AT Camp Ritchie they said, go to Washington. In Washington the address given him belonged to the Office of Strategic Services. He reported to a suave gent named Earl Looker, a Colonel. This one's appearance and manner suggested an advertising or media executive, an acquisition of OSS directly from civilian life. Looker introduced him to a Lieutenant Martin Herz and that ended Looker's role in his life. It was Herz who did say, on one or two occasions, that Looker had bought De Grazia as a Second Lieutenant, not a First Lieutenant; he wanted to reserve any promotions to himself. Too bad, he had to accept the orders when they came through: score one for Our Hero. Second, Looker wondered why it took him so long to get from California to Washington; but he failed to interrogate Our Man personally, a mistake, since Herz gave an understandably garbled explanation of what was byzantine logic to begin with, such that Looker gave up the inquiry. Not that there was a mountain of work awaiting our Lieutenant, once his job was detailed.
Here was the set-up, according to Herz. OSS was not Part of the Armed Forces, but then again it was: the Highest Officials were continually disputing over this question, and no answer had been or would be shortly forthcoming. (Herz had a hacking laugh, which chopped the air on matters like this.) The missions of OSS concerned intelligence, espionage, counter-espionage, and dirty tricks against our enemies. Since the Army and Navy, not to mention the FBI, Treasury, Immigration and Naturalization, and the State Department, were also in the same business, or could be, were they so inclined, OSS might step on many toes and did so do.
Still, in the present case and as our Lieutenant entered the picture, OSS and the Army had agreed to mingle their personnel, uniformed and civilian, and their resources to devise, staff, and equip a special outfit -- an exceedingly complex company it would have to be -- to reach out to our enemies by propaganda. This company, to be called deceptively the First Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company, was even now forming up, and they, the two young lieutenants, would be responsible for the analysis of the psychology of their enemies in the theater of operations and for preparing the messages to be delivered.
Our Lieutenant found the prospect most engaging, even before he knew more than this. He could see that Herz was on the ball, honest and straightforward, at least with his peers, serious, objective, using a curt rasping voice and speaking a proper exact canned English. His wiry frame and thrust-back head passed him as a soldier, whether he had been much of one or not before the present operation began. He had black hair, snapping black eyes, and a hooked nose. His movements were somewhat jerky, but he could repose calmly when there was no reason to move. He seemed to be the type who was always quite busy, and, in his case, usefully, or, at least, intelligently.
"How did I get here?" he was asked. I happened to meet your brother, Sebastian, said Herz, at a little conference. I told him that we were looking for someone with military training, a knowledge of propaganda, and an acquaintance with Italy and the Italian language. I said that we had the authority to procure a transfer. He said, my brother would be right for you. Herz was himself bi-lingual in German. He had been born in Austria, where perhaps he had learned to laugh and play with words, and had been working on international money transfers at a New York firm before induction.
The Newcomer didn't feel he should tell the whole truth. Yes, he had the needed military training, he had the rare tutelage in propaganda (he was, incidentally, now hearing a term being used as a synonym -- "psychological warfare") afforded by Professors Harold D. Lasswell and Nathan Leites at Chicago, and, yes, he had travelled in Italy, but, he had to inform Herz, he didn't speak, read, or write Italian well. Fact was, although he didn't say so, he was totally incompetent in the language. Herz had no intention of questioning a language deficiency in any event. He was delighted with finding a genuine soldier who was an officer and more than that, an intellectual, and even versed in the field of public opinion.
We have two platoons, he said, one dealing with German matters, the second with Italian. I head the one. You can head the other. That's the understanding of the Commanding Officer, Colonel Oren Weaver -- he's at Camp Ritchie, you'll meet him. Then we have a printing section and a radio transmitting section with three 1KW transmitters. The whole company numbers about three hundred soldiers, almost all from the signal corps, or recruited directly from civilian life, especially in our sections, with high language capabilities.
Our Man lacked a marvelous quality that the United States Army bred in its Regular Officers, an unruffled acceptance of command over matters of which they knew nothing. He felt it was unconscionable to be falsely ticketed as a linguist. It was not his fault, but he must do something to redress the situation. Upon leaving Herz he hastened to the room that his wife had found for them in the comfortable Victorian home of Mrs. Singleton, a pleasant Southern lady whose husband was an attorney and who was happy for every indication of getting closer to the War. Taking Jill by the hand, he escorted her from one phonograph store to another around town until they came upon a single unsold set of Linguaphone in Italian. They brought it back to their room, he closed the door as a security measure, and, unwrapping the cellophane cover, placed carefully upon their portable gramophone Lesson Number One, then listened attentively as the needle scratched it out: "La Famiglia Bianca: La Famiglia Bianca e'..." Mrs. Singleton could not help overhearing the strange phases in that beautiful language; when he met her in the hallway, her eyes lit up excitedly, he had to warn her to secrecy; she was delighted additionally with the stamp of a secret. Her home was a staging area for the invasion of Europe! Unfortunately she could not have her nice young Lieutenant couple for long. Before he had finished "Lezione Quattro," he was ordered to Camp Ritchie, along with Herz.
