Before Their Time: A Memoir

by Robert Kotlowitz

  “One foot at a time, old boy. Don’t rush it.” That was Bern.

  “Don’t open your eyes. We’ve got you.” Me, lying.

  “Not too fast now, you’ll step on Barney.” Bern again.

  “Jesus, Ira.”

  “Sweet mother of God.”

  Minutes passed. An hour. All of eternity, it seemed. Then somehow, while the ladder slapped hard against the Argentina’s hull, we were at the bottom, or close enough. Men clustered like flies to the side of the ship on our right and left, jumping one at a time onto pontoon bridges that had been laid down, then into the clumsy vessels waiting alongside them. We jumped too, Bern first, then Fedderman, then me. One by one, knees buckling, we crashed on deck. A moment later, up near the prow of the Higgins boat, Fedderman stood alongside me, panting. His nose was bleeding. “For God’s sake, wipe your nose,” I ordered irritably. Fedderman looked startled but did as he was told. Then, as the vessel began to fill, Bern lighted a cigarette, hiding it in the palm of his hand, while Fedderman poked at his nose with his handkerchief, examining the bloodstains with a resentful look.

  So you finally made it down the ladder, I remember saying to myself; you actually did it. The taste of that was sweet.

  But we weren’t in Cherbourg yet.

  Finally loaded, the boat headed for shore. A couple of hundred yards farther on, it began to slow, then suddenly came to a halt alongside a dozen others, each one jammed tight with troops, like ours. A couple of minutes passed. I could feel Fedderman’s massive presence behind me. The butt of his rifle slapped against my thigh, and Bern’s canteen—or Willis’s, I’m not sure—began to rub against my hipbone, creating a maddening pressure. Up ahead I could see square granite houses, with their shutters drawn. There were also a couple of shuttered depots and what looked like a half-empty market, with empty crates piled in the middle of the street. A few bicycles rolled by, their riders glancing at us. Everything was out of scale, disproportionately small. The strange weight of foreignness was everywhere we looked.

  Then the prow of the landing craft slowly opened; we drifted in a few more feet and stopped again, rocking in the surf.

  “Holy shit,” Rocky said, eyeing the water that lapped at our feet.

  “Okay, men,” Lieutenant Gallagher said, addressing us from the top of an oil barrel. Where had he come from? “This is the end of the line for you guys. Or maybe the beginning.” He paused a moment to laugh at his little joke, but he laughed alone; no one was in the mood for little jokes. “What you do now,” he went on, suddenly looking serious, “is head for those steps there.” He pointed to some stone steps cut into the side of a quay many yards off. “It’s all shallow waterfront from here on. You’ll find trucks waiting there for the platoon. Look for your squad leader. Stick with your buddies. Keep it orderly and keep it moving. And no business with civilians. I mean no business. Of any kind.”

  I could hardly see Gallagher’s face as he spoke, lost as it was inside his helmet. Absolutely nothing of government issue fit him.

  Then we were off, scrambling up to our chests into the dirty gray water, holding our rifles horizontally over our heads to keep them dry, sludging along step-by-step toward Cherbourg. For every one of us, I’m sure, making it across the fifty or so yards that remained was like trying to walk through water in our most dire dreams; our thighs ached painfully and our hearts pounded double-time from the struggle to break through.

  But we did break through minutes later, yelling with relief as we scrambled up the steps of the quay to the street. Soaking, we quickly managed to board one of the trucks waiting there, under Arch’s nervous eye. Bern and I hoisted ourselves up, shoving Fedderman’s stubborn wet butt ahead of us to give him some extra leverage. Then, just as we began to settle down, we had to do it all over again, because it turned out that we were on the wrong truck. Everybody was on the wrong truck.

  “How about it, Arch,” Rocky complained as we milled around in the street, complaining too.

  Finally, along with everyone else in the third platoon, we were pointed in the right direction and boarded the correct vehicles efficiently. The roll call proceeded: “Johnson (Yo!), Willis (Here!), Barnato (Ja!), Natale (Yo!), Brewster (Yo!), Keaton (Ho!), Fedderman … Fedderman …” then a third time, “Fedderman (Ici!), Kotlowitz (Here!)” By then, we were seated along the insides of the truck, facing each other, our teeth on edge.

