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  ROLL ME OVER

  An Infantryman’s World War II

  Raymond Gantter

  booksuch • Chu Hartley Publishers • New York

  Copyright © 1997 by The Estate of Raymond Gantter

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  ISBN

  To the Infantry— the Queen of Battles

  Roll me over

  In the clover;

  Roll me over, lay me down,

  And do it again!

  —A song of the infantry

  Foreword

  People keep talking about another war as though it were inevitable and only the moment of its coming uncertain, tomorrow, or maybe next week. Self-appointed prophets of doom, all of us. We talk a lot about it, but we don’t really think about it because it doesn’t bear thinking on: We know (and hide the knowledge from ourselves) that when it comes, if or when this “cold war” becomes a blaze, it will ravish the world. Atomic warfare, biological warfare, the swift murder of cities and civilians—warfare to make a mockery of the conventions of war, transforming armies into bewildered huddles of uniformed men who scamper crazily to catch up with an adversary who struck ten minutes ago and is now gone and away.

  Yet I believe that the next war, like the last one, will require the foot soldier. New weapons and new techniques there will be, new devices to blast and devastate with laudable efficiency, but when the weapons and devices have finished their work, the battered target, the precious, battered inches of ground, will have to be secured and held, and that’s a job for the infantry.

  This book, then, is at once a tribute to all former infantrymen, a personal narrative for my family, and a rough notebook of sorts for the young men who will be the foot soldiers of the next war.

  My original purpose in writing was nothing so lofty. I started to write because I was scared. Most of the time I was scared—not by bullet and shell alone, but by the huge and brutal impersonality of the whole business. Writing about it gave me a measure of control over my fears.

  Some of the material in this book is taken from letters written to my wife, Ree. Most of it, however, is drawn from rough notes jotted during the combat months, hastily scribbled observations that, for reasons of security, could not be included in letters home. I started those notes on the day I finished with the homeless misery of the Replacement Depots and joined an outfit, became a member of a family. I wrote as the circumstances permitted, employing whatever material was at hand—the backs of envelopes, paper bags, even the wrappers from our miniature packets of GI toilet paper. I carried the notes between my underwear and my shirt to protect them against the weather.

  A lot of war books have been written, and perhaps there’s nothing in this one that someone hasn’t already said. But now that it’s over and a degree of perspective becomes possible, a couple of things have hit me hard and hit me fresh. One concerns heroism and heroes. It’s a commonplace to say that heroes, most of them, are accidental. The thing that surprised me is that a guy can be a hero and a bastard at the same time. I’m talking about true heroes, of course, not guys who wear decorations. A lot of phonies are wearing ribbons they never earned, and that’s no secret. But I mean a man who does something truly gallant, something that rings inside you like the surging memory of Hector before the walls of Troy. And yet you don’t like him. If you didn’t like him before, you’re surprised to find you don’t like him any better now, even though you recognize the magnitude of his act and are awed by it. He’s a hero, sure, but he’s still a jerk. That contradiction belongs to war. War is a marriage—almost a rape—of giant opposites. It’s everything and all things and all at the same time: bad and good, heroism and cowardice, terror and serenity, feast and starvation, gallantry and bestiality. The wonder is that you can continue to be surprised.

  Something that always angered and frightened me was the small horizon of the man in the ranks. Most of the time you don’t know what’s happening, or why. You don’t even know where you are. It’s something you force yourself to accept—the big picture is for the brass, but it’s none of your damn business. You have a job to do, a town or a hill to take, and you do your job. Sometimes you know the name of the town; sometimes it remains forever in your memory only as That Place Where. I puzzle yet over maps, striving to find certain villages that were significant in my odyssey, but they are like cities on the moon, having no geographical context.

  If I were concerned with trying to show you the sweep of war, I’d have to do a lot of research, and then I’d be able to tell you that on such and such a day, when we’d been ordered to take such and such a town, the strategic picture was this and this, and we did what we did because of its relationship to the big plan. But I leave all that for the memoirs of generals. My purpose is to show you the dark side of the medal: how it was to be fumbling and blind, moving because we’d been ordered to move, but not knowing where or why. If some faint tingle of that unreality touches you, you will understand how it was that we were sometimes overwhelmed by black and crawling fear.

  You’ll find errors, possibly some misinformation in this. I’ll try to avoid them and give the true and accurate story, but I’m not going to worry much about a few errors of fact. If you at home lived in a world ruled by rumor and misinformation, so did we. You ought to know something about that rumor world of ours.

  In marshaling my notes and letters and memories together to form some semblance of continuity, I have frequently been nudged by the disturbing reflection that portions of this book would seem false or distorted or incomplete to many of the men who shared these experiences with me. To all those familiar voices, raised in reproach, incredulity, or shock, I plead only that men, sharing a common experience, saw different things and saw them differently. My view was not complete nor even accurate necessarily, but it was mine.