What else had he done while in Washington? Between "La Prima Lezione" and "Lezione Quattro." He had plotted the invasion of Sicily. Everybody was wondering what might be the next step after the defeat of the Axis troops in Africa. He figured that Sicily should be next, not Greece as Prime Minister Churchill would have it, or France, as Stalin wished: Greece could be counterattacked from every direction even including the South from which the invasion forces would have to arrive and be supplied. The Dieppe disaster showed that the costs of landing now in France would be enormous, unacceptable, unless the leadership there had been faulty. Not peninsular Italy directly, because of the lack of air bases from which Allied planes might protect their ground forces.
His plan for Sicily was unorthodox. It popped into his head as he thought how to conquer Italy. Like most of his ideas, beginning with the fantasies of infancy, it assumed a visual completeness in his brain immediately, as if it had been there all the time waiting to put out like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter. He had toured the Island five years before, and he could picture its features vividly as he pored over the fine maps that the OSS library provided for him. Mt. Etna, so prominent on the Eastern half, obscures with its grandeur and fame the presence of another notable feature of Sicily, a high central plateau around the small city of Enna. The road network of Sicily, well developed, as was its railroad network, created two patterns. The first circumnavigated the Island, along the beaches and seaside cliffs. The second consisted of a spider web whose center was around Enna.
The Allies had most of two airborne divisions in North Africa, battle-hardened, and could reinforce these. They would soon have aerial superiority over Tunis and control of the sea. Malta held. Pantelleria would fall. They had aircraft carriers. Of the enemy, there would be large numbers of Italian troops, mostly of low morale, a large part of them recruited in Sicily. The Germans had few Island forces, but, even in the event that they did not lose all of their African Army [as they did in fact by May 12], they would have been able to bring only several divisions to bear in Sicily.
He inquired about who might be able to listen to such a plan in OSS and pass it along. He was referred to Dr. Gengerelli, who had been Professor of Psychology at the University of California and was engaged here in intelligence and planning on Italian operations. Gengerelli was surprised and wondered whether there was a leak in security. Not at all, said the Lieutenant. The target was obvious. He told how the airborne forces could be dropped on the undefended plateau, would seize Enna and the towns around, in a triangle that included Caltanisetta. The airport there could receive supplies and reinforcements. The Axis forces could move only by routes around the Island, which would get them nowhere and subject them to continual air and sea attack, or by thrusting up one or more of the several roads leading to the plateau. But they had nowhere near the forces needed to carry them up any one of the roads, and difficult minor mountain roads would have to be traversed to bring their forces together without going back to the sea and climbing along a single route. If they accomplished this feat and were able to push back the Allied force from the central plateau, there would be no second Axis force that could block its withdrawal, and they could readily embark and depart on the Allied fleet. But this was a worst case scenario, because he had in mind that, as soon as the airborne force was landed and the enemy started up the roads to the interior, an army would be landed on the South-Eastern beaches, headed for Catania and Messina. The enemy army would have to surrender or flee by the northern coastal road. The Eastern enemy troops would have to be driven up the coastal road to the Messina ferries. There they might surrender or be destroyed by land and sea artillery and air strafing and bombing.
Having persuaded Dr. Gengerelli that the plan was worthy of consideration and extracted a promise to move it at least one level up, the Lieutenant left it with him and departed satisfied. He heard no more of it, nor did he expect to. It didn't help that he volunteered, according to a footnote of the memo, to join the expedition. Meanwhile he disposed himself for the move to Camp Ritchie, where Jill, conveniently introduced, had taken up quarters in the home of a cousin of Mrs. Singleton.
If Camp Ritchie, now Camp David, has become a retreat for the President and his entourage, the Lieutenant would be able to explain. The area was hilly, abundantly supplied with trees both deciduous and evergreen. It was speckled with cottages and small settlements, flowers blooming among them with the first sign of Spring. Its brooks were poetically exact, with the proper gushes and gurgles, the right proportions of accelerations and decelerations, glistening beds and warm banks of pebbles and sand, rugs to the barefoot. He and She tripped along a stream lengthily and dreamily until his and her bodies fell down together upon some sandy niche, nor did they rise up until shadows fell upon them from the low bluff behind and they had finished dissevering, one by one, the sounds and lights of the mild exterior Nature from their orgasmic explosions. There was more of this in the sanctuary of their large-windowed wood-framed room, but Cousin Singleton could not have been surprised, after what she would have heard from Mrs. Singleton. However, something was happening to them that they did not now realize.
