I NEVER REALLY KNEW SGT. WHITIE (PART IV): WHITIE’S PRIVATE WAR

Brothers Red, Chuck, Whitie and Don in the restaurant they opened 

after the war.

There’s an old saying that it isn’t weakness that causes mental breakdowns, but rather, having to be far too strong for far too long.

I vividly recall my father’s first complete mental breakdown. I remember, in fact, the word breakdown on my uncle’s lips and how it scared me. I was five at the time. It was not quite a decade after the war. We had just moved into a new house. Although, the other house had been ours too, my father had bought it from his father. That first house that I recall had been the address on my father’s dog tags throughout the war, the place he had lived as a teen with his parents and three brothers, and where my mother had lived with my father’s family through most of the war, so it was as if this new place were the first house that had ever really been Whitie’s own.

Sadly, however, he never seemed happy there. He had put the down payment on it on a kind of whim while our mother was still in the hospital after giving birth to our little brother. Now we were five, my parents, my older sister, my newborn brother and me, and for some reason, Whitie decided it was time to move.

I think having so many burgeoning responsibilities right away after coming back from the war must have put quite a strain on him, considering what he’d been through and the kind of high-strung guy he was. At any rate, being the second-born, I couldn’t recall a time when he didn’t seem tightly wound. I always figured it was just the way he was. But life back in the old house seemed like better times to me. Like when he would sit in the armchair in front of our big black and white Admiral TV in its maple-wood cabinet watching the Friday Night Fights, sponsored by Gillette Blue Blades, and I would sit on his lap watching with him and eating the spearmint-flavor “greenleaf” jelly candies, marshmallow “circus peanuts” or Brach’s chocolate stars that he handed me one at a time. I still remember what a safe, happy feeling that was to lean back against my dad, who smelled of soap, Skin-Bracer and cigarette smoke, and feel him relaxed and tranquil, as he told me why he liked Joe Lewis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMota, Jersey Joe Wolcott or Archie Moore to win, as if he were talking to someone much older than four and as if the boxers he was talking about had at some time been personal acquaintances of his. I think that memory, that feeling alone is why, to this day I find it soothing and inspiring to watch a good boxing match on TV. It was a sport in which my father saw the training, the poetry in motion, the one on one challenge rather than the savagery that the sport’s detractors always point to and it’s the only sport for which I have inherited his enthusiasm.

At the new house, however, he seemed changed, always nervous, preoccupied and short-tempered, unprepared for the rigors of caring for small children when my mother worked late, so that I now dreaded Friday and Saturday nights when she did so, and was glad whenever she would talk her mother into coming over and lending a hand so that Whitie could just sit quietly in an armchair watching TV and smoking until Mom got home.

And then came the breakdown. As I recall, it was around noon when Whitie’s big brother, Red, brought him home from work at the restaurant that they owned together with their younger brother Chuck. Red had his arm around Whitie, helping him along as if he might fall down if left to his own devices and my father seemed to be sobbing and muttering incoherently. Trying to put on a jovial face as usual, my uncle turned to me with his big red-faced grin, said, “Who’s this guy?” then took his pipe out of his mouth and, pretending it was a six-shooter, squeezed off a couple of rounds in my direction, then blew imaginary gun smoke from the stem, before sticking it back into his mouth.

But then was when he turned to my mother after taking Whitie to the bedroom where he could lie down, and I heard Red say the words “Dr. Berry...complete breakdown...clinic...”  in hushed tones, and saw the frightened look on my mother’s face. She noticed, attempted a strained smile, said, “It’s okay, honey, Daddy just isn’t feeling well,” and added, “Why don’t you go out and play while I talk to Uncle Bob.” I went out, but didn’t play. Instead, I sat on the edge of my sandbox trembling, and worried. There was something serious going on here. Something worth fretting about.

Recurrent Nightmares. What followed for Whitie were decades of what, back then, was called “manic depression”—before the days of more modern and rather more euphemistic terms like “bipolar disorder” or “chemical imbalance” or “post-traumatic stress disorder”. This was often accompanied by a new term that my father’s doctor, a former medical corps lieutenant colonel, introduced and which sounded sinister and ominous: psychosomatic symptoms. These included severe back pain, allergies, acid stomach and chest pains, among other things. We even learned how to use such academic terms in common conversation, as in: “Frickin’ psychosomatic my ass. I’d like that sonuvabitch to have to live with this pain and see how goddamn psychosomatic he thinks it is!”

Reba Mae and Whitie on their 50th anniversary. Decades of manic

depession couldn't separate them. They would share their lives for yet

another ten years.

So it was that we began to watch Whitie like you might a ticking time-bomb, as he would go from soaring highs in which he seemed an unstoppable powerhouse, capable of incredible feats and snap decisions, and in which he became irrepressibly talkative, highly sociable—if extremely volatile—and well-adapted to superhuman work schedules and stunning achievements, followed by headlong plunges into total darkness in which he might hole up in his bedroom with the drapes drawn for weeks or even months on end. In these abysmal states, he refused the help of those who tried to reach out to him, even telling Reba Mae that he was no good, that she should find somebody else, that he didn’t deserve her, that she should just let him die in peace, because a life like this just wasn’t worth living. As his family we “entertained” a miniature parade of well-wishers, who would come to try and “cheer him up”: among these, successive Methodist pastors, who, over the years, would spend part of their house-call evenings sitting in our living room, munching on our popcorn, watching our TV and waiting in vain for our mother to coax the lion from his lair; Red, who would stop by for a cup of coffee and to see if maybe he could get in to give his little brother a pep talk; Whitie’s own father, who would talk a leg off of Reba Mae about Whitie’s condition at a volume that the subject was sure to hear from his bedroom—“I was a-tellin’ Alice that it’s all just his nerves. He was always nervous, even as a kid…”—but all to no avail, since in these states, our father refused to see or talk to anyone. He would draw into himself, almost implode, and nothing and no one could pull him out of his own troubled soul. It would be over when it was over. We would just have to wait.

