Behind Hitler's Lines (4 page)

That evening Joe's stick celebrated their cherry jump with beer. The army had delivered on its implied promise throughout parachute training: “Do what you're told, as you've been trained, and you'll get to the ground in one piece.” That pledge had been fulfilled, and Joe's faith was reinforced immeasurably.

For officers there was a ceremony called a prop blast, where each cherry downed an eye-watering potion from the hub of a C-47 propeller. The celebrant was to gulp fully while his fellows counted to four, the tensest interval before the chute opened with what was called “opening shock.” If, after four seconds, those watching felt he was insufficiently blasted he had to “pull the rip cord” of his imaginary reserve parachute and drink all the way to the floor (about a minute).

An elderly lady in Muskegon who saw Joe during furlough noticed his gleaming jump wings and thought he was in the air corps. “How many flights have you made?” she asked. “Eleven takeoffs, ma'am, but no landings,” was his answer. That cherry jump was Joe's first ride in an airplane. There were thirty-five more before he landed in one.

THE SECOND WEEK AT
sea was trying and wearying enough to nearly dissolve the Airborne spirit. Scabies broke out, cultivated in fatigue uniforms that could only be washed with sea-water, which left a starchy irritant causing crotch rot. For this the medics had only gentian violet, which became compulsory whether infection was evident or not. Applied to body parts, gentian violet fluorescently stained underwear, olive-drab shorts, and T-shirts, which were as scarce as aluminum mess kits. Joe, Jack, and Orv began to ask one another if their battalion commander had anything to restore morale for crusaders who were feeling like convicts.

Colonel Sink had labeled the battalions of his regiment Red, White, and Blue. Commanding the Blues of Third Battalion was Lieutenant Colonel Robert Wolverton, a West Pointer from West Virginia, hardly in the mold of Sink (that mold was broken after the original). Sink was to say that Wolverton helped develop “a spirit unsurpassed among fighting men, not one of stupid following but rather of initiative
and bold aggressiveness.” That was Sink's recollection of how Wolverton trained the Blues. To Joe he was a demigod in a hierarchy beginning with Captain Shettle, his company commander. Their inspiration faded like old letters from home while the Currahees were stifled and impotent at sea.

So no less exhilarating than a prop blast was the cry “Land ho!” from
Samaria's
bullhorn. Paratroopers rushed starboard nearly tilting the ship. The land, the island, was Ireland, but it didn't look emerald, not even green. Nevertheless the loud talk on deck was about Irish origins; it seemed some Currahees could trace their ancestors by apocrypha and what they remembered from grandparents.

Landfall marked the end of sleeping in passageways, the ship resembling a Bowery flophouse and almost as lawless. At the sight of Ireland the chain of command sprang into life. “Reread your
Guide to England,”
officers ordered. “Hand-press your fatigues. Fall out on deck for calisthenics. You troopers are in worse shape than a regiment of WACs.” Blues believed in their officers but not everything they said. Just get us off this tub, Joe and his cohort grumbled; we'll show you what kind of shape we're in.

More than the New Yorkers who had seen them off, the Liverpudlians who received them looked wan and worn by the impositions of war. The Salvation Army was at dockside with tea, biscuits, and a few faint horns, which expressed an attitude less stimulating than sympathetic. Longshoremen tending the
Samaria
were listless relics from World War I. Lieutenant Colonel Wolverton saw how this initial impression of the ETO bemused his Blues. Before they debarked he counseled that the British had been holding off the Nazis for four years. “We're their reinforcements, the force to drive a stake in the heart of Hitler's Reich. What we have in common is a language and V for Victory.”

That was signaled by upraised fingers, the symbol on every wartime matchbook. As the Blues rode their train to Hunger-ford, natives flashed a V the way they used to tip their hats.

Grateful to march once more, to have escaped the
Samaria's
rancid bowels, Blues lugged weapons and duffel bags
from Hungerford station five miles to the village of Rams-bury, population 350. Third Battalion numbered a hundred more than that and dispersed like some oversized tourist group that couldn't be put up in a single hotel. Part of I Company went into a livery stable, a sister company went behind an inn, another ended up out on a farm two miles from town. Joe was billeted by a manor house.