He warmed to the Camp itself, too. It nestled in the mild hills, with buildings here and there, not uniformly placed. Wavering paths wandered hither and yon, unlike Tyson, Davis, Bliss and the Desert encampments. Most striking was the absence of large formations. Rather, at any time of day or night, you could observe human figures, from the many singles to the multiples, typically from a dozen to a score, moving this way or that, sometimes armed, sometimes carrying strange packs, sometimes scurrying about empty-handed. If you could have infiltrated the thousand minds of the panorama, you would have located a dizzying lot of schemes whose ultimate denouement would occur in a Malayan jungle, a Baghdad consulate, the Spanish Steps of Rome, and the Old Port of Marseilles. Oh, yes, too, in Palermo, for someone here was thinking about sneaking some patriotic mafiosi into Sicily to rouse up local interest in an American victory, and actually did something about it.
The Lieutenant found his Company, the 1st MRBC, scattered about, the Radio Station crews setting up and taking down their transmitters on one field, clusters and couples conversing in several languages around a set of offices, men off by themselves quietly reading an intelligence report of interviews with prisoners or a manual on the portable Mergenthaler offset printing press, or, for that matter, one of a score of books that the Lieutenant had well in mind, and helped persuade him that he was well equipped for his job. What job? There was no manual, no routine, no training program, no tests, nothing but serious talk and good fellowship, it would appear, for the forty intellectuals of the Company. They should have been, but were not, being trained in the interviewing of prisoners of war, politicians, ordinary civilians, in the production of certain kinds of reports on the political situation as known to or believed in by respondents and informants, in map-reading, and in propaganda analysis and propaganda policies. Never mind the manual of arms, firing of small weapons, booby-traps and mines, vehicle driving and maintenance, and in the actual preparation of propaganda. Snippets of all these things were to be had. Russian Front leaflets were passed around, cleverly written, well designed and illustrated: Herz was of the opinion, which Our Man accepted, as did others, like Hans Habe and Hans Wallenberg, but perhaps not Peter Viereck or Klaus Mann, that Soviet propaganda was too political, too ideological, too demanding. The mentality of the German soldier was too Nazi to believe the message; the practical tactic and consequences for any German soldier who might accept the message were not made explicit. The Chicago Lieutenant's favorite Soviet leaflet had the Nazi leaders in comical poses, with headlines: "The German G.I. has it good!.." following with: "Hitler thinks for him!.. Goebbels talks for him!..Goering eats for him!..Ley takes care of his girlfriend!.. He need only die for himself!" showing him stuck bleeding in a snowdrift.
There was a Headquarters staff, of course, consisting of a red- headed, red walrus mustachioed, cheerful blustery Executive and practical Commander, a former advertising man named Caskey; there was, too, his Assistant, a full-cheeked down-plumbing-resonant- voiced Captain Rathbun who knew some Italian because he had studied singing, a Lt. Jerry Stern who had been a radio programmer and was now personnel officer, a Lt. Zimmerman, who had been a radio announcer in Milwaukee, a Lt.Tommy Anglin who had been and was, well, a nice guy. Two facts were apparent: the 1st MRBC stood high in priority for shipment overseas, and the 1st MRBC was in a state of happy confused ineptitude.
Rarely to be seen was Lt. Col. Oren Weaver, the Commander, who appeared in jump shoes, paratroop uniform, and beret, out of the skies, so to speak, a former CBS radio man from Chicago, exuding confidence, smiling, teaching nobody anything, although, to conjure up excuses, he may have been helping to develop and obtain equipment: he had to be doing Something! Supernumeraries and redundancies were structured into the Army brain from the time when every cavalryman led a couple of spare horses.
The designers of the 1st MRBC were myopic. Two major operations, and the equipment and training requisite therefor, went overlooked: loudspeakers for delivering messages to audiences across the lines, and the system for distributing leaflets by artillery. They would have to be developed in the field. For that matter, not a single leaflet was written and printed at Camp Ritchie as a sample of what would be effective for dissemination among civilians or hostiles at the front.
I wish that I could relate to you that Our Man moved in effectively, was cordially received, and in the short weeks remaining, transformed the outfit into a Mark VI dreadful monster of the mind. Not at all. He was cordially received, he did his bit, working almost entirely with Herz, to evaluate and integrate the two-score propaganda soldiers, and he even drilled them and helped them to fire rifles. He was ashamed to parade them, but kept them off on corners of the fields and bypaths of the Camp.
They were a charming group, whatever their military bearing or fire-power. The Company had been granted permission to commission several of the men from the ranks, and their designation had been left to Lts. Herz and De Grazia. Consequently, he personally interviewed them all, beyond the normal variety of contacts.