Psychiatrists followed: doctor’s orders, since Dr. Berry, the ex-colonel and our family doctor, was finally able to convince Whitie that you didn’t have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist and that if he didn’t go, he’d never get well. But then, getting well, it seemed, was never really in the cards.

He told the first psychiatrist, a Dr. Kalb, that he hated his job. “Then you have to stay at it, confront it, show yourself that you’re up to the challenge,” this psychiatric fundamentalist told him. And Whitie grew furious. He wanted permission to quit, to do something else with his life. He wanted off the hook. But if he wanted to quit, the hardline analyst reasoned, it was because he was sick and needed help seeing that the only way to quit was to meet the challenge, find success and move on to bigger and better things with a strong, light heart. Being a quitter would never help him rebuild his self-esteem. Perhaps what he needed was a bit of stimulation with electric shock treatment. Whitie told him, more or less, to go shock himself. The doctor talked to Reba Mae about his shock theory and she told him the same thing. They talked about Whitie’s childhood and the Doc told him he hated his father. Again Whitie was furious. What kind of textbook bullshit analysis was that, he wanted to know?

That was good, Herr Doktor said. Getting angry was good, even if he transferred it to the doctor (instead of raging at his father as the psychiatrist thought he should). “Go ahead,” Herr Doktor encouraged him. “Get mad! Tell me exactly how you feel!”

“Like wringin’ your goodamn neck, you kike bastard!” Whitie ranted.

Getting mad was one thing, but anti-Semitism was more than the good doctor’s own bruised inner child could take. “Okay, that’s it,” the Doc said, adding in a voice not unlike a baseball umpire’s, “Yer outa here!”

The next one, a Dr. Ciavarelli, was just the opposite.

“You want to quit, quit! It’s your life to lead as you like. You don’t owe anybody anything. You don’t want to go to work, stay home!”

Whitie did…and went to bed for another couple of months. Reba Mae wanted to know what the hell the doctor thought he was doing with advice like that.

Oh, well, that wasn’t at all what he’d meant, the doctor assured her. He’d meant Whitie should do whatever made him happy! But that was just it, nothing made him happy. The man was a prisoner of the deepest kind of depression. Reba Mae got him up, got him dressed, got him back to the doctor’s office. The doctor declared him (again) “manic depressive”, but now added, “with acute suicidal tendencies” and added that Whitie was going to need intensive treatment in a medical facility.

Home Away From Home. By this time, I was about twelve or thirteen. I can’t recall how long Whitie was in the hospital that time. But long enough for me to have accompanied my mother several times to visit him after school or on the weekend. He was staying in a facility in the city of Troy, Ohio, about an hour from home. Reba Mae and I tried to make an outing of it, as if we were just on a lark. We would chat and listen to the car radio and chew Doublemint gum as my mother drove and, depending on what time we set out, either going or coming back, we would make a halfway stop in the town of Sidney, for strawberry pie at The Spot, a traditional family restaurant. If we were on the way there, the pie served as fortification. If we were on the way back, it was comfort food.

It seemed a little silly to need a boost in order to “man up” for the visit. After all, he was her husband, my father. But the man we would meet in the psychiatric ward at the hospital didn’t seem like Whitie, not even like the erratic Whitie who could, at any time, be enthusiastically leaping over the moon or resignedly parachuting into the bowels of hell. This was “Institutionalized Whitie”, living in a safe, orderly, indoor, hospital-green world that, oddly enough, appeared to suit him, so that our overly cheerful presence and upbeat banter clearly seemed more than a little jarring to him. Here, for as long as it lasted, he wasn’t anybody’s husband or father, nobody’s brother or son. And he didn’t seem particularly happy to be reminded that, back in the world, he was. Here he belonged to nothing and to nobody. He was the individual subject of specialized treatment, and was only part of anything in as much as the people who shared this ward with him were all as disturbed, at least, and as broken as he was, so that nobody was accusatorily asking him just what the hell his problem was and why he couldn’t get the hell over it. Here, nobody knew what his or her problem was. It was what they had in common. That’s what they were all here to find out, and if anybody was asking that kind of questions, it was because they were genuinely trying to help him find the answer. In the meantime, it was a kind of ivory tower, in which he obviously felt untouchable. The only pressure was to try and find the answers he was looking for, to try and get well, nothing more.

On one visit, for lack of anything better to do, I asked him to show me his room, since we always met him in a sort of rec room in the middle of the ward where there was TV, reading material, armchairs, sofas and tables for games and activities. So he led me to his room.

“It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s okay.”

It was a basic, utilitarian space that, once the bed had been placed inside, had barely enough room left for a passageway from the door to the window at the other end and for a small built-in locker for personal belongings at the foot of the bunk against the wall. The hospital-green linoleum floor was shiny clean, the matching paint on the walls and ceiling impeccable. This too, somehow seemed to suit Whitie, since he had always been obsessively neat. This tiny room, had that “squared-away” look that he had always prized, with his house-slippers placed just so with their toes under the bunk at one end and his pajamas neatly folded on the pillow at the other, the bedding pulled and tucked so tight that you could bounce a quarter on it.

To me, it looked like a cell, but more like a monk’s cell, I was thinking, than a prisoner’s. Except, that is, for the bars on the window, the silhouettes of which I could see through the neatly pressed translucent curtains. What did they think, I wondered, that he might break out and run amok? Or were the bars so that he wouldn’t climb up onto the windowsill and take a three-storey swan-dive into the parking lot pavement. Both thoughts disturbed me equally and made me eager to get back to the rec room where my mother was waiting.

