean and workable condition. We turned them over to be issued to the Free French Colonial Forces.
We left New York Harbor on April 29, 1943, as part of a huge convoy that I believe included the whole 82d Airborne Division. Navy escort vessels accompanied us, including at least one baby flattop aircraft carrier. Aerial surveillance was a big plus in escorting convoys. It not only gave early warnings of submarines, it kept them submerged as much as possible, at least during daylight. The convoy had weapons to fight any submarines that were spotted.
The ship companies set up to feed the men for ten days on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, and even at this rate we were only fed two meals a day. It was my rotten luck to have one of the four high cots that were stacked against the bulkheads throughout the cargo areas, and to be right on one of the aisles where the chow line went by. I thus could not avoid seeing that it was just one long continuous file of men. We passed through the chow line down one side of a one inch by four inch plank, which was about five feet off the deck between two upright steel posts, placed our mess kits on it and ate standing up. In rough weather food and liquids slopped over onto the deck, and we were usually wading around in messes. Then, too, some people would get seasick as they smelled the kitchen.
The odor in the troop compartments wasn’t the best. No showers were provided, so body odor was horrendous. Add to this people getting seasick, and you have a pretty good idea of the unpleasantness of the troop compartments. They tried to rotate us up on deck to give us some exercise and fresh air, but time was limited. We would try to sneak up past the guards.
I think they made an honest effort to keep things cleaned up, but it was a losing battle. The latrine area was the worst case of stench and contamination, what with the overpowering smell of shit and the vomit from those who couldn’t make it to the latrines. I’ll never forget the command that periodically, day and night, came over the PA system: “Sweepers, man your brooms! Clean, sweep, fore and aft!” What the hell that meant, I don’t know. I don’t know who the sweepers were or what they were sweeping, because I never saw them. They must have been up on the main deck.
We were required to wear our life preservers twenty-four hours a day. We slept with them on, ate with them on, everything. Everyone knew that if the ship was torpedoed, it would go down fast. They attempted to carry out fire, evacuation, and abandon-ship drills, but anyone in his right mind could see there weren’t enough lifeboats. The whole situation got darkly humorous, but we went through the drill anyway. In retrospect, I think it actually was meant to lay out a plan to empty the troop compartments and get us up on the open deck, where we stood a better chance of surviving a sinking.
We had a pretty good crossing as far as weather was concerned, and we arrived in the battle-scarred harbor at Casablanca, French Morocco, on May 10, 1943. The land campaign in North Africa ended three days later.
Chapter 8
French Morocco: Fifth Army Mines and Demolition School
The day we landed at Casablanca, we were trucked to Fort Marshal Lyautey near Rabat, French Morocco. As we lined up for roll call, the commander came out of his orderly tent, looked at me intently, and said, “What the hell are you doing here, Sergeant Wurst?” Much to my amazement, I discovered I had reported to one of the Selective Service men I had trained as a recruit the previous spring. Here he was again, standing in front of me as the commander of my replacement company.
The EGBs had better living conditions than the 82d itself. We stayed behind on the coast at Rabat, while the division went about 400 miles straight east, into the desert at Oujda. Even so, our training took place in 100 degree heat, although we did have fresh water and could occasionally go for a swim. It was interesting for a while, for this was our introduction to soldiers from various foreign armies, encampments of French Foreign Legion troops, and native French military organizations. We even had boxing matches with the Legionnaires.
We only had contact with the rural lower class of the native population, and the areas where we bivouacked were desperately poor. Soldiers who had fought in the North Africa campaign said the Arabs came into their firing positions to pick up the brass while shots were still being exchanged, ignoring the danger to themselves from both sides in their eagerness to get the cartridges. They were a real problem while a fight was going on, for their presence gave away our firing positions.
We had to keep a close watch on all our personal equipment and possessions, and the interior guard was exceptionally issued live ammunition as a last resort to keep the Arabs out of our camp. Not a night went by when I happened to be awake that I didn’t hear a guard quickly challenge, rapidly followed by the sound of shots. Arab villages were within earshot, and after the shooting, especially on quiet nights, we could hear the sound of strange, disturbing chanting. It was hauntingly foreign to our ears, and went on for hours at a time. There were many nerve-wracking nights when I lay awake in my sack listening to the funeral chants coming from the villages.
The Arabs were also famous as traders, and I still have a large wallet that I bought from a street vendor and carried throughout the war. They also wanted to buy things we had, and we always haggled a long time over prices. Two especially hot items were our mattress covers and barracks bags. The mattress covers were sewn together at one end: the Arabs cut a hole in the middle of the closed end and another on either side, then slipped the mattress cover over their head for use as a tunic.
Barracks bags at the time were still made of cloth and had a drawstring top. Each man had two barracks bags, one labeled “A” and the other “B.” The latter bags contained regulation items and were shipped as soon as we were off the front lines; A bags arrived when we got to a rear area. Both had quite a bit of stenciling: our name and serial number, shipping number, and other information, but never our unit number.
