Salinger

by David Shields

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger would have experienced hedgerow fighting at its worst. A hundred yard gain on a three hundred yard front took an entire day for a battalion. German gunners were dug in every few yards. Forward movement brought certain fire. The Germans used this terrain to their great advantage. The fields were incredibly well mined by the Germans. One was called the “S” Mine, otherwise known as the “Bouncing Betty,” which filled every single soldier, including Salinger, with immense fear. When a GI hit the trigger device on [a Bouncing Betty], a small charge would shoot up a canister. A Bouncing Betty had 360 ball bearings in it and was timed to explode just as it reached your genitals. The effect was devastating.

  American troops fighting in the hedgerows.

  PRIVATE ALBERT SOHL: It was at the hedgerows, in some deep grass alongside a cow path, that we came upon our first casualty. A dead American soldier was lying grotesquely on his side. His helmet was askew, and he was still clutching his M-1 rifle. A thick, hardened crust of dried blood formed a dark red mask where his face had once been. His trousers and underwear were down below his knees. Obviously he had been in the process of relieving himself when a stray fragment of shrapnel brought a profane ending to his last living act.

  CORPORAL ALTON PEARSON: While we were in our position behind hedgerows, I could hear the roars of bombers. They came in one squadron at a time, each one dropping bombs where the other ended and so on. The ground was shaking . . . so bad that it would knock out your breath if you lay on the ground.

  PAUL FUSSELL: During the bombing, some German troops, literally driven insane, blew out their brains rather than remain in the noise, the flame, the smoke, the screams, the shaking earth, the flying bodies, and parts of bodies. Ordered from on high to “hold in position,” General Fritz Bayerlein [commander of the Panzer Lehr Division] replied, “My grenadiers and the pioneers, my anti-tank gunners, they’re holding. None of them have left their positions, none. They’re lying in the holes still and mute, because they are dead. Dead. Do you understand?” A bit later, he reported, “After an hour I had no communication with anybody, even by radio. By noon nothing was visible but dust and smoke. My front lines looked like the face of the moon and at least 70 percent of my troops were out of action—dead, wounded, crazed, or numb.”

  LIEUTENANT ELLIOT JOHNSON: We were surrounded by hedgerow fences. One corner would be cut down so cattle could go and drink. In one such corner, there was a sniper. He was shooting at us. Every time, I’d stick my head out of the foxhole, I’d get shot at. I called two very dear friends on the [field] telephone. We fanned out, each of us with a grenade. At a given point, we pitched our grenades and accomplished what we had to do. I avoid using words like “kill a man” because I like to divorce myself from that.

  CAPTAIN JOHN SIM: While we were being mortared, this lone German soldier had come down toward us, from the castle fence carrying a rifle. I quietly said to my batman, “Harris, you see that soldier coming down? Shoot him.” And he did. Much later I thought, “How could I have given such an order?”

  —

  EDWARD G. MILLER: The drive to Cherbourg—what the 12th Infantry Regiment went through and what Salinger saw—can be summed up in casualty figures. The 12th Infantry landed on D-Day with not quite 3,100 soldiers. By the end of June, it had lost more than two thousand. The army hadn’t anticipated infantry losses like this. Soldiers were being wounded and killed by the truckload.

  JOHN McMANUS: The 12th Infantry, wedged in between the 8th on the left and the 22nd on the right, was making equally slow progress. The regiment’s objective was the high ground northeast of Montebourg, but first it needed to capture Edmondeville.