When we went for the last time to that place to pick him up and take him home, Whitie sat on the edge of his bunk, his gear neatly packed in a small suitcase and waiting on the floor beside him. He looked pale and overtly anxious about whether this was such a good idea. It was as if he were being abducted by strangers and had no idea where we might be taking him. But the doctor assured Reba Mae that Whitie was doing well. That he’d not only made great strides in conquering his own neurosis, but that he had proven a great help to others with similar problems. Among his “peers”, we were told, he had become a leader and had been of fundamental importance in the improvement of several other patients. So much so that the doctor felt Whitie had missed a great calling, that he should have studied to be a mental health worker.

He wouldn’t have had to tell me that. I knew how smart Whitie was, that he could have been anything he set out to be, if he hadn’t also been so mentally and emotionally flawed. But at that age, I didn’t have the words to fully express what I felt—least of all, to Whitie. So as I advanced into adolescence, our relationship was to become a sort of tacit stand-off that occasionally boiled over into open and mutual hostility.

In later life drugs didn't solve the problema but helped him find a sort of

middle ground. Here Whitie, Reba Mae, Dan, Darla and Dennis enjoy a

family reunión.  

Advances and Retreats. After this first brief period of voluntary institutionalization, Whitie no longer holed up in his room when the world closed in on him. Instead, he would call whatever doctor he was seeing at the time for an admission order, pack a bag and head for the nearest psych ward. During the good times, he was more capable than ever of incredible achievements, like during the longest high I ever recall, in which he became a route salesman for a local cheese manufacturer and turned a northwestern Ohio route that hadn’t been able to eke out enough sales to pay for the licensing and insurance of the truck he drove into a company powerhouse that brought in nearly four million dollars a year in revenues.

It was during that period, when my sister and I had already long since left home—she for college and a career, I, to travel, then briefly for college, and finally for a three-year hitch in the US Army—and when our little brother, now a teen, was the only witness still at home, that Whitie met up with a new breed of psychiatrist. This one—a tall, laconic Korean—really couldn’t have cared less, it seemed, what our father had been through in his life, about his childhood, his youth, his job, his marriage or his world. For this one, depression all boiled down to chemistry.  If you could reach high highs and low lows, all that was necessary was to find the middle ground, and you found it with drugs.

Fluoxetine (Prozac) was still a somewhat experimental drug at the time. Psychiatrists were finding out more about its effects by watching what it did to their patients than by reading the laboratory prospectus. And what it did seemed to vary drastically from one patient to the next. Whitie and an old friend, also a veteran, who had been in the Marines during World War II, were both going to the same psychiatrist at the same time, and both were taking fluoxetine. Whitie entered a state of long-term non-manic behavior, a sort of irritable light-gray mood in which he was never content but seldom took to his bed for longer than a day at a time. I missed the highs, but not the lows. In this state at least he and I could sit down and talk without impossible peaks and valleys. His friend and fellow patient, meanwhile, went from bad to worse over the years and eventually killed himself before his seventieth birthday. With Whitie, the panic and depression would, in the end, come back but by then, he would have choices—a stronger dose of drugs and early retirement.

In all those years, I never once heard of anyone’s having asked Whitie about World War II—about his years with the Seventh Army, about the horrors of war—in connection with his treatment. World War II was something you only talked about as a triumph of good over evil. What one had lived through in that war was a duty and a privilege, not a burden. You carried it without complaint and without regret—at least in theory. Anything that was wrong with you mentally was a product of your own failings and weaknesses. And with drugs to remedy it, there was no longer any excuse for “bad behavior”. You fit in or you checked out.

Whitie, still a powerful man a age 70 despite his life-long

struggle with manic depression.

Telling Signs.  Since Whitie’s death a decade ago, there has been a plethora of film documentaries on the subject of World War II, starting with those in remembrance of the sixtieth anniversary of D-day and the end of the war. After the earliest of these came out, I tried to see as many as I could, since in nearly all of them, besides real battlefield footage shot by combat photographers and cameramen, there have been the testimonies by World War II veterans—often from both sides of the conflict. What the American witnesses to that war have, for me, had in common is that I have seen Sergeant Whitie reflected in all of them. In most cases, now octogenarians, they are talking openly about their combat experiences for the first time since the war. They are usually reserved and reticent, yet apparently full of need to unburden themselves of the horror and pain they’ve been carrying in their hearts and in silence for all these decades. Often the point at which they break down during the interviews is when they have to talk about the men they killed, certain that it was either that or die, but also knowing that most of those enemy soldiers were just men like them, with lives, loved ones and dreams like their own, and, like them too, simply victims of the politics of those times. There is no longer any hatred, just remorse and sadness. 

So it is that, in the last ten years, I have begun to wonder just how much the trauma of his years as a combat foot soldier were responsible for my father’s on-going mental illness and his apparent incapacity for happiness or for any deep sense of beauty in life. In fact, as time goes on, I wonder more and more if it wasn’t the war that was entirely to blame for shattering Whitie’s life.

As he grew older there were telling signs on which to base such a theory. When, as a member of the Regular Army, I was assigned to the NATO forces in Europe in 1972, my father, mother and brother came for a short visit. I was stationed in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and they flew into Frankfurt, located a couple of hours away by car. A German acquaintance took my wife and me to the Frankfurt am Main Airport to meet them.  On the way back home, everyone was chatting and joking and just generally being happy to see one another. But Whitie was uncharacteristically silent, watching the landscape as it whizzed by along the Autobahn. Eventually, I touched his shoulder and said, “What’re you thinking, Dad?”