  Someone noticed that Arch had succeeded in remaining perfectly dry while getting ashore. We all wondered about that, muttering under our breath. “He probably flew the fuck in,” Fedderman said, smiling in that sarcastic way of his, but he echoed our feelings exactly. We all knew how inventive our master sergeant could be when it came to his own creature comforts.

  In another moment, the second squad arrived, rowdy as always. They clambered into the truck, yelling and stepping all over our feet. (There were no sad sacks in the second squad since Fedderman’s departure, no sissies.) We sat quietly. While they were rowdy we would get some rest. Let them yell and carry on.

  The trucks began to rev up, then idle, then rev again. Half the squad was already asleep. Then at last we were rolling, once again part of a convoy. Cherbourg, I thought, straining to see the city. It looked different, it smelled different. Yeasty and pungent and alien—but indisputably French. Overhead, the gulls were still with us. I watched them trying to keep pace, circling in formation, then swooping independently from one truck to another. They seemed to be in better order than we were. What a noise we made, what an engine roar! My eyes began to close. Sleep moved in, but first I wanted to reach out and embrace the strange city that lay around us and, like a fool, shout, “I’m here!” Me voici! But it was too late for that. My attenuated French had vanished with the day’s struggles. I was already half-dead to the world.

  FOUR

  Short-Arms

  WE SOON learned that Antonovich liked to talk about Kansas and Nebraska, where he had triumphed at football, and by implication about the whole Midwest and its dependencies; and with so much time on our hands in Normandy, so much waiting time, he had all the opportunities he needed.

  In theory, he was supposed to be lecturing C Company on infantry tactics (there was really no other subject in the YD), but after completing basic training and Tennessee maneuvers, as well as two months at Camp Jackson refining details before we shipped overseas, there was not much left—in the abstract, at least—to learn about infantry tactics. We knew it all, was the general attitude in the Yankee Division; all that was left was to apply what we knew.

  Gradually then, Antonovich’s daily class, held right after the midday meal within the cramped apple orchard in which C Company was bivouacked, began to drift in other directions, according to Antonovich’s whim, and before long we were engaged by an intellectual syllabus that might have been entitled The Great American Plains and Their Incomparable Metropoli, most particularly the cities of Omaha, Kansas City (the wrong one), and Abilene, glorious gateways to the glorious west. Those were Michael Antonovich’s favorite towns, his American urban lode-stones, the homes of the really free and the truly truly brave.

  Of course it was absurd, the whole idea of Michael Antonovich lecturing us about anything. (How he chewed away, bite by bite, at the substance of that beefy geography while we struggled to stay awake after the midday meal in the late summer heat.) We all knew that we were waiting at that moment for orders to join the new Ninth Army, which was slowly being formed with fastidious care under the command of General Simpson, whose name we had never heard before. Nobody tried to keep our situation secret. It was probably common knowledge all over the ETO, on both sides of the lines, American and German. Several other divisions were also waiting on the Normandy peninsula, as we were, camped in a patient cluster near the sea. We had already been there two weeks, living a privileged life. The word was that the Ninth Army, when its time came, would join the Allied forces somewhere in northern France, near the Belgian border. (“Ro-ses are smiling in Pi-car-dy,” I sang
to myself as the rumor spread; it was a sentimental old tune from World War I that my father had become attached to during his own Army days overseas, and it had stuck to me through childhood like a birthmark.) The cities of Lille, Amiens, and Roubaix were mentioned. So was the Ardennes.

  It could take months to put a new Army together, while we waited for fresh divisions to arrive from the UK and the States, and nearly as long to get it into action. So there was no hurry. That was what Lieutenant Gallagher told us—more, certainly, than he should have—and it was what we wanted to believe. Waiting: that suited us fine. We lived in a kind of trance-like state, camped in the midst of heady calvados country, near the village of Montebourg, hidden from the road by thick hedgerows, and always a little high from the pungent smell of rotting apples and smoky wood fires that never quite burned out. It was a classic bivouac camp, perfect in almost every detail. Even our mail reached us soon after we arrived, bringing on a sudden rush of nostalgia. Did we deserve such bounty? We didn’t ask. It was enough to know that once again the war was somewhere else and good luck to it.

