European Theater of Operations (ETO)
From Marseille to the Maginot Line
On September 15, 1944, our basic training at an end, we entrained for Camp Shanks, New Jersey, and soon boarded the Santa Maria. Bunk beds stacked five high, with barely enough room between to roll over in your sleep. Part of a long troop ship convoy. After about eight days we saw some white stucco houses far off to the right. "Casablanca," some of us knowledgeable ones exclaimed. "Oh, no! We're headed for Italy," where we knew some of the fiercest most difficult battles of the war were being fought.
Some comments from Jack Mitchell are inserted here, along with a photo I requested. Handsome guy, eh?
Just noticed your WWII recollections and found them amazingly like mine. I was first in the AA at Palacios Texas, then to ASTP
engineering at (at the time) Oklahoma A&M at Stillwater. When they closed the program, I went to the 411th, Company D (Heavy weapons).
I was also on the Santa Maria, and was surprised that you never mentioned the fact that about 80% of the passengers and crew were
sick and upchucking for most of the voyage, that we were on an ocean-going ship that had been designed for the Great Lakes which would bounce
up and down when groups were doing calisthenics on the hatch covers.
Do you remember the two storms we ran into? The first on the Atlantic,
and the second on the Mediterranean when the balsa life rafts were demolished. The trek from the docks in Marseille to the hills where we encamped,
and people were trickling in for days.
My many thanks to Jack! My memory—and not only of those events—is too often a blank. I have to ask my wife, "Where's my hammer? Where did I leave my head?" This also, in response to my request for additional information:
I'm not the greatest of writers, my wife tells me that I become far too long winded and tend to sentences lacking in periods. She, an attorney who is a good writer offered to edit any purple or dark prose I might come up with. However, I feel that writing is very hard work, and being VERY lazy, I might procrastinate too long to be of any avail.
I think that you did a fantastic job with your tales. You must have done quite some research to come up with all the locations and details. I, now 82 but in fantastic shape was so naive at the time, as were most of us in company D never knew where we were. I recall that when we first got into Germany, we had the brilliant idea of going to the railroad station to find out the name of the town we were in. We searched on the map but could not find Ausgang!
One of my favorite stories.
That's a terrific one. For those with no knowledge of German, Ausgang means Exit. In combat at the front, your unit generally doesn't have a clue regarding what's going on elsewhere, so I was glad to get this from Jack: My platoon had 81 millimeter mortars. They were composed of three parts: a base plate, a bipod, and a barrel. The baseplate had a socket in its center into which a ball at the bottom end of the barrel was inserted. The Bipod was then clamped at the center of the barrel allowing fine adjustments up and sideways. Shells were supplied with accessory removeable tabs to adjust (in small degree) the range. Each of the three parts, about 60 pounds as I recall was carried by one soldier. I carried the barrel, shifting it from shoulder to shoulder as each got sore as did the carriers of the other parts. Since these mortars were not terribly accurate, we were usually instructed to lay down a grid of fire, aiming to the right or left and up or down in small increments.
The Germans typically knew the areas they had just left and countered with fire from "88's". To us, they seemed more accurate than we were and since their response was fairly immediate, we would lay out and arm all the shells we were to fire, set up the mortar to aim at the first point on our grid selecting the highest elevation possible for the shells and try to get all the shells in the air at the same time. Before the first one hit, we were out of there, watching the incoming fire seem to hit very accurately the area we had just left.
The worst element of the mortars was that occasionally a shell, which was just dropped into the barrel to fire it, would just stay there at the bottom. One would not know if it was ready to explode or not. The procedure was to tip the barrel up until the shell would just slide out, catching it in one's hands without touching the tip, place it on the ground with a marker and get the hell out of there.
Continuing on now, from the point where we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and guessed we were headed for Italy:
However, troops from Italy had already landed in southern France and taken Marseille and that's where we disembarked. Not extra heavy myself, I was among those assigned to unload all the heavy duffel bags and equipment. I've never felt such a flow of adrenaline in my life. About to enter combat! I ran up and down—up to five flights of stairs each time—carrying that stuff up and then down again for more. Up and down, up and down till early morning, and I hardly felt fatigued. Finally we were able to rejoin our squads where they had set up tents in an outlying area.