At that time the most conspicuous officer candidate was Hans Habe. Little objection might be raised to him. He was older than the ordinary lieutenant, tall, with a confident manner, ready with a big smile, cordial, almost effusive. He had published a novel. His Hungarian accent was scarcely noticeable. Complexion ruddy, hair reddish blonde maintained by dyes. A bon vivant, luckily he could be indulged and indulge others, especially Captain Caskey, with drinks and dinners, because he had married a rich woman, old and ugly some young sports might say, quite nice said many another. He wore custom-tailored khakis and fatigues. He was enthusiastic. He knew Central Europe very well. He was anti-Nazi. He was ever so clever in human relations. Beyond everything else, he was rational, not addle-pated, visionary, or nonsensical. You could imagine him operating a system consistently without breakdown. They agreed, and Captain Caskey heartily concurred, on Habe.
In fact, they agreed on all three candidates who were to be finally commissioned. Peter Viereck was very bright, a poet, a dedicated anti-Nazi and liberal. His father had been the most famous of pro- German Americans in World War I and had spent time in jail as a traitor of sorts. The mark of this (in)justice was clearly upon Peter, in his clashing determination and hesitancy of manner. (A wild psychoanalyst would venture, aha, there's one who wanted to kill his father but couldn't let himself do it.) Physically, he did not cut a dashing figure; he looked as if he had just escaped a concentration camp. He seemed quite uninterested in managing others, though fully cooperative at work.
More ambitious and a fine figure of a man was Corporal Costas, who told the Lieutenant, with an educated Greek accent, that he was expert in seven languages, but in none better than English. He had a way with Germans as well, he recounted. His calling card when in the Reich carried him as Alexander, Graf von Costas, Sparta, Greece. The Germans swooned at this. He had been born in Sparta!
Sergeant de Lattre taught French at Northwestern University. He was a large man overflowing with flesh, whose bullet-head put him credibly in the ranks of the French infantry in Morocco as he claimed. He was heavy-handed, obstinate, opinionated, endearing because of his good will and harmless role of the moment. He had the war all figured out, of course.
This could not be said of Corporal Grigis, who kept his own counsel, obeyed instructions promptly, and exhibited a judicious temperament under incitement. He had the manner and speech of a Near Midwesterner and there was no question that his stocky body could support a heavy load over long distances. He showed no obvious source of his knowledge of Italy and Italian, which was satisfactory; "I've always listened to Italian radio programs, " he said. There were Italian-Italians in the platoon, Jewish refugees, Fabio Coen, Raymond Guetta, and Kaminski, a version of Viereck; all were young, bright, intellectual, congenial, and militarily untrained.
Hans Langendorf was an older man, lean and depressed of temper, a German refugee whose perspective upon the War and World were those of a political extremist from a worker's party. He gave no sign of leadership, or of caring about managing others. In this he was like Klaus Mann, who was even more depressed, with sunken haunted blue eyes, which the Lieutenant ascribed to an autocratic father, Thomas Mann, whose home In California had been the scene of a visit by the de Grazia's with Mann's younger daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Giuseppe Borgese, Professor at the University of Chicago. Klaus could be voluble on occasion. His knowledge of what had been occurring in Europe, historically, and his mastery of German prose were unsurpassed in the Company. He had a beautiful intelligence.
Hans Wallenberg was a short stocky pugnacious-looking Prussian Jew, baptized Catholic along the line. His father had been a leading publisher in Berlin in earlier years. Hans would never lose a strong German accent, but he spoke clearly, like Henry Kissinger, and was naturally authoritative. He was not out front among the men. He led from within, by his forceful personality and competence with ideas. Of his self-sufficiency and hardihood, there could be no doubt.
So there you have it, the candidatures. Besides Habe, the choices were Wallenberg and Grigis. Their names were seconded and duly forwarded. It was time to turn to other matters. Ready or not, the Mediterranean Theater of Operations was beckoning the 1st MRBC. There was a large army of German and Italian troops, hard-pressed, but well-situated to put up an extended defense of Tunisia. They should be suffering a barrage of propaganda. Elements of the 1st MRBC should have been flown over by now and in action.
Instead, the orders to move came at the beginning of May. This had given the Lieutenant and his wife time to get a preliminary opinion -- positive it was -- on her pregnancy. The question could not be fully decided. He thought the carefree occasion was the sandy bower of Spring flowers brookside. She, who was contracepting in her typical unreliable way -- or was the unconscious wish creating unreliability? -- believed the conception to have occurred on Cousin Singleton's bed with the breezes of April blowing the light curtains into the room over their heated bodies, or even in their airy bedroom in the Maryland hills.
Howsoever that may have been, they reversed, almost without discussion, their long-enduring refusal to grant any neonate the privilege of their parenthood. Not only that; they even felt that it was the best thing that could have befallen them at this moment in time. They wanted to commit an act of reproduction, to bring in a unifier who would serve to defy their fateful separation. Since they were not sure of the conception themselves, its chief indicator being a by-passed menstruation, unless you want to consider a loss of appetite and a slight illumination of the senses and skin, they spoke of it to no one.
