Salinger

by David Shields

  —

  PRIVATE BOB CONROY: [A GI named] Gordon got ripped by a machine gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He . . . told me he was hit through the stomach as well. . . . We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain], so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death; he bled to death.

  WILLIAM MONTGOMERY: The casualties had been hit by shrapnel the night before and were lost in the dark. One man had frozen, poor guy. The other was a real Survivor—with a capital “S.” His leg was shattered, but he had made a tourniquet of his belt. He burrowed down into the snow and covered himself with his shelter-half, lit an alcohol cube with his Zippo lighter, and shoved his rifle butt into the small flame. When the fumes got to him, he put out the flame, flapped the shelter-half, and settled down for a while, then started over again. I remember him well because he was such a vivid example of the hell riflemen had to live through every day. Even now, fifty-five years later, I’m still in awe of what guys like him did. My squad and I carried a lot of them off the line—enough to know that it was the infantry who won the war.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: The successful penetration of the American lines trapped large numbers of American troops, which is why many were captured. They ran out of ammo, there were no reinforcements, and they lost the resources to fight their way out.

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The enemy hoped to break up and isolate the regiment so that his panzers could pass through. The problem for Col. Chance [Salinger’s commanding officer] was to make contact with his isolated units and form a line.

  STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: The Americans used desperate methods to bolster the defense. Pvt. Kenneth Delaney of the 1st Infantry Division had been in combat from D-Day to November 15, when he was wounded in the Hürtgen. A month later he was recuperating in a hospital in Liège, Belgium. “On December 17th,” he recalled, “the hospital staff informed us that if you can walk or crawl, you will have to go back to your Division as soon as possible.”

  —

  GEORGE KNAPP: On Christmas of ’44, in a small town close to the river separating Luxembourg and Germany, I conducted a candlelight service in a barn alongside the road leading to the front line. Candelabra and candles came from a bombed-out church in town. Men of all faiths attended. We only had a trio to sing as the other member of an intended quartet had been captured. The next morning, my Christmas Day Services were conducted in a two-lane bowling alley in another town a bit farther away from the front.

  —

  COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: On those days [of warmer temperatures], melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields, and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been either partially or completely destroyed, and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France, and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12th had ever fought through.

  MARTHA GELLHORN: There were half-tracks and tanks literally wrenched apart, and a gun position directly hit by bombs. All around these lacerated or flattened objects of steel there was the usual riffraff: papers, tin cans, cartridge belts, helmets, an odd shoe, clothing. There were also, ignored and completely inhuman, the hard-frozen corpses of Germans. Then there was a clump of houses, burned and gutted, with only a few walls standing, and around them the enormous bloated bodies of cattle. The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.

  At Warnach, on the other side of the main Bastogne road, some soldiers who had taken, lost, and retaken this miserable village were now sightseeing the battlefield. They were also inspecting the blown-out equipment of two German tanks and a German self-propelled gun which had been destroyed here. Warnach smelled of the dead; in subzero weather the smell of death has an acrid burning odor.

  Farther down the street a command car dragged a trailer; the bodies of Germans were piled on the trailer like so much ghastly firewood.

  HANSON W. BALDWIN: The fundamental reason for the German failure was a lack of military power to match Hitler’s imaginative and extraordinary aims. And, as so often happens in totalitarian societies, the Germans underestimated the staying power of their enemies. . . . After the first shock of surprise had been dissipated, U.S. troops, especially the bloodied veteran divisions, rallied, fought, and died. . . . This is probably the major imponderable of warfare—to know just when men will suddenly, and often of their own free will, commit an act of unthinking, desperate bravery.

  PAUL FITZGERALD, excerpt from an unpublished poem:

  The Fighting Fourth Division became a seasoned team, through Normandy, through Paris, and Luxembourg. The Siegfried Line deterred our troops, but soon it was asunder.

  COLONEL RICHARD MARR: The 12th Infantry held; held in the face of odds so ominous that it would be difficult, even in retrospect, to believe possible had one not seen, during months of continuous combat, the high courage and honor which marks all ranks of the 12th Infantry.

  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment was awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation for its defense of Luxembourg.

  MARTHA GELLHORN: There were many dead and many wounded, but the survivors contained the fluid situation and slowly turned it into a retreat, and finally, as the communiqué said, the bulge was ironed out. This was not done fast or easily; and it was not done by those anonymous things, armies, divisions, regiments. It was done by men, one by one—your men.

  One soldier stands over a frozen soldier.

  JOHN TOLAND: The will of the German soldier was broken. No one that survived the retreat believed there was the slightest chance of German victory.

  ALEX KERSHAW: The brutal culmination of J. D. Salinger’s combat experience in the European theater of operations was the Bulge, fighting in the Ardennes. He was surrounded by a huge volume of human suffering and annihilation. It’s impossible to believe that he wasn’t fundamentally altered in unrecognizable ways.