 My first home in France: a pup tent. Back at Camp Howze, Texas I initially attended church services at the LDS (Mormon) chapel in Dallas. Soon I was appointed "group leader" of all LDS servicement in the 103rd Infantry Division. My principal responsibiity was to arrange for and conduct Sunday meetings at Camp Howze with the assistance of the 103rd Division Protestant chaplain. Our first meeting in France was held in the fairly large tent chapel at this site. Pocket edition copies of the New Testament and the Book of Mormon were made available to me for free distribution to LDS servicemen. This meeting was the last one until after war's end in Innsbruck, Austria, when we survivors were able to meet again. What joy.... and what sorrow for those not there!
Just one short pass to visit France's great Mediterranean port. Not much time, which I spent mainly gawking at the French and things French. Victor Hugo's Les Misérables was probably my only introduction to French literature at the time and I didn't even know about baguettes and gruyère. My first tiny tentative steps were taken in Marseille into the fabulous world of the French. After that day of leave we were on our way to combat, trucking up the spectacularly beautiful Rhône River valley.
One of us was always posted at the right-front corner of each truck, head and upper torso poked out above the canvas tarp to spot enemy planes or any other kind of hostile activity. When it was my turn, the wind slapping me in the face—cold, overcast weather—I sang my heart out with beloved hymns and songs: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men," "O Divine Redeemer," "Thanks be to God for Love Divine, for hopes that 'round my heart entwine," "Jesus, the very thought of thee with rapture fills my breast," "Abide with me," and many others, so beautiful, consoling, and fiber-firming. Firming up every fiber of one's soul. To a lesser extent, the fibers of one's body under extreme stress. As the Apostle James put it, "We can control a horse with a bit and a ship with a rudder, but can't control our tongues..." and as I soon discovered in combat, certain aspects of "biology."
Stout-Hearted Men
Sigmund Romberg/Oscar Hammerstein II
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You who have dreams
If you act, they will come true.
To turn your dream to a fact
It's up to you.
If you have the soul and the spirit,
Never fear it, you'll see it through.
Hearts can inspire other hearts with their fire,
For the strong obey when a strong man shows them the way.
Give me some men who are stout-hearted men
Who will fight for the right they adore.
Start me with ten, who are stout-hearted men
And I'll soon give you ten thousand more.
Oh! Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder
They grow as they go to the fore!
Then there's nothing in the world can halt or mar a plan,
When stout-hearted men can stick together man to man!
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O Divine Redeemer
Charles Gounod
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|:Ah! Turn me not away,
Receive me tho' unworthy:|
Hear Thou my cry,
Behold, Lord, my distress!
Answer me from thy throne.
Haste Thee, Lord to mine aid,
Thy pity show in my deep anguish!
Let not the sword of vengeance smite me,
Though righteous thine anger,
O Lord! Shield me in danger,
O regard me!
On Thee, Lord, alone will I call.
|:O Divine Redeemer! O Divine Redeemer!
I pray Thee, grant me pardon,
And remember not, remember not my sins!:|
Forgive me, O Divine Redeemer!
Night gathers round my soul.
Fearful, I cry to Thee;
Come to mine aid, O Lord!
Haste Thee, Lord, haste to help me!
Hear my cry ! Save me Lord in Thy mercy;
Come and save me, O Lord.
Save, in the day of retribution.
|:O Divine Redeemer! O Divine Redeemer!
I pray Thee, grant me pardon,
And remember not, remember not my sins!:|
From Death shield Thou me, O my God!
O Divine Redeemer, have mercy!
Help me, my Savior! . . . . . .
Help me, my Savior!
Courtesy of a husband-wife team of music teachers who prefer to remain anonymous.