Home for the next nine months would be this residence in Wiltshire County where water was drawn from a well, where there was a once-a-week shower at a drayman's garage if the Blues were not out on a maneuver when their allotted day came up. If so, shower day was postponed till next week. At least this preserved soap, a commodity rationed like cigarettes and sugar.

Wiltshiremen were as hospitable as if they had every amenity to share, though they had hardly any at all. Grubby from extended training, Joe's squad would amble into a favorite pub, down pints with World War I veterans, and frequently be invited to their homes. Colonel Sink's policy, however, was that all such invitations were to be gratefully but politely refused. He did not want young Americans drawing on their allies' scant resources and telling them how much better things were back home.

Midwesterners like Joe, accustomed to the extravagant spaces of rural America, blinked at the compact quaintness of English farmsteads and the reticulation of the landscape by mile after mile of neat stone walls. Everything, even the trees and streams, seemed older, more in order. Everything, including rabbits and deer, belonged to someone here; there were no vast tracts of federal land like Toccoa and Fort Ben-ning. Bemused, the troopers debated whether it was preferable to have their parachutes dragged by wind into a high wooden fence back home or a low stone wall in the Midlands.

“Hey, Joe,” Orv once asked, looking up from a letter he was writing, “is Wiltshire a county or a state?”

“It's called a county, but it's like a state back in the States.”

“Oh.”

SERGEANT DUBER APPROACHED HIM SLYLY. HOW WOULD JOE
like some brandy—
really
good brandy? The offer didn't appeal. A couple of pints of bitter at village pubs like the Bleeding Horse or the Bell, Crown & Anchor were enough alcohol for Joe after training six days a week, and some nights, in Wiltshire County and beyond. Nonetheless he was interested because of previous collaborations with Duber to improve I Company's chow, especially in the field.

Duber was a crack marksman, able to drill some lord's hare with a single shot from his carbine fitted with a silencer he'd obtained from no one knew where. For further fare he had called on Joe, trained in demolitions at Fort Benning, to help him fish the streams as I Company marched and countermarched through battalion maneuvers. Duber gauged the depth of dark eddies, then stated an amount of explosive. It was for Joe to prime and toss it into the stream with a waterproof fuse.

The detonation was like a depth charge and usually produced a shell-shocked trout, which Duber scooped up in his helmet. At the next break fish was frying for a select group in company headquarters. Deer were also Duber's prey but the most dangerous because they were in the inventory of vigilant British game wardens. By Sink's orders, Lieutenant Colonel Wolverton was obliged to fine each man in his battalion a pound sterling for every deer that fell to Blue bullets. However
, before their collective punishment could be imposed milord's game warden had to produce evidence that his game was not just missing but had been shot.

What Duber did best was make things disappear. He could skin a stag, gut and bury it almost before the carcass cooled. Venison made great sandwiches to supplement K rations, appreciated by Captain Shettle and once even served to Wolver-ton, who was pleased enough to not ask about its origins. So, when approached with the question of brandy, Joe harkened to Duber, almost twice his age and respected additionally for having survived Currahee training that had washed out a third of Third Battalion's youthful candidates at Toccoa. His proposal was enticing:

“Listen up, Beyrle. So what if you don't drink much? You get two bottles for trading. Napoleon's brandy—I'm not shitting you—worth hundreds of dollars per bottle.
Hundreds,
Joe, more than two months'jump pay—and all you have to do is stand guard while I requisition it.” This, said Duber, was a guarantee, not a gamble.

Shorty, the professional gambler, presently a stockade inmate somewhere in Britain, had convinced Joe to bet on himself, thereby adding the personal factor to an equation of chance, and always review the odds before a gamble. So before participating in the brandy requisition Joe asked Duber to describe the plan. He readily did, a reassurance but with a rebuke—he was doing Joe a favor by bringing him in, a favor for his contribution to pirate fishing.

Duber explained that for generations the earls of So-and-So had owned the estate on which men of I Company were now billeted. The manor house contained a wine cellar where famous liquors had aged for at least a century. When British authorities required the present earl to accommodate Americans, he had prudently removed his most valuable possessions, such as the brandy.

Upon evacuating, the earl had dismissed most of his staff. They were heavyhearted, having to find odd jobs around Ramsbury or being vacuumed up by conscription. Duber had met the out-of-work wine keeper at a pub, bought him some
bitter, and learned of his unhappiness. A carton of Lucky Strikes was enough for him to divulge the location of milord's brandy trove—buried under hay in one of the manor barns. With that information, Duber said, the heist would be “easy as spitting.”

