A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  The Quartermaster Corps served as provisioners of the army, vital but unglamorous, feeding, clothing, and supplying the troops and repairing their equipment. Its training school was booming in 1942. More than ten thousand men were commissioned as second lieutenants, with eight separate thirteen-week class groups that year, each with between six hundred and twelve hundred soldiers. About two-thirds were college graduates, and a number of them, like Elliott, had histories or characteristics that precluded them from certain assignments. Elliott’s was the final class, commissioned on December 23, two days after military intelligence belatedly had tried to hold him down to a private and transfer him to Louisiana. He executed the oath of office upon his appointment, solemnly swearing “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

  His first assignment after graduating was close to home, at Romulus Army Air Field on the outskirts of Detroit. At the start of 1943, he began work as assistant base quartermaster for the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command, where he was personnel officer for the Quartermaster Section and in charge of base public relations, including putting out the base newspaper. Elliott enjoyed editing and layout as much as writing, and it did not take long for his superiors to notice the quality of his work. On February 5, Carlyle L. Nelson, commanding colonel of the Air Corps, fired off a memo of praise: “To: Lt. Elliott Maraniss. 1. I desire to convey my compliments to you and your staff on the merits of No. 2 edition of ‘Wings over Wayne.’ 2. Especially impressive is the cover design. It is clever and meaningful. Best wishes for the continued success of this publication are extended to you and your co-workers.”

  But military intelligence was determined to move him. They had been plotting his transfer even before he was praised for the quality of the base newspaper. In a January 28 special order issued by the director of military intelligence, Room 1804 of the War Department in Washington, the Military Personnel Division was instructed to transfer 2nd Lt. Elliott Maraniss “to an isolated post”—in this case Fort D. A. Russell, out in Marfa in west Texas. The reassignment was “per Capt. Munez, G-2, and concurred in by Headquarters of Army Air Forces and 8th Service Command.” Again the military seemed at odds with itself. Elliott’s immediate superiors thought well of him, and his personnel record was excellent. Col. E. S. Hetzel, chief of the Military Personnel Division for the Air Corps, noted that there was no record that the commanding general concurred with the reassignment and requested that Elliott be allowed to continue his activities at Romulus. This time, however, the G-2 prevailed, and Elliott was shipped off to Marfa, far from the action in Europe and the Pacific.

  He was at Fort D. A. Russell from February through August 1943, serving as assistant sales officer, bakery officer, and athletic officer. It is easy to imagine my father organizing sports activities; he had obvious leadership and coaching skills, traits I saw later. But baking? They sent him to the Cooks and Bakers School at Ft. Sam Houston for a few weeks, but still it is hard to picture him making bread or pastry; the only cooking skill he demonstrated later in life involved timing a soft-boiled egg. The one story about his time there that we children later heard about was when my mother traveled from Detroit by train and bus to visit him all the way out in west Texas, boiling hot in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos.

  * * *

  ONE OF THE stops Agent Maranda made during his military intelligence investigation had been at an apartment complex at 2747 Gladstone Street in Detroit. He set up an appointment to interview the superintendent there, a man identified in the report as Mr. C. Lang, and on the way to that meeting he took note of the names that appeared on the mailbox for apartment B1: R. A. Cummins, Goodman, Beis-wenger, Mariness, Mutnick, Campbell. The names were familiar to me. R. A. Cummins was my uncle Bob, who was overseas with the Army Air Corps in England. The Goodmans were Bob’s wife, Susan, and her sister, Peggy. Beiswenger was Hugo Beiswenger, a Detroit communist who was also in the military and gone from Detroit. Campbell was the maiden name of his wife, who had moved to New York. At the time Maranda came spying there were four young women living there: my mother, whose name was misspelled on the mailbox, her friend Margie Mutnick, and the Goodman sisters.