Translated from the original French
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 Combat history of the Fighting 411th Infantry Regiment (reduced size)
Motto (a coiled snake): Paratus Ferire - Ready to Strike
Trajectory of 411th Infantry Regiment combat
From the above booklet
Frontispiece from Report After Action: The Story of the 103rd Infantry Division
His helmet on his rifle, bayoneted into the ground, marked the site of a death in combat.
Our first day of combat.... Near Epinal. The regiment was approaching the front. Had to be. Where else would we be going? The sky was still overcast. Rather cold weather. We were bundled up. "Hey, listen to that thunder," somebody said. "Looks like we're in for rain." That's how totally green and untrained the troops were. Rain? You bet. We got rained on good! That wasn't thunder. It was artillery fire, and all kinds of shells would be raining down on us troops in no time at all, to be joined shortly by mortar shells, bullets, and land mines.
I'll never forget, as they became casualties, the laugh, the jest on my buddies' lips. Bill Schor, killed almost immediately. Blown to bits. Moments before, he was declaiming comically, professorially, "Our artillery shoots one long, one short, and then one.... the theory is.... right on target. The Germans triangulate you. One at the apex, one at each corner and then one right on center. Blooey! You're gone!"
We were only a few feet apart. Bill was taken, I was spared. I resolved then that I would try to live a larger life, no matter how long it might turn out to be. Large enough to fill—at least a tiny bit—the void left by the loss of such special comrades, fated to be unsung and largely unremembered, perhaps, but not by me. Gifted comrades, capable in the future, if they had survived, of achieving great little things and great big things.
To keep them in remembrance I've kept Old Glory in my office and flying from a staff outside our house. It's been my custom to remember them as I salute it every morning and evening and whenever I pass by. And oh, if I could only make my life more useful, of greater service, fighting on for what so many gave their lives, in my own unit and in other outfits and theaters of operations, including many boyhood friends. I feel that I'm always failing in this but continue to kick myself in the behind to get with it.
We had reached a wooded area on a hillside. Nothing in sight. It never occurred to us, and it was never pointed out in training that the enemy would have binoculars. Bill Schor was the first casualty and then Corporal Nichols stepped on a land mine. Horribly mutilated, in terrible pain, he got out the words with a strangled laugh, "Hey, don't cry for me, boys, I'm going home." The rest of us were paralyzed. Afraid to move, to take one step—even to take better cover.
That's when my admiration for the medics became unbounded. Here they quickly came, summoned by a field radio, bearing a stretcher, unarmed, their arm bands with a red cross on a white field their only—laughably theoretical—protection. Where others feared to tread, risking the loss of legs or their lives, the medics moved swiftly, placing Nichols on the stretcher, hurrying him off to an Army ambulance and then to a field hospital back behind the front line. Poor Bill Schor's shattered corpse was left for later removal after the platoon moved forward.
We knew we were in it now. No way out. We didn't want out. We'd fight to the end—of the war or of our lives. No one went over the hill. No section VIIIs. (A U.S. Army discharge based on military assessment of psychological unfitness or character traits deemed undesirable.
Slang: A soldier given such a discharge or deliberately behaving in a way to get such a discharge: He's a Section VIII. Trying to get a Section VIII.)
Total casualties for the 103rd Infantry Division were listed as 9,369—a turnover of 66.5%. Non-combat casualties, presumably primarily from illness, are included in the figure. When the fighting was over, an exhausted Private First Class Wendell H. Hall, Serial number 19153139, was sadly jubilant to be among the 33.5%.
A report of U.S. Army ETO combat casualties by campaign lists Rhineland as first, Ardennes-Alsace as second, Northern France as third, Normandy as fourth and Central Europe as fifth. Our 103rd Division fought in three of the top five—Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace and Central Europe—for which we received the corresponding campaign ribbons and battle stars.
Though over fifty-five years have passed, my remembrances are clouded with anger. How could the American High Command be so utterly incompetent! They are honored now. One was elected president. General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, was considered a genius. Didn't a single one of the geniuses have even a casual, passing glance at the potential battlefields to check out obstacles and dangers and determine what weapons, equipment, and tactics might be required to cope with them so the troops could be properly armed, equipped and trained?
