My Father’s War – First of the Month

Originally published here in 2011.

The black and white photograph had been blown up from a snapshot taken in early March of 1945, seven men in a forest. They are posed the way a school class is posed in a group portrait, two sitting and one kneeling in the front row, three standing behind them, and my father standing alone in a third rank. That was his squad, he explained, he was its sergeant. His arms are around two of them, one of whom looks very tall. That was one of the two Texans, he explained, whose somewhat innocent bellicosity probably tipped his decision to take a pill box after being abandoned by the man he would eventually call, more than fifty years later, “Lieutenant N-”. Years later, encountering the phrase “Lieutenant N-” in print made a few typed pages feel more like a Maupassant story than something written by a former GI, but I saw the photograph first, and when he talked about it he sounded like an American. The very small man sitting in the front row, an enormous BAR across his lap, was apparently typical—perversely enough, my father explained, the smallest man usually had to carry the BAR. The other Texan, also standing, has a grease gun in a sling across his chest, and two men in the front row are holding M1s. They must have all been young, although they do not look it. Their winter uniforms appear dirty, rumpled and ill-assorted. I was disappointed that they seemed so drab, not quite taking in that they are wearing their working clothes. Four of the men, my father one of them, are smiling, although the man with the BAR is not. I ask my father, excited to see the people I take these men to be, “are these the men you fought with in the Bulge?” He is clearly a bit surprised by this question. No, he explains, they were all replacements.

These are some of the stories my father told me about his war; they are what I remember of what he remembered, and chose to tell. Early on he recounted what he considered the first moment, the morning of December 16th, the first day of the Bulge. His regiment, the 424th Infantry, had been ordered up to respond to what was described as a local counterattack. No-one had ever been in combat, and the men in the truck in front of his were singing the chorus to “Over There”. He remembered that this seemed corny, although not as bad as when, debarking in France, one officer proclaimed “Lafayette, we are here!” Then the truck filled with singing young men exploded.

I now recognize this as military memoir in the only currently-approved style, the one pronounced canonical by Paul Fussell: stories of war are supposed to be ironic, and frequently recount helpless and hopeless young men bumbling toward unheroic deaths, their mouths filled with bombast. The style rather coldly juxtaposes innocence and experience. Samuel Hynes, the greatest critic of the war memoir (and himself the author of one) observed that people go into battle with a war in their heads, with Englishmen and Americans who fought in the Second World War having the memoirs of the First World War in their heads, so that they anticipated disillusionment. People do sometimes find what they are looking for, but I think it is rarely the only thing they find.

On December 16, thirty German divisions, ten of them armored, attacked the American Army in the Ardennes forest along the Belgian-German border, achieving absolute tactical and strategic surprise, and in some places overwhelming numerical superiority. Where most successful these divisions advanced around sixty miles into Allied lines. Well over a million men fought in the Ardennes, which became the largest and bloodiest battle Americans fought in the Second World War, and opened with the greatest American defeat suffered in the European theater: the 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments, which like the rest of the 106th Infantry Division had never been in combat, either did not receive or did not understand their radioed orders to retreat, and were almost immediately encircled. Cut into smaller pockets, under artillery fire to which they could not reply and running out of ammunition and medical supplies, both surrendered on December 19th; there were more than 7000 prisoners, among them Kurt Vonnegut, who gave a brief and ironic account of the Bulge in Slaughterhouse Five. The 106th Division’s third regiment, the 424th,, wound up defending St. Vith. Three months later my father was, as he observed on a couple of occasions, the only man left of his original platoon—the one out of forty-one who had walked both into and out of the Ardennes.

From December 16th through December 23rd the 424th Infantry, along with another infantry regiment, a parachute regiment and an armored division, defended St. Vith, part of a position called the fortified goose egg, which included Bastogne. St. Vith was a rail and road junction and a choke point for the German armies. The Army’s official history celebrates the defense of St.Vith: in its words, the defense created a salient which threatened the Fifth Panzer Army’s northern flank and for a critical week prevented the movement of the Sixth SS Panzer Army. It is now considered as famous a victory as the loss of the rest of the 106th Infantry Division remains famous as a defeat. My father’s stories never directly alluded to the defense of St. Vith. He once mentioned that when a German tank approached his fox hole, the man with whom he shared it began telling the beads of his rosary. My father asked the man to put down the beads and pick up his rifle, to which the man replied that under the circumstances the beads would be as useful as the rifle, a remark my father thought probably true but extremely irritating. Before he could reply, a light machine gun opened up from somewhere down the line, and the tank veered off toward it. My father remembered being grateful for this development, although his happiness was diminished by the thought that he would have to put up with a lot more on the efficacy of prayer on the morrow. Fortunately, he remarked, that man was killed the following day.