  One last thing: War is supposed to be a young man’s business, and maybe it is. And though the age of thirty doesn’t usually indicate senility, it’s not what you’d call springtime, either. What I’m getting at is this: I went in with a group of men my own age. High school, even college, were long past, and we left wives and children behind us and well-used marriage beds. Because of these circumstances, we saw some aspects of war rather differently from younger men. I’m not implying a moral judgment: I say only that we saw some things differently. Sometimes, listening to the talk of the younger men, watching them, I felt old and sagging. They had sap in their veins, which I was aware had run a little thin in mine. But I did all right. I have no complaints.

  Raymond Gantter

  September 1944-June 1949

  CHAPTER ONE

  “… they were still picking up bodies from D Day.”

  September 1944.

  I made the crossing on the Queen Elizabeth. There’s nothing to say about it except that we were too damn crowded, and our quarters were deep in the belly of the ship. We were so hot that we slept naked and dripped waterfalls of sweat through the thick canvas of our bunks. Sometimes we tried to sneak up to the decks to sleep, but always the guards would discover us and make us go back down. The food was lousy.

  A few days before leaving Camp Shanks, I’d been named an “acting noncom” (noncommissioned officer) to serve as assistant to the orientation officer of our shipment. The assignment made me pretty happy because I thought it was a little more up my alley than toting a gun in the ranks, and I attended the three-day orientation school at Shanks with zest I believed ardently in the importance of finding out what we were fighting for, and I thought I knew some of the answers. Unfortunately, the orientation officer on the Elizabeth shared neither my ardor nor my convictions. He was a fuzz-faced college boy, not yet twenty-one—I was painfully conscious of my seniority in
age and his seniority in rank—and he didn’t believe in books, didn’t believe in theories that fell short of a solid, unequivocal QED, and thought the entire Orientation Program of the army a lot of damn-fool nonsense. In fumble-tongued bluster he stated that unless a book contained ‘facts that you could prove”—he named a text on engineering as an example—or was written for amusement only (like the Thorne Smith novel he was reading), it served no legitimate purpose and might better be burned or thrown away. I tottered away and sat in the latrine with my head in my hands, cursing the army and bemoaning my lot in life.

  We landed in Scotland, boarded a train, and sped to the south of England. At the first letter-writing opportunity I tried in oblique fashion to tell my wife, Ree, about my journey thus far. But the censor, canny man, caught the giveaway word “moors,” and snipped it out with a nail scissors, spoiling a lush bit of prose. However, he missed “rowan berries,” “crofts,” “heather,” and “Black Angus cattle,” and she guessed correctly after all.

  October 2-7, 1944. Warminster Barracks, England.

  A depressing interlude. We pitched tents in the middle of a muddy clay field and endured the raw cold and the rain with as much noisy self-pity as our officers would tolerate. At least once a day we’d have to strip to the buff, don overcoats and shoes, and march in long, shivering lines to some barn of a barracks where the medics waited. Sometimes it was to get a “shot” of something, although we never could figure out why it was necessary to strip naked in order to have a needle stuck in our arms. But most of the time the trip meant another short-arm inspection. Since the short-arm consisted of shuffling along in the line until you reached the medic, opening your coat for a second—shyly or with bravado, depending on how much cause for pride you had—whipping it close again and shuffling along, it seemed time wasted. We’d been short-armed just before boarding the Elizabeth on the other side of the Atlantic, short-armed on the Elizabeth, herded from a dock in Scotland to this bleak camp in England without more than a glimpse of a female ankle, and denied pass privileges to town since arriving at Warminster. We began to feel that the army was taking an unnecessarily heavy interest in keeping us pure.

  In spite of these cloistered and hygienic precautions, the army pressed prophylactic kits and contraceptives upon us in such profusion that, lacking more purposeful use for them, the men treated the latter as toy balloons. And many a sweating officer, conducting a training film lecture, was forced to pause and chew ass for a while because the screen would be obscured by the floating shadows of air-filled, grossly distended contraceptives. I have a low sense of humor: the spectacle always made me laugh like hell. Some grotesque and telling effects were achieved by the skillful tying together of three balloons in strategic arrangement. The army is a wonderful place.

  Something very disturbing occurred before we ended our brief stay in England and sailed for the Continent. One day our entire package was ordered to assemble before the captain’s tent. We shifted from foot to foot in the mud and wondered what was up. We found out fast. An officer whose duties included the censorship of our letters strode from the captain’s tent, thrust his jaw fiercely in our direction, and delivered a vicious and blindly hot diatribe about the anti-British sentiments we were expressing in our letters home. The official attitude was, and I quote: “It will not be tolerated!”

  The incident had grave implications, it seemed to me. In the first place, I was baffled by the accusation of prejudice. I’d heard a few wisecracks, a few sour comments, but I dismissed them as the escape-valve griping of men who were frightened, homesick, and ill at ease in a foreign land. It hadn’t occurred to me that anti-British feeling was truly bitter or widespread. Why should it be? All of us were fresh from the States, new to Europe, and new to the army. We’d been in England but five or six days, had met possibly a dozen English men and women—most of them workers in the canteens of Warminster Barracks, and kindly folk—and yet, according to the officer admonishing us, an anti-British wave of serious proportion had engulfed our group.