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  SHANE SALERNO: The common understanding is that Hemingway and Salinger met only two times, in Paris and in the Hürtgen Forest. However, another meeting took place during the Battle of the Bulge. On December 16, 1944, the first day of the battle, although Hemingway was in Paris, recovering from pneumonia, his friend General Barton told him “it was a pretty hot show and to come on up.” He did.

  CHARLES MEYERS: I was in the Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. During the Battle of the Bulge I was loaned, along with an Atlantan named Ernie Welch, to the 4th Infantry Division CIC team. The 4th Division anchored the southern hinge of the Bulge in Luxembourg. Its CIC team numbered about fourteen men, six of whom were located in pairs at each of the three regimental CPs. One of these pairs included Jerry (J. D.) Salinger.

  Our assignment during that January 1945 required Welch and myself to jeep each day between Division Headquarters and the three regimental CPs. It was cold that winter, and we did a lot of warming up at the regimental CIC billets. Jerry was writing at that time and selling a few of the stories he was then writing in the time he could spare (sometimes a lot) from the war.

  Hemingway was at that time attached to the 4th. Jerry gave him some of his stories to read, and one day, when Welch and I had dropped by to thaw again, Jerry showed me a note penciled on a piece of brown paper bag which Hemingway had sent him. The note commended Jerry’s “
ear” and praised the considerable talent and promise of his stories.

  LEICESTER HEMINGWAY: [When Hemingway took a hotel room in Luxembourg, he] came out to relax with good pals . . . [including] Jerome Salinger, who was a good man with the CIC.

  —

  BART HAGERMAN: Every time it snows . . . I’ll think about those days during the Bulge. It brings back memories of the friends that I lost and the desperate feeling that we had in those days, and it kind of irks me that, after 50 years, I still think that way. I should forget it and go on about my life, but . . . it’ll always be with me, I guess.

  ERNIE PYLE: There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

  Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

  Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the road in France.

  We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.

  MARGARET SALINGER: I remember standing next to my father—I was about seven at the time—for what seemed like an eternity as he stared blankly at the strong backs of our construction crew of local boys, carpenters building the new addition to our house. Their T-shirts were off, their muscles glistening in the summer sun. After a long time, he finally came back to life again and spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one in particular, “All those big strong boys”—he shook his head—“always on the front line, always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them,” he said, his hand flat, palm out, pushing arc-like waves away from him.

  6

  STILL BURNING

  KAUFERING LAGER IV, LANDSBURG, GERMANY; BUCHENWALD, GERMANY, SPRING 1945

  Exhausted at war’s end, Salinger and the 12th Regiment enter Kaufering IV. In many ways, Salinger never leaves.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: Salinger would have recognized it from a mile or two down the road. It always amazes me when local civilians say they didn’t know what was going on in the camps; the smell just pervaded the countryside.

  Kaufering IV, subcamp of Dachau.

  ROBERT ABZUG: The experience of liberating the camps—the horror, really—began even before they got through the gates.

  ALEX KERSHAW: J. D. Salinger was one of the first Americans to witness the full evil of the Nazi regime when he went into a concentration camp in Germany in the spring of 1945. He would have seen unimaginable horrors: burning bodies, piles of burning bodies. It’s a truism because it’s true: words aren’t enough to describe it.

  ROBERT ABZUG: You walked through a beautiful, manicured German village, and at the end of the road was this camp that looked like hell piled with corpses.

  For a soldier like Salinger walking into a camp, there was a stillness to it and a craziness to it. You were caught off guard. You weren’t psyched for battle. These weren’t liberations in the sense of busting down the gates or anything like that. The war was over; you could let down your guard a little. These soldiers basically walked into these horrific situations. Unguarded and unsuspecting, they were walking into an open place. This was like opening up, and falling into, a graveyard.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger has never described in writing what he witnessed at the Kaufering concentration camp, but it permeates his life and work.

  SHANE SALERNO: He did comment on it to his daughter, Margaret, and to Jean Miller.

  MARGARET SALINGER: As a counter-intelligence officer my father was one of the first soldiers to walk into a certain, just liberated, concentration camp. He told me the name, but I no longer remember.

  J. D. SALINGER: You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.

  Burned corpses at Kaufering IV.

  JEAN MILLER: He did not talk about the war and his experiences in the war. The only thing he said to me once is that you never forget the smell of burning flesh.

