Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  THREE

  Bliss It Was

  STILL, it was a kind of bliss to be nineteen then, in uniform, and packed atom-like with all my pals from the Yankee Division aboard the SS Argentina, a former luxury cruise liner that had been transformed into a model troopship, as we sailed in convoy for France, land that I loved.

  Not that I knew much about France that amounted to anything: racy novels like Zola’s Nana, hoary clichés about high life and worldly appetites, a beautiful and seductive language that I had valiantly studied in high school (to no good end), ravishing music by Ravel and Debussy, some of which I could actually play on the piano, and movies that seemed, in my provincial cave in hometown Baltimore, to cut close to the bone. I was a sucker for all that; it turned me into a Francophile (an amateur, however), and developed a taste in me—remnants of which still litter my psyche—for a touch of Gallic sophistication that I could call my own. And suddenly I was on my way to claim it at its source.

  Vive la France! I said to myself as I threw up again on the first day out to sea. Vive la gloire!

  We were all equally ignorant of France and the French in the Yankee Division. And the American Army was not about to fill the gaps in our education. It was not on their agenda. So we would have to take pot luck, just as we found it, and make our own judgments and our own mistakes. We would sail across the Atlantic, unthinking and blind, in the self-absorbed way of all traveling armies through history, and learn by doing, by being there. Nevertheless, it was still a kind of bliss.…

  THE SS Argentina sailed from her Brooklyn berth at midnight on a Saturday in August 1944. It was ten weeks after D-Day. A band was playing somewhere under a shed at the end of the dock. I could hear the brass oom-pah and all the false cheer that went with it. My teeth were grinding together from the excitement. Word soon went out that Kate Smith was singing with the band, sentimental songs like “I’ll Walk Alone,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” but none of us could hear her, if she was really there. We were too far away, way down at the other end of the dock. Besides, the embarkation noise, overall, was terrific; not much sound could rise above that. And, as we had been repeatedly warned, our sailing was supposed to be secret. I was sure all of Brooklyn could hear us.

  “Who’s singing?” Fedderman shouted.

  “They say Kate Smith.”

  “The cornfields of kitsch!” he shouted again, leaving me blank-faced. I had never heard the word before. I had to ask him what it meant and how to spell it.

  It was hours before we sailed, amid a tumult of misplaced bodies, lost gear, shouting officers, and frantic NCOs, some of whom were missing entire platoons. The decks of the Argentina were packed with exhausted GIs, sprawled out on their equipment, waiting to be allotted a hammock below deck. We had missed the evening meal and were chewing rations slowly to make them last; dry and gristly stuff, packed, it was claimed, with nutrients. They filled us up.

  Bern stuck to my side and I to his. Fedderman, bulking large, also stayed close. (By now he had become totally dependent on Bern and me; it didn’t matter that he was our prevailing intellectual and smartest kid, we had him on our hands.) I had the feeling that if Bern and I allowed ourselves to be separated, we would lose each other forever. (I worried less about Fedderman.) And it was easy to imagine: the Argentina was the largest ship I had ever seen. When we boarded, climbing the gangplank under our massive loads, I could see no end to her. She seemed to be without prow or stern, to go on forever. On our slow way up, I saw Bern suddenly stop and reach out with both arms, as though he wanted to embrace the Argentina’s black hull. He looked as though he was blessing the ship and maybe, as a superstitious infantryman, propitiating the gods at the same time.

  By morning, the ship had made its first rendezvous a few miles off Cape Cod. About a dozen other ships—all shapes, all sizes—joined us there at dawn, gently rocking in a swelling surf. Watching them brought on our first seasickness, which we all took as a joke at first, especially when Fedderman chose to throw up into the wind. But we were all a little sick for the first twenty-four hours, and it wasn’t long before the joke lost its point. It took Ralph Natale, one of our new men, another full day before he could sleep below deck.