The nature of the terrain.... Couldn't even one of them take a dogface's look at it? Dog faces, that's what we were. There were several impolite cognomens, too. Tens of thousands of dogfaces, loaded into landing craft, often having to wade or swim to the beaches, loaded down with equipment and supplies, half-drowned or drowning, many dying under intense enemy fire. Surviving only to meet the hedgerows of Normandy. Banks of earth over six feet high topped with trees and bushes. Allied advances against them were measured in yards. Not one single officer involved in planning the assault had taken them into account. All their marvelous maps had absolutely no earthly value.
What could have been a mad dash for Paris turned into a near disaster resulting in the unnecessary death and disablement of many thousands because no one in charge had the brains of a Sergeant Coulter. Why all the parading and Tench hut! (Attention!)? The troops could have learned a lot more about combat from reading a Spanish Civil War novel than from all the months of so-called basic training. Basic? They scarcely touched one base!
Now, now. Let's not exaggerate. A base and a half? Three? Training around eight million raw recruits overnight was no easy task. Even obsolete relics from the past had to be issued. My first rifle was actually a pre-World War I Enfield. "While the storm clouds gathered far across the sea..."
We loved that song (God Bless America) and feared what the clouds portended, yet too many of our elected officials believed that concerned patriots who "cried wolf" were foolishly allowing themselves to be alarmed by harmless German shepherds—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin... serious social innovators, forceful leaders, who genuinely felt their people's pain and were justifiably nipping at their heels, pinning them down, and penning them up in order to alleviate it.
Only the introduction, so seldom sung or heard, is printed below, with an expression of gratitude to Irving Berlin for the patriotism that inspired him to compose it and to the unknown artist who has included the introduction in this midi.
While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.
[On second thought.... forever chauvinistically and undyingly patriotic....]
God bless America, land that I love,
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam
God bless America, my home sweet home,
God bless America, my home sweet home!
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Well, generals are looking at the big picture, the grand strategy. They play their games. Well, in the future, let them get down to earth, literally, and check things out with the dogfaces! And in the future, make on-the-spot battlefield promotions of sergeants like Sandy, if not to the rank of general then as a general's aide-de-camp with authority and instructions to speak up.
Yes, war is hell.... er... uh.... heck, as I jocularly claim to have discovered when I noticed that there were no provisions for plumbing. I have never cursed since my beloved mother Florence washed my mouth out with soap after I spoke a word I'd picked up somewhere in our enviable Utah environment.
The story is told of Mark Twain that, distressed by Twain's habitual cursing, his sweet, dainty wife Olivia decided to cure him of it by letting him hear how he sounded. She knew the words, having heard them more than enough, so when the right occasion presented itself, she let out what she thought was a horrible stream of frightful obscenities. Twain just shook his head and said, "Honey, them's the words, but that ain't the music!"
Well, in one of their most frequent bouts of cursing in combat, the dogfaces didn't use the words but they very definitely used the music. On any occasion, in any situation at all, someone would bitterly mimic F.D.R.'s infamous words: "Ah hates wah. Eleanah hates wah." (Wife Eleanor, too!) President Roosevelt had promised the mothers of America that their sons would never go to war. Music to Hitler's ears. The U.S. would not resist him. The sons of American mothers would not go to war.
A typical liberal. Saying what sounds good. What gets votes. Not thinking or caring what the import or consequences of the words might be. It's a leader's job to lead. Churchill understood immediately the deep danger in allowing Hitler to march into the Rhineland, unimpeded, barely scolded, to retake it contrary to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. If the Nazis had been stopped then (and they easily could have been), there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust.
Our country's next war—in which my brother Delbert was involved—came about when Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman's secretary of state, informed the world that North Korea was not within the U.S.'s sphere of interest. So encouraged, the NKs invaded the south, and we're still embroiled in the consequences of that.