  To get even near Edmondeville, the 12th had to fight its way through these honeycomb-like, tree-rooted berms that were five, six feet high. It was small-unit fighting, nasty, intimate, and up close. There was one group of Americans on this side of the hedgerow and a group of Germans on the other side, and only one of them was going to be alive to keep going the next day. The entrenched German machine guns were slaughtering Americans in droves. The fighting around Edmondeville was some of the bitterest combat of the Normandy campaign. Colonel Reeder’s command post was almost overrun several times, which tells you the German and American front and rear lines were all mixed up: deadly chaos reigned.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Three days after D-Day, Salinger’s regiment was wedged between an enemy strongpoint at the village of Edmondeville and the guns of the fortress of Azeville. Here the Germans bombarded them on two sides. Salinger found himself on his belly, his regiment pinned down before Edmondeville. Under unrelenting machine-gun and mortar fire, desperate to withdraw, the soldiers were forced to rush the German defenses, regardless of the odds. They were cut down each time. After scrambling to collect the dead and wounded, they would storm the position yet again, only to gain a few feet at tremendous cost. For over two days and nights, Salinger’s company repeatedly attacked until the Germans silently withdrew. This is one of the battles that Salinger details in “The Magic Foxhole.”

  J. D. SALINGER (“The Magic Foxhole,” unpublished):

  The Air Corps finally smartened up and come around with some dive bombers to give us a hand, but we was—I mean our Company—was pinned down on this side of the swamp nearly two days. Out of around two hundred and eight of us only about thirty-five of us come through. The Swamp was a widow maker, all right.

  It was only about a few thousand yards across it, but the Front itself was real narrow—only about five hundred yards wide. Water on both flanks—grassy rivers, like. So you had to cross the damn thing, and they give the job to “C” company because we was the hottest outfit in the battalion, and because the C.O. asked for it, the bastard; he was bucking for his Captaincy.

  On the other side of the Swamp the Krauts had two goddamn companies, damn near full strength, and four twelve-centimeter mortars—four that we could count, anyways. Them mortars sure gave us hell.

  SHANE SALERNO: In order to take a village whose population numbered fewer than a hundred, the 12th regiment had lost three hundred men. Outnumbered two to one, the Germans finally came out with a white flag to surrender.

  LIEUTENANT JOE MOSES: After much discussion, Lt. Everett decided to go forward with a few men to take . . . prisoners. All prisoners in sight were moving toward us with arms raised overhead. While we were moving to receive these men a German machine gun crew whom we had not spotted, but was a part of the unit, opened fire when Lt. Everett and guards were within 20 yards of his enemies. Lt. Everett was riddled through the head and down the right cheek across the chest. One enlisted man was also killed and two wounded.

  JOHN McMANUS: The Americans who witnessed the false surrender became what I call “kill-crazy.” Salinger’s 12th determined that no Germans, even those who tried to surrender, would survive. They killed any and all. They hunted down and killed all the Germans they could find. We honestly don’t know what happened from a German perspective because they were wiped out.

  CAPTAIN FRANK P. BURK: [They] made the enemy pay dearly for their treachery.

  SHANE SALERNO: Edmondeville scorched itself into the memories of Salinger and his fellow soldiers.

  PAUL ALEXANDER: On June 12, not a week after D-Day, Salinger revealed his general feeling about what he was doing when he wrote [Whit] Burnett a brief postcard in which he mentioned conducting interrogation work. Most citizens, he said, were anxious about the shelling but thrilled the Allied troops had come to defeat the Germans.

  Paul Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger with their beloved dogs.

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: As we went into our eighth day, it was clear that the enemy, despite vicious counterattacks again and again, had been unable to drive us back even so much as a foot, and that the beachhead was thus fairly secure for the moment. Troops and supplies were pouring in over Utah Beach and spreading over the hard-gained ground that [the 12th Infantry] had fought so valiantly for. This underscored the necessity for pushing the attack even harder to
secure the vital port of Cherbourg in the minimum possible time.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger witnessed brutal street fighting in the Cotentin Peninsula as the 12th headed toward Cherbourg. The German failure to separate the American forces at Mortain was a turning point in this battle on the Western Front. On August 23, the 12th Regimental Combat Team started the 165-mile march toward Paris.

  SHANE SALERNO: There has been a lot of misinformation about what J. D. Salinger actually did in the war. These inaccurate stories have been repeated for decades in numerous books and articles. The most recent offender is Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life (2010), which has dozens of errors about Salinger’s war record. Slawenski claims that “once on the field of battle, he [Salinger] was forced to become a leader of men, responsible for squadrons and platoons.” For starters, squadrons are only in the Air Force. Furthermore, members of the Counter Intelligence Corps didn’t lead men; they weren’t combat soldiers. Salinger’s close friend John Keenan, who served with him in the CIC, explains their actual duties.

  An American soldier looking upon a dead German soldier in Cherbourg.

  JOHN KEENAN: Our job was support for assault troops, working in German command posts and communication posts and communications terminals, telephone exchanges, also telegraph. We also had lists of people identified as German collaborators. We were to seize records, interrogate. A lot of it was aborted because a lot of the targets had been blown apart. For instance, the telephone exchange in Ste.-Marie-Eglise [had been destroyed]. We did get some prisoners, but we didn’t have time to interrogate them; we had to send them back to England.

  ALEX KERSHAW: As a member of counterintelligence, Salinger had a lot of freedom, a lot of latitude. In some ways, it was a more intellectual, probing war for him than the average grunt. He, for example, would not have to reply to an officer with his rank because he was in counterintelligence. He could actually order a major or a colonel to do something, and yet he was a sergeant. He had a lot of latitude to move behind and near the enemy lines, to understand the culture, to understand the people, to understand what war did to the local people, how it strained the relationships between soldiers and locals, how it had corrupted and infected and damaged these great European cultures and traditions and peoples.

  He would have understood what it was like to be a civilian and be bombed, what it was like to be a collaborator, to be a young, attractive female whose only opportunity for bread and to feed her family was to have a relationship with a German soldier.

  He would have understood that level of complexity, not only of combat, but more importantly of the relationships that are strained and come into connection with combat and how war poisons everything. It spreads from the battlefield and poisons everything. He would have had a very complete picture of what war did to ordinary people in the Second World War.

  JOHN McMANUS: The fighting the 4th Division did in Cherbourg was building by building, block by block. They advanced through building basements if they could, because being out in the street was too dangerous. Basements are very valuable in that environment. But once you encounter Germans, it’s very close fighting, just like in the hedgerows. The killing with automatic weapons would be so close—Browning automatics, Thompson machine guns—ammo would literally tear a jagged hole in a person. Shots to the head would tear off pieces of skull. The 4th and two other divisions were fighting their way through the town to get to the German harbor defenses. The Allies needed to control the harbor to land supplies for the drive across Europe.

  PAUL FUSSELL: The point of the whole operation was to obliterate that part of the German army holding up the Allied advance, and that advance had to proceed, regardless of any humane complications.

  Company Morning Reports.

  DAVID SHIELDS: The countless losses of U.S. staff officers as the 12th pushed from the beaches toward and into Cherbourg forced individual units to improvise with personnel. Salinger’s role may have mutated from noncommissioned staff sergeant intelligence to unofficial combat officer status to infantryman to a combination of all these during reconnaissance operations. He is mute on the subject, but there are other accounts that give us a very good idea of the deadly, fluid situation that he and the 12th found themselves in.

  CLYDE STODGHILL: Following the bombing and breakthrough at Saint-Lô, our battalion, perhaps the entire 12th Infantry Regiment, was assigned the job of cleaning out pockets of Germans left behind during the rapid advance. We hiked from place to place, frequently covering the same ground two or more times. Sometimes there were Germans waiting and a firefight ensued. . . . It was a grueling assignment that allowed little time for rest or sleep and left us in a state of weariness beyond mere exhaustion.

  LEILA HADLEY LUCE: In the beginning Jerry felt very patriotic, that they were doing good in the world. I remember he said it was extraordinary to feel that he was part of something good. But when he saw people who were wounded or killed, when he saw death and mutilated people, this distressed him terribly. And then he didn’t want anything to do with the war at all.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: There isn’t much time to reclaim who you were before the battle. You’ve been changed in ways that you can’t quite fathom.

  EDWARD G. MILLER: It was a long way from a Park Avenue apartment to Normandy and to war.