Without hesitation, he said, “I’m thinking I’ve seen this landscape before. I’m thinking I crawled over most of it.” And then later, as he gazed straight ahead at the road, “You know, Dan, they had these superhighways way back then. We couldn’t believe it. There weren’t any Interstates back then. We’d never seen roads like these. We landed cargo planes on them.”

When our father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1999, my brother Dennis moved back to Ohio from Saint Louis, where he had lived for many years, to help our mother care for Whitie. It was at about that time that the 1998 World War II blockbuster, Saving Private Ryan, came out in video. After having seen it in the cinema, Dennis decided to make a gift of the video version to our father, thinking that it was a film that he would surely be interested in, since he had been in service during the war. Since we knew so little about our father’s personal experiences in the war, there was no way for Dennis to gauge how Whitie might react.

If there’s anyone who has never seen the film, it is worth noting that it is a Steven Spielberg masterpiece, with an equally masterful script by Robert Rodat. It has been critically acclaimed for its graphically realistic depiction of some of the worst fighting of the Second World War and of the horror experienced by the men who struggled, died or survived in the midst of it.  The video cassette lay around the house for some time before Reba Mae was finally able to talk Whitie into watching it. Before they ever got through the carnage of the earliest scenes in the picture, however, Whitie shut it off.

“What’s the matter?” Reba Mae asked.

“I can’t watch it,” he said. “It’s way too much like it really was over there.”

Shortly after that, Whitie started obsessively reminding his wife that he wanted her to promise that he would be given no military honors when he died, no color guards, no twenty-one-gun salutes, no military markers or flags on his grave, no VFW speeches, no bugler’s Taps, no piper’s Amazing Grace, nothing to connect him with the young man who had left his innocence on the battlefields of France and Germany.

A last family reunión at our Ohio home several months before Whitie's

death in early 2003.  

Epitaph. The last time I visited my father’s grave back in Ohio a few years ago, when I saw the bronze stake grave marker identifying him as a World War II veteran, I had a fleeting urge to uproot it, toss it into the trunk of my rented car and leave it there, as if forgotten, when I turned the car back in, down in Miami. I know that sounds awful. But then again, I figured it was my fault it was there. Whitie fought the terminal cancer that finally killed him at age 80 for four years. During that time the cost of his medications not covered by health insurance ran into the thousands of dollars a month. I was the one who talked him into getting into contact with the Veterans Administration to see if he couldn’t maybe get some help from them with these onerous expenses. They owed it to him, I reasoned. They had borrowed on his youth, placed him in harm’s way, sent him into the thick of the worst war in history. It was time they paid something back. He could, it turned out, and did get VA help, during the last couple of years of his life. Before that, he had been adamant. He’d just done what he had to do, he said, like everybody else. Nobody owed him anything and he wanted nothing, no recognition, no honors, no fanfare in return. He had spent his entire life practically denying any real part in the war. And now more than ever, he was reluctant to own up.  But, finally, more because I was an Army veteran than because I was his son, he heard what I had to say, responded that he would think about it, and eventually gave in.

I figure that it was because of this new contact with the Veterans Administration that, when he died, we received his record, medals and honors—among them, four bronze stars and a commendation from the French government for his part in the liberation of France from the Nazis—and why that marker that he had never wanted was on his grave. So now, standing there alone in the sharp winter wind on a gray, snowy, Monday morning, that fleeting thought of well-intentioned vandalism flashed through my head. In the end, however, I desisted. Just as soon as I thought of plucking the stake from the frozen ground, I was also assailed by another thought: that no matter what Whitie had said while he was alive, that stake wasn’t mine to remove. Men who struggled in war together as comrades became a family of their own, a family for life and in death, and that bronze stake marker, with the crisp new flag fluttering in its holder, was a symbol that said, the man who lies here forms part of a band of blood brothers. Only we can ever know that part of him, and in that, he’s ours.

For myself, however, I was thinking that I would rather they had honored him in some way other than identifying him with a war he spent his life trying to forget, perhaps with an epitaph that could read: Here lies Sergeant Whitie. He gave his all and asked for nothing in return. All he ever wanted was his life back. Rest in peace.

I NEVER REALLY KNEW SGT. WHITIE (Part III): OPERATION DRAGOON

Sgt. Whitie: Somewhere in France.

A few choice anecdotes, a repeated repetoire, that was about it, the full extent of what we ever knew of Sergeant Whitie’s war. But that wasn’t—couldn’t possibly have been—all there was to it for that young NCO, shipped off in his early twenties for several long years to face unimaginable tasks, inescapable responsibilities and unspeakable horrors. And no matter whatever else he did, became or was in his life afterward, Sergeant Whitie would be part of it and everything would be sifted through the jaundiced eye of that combat-hardened veteran, who could hardly help but have to look at the present against the backdrop of the endelible battlefield world he hid inside him, a world in which he would forever be who he was back then—whoever else he might be.

If it was hard to know what Sergeant Whitie’s personal story was, the story of the Army he shared that journey with is clearly documented. The men of the Seventh Army were among the first US field army troops to see combat. At first under the command of General George S. Patton and boasting the brand new seven-step-A shoulder patch of their outfit, they arrived by sea, direct from Stateside, on the southern shores of Sicily, in July of 1943, and captured Palermo. Less than a month later, in joint combat operations with Britain’s Eighth Army, they also took Messina. During this invasion, elements of the Seventh Army killed or captured some 13,000 enemy troops. Though the modification was never officially authorized, the newly tested combat veterans would add an embroidered slogan to the foot of their Seventh Army emblem, reading: Seven Steps to Hell. After taking Messina, they would set up a new Seventh Army headquarters in Italy while they awaited further orders and mobilization, following Patton’s reassignment to the Armored corps. Those orders didn’t come until early the next year, but when they did, they were for an operation that would last practically until the end of the war. It was called Operation Dragoon.