Those first few days of combat were a blur. The next thing I remember—vividly—is entering upon utter chaos in a shelled-out town still under shellfire. Suddenly a lieutenant I'd never seen before shouted at me, "You, soldier! I need a driver." Apparently his had become a casualty. So I jumped in the Jeep and since I'd never really driven before, I just clashed gears, accidently went into reverse instead of forward, and in a few seconds was out of a great new assignment as the looey disgustedly kicked me out and took over. Surges of adrenaline sometimes make possible the impossible, but they only made my impossibly inept driving worse. I was almost vomiting adrenaline.
Typical scene of destruction as we advanced. Much like where I could have become the lieutenant's driver. These guys obviously came along when the action was over.
Our introduction to shellfire was non-stop. ("Hey, hold it! We've already been introduced!") Know why I still get up at 5:45 in the morning? Because the German 88s,* the world's most accurate, most feared artillery, began our precision morning wake-up call at 6:00 a.m. Well, not always. Often enough to establish a routine. I wanted to get behind a tree and get my daily duty done before I had an accident, if you know what I mean.
The thing I dreaded most was ending up a sad lifeless corpse with its bare butt showing. With luck I could finish by 5:59 before my Arsch (German for arse) froze off, having to let down two pairs of pants, the bottom half of my long johns, and then button up again. No zippers or velcro in those days. Coldest winter of the century up till then, we learned later. Try fumbling with buttons in sub-zero temperatures. All those months—rain, mud, sleet, snow, ice and not even an outhouse.
*Well, we always referred to them as 88s. Later on, long after the war, I learned that the most common German field artillery piece was a 105mm howitzer. Somehow that doesn't sound as scary. The 88s were anti-aircraft weapons.
What an embarrassment! Oh, what shame to mention it! I did have an accident. When at Lewis Jr. High School in Ogden, Utah, one of my best friends, Don Smalley, let me read his great collection of Tarzan and Lucky Aces magazines. Lucky Aces had great stories about World War I aces, Spads, Fokkers, the Red Baron, and all that. A certain episode snared my fancy. German artillery barrages caught some aces too close to the front and one of them dove into a pig sty in a desperate move to survive. Hilarious.
A day or a week or two later.... We didn't know it.... Who'd ever heard of the Vozgheez Mountains?... But, as we later read about it after the war, we were advancing through the Vosges [Vohzh] Mountains, headed for the Maginot Line, the Siegfried Line and the Rhine River.... An icy rain was falling. Under fire, as usual, scrambling to get behind even a little cover, what I dove into was.... chicken S-word. I crashed through the partly demolished wire of a chicken run, lost my balance and fell right into.... it. Of course there were no chickens. They apparently had "retreated" right along with the German troops and the DPs. Burocratese for refugees. DP.... Displaced Person. I survived that but just before nightfall I found myself in a stable. Weird to us Amis (Americans). The animals were stabled below and the people lived on the second floor of the peasant houses.
In that part of France, having the biggest pile of manure seemed to be a matter of prestige. Well, I'll skip.... (How at the edge of one, peasants would hitch down or up their clothes and....) I was in the stable.... It appears that the DPs had left so suddenly they had to leave their manure behind. Hey, they had and have my total sympathy. I'm not making a joke of this. On their fertilizer-starved fields it was a precious commodity. All commercial nitrate was going into the production of gun powder, shells, bombs, land mines, booby traps, explosive charges for the demolition of bridges, etc.
Valuable stuff. They even pumped it in liquid form into wagons like barrels on wheels and sprayed it on the fields. Barnyard schnaps, we learned to call it. Ho! Once we arrived at a deserted barnyard and innocent Corporal -ylie (name partly suppressed to protect the innocent), seeing a pump and knowing no better, took out his canteen cup, grabbed hold of the handle—while the rest of us stared in astonishment and anticipation—and started pumping vigorously away. When a brown yellow stream came out, he jumped back, let out a stream of brown yellow cuss words, and about threw up.