  Later in the afternoon, a second fleet joined us, one ship at a time. They slipped into position as though they had rehearsed it. By evening I could count sixty vessels—naval, cargo, troop transport, even a couple of aircraft carriers—spread in a stupendous 360-degree sweep that extended across the horizon. Standing on deck, immobilized by the power of what I saw, I could feel the strength of the SS Argentina, the ship’s engines rumbling beneath my feet, the ship itself trembling with contained energy. Down below, the sea suddenly shifted. So did the position of the other ships. In the half-light of early evening, under a gauzy moon, the Argentina slowly rose and fell in a steady, repetitive movement.

  “My God,” Bern said, at the sight. He was standing alongside me on deck.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “One sub,” Fedderman said. “That’s all it would take.” That was another way Fedderman liked to talk, as though it was his pleasure to scare us.

  The next day we began to trace our zigzag route across the Atlantic. We could feel the strange, confusing motion as we changed direction, sometimes from hour to hour. Northeast by east, then northeast again, and back. By then the convoy had almost doubled in size, most of the ships traveling at the same speed, geared to the slowest. At the fringes, tough little destroyers moved at their own feisty speed, on the alert for a U-boat encounter. All was calm as we watched them.

  • • •

  EARLY that evening, I found Paul Willis standing on deck, staring out at the gray sea. From where we stood, we could hear the exhilarating whoosh of the Argentina’s wake. Even under restraint, the ship seemed to move fast.

  “Some sight,” I remember saying, feeling a little shy. I was still not used to talking to Willis.

  “Yeah.”

  “I never imagined anything like this,” I went on.

  Willis looked me in the eye, something he rarely did. He seemed to be trying to make up his mind whether to speak or not. Finally, he spit into the Atlantic and asked, “Is Fedderman going to make it? In your educated opinion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Has he got it? Can we trust him? Will he be there? He’s your pal, you should know.”

  I had been asking myself those questions for a couple of weeks, and the answers made me unhappy. “As much as anybody, I guess” was what I said. But I spoke without conviction. Certainly as much as you, I wanted to add.

  “I’ve made a recommendation to Rocky,” Willis then said, sounding self-important.

  “What kind of recommendation?”

  “Put Johnson at the head of the BAR, with you and Keaton as assists. Look for another scout to replace Johnson. Maybe that new man, Brewster. Brewster has an eagle eye, ever notice? Keep Fedderman an ordinary squad member, with Natale. With no special duties. That’s the part that counts, no special duties.”

  He had certainly thought it through. I said nothing.

  “I think it’s going to happen, too.” Willis puffed up as he spoke. “Rocky likes it. We’re going to have to carry Fedderman. Maybe Natale, too. I know the handwriting when I see it.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t really want to talk to Paul Willis about Ira Fedderman. It was disloyal. Besides, Willis was right; we were going to have to carry Fedderman, and I didn’t want to be identified with that.

  For a moment or two, Willis and I watched the ghostly green spume, the phosphorescent gleam, trailing us. It was vaguely unsettling, as though a whole sinister other life was festering underwater, beneath our very feet. That feeling grew stronger as Willis and I watched together.

  An omen?

  “We need harmony in the squad, you know,” Willis said, looking at me again. “For what we’re going to.”

  Harmony, indeed—at the very
least. I nodded in agreement; I would give Willis that. Then, apparently satisfied with our exchange, he turned to look at the convoy. I could see him taking it in, from one end to the other. In a moment, he braced himself as though he was coming to attention. His eyes opened wide. I saw wonder, amazement, awe on his dim, pale face as he looked out to sea.

  My God, I thought, Willis lives! Look at him!

  No question about it, at that moment, my feelings about him changed. Willis became real to me at last. He was no longer just the thieving freak, the first squad’s feckless punk.

  MOSTLY we lived on board the Argentina by comforting routine: sleeping in hammocks that rose six-high from floor to ceiling; jammed into cabins, public rooms, the hold (Antonovich and Gallagher slept on another deck with the other officers, higher up; we never saw them); taking our meals quickly on our feet, standing at a chest-high mess table that was bolted to the floor; lining up for the washbasins and toilets in the head, where we could throw up; then on deck for the rest of the day (and the night if it suited), where we could throw up into the sea; participating in lifeboat drill, while the NCOs, frustrated at our indifference, threw tantrums; gambling (poker and dice); talking, mostly rumors and sex or rumors about sex, with Barney Barnato, who was strangely subdued during the crossing, relating vague anecdotes to the rest of the platoon about his colored past; napping often; reading.