They came wearing the new seven-step patch of the US

Seventh Army, and after Sicily, although it was never

officially authorized, they added the slogan, 7 Steps to Hell.

Operation Dragoon. The mission of Operation Dragoon, which began on August 15, 1944, with the Seventh Army now under the orders of General Alexander Patch, was to land on the beaches of the South of France, push northward and complete the liberation of France from Nazi control—a task which had begun with the Normandy invasions two months earlier—continuing, once France was secured, across the Rhine and into Germany proper. With the Normandy troops moving into France from the north and the US Seventh Army and France’s First Army moving up from the south, the Germans were forced into the Vosges Mountains.

While at first glance this might have given the impression of an allied rout of the retreating German troops, it was anything but a walkover. What ensued were months of grim and savage mountain combat in impossible weather conditions—torrential rain, mire, ice, snow and slush—that plagued the combattants on both sides. But in principle, the Nazis, militarily speaking, had the upper hand, having fled before the Allied advance and dug into the high ground in the mountains to make a stand against the Seventh Army troops and their French allies advancing from the low ground.

Anybody with a passing knowledge of military history would have known that this would be the case. The Vosges Massif is the natural north-south boundary between the German-speaking Alsace and the French-speaking Lorraine and had been, for centuries already by then, the scene of repeated bitter fighting for control of the entire Alsace-Lorraine region. During World War I, barely a quarter-century before, this rugged terrain had witnessed almost continuous heavy fighting and killing between German and French troops throughout the confrontation.  Coincidentally, this too was the very region from which Sergeant Whitie’s wife’s family, the Webers, had emigrated to America, just a generation before her father’s.

Savage mountain combat in imposible weather conditions.

(Photo: WWII Letters of Wm Taylor:taylorletters.blogspot.com)

Although in the telling of contemporary history, Operation Dragoon has often been eclipsed by the more massive Normandy landings, it played a crucial role in the defeat of Nazi Germany and included some of the most intense fighting of the war. Of this first decisive battle in the Allied push to cross the Rhine and definitively crush final German resistance, author Keith Bonn writes that despite how little known this campaign was, the Seventh Army accomplished what no other army in history ever had before: vanquished an enemy defending the Vosges Mountains. In his book, When the Odds Were Even (Ballantine Books, 2006), Bonn calls the Vosges the toughest terrain on the Western Front. The title of his book refers to his claim that the Germans here were still well organized, well armed and well supplied, evenly matched with the invading US Seventh Army and its French allies, but dug in on the high ground with the mountain range as their seemingly invulnerable fortress. Motivation was high on both sides of the fighting since the Allies had to capture those mountains in order to continue their run through central France, across the Rhine, and into Germany, while the German G Group troops holding the range knew that they were the last line of defense between the Allies and the Rhine.

Despite the historical odds against victory, Bonn writes, the US Seventh Army, fighting both the enemy and horribly inclement weather, overran thousands of pillbox gun emplacements, tore through miles of barbed wire and rolled over every other obstacle the enemy erected in front of it, eventually blasting the German defenders out of their mountain fortifications. And once that was done, the Seventh Army and the French First Army stayed and held onto the ground they had gained in the face of a new German offensive known as Operation Nordwind.

US Army tropos on the move in the Vosges Mountains. (Photo WWII in Color)

Operation Nordwind. This campaign was a powerful last ditch effort by Hitler to regain control of the Alsace and of France. Now attacking General Patch’s Seventh Army defenses were Germany’s First and Nineteenth Armies under the command of four ranking Nazi officers, one of whom was the notorious Heinrich Himmler. Imparting instructions before launching Nordwind, the Führer admonished his generals: “The attack has a very clear objective: namely, the destruction of the enemy forces. There is not a matter of prestige involved here. It is a matter of destroying and exterminating the enemy forces wherever we find them.” 

The Germans launched their attack on the heels of orders from Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower that the US Seventh Army should divide its strength in the Vosges and send troops, supplies, equipment and arms north to Ardennes to reinforce American lines in what would later be known as the Battle of the Bulge. The now severely understrength US Seventh Army and its small detachment of French Army allies suddenly found themselves trying to hold a 68-mile-long line of defense in the Upper Vosges against everything Germany could think of to throw at them—air cover, tank divisions, what was left of the the G Group that had been resisting American advances from the outset, plus massive reinforcements from the German First and Nineteenth Armies and specially trained SS mountain troops. The fighting began on New Year’s Eve 1944 and continued until nearly the end of January 1945. The battles were so intense and casualties so high, that General Eisenhower began to fear the total destruction of the Seventh Army, reconsidered his original move and rushed battle-weary reinforcements back from Ardennes to the Vosges, where, its strength bolstered, the Seventh Army went on the offensive, retook ground lost and drove the Germans out, containing their advance. In the fighting, German losses numbered some 23,000, while combined American and French fatalities totaled over 30,000.  The following month, with the arrival of new American and French reinforcements, the Allies were able to secure the west bank of the Rhine and prepare to cross it, beginning their push into Nazi Germany.

Cold weather and cold rations to match. (Photo: Toledo Blade)

Now, with a bridgehead established on the Rhine, the Seventh Army was able to regroup and, in late March, it broke through south of Frankfurt. From there, it captured the city of Aschaffenburg some 35 miles east of the Rhine in a week of fighting before reaching Heilbrom in early April. Just as Sergeant Whitie would tell it many years later when he complained about Patton’s doing a drive-through and leaving Whitie’s outfit to clean up the mess, the Seventh moved in here behind a swift push by armored units to isolate and destroy enemy defenses. But as foot soldiers marched into the area, they faced harsh and unexpected resistance, and were pinned down in heavy fighting for well over a week before finally taking Heilbrom. This was, indeed, about the same time that Eisenhower had ordered Patton to take the Third Army, which he now commanded, and make a swift drive southeast through the Danube Valley, first to take Linz and then to push on into Austria.

