This was the Washington Richard Nixon first knew. As a Quaker he wasn’t at all sure he should fight, so after Pearl Harbor he took Pat east and joined the OPA at $61 a week. Nixon had left college a liberal, but, as he later recalled, he became “more conservative” after watching the men administering rationing. Although he was making $90 a week by August, his feelings about how “political appointees at the top feathered their nests with all kinds of overlapping and empire building” led him, one is told, to resign, overcome his Quaker scruples, and join the Navy. Since he had become subject to the draft, the point is irrelevant. As an attorney he was entitled to a commission as lieutenant (j.g.), and he was sent to the South Pacific, where another Navy lieutenant (j.g.) named John F. Kennedy commanded a PT boat. Unlike Kennedy, Nixon spent most of his time in the backwash of the war with an air transport organization (SCAT), playing marathon poker and becoming so adept at scrounging delicacies and even bourbon from visiting ships that his billet became known as Nixon’s Hamburger Stand. One day he was on Bougainville when a plane carrying Harold Stassen, then a member of Halsey’s staff, touched down. Nixon knew Stassen was a political comer, a man whose presidential chances were ranked high, and he managed to be at the bottom of the ramp in time to greet the visitor. He was greatly impressed by Stassen’s firm handshake, though when he mentioned the meeting to him after the war, Stassen couldn’t remember it.
In his suite on the second floor of the White House, always within hailing distance of the chief, Harry Hopkins was briefing another future President on the coming strategy in the European Theater of Operations, known henceforth to the swing generation as the ETO. Eisenhower was still a relatively obscure figure. He had made his Army reputation in the Louisiana maneuvers of 1941. Roosevelt, reading reports of it and consulting General Marshall, had decided this was precisely the sort of man to wage that most difficult of conflicts, the coalition war.
Everyone in high office knew that Lieutenant General Eisenhower was a comer, but few resented it. He was the typical American’s concept of what the typical man should be, a Norman Rockwell general taken right off a cover of the Saturday Evening Post. He was canny, openhanded, brisk, candid, and modest; he enjoyed dialect jokes and singing “Abdul Abulbul Amir” to the thirty-eighth verse. Born in Texas, he had grown up in a small town in Kansas, the American heartland. Most men liked him, and he liked most of them. He must be one of the few Republicans of consequence to have put in a kind word for Hopkins: “He had a grasp of the broad factors in military problems that was almost phenomenal and he was selflessly devoted to the purpose of expediting victory. He never spared himself, even during those periods when his health was so bad that his doctors ordered him to bed.”
It was June 1942, and high time the President named an ETO commander. Roosevelt had rashly promised Molotov that Stalin could expect a second front “this year.” American troops had sent a token body of troops to Ireland after Pearl Harbor—inspiring one of Tin Pan Alley’s more unfortunate wartime ballads—“Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland”—and now GIs were crossing to Britain itself. They were being thrust into odd corners, and the British had begun to complain that the trouble with Yanks was that they were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” Clearly a sense of direction was needed. With Eisenhower installed in Mayfair’s Grovesnor Square, renamed “Eisenhowerplatz,” the Yanks and Tommies were ready to move.
But where? The Americans wanted a cross-Channel stroke from England; the British preferred what Churchill called “the soft underbelly of Europe.” They weren’t strong enough to take on either, so they compromised on French North Africa. Timed to match a Montgomery offensive from Egypt, it could knock the Germans out of Africa. The code name for the operation was Torch.
It began, bizarrely, with an American attack not upon Germany, her sworn enemy, but on France, her oldest ally. The invaders lay in eight hundred ships off the coast of Algeria and Morocco on the night of Saturday, November 7, 1942, exactly eleven months after Pearl Harbor. Hiding so large a force was impossible; Berlin and Rome knew of it, tried to guess the convoy’s destination, and decided it would be either Malta or Egypt. When the landing craft began putting infantry on French African soil at 3 A.M., Europe was dumbfounded, no one more than Marshal Pétain. The trespass of ninety thousand Yankees offended him deeply. FDR’s shortwave broadcast to the people of French Africa (“Mes amis… [w]e have come to help you repulse the invaders…. Vive la France éternelle!”) distressed him so deeply that he wrote the President, “It is with stupor and sadness that I learned tonight of the aggression of your troops. You have taken such a cruel initiative.”