  2

  SLIGHT REBELLION OFF PARK AVENUE

  NEW YORK CITY, 1919–1936; VIENNA, AUSTRIA, 1937–1938; COLLEGEVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA, 1938; VARIOUS ARMY BASES, 1941–1943

  Born into Park Avenue affluence, the young Salinger is a contrarian, a loner, an actor, a poor student, a military academy student, and a college dropout artist, anything but his parents’ son. Or so he needs to believe in order to become the writer he wants to be.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Salinger grew up in a bubble. He loved his mother, who loved him. He adored his sister, Doris, who adored him. His father was conventional, stern, and, despite being a Jew whose business was importing hams, religious. Jerome David Salinger didn’t want to be any of those things. Growing up the coddled son of a wealthy family, he was against whatever they were for—the values of upper-middle-class Manhattan; or rather, he was deeply conflicted about these values. His initial woe was, in a way, absence of woe.

  IAN HAMILTON: His father, Sol Salinger, was born [March 16, 1887] in Cleveland, Ohio.

  DAVID SHIELDS: Solomon Salinger, twenty-two, a Jew from Chicago, met Marie Jillich, seventeen, a Catholic born on August 26, 1893, in Atlantic, Iowa. When they married, she changed her name to the more Jewish-sounding “Miriam.” It’s in the very contradictions and confusions between his father’s Judaism and his mother’s Catholicism that Salinger will wind up finding himself; that’s the gap he’ll shoot.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger’s sister, Doris, told his daughter, Margaret, that in Chicago Sol and Miriam ran a movie theater, but it was unsuccessful. Sol found his niche with a meat-and-cheese importing business, J. S. Hoffman. The owner was so impressed by Sol he asked him to relocate to New York and manage the East Coast office.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: After Salinger’s sister, Doris, was born on December 17, 1912, his mother, Miriam, suffered two miscarriages.

  SHANE SALERNO: Miriam’s doctors didn’t expect her second pregnancy to come to fruition, because during the second month she was ill with pneumonia. However, on January 1, 1919, at the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital on West 61st Street in Manhattan, Jerome David Salinger was born. He was nicknamed “Sonny” at birth.

  WILLIAM MAXWELL: So far as the present population is concerned, there is a cleavage between those who have come to the city as adults and those who were born and raised there, for a New York childhood is a special experience. For one thing, the landmarks have a very different connotation. As a boy Jerry Salinger played on the steps of public buildings that a non-native would recognize immediately and that he never knew the names of. He rode his bicycle in Central Park. He fell into the Lagoon. Those almost apotheosized department stores, Macy’s and Gimbel’
s, still mean to him the toy department at Christmas. Park Avenue means taking a cab to Grand Central at the beginning of vacation.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: When Salinger was born, his family lived at 500 West 113th Street, then in North Harlem at 3681 Broadway, moved back to Morningside Heights—511 West 113th Street—down to the Upper West Side at 215 West 82nd, and finally—from the fall of 1932 onward—on the Upper East Side: Park Avenue and East 91st Street, 1133 Park Avenue, in the same general neighborhood where Holden Caulfield’s affluent parents live.

  MICHAEL CLARKSON: An introverted, polite child, Salinger liked to act and write and go for long walks by himself.

  SHANE SALERNO: Doris Salinger told her niece, Margaret Salinger, “Your father and I were the best of friends growing up.”

  DORIS SALINGER: Did Mother ever tell you the Little Indian story about Sonny? One afternoon I was supposed to be taking care of Sonny while Mother was out shopping. He couldn’t have been older than three or four at the most. I was about ten. We had a big fight about something—I forget what—but Sonny got so mad he packed his suitcase and ran away. He was always running away. When Mother came home from shopping a few hours later, she found him in the lobby. He was dressed from head to toe in his Indian costume, long feather headdress and all. He said, “Mother, I’m running away, but I stayed to say goodbye to you.” When she unpacked his suitcase, it was full of toy soldiers. . . . They were very close. It was always Sonny and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy always got the short end of the stick.

  DAVID SHIELDS: One of the few anecdotes we have about Salinger’s relationship with his father is echoed in the title of perhaps his most famous short story. At the beach, Sol would hold Jerry in the water and ask him to look for “bananafish.”