  But in the meantime, while we waited, what were they to do with us?

  While Michael Antonovich lectured C Company on the glories of the great American Middle West, Lieutenant Gallagher decided to offer a series of talks on battles that had changed the world—on the theory, I imagine, that such a course might fire us with a certain zeal for action. But it soon became clear that Gallagher was a total dilettante, at best an ambitious novice on the subject, and always shaky when it came to essential details. Nobody cared. As usual, Gallagher had the right spirit; he knew how to force his ideas on us without stirring resentment. Marathon, Thermopylae, then (a great gap) Lexington, Waterloo, Gettysburg, and the Marne, which was Gallagher’s favorite, especially the part about how the taxis of Paris had helped to save the city—one detail, at least, that he got right.

  In Gallagher’s lectures, every battle soon began to sound exactly like every other, in the general mess of skewed facts, except for the names of the battlefields themselves. Marathon and the Marne, Lexington and Waterloo, they were all one. So were hoplites, redcoats, minutemen, Johnny Rebs, Tommies, and poilus. From his training at OCS, apparently, Gallagher had retained an ideal of Battle, a pure abstraction that served for all battles, and through his bright and disorganized monologues, which followed Antonovich’s on the afternoon schedule, he tried to impose that ideal on the troops of C Company. It was Ira Fedderman who developed this theory for Bern and me—one of his plummier perceptions, I thought.

  Yes, it was absurd, as absurd as Antonovich’s meanderings through the Middle West. We knew it and I hope Gallagher knew it. Yet, despite really ghastly boredom, we stuck loyally to our platoon leader and pretended to be enthralled by his talks. In that way, we proved to ourselves that we loved him. Time had to be killed while the new Ninth Army slowly took shape, and if absurdity would help to hurry the process … well, we could put up with a little absurdity.

  Antonovich and Gallagher were really talking to deadweights after the midday break. Sprawled out on the sweet-smelling ground, a litter of loose Yankee bones at their ease, the third platoon and the rest of the company languished inattentively in front of their commanding officers, trying hard to stay awake. We faked it for Gallagher, nodded off for Antonovich. Every now and then, Master Sergeant Archambault would step lightly through the sprawl and prod our stuffed bodies with a stick if we fell asleep. “Stop that dreaming,” he would mutter dutifully, but we could tell his mind was elsewhere; he could hardly keep from yawning himself.

  Midday meals were huge: meat and poultry requisitioned from Cherbourg depots, Norman potatoes, in theory off-limits; breads baked by our own cooks, in their element at last; steaming gravy that took half a day to digest. It all sat heavy and killed our energy. Up front, facing this postprandial trance and in no hurry to finish, Antonovich talked on about Omaha or Kansas City and trains and beef and the connections among all three, about wheat futures, cattle prices, the humane slaughter of edible beasts, and so on, including an occasional obvious fact about dealing with life on the great prairies in the midst of a hard winter. For example, always wear a hat in freezing weather, he told us, because body heat escapes through the head. Things like that—totally irrelevant and all promptly forgotten.

  Meanwhile, Gallagher was at us about frontal assaults, flanking operations, guerrilla tactics, and the special military skill of the Huns. That was what he called the Germans in his battle recitations, the Huns, as though the YD was still at St.-Mihiel or Belleau Wood. I don’t think Gallagher was thrilled by the subject. I think he just stumbled on it when he realized how much time had to be filled while we waited for the Ninth Army to grow to full strength. I also think that he made up everything as he went along; he was always a great improviser. So we yawned, dozed, snored, and pretended to care. Meanwhile the sun shone, apples fell from the trees, every morning we hiked five to ten miles on mostly deserted roads, and we were bewitched.

  • • •

  ARCH, who loved the weapon and insisted on its primacy, put us through bayonet drill for a half-hour every day.

  “Fix bayonets!” he would shout, and we did, far too slowly for Arch’s approval, our hands trembling as we fumbled with the scabbard and blade in a shaky attempt to fix it to the muzzles of our rifles without drawing blood. We were scared of the bayonet. It carried a terrible power. It could disembowel a man. Would we ever have to use it? Could I disembowel a man? I doubted it.