No one would have listened, anyhow. They were all busy packing their gear, drawing an issue of new shoes and clothing, polishing and greasing vehicles against the salt air, writing their families despite the rule to keep any troop movement secret, redrawing wills, and arguing about their unpreparedness when, as was anticipated, they would be cast to die or survive on a battlefield of grand scale.
They boarded trains that reached Newport News, Virginia, somewhat after the arrival of several cars of wives and sweethearts. So much for the secret destination. Everyone knew that the Nazi SS wanted especially to kill enemy propagandists; this was evidenced in Russia in thousands of cases. Also, they knew that the sea lanes were hardly safe for the Stars and Stripes; the truth of the matter, unknown to them, was that convoy losses were heavy, 21 eastbound ships having been lost in one engagement with submarine packs in March, 13 westbound ships from an April convoy. May would be a better month, watching the sinking of 264,852 tons. In June, (they could not know) the situation would dramatically improve, with Davy Jones' Locker in receipt of only 95,753 tons.
Jill and the others registered at the Hotel Warwick. There, like high-priced courtesans, they were visited furtively and in haste by their consorts. Jerry Stern was an important runner. When everyone else was locked into the great dock area, he had to go out on logistical problems. On May 6, in what was guessed to be a last contact, Jerry was given a letter for her, which, inter alia, said,
Certainly we haven't had much leisure in which to reassure each other of undying fidelity and love but I feel such reassurances not very necessary, even though very nice. I have no intention of giving you up for any girl in the world. I have every hope of creating happiness for both of us in the not too distant future. Even under the stress of these uncertainties of the day and the tomorrows, I am growing more delighted and expectant over the probability of a child to come. At the same time I pledge a successful resumption, and this time an unfrustrated one, of romance as we know it - and we do know it intimately, from breakfast for two to breakers off Santa Monica. You need never feel that you are being forced to create a world of yourself and a child. I always love you and you always have, barring sleepless nights and nerve-racking departures, a gay blade with an open heart & a boon companion.
Well, wish us luck and carry the torch high. Maybe, I'll get home sooner than we think, the way the African battle is going today. All my love.
Al
[in the margin is written] P.S. You might as well leave tomorrow sometime, inasmuch as we shall be departing tomorrow. This looks like it. Goodbye for now, love.
But there is more to it; it's an operatic ending. The faithful Jerry (who is not missing the chance to see his own cool combed beauty of a wife), brings back a note from her, with a coda.
Darling,
Jerry just told me the news and gave me your note. I hope I'll be able to see you at the gate in the morning. If I do, no written words are necessary. But if vile fate intervenes once again, this will have to be our last goodbye, for the duration + six months anyway.
To say I wish you all the luck in the world is redundant, almost silly. I know we'll see each other again - that we'll both be as we always were, only there'll be more of us. I'm not sorry for anything - that we married in wartime, that you're going over (I still wish, impossibly, that I could too) or that I'm having what we hope will be a baby. And - and this may annoy you, since it marks me as a dupe of propaganda - I am and always have been, very proud that you were in the Army - from private up.
Come back soon. There'll be lots of us waiting for you.
Early the next morning, at the dockyard gate, silent around save for the guard and a couple of soldiers passing, he does meet her. They hold hands, kiss, especially they look at one another for a few minutes. Then, when they should have been trudging off back to back to the tune of Lili Marlene, they said things like "Don't forget to.." and "Tell Buzz that.." and "Watch your step when.." and "Have a good time with Liz and Bill at Quantico," and, most ridiculous of all, "Don't forget to write.." One more kiss.
His description in a letter that he slipped to a stranger going ashore, which reached her when she arrived at the home of Miriam and Sebastian in Washington, says it better:
You were sweet when I saw you last, quite wide awake for such an early hour. It was a nice, brief way to say goodbye. When the parting is prolonged, the thought of how much I love you grows more and more oppressive, and the pain unbearable. All my love, baby, may we be together forever soon.
On the 9th of May the convoy finally got underway. His Navy transport, with a Captain for the Ship's personnel and a Commodore to rule the Army crowd, seemed to ride in the middle of the files. Its log, according to Lieutenant de Grazia, contains the following entry to begin with:
We had little sleep to commence the great journey. I had a hasty breakfast after a brief nap, and then packed my laundry into my snappy grip, which, incidentally, has aroused much favorable comment. All my buckles had to be tightened, my straps slung and my cartridge clips filled, before taking off. We were a staggering lot, borne down, in my case, by a knapsack, jammed with small articles & a raincoat, a gas mask, a belt with compass, first aid kit and cartridge container, a pair of binoculars, an ammunition sack pregnant with .45 ammunition, a dispatch case full of essential papers, and a tommy gun. Plus the helmet.
The men were similarly laden with a barracks bag in place of several of the above items. Le tout ensemble tottered for the mile or so to the trains, the weaker dropping slowly behind. Every now & then I would carry a rifle or a bag for one of the men [particularly Viereck]...
That night he lay in his bunk, his fellow officers no more than a spit away in every direction, and thought of convoys and submarines, and Jill driving northwards in Martin Herz's car towards Quantico to visit Bill and Liz Evers, then to Washington where she would stop with Sebastian and Miriam before going on to New York to see her sister and others, turn over the car to Martin's mother, and then head home to Chicago for the duration.
The duration, he thought, could be as much as a year. The nation had been at war almost a year and a half. He was trained well for some things, but not certainly for what could be coming, and he felt that all about him were men who were much less trained. Who is in charge of this show? What in the world is this crazy company going to do? It would be weird to run it up to the Front with its panoply of equipment, its gibberish, its bedlam; it would certainly startle the enemy into some response. No other combat unit would want to be near it.
In all his Army time he had done about 300 hours of learning and training; the rest of 3000 working hours had been wasted. And of these 300 hours, only perhaps a hundred represented skills and knowledge that would be used. In the 14 months before he was transported to North Africa, he cost the army about $800 in cash and $500 in keep, and then his share of the low-cost training and his pro-rated part of the use cost of some equipment the most expensive of which would be 1%, say, of the cost of eight 40-mm cannon, on whose sales their Swedish developers had grown rich while preserving their neutrality.
He might have been sent overseas ten days after he was inducted, a day for clothing and shots, a couple of days to explain a batch of equipment and arms that were to be draped upon him and carried overseas, and several days of military intelligence about the front to which he was being sent. All the rest could have been learned, and a lot more, especially concerning the environmental factor, in and near the action. or behind the action getting acquainted with the people he'd be working with. He could afterwards have been pulled out from whatever outfit he was with for his special work. Feeding in, that's the way it should be done: feed the recruits into whatever units, British, Russian, Indian, Senegalese, Jewish, etc. that were in action, American, too.
It was important to build up cadres quickly, to train men to train and lead groups of men. Place men as individuals and small groups wherever they might experience the environment of warfare, get the taste of it. Training by huge encampments and then organizing by full divisions, corps and armies, so that no one dampened his shoes until a half-million could do so at the same time: this was hugely wasteful in irrelevant and unusable motion, interaction, and of precious time. Perhaps all units should be conceived and basically organized as modules, like organisms begin as an undifferentiated cell, and they should be limited in growth like bonsai trees, until you have a large number of modules with incipient specializations that should be kept intact until they win or are destroyed. These could be formed into as many different kinds of larger units as might be required. What he was getting at, never having been to a General Staff School, was the concept of the Task Force, that was making its way in military circles. To his credit, perhaps, was his envisioning the process as radical, going back to the beginning of all military training, so that there was no other way to operate from the beginning than through Task Forces, and therefore, when the special Task Force was called into being, its personnel would possess an intense concern for communications, liaison, information exchange, three times the intensity and effectiveness of the ordinary experience. Nobody foresaw it, but that's what happened inefficiently to this tiny special function of the Army called psychological warfare, and, finally, combat propaganda. What actually took place at the end of the line, at the front, bore about as much resemblance to the way the whole thing was conceived and put together as the fat larval slug to the svelte butterfly. A metamorphosis occurred.
The Army, like the school systems of the nation, did not prepare one well for what would happen, the real thing. Were the other soldiers on the boat even less well trained? Or perhaps their jobs were simpler. But that's not what bothered him; it wasn't the technical niceties of warfare. It was the lack of agglomerative flexibility that was just mentioned. And, too, it was the failure to emulate the environment of logistics and battle that affected the individual's behavior and thence the outcome. Were American troops really acculturated to this environment? How long would it take for them to test themselves and adjust the difference?
But there is more to be quoted from his extensive log of the voyage out:
The 1st MRBC was only the beginning, the advance party, the first sprinkling of men. The long lines xxxx ["too much information on page 5-6" scrawls the Censor; he even forbids telling the name of the ship, which is lost in memory and in a square mile of federal archives now] xxxx in the hold where the air is foul and dark. The bunks there are packed four deep with a thread of space in place of an aisle, line after line of them, in or around each a barracks bag, two blankets and a rifle. The occupants sleep a lot in them, but otherwise shun them. They clamber up the ladder to the deck, girded with the padded life jacket which is the laissez-passer to the world of sea and sunshine. Some hardy gamblers stay below and shuffle their cards and clink their coins in a shaft of light which enters from a missing board forty feet above.
At the first signs of darkness the order comes from the loudspeaker to "Prepare to Darken Ship" A few minutes later comes the order "Darken Ship!" The smoking lamp is out on all weather decks. This means no smoking except in prescribed places inside the ship. From then on, one stumbles in darkness, feeling his way up and down ladders, into staterooms, along cluttered decks and into dark latrines. I have suffered my share of hard knocks, funnier to discuss than to endure. First a crack on the head from an overhanging assault boat which didn't hurt as much as an excruciating bang of my knee against a bulkhead.
Lately, I have taken to sleeping topside in the open. The air is so much cleaner there than in our tiny compartment where nine men breathe the equal cubic space of a room at International House. It was very cold last night outside & I'm making more adequate preparations tonight. I carry my cot up with blanket, my life belt and my tommy gun with some ammunition. The compensation is drifting to sleep with the sky and sea stretching immeasurably around me, with the other ships in the convoy lying away gently into the darkness and with the whole world being put to sleep naturally instead of artificially by a flick of a button. Whether at sea or in the desert, sleep in the open is, like reading a book before falling asleep, an unconscious denial of the regimentation that now it is time to sleep, ergo sleep. You remember those very pleasant nights when neither of us was pressed by the morrow and we could lie in semi-darkness talking affectionately and agreeably at ease.
Some of the men grouse around each night for a place on deck to sleep. The sailors are crowded too and they crawl into all sorts of places to sleep when twilight comes. They sleep in the assault boats and on all the decks except the top one. Despite the small size of the ship, its domain, so to speak, there is a kind of nomadism about these boys in their prowling around and changing of lairs in the evening, and in the way they shimmy from here to there to no seeming good purpose. You get the same sensation watching monkeys in an outdoor rocky cage. They still are wanderers and migrant citizens.
There isn't too much work for anyone aboard the ship, and frequently a group is composed of both soldiers & sailors. There is a great deal of friendliness on all sides with an astounding display of courtesy on both sides. The most irritating things are passed off with great good humor. Painful encounters in the darkness, many dull questions, terrible crowding are passed over in a most gentlemanly fashion, befitting well-fed, housed and slept persons of strict Christian upbringing.
The men don't have too much to do. The food is good but the hold is stifling and the deck space is limited. There is a little reading, a considerable amount of card-playing, but mostly there is rail-leaning hour after hour, rewarded by the sight of other ships, some flying fish, a scout plane now & then, the great seaweed bed, and once a whale. Conversations are endless. The men are already planning their return trip. Some are looking forward to the women of North Africa. The length of the trip, seasickness, incidents of the sea and ship are all favorite topics.
Some of the group clusters are striking. A dozen or so, clad in coveralls and a padded life jacket, unshaven and unkempt will stand around listening to two or three champion BS's ["bull shitters"], or to a soldier strumming a guitar, or watching a young sailor painting a post with patient, unexcited interest.
The officers are fortunate in possessing a wardroom which, when the tables are cleared, serves as a smoking and reading room. It is a great asset, since even our rooms are too cramped to bear for long. It is here that meals are served by efficient messmen in white jackets.
The life of a naval officer is soft and pleasant. They have very little to do with the men. They have their quarters which are far more comfortable than any in the army. Their food is superior. Their linens are clean, on the table & on the bed. The lieutenant commanders have spacious rooms with private baths. All of this goes with them to the last battle. They go into the fight living & eating & sleeping as gentlemen. They come out of the fight with the same blessings. How different from the soldier who never has a home, a place for his possessions, bathing facilities or a constantly good food supply. If he is lucky, he goes into battle on a tin of food and exists for days on less. He is exposed to the rains and snows, to heat & cold, to great noises and great confusions. There is something of finality about his absence from home, whereas, to the sailor, home is never more than several weeks away on an order that may come at any time....
The chaplain aboard ship is from the Univ. of Chicago where he took some work in Sociology. His name is Phillips. Perhaps you can recall him -- a slender, medium-sized man of about thirty with a small mustache, glasses, sparse blond hair & a receding chin. Most ships haven't chaplains but this is an exception.
I've read several books during this voyage. Appeasement's Child is excellent - calm and learned. Massock's Italy from Within is likewise good. I've done some conversing in Italian and am able to get along pretty well, as well as a person who has spent a couple of years in Italy, according to my partner in conversation.
Have you ever read Not Peace But a Sword by Vincent Sheehan, U. of C. fellow alumnus. He is really good, a clearer thinker than Schuman on what lay ahead, I believe. He gives out on the kind of socially conscious writing I like. I mean that he makes it a part of the whole fabric of life - not some monstrous and all- consuming Marxian whole. No doubt his mind, and he is only human, would tend that way, but he has that trait of mixing with life, of wading in the currents that drives obsession from actions or thoughts related to actions, if not from the original fort they hold in the ideology; to mince platitudes, he is a "practical idealist" - words that ordinarily mean nothing.
This is my fifth crossing of the Atlantic and the experience is as it was always, boring much of the time. Despite the lack of women, dancing, swimming pools, many flunkies and scrambled sweetbreads for breakfast, it is not a worse voyage. The ever-present danger lurking around us night and day gives some zest to the trip. But I suppose it is again the abnormalities which one always finds in war which afford the chief interest, the efforts of men to adjust, to find meanings, to take or avoid responsibilities, to explain unknown fears, to pass the day and night, the way they bear discomforts which always cause one to ask himself "What does unbearable mean?"
Midway in the voyage, a soldier dies suddenly in a great fever. Spinal meningitis. A dreadful plague was feared. Several contracted jaundice. The dead man was buried at sea; the Reverend Phillips prayed and a goodly company assisted. One of the MRBC men was stricken with acute appendicitis and operated upon; he survived.
Let the log resume:
You may have noticed indications here & there of this letter being compounded over a period of days. This afternoon, after several days of good weather and slick seas, a heavy roll hit the convoy. All the ships are pitching mightily, nosing up great puffs of spray. The stocky cruiser, especially, is bucking and tossing like a bronco. Appetites were not so sharp this evening and pale, wan smiles are common. The land had never so much to offer as now.
Another day and less change. A convoy passed us at a distance this morning, homeward-bound. It looked to be chiefly cargo ships. A funny sight in a way, that crowding of masts and hulls away off. One felt like exclaiming "Ahoy, the Spanish Armada," or "Lo! The Carthaginian fleet." I realize the thrill a look-out must have had in those days of visual communication.
What an ordinary beautiful day this is. The sea is again very calm. I have read more. I have read several short stories by Aldous Huxley, again admiring his masterful techniques and condemning his approach to his subjects, poor things. They are certainly flailed unmercifully. And I have read some absurd pastoral by Thornton Wilder called Woman of Andros. The pastoral is typically an attempt to sugar-coat nonsense so that it will be swallowed easily. Prurient sex becomes charming & cute; drivel becomes mystic and corn goes rustic....
We have been giving news programs to the ship's complement & troops twice each day. The idea was put out by Herz as a good exercise & a way of getting the men out of the hold. The talks are very successful & are heard throughout the ship. It was by means of this loudspeaker that the men learned the cheering news of the fall of Tunisia, the great diplomatic activity everywhere, and now the brilliant RAF assault on the Ruhr dams. The news has done a lot, I think, to take the men's minds off the submarines. Zimmerman has been doing an A-1 job of announcing. He is as good as any I've heard. I've found that I've lost none of my editing skill & can cut a thing to pieces & put it together in quick-time. Most of the time I let my extreme critical faculty rest & allow ordinary, decent presentation to get by. Funny, though, how little effect an "abased" life has on one's mental processes. Habe is pretty good at handling the relative importance of items. He has a little of the Hollywood about his literary efforts, however.
Several of the men have been giving language classes to the officers of the ship. a nice way of taking up time & learning a little. Peter Viereck and I have had a chance to converse at length several times. He is, to my mind, a brilliant man, an American Shelley, a writer full of epigrams and wit. I expect him to be writing famous books some day. He is as nervous & thin as a reed, wonders where the war against Fascism is, and rather too constantly is complaining and railing. I reprove the latter behavior by forcing him to admit that to me it is old, old stuff - I know it & I agree but so what & T T [Tough Titty = it's hard to feel sorry for you] - but he can't help himself and says I have no right to be an intellectual, because of my stability.
Great indign [line missing] xxxx destroyers, disturbed at the [words missing] xxxx into our march of pomp & circumstance across the broad sea.
I have read much, too, some short stories, a biography of Churchill and now, with great voracity, Thomas Wolfe's The Web & the Rock. And what a delight it is. I recall now why I treasured Look Homeward, Angel in those rather bitter days in New York...Yet I know that my writing would never be of his type. I am repressed. I hate to blurt. I cannot confess so completely in all detail, though I be ever so conscious & full of these details.
[line missing to the censor] xxxx lands of blue waters & perpetual sunshine - old Mexico, Southern California in their pristine state - white buildings set like jewels in mountainsides. And now after more blue water, our port of disembarkation, a great cluster of white houses, some looking quite large through my binoculars. It is a marvelous day - a flat sea full of tiny wrinkles & glorious sun and land!
Peter Viereck has been scribbling, too, in this and that crevice of the ship. The New Yorker publishes his poem shortly thereafter:
We grumble up the gangplank to the ship,
Zigzag past periscopes toward history,
And know that in each squad of twelve, one man
Wears doom, like dungarees, and does not know.
He will not see the Brooklyn Bridge again,
No, not though all his buttons glow like planets,
Shining like prayers to intercede for him,
Though he ban sins and wrinkles from his bed
And scrape his mess kit clean with sand and soap --
Not even this can coax a soldier's furlough
From death for one who strolls among our twelve.
This morning we,
Because not knowing which of us he is,
Swore twice as gruffly at each other with
That soldier's gentleness we won't admit.
The Lieutenant would have quibbled over various lines of the poem, mostly their melodrama, but stayed fond of fierce-feeling gentle Peter. Warfaring needs poets. It needs the leadership of the phrase and word. This is not said in praise of war. Concentration camps need poets, too.
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