UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

1. Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, 312.

2. Bishop, Glasgow and Fisher, The Fighting Forty-Fifth, 61–62.

3. Smith et al., History of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 49.

4. “You should have tried smoking those Raleighs ten years later,” remarked my younger friend, ex- Captain Thomas Halsted, after reading the manuscript of this book. “We were still getting vintage 1944 K rations in 1955.”

5. Diary of Major General John P. Lucas, November 14, 15, 16, 1943. As excerpted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, 249.

6. Blumenson, Mark Clark: The Last of the Great World War II Commanders, 146. One wonders what induced a distinguished military historian to write such a strange biography of such a vain mediocrity. Blumenson offers little to substantiate his title and plenty of the scorn with which Clark was regarded by the British, the press, colleagues such as Patton, and us dirty dogfaces in the dregs of his war. After the war Clark was in the headlines as an extreme right-wing racist supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy.

7. On the left of the First Rangers was the Fourth Ranger Battalion for which the recruiter who came looking for suckers after we set up in the Racetrack had enticed and goaded George Furber and Leon Domaszewicz. Years later, I asked Furber how many Germans he thought he got in combat. His capsule account made my blood run cold.

The first one I ever knew I killed was when I was first scout and leadin’ the Battalion goin’ up in the mountains above the Volturno. This happy-go-lucky German with his rifle on his shoulder was comin’ down, all by himself, musta thought he was walkin’ back down to headquarters. He saw me and was goin’ for his gun. And that’s when I learned how to shoot a Thompson submachine gun, ’cause I always used to carry it like this, with my fingers right up to the trigger. We jest came around a lil bend in the path. He was about ten feet away, and I jest fired. Well, my gun walked right up [if you didn’t bear down on a Tommy gun, the recoil drove the butt down and the muzzle up, and it climbed], and his face jest disintegrated.

“What the hell kind of a sensation was that for you?” I asked. “Did it shake you up?”

You know, it didn’t bother me a bit. I’ve never had any qualms about it. I’d got him. He didn’t git me. The only thing that worried me was my firing, if I’d alerted any Germans up ahead, so I was extra careful after that. Generally they’d let the first scout by. If I missed something and he spotted it, my second scout would give me a catcall, and then I knew, shit, I was in trouble.

“How about prisoners? Did you take prisoners?”

Not unless they wanted ’em. Up in the mountains—I’m sure you had the same thing happen— we’d git a bunch o’ prisoners, always send a BAR gunner with a coupla men to take ’em back, an’ you know, they’d git fifty or a hundred yards away an’—RRRRRRR—come back. “They tried to git away an’ we had to shoot ’em.” An’ you knew damn well they didn’t, but who the hell wanted to go down the mountain an’ back up again. So they took ’em a nice distance so they didn’t smell up the camp.

8. At the end of the war, when Pullman was up in the Po Valley in charge of captured German horses eventually given the farmers so they could plow and plant, he ran into a German artillery captain who remembered very well the Americans above Viticuso, looking down their throats and shelling them every time they moved, and who thought he might have laid in the round that got Jack and Jose.

9. Morison, Sicily—Salerno—Anzio, 319.

10. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, 204.

11. Dunleavy, interview, 1982, and his “Hitler Count Your Children: Personal History.”

12. When I rediscovered Mohawk in 1982 at the regimental reunion in Denver, where he was living, he was sixty-eight and the courtly and portly self-ordained Dr. Valen J. Mullenax (AD, Rev’d, MscD). Pullman and I spent an afternoon with him, and Jack wrote me in December:

I have of course now recovered from the afternoon session on Tejon Street . . . Mullenax is a real victim of the all too human propensity to tidy up the story, sanitize the “Battlefield,” play the might-have-been game. With details of course, and who is to say 2000 years later that it was or wasn’t ten thousand people who were fed with eleven loaves and seven fishes.

What is the basis of Mullenax’s legends? Is it the Angel Gabriel, the spirits that talked to Christ in the wilderness, Buddha on his mountaintop, Mohammed in the desert? Or, was it the gods who came down to design the Pyramids, build Andean space stations, cause countless likenesses of themselves to be sculptured on a small island in the mid-Pacific? Add all the little bits and pieces, personalize the myths with names, and you have a program tailormade for a Striver like Valen J.

I strongly suspect that if you dig back deep enough in his gene line you’ll find a first or second-generation American circuit preacher. Perhaps we’ll hear of him yet, leading a group to the Top of a Mountain, in California no doubt, hopefully awaiting the Second Coming.

And yet, yes yet, the very prophets that Mullenax believes in may have interfered . . . I would have liked to have discussed a few of these things with the Mohawk, but heavens, he might have converted me.

13. Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 369. Letter, GSP, Jr., to Beatrice, November 7, 1943.

14. A few ridges away, Gareth Dunleavy didn’t have to go on patrol in the snow and mud with the 45th Cavalry Recon on New Year’s Day because an unspoken truce prevailed.

So we stayed holed up in two or three houses in this rotten, stinking little medieval village, where I was told to take Tom Craig, an artist with the Army, on a tour of the damage.

I took him up to a house that had been blown out by our shellfire. He had a camera with him. I looked in and said, “Here’s something you might like to see.” An armorpiercing shell or something horrible had come right through the door. It was a German squad of six or seven men. The leader had sat down and probably propped himself up against the side of the fireplace, and his head was off, in his lap. The men were lying around, dead and terribly chopped up.

Craig took one look and turned around and disappeared as if the mountains had swallowed him up. I never saw him again and was all alone walking back down.

The Moroccans had tried that same Hill 895 all over again . . . en avant, au secours . . . and we’re sitting there chewing on our New Year’s turkey brought up in the vacuum containers when there’s this clip clop, clip clop, clip clop, and Christ, this long mule train is coming down slung with body sacks, and every single one’s got a goum, and then they stack ’em like cordwood within a few feet of where we’re tryin’ to eat. Must have been thirty bodies.

These Arabs and French noncoms and officers had a very different attitude toward life. We were much more protective and defensive and careful. We learned very quickly that there wasn’t any point in marching up the side of a hill like a goddam fool working his way through an infiltration course back in the States. This was absurd. We’d go out on these patrols in the late afternoon day after day and come back—and there’d be two or three guys gone—in order to find out how things were and line things up so the Moroccans could go up the next morning and get themselves slaughtered again.