  Another aspect of the incident that bothered me was the official attitude as expressed by the lieutenant—who was a schoolteacher in civilian life. “It will not be tolerated!” Will not be tolerated? Were these words to speak to a civilian army, to free Americans? (Remember, I hadn’t been in the army very long! I learn slowly.) I felt my hackles rise and yearned to wave old battle flags and yell old battle cries: “Don’t tread on me!”... “54-40 or fight!”... “Remember the Maine!”

  The prejudice I heard expressed in the army was often provoking and sometimes silly, but I maintained (silently, of course) that the men had every right save the right of intelligence to speak their piece. If they believed what they said, no matter by what subterranean groping they’d reached their conclusions, then by God, they had a right to say it, even as those who would disagree had a right to argue about it. So long as wartime rules of security were observed, no officer had any goddamn right to stand in front of us and tell us that certain things we were saying in our letters “will not be tolerated.”

  My final judgment, expressed frequently and with a great display of indignation, was: Why the hell didn’t the army do something intelligent about it? During training we’d been fed a lot of pap about the value of orientation, the importance of education in this, the most honest and necessary war in all history. Yet, faced with a situation that could be cured only through the techniques of education, our officers were turning their backs on intelligence and open sincerity and giving arbitrary orders for the governing of our thinking. Logically, there could be only one result: the grievances would be driven underground, to fester unseen and grow poisonous.

  Thus ran my complaint, unheard save by a close circle of friends. And feeling as I did that this war would be the same bloody waste as the last unless we emerged from it with increased understanding and tolerance, the “this will not be tolerated” incident made me pretty sick for a while.

  October 1944. Normandy, somewhere near Le Mans.

  We had our first casualty as we transferred gingerly from the ship in which we’d crossed the Channel to the LST that would deliver us to the coast of France. One of our officers, a grinning and likable guy, was crushed to death between the LST and the Channel steamer. Climbing down the landing net hung over the side of the larger vessel, he hesitated a moment too long before leaping for the LST. A bad omen.

  We landed on Omaha Beach, scene of the D Day invasion. Attempts had been made to clean it up, discipline it into some kind of order, but dead vessels still thrust gaunt fingers from the tossing water, rusty barbed wire was snarled in vicious tangles on the sand, and the beach was littered with broken and abandoned equipment. One of the guards on the beach said they were still picking up bodies from D Day. Every day a few were washed ashore or uncovered by the vagrant sand. We looked with frightened eyes at that grinning, naked beach and the sheer cliffs leaning over it, studded with the vast wreckage of German pillboxes. We muttered in profane gratitude our deep thanks that we’d been safe in the States on D Day.

  It was a helluva long hike up the hill from the beach to an apple orchard flanked by neat hedgerows where we pitched tents, in the rain again. Then more waiting.

  Just before we left Warminster to board ship for France, our sergeant toured our area, stopping at every tent to give the occupants a generous supply of contraceptives. (I don’t really have a fixation on the subject of birth control or sex hygiene, but don’t let anyone kid you that this was a pure war.)

  The next appearance of the safeties was in a kind of parade of virility. With skies that opened and flooded us every day and every night, it was something of a problem to prevent the bore of a rifle from rusting. So, with true Yankee ingenuity— and after all, there had been no occasion thus far to put the prophylactics to the use for which they’d been designed—the men utilized them as rubber caps on the muzzles of their rifles. I feel that there was a certain insouciance to our marching columns, although I’ve often wondered what
the French villagers thought, if it seemed to them the most arrogant kind of boasting.

  Sometimes the mud in Normandy has the thick, rich creaminess of melted milk chocolate, a quality so smoothly silken that you walk through it with a kind of dreamy pleasure in the lazy gulping and gurgling created by your moving feet. But most of the time it’s just plain mud, and you curse it and flounder and splash, and yearn for a comfortable, dry desert.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “... a kind of dull struggle to keep warm and get enough to eat.”

  November 1944. A pine forest, three miles from Bastogne, Belgium.

  It took the ruined villages of France and Belgium to teach me a proper humility before civilians. My stateside experience with civilians had been a little embittering, and it didn’t help much to tell myself that my point of view was lopsided. I didn’t like the army; I didn’t like the infantry. I resented the separation from my family and the interruption of my career. By God, if I had to endure all these miseries, it seemed to me that the least civilians could do to repay me for my sacrifices (however reluctant) was to stand at attention as I went by, and buses and streetcars stop and the passengers get out and bow.

  Seriously, it frequently angered me to see civilians doing business as usual, with careless unconcern or open rudeness for the men in uniform. Since the war had broken into my life and kicked me around and forced me to recognize its existence, I felt that all these civilians should indicate by some small sign that they also recognized the enormity of the cataclysm that had swallowed me. After all, I argued, it was their cataclysm, too! Life should stop for them or be vastly changed because it had stopped or been vastly changed for so many of us.