Stories about my Father 15
Ninety-one American armed forces divisions fought in World War II. My father was part of the 87th Infantry. Their symbol was a golden acorn on a dark green field. So many of the original soldiers were from the South that troops just referred to it as the “Yellow Peanut” Division.
The 87th had been created during World War I but had mainly been used to supply other units with replacement personnel. When they were sent overseas in late 1918, they never saw any actual combat but were used as labor by the Services of Supply for the American Expeditionary Services. They were demobilized soon after the war ended two months later. In 1942, the draft age was dropped from twenty down to eighteen. the 87th was reactivated and was the first Division to take in this new wave of much younger recruits. After a year of basic training, more advanced and specialized training and maneuver exercises, Washington decided that they were too young to be sent over into combat and reassigned about half of them to other places. My dad was one of the thousands of soldiers sent in to replace those younger men.
There were 16,000 yellow peanuts. In the simplest and most basic terms, the Division was divided into three Regiments of 3,000 men each. Each Regiment was divided into three Battalions. Each Battalion had three Rifle Companies. Each Rifle Company had three Platoons of riflemen. At each level of that inverted pyramid were also attached heavy weapons companies as well as other smaller units that provided support and maintenance.
My father was part of the 912th Field Artillery Battalion. The 912th was made up of three Gun Batteries, a Service Battery, and the battery my dad was a part of, the Headquarters Battery. The Headquarters Battery was responsible for surveying, radio and telephone communications as well as dealing with all the essential human things that people need whether they are fighting a war or not - food, medical care, and, of course, office paperwork. You can’t fight a war without that.
The Headquarters Battery was, itself, divided into three major Sections. The first was the survey Section which my father had been a part of during his basic training back in Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. The second was a Fire Control Section which figured out where to aim the guns. The third was the Communications Section which was responsible for laying phone wires and transporting radio and telephone equipment to the front. That’s what Dad ended up doing during the Battle of the Bulge.
These last few weeks that Michael and I have spent tooling around Europe have made World War II seem both larger than I thought it had been and smaller than I thought. I had never paid much attention to it in terms of a specific timeline. In my mind the Germans started invading other countries and killing people, everyone else retaliated, and then it ended. When we left New York three weeks ago, I had a general sense of where we were going to go based on what I had read of Dad’s wartime letters and later writings, but I hadn’t read all of it yet, nor did I understand even the basics of what had really happened.
Dad told stories about the war so often, that my sister and I usually tuned out. I realize now that the parts of his stories that were vivid enough for me to remember were often jumbled up in my memory or had gotten confused in my general sense of it all.
We are now about halfway through watching Ken Burns’ documentary, The War, which is a remarkable way to get a crash course in what happened. My connection with the war has always been purely through the European conflict. The Pacific part of it never entered the stories we heard as kids because my father wasn’t there. When the war was over and he returned home, he fully believed that his division would be sent to the Pacific, but then we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrendered too. He never went.
Faced with what were essentially two different wars happening at the same time, Roosevelt and Churchill decided that they needed to win in Europe first before they could concentrate on the Pacific. Much of what we did in the Pacific was defensive rather than offensive. We did what we could to stop the Japanese from expanding rather than trying to beat them back. In Europe, however, we went for it.
Following in my father’s footsteps has made the war seem smaller in a way. He wasn’t fighting everywhere; he was in one place. He was in a little village in a particular house with a hole blown out of one side that now had one of the guys in his section sitting inside pointing a machine gun out through it. He and his buddies had small specific objectives and that is what they concentrated on. The places that we found where Dad had been, were very real places. You could see where walls in old houses had been rebuilt following the devastation. A ridge we found that Dad mentioned now had beautiful wildflowers growing all over it rather than dirty packed down snow, mines, and Germans on the other side of it.
In later years, my father read a lot of history about the war. There was so much he didn’t know and so much that had been kept from the soldiers on the ground. Practically speaking, the soldiers didn’t need to know what was going on in Berlin or Washington, they just needed to know that they had to push the Germans away from that little ridge in Belgium. Knowing why or what the overall objective was, was none of their business. Some more major player was sitting in front of a map well behind the lines making those decisions based on seeing a much bigger picture. Above him was another even bigger player moving, in turn, several of the major players around on the board. Like the structure of the forces, themselves, it was just another triangle. This one led up to Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito at the top. All strategists and game players moving their millions of bloody pieces around on a board.
On June 5th, 1944, the Germans controlled most of Western Europe. To the east, they were fighting the Russians. Their entire western border was water. On June 6th, 1944, the Allies landed at Normandy in France and started pushing the Germans out. Suddenly there was a long front for them to defend. They were now getting it from all sides. As the Germans were pressed into a smaller area their ability to supply their troops on the front ironically became easier. All the food and munitions they needed were coming from within their country. The opposite was true for the Allies. There was no deep-water port in the territory they were gaining that could accommodate supply ships. The Germans had destroyed Antwerp in Belgium before we got there, and it wasn’t until November that it was usable again. The Allied forces were now strung along a very long battlefront, and it wasn’t easy to get them what they needed.
With only so many chessmen to play with, the Allies concentrated their forces everywhere