The forest: my father vividly remembered, with loathing, what he called tree bursts, German shells that sent huge splinters raining down from above. He remembered sitting in a foxhole with a Regular Army sergeant who went quietly mad, ordering my father to take messages to the dead. He remembered a man shooting himself in the foot through a ration can, hoping to conceal telltale powder burns, only to have the wound assessed as “self-inflicted–complications, pork and beans”. He remembered something he had never heard anyone else either remark on or write about: his part of the Ardennes had been covered with shredded metal foil dropped by bombers to jam German radars, so that it looked like a forest of Christmas trees, and was in this one respect quite beautiful. He was once irritated during a war movie when the audience gasped at an American who chose to sit on a frozen German corpse; after all, one necessarily did what one could to keep dry, and the snow was usually wet. He remembered living on chocolate—which he called D bars–for a week. He could talk for a long time, in considerable detail, about the possible contents of other rations. He remembered attacking a German-held village, during which a good part of his battalion was massacred by German artillery, and said that he remembered no gore, only men going to sleep in the snow.

He never said much about the particular people with whom he’d fought. These are some of the ones he mentioned:

The first man who commanded the platoon, Randy Bailey, asked my father to accompany him up a road that first night, looking for a missing squad. With orders to retreat, Bailey was unwilling to abandon his men, and my father, the platoon scout and sniper, accompanied Bailey up a road until the two men heard German voices, at which point they began to crawl. They crawled up to a fox hole, at which point they were challenged. My father could understand German, and remembered the words many years on: who goes there? English or American? Where is the sergeant? Bailey prepared to throw a grenade, my father grabbed his lieutenant’s wrist, and the two crawled back toward the remainder of Bailey’s platoon. Bailey later lost a leg.

Lieutenant Huddleston was the battalion S 2. My father noted that a member of Huddleston’s family had died in every American war. Huddleston was killed in an attack on a town called Ennal.

A man my father referred to only as ‘an Indian’, from somewhere in the Dakotas, taught my father how to survive in a forest during a blizzard, so that my father came through that winter with only trench foot and some frost bite. The Indian was later killed by artillery.

He remembered a man who froze in fear during a mortar barrage, and putting a trench knife a quarter inch into the man’s buttock.

Sergeant Rutland, Regular Army, from South Carolina, on the occasion of my father earning a commission, told him that he might have made a decent corporal in the Army of Northern Virginia. My father took this as the compliment it was intended to be.

The paratroopers: my father remembered the paratroopers shooting a group of prisoners–SS men–but sending one back with the instruction to ‘tell your friends not to shoot paratroopers in trees’, a grudge they had been nursing since Normandy. This was soon after the Malmedy massacre, eleven miles from St. Vith, also several other massacres, one around a thousand yards from St. Vith. My father said nothing.

He remembered another infantryman watch paratroopers mistake outgoing for incoming artillery, then spit copiously into the snow, announcing ‘paratroopers, shit’. He thought this man amusing and bold, but rash.

Fifty-one year after the battle my father first attended a reunion of his division. In 2004 he asked me to go with him, and I did. I watched him and another man pore over a vast wall map of the eastern edge of the Ardennes; the other man, tall and lean, spoke with the thickest Mississippi accent I have ever heard. They remembered something done by L Company, in which neither of them had served: in the first days of the battle, marked almost entirely by defeat and retreat, that company had at one point defended a position bravely but stupidly attacked by German infantry. There was some terse and incomprehensible conversation about the ground, fields of fire, how L Company had deployed, and where it had set up its machine guns. Then, with cold satisfaction, my father reminisced that L Company had “stacked ’em up like cordwood”, and the Mississippian nodded in cheerful agreement. We are often told that this is the sort of thing said only by people who have never seen war, but that does not seem to be true.

A day later, the men walk through the National Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. My father nudges another man as they pass a P-47, and points a thumb at the plane. “Man’s best friend,” he murmured. The other grunted assent, and it had the air of an old joke. I remembered that when the weather finally broke—for the first portion of the battle, American aircraft could not fly—after the withdrawal from St. Vith, and the subsequent slow retreat across a series of ridge lines, finally part of a continuous reformed line awaiting the culminating German attack, with the artillery lined up hub to hub, my father had watched P 47s work over a panzer regiment.

My father, who began the battle as a Pfc. , became a sergeant leading a squad, and on an unusual occasion was quartered in a house. A scream came from up stairs, and one of the Texans, normally frightened of nothing at all, was shouting: I pissed in it, Sarge, and it pissed back. My father explained that it was a bidet.

