Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  WE WAITED a long time and, even after waiting, our turn to cross never came. Other factors interceded, other calculations, and everything changed.

  This is what happened, as I learned during the course of the night. At two o’clock in the morning, in a deluge, twenty YD infantrymen—most of them from Company B, at least half ASTP kids, median age nineteen—set themselves adrift, as planned, in a rubber assault craft from the turbulent southern shore of the Cumberland. The goal was to make it across to the other side, at a point that lay, cove-like, farther down the swollen river, as part of an assault tactic that was one of the essential challenges of our maneuvers.

  Nearly half a dozen crossings had already been made by troops of the 104th in the dark, using the powerful drift of the river’s current as the chief propellant. All were successful. Two full platoons now waited on the north shore for reinforcements before moving out to flank the enemy; when the flanking movement happened, it would be an assault in force. The rest of the regiment, strung out to the rear on the southern shore of the Cumberland, had been standing in the rain for three hours or more, waiting their turn; this included Company C and the third platoon.

  Nothing moved in the dark. Some of us were already asleep on our feet, holding on to the upturned muzzles of our rifles for support and twitching awake every few seconds in order to keep from falling over in the mud. It was a tricky routine, sleeping on our feet in the rain, but it could be done. At the same time, while we slouched on the road in some disorder, there was an evil-sounding undertone of grousing and obscenities and a steady rumble of truck traffic coming from somewhere in the rear. Straight ahead of us, we could hear the river, not too far away, a swift, chugging sound, vibrating soft and loud, that came and went with the rain and wind.

  We didn’t know where our NCOs and officers were in the wet blackness. Only Rocky was a sure presence, standing fully awake at the head of the squad, somehow looking both benevolent and fierce at the same time. As the hours passed, we kept checking him out up front, for the simple reassurance of seeing him there, rawboned and tall and very intent.

  By then, the cooking fires were out. There were no stars, of course, no moon, no light of any kind to give us away or help to prepare our surprise assault on the enemy who, as it turned out (when all the facts were finally produced), was actually encamped on our side of the river, two or three miles to the east. None of us, of any rank in the 104th regiment, knew this. Intelligence was not functioning that night. The fact, which no one understood or even imagined, was that we were crossing the Cumberland into a void, in which no enemy waited for us; where we were blindly headed there was no enemy.

  After the first attempt to set themselves adrift, the twenty infantrymen, bowed deep under full equipment in their jammed rubber craft, kept swirling back to shore, spun by the current. There was almost no way to control the movement. All the previous crossings had faced the same problem, and they had solved it through stubbornly repeated tries and a certain amount of luck, on which we all depended; there had been no training, ever, in river crossings for the Yankee Division. So the attempt went on, out into the waters again a second and a third time, until the vessel finally caught hold in mid-river and, spinning slowly, headed downstream, as hoped for.

  A few seconds passed as the assault boat disappeared into the dark. On shore, another twenty men from Company B moved into position, ready to board their own craft. Then, according to the evidence, there was a shout downriver from the assault boat, barely heard above the sound of the charging waters, and another, soon followed by an eerie silence on both the river and the shore. More time passed, during which a radio message from regimental headquarters was exchanged with the far shore, and a waiting began—not long, just enough to form an ominous judgment. Moments later, as this judgment shaped itself, a tumult started at the debarkation point, a slow awakening by regimental and battalion officers to the indisputable possibility of catastrophe. Everything had suddenly gone crazily awry.

  “Facts” began to seep in, claims, contradictions, exaggerations, tall tales, horror stories; believed, not believed, accepted, rejected—the old chaos, reinforced by a powerful new reality. Nothing, however, was seen again that night of the men and the adolescent boys who tried to make the crossing. They had vanished almost without warning, in the impenetrable darkness, sunk apparently by the extra weight of the ordinary infantry equipment they were carrying. It was over in seconds: twenty bodies instantly drowned in fast-running water—a swift and terrible death, in full awareness.

  • • •

  BACK UP our line of march, a nervous tremor, moving like an electric current, shocked us all awake. It was the rumor of disaster, racing at the speed of light. Three rafts had gone under, it was claimed. An entire platoon of B Company had been swallowed up by the waters. The battalion commander, Major Quesada, had broken down and wept in front of his staff when the news was confirmed.

  So it went for another three hours, while we still waited, until a line of dusty chalk, the faintest suggestion of light, showed itself in the east. “Rest, men” was the order, the first since midnight. But we were already sprawled in the mud and beginning to hallucinate from shock and lack of sleep. We stayed there until full dawn, shivering from the cold, when word finally came through that it was over. I think it was Rocky who passed the word along. There would be no more crossings, he said. We were finished with the Cumberland. I gave a moan of pleasure at the news, then slept.

  THE CALAMITY on the river marked the end of maneuvers. There was no more talk of the enemy or of assaults, no further tactical night marches or encampments. The official umpires, who were hanging around to referee our victories and defeats, turned in their scorecards and removed the armbands that identified them as neutral observers; all planning stopped while the division drew in its breath, waited, and secretly mourned the dead.

  For there were no public rituals for the drowned victims. They had simply vanished, without a trace or a memorial. (One of them, Moose Monchick, was an old pal from Maine, and I grieved for him.) The episode was never publicly acknowledged, never discussed with us in any official way, never reviewed with the line troops who might have learned something from it. It always remained at the level of rumor, as roiled and muddy as the waters of the Cumberland that night, and as awesome.

  On a primitive level, life quickly returned to normal; that is, it became routinized again, full of the mundane and ordinary—reveille, taps, meals on time, even close order drill, all the steady, reliable glue that holds military life together and gives it a predictable shape. Within days, after drying out on the shores of the river and vainly trying to assimilate what had happened, we were on our way by truck to Camp Jackson, South Carolina, which would be our new base. Maneuvers were officially over.

  At Jackson, it was clear, we would be polished down to the soles of our boots, refined, re-outfitted, and generally readied for overseas service. (No one doubted that we would go to the ETO; the Pacific, halfway around the world on the other side of the globe, was unthinkable.) And so we were—in the relative calm of late spring 1944, a time when one day in camp was much like any other—totally defined by routine, while we pursued the trivia of infantry training in the terrific Carolina heat.

  The calm, of course, made life easier. It soothed anxieties, dampened foreboding. Time ran together in a blur. The sameness of the days created order. There can be a sweet, healing monotony to Army life when there are no crises at hand. In this benign environment, and almost without our knowing it, without our even thinking about it, the first squad finally began to come together as a functioning combat unit, for better or worse, with an identity of its own. ASTPs and the others became near-equals at last. My still unexplained (to me) little caper in Tennessee, which was Bern’s too, helped; it gave us a kind of modest notoriety in the platoon and created a small reserve of respect among the old-timers.

  It was around this time that Keaton, Kelleher, and I stopped dominating the KP and latrine-duty ro
sters, although we were not able to get rid of the BAR, even on impassioned application to Rocky. Also, Rocky’s authority had somehow subtly expanded. He now seemed unassailable—exactly what the squad needed. At this time, too, Roger Johnson decided to talk to us, as though a curse had been lifted, still using, however, as few words as possible. On occasion, he even offered us gratuitous advice that made life more comfortable. Even Willis became part of it to a degree, included for the first time—condescendingly—in our conversations. Perhaps we had learned how to absorb his strangeness and were now able to put it behind us. Maybe we had just grown used to him through exposure and shared experience.

  Soon after we got to Camp Jackson, Barney Barnato finally made it back from his mother’s deathbed, causing a commotion in the barracks. Barney, we discovered, was something of an icon in the platoon, an anomalous European-styled sophisticate in his late thirties who liked to brag about his sex life. Not that bragging about sex was so unusual in the Army. But Barney’s bragging was never obvious and never crass. It was all done through inference and implication, with a certain coy edge to his words that I found vaguely unpleasant. Once Barney had his say, it was hard to describe exactly what he had been talking about. He mentioned nameless mistresses, suggested mysterious adulterous affairs, eyeing us salaciously the whole time. And the platoon, which lacked the confidence to challenge him where he seemed to be an expert, responded with hilarious enthusiasm.

  In this way, Barney helped turn himself into a glamorous figure amid the drabness of barracks life, and he definitely had the rich, flirtatious style for it. Perhaps as a way of sanitizing his other obsessions, Barney also liked to drop intellectual names, Schopenhauer (whom he called “Chopenauer”), Nietzsche, Kant, among others, and could quote from them or pretended he could. “Coitus is chiefly an affair of the man,” he once announced to a barracks full of troops. “And pregnancy entirely that of the woman. Chopenauer.” A roar went up. “Do you know what coitus is, you ignorant fools?” Another roar. They loved Barney. These nibbles at exotic philosophical flesh were never questioned by any of us; we were like vacuums when it came to philosophy, ready to accept anything that was set in front of us.

  Like Paul Willis, Barney was a truly strange man. His body had become totally hairless from an unnamed childhood disease. And he had an unplaceable accent—vaguely mittel-Europa—that I could never identify. He worried me (sexual boasting always does), especially when I learned that his mother hadn’t died, after all, that there was even some question about whether she had actually been sick in the first place, and that this had not been Barney Barnato’s first emergency furlough, by any means. It all seemed a little peculiar to us, perhaps more than a little. Bern, in fact, wouldn’t go near him and soon Barney began to replace Willis as a pariah for us. I’m sorry to say that we seemed to need one.

  Then Doug Kelleher, at the very end of our stay at Jackson, received a special transfer (the kind we all dreamed of), thanks to his father, the career officer, which took him north to Camp Lee, where he would serve out the rest of the war sitting behind a desk, only a few hundred miles from his father’s benevolent eye. Lucky Doug: simple envy of him almost poisoned us. When he left, as teary-eyed as a crocodile from sentiment and guilt, he still could not control his sappy little prep-school giggle nor could he hide the sense of relief he felt at being transferred out of the infantry. He was still giggling when we said good-bye.

  And then, almost as soon as Doug was gone—that evening, in fact—Ira Fedderman made an unexpected pitch to Rocky for a transfer into the first squad, to fill the new opening. It was obvious that he was overreaching himself in his need to be close to Bern and me, but to our horror, Rocky immediately said yes—an inexplicable aberration of judgment. What was he thinking? Naturally, the second squad did not resist the move. How happy they were to be rid of their sad sack, how crazy they thought we were for taking him, and within days, as soon as the paperwork could be processed, we had our replacement for Kelleher. Bern and I could hardly believe it.

  And finally, I was still unable to face the one great obstacle in infantry training for me: the thirty-foot climb up a rope ladder—under full-field pack and rifle—to the top of a rickety wooden structure, then the dizzying descent down the other side. I was terrified of that ladder, had always been terrified of it, from basic training on. The idea of it brought on uncontrollable vertigo, a trembling of limbs that could not be contained. To escape it in basic, I had volunteered for KP or even latrine duty, willing to trade ten minutes of anguish for twelve hours of hard labor; and I considered it a bargain. I did the same at Jackson and never got to test myself. I felt a certain shame at my failure; shame at my chicken’s heart, embarrassed that I was something less than the others. At least Bern, who was unexpectedly nimble at going up and down rope ladders, kept his mouth shut about it and didn’t ride me—a discreet act of support, I’ve always thought.

  AT THE very end of our stay at Jackson, just before we left for overseas, still ignorant of where we were going, we gathered in full regalia on a hot August afternoon to parade for General Paul, the Yankee Division’s commanding officer. Willard Paul was known as “Gangplank Paul” to everyone in the ranks for his outspoken eagerness to get his troops overseas; his hortatory speeches on the subject went back years and still stuck in the minds of the earliest YD recruits. By now the joke had turned back on itself. This time we were really going. Gangplank Paul had had his wish. Our duffel bags were already packed.