  Then, swallowing our fear and following Arch’s orders, we aimed, thrust, slashed, or whichever—screaming “Kill! Kill!” in our thin teen-age voices—Bern and Ira and I. Self consciousness overwhelmed us. Squeaky sounds came from our throats. We could hear them. “Keel, Keel!” Ira tried to yell, in a threatening falsetto, as though he were some kind of Latin movie villain.

  Arch, looking disgusted, kept us at it, over and over again with no breaks, his own voice choking with pretended passion. “Girls, girls!” he shouted, only half-joking. I lunged for Fedderman (thrown totally off-balance, as I always was when carrying that huge knife at the end of my rifle). Bern went for Willis, Brewster for Natale, while Johnson and Barnato ran at each other, in a manner of speaking, both of them a little too serious, too ardent, I thought, and clumsy. Their unsheathed bayonets actually touched each other’s flesh at one point, breaking a strict taboo. “Watch it, shitheads!” Arch screamed. “That’s real skin and blood there.” From the sidelines, Rocky observed the action in silence and bit into an apple. He looked serious. God knows what he was thinking.

  Another half-hour a day was spent on weapon-cleaning, which we performed by now with near-perfect skill and speed. (We had certainly practiced it enough.) Even Fedderman and I were near-perfect at it, stripping our rifles with our eyes closed, then minutes later putting the rifles together again, piece by irreplaceable piece. We loved to do that (at last), showing off for each other, just as we loved our M-1s, without exception. We fondled them, stroked them, sometimes held them in our arms and hugged them while we slept. It was another kind of propitiation. I knew men who used to kiss their rifles surreptitiously. Paul Willis was one of them.

  We could even take apart the BAR, although with less confidence and no love. With the BAR we might fumble a bit, look confused, hesitate, but in the end the job was done. But when, I sometimes wondered, would we ever find ourselves in a combat situation in which we would have the time and the opportunity to strip our weapons and fastidiously clean each piece? I knew, and everyone else knew, that in combat we would have to depend on pouring oil down the gun barrels and slopping the trigger mechanisms and the stock in the same way, at top speed. But then we were not being serious in our Norman orchard; we knew that we were merely killing time while we waited for orders from General Simpson.

  So we hiked, had bayonet practice, listened to absurd lectures, cleaned our weapons, ate enormous unhealthy meals, and kept house in our pup tents, which were rigorously inspected every mornin
g after breakfast. Sometimes Arch looked in, holding his nose as a joke, other times Gallagher showed up, and even, once or twice, Antonovich himself. Mostly, though, it was Rocky’s job, as squad leader, and I have to say for him that he didn’t take it lightly. I think that inspection appealed to his sense of order and pride, and for Rocky most of us tried to keep our nests fastidious.

  Maybe it was a good thing that Bern had moved in with Roger Johnson, who now headed the BAR team, while I took on Fedderman shortly after we landed in Normandy. This was not done casually. It happened only after Bern and I shared a couple of serious, even mournful exchanges about how our individual failings seemed to feed the other’s, so that it would probably be a sound idea to separate, if only temporarily. The whole painful discussion was accompanied by a lot of symbolic bowing and scraping and calculated politesse on behalf of our tender feelings for each other. But it worked and the deal was set: Fedderman and Johnson did not object, neither did Rocky.

  At least with Fedderman I could complain as much as I wanted, berating him about his sloppiness and general disorder without feeling guilty. He was worse than sloppy: his side of the tent was a litter, far messier than anything Bern and I had ever produced in our time; mine of course was now perfect, for Rocky’s sake. Soon my complaints turned into the kind of relentless nagging that kills the spirit without fail. Then I discovered that I was actually beginning to enjoy it—the nagging, that is. Naturally, this disturbed my sense of myself.

  Sharing a pup tent could do that to you. It put you in someone else’s thrall. It forced you into someone else’s domestic embrace. Suddenly you turned over part of your world, perhaps the essential part, to a stranger, an intruder—in Fedderman’s case bulky, twitchy, high-strung, and incompetent—with noises, habits, and intimate smells of his own; and he returned the favor. (It was hard enough to get used to your own smells, much less someone else’s.) Men were not made to live together, I was learning for a second time. It created a false situation, bound by unyielding tension. I would not forget that lesson. It would last for years.