Ugly house to house combat in bombed-out cities.

Nuremberg and Beyond. Later, elements of Patch’s Seventh were also ordered to wheel south by southeast and take Bamberg and, eventually, Nuremberg. In this last city, which the Nazis were trying to hold onto at all costs, the Seventh Army again came up against heavy fire and only took the city on April 20, 1945, after laboriously breaching a dense ring of gun emplacements and then securing the city in ugly, close-quarter, house to house combat.

It was a long, dangerous, costly and bitter road, but by late April, it was clear that the war in Europe was nearly over. The Seventh joined the Third Army in carrying out clean-up operations in southern Germany and Austria and German troops were now surrendering by the thousands to the invading Allies. Back in Italy, where the story of World War II had begun for the men of the Seventh Army, Il Duce had already been executed and strung up by his bootstraps in the town square and there too the last German defenders had thrown down their weapons, raised their hands and surrendered. On May 7, 1945, Germany signed its unconditional surrender.

Sergeant Whitie’s Private War.

Show lesThere’s an old saying that it isn’t weakness that causes mental breakdowns, but rather, having to be far too strong for far too long…

(To be continued)

 

I NEVER REALLY KNEW SGT. WHITIE (Part II)

His chevrons carried a T under them, for

tech-corporal 

 After his talk with Captain Anderson, Whitie’s Army experience changed. Before long, he was given his first set of stripes—a band with two chevrons pinned to his sleeve—as an acting corporal. The captain was evidently smart enough to know that if you had a rebel among your troops there were two ways of dealing with him: You could punish him again and again for his rebellion but if he was also someone capable of taking the punishment and of doing the training anyway, and if you’d ever read the story of Spartacus—the making of the motion picture Cool Hand Luke was still a quarter-century off—then you knew you ran the risk of turning him into a hero and of inadvertently making his influence greater than your own; or, you could promote him, put him in charge of something and you’d be building a subordinate leader for the future, while taking away his reason for rebelling against authority by making him one himself. Logical schoolteacher that he was, the captain chose the second course.

Through his advanced training, Whitie was a squad leader, and when he was done with that, his corporal’s stripes were sewn on permanently, and he was added to the NCO cadre to help train the steady flow of new troops coming in from all over the United States. At first, he remained at Camp Butner, North Carolina, where he’d had his original training. His chevrons carried a “T” under them standing for “technical” or tech-corporal—what in today’s Army (and the Army of my own day) is known as a “specialist”—since he now had a specialty: battlefield demolition.

After his promotion, Whitie ended up being on almost constant military maneuvers for months on end, both imparting what he now knew and gaining ever greater military experience and training, both at Camp Butner and, later, at Camp Forrest, Tennessee, one of the largest US infantry training centers in World War II. Perhaps it was this kind of truly intensive training that would later pay off in keeping him alive during the years he would ultimately spend in some of the most dangerous venues of the European Theater during World War II, where literally millions of men were to struggle and die.

But for a while, it almost looked as if he wasn’t going to see that theater of war at all. The weeks melted into months and the months dragged on. Training cycles came and went. One contingent of men after another shipped out. But Whitie’s outfit and some others like his—men who, by the massive and fast-turnover training standards of World War II, and though barely more than boys, were already practically considered veterans—were kept in place to help short-handed career NCOs manage the enormous flow of raw troops.

These were the "temporary" barracks that Whitie and his buddies helped

build at Ft. Bragg in the forties. This picture is from 1969, the year before I

did my basic combat training there during the Vietnam era. 

(Photo: togetherweserved.com)

They also helped in other ways, with infrastructure, for instance. Some of the bases, like Camp Butner, were brand new and still under construction even as hundreds of thousands of men were being trained. And others, like nearby Fort Bragg, North Carolina, weren’t equipped to handle such a huge influx of soldiers. When I myself formed part of one of the last cycles of some 200,000 men provided with basic combat training at Bragg—home of the Airborne and Special Forces—during the Vietnam War era between 1966 and 1970, my father told me that he had been part of a group temporarily attached to the Army Corp of Engineers and sent to build additional barracks there. He had volunteered, he said, to get a break from being in the field on maneuvers all the time.

“Probably not the same ones, though,” he mused, “since they were just sort of basic two-storey wooden things with no heating or anything, built as temporary quarters for the war.”

On maneuvers for months on end in Tennessee.

But when I said, “I don’t know, Dad, your description sounds familiar,” and provided him with a detailed description of my own, he shook his head, smiled to himself and muttered, “Well, I’ll be damned! Those are the same ones. We built those. And they were supposed to be temporary even back then!”

Meanwhile, like so many other World War II sweethearts, Reba Mae was just waiting for her boyfriend to come back. Nobody knew how long that would take, but they figured when Hitler saw all those Yanks coming, he’d be on the run soon enough. It couldn’t last all that long, could it? Maybe Whitie would never even leave Tennessee. It’d be over shortly, they figured (and hoped).

But they figured wrong. US intervention in the war would last nearly half a decade. A total of 60 million people would die as a result of World War II. And stopping the Axis powers would prove costly in human lives, despite all the talk after the war of having “whipped their asses”. A quarter of the millions who died in the war would be Allied troops. More than half would be Allied civilians. Fatal casualties on the Axis side were thirteen percent of the total military losses and four percent of the civilians, but in a country the size of Germany, for instance, those seemingly “low” percentages of the whole represented the decimation of the country’s population. The Allied Soviet Union, however, lost nearly 14 percent of its population in the war. US military losses would total 416,837 over the course of the war, 318,275 of which were US Army personnel.