The American commander in chief was naturally in a very different mood. He was spending the weekend with Hopkins and a few other friends at Shangri-La, his Catoctin Mountain hideaway sixty miles north of Washington. It was still Saturday evening there when the invasion began. The President’s phone rang. Grace Tully answered it. It was Stimson. Roosevelt’s hand trembled as he lifted the receiver. He listened a moment and then said, “Thank God, thank God. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.” He replaced the receiver and turned to his friends. “We have landed in North Africa,” he said. “We are striking back.”
***
Eisenhower had directed the landings from a command post deep in the damp tunnels of Gibraltar. On November 23 he transferred his headquarters to the white, hilly city of Algiers; his presence ashore was essential, even if only to boost morale. Americans were beginning to learn how the Wehrmacht had won its reputation. Although caught off balance by Torch, the Germans had moved swiftly and effectively. Before the unblooded American troops could advance, Axis troops had occupied Tunisia and fortified it with men and arms from Sicily. While the GIs trudged through the winter rains and the mud, Stuka dive bombers and Krupp 88 artillery pieces pounded them, their tanks, and the Allied air cover. Then, in February 1943, counterattacking Germans hurled the Americans back through Kasserine Pass.
At the time, the pass seemed an Allied disaster. It turned out to be disastrous for the Axis. Patton replaced the corps commander there, recaptured the pass, and teamed up with Montgomery, who had arrived after chasing Rommel’s Afrika Korps all the way from El Alamein. The Germans in Africa were doomed; Rommel flew off to tell Mussolini and Hitler that his men must be evacuated. To survive, the Korps needed at least 140,000 tons of supplies every month, and the Allied navies’ command of the Mediterranean was reducing the German trickle from 29,000 to 23,000 to 2,000 tons. Mussolini and Hitler told Rommel he was a Cassandra. Look at Kasserine Pass, they said triumphantly; that was what happened when Aryan troops met mongrelized Americans. To Rommel’s horror, they were shipping men into the beachhead. Thus, when the Allies snapped their trap shut in early May, they bagged nearly a quarter-million POWs. This, combined with battlefield losses, meant the Axis had lost 349,206 in French Africa. The Americans, in their first campaign, had sustained just 18,500 casualties.
Patton wasn’t there at the finish; Eisenhower had sent him off to plan the invasion of Sicily. Here, again, Montgomery and Patton were to work in tandem under Eisenhower. The troops for Husky, the operation’s cipher, included a French corps. Despite Anglo-American snubs, Charles de Gaulle had been working behind the lines, dominating the freed French by political maneuvering and sheer force of will, and inspiring them to enlist. Of the Gaullist troops Mark Clark would later say, “A more gallant fighting organization never existed,” but all Allied troops looked fearsome now. Europe had turned a psychological corner. The Germans had lost Stalingrad—and another 330,000 men there—and now that they had been thrown out of Africa, the Wehrmacht no longer looked invincible. By this summer of 1943 it was the Allies who terrified their enemies, particularly such half-hearted Axis partners as the Italians and Sicilians.
Sicily was a political battle, fought to knock Italy out of the war, and on those terms it was successful. It was also a military victory; the Allies conque
red a barren, mountainous island defended by 255,000 troops, and did the job in little more than a month. In Rome, King Victor Emmanuel bluntly told the dazed Mussolini that he was no longer head of the government: “The soldiers don’t want to fight any more. At this moment you are probably the most hated man in Italy.” Mussolini was arrested, and a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio began furtive peace talks with Eisenhower’s representatives. The upshot was that Badoglio agreed to announce the Italian capitulation over the radio on September 8. That same night, the Allies would be landing troops at Salerno, in the Italian shin. The code name was Avalanche. Its purpose was to capture the startled Germans and clear the entire Italian peninsula of Axis troops.