  Bob had met Susan Goodman in New York two years after returning from the Spanish Civil War. She was thin and striking, a dark-haired art student studying at the Art Students League of New York on West 57th, while he had a clerical job at a Manhattan bank and an apartment on East 53rd. They were both active in radical politics, which is how they met. Elliott and Mary were also in New York for part of that time. Mary had dropped out of Michigan after her sophomore year, escaping east with Elliott when he landed a job at the New York Post, and the young couples moved in the same political circles. But Mary and Elliott had left for Detroit and Elliott’s copydesk job at the Times by the time Bob and Susan were married at City Hall on the morning of August 30, 1941.

  It was while Elliott and Mary were still in New York that horrific news arrived in a letter from Ann Arbor. Phil Cummins, Mary and Bob’s brother, had suffered a mental breakdown. He had been hospitalized with depression and irrational behavior that would be diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder. Among other, more problematic behaviors, he exhibited what was called “inappropriate laughter” and liked to wear a beret and pretend he was Lenin. By the time the war started and Bob and Elliott were in the army, Phil was at a sanitarium in the hills of western North Carolina. His mental collapse took a toll on the entire Cummins family. One son and brother had survived the calamity of the Spanish Civil War; now another had become a casualty of mental collapse. His father, Andrew, had struggled with depression off and on, and so had Mary, to a lesser degree. She was particularly empathetic when it came to people who appeared down and out, depressed, or somehow vulnerable or out of the mainstream—a characteristic, along with idealism and naïveté, that motivated her politics, and she ached deeply in sympathy with her brother.

  All four roommates at the Gladstone apartment found jobs in Detroit’s defense industry, doing their part in the Arsenal of Democracy, while continuing their leftist activism, especially on issues of race. Susan and her sister, Peggy, even sent off a telegram to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of Major League Baseball, urging him to abolish Jim Crow segregation in the game “in the interest of national unity for winning the war and good baseball.” Mary worked at a Briggs auto manufacturing plant that had been converted to war production. She was the quintessential Rosie the Riveter, working on a team that inserted rivets in the trailing edge of the wing tip of B-17 bombers. She was only twenty-one and appeared even younger, with her rosy cheeks and soft voice, but she was active in union affairs and the United Auto Workers shop committee appointed her a floor steward, charged with settling spot grievances.

  One of the myths of the home front during the war was that Americans were working in unison and harmony for the same cause. In truth, there were many ugly divisions, none more than those involving race relations, and nowhere was that more intense than in Detroit. With tens of thousands of men and women, black and white, migrating to the city from Appalachia and the Deep South to work in the defense plants, tensions grew month by month, fueled by racism. Many white workers reacted forcefully and at times violently to efforts to bring more black workers into the plants and provide public housing for them, especially in areas bordering white neighborhoods. More than twenty thousand white workers had walked off the job at a Packard plant to protest the promotion of three blacks to work alongside them on an assembly line. Mary was an outspoken activist in the campaign to open up more and better jobs for African Americans at the Briggs plant and elsewhere, and for that felt the wrath of some coworkers. “That bothered her and saddened her,” Elliott said later. “But it didn’t stop her.”

  The racial tensions in Detroit exploded into a violent three-day riot in 1943, during which thirty-four people were killed, twenty-five of them black, and more than four hundred wounded, the preponderance again black.
Most of the casualties came at the hands of police and federal troops. The bloodletting had begun with a confrontation between bands of young whites and blacks on the bridge leading out to Belle Isle on the boiling Sunday night of June 20. The riot spread through swaths of the city and continued into Tuesday, the 22nd. In between, on Monday, Mary had taken a streetcar from her apartment on Gladstone to the Briggs plant, and her route took her through a predominantly black section of the city’s East Side.

  Something happened that day that became the stuff of legend in our family, told in various ways, no doubt with various amounts of accuracy but always the same moral conclusion: we would be on the right side of racial justice, as my mother was that day, an aura she somehow conveyed on her way to work. My father’s version went like this: It was “almost as if a guardian angel were looking after her. . . . Although passengers were being attacked and hauled out of some of the streetcars, Mary, sitting there with a kerchief on her head, a lunch bucket on her lap, and a union button on her blouse, a blonde-blue-eyed picture of white womanhood, was never touched.”

  * * *

  After the violence in Detroit and another race riot that summer at the shipbuilding yards in Beaumont, Texas, Langston Hughes captured in verse the dilemma African Americans faced during the war. His poem “Beaumont to Detroit: 1943” begins:

  Looky here, America

  What you done done—

  Let things drift

  Until the riots come

  And ends:

  Yet you say we’re fighting

  For democracy.

  Then why don’t democracy

  Include me?

  I ask this question

  Cause I want to know

  How long I got to fight

  BOTH HITLER—AND JIM CROW.

  FROM THE ISOLATION of west Texas, Elliott was next assigned to Borden General Hospital in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where he spent most of 1944. While there he was promoted to first lieutenant as he oversaw procurement and salvage at the 1,400-bed army hospital. He was eager to join the fight overseas but was held back because of his politics. Finally, on August 18, he received orders to return to Camp Lee. On the way east, he stopped in Ann Arbor for ten days with Mary. As she reported in a letter to her brother Phil at the sanitarium, she and Elliott slept ten to twelve hours a night, “ate Mother’s delicious cooking,” played Michigan rummy and cribbage, and went to see Donald O’Connor in This Is the Life.

  Something was in the wind. Elliott’s new army life would be spent organizing and training a salvage and repair unit in the Quartermaster Corps in preparation for taking his men to a battlefront overseas. In what was still a segregated American military, the army found a place where they could use him. His temperament, his worldview, and his leadership skills would all be of great value as the commander of what was then called an all-Negro company.

  14

  * * *

  Legless

  OF THE MORE than sixteen million Americans who served in the military during the Second World War, about one million saw infantry combat. Charles Edward Potter, the future congressman and member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, faced more than his share of enemy fire and suffered more than most soldiers who survived. He was operations officer in the 1st Battalion, 109th Regiment, of the U.S. Army’s 28th Division as it moved across France and Belgium and into Germany in late 1944 and early 1945. “Bloody Bucket,” the 28th was called, and though the nickname was inspired by a bucket-shaped red insignia, it was reinforced by all the bloody battles the division endured, from the Hürtgen Forest to the Colmar Pocket.

  Potter was twenty-six when he enlisted in May 1942. He left from Cheboygan, a town nestled on Lake Huron on the northern tip of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, where he had secured a job as administrator of social aid for the county, helping down-on-their-luck rural families. Chuck, as he was known, had grown up a four-hour drive south of Cheboygan, on a farm near Lapeer in Michigan’s thumb. He left the rural life to attend Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti with sixty dollars in his pocket and worked his way through college with jobs in a sawmill, a cannery, and on the graveyard shift at a Pontiac plant polishing pinion gear collars from eleven at night to seven in the morning. He had planned to go to law school but never made it, instead marrying the “charming, attractive” daughter of a prominent Cheboygan businessman, as reporters later described her.

  His unit crossed the English Channel a month after D-Day and fought its way through the countryside hedgerows all summer from Saint-Lô to Paris, where the 28th joined the American contingent that marched triumphantly down the Champs-Élysées on August 29 to celebrate the liberation of France’s capital. The elation of that moment was followed by some of the most brutal fighting of the war. First came the Battle of Hürtgen Forest along the West Wall, known as the Siegfried Line of defense, near Germany’s border with Belgium. The forest was only eleven miles long and five miles wide, with perfectly aligned rows of fir trees interrupted by sloping creek beds and ravines wild with underbrush. The woods were so thick in places that one could see no more than thirty yards in any direction.

  By the time Potter’s battalion went into battle at nine on the morning of November 2, this contested territory had become an obstacle course of death. The Germans had planted thousands of land mines and could fire unseen from well-protected bunkers they had dug at effective angles. As if rain, mist, cold, and thick trees were not enough to haunt the battleground, the woods were also strewn with the rotting corpses of American soldiers from the 9th Division who had failed in an earlier attempt to push through the forest. Beyond those difficulties was what most military historians would judge as the bloody folly of a needless battle, poorly planned and fought in the wrong way in the wrong place. In retrospect, most of the blame would fall on Lt. Gen. Courtney H. Hodges, the cautious yet belligerent commander of the U.S. First Army, who failed to see that it would be better to circumvent the forest, seal it off from the side, and focus instead on controlling two crucial dams nearby on the Roer River.

  The soldiers of Brig. Gen. Norman “Dutch” Cota’s 28th Division paid the heaviest price for that mistake. Along a 170-mile front near the West Wall, they were the only ones sent to pierce it, and to do so through the woods. It was slow going for the three regiments on the attack, when there was any going at all. The 109th moved in from the left and advanced barely three hundred yards in the first day and a half. For every advance, there came a counterattack by the Germans, who proved more efficient with cannon fire, calibrating their fuses so that shells exploded at treetop level, raining deadly piercing tree shards onto the men below. American machine-gunners proved more effective at close range during the counterattacks, often waiting until the Germans were within six yards before firing. One lightweight .30 caliber machine gun, accurate only at close range, took down so many charging Germans that the gunners had to move the pile out of the way to keep firing. But American losses were enormous. Over seven days of fighting, with little accomplished, the division set up a defensive perimeter of land mines and made its way out, but by that time several battalions were shredded by casualties.

  Potter got out unharmed, and a few weeks later he was interviewed by an army historian, Lt. Harry G. Jackson. Potter recounted the action day by day. He described capturing one hundred Germans on the second day, but not without the loss of some men to tree bursts, “the worst thing we had to contend with.” He said German patrols made it behind the American lines at several points, and it was impossible to tell where they would pop up to attack supply routes. On the morning of November 6, he was at an observation post when they saw that a German patrol had outflanked them and was only fifty yards away. Potter called the battalion commander and said he and a few others were going to “try and make a break and get away.” They succeeded, but about fifteen men at the observation post were soon captured, including the forward observer. On the afternoon of November 7, the commander of Potter’s battalion, Maj. Robert Ford, was ki
lled during a reconnaissance mission into the town of Vossenack, and Potter said he briefly took over until a lieutenant colonel was sent down from regimental headquarters. For a week after the division had withdrawn, they were still rounding up bunches of stragglers from companies that had been separated and lost during the fighting. By the time other elements of the 28th came to relieve them on November 18 and the 1st Battalion was able to pull out, its companies “had only about fifty men each,” and A Company was the only one left with a commanding officer.

  * * *

  AFTER RECOVERING AND reorganizing at a camp along the Our River, replenished with more than three thousand new troops, the 28th soon found itself in a fight far more trying than the Hürtgen Forest. What became known as the Battle of the Bulge was the war’s largest engagement on the Western Front, and Hitler’s last major offensive, fought in unforgiving winter weather and again on dense and difficult ground.

  The battle began on the morning of December 16, when a massive Nazi force comprising some 200,000 troops and one thousand Panzer armored tanks began moving through the Ardennes Forest determined to split four American divisions and drive across Belgium to the coast. A key highway in the German offensive was St. Vith, known to the Americans as Skyline Drive, which cut through land held by the 28th. One of its regiments, the 110th, took the brunt of the early assault, with shelling so intense and unrelenting that it knocked out all communication lines. Potter’s 109th Regiment was then attacked by two German Panzer divisions rumbling along a nearby road. His 1st Battalion was stationed in front, serving as a holding force as a column of Panzers approached. It was during an attack on the tanks that Potter suffered his first combat wound; a shell fragment gashed his mouth, requiring stitches but resulting in no lost teeth. Holding and then retreating and holding again, the 28th was part of the effort that slowed the German offensive until Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army reached the Ardennes from the southern flank and took up the fight.