Persuaded, Joe stood watch at twilight as a jeep coasted down to the barn. Four men piled out. Their silhouettes scampered between barn and jeep, careful to suppress clinking of bottles. Three men packed hay to cushion the glass, then climbed aboard to surround and protect the load. Duber quietly started the jeep and rolled away at a walking speed.

There was no immediate outcry. The earl, now living outside Wiltshire County, raised it at a high echelon, several removes from the concern of Wolverton, who had implemented two unwritten rules: (1) do your major drinking on pass to larger towns like Swindon; and (2) while in Ramsbury behave as if at home—that is, with your parents watching.

Wiltshiremen appreciated Wolverton's policy, and there was never much trouble, though there wasn't much to eat or drink either because both food and alcohol were far more tightly rationed than in the States. Petrol was even more precious, so that horse carts far outnumbered cars on lanes, called roads, which were designed for scenery rather than speed. Though GIs chuckled, locals thought it not funny at all for British officers in uniform and businessmen in suits to decorously ride bicycles.

GIs were not the only strangers in town. Three years earlier, ruthless bombing of English cities had forced evacuation of tens of thousands of the aged and underaged. Over a hundred were quartered in Ramsbury, along with young women placed by the Ministry of Labour to do farmwork, previously the occupation of Wiltshiremen now overseas. Additionally there were uniformed women doing administrative jobs for the Auxiliary Territorial Service, a factotum wartime agency. They came from every class and social background less welcomed by the natives than were the Americans, whose presence had resulted in a famous British saying about
their GI tenants that they were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” To which there was a less well known American retort: “You're underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.”

What cultural friction the Blues experienced was more within the U.S. Army. Though large-scale maneuvers took them farther and for longer periods away from Wiltshire County, they had made necessary adjustments with then-hosts, which were not disrupted before regrettable incidents occurred when the 28th Infantry Division of the Pennsylvania National Guard moved in near Ramsbury. Their scarlet shoulder patch—to become known as “the bucket of blood” after horrific combat—was the icon of Pennsylvania, a keystone, so Duber labeled them Keystone Kops. They probably would have been tolerated had they not hustled girls whom Blues considered proprietary. Competition immediately flourished, and the legs turned out to be as clever as they were presumptuous.

While Third Battalion was participating in an invasion rehearsal, measles broke out among the female population of Wiltshire County. British authorities requested assistance from nearby 28th Division medics, who obliged and, with all professional gravity, concluded that because most local lasses had had contact with Blues, it would be prudent for a quarantine to be imposed between the two. Wolverton was in the field, so the medical recommendation went up to Sink, who, in probably his most unpopular command decision, acquiesced to a thirty-day quarantine.

This struck Jack Bray hard. He took his pleasure quietly, assuredly. There was a Swindon girl with the same tastes, and they had melded with none of the abruptness of a wartime romance. Now she was off-limits! He was quarantined! Something had to be done, and it was for Joe and Orv to help him do it, as Keystones were reveling in pubs once the preserve of Currahees, buying drinks for Blue girls. Only two factors worked in favor of the paratroopers: for the legs, new acquaintances had not yet taken firm hold, and the 28th Division also had a full schedule of training and maneuvers. If
certain pubs could be denied to them, the thirty-day quarantine would expire before the fairest of Wiltshire were won over by Pennsylvanian treachery.

Joe and Orv consulted Duber, who, though he had a wife in the States, was courting a lady of Swindon and was said to be engaged to her. As in his fishing technique, Duber believed in demolition solutions. The quarantine called for smoke grenades. Designed to guide resupply parachute drops and air strikes, they produced voluminous smoke in a variety of colors. The Keystone color was red, but Duber felt green would be better—the signal to go (and don't come back). He directed that Orv, Jack, and Joe hit three pubs simultaneously. They knew the proprietors and felt bad about anonymous bombing, but when Keystones piled out of every door and window, that was compensation. The girls, now changing hands again, were initially angry, suspecting Blues and no one else. But a short time healed. Bray's lover was the first to forgive and led a movement back to the paratroopers.