Whitie eventually got a short leave and spent it back in Ohio visiting his family and Reba Mae. Things were getting serious between them, but how could he ask her to marry him right now? If there was one thing they couldn’t be sure of, it was any sort of future. Talking about “when the war’s over” was about as definite as talking about “when pigs fly”. But she said he shouldn’t worry, that she’d wait for him.

Reba Mae on a visit to the Carolinas in the

summer of '42.

So it was back to North Carolina and to Tennessee for more training and maneuvers. While Whitie was at his base in North Carolina, Reba Mae and a friend called Lois drove down for a visit. Lois had a boyfriend in the service too, and she had a car. It was a big deal for Reba, who was now nineteen and had never been much of anywhere before. And doing anything with Lois was always guaranteed fun. She felt grown-up, independent, like she was taking charge of her life, the life she planned to share with Whitie after the war. But everything pivoted on that, the war. It was all-pervasive. Life on every continent was dependent on it and subject to it. No one’s future was totally his or hers. Everyone’s present and future depended on what the war had in store for them. The journey to the South, then, was one that Reba Mae would never forget. It might as well have been a cruise around the world rather than a drive down the Dixie Highway from Ohio to the Carolinas. It made Whitie happy to see her and gave him the confidence in her commitment to him to start talking about marriage. If only there were some way to know what was going to happen, to be able to foresee the end of the war, to peer into their future and know what their chances were!

Then the word came: Whitie’s outfit was shipping out for Europe and they would be there “for the duration.” Suddenly, marrying Reba Mae seemed like the most important thing on Earth. For his group that was now on the activation list, all leaves had been cancelled. He was desperate to talk to Reba Mae and tell her how he felt, how the future would have to take care of itself, how the only thing that mattered was that they should become husband and wife. So he managed to wrangle a four-day pass. It wasn’t much but it was all he could get and he had to beg for that. Suddenly, time was of the essence. In such dire times, life had to be lived for the moment, since the future was a spin of the roulette wheel, a roll of the dice. If he’d told his superiors that he was planning to use the pass to travel 450 miles to Ohio to get married, they probably never would have given it to him. A 900-mile roundtrip in four days was an AWOL waiting to happen, even if the guy hadn’t just been activated and wasn’t eloping. But it was December, just two weeks before Christmas, and they were feeling generous.

Whitie and Reba Mae, wedding day, Dec. 12, 1942.

So that was how Reba Mae and Whitie wed. The bride was nineteen, the groom twenty. She wore a pillbox hat and a pretty new dress with two artificial corsages of three flowers each, in heart-shaped arrangements on the bodice. He wore his Army-issue Class-A wool dress uniform and service cap. A marriage license, a willing parson, a night out at a basketball game to celebrate, part of a day somewhere in between to bask in their new matrimony, and Whitie was off to the South again, and then off overseas, to war.

It is from here on that the story of how Whitie spent the war is his and his alone—a unique and tacit story, probably run like a film in his mind, time and again throughout his life,  a story like those of hundreds of thousands of other individuals of his era, who did what they considered their duty and then returned home to “business as usual”, after having been witnesses to and participants in some of the greatest and most massive horrors humanity had ever known. Like many of them, he played down his role. He was never “in the first wave”. He’d “never done much”. There was “no patriotism in it”. He was “just trying to get back in one piece.” And there was one “specific truth” that our mother and father always seemed adamant about: Whitie, we were assured “never had to kill anybody.”

Like most of the American boys of my era, I was fanatically interested in World War II. Both my father and his older brother had been there, after all. Both had placed themselves in harm’s way, one to help save Europe from Fascism, the other to help halt the expansion of Japanese imperialism. My friends and I “played war”, were familiar with nearly every name and caliber of every weapon used on all sides of the conflict, watched every World War II movie ever made, followed the documentary footage of the war presented by famed TV anchors like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. I, like many of my friends, had a gnawing need to piece together the story my father refused to tell in full, from the shattered fragments that sometimes festered their way to the surface like pieces of long-buried shrapnel. So whenever Whitie did manage to eke out a phrase or two about his wartime experiences, I hung on his every word and committed those words to memory.

Quoth Whitie:

“When I first got over there, they had me working in the motor pool fixing busted trucks and jeeps. Just me and this Algerian Frenchman. We welded frames and bodywork back together. This Algerian Frenchman was a real blacksmith. Hooked up with the Seventh Army in Africa. He’s the one that made that Seventh Army ring for me and the other one for your mom. Pounded them out of two coins. He was a real artist. Tough...that guy was as tough as they come. Once, he handed me a pair of tongs with a red-hot wire and had me stick it into a hollow in a tooth that was hurting him to kill the nerve. Opened his mouth and pointed at the tooth, like this. It smoked when I put the wire in there. He just groaned, then grinned and thanked me and we went back to work.”

***

A combat-hardened demolition tech-sergeant in

the European theatre. He commanded a 9-man

technical squad.

“I started working in demolition a little later on. They made me a buck sergeant and assigned me nine men. I was the squad leader. I carried a sidearm, a forty-five automatic. That was standard issue for a tech sergeant with my kind of job. But those damn things kicked so bad it was hard as hell to hit anything over ten yards away. You might as well have thrown it at the enemy. So I also always kept an M-1 carbine handy, just in case.”

***

“Our job was to come in right behind the point troops after they’d gained ground from the Nazis and then blow up anything that the enemy might be able to use if they managed to turn the tables and win that ground back. Some places we even blew bridges so there was no easy coming back for anybody. You just had to fight and keep advancing. But mostly it was a matter of disabling ordnance, blowing up abandoned tanks, trucks, gun emplacements, ammo dumps and so on. God, I can still smell those tanks! You’d crank open the hatch to toss in a combustion grenade and the smell of those burned up Nazi bodies would roll out of there and gag you.”