  —

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Kaufering IV was a catchall camp for the sick prisoners of the other small camps in the area. It was called the Krankenlager (camp for the sick), but it was actually an extermination camp, because the sick prisoners were simply allowed to die from their illnesses or from starvation. On the day before American troops occupied the area, the SS guards evacuated some three thousand prisoners via railroad boxcars and killed all those who were too sick or too weak to travel. They shot, clubbed, and hacked to death ninety-two prisoners, and they burned alive eighty-six others by locking them in wooden barracks and setting the barracks on fire. When the Americans arrived, all the SS guards were gone and only a handful of prisoners were still alive. They had escaped extermination by hiding from the SS. In addition to the 360 prisoners whom the SS had killed before pulling out, the GIs found two mass graves containing the bodies of another 4,500 prisoners who had died from sickness or malnutrition.

  The SS evacuated people from Camp IV, the one that Salinger came upon, and as the SS was trying to march them to railroad cars, a lot of the inmates tried to escape and the SS butchered them with machine guns. Some bodies were actually cut in half by machine-gun fire. The SS had also slaughtered them with axes. The GIs found bloody axes next to the corpses.

  So as Salinger and his driver drove up to the camp—as a counterintelligence officer, Salinger had access to vehicles other soldiers did not—they saw the almost one hundred corpses lying in the area between the camp and the railroad siding. Then, entering the camp, they saw stacks of emaciated corpses. Salinger and his driver continued into the camp and found the source of the terrible smell: there were three barracks buildings, nothing much more than large doghouses, half underground, and these buildings the Nazis had nailed shut with the sick people inside and set on fire. Salinger and his driver saw the burned bodies still smoldering in those ruins.

  Bodies at Kaufering IV.

  ALEX KERSHAW: They were behind barbed wire, starved, beaten, tortured, killed.

  ROBERT ABZUG: It was the shock of seeing something unexpected. Kaufering was discovered a day or two before the main camp of Dachau. None of these troops had seen anything like it.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: The German SS realized the Americans were approaching. They tried to evacuate all the able-bodied prisoners in so-called death marches. In the case of the camp that Salinger visited, the Krankenlager, the camp for the sick, a lot of the people there were unable to walk, so these people were killed by the SS.

  When American soldiers discovered the abandoned camp on April 27, 1945, they were greeted by the smell of burning bodies, as the SS had set fire to several earth huts full of prisoners and shot all those who tried to escape the flames. As they went into the camp, the U.S. soldiers saw corpses that had been stacked like cordwood, as one soldier said, and as they looked at these bodies, they saw that they were only skin and bones. The estimate is that most of them weighed between fifty and seventy pounds. They had obviously been starved to death.

  Most of what the GIs found were bodies.

  JACK HALLETT: The first thing I saw was a stack of bodies . . . that appeared to be about 20 feet long and about as high as a man could reach. . . . And which looked like cordwood, stacked up there. The thing I’ll never forget was the fact that closer inspection found people whose eyes were still blinking, three or four deep inside the stack.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: The camp assaulted Salinger, as it did any of the soldiers who entered it, with the smell and also with the sight of naked bodies stacked up in piles—bodies that looked like they were dead people, but sometimes sounds coming from the bodies and soldiers realizing that in fact they were still
alive. They discovered people who were so incredibly thin that their cheekbones stuck out almost like horns. Their wrists protruded. The skin was stretched over their bodies like a nylon stocking: you could see through it to the bones. Nothing in their experience—and Salinger was an experienced soldier by this time and had been through terrible battles—nothing in their experience could have prepared them for the sight.

  ALEX KERSHAW: As Salinger looked at them, these men would duck their heads in submission. They looked like beaten dogs. They were afraid to look another man in the eye in case they would be shot or killed or beaten. That image—of men who couldn’t even look their liberators in the eye—remained with many of those Americans for the rest of their lives.

  SHANE SALERNO: Paul Fitzgerald, Salinger’s close friend and fellow CIC agent, was next to Salinger when they liberated the camp. A female survivor handed Fitzgerald a stack of photographs she had of the atrocities that had occurred at Kaufering IV. Fitzgerald held onto these photographs and didn’t show them to anyone until 1980, at which point he sent them to the Holocaust Library and Research Center of San Francisco, writing, “I have had this album for thirty-five years now. . . . This is my own personal memory of a terrible nightmare.” Max R. Garcia, the director of the Center, wrote to Fitzgerald’s intermediary, August Carella, “Please convey my thanks to Mr. Paul J. Fitzgerald for allowing me to see the album of the gruesome photographs he brought back from his WWII days. The photographs of the torture devices I have never seen before and they are indeed eye openers. It and the other photographs clearly indicate the brutality of the Nazi regime that reigned at that time.”

  ROBERT ABZUG: Soldiers like Salinger, any of the GIs coming into these camps, were shocked, but they somehow had to make human sense out of it all. They’d look at bodies and try to find some human feature, some lifeness. The living dead were even worse for them to confront, because they would stagger right into their faces and sometimes try to embrace them.