  I read a lot, my habit, mostly tough little genre mysteries by Chandler and Hammett, but more serious stuff, too—a novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, for one, called Success (remembered from my parents’ library). The high-minded Central European aura of this book, its obsession with justice, has stayed with me all these years; the novel still sits on my bookshelf. I was susceptible to moral issues then, powerfully so, and still am. I believed in the universal struggle between good and evil. Innocent and guilty. Right and wrong. In choices and in “us and them.” That was how I saw the world: in simple, direct adolescent terms, for I was still an adolescent. That was why it was easy for me to hate the enemy.

  Keaton and Fedderman also read, as much as I did, Ira maybe even more, and so did many other GIs aboard the Argentina; we were not exceptional. The ship carried the entire paperback Armed Services Library, for us an indispensable resource. Every time the SS Argentina crossed the Atlantic from the States, it unloaded another well-read division in the ETO.

  At sea, during those dreamy days of late August, we had no responsibilities. All that was demanded of us was that we behave ourselves. I felt this trust implicitly, and I think everyone else did, too. There were almost no dramatic incidents, no disturbances aboard ship. Harmony, Willis had called for during our unexpected little exchange; and we had it, with almost no perceptible strain. We were suspended in time and watery space, headed for a mysterious destination. We may have been caged on our ship, but it still represented a kind of freedom to most of us. I never wanted the crossing to end. I was willing to sail on to the end of the world in order to hold on to that serenity

  But, of course, one morning ten days later we awoke to see a coastline. Green hills, modest cliffs, white beaches slowly came into view; an unexpected prospect. It was France, we were told, Normandy itself, close to the great bloody battlefields of D-Day. An electric hush fell over the ship as it began to slow.

  Bern and Ira and I stood together on deck, gazing in silence at the Old World, powerfully resisting the idea of landfall. Just beyond landfall our whole future lay in wait. In the far distance, we could make out a small church with a squat stone tower, then some ugly pillboxes positioned atop a hillside, and finally a lone person, wearing blue coveralls, bicycling along a road that paralleled the shore. The bicycle looked as if it was barely moving. It was a first taste of Europe, never to be repeated, and I found it strangely moving.

  The Argentina crept in a foot at a time. Overhead the gulls wheeled and stayed close. Fedderman, suddenly jittery, began to tell terrible jokes, until Bern told him to shut up. Directly ahead lay Cherbourg, the old Norman city, the great port now preparing to welcome the Yankee Division. The rest of the convoy, we discovered, had peeled off overnight into smaller clusters, most of them heading for the United Kingdom, for Plymouth and Southampton and other ports. Operations in Cherbourg were still not normal more than two months after D-Day. Half the port was wrecked, the rest was barely functioning. Cherbourg could not yet dock a ship the size of the SS Argentina.

  We began to gather, lining up on deck with all our equipment, shifting irritably from one foot to another, suffering nerves and stomachaches and impatience, the soldier’s oldest enemies. Behind us stood mounds of duffel bags, stuffed with all our personal possessions, including illicit goods, too, like whiskey and gin. Arch was striding back and forth in front of us, his eyes bulging like a predatory fish’s. He examined us, muttering under his breath. He checked our clothes, our equipment, whether we were clean-shaven. Did we pass muster? Were we okay? There was no comment, merely a nervous twitching, peculiar to Arch, back and forth. Behind Arch, Lieutenant Gallagher sauntered along, as though he didn’t know what to do with himself, his small-boned face almost lost in the depths of his helmet. He had a nice sunburn, and so did Captain Antonovich, from a pleasant ocean crossing on an open deck that was off-limits to the rest of us.

  An hour passed. My back straps hurt; I loosened them. Alongside me, Fedderman was groaning quietly. It was a habit of his, a way of expressing anxiety. He had others, like clicking his teeth, very loud. Now his pack rested on his fat butt, way too low, and his ammo belt was down near his groin. You couldn’t get near him without getting bruised by a piece of misplaced equipment. The saddest sack of all, as he had come to be marked by everyone in Company C. (Maybe Rocky thought he could salvage Fedderman when he agreed to take him into the squad. That was certainly possible; Rocky seemed to be attracted to the idea of redemption in others.)