How they thought they could bring it off is inexplicable. Keeping so big a secret was impossible; talky Italians had given the whole thing away to the Gestapo and Nazi intelligence. Badoglio surrendered unconditionally on September 8, as promised, but by then elite German divisions had poured into Italy and disarmed their former ally. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army was pinned down at Salerno, and the GIs, who had been told of Italy’s surrender and expected an easy time of it, were angry and confused. Now enemy tank and artillery fire confined them to a beachhead less than five miles deep. Every night loudspeakers, commanded by a bilingual German who evidently admired Hollywood Westerns, roared at the hemmed-in infantry, “O.K., you guys. Come in and give yourself up. We got you covered.” This sort of thing went on for four months. In Berlin “Lord Haw-Haw,” the renegade Englishman who broadcast propaganda for Goebbels, was predicting “another Dunkerque.”
This was the beginning of the Italian tragedy, of useless battles, needless suffering, and endless siege warfare. On the east coast of Italy, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had moved swiftly, joining the 1st British Airborne Division—which had taken the naval base of Taranto—and then racing on to the Adriatic port of Bari. The British accelerated their advance to take the pressure off the American infantry. American airmen bombed the hills overlooking Salerno. The beachhead was jammed with artillery until, on September 5, the Germans at last began to withdraw slowly toward Naples.
Company commanders knew what was wrong with the Italian war, even if generals didn’t. The Fifth Army was fighting geography. It took them three weeks and nearly 12,000 casualties to reach Naples. The spine of the country was traversed by the Apennines. Since this mountain chain was the source of Italy’s rivers, infantry had to cross an endless succession of valleys, beyond each of which would rise a ridge held by entrenched Germans. The most famous crest was Monte Cassino, the site of a fourteen-hundred-year-old monastery and the western anchor of Kesselring’s Gustav Line. Dug in along the heights around the monastery, the enemy decimated American infantrymen with mortars and nebelwerfers—“screaming meemies,” GIs called them—while U.S. tanks were destroyed by 88s. The Allies believed the monastery was being used as an observation point and bombed it to rubble. Nothing had been solved. Enemy fire was as accurate and pitiless as ever.
To compound the foot soldiers’ misery, Eisenhower, recalled to England for planning the cross-Channel invasion of France, took with him his best generals: Patton, Montgomery, and Omar Bradley. In Italy icy winds and heavy snow lashed the jagged ridges. The mud was waist-deep in the daytime and frozen solid at night. Bill Mauldin thought there was something almost supernatural about the muck: “I’m sure Europe never got this muddy during peacetime. I’m equally sure that no mud in the world is so deep or sticky or wet as European mud. It doesn’t even have an honest color like ordinary mud.” Day after day the war of attrition went on; dead bodies were wrapped in bloody bed sacks or ponchos and stacked like cordwood, bound together by Signal Corps wire. Scavenging dogs ate the throats of the dead. Frostbite and trench foot were epidemic. Sentries shivered at their posts. It was one of the worst Italian winters in memory.
***
After V-E Day and V-J Day the Army informed American newspapers and magazines that they should stop calling infantrymen GIs, on the ground that GI meant General Issue and was therefore “dehumanizing, demeaning, and disrespectful.” In the spirit of victory, editors and publishers quickly submitted. It seemed absurd at the time, but in the long run it turned out to be a good thing, for just as “doughboys” meant the foot soldiers of 1918, and “grunts” those of Vietnam, the GI belongs almost exclusively to World War II. He is the symbol of the swing generation’s youth, or the erosion of it: the fresh-faced adolescent who left home in ill-fitting khaki and returned much quieter at twenty-three with dull, resigned eyes and a way of tensing up when the old Third Avenue El or anything else approached overhead with a whir, a whoosh, a whiz, a whistle, or a sound like rapidly ripped canvas.
The sad part is that hardly anyone remembers GIs as they were. Actors pretending to be in the armed forces of those days appear in television situation comedies on TV so often that children are seduced into believing that the war was all thrills and high good humor. Every dogface in the ETO assumed that if he grew old enough to father children at home, one of them would ask one day, “Daddy, what did you do in the big war?” He never imagined that the question would be rhetorical, to be followed by the child’s observation that doubtless it was great to have been one of Hogan’s Heroes or in McHale’s Navy or—cruelest of all—“What fun it must have been to fight with Patton!” There are other dogface images around, but they are just as irrelevant. The harpies of the DAR, the VFW and the Legionnaires see the doggie as a clean-shaven, well-barbered, selfless hero, and college students of the 1970s wonder whether once upon a time it was really possible to wear the country’s uniform with pride, shoulder a rifle, and righteously shoot to kill.