Race, class and gender, in that order: on election night, 2008, asked to write about the evening as it occurred for Dissent, I remembered two terse anecdotes my father had (on different occasions) off-handedly related when I was a boy. One was about the experience of briefly commanding a black company occupying what would become an East German town, an experience he unselfconsciously described as being the loneliest moment of his life.

The other recounted something that happened a few months later: approaching the port of Antwerp in the back of a truck and exhilarated to be going home in one piece, he remembered offering a bottle of whiskey around to some fellow soldiers, black GIs. A black sergeant, apparently warily astonished, asked “Lieutenant, where you from?” “New York,” my father answered. “That figures,” he recalled the sergeant coolly replying. On election night, 2008, an awful lot of the country seemed to be from the New York that sergeant conceived the town to be, and not the one that had prepared the only white American in a German town to be so piercingly lonely. My father, a life-long Democrat, missed it by three years.

His rifle company all voted for Roosevelt on the deck of a troop ship, and had a proverb my students misunderstand: ‘no-one ever saw a Republican carrying a rifle.’ Until we dumped a few hundred thousand replacements into the infantry after D-Day, rifle companies were working class outfits, which in the mid-‘forties still meant an FDR-worshipping population. Then again, my not-particularly-rich grandfather was driven by his chauffeur to meet my father’s returning troopship when it docked in New York, sometime in 1946. It was, in certain ways, an inconceivably different world.

After he enlisted–he was in college at the time–he was eventually placed in something called West Point Prep, and sent to Amherst. For a year he got a broader education than anything available in his engineering school, but a series of disciplinary infractions, along with simple laziness, culminating in an episode with a Smith girl in a shower, finally got him expelled in disgrace and sent to an infantry division as a private. Some of the others who went on to West Point later visited his family during an Army football game played in the Bronx; the news from the Ardennes was very bad, but the cadets wisely suggested that no one should lose hope. They were not commissioned in time to fight in the Second World War, and were instead killed in Korea.

Belgian women risked and sometimes lost their lives distributing fresh-baked bread to retreating American soldiers, under the eyes of neighbors they knew would betray them to the German army that would soon reoccupy their homes. He remembered those women for the rest of his life.

He bought and ran a nightclub in Munich during the Occupation. When I finally asked him how he had managed to buy a nightclub, he explained that when quartered in an imprisoned Nazi industrialist’s villa, another officer found a lot of money—sterling and dollars–and suggested that they split it. My father initially refused, and the other man explained that he could not trust my father to keep quiet unless he took half of the money, which he did, and bought the nightclub. A former Stuka pilot who had known Munich actresses and singers before the war both recruited the talent and taught my father to drive in a pre-war sports car, reassuring him that even if he actually killed someone he was, after all, an American officer. He also taught my father the words to Lili Marlene, which my father sang in German. My father sold the nightclub just before going home, but didn’t have the nerve to do what others did, which was buy diamonds in Amsterdam and smuggle them back in a toothpaste tube. He instead bought farms for his girlfriends. It must have looked like quite a grand gesture.

The trade he trained for: the army sent him to sniper school because he had the freakish vision, steady hands and even breathing that apparently make a marksman. Very near the beginning of his war he had thrown away his sniper scope—he thought having H (for Hebrew) on his dog tags was risk enough, and there was a sudden surplus of M1s, which seemed better for the job at hand than a Springfield. Near the end of his war, pushing through the Siegfried Line, back where they had started, someone had the idea of using sniper rifles to put rounds through the firing slits of German pillboxes, while other men ran up and threw explosives. To my father’s surprise, it worked. He only fired a gun once after leaving the service, and would not have one in the house—when his first child was born, he gave away a Luger he’d brought home from the war, and he outlawed firecrackers too, thinking it dangerous to play with even very small explosives. The exception was when my parents visited us at camp, and the fathers were offered a chance to shoot at the rifle range. The others happily accepted—there was some prefatory male joking–but my father declined. I thought I detected some smirking among the other campers, also dismissive looks among the councilors, and quietly begged him to reconsider. We were not at that time close, but he obliged, shooting a series of perfect targets, first standing, then kneeling, then sitting and finally prone. I did not understand what this meant, but the counselors apparently did, and were very polite.

He always thought he’d been eerily lucky. Near the end of the battle, for a moment careless, he’d tripped a mine, which proved a dud, and on a terrible day he was unscratched by shrapnel that killed a lot of people around him. He also thought he’d had what the philosopher Bernard Williams described as moral luck. Dr. Johnson claimed that “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea”, which does not seem to be true now but pretty recently seemed less obviously false. In part because he’d been where he was on the 16th of December, and not a few miles to the north and east, my father did not at the end of his life think meanly of himself, but others had been less lucky. At the 2004 reunion I sat at a table of vets from one of the regiments that had surrendered, one of whom suddenly asked whether anyone else there had failed at anything. When asked what he had failed at, he observed that sixty years ago he’d certainly failed as a soldier.

