A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  That is not to say that everyone in his unit was gung-ho about the military. Elliott had to deal with malcontents in the enlisted ranks. He estimated there were ten to twelve in his company who did not want to work and were looking for ways to prevent being sent overseas. “Without attempting to give an analysis of the motives and reasons for their actions, I’ll tell you what they are doing,” he wrote. “They feign illness, disregard the orders of their non-coms, taunt the other men who are doing their jobs properly as ‘suckers’ etc.” Elliott understood America’s difficult racial history and the many subversive ways that African Americans, from slavery onward, thwarted the intentions of powerful whites as a means of protest. But he felt he could not allow the discontent to infect his unit.

  “Of course, the really bad characters are screened from units before they ship. But men whose only ailment—real or imagined—is gangplank fever, well, the army and my unit simply cannot operate on the theory that overseas service is a sort of punishment that is handed out in return for faithful service. It is a duty and obligation of every man who is physically and technically qualified.” His approach to dealing with the problem, he told Mary, was twofold. “First, I am striving to inculcate in the company as a whole, a feeling of technical proficiency—confidence in themselves and their ability to perform their job, that is the backbone of morale. Also, without too obvious ‘lecturing,’ I’m trying to instill a desire to serve overseas, pointing out that our services are needed to help bring victory and thus an end to the war. That is not an easy task, but I think that we are definitely making progress. All my non-coms have that attitude now, and they are getting it down to the men. Concurrently, I’m trying to work on them individually, trying to find out exactly what they think and why, and thus make a start toward straightening them out.”

  * * *

  AT SEVEN ON the morning of February 5, the company left by motor convoy for the A. P. Hill Military Reservation. By day’s end, Elliott was at the company command post, working by the light of a kerosene lamp. He noted that he was stationed “at the very spot General Grant bivouacked in the last stages of his campaign to end the Civil War.” He felt fortunate that his company had arrived without incident and was now bedded down for the night. That comfort did not last long, however. They were awakened at three the next morning with orders to move the entire company and its equipment to an area twenty miles away.

  “I had been expecting that they would throw the book at us—and I guess they will all right,” he wrote later. “ ‘Shake down’ move is what they call this business of packing up and moving the very first night that you hit a bivouac area. Well, we made it all right, with a lot of work and sweat and cold toes and noses. The only mishap was a busted window in one trailer. It was a shuttle march in which they had six trucks move the men, they load up and carry that group to an area and the rest march to meet them, then load up another group. Got the orders at 3 a.m. and got everyone to the new quarters by 10 a.m. They ate C rations for breakfast and then dug foxholes and camouflaged the trailers and tents.” The feeling of satisfaction was disrupted the next day when two men turned up with spinal meningitis and were taken to a hospital in Fredericksburg. Doctors came out to the field to examine the other men in the company and slapped a three-day quarantine on the unit. “You can imagine how I feel,” Elliott wrote. “This matter of having the safety and health and well-being of 200 men on one’s hands is a tremendous responsibility. I hope I can meet it.”

  Once the quarantine was lifted, the place was “crawling with inspectors of all kinds and all ranks,” including “a visit by General Horkan himself, who incidentally was taken prisoner by one of our sentries since he didn’t know our password. He looked around and . . . I imagine he felt we were getting along ok. At any rate he didn’t say anything that would indicate otherwise.” Soon after the general left, the company was attacked by “Nazi” tanks and responded by raising “quite a furor.” One of Elliott’s men succeeded in putting an approaching tank out of commission by strategically placing logs in its track. After a week in the field, his troops were starting to act like seasoned soldiers. “They can balance mess kits on one knee, shave with cold water out of a steel helmet, wash their feet every night, fix their pup tents in the dark, dig a foxhole deep and fast, clean their rifles in the dark, use a compass at night.” It was enough to draw compliments from a high-ranking officer in the Quartermaster Corps who visited the 4482nd in the field, Elliott boasted: “He paid us a very high compliment: He said we were far ahead of other salvage repair companies that activated the same day. Naturally, I was pleased, and passed the compliment on to the men, with the admonition that we still had a long and hard road ahead.”