***

“We were pretty much on our own in France. We’d get our assignment and a time to handle it in before we had to rendezvous with our company . Sometimes if an area had been well secured, we’d hustle to finish our job and then we’d hang out in some wine cellar getting drunk on good French wine and cognac for a few days. We had strict orders not to eat or drink anything left behind by the Nazis because it could have been poisoned. But we thought, what the hell, ya gotta die o’ somethin’! We only got sick once, but that was enough. We ate some ham that wasn’t cured right. They said it was trichinosis. I don’t know what it was, but we could stand at one end of a slit trench and hit the other end with our shit.”

***

General George S. "Blood and Guts" Patton.

Everybody said he was a hero. Whitie thought

he was "a blowhard".

About General George S. Patton: “Patton? Ha! The big blowhard! We followed that sonuvabitch through I don’t know how many places. Whenever you got there, the story was always the same. The MPs would tell you the area ‘was secured,’ that ‘Patton had been through there.’ Yeah, he’d been through there all right...Patton’s way. Ride through on a goddamn Sherman tank and call it ‘secure’. Then we’d spend days on end getting shot at by snipers that were still all over the place, until we could...you know, get that mess cleaned up and get down to work. I’ve never had any use for that bastard, and I’ll tell that to anybody that asks!”

***

In answer to my persistent questions about if he had any close buddies who got killed, he usually ignored me, but once he told about one, maybe the one that most stuck in his mind: “I had this one buddy. We were with each other through a lot of the war. One night when he was on guard duty, toward the end of the war, he got killed by Nazi sympathizers. They just killed him for no good reason. Chopped him up with an axe.”

***

“When we had the Germans on the run, there were lots of prisoners...thousands of them. I did guard duty for a while toward the end in a POW camp we set up. I had a Lugar for a while that we took off of a German officer. Wanted to bring it home with me but it got confiscated. I sent some other stuff home: An SS officer’s uniform and a German helmet. Your Grandma planted petunias in the helmet, and your mom burned the uniform in the coal furnace, because she said it ‘smelled like death’. I remember it was really cold and the prisoners were in really basic huts. They had these troughs outside for them to wash up in. In the morning, the water in the troughs would be frozen over. I was always amazed at how those Germans would come out there every morning first thing, strip to the waist, break the ice and wash themselves up. No matter how cold it got, they washed up every day.”

***

The "Munich" motorcycle Whitie confiscated was almost certainly a BMW

R75 "Wehrmacht", made especially for the Army of the Third Reich. With

the sidecar, they weighed upwards of 980 pounds dry (without fuel or oil),

and made incredibly fast and versatile battlefield and patrol vehicles.

“I also confiscated this motorcycle once, after we’d crossed into Germany. We were amazed by their roads and machines. The flyboys used to land transports on the Autobahns. We thought we had roads till we got over there and saw theirs. Anyway, I had this Munich motorcycle [almost certainly a BMW R75 Werhrmacht model]. The thing weighed almost half a ton, and I was all over the place on it.



So this one time, there’s nobody around and I’m going flat out on the Autobahn and I come up over this overpass, but what I didn’t know was that on the other side of the hill, the road had been completely bombed out. So I hit that rubble and gravel going about sixty and flipped the damn bike. The bike, which, like I say, was heavy as hell, stopped and I kept on going and slid and rolled through that busted-up road-bed for fifty yards or so. I was in a field hospital for a while after that. And for a good two weeks after they patched me up and let me go, I was picking gravel out of my skin, whenever it festered to the surface.”

***

“I’ll never understand why anybody that was in service would want to go goddamn camping! We lived in tents for years on end. And when we weren’t in tents, they billeted us in salt mines or converted hog and chicken houses. I had my bellyful of that shit in the service. And all these overgrown Boy Scouts around here are always saying, ‘A bunch of us are going camping over at the lake this weekend. Why don’t you bring your family and come too?’ Why the hell would I want to do that? I never want to sleep without sheets and a bed again!”

***

“Some of the guys used to say the English were sissies, you know, because of the way they talked. But I’ve never known tougher people in my life. In London, I remember how the Germans would bomb the shit out of them, and calm as could be, they’d say, ‘Well, the Gerries are surely out tonight, aren’t they, mate.’ And as soon as the raid was over, they’d be out cleaning up the rubble, putting out fires, and looking for survivors. Anybody tells me the English are sissies, I’ll tell ‘em they’re full o’ shit.”

***

Whitie was in France for a long time. He said he’d learned a little French while he was there. “Say something in French, Daddy, say something in French,” we’d beg when we were little. “Oú dormez-vous?” he would say with an ornery grin. And from wherever she was in the house, Reba Mae would respond, “Norman Newland, I can hear you!” We later learned that it meant “Where do you sleep?”

***

“I remember how in the towns in France, people would all turn out in the street to greet us when we rolled through. The women would kiss us and hug us and throws us flowers. We had this major who, through the whole last part of the war, had this red silk ball cap he wore. The guy was a crook. He’d trade these French people, who were literally starving, chocolate and K-rations and cigarettes for their family silverware and linen or whatever and then he’d sell it to us. Made a killing, that guy.”

***

In response to my mentioning that an Army buddy of mine had won a bronze star: “Bronze stars are like assholes, Dan. Everybody’s got one. They even gave me a couple, so they can’t be worth much.”

***

The Queen Mary entering the New York Harbor carrying thousands

of US troops, on June 20, 1945.

 “I came back from the war on the Queen Mary. It was so big it was like a floating town. It was three football fields long, easy. It could carry, maybe, fifteen thousand troops or more the way they had it rigged for the war. But it wasn’t like we could enjoy the ride. The weather was so rough most of us heaved our guts up all the way back. We didn’t really give a shit though, ‘cause we were headed home!”

(To be continued)