The Arabs cut two holes in the bottom of the bag, slipped it on and pulled it up like a pair of pantaloons, then pulled the drawstrings tightly around the waist and tied them. They were very ingenious, but we thought it was hilarious. To us, they looked like big diapers. We mostly sold them B bags, which meant they would walk around with something like: “B bag, John Jones, serial number so-and-so” stenciled across the ass.
Of course, all this activity was strictly black market, and was frowned on by the authorities. The men who sold their barracks bags quickly learned to tell the buyers to turn them inside out so the lettering wouldn’t show. I forget how much the bags were going for, but mattress covers were bringing at least $20.00 each, which was a good sum of money.
It was on the rifle ranges at Rabat that I became a life-long tobacco chewer, much to my future wife’s dismay. Every time we fired a round, the muzzle blast kicked up a cloud of dust that drifted back over our heads. Before long, we had dry mouths and were spitting dirt. One of the fellows alongside me on the firing line was chewing tobacco. I asked him for a chew, and the rest is history. Of course, chewing was a lot safer on the front line than smoking. No matter how hard we tried to conceal a flaming match, we were never sure we managed it. The superstition about being third on a match is well founded in the facts of trench warfare in World War I. By the time the second man lit up, a sniper would have had time to locate the position and zero in on the third.
We also got the chance to shoot a new weapon in Rabat, a hand-held antitank rocket launcher with a diameter of 2.36 inches. The propellant consisted of thin sticks of slow-burning powder inserted into the rear body of the projectile. We named it the bazooka, after the musical instrument played by the comedian Bob Burns, whose act featured a homemade slide trombone he had put together from a bunch of pipes.
The first time we set about shooting a bazooka, I
was acting as gunner. I placed it on my shoulder, and the assistant gunner put a rocket into the rear end of the tube. He then stood clear and tapped me on the shoulder, signifying it was ready to fire. I squeezed the trigger and was instantly stunned by an explosion that blew a hole right out of the tube. Luckily, the metal flew out away from my face, but I was momentarily dazed and dropped the bazooka. I bent over and started spitting, and the lieutenant in charge came running in a panic, thinking it was blood. He was greatly relieved to discover it was only tobacco juice.
As it turned out, the powder in the bazooka rocket I had fired had been stored in the hot African sun, which dried it out and made the rocket faster burning—so fast, that it exploded in the tube itself. The ordnance department responsible for designing the bazooka later reinforced the tube by tightly winding wire around the circumference of the back end, where the gunner’s face touched the launcher. Later yet, I discovered the manuals stated that for training exercises, people had to wear a gas mask for extra protection against explosions in the launcher.
During my stay at Fort Marshal Lyautey, I only got one pass to Casablanca, much to my sorrow. We were warned about going into the Medina, the native quarters. I had started drinking early, and had gotten quite a nose full before joining up with a French Foreign Legionnaire. He couldn’t speak much English and I couldn’t speak much French, but I know now he took me to the Medina to roll me. He soon realized, however, that I wasn’t drunk enough for him to knock me out and steal my money without a real struggle. So he left me there, stranded deep in the native quarter in blackout conditions.
I think I was as close to being KIA right there and then as I ever was in combat. I finally managed to get onto the main drag in the European section, but even then it was rough going under blackout. Eventually, I saw a light coming from around a doorjamb and heard voices speaking English behind the door. So I opened the door and walked in. Lo and behold, I was in the Allied Officers’ Club. As a lowly sergeant, I was strictly off limits, but being in the mood I was in, I went right up to the bar and proceeded to order a drink. The bartender gave me a hard time, but it was about two deep at the bar and some of the junior officers stuck up for me. I managed to down a couple drinks before the MPs arrived.
The last thing I remember is being thrown on a two-and-a-half-ton truck. When I woke up, I was lying on the ground in an old POW stockade, with machine gun towers in each corner. I had a very tough hangover.
The MPs assembled all the occupants and marched us into a building where I met a famous gentleman by the name of Major Fry, the provost marshal of the Casablanca area. I heard he had been a master sergeant in the peacetime Army who had run a very hard, brutal Army prison. Word had it he was the toughest provost marshal in the Army. Not only was he reputed to give the roughest sentences, he was said to have a strong prejudice against paratroopers.
I stood before him, headache banging, expecting the worst. He began by asking me a few questions, and of course I couldn’t deny I had stormed an officers’ club in a drunken condition. So the major gave me my choice. He said, “As you are an NCO, you can ask for a special court-martial, or you can take a summary court-martial.” Then he told me the conditions: “I’m the summary court officer,” he said. “If you go before a special court-martial you could get six months and two-thirds of six months’ pay withheld, and if I take your case you can get thirty days and two-thirds of thirty days’ pay withheld. Which do you want?”
I didn’t exactly have much choice. But after he’d completed his summary court-martial, Major Fry made me a little proposition. “Sergeant,” he said, “I can’t order you to do this because you are an NCO, but if you can work for me out on the rock pile for a couple, three days, maybe we can tear up these court-martial papers.”
I thought it over and figured I probably had earned a couple of hard days on the rock pile. So I agreed to do the work for him. And thus it was that for some very hard, hot days, I broke rocks along with about twenty-five or thirty other gentlemen who were in the same position as me.
The major was constructing a racetrack and riding paths for senior officers. All day long, we made smaller rocks out of bigger ones and transported them to make lanes lined with stone walls. After I had put in two or three days of hard labor, Major Fry, true to his word, tore up my court-martial papers, and they were never entered on my service record. I won’t go so far as to say he used slave labor. Let’s just say he used unwilling labor to get things done. Thus I learned the lesson that trouble never pays, but you always pay for trouble.
Within a few days of reporting back to the replacement company, I got a set of orders from the Fifth Army headquarters. I had been selected to attend the Fifth Army Mines and Demolition School, where demolition procedures and all the details about mines and booby traps were taught to engineers and selected infantrymen. The school was situated back in the desert, and classes contained English, American, and French students, all mixed together. It was standard procedure to stand retreat in the rear areas, when inspection was followed by the bugle call “to the colors.” Because three nations were represented, the end of the day was a colorful affair. We had to stand retreat through three national anthems, holding our salutes through the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Save the King,” and the “Marseillaise.” To this day, whenever I hear the National Anthem, I associate it with standing retreat in some far-off place like North Africa.
Our chief instructor (and, I believe, the commandant of the school) was a very interesting English character by the name of Colonel Stevenson, who had long been the division engineer officer in the North Africa campaign for the famous “Desert Rats,” the British 7th Armoured Division. Colonel Stevenson knew everything worth knowing about mine warfare, and he set his school up to great advantage to teach us the basic facts. Classroom work was kept to a minimum and emphasis was put on practical application. We were taught to identify and disarm all kinds of mines, and how to safely handle explosives—TNT, plastic explosive blasting caps, and primer cord. First we used scale models, calculating the amount of demolitions needed and where to place them, then blowing them up. When we went out to the field to practice what we had been taught, we did not use dummy materials—we used live mines and live explosives. Believe me, we learned very quickly.
I vividly remember a night mine-clearing exercise where a man was accidentally killed by gunfire. We had to cut and clear a lane through a minefield containing barbed-wire obstacles, clearing it in the prone position, probing for the mines with a knife or bayonet. For once we were not using live mines. This time the danger was elsewhere: throughout the exercise, water-cooled .30-caliber machine guns fired real ammunition two to three feet over our heads.
We worked in teams, digging underneath the mines, lifting them up from their positions, removing the fuses, and moving them out of the lane. The lead man probed and found the mine, the next man lifted it, and so on. As the “lift” man, I checked for booby traps, dug around the mines, removed the fuses, and set them to the side. We did all of this while crawling on our stomachs.
We had advanced part-way down the field when disaster struck. A tripod leg on a machine gun collapsed, sending a burst of gunfire down through the minefield. The bullets plowed into the lead man in my team, an engineer from the 36th Infantry Division, hitting him multiple times. He was working the field directly in front of me. This man later died of his wounds. He was the first man I ever saw killed by gunfire, and it was my own first narrow escape from death. It was truly a case of, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Shortly after I completed my course and returned to the replacement company, the EGB448s moved further east near Oujda, a small town crowded with soldiers of different nationalities. The flies and the insects were thick, and water was in short supply; as hard as we tried to keep clean and prepare our food in a sanitary manner, our efforts were usually defeated. The latrines were far from what they should have been. Our diet also contributed to health problems, as there wa
s very little fresh meat or fresh vegetables. There were a lot of cases of the GI trots and dysentery.
We got passes into town, where the government sponsored a house of prostitution. There was a main center with two large courtyards leading from it—French prostitutes on one side, Arab on the other. Soldiers had to pass through the center going in and out, and it was impossible to leave without taking a prophylactic as a precaution against venereal disease. And when I say prophylactic, I mean a chemical liquid inserted into the penis.
The Army encouraged abstinence in North Africa, but failing that, we were told to take every possible precaution against disease. Supposedly, the prostitutes in the government-sponsored houses were examined weekly, or even daily, by Army medical authorities. The Army claimed there was a particularly virulent strain of venereal disease prevalent in North Africa called “the black syphilis,” and that anyone who contracted it would not be allowed to return to the States. Believe me when I say this scared a lot of us away from having sex in North Africa.
Otherwise, there wasn’t much to do in Oujda, so I mostly spent my time at camp. We did discover a supply of dry, very potent red wine in one of the nearby villages. Whenever we got particularly bored, we sent someone out with a five-gallon can to buy some wine, then sat around the can in a circle, and repeatedly filled our canteen cups until we were thoroughly inebriated. Then we rolled over and went to sleep. Eventually, we crawled back to our cots and finished the night off. This practice left us with some crippling hangovers, but they never deterred us from sending out for yet another can of red wine.
One morning, after one of these wine-guzzling sessions, I was assigned as an assistant instructor for bayonet training. The instructing officer explained the various jabs, and I was supposed to demonstrate each of the techniques. I was so hung over I could hardly bear to stand up. Finally, the long thrust did me in. I managed to perform it the first time, but I pitched forward the second time, and fell flat on my face in the dust. To say the least, I was one sheepish platoon sergeant.
Descending from the Clouds Page 7