  At the end of the two-week exercise, as the company was loading up the trucks from their final bivouac area, it started to rain, then snow and sleet. “The ground became soggy and wet; the temperature took a sharp drop. The ride back was cold and freezing and damp, but our spirits were pretty high and the weather didn’t affect us much,” Elliott recalled. “The men sang most of the way back. The current favorites in this company, I would judge, are ‘Accentuate the Positive,’ ‘Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall,’ ‘Till Then,’ and ‘Rum and Coca-Cola.’ ”

  * * *

  MARY WAS EIGHT months pregnant. Unlike Elliott, she did not write every day, but only when she felt she had something to say. And Elliott was not her only correspondent. She also received letters from her brother Phil, who was writing from Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Mary and her siblings knew that Phil was brilliant; his IQ was 150. But mental illness separated him from the world. Dr. Otto Billig, chief psychiatrist at Highland, told Phil that he saw improvement after four years of treatment, but Phil wrote to his family that he felt the opposite. “I just feel that I am doomed to gradual incapacitation of a more or less general nature, being regarded as something of a sub-human species halfway between a gorilla and a man. For I am pretty much all by myself in the world, have difficulty in making friends and adjusting myself with no ideas practically, nothing to say and getting no enjoyment or satisfaction out of anything I do. I am also tired most of the time, worried, apprehensive, and very unhappy. It’s downright torture, that’s all it is.”

  On February 28, Mary wrote back to her brother. She offered sympathy and advice, venturing into delicate territory. “I admire you tremendously for the fight you’ve put up against that suffering and the way you’ve come out of it. I think that (despite Mother’s teachings) if you do feel terrible, better to say it than try to fool yourself or others. As Sue [brother Bob’s wife] said once, even for a person who hasn’t been ill with schizophrenia, for a person who has only suffered from an acute case of shyness, inferiority, lack of confidence, or something of that sort, it’s a very hard fight to abolish the constant worry about how one fits into the things that other people seem to be fitting into so easily—work, friends, recreation, avocations, etc. Am I right in presuming that that is one of the things on your mind that seems so darn pressing? Sue (although she didn’t say so) was speaking from personal experience, and as a matter of fact, I agreed with her from personal experience. I’ve become convinced that President Roosevelt’s slogan of ‘You’ve nothing to fear but fear itself’ is the best one to work by that I’ve ever heard. Whenever I start worrying about things I’ve done in the past that I haven’t been satisfied with, or whether I’ll be able to do something in the future, I make an effort to realize that the greatest impediment I’ll ever have is simply the fear and worry I carry along.”

  Mary told Phil that she had just returned from Detroit, where a group of friends—including her sister, Barbara, sister-in-law Sue, Margie Mutnick, and Anabel and Gladys Purdy—hosted a baby shower. Anabel Purdy was the young widow of Harry Purdy, a friend from University of Michigan days when he and Phil and Mary had been active together in the Young Communist League. Purdy and his younger brother, Robert, left college early to work as labor organizers in the auto-related tool-
and-die industry in Detroit. They both enlisted after Pearl Harbor and joined the Army Air Corps. Harry was flying a B-24 on June 20, 1944, on his way to bomb an oil refinery near Pölitz, Germany, when his plane was shot down. According to military records, he parachuted behind enemy lines and apparently was captured and killed by civilians, who destroyed his dog tags. Gladys Purdy was the wife of Harry’s brother, Bob, who at the time Harry died was being held in a German prison camp, where he would remain until the end of the war. He had been captured after his B-24 was shot down over Vicenza, Italy. Two Americans, brothers and leftists—one killed, the other imprisoned, fighting for their country.