There was such a time, and these were its men. By the winter of 1943–44 the ETO foot soldier had become a veteran of war, a skilled foot soldier who would have been valued by Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. He was more subdued than they were (or than we have been told they were; combat makes a man suspicious of all warrior legends), and if he had rank he didn’t wear it on the line; up front the Krauts, as everyone called them, enjoyed sniping at leaders. GIs didn’t shave or get their hair cut while in combat, not because they wanted to become flower children but because they lacked razors, shaving cream, mirrors, hot water, and time.
After two weeks of Italy’s driving rain, lying in a muddy foxhole while the enemy tried to hit him with bombs, tanks, grenades, bullets, flamethrowers, booby traps, and HE (high explosive) and phosphorescent shells, a man looked like a tramp. His behavior was often uncivilized. He moved his bowels in full view of his peers, many of whom took a critical interest in his performance. He was foul-mouthed, and especially insulting to men who hadn’t been up front (“rear echelon bastards”). The dogface had been wet so long that his combat jacket was disintegrating, and sometimes he smelled vile. Most of all he was tired. Some men took years to recover from that weariness. Some never did.
When it was all over, and the generals had finished decorating and congratulating each other—that sounds cynical, but the GI would have put it that way; you can never understand the dogface until you have grasped the extent of his cynicism—a civilian employee of the Quartermaster Corps did a little historical research and disclosed that the average American infantryman in World War II had carried 84.3 pounds each day. That made him the most heavily laden foot soldier in the history of warfare. The figure startled some people, including, inexcusably, generals. It didn’t surprise the former GI. He knew he had been a beast of burden. Moving into the line, he had worn or carried his uniform, his steel chamberpot helmet and helmet liner, an M-1 rifle, a knife, his canteen, an entrenching tool (a combination pick and shovel), his bayonet, his first-aid pouch, a web belt with cartridge magazines in each pocket, two bandoliers of extra ammo, hand grenades hung by their handles from his belt and the suspender harness supporting his pack, and the contents of the pack: a poncho, Primacord fuses, mess kit, cigarettes, a Zippo lighter, writing paper, letters from home, and various rations—C, K, or canned h
am and eggs from H. J. Heinz Co., winners of the Army-Navy E pennant. In addition, the GI had to carry part of the outfit’s communal weapons: a Browning automatic rifle or its tripod, or Browning light or heavy machine gun or its tripod, or a 60- or 81-millimeter mortar or its base.
These were essentials. He was supposed to carry a gas mask, too, but he had discarded that before he left North Africa; he couldn’t bear another ounce on his back. The Army wished he could shoulder more, not because it was sadistic but because he needed more. He ought to have had a blanket at night. He should have had a shelter half, so he and the man beside him could ward off the rain at night. Most of all he needed extra socks. Without a change of socks, GIs accumulated wet mud around their feet and, eventually, trench foot. The pain became excruciating, and when they crawled to the battalion aid station (nobody with trench foot has ever walked), and the medics cut off their shoes, their feet swelled to the size of footballs. Sometimes they had to be amputated. That happened with frostbite, too. Late in the war privileged divisions were issued “shoe packs,” which helped keep feet dry, but there was no real substitute for the warmth of socks.
To the strange mud-caked creatures who fought battles, however, the greatest source of anxiety was German artillery. “That artillery did things to you,” said a corporal quoted in Yank, the GI weekly. “We’d been told not to duck when we heard the screaming of shells; it would be too late. But we ducked anyway. Even the almost silent pop of the mortars was frightening. We got to know exactly where they would land.” Of all the Nazi big guns, the most feared was the Krupp 88. Sometimes it almost seemed that it could shoot around corners. At the time, doggies believed that nothing could be as bad as their “incoming mail” (German shells), but the men with iron crosses on the other side of the hill wouldn’t have agreed. By 1944 American “outgoing mail” included radar-guided rockets, proximity-fused shells, and a flamethrower fuel invented by Harvard chemists in partnership with Standard Oil technicians, a wicked brew of soap powder and gasoline called napalm.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 42