That evening I quoted this conversation to my father, who pointed out that the different fates of the two groups were a matter of pretty pure luck: drawn from the same backgrounds and trained identically, given a chance the ones who’d at the direction of their officers surrendered would have fought with equal success. They had instead only suffered, starving from mid-December until the first week of May, many losing fifty pounds, and a few, disproportionately the Jews, sent to Berga, a satellite camp of Buchenwald. Some of them now had POW license plates, which seemed to denote pride in one’s self for having suffered, but on the strength of that dark joke our culture does not make us truly proud of having suffered. We are proud of ourselves for other things.

After they stopped retreating they took back the ground lost in the first weeks, and although the names of the towns they fought over never became famous the way St. Vith became famous, my father thought the fighting had been worse. Decades later, watching Band of Brothers, he remarked that as bad as it was to be shelled in a hole in a forest, it was worse to be shelled advancing over an open field.

At the very end of his war, his patrol abandoned by Lieutenant N. a little bit behind German lines, he had talked a pill box into surrendering and brought its defenders back across the lines; it was the beginning of March, and some of the fight had finally gone out of the Germans. He would be commissioned and sent to OCS at Fontainebleau. He was exhilarated to see Paris, in part because it had loomed very large in his imagination as a boy. Many months later he went to a High Holy Days service, he thought the first since the Liberation, in one of the fancier Paris synagogues, which like a visit to Dachau while stationed in Munich gave the war a particular plangency. I think he meant that although it had not seemed so at the time, having had a chance to fight was clearly preferable to some other possible lives. His happiest memory of the war was walking around Paris the day before going to OCS, wearing staff sergeant’s stripes, a combat infantry badge and two dark green felt strips around the epaulets of his jacket, which indicated that he had commanded a unit in combat. From Fontainebleau he wrote a letter to his father, mentioning that he was periodically thrilled by fantasies of D’Artagnan emerging from the woods, pursued by Rochefort and the Cardinal’s men. He had fought for eleven weeks, had recently turned twenty-two, and at various points over the next sixty years he would try to understand the person he had been for those eleven weeks. By the end of his life he decided that he was proud of what that person had done, but it had been touch and go for a number of decades.

In the St. Crispin’s Day speech Henry predicts that men will remember with advantages what feats they did that day. I do not think my father remembered with advantages, mostly because he never mentioned any feats, but at the end of his life he did in one respect remember something differently. In the hospital he observed, not for the first time, that he’d been the only man in his platoon who’d walked both into and out of the Ardennes. But for the first time, after a pause, he’d added in a meditative tone that ‘of course, I had to shoot some of them myself’. That is the last thing he said about the war. I thought hard about what he meant, and I think he meant he’d had to shoot some of the mortally-wounded men he had once said he’d remembered lying down in the snow and going to sleep, folding their hands and turning their heads, like children saying their prayers at bedtime.

A couple of years after he died my wife, driving what used to be his car, was on her way home from a former steel town where she had been visiting her father, who’d also fought in the Bulge. A fit and hard-faced middle-aged man with close-cropped hair and an Army sticker on his bumper approached her at a gas pump, which startled her, and pointed at the private joke of a vanity plate on what had been my father’s car, which read “424INF”. Who fought in the 424th?, he asked, pretty abruptly. My father-in-law, she replied. The man said, Tell him thanks. Like the looks those two dark green felt strips had apparently drawn in Paris, it was probably an opinion from someone competent to have one.

“The real war will never get in the books” is a phrase of Whitman’s, also a chapter title of Paul Fussell’s, who insisted it was true while giving it the lie in the very book he was writing, and subsequently in a number of others. Every element of my father’s war parallels something written in books, other than the part about the tinsel making a portion of the Ardennes look like a forest full of Christmas trees. Some of it—the reprisal killings of German POWs—has gotten into widely-read books only relatively recently, but that means a couple of decades. I tell my students that war has been getting into books pretty much since books began, that people read such books because they are persuaded that it is a real war they are reading about, and that however often we are told that what gets into the books is always Disneyfied or otherwise euphemized, I’m doubtful. A very old book states that “the spear point pushed on through, under the bone, piercing his bladder”, which does not sound either Disneyfied or euphemizing. Now my father’s eleven weeks of war are in a book, which despite some reservations is where I think they belong, because getting into books has traditionally been the way we give people something they might conceivably have valued, in the only return we can make for what they had to do in war.

From June, 2011

Published	Aug 10 2023
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Extent	336
ISBN	9798765100448
Imprint	Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing