Behind Hitler's Lines (3 page)

Joe's parents had no such asset in reserve. His older siblings dropped out of school into menial jobs necessary to keep the family together. Joe, in the seventh grade, barely made the cut, and only because his dad would not give up the grail-like goal of having one of his children graduate from high school. One daughter had died in quarantine from scarlet fever. It was for Joe to take up a humble mantle.

It did not fit well. He was a multisport star, a big frog in a
small pond. Ignoring academics, he reveled in athletics. He could run a mile in under five minutes, an accomplishment noticeable enough to the University of Notre Dame that they offered him a scholarship to enroll in September 1942. It was probably a hedge: Notre Dame knew that its wartime classes would be culled by the draft.

Athleticism was also Joe's entree into the esprit of the 506th. More than any war up to that time, World War II required physical, that is, aerobic training. Though a heavy smoker and drinker himself, Sink was one of the first regimental commanders to appreciate this requirement, as well as the fact that close-order drill and rifle-range marksmanship— not that the Currahees didn't do plenty of both—were largely relics of the First World War.

With very few vehicles, and those subject to loss because they were landed in gliders, his men would have to backpack all their wherewithal into battle. Hence endurance marches under crushing loads were the hallmark of Toccoa training. Paradoxically, paratroopers were designed to be shock troops striking the enemy rear, the military equivalent of sprinters in contrast to distance runners. Therefore speed and bursts of violence were what Sink sought in tactical exercises.

Additionally, the unexpected had to be exploited by instantaneous initiative. Unlike the 1st Infantry Division (now veterans of North Africa), Currahees would not be attacking from friendly lines against well-located enemy positions. Instead the paratroopers were to land on the enemy's heads and make sudden chaos their ally. This situation was the most difficult to simulate in training. Sink's attempts produced the cruelest memories from Toccoa.

Joe's included an unusually arduous day when the training cadre came around all smiles to announce that dinner would be spaghetti, meatballs, and Parmesan. This was a feast for these teenagers of the Depression, who cheered before chowing down, feeling good about themselves, encouraged by a cadre strolling around delivering pats on the back for exceptional performances that day. Then the executive officer appeared, smiling as he rarely did. That, Joe learned, was a
tip-off. The XO instructed the cooks to bring on strawberry shortcake, a favorite dessert. It was nearly devoured when the CO banged open the mess-hall door. “Hit it!” he yelled. “Fall out on the double, company formation. Last ones to the top pull KP.”

It was another run up thousand-foot Currahee Mountain, three miles on a winding trail, a routine ascent for them but not with a full stomach and as a complete surprise. Troopers staggered, farted, puked, and swore in anger at the malicious timing of the run. They did everything but quit because buddies grabbed them and kept them going, mostly by curses and kicks. These unannounced fire drills were hated and dreaded like nothing else. Sink's lesson was to always be ready for anything, even when relaxed. Sudden combat could come at any time, when least expected.

Such initiations arc-welded camaraderie. Like Euripidean characters, each young man had at least one strength and one weakness to emerge situationally. Joe, strong from the best and most plentiful food in his life, was one who could support the stumblers up Currahee Mountain. And he had a strong stomach. His uncle had been a butcher, so crawling through pig entrails strewn under barbed wire—another Sink training innovation—bothered him little. But at gambling (with its GI gold medal for craps) Joe's luck was less than average. Compensating for that deficiency there was Shorty, son of a Chicago gambler-mobster and next-door neighbor of Al Capone, whom Joe met when detailed to pick him up from jail.

Shorty owed Joe for not handcuffing him as required, so on the train back to Fort Bragg he demonstrated how to roll dice: lightly on three fingertips and the thumb of the nondominant hand, limp-wristed with double sixes up. This worked best in GI games where the dice didn't bounce off anything except a blanket.

“Don't
shoot
dice, Joe—you don't want to kill 'em. Imagine them bouncing like bingo balls, with your number coming up. And only bet when the shooter is coming out. Those are your best odds in a casino or anywhere else. Watch the
shooters. Follow your instinct, and don't be impressed by the ones always yelling ‘seven-eleven’ or ‘eighter from Decatur,’ stuff like that. I don't yell numbers, I
think
them.”

Shorty's fate had raised more than average interest in I Company. He had gone AWOL shortly before embarkation. His punishment was expected to begin by being drummed out of the Currahees, his jump wings and shoulder patch torn off, his paratrooper boots removed forever. This was the fate of those who were late returning from their first furlough, the humiliation inflicted in regimental formation reminiscent of the Civil War, complete with muffled drums as the disgraced were marched out as if for execution. That was the way Sink made his point that no one could be late in combat.

But Shorty had not been drummed out, only consigned to the
Samaria's
brig. Barren Duber, I Company's communications sergeant, speculated that it was Shorty's Mafia connections that saved him. Others felt, more logically, that paratroopers were now so valuable that none could be spared even for deserved punishment. Few would dispute that they were Eisenhower's elite, Hitler's dread, far above “straight-leg” GIs in the rest of the army. Paratroopers kept their knees bent to absorb the shock of a parachute landing, approximately the same impact as dropping off the tailgate of a truck going fifteen miles per hour. “Legs” was their derisive term for everyone else in the world. A favorite paratrooper chant on training runs was “There're just two things that we can't stand—a bowlegged woman and a straight-leg man!”

Such pride and prejudice had been thoroughly inculcated by the time the Currahees put to sea, but they deteriorated from pilferage on the
Samaria.
Troopers would give one another their lives but also take from one another, as if nothing was individual, so anything left unsecured was communal and its “requisition” tolerable. The most frequently requisitioned item was the aluminum mess kit, prized for resisting the corrosiveness of seawater, which was all there was to clean anything or anyone. Fresh water was available only for drinking and only fifteen minutes per man per day. Seawater soap produced slime rather than lather, so Currahee offi-
cers looked at the sea as beards grew during the passage to England.

It wasn't a difficult passage by Atlantic standards. Though there was little seasickness, appetites even as robust as Joe's weakened to the point of voluntary fasting. All K rations had been consumed till they became gambling chips, and it took a stronger stomach than Joe's to think of food while swishing his mess kit in a wash pail teeming with flotsam of bread crusts, fish heads, and cornflakes.

Time on deck to see the sea was rationed like fresh water and hammocks. Sometimes the convoy closed up so tightly that troopers on one ship could yell to those on another. Once the
Samaria
was nearly rammed. More frequently the convoy spread out almost to the horizon. All the while the Atlantic continued an undisturbed tempo. It was for those who traversed it, unconsciously influenced by it, to adjust. Most did so by projecting rather than reflecting. For none of them was the past as significant as the future. Unless they did then-job—unless that job was doable as General Marshall had gambled—home, in the medium future, would be ruled by monsters who did not speak English. In mid-1943 it was that simple, that evident, that true.

True because European civilization had submerged like Atlantis into the darkest depths and clutch of fascism or communism. Their exemplars, Hitler and Stalin, were now tearing at each other like tyrannosaurs. It was a time for democracy to make a statement, albeit compromising as Churchill had, that he would find cause with the devil to send Hitler to hell. That holy endeavor produced America's most inspired and titanic mission of the twentieth century. Colonel Sink rarely addressed his regiment as a whole, so Joe remembered a sentence: “The U.S. spells
us
” Sink had shouted at the formation where the AWOLs were drummed out.

During his own furlough Joe confirmed what Sink had averred. In Muskegon Dad had plunged into seventy-hour workweeks at Continental Motors, turning out aircraft and jeep engines. His personal and the national depression were over. The war effort was unified, universal.

For Joe that furlough was like a return from space or some exotic expedition. Everyone wanted to know what jumping was like, what else he had been doing, but their unasked question was how he'd changed. His folks met him at the bus station, and Mom cried a little, saying that he looked different in a way she didn't expect and couldn't explain. Dad said that was good—Joe was just growing up fast—no need to talk about it. Off they went to the 539 Grill, passing a popular poster:

That would not apply to Joe as he sat down to a meal of prewar viands: veal Parmesan, buttered noodles, and asparagus, topped off by Black Forest cake made with a pound of rationed sugar. The owner of the grill announced that the feast was on her, and that Joe should come back anytime. He, a private in the army, was a privileged celebrity in a way he'd never imagined.

That was confirmed when Sister Angelique, Saint Joseph's principal, summoned him—her authority over Joe, an alumnus, never questioned—to address the student body and guests. The school was too small to hold everyone, so he would speak next door in the church. His mother mildly protested that she'd heard only religious teachings at church. True, Sister Angelique agreed, but in wartime everything can change—as just about everything already had.

Joe remembers his speech as corny by current standards, but at the time everyone took it very kindly. Outside the church he was obliged to sign autographs like some big-league ballplayer. This embarrassed him because he'd done nothing in the war yet; but then came a public relations task he enjoyed—a visit to Continental Motors, where he had worked before induction and where his father was now a supervisor. The vice president of Continental had met Joe and
escorted him down the assembly line of a plant roaring as never before, working around the clock, running off military engines by the thousands. With mutual pleasure Joe shook hands with a hundred workers.

Those days at home sped by in a dazzle. Joe had resolved to treat the furlough as just a break, a break so short it would not leave him longing for civilian comforts. Only sheets were such a smooth luxury that Joe would miss them. Currahee training had shown him a second self, that of a soldier related to his civilian persona but qualitatively different. He felt there would be another similarity, though with much more overlap, when he jumped into battle. He looked forward to the progression. He had, by this point, denned himself as a soldier, with a soldier's standards of success or failure. The feast at the 539 Grill, the speech at Saint Joseph's, the handshakes on Continental's assembly line—he could not fail those who so esteemed him.

Preparing to resume his second identity, Joe packed up in his bedroom. Like typical parents, Mom and Dad had left the room just the way it was when he'd gone off to Camp Custer—the high school pennant, souvenirs from places he'd visited, the Chicago Cubs banner, a picture of Notre Dame's golden dome. Joe wrote something on a scratch pad as he left the room, his shoulder bent by an army duffel bag, something left undisturbed till he returned:

Even with Bray and Vanderpool such ruminations were not much discussed on the rail of the
Samaria.
Recalling their initiation as parachutists was more topical for soldiers steeling themselves to jump on the side of good in its stark fight against evil. Their big day, remembered more vividly than first sex, was their “cherry” jump.

Wearing football helmets with numbers chalked on them,
the fledgling parachutists had marched out onto the Fort Ben-ning airfield to be briefed on wind conditions and where to assemble after the drop. This was their reminder to consider a jump, even the first, as no more than the means of delivery from here to there—quite like the train to Toccoa. Don't do anything significantly wrong, and you'll arrive at the designated destination.

With that attitude the prejump briefing included nothing about parachute malfunctions. If one did occur, there would be no one to blame except the rookie himself, for he had packed his own chute, the ultimate designation of personal responsibility for a teenager to contemplate as he accelerated toward the ground.

Twenty-four cherry jumpers loaded into each C-47, the transport later said (with the jeep) to have won the war, moving men and materiel over the oceans and the Himalayas. The weather was cold in December 1942, but the rookies were sweating. A “stick” is the basic jumping unit, six to sixteen paratroopers, their leader jumping first. Joe was second. While the C-47 climbed slowly to fifteen hundred feet, Joe peeked outside. This was discouraged; they'd been told not to look down, to keep their eyes on the horizon, but he watched Georgia and Alabama spread out below. The control tower had loomed tall while they were on the ground but now became smaller and smaller.

“Stand up! Hookup!” shouted the jumpmaster.

All Joe remembers was shoving up tight to the big parachute pack of the stick leader, who disappeared like a leaf in a gale. Joe took a step to follow, was sucked out into the engines' roar and the wind blast, then felt a blow to the chest before realizing he was hanging in space. He'd jumped! It was an act of faith and a result of training that defied every natural instinct. What must be done could be done and would be done. That became a premise of the Airborne. It was said in a speech on its fiftieth anniversary: “We took our name from the air but gained our fame on the ground.” Nonetheless, hurling oneself into the air had a lot to do with what one did on the ground.