UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

he likes to see other people react to his words as he knows they will—a sort of moulding of personalities which is a game with him. He works this successfully on me, so I know, but I also know how to manipulate him, so it’s all even here.

We both think we are with the best gang of guys in the Army; maybe this is because we face death every day with them. Both of us have sunk into the monotony of war and so we have become, in many ways, the machines that the Army wished us to be in the first place. War is just what Sherman said it was except he left out too many adjectives.

Not until February 29, for the first time in three weeks, was I able to get back to my journal:

The new front proved to be the hottest fighting this Division has ever seen. Scores of times I thought my time was up in the last ten days. It was one long nightmarish Hell. We went through so many terrific barrages, patrols, sleepless nights, I can’t recount them all. Only bright spot was our close association with the British, a wonderful nation. Second Battalion was pushed too far ahead, got trapped and surrounded, part of them living in a cave. Before they got out Jerry smashed them. They had 200 men left. [Little had we known how bad it was.] For several days there were ten men left functioning in the I&R. All the rest were wounded, sick, missing, yellow, or truck drivers.

Wounded were Mullenax, Locklear and the two newer replacements with them; Waldron, Dilks, Oman; Dowdall for the second time, grazed on the head by a butterfly bomb and back the next day, bandaged up—as he laughed—like a Minuteman. Missing in action were Mountain, Sumey and Fleischer. Mills and Zapiecki were still in hospital, and one or two others may have been sent back sick. No one was yellow.³⁰

Over the lifetime since, I’ve been able to recall but scraps, vignettes, reactive flashes such as the house we were shelled out of when the jolly Limey brass came parading up the drive, and the weird patrol with Griff and Jimmy to the London Irish, sweating out the clocklike shelling in their gully.

More shadowy yet is that black, bedlam night, bouncing through shell holes up to the line beyond the Overpass on some mission, flares bursting overhead, rifle and machinegun fire all around, tanks rumbling, guys wounded, shells coming in and going over, and hightailing out like crazy through shell holes, mud and ruts with nothing but blackout lights that illuminated nothing.

Dimmer still, the afternoon a couple of us were wound up so tight that we hit the dirt at the sudden SSSHHHHH of an incoming shell, only to see when we picked ourselves up that it was a guy dragging brush to camouflage his dugout.

The rest, along with all those terrific barrages, patrols and sleepless nights that I couldn’t recount, are buried beyond retrieval in the debris of war in my head. Why mine and not Zapiecki’s and Mills’s and Pullman’s and Dilks’s and Dowdall’s and Waldron’s and Caird’s and the rest, I cannot fathom, for surely I’ve no more reason to repress those memories than they, or do I?