  Bob Cummins had already fought fascism once, in Spain, and when he enlisted with the army after Pearl Harbor his ambition was to be on a bomber crew, like his friends the Purdy brothers. But the military had kept close watch on him, just as they had on Elliott, and rejected his requests to fly combat missions or be transferred to the infantry. Instead he spent the final two years of the war at an air base in England as a mechanic with the 713 Bomb Squadron, 448 Bomb Group. That is where he was when his wife helped host the baby shower for his sister. The English winter, he reported in letters home, had been “damp and gloomy,” but he saw signs that spring would be “worth its name.” On a two-day pass, he had gone to nearby Leicester, attended a football match between Leicester City and Sheffield, and met a fellow named Derek Bircumshaw, who invited him to stay the night with his family. Back at the base, Bob studied hydraulics by day and in his spare time at night taught himself how to speak and read Russian. “They are really coming along fine,” he said of his Russian studies. “I should be able to read newspapers, say, by next fall and after that it would only be necessary to extend my vocabulary.”

  The U.S. military’s wartime handling of radicals, suspected communists, and Americans who fought with the International Brigade in Spain was uneven. Many of them were subjected to military intelligence investigations, like Elliott, or kept from combat, like Bob. Peter N. Carroll, in his book The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, reports that many Lincoln veterans spent much of the war in the Aleutian Islands or were segregated in a company of suspected subversives at Camp Ripley in Minnesota. But their treatment was unpredictable, like most personnel matters handled by the wartime army bureaucracy. Along with the Purdy brothers, another young radical who was able to fly combat missions in Europe was George Watt, the Lincoln veteran who at a Young Communist League meeting in New York in early 1937 had recruited Bob Cummins and Ralph Neafus to fight in Spain. Six years later, on November 5, 1943, his birthday, Watt was a gunner aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress on a bombing mission from the Knettishall Airfield in England to Germany’s Ruhr Valley. As the plane flew over Belgium, it was attacked and hit by a German Focke-Wulf 190. “It was not the first time I had known such fear,” Watt wrote later. “In my first action at Fuentes del Ebro in Spain, six years earlier, we had been dive-bombed by German Stukas. I lay shivering with fright in a shallow communications trench as the near misses exploded all around us. Now I felt that same kind of terror again.” The cliché was true: his life flashed before his eyes as the plane headed down. He kept saying to himself two words: “No regrets.” No regrets about fighting fascism in Spain and flying in the war against Hitler. Then he parachuted out, landing in an open field near a river.

  What happened after that was retold by Watt in his book, The Comet Connection, detailing the bravery of a network of villagers and underground fighters who helped him make a harrowing escape through enemy territory in Belgium and France. His final walk to safety had a poetic symmetry. He climbed over the Pyrenees, again, just as he and Bob Cummins had done six years earlier as Lincoln volunteers, an act of commitment and courage that prompted the U.S. government to label them “premature anti-fascists.” Spain was neutral territory now, a free zone between the Axis and Allied powers, but still it could not seem like friendly ground to Watt, not with his old nemesis, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, in charge.

  Among the gifts Mary brought back to Ann Arbor from the shower her friends hosted for her in Detroit was “a beautiful baby crib.” As to the specifics of the baby who would sleep in the crib, she had no idea. “I don’t know whether it will be blonde, brunette, girl, boy, whether it will look like Ace or myself, and as a matter of fact, we don’t know for sure yet what it will be named.”

  Mary said she would send Phil’s letter on to Elliott and recommend that he telephone Phil, since the long-distance charge for a call between them might be relatively cheap. “Elliott is still at Petersburg,” she closed. “He is a first lieutenant in charge of a company (about 200 men) of Negro quartermaster salvage repair troops. . . . I think he feels pretty successful about the whole thing. The company will be used for overseas duty within the next couple of months or so, and then we’ll be writing to an A.P.O. He may be here in time to see his offspring.”

  * * *

  DAY BY DAY, Elliott’s pride in his company grew. It was a good-looking outfit, he thought. The soldiers wore their uniforms sharply and tossed the smartest salutes in the camp. “To tell a tale out of school, we are already looked upon in Camp Lee as a clannish outfit,” he confided to Mary in a March 1 letter. “My men stick together. There are very few men left, although there are still a few, who are bucking for ‘out’ and they are in very bad standing with the others.” His unit was in such good shape that the next day the group commander announced that all the salvage repair units on the post would be inspected—except the 4482nd.