  It made me feel contemptuous, Fedderman’s sloppiness, his incompetence, his seeming lack of pride. Why didn’t he care more? I wasn’t much more competent at rolling a full-field pack, I could be a slob, too, but I cared and I tried and so did Bern Keaton. (Oh, how we cared; that part of us must have been insufferable to Fedderman.)

  On the other side of Fedderman, Bern stood at rest, unusually calm, it seemed to me, for what was going on all around us. He was engrossed in Of Mice and Men. We all had books with us, stolen from the ship’s library. Fedderman was carrying Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (he claimed to love Westerns, had a whole theory about their unacknowledged aesthetic value in the canon of American literature), and I had a copy of The Pocket Book of Verse stuffed into one fatigue pocket and Harry Kurnitz’s smart little mystery, Fast Company, in the other. I could still tell you the plot.

  Down below, the engines suddenly stopped. A vast silence spread everywhere. Between the Argentina and the city of Cherbourg lay an expanse of choppy water, perhaps three hundred yards in all to shore. A stiff wind had begun to blow. Clouds were moving fast to the east, into the Norman countryside. Another half-hour passed. It grew chilly on deck and suddenly we realized that our officers had disappeared. Then Fedderman’s teeth began to click; a horrible, foreboding sound.

  “Okay, men, this is how we’re going in.” It was Arch, finally ready with our orders. “Pay attention. All of you.” He sounded oddly subdued, almost schoolmasterish, which was not Arch’s style. We could hardly hear him.

  We were going in on Higgins boats, he told us, landing craft that had carried the infantry ashore on D-Day. He paused a moment, while we assimilated this. We would board the boats by descending the steep sides of the Argentina’s hull on a rope ladder that was being lowered in front of us at the very moment that Arch was describing it. I swallowed a momentary panic when I saw the crew at work, then began to focus on the problem itself, which of course was a familiar one. But there was no escape for me today, no KP or latrine duty to volunteer for. That was clear. This time, for the first time, I was going down the ladder with everyone else. Right. So be it. Amen. I
glanced over at Bern. He had put his book away. I thought he was smirking a little. As I’ve said, Bern was good at rope ladders.

  “We’re going to have to take him down with us,” he said, in a calm voice.

  “Who?”

  Bern nodded at Fedderman, who stood between us making a lot of noise, hyperventilating. He seemed to be blind to us he was so scared. Maybe, I thought, if I concentrated on Fedderman, I could forget myself. That kind of displacement had worked for me before, in other situations.

  “You guys make a move without me, I’ll crush you,” Fedderman said, between his teeth. He took in a couple of loud breaths. His moon face stared straight ahead. His rifle was dirty and he was beginning to lose things from his pack. A can of C rations fell out, bouncing on the deck. He was still hyperventilating, heaving away between Bern and me. To hell with him, I thought, looking away. I hated helplessness in others; it was too close to home.

  And yet, in another twenty minutes, during which Bern and I put Fedderman together, stuffed his pack, hoisted it higher, tightened the straps, and pulled his belt up, we began the descent, along with fourteen thousand others. Of our group, Rocky went first, disappearing over the side of the ship like a silent wraith, which was how he had behaved all the way across the Atlantic, holding tight to himself for the entire journey. Willis and Johnson followed, Johnson carrying the BAR (Willis had won his point with Rocky). Ralph Natale and George Brewster followed them, also silent and grim. Then Barney Barnato lifted himself over the rail, pink-cheeked and flabby; as he disappeared over the side, he was grinning in a silly way, as though he had known this was coming all along.

  Bern and I flanked Ira Fedderman even closer, gripping him by each arm, as he finally got himself over the railing and slowly positioned himself on the top rung of the ladder. He was shivering. So was I.

  “Keep moving and don’t look down,” Bern ordered, and we started, our feet testing each rung, paced by those platoon members who were below us; we were crooning into Fedderman’s ear at every step.