So I was in the stable when the shelling started up again. What happened then was not synesthetic—a term unknown to me back then. When the shelling stopped momentarily—no doubt to reposition field guns and mortars in order to evade U.S. return fire—all I could do was prop my M1 rifle and just-issued "grease gun" (an M3 semi-automatic pistol) against a railing, take off my belt with canteen, trench knife, a couple of grenades, a holstered Colt 45, assorted ammunition, and hang it next to them.... undrape my big olive drab overcoat, hang it beside the belt.... stoop above the manure.... my combat jacket short enough to be no problem.... let down my two pairs of pants.... retrieve my so-called trench knife.... twist around.... Biology coming up.... and like an amateur contortionist doing a never before practiced act, I jaggedly cut out the rear end from the bottom of my long handles. The best I could. Not good at all. Luckily no eyes there, not even a rat's, to witness this and further mortify the "spit" out of me. Residual "spit." If any.
Taking my boots off, undressing, standing in my stocking feet in S-word to remove everything soiled was not an option. The thought of ending up a naked corpse on a filthy stable floor, my congealed blood curdled with manure, was beyond unbearable.
I pulled the mutilated long johns and double pair of pants back up again, rushing it, with shellfire, mortar fire, hellfire, potentially coming my way again at any moment. I felt forlorn, dishonored, disgraced. Dirty. A sad sack, as the G.I.s expressed it. A sad sad sack of S-word.
Months later I was able to take two showers. The first time.... near the front, in the snow, out in the open at the edge of a forest.... the portable equipment broke down. I had just lathered up when the gasoline-operated pump failed. All I could do was wipe the soap off with snow and get dressed again. No change of clothes, of course, till the war was over. At least I don't remember seeing my duffel bag again till then. Some of my stuff was damp and pages of the few books I was able to pack had been damaged by moisture.
Moving gingerly away from the mess in the stable, my derrière a bit moist and a little drafty, I climbed upstairs to explore the living quarters of the partially destroyed house, found an intact bed, and on it.... a wonderful, incredible Federbett (feather bed). The lap of luxury in those or any circumstances. I didn't know where my buddies were and hoped they wouldn't try to find me, now that total darkness was descending. I knelt and said my prayers and climbed into the glorious Federbett "muddy" boots and all. I didn't take my turn at guard duty that night and, totally exhausted, slept like a little child. Ah, sleep, blessèd sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of self-esteem and honor. I didn't wake up until you know when.
When I rejoined my squad, everybody was bitching about how the lousy K-rations had given them the trots. Nothing could be more obvious. Everybody knew it: The K-rations were to blame. "Yeah. K-rations laced with shellfire," I thought. Any other explanation was inadmissable, even though everybody knew that everybody else was scared "spitless" too. Not a one of us was fearless (Show us an honest man who'd deny it), but we managed to control our fear and keep going.
All we had was K-rations. (Can't remember having the more substantial, nutritious C-rations, but must have had them two or three times.) In the little K-ration box about the same size and rectangular shape of a margarine container: a chunk of cheese, some crackers, a hunk of chocolate, a little sealed envelope of soup mix (dehydrated onion, a few spices), plus about four cigarettes. Amazingly, my four best buddies in our squad of ten didn't smoke! Practically everyone else was always after our cigs. They could be very injurious to a soldier's health. The glow of a lighted cigarette in the dusk or dark could attract bullets. The smell of the smoke could reveal your presence and location.
Scene before the snow froze us stiff. I'd like to say that in this photo we have Marvin "Finkel" Feldstein to the left and Wendell "Rugged" Hall to the right. Could be, except that we never in our World War II Third Platoon lives ever had dugouts like that. So it must be the First or Second Platoon of our Anti-Tank company. Also, we would not have been sitting so casually there on our duffs. Can you imagine one of us reading?* True, the guy on the right looks fairly handsome and kinda rugged looking. See the little 57mm anti-tank gun? We called them pea shooters. We could shoot anti-personnel shells with them as well as armor piercing ones. We considered bazookas to be better, despite their shorter range.