  The air that day swirled with dust and flags and the confused sound of bugles and drums clashing dissonantly. It was the first time that some of us had ever seen the general; certainly he was nowhere in sight during maneuvers. (In my experience, World War II generals did not like to be eyed by the troops; they seemed to be amazingly shy.)

  Captain Antonovich, huge as a Clydesdale, marched at a dignified step at the head of the company, moving ponderously and steadily, but he blurred the salute as we passed the reviewing stand because he suddenly began to hurry. When this happened, he gave a few embarrassed coughs and seemed to shrink a little. Behind him, old Arch hupped along on his bandy legs, helmet gleaming in the powerful sun. Lieutenant Gallagher paraded alongside the platoon in a uniform that was a size too large for him, making him look even smaller than he actually was, but he kept us laughing with his side-of-the-mouth wisecracks. We must have looked impressive—the company, the battalion, the regiment, the mighty division itself—spread out almost a full mile, end-to-end. I certainly felt impressive to myself for a moment or two, marching along in the middle of that scrubbed and obedient mob.

  Afterward, when we had come to rest in front of him, glittering like heroes of Sparta, Gangplank Paul attempted to make a rousing going-away speech into a microphone that turned out to have feedback problems. Everything he said returned to echo in his face. Nor was he able to rouse us much to battle fever—it was probably too late for that—but clearly his words and the sound of his own voice coming back at him did something for his self-esteem. Maybe they helped to wipe out the memory of the Cumberland crossing, which was much on our minds that day. Maybe it helped him to believe that we were really as tough as he claimed we were. Who knows? Maybe Arch was tough, maybe Rocky and a few others were, but not us, not Bern Keaton or me and surely not our new squad member, Ira Fedderman, who stood alongside me, at parade rest, breathing hard after our march. I could smell his sweat in the heat.

  Yes, we thought about the Cumberland crossing a lot that day. It had become a talisman of disaster in the Yankee Division, a bleak reminder of what could happen to any one of us in the future. The message it delivered was stern, and we read it clearly and well. I stood there alongside Fedderman in the August sun, dreamily reviewing the events in Tennessee and thinking of my pal Moose Monchick, who had drowned in the Cumberland with all the rest. Moose Monchick was the drollest person I had ever known, his face always puckered, as though he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Ultimately, of course, he always laughed.
God knows, he made us laugh, at Benning and in Maine, with his mostly self-deprecating wit. Anyway, I was thinking about him, in an abstract way, while Gangplank Paul droned on about his ambitions for us, and I had to catch myself. I was beginning to work myself into an emotional state (easy for me), and I did not like emotional states; they gave me hives.

  So the day proceeded. We grew tired. There was muttering in the ranks, a plaintive threat of rebellion that passed quickly. At the end of the ceremony, sweltering and dusty with sand, we all nevertheless felt an irresistible sense of pride in ourselves, as the Army had always intended. Even Fedderman, smiling in disbelief at my side, felt it, and at least for this moment he was exactly like everyone else, an infantryman for better or worse. Once we broke ranks, I never saw Gangplank Paul again. It was as though he disappeared from the face of our parade grounds into a no-man’s-land of his own, where he could manage the troops from a hidden headquarters, curtained off from the rest of us, like the Wizard of Oz.

  That, in any case, was how it came to appear to some of us in the Yankee Division.

  AT THE last moment, a few strangers showed up to fill out the platoon. Second and third squads suddenly went to full strength, a startling novelty. Two vague and somewhat reserved individuals, Ralph Natale and George Brewster, joined the first squad, giving us a roster of nine. At last, we all thought, eyeing the newcomers with a cold eye. They were neither ASTPs nor old-timers. Just two poor saps, called replacements, who had been squeezed through the tight pipeline of Army commands, from one outfit to another, ever since they had finished basic training. At last they had found a home. I don’t think I ever spoke more than ten words to either of them, or they to me, but at least the squad had put on a little needed fat; with their arrival, we weren’t scarecrow-thin anymore.