  A report from one of his noncom leaders on the complicated subject of race pleased Elliott even more, he told Mary. “Staff Sergeant Anderson, platoon sergeant of the 2nd platoon, told me one day last week that despite the strict discipline and control our noncoms exercise they are the only group of noncoms in camp who are not called ‘Toms’ by the men. You know as well as I, of course, what the meaning of the term is; and you therefore know how I felt when I heard it. For it is indisputable proof that our program and plan and effort is taking hold, that our noncoms are beginning to exercise leadership in its proper meaning, and that the men are beginning to develop a group spirit that could come only from deep conviction that they are getting a square shake.”

  Life became an anxious waiting game: waiting to ship overseas, waiting to hear baby news from Ann Arbor. March 22 was a lovely night at Camp Lee, “warm and breezy, with the pungent odor of the pines.” Early the next morning, Elliott was told that his mother-in-law, Grace Cummins, was on the line. Mary had given birth to a son. “Now that it has happened, I’m completely at a loss as to what to say,” he wrote to her that night. “My first concern and greatest worry of course is about you; and you have no idea with what relief and joy I heard your mother’s assurance that you were very well, recuperating nicely, and feel no ill-effects. When your mother called me this morning, I was stunned, surprised and bewildered but of course it was not long before I was filled with joy and pride and a deep love for you and our son. The connection was pretty bad, so I had a hard time hearing what she had to say. By dint of loud shouting, however, I managed to get all the sweet details. I was passing out cigars today with my chest stuck way out.”

  A few days later Elliott received orders to travel to Washington for a conference. He flew up and back the same day. The call to port was expected soon; the company’s advance representative was already in Seattle preparing. The Tenth Army was landing on Okinawa, and Elliott’s company would soon follow. “My guess is that we are going to hook up with the Tenth, which is now 325 miles from Tokyo and follow it into Tokyo, possibly via China, or possibly directly to Japan.” Then word came that they were to wait again, for another few weeks. The delay had to do with shipping schedules to Okinawa. Elliott was frustrated but took advantage of the situation to get permission for a quick trip up to Ann Arbor to see his wife and baby son, James Elliott Maraniss. He flew Eastern Airlines from Richmond through Washington to Detroit, leaving at 4:30 on Saturday morning and returning at 5:15 Sunday a
fternoon.

  Back at Camp Lee, Elliott was effusive. “I can’t remember spending a more satisfying two days than those two with you and Jimmy,” he wrote Mary. “On the surface they didn’t seem much different than many another weekend. But there was a great qualitative difference in mood, emotion, and thought that sharply set it off from other leaves we’ve spent together. In the first place, there was the successful accomplishment of the audacious scheme of travel itself. It really was quite a trek, and ranks with the job we pulled off getting you and Margie to New Orleans. I was taking quite a chance, and had my neck stuck out a mile, but it was a calculated risk with the odds in my favor, and I have never been one to shrink from taking calculated risks, especially when there were more important stakes involved. Most of the officers here were quite amazed at my ‘daring,’ and were frankly surprised that it worked out so smoothly. Then the visit itself. Darling, we’ve got a wonderful little baby. He looks good to me, every bit of him, and I’m proud as a peacock to be his father. He will never be a stranger to me, no matter how long I am away.”

  The call came the next day from the port of embarkation, the last and final word. They would leave Camp Lee in two weeks.

  The day after that, April 12, Cpl. Henry Pohly heard the teletype bell go off in the camp’s information office and ran over to see what news was breaking. It was 5:49 p.m. Soldiers were just leaving the chow line. President Roosevelt was dead.

  “There is a deep unrelieved gloom in the barracks here tonight, as if every one of us has lost not only a leader but a close personal friend,” Elliott wrote to Mary after hearing the news. “I don’t feel like writing more tonight, so I’ll close and go to bed. It seems the heart has been taken right out of me. O, my lord what a terrible thing has happened to us! Tomorrow evening at retreat my company will hold a brief memorial service, paying silent tribute to our fallen chief. I know that my men are going to be depressed and bewildered, and it will be my job to keep alive the hope in their hearts for victory and lasting peace. That hope will never leave my own heart, and I pledge now, to you and our son, that I will never falter and not give up for one minute my efforts to bring about that victory and peace.”