*Though I'm a great reader, all I had to read was pocket copies of the Scriptures. When our son John started kindergarten in Ashland, Wisconsin, the teacher asked all the little kiddies what their daddies did. There were policeman, fireman, pilots of iron ore boats, and other impressive occupations. "And what does your daddy do, Johnny?" "He reads." The teacher had to laugh but was thoughtful enough to share this with us. After all, I was a professor at Northland College, and isn't that mainly what we do?
Actually, often enough we were deployed like regular rifle company troops—Companies A (Able), B (Baker) and C (Charlie), etc. That's because most of the time we were in mountainous areas (in particular, the Vosges and Haardt Mountains) not at all suitable for tank warfare. You are seeing here a rare exception where there was a wide field of fire. All of us, weapons carrier drivers or whatever, could fire pea shooters and bazookas.
In most circumstances we had to be right up front to protect the foot soldiers (who had machine guns, mortars, and jeeps). And remember: Just because you can't see the enemy doesn't mean he's not there—the first lesson we learned on our first day of combat.
The Fourth Platoon was different. Their specialty was land mines. Now that is scary!... Handling them or being around them at all. The Fourth had the job of placing ours and removing the enemy's. An extremely hazardous, impossible task, inasmuch as the Germans were employing plastic land mines which the metal detectors couldn't locate.
Bless that soup mix! Once when we were holed up in an abandoned house, I found a potato or two in the cellar which I immediately liberated, carefully peeled and cut up, placed in my canteen cup, added the soup mix, and had the most delicious soup of my life. Don't recall how I heated it, but matches came with the cigarettes. To this day, potato soup remains my favorite.
I've never been a hunter. An incident while still in the Vosges Mountains cured me of any inclination to be one. We had several Jeeps in our company with machine guns mounted on them. You know, of course, what a hart is. A European red deer. Two guys in one of the Jeeps ran a little hart to ground and riddled it with rounds from the machine gun. A beautiful little stag. What a relief from our steady diet of K-rations! Did I join in the feast. You bet! To use just once more the Americanism you can bet I deplore (when it punctuates every other word): You bet I did. But since then I've just had no stomach for shooting such splendid wild creatures.
That night, still at the house with the cellar, Marvin "Finkel" Feldstein was outside on guard when a screaming meemie came corkscrewing in. Scariest sound known to mankind. Psychological warfare at its most horrendous. The idea was to scare the enemy to death. They sounded like a series of huge gates screeching open on rusty hinges with varying wavering pitches. The gates of hell.... The eruption when they exploded seemed by contrast like just an afterthought, tremendous though it was.
Everyone was immediately awake, of course, and a few seconds later Finkel came rushing in screaming, "Sc sc sc sc screa sc screa sc sc sc sc sc screa sc sc scream sc sc sc ream r r r rea r r r r ream r r reamy sc sc screaming m m m mee m m mee m m m m mee m m m meem m m m m mee m m m m MEEMIES!" As if the rest of us didn't already have some small intimation of the fact! Thanks to him, our uncontainable laughter momentarily relieved our fear.
Yes, Martin was a stutterer, though those sc sc sc sc screa sc screaming m m meemies were enough to make anyone stutter. To my mind, the most difficult work expected of us on earth is learning to love our neighbors as ourselves, lending assistance wherever/whenever possible. One must be very unobtrusive and careful, of course, in every circumstance. It is so human of all of us to be so touchy. A show of being overly concerned, overly caring, the slightest bit preoccupied, could be counterproductive.
But be a real friend, is what I wanted to be. Accept others as they are—even though they are what they are.... now. Accept that I was in need of improvements myself. Show appreciation for Martin's great qualities, not the least of which was the indomitable way in which he handled his difficulty. He didn't let it stop him one bit. If he had something to say, anything he wanted to say at all, he said it. Let the stutters fall where they may! I admired him for this very sincerely. He was humorous, insightful, and just a great guy to be around. He was from L.A. and was always saying something about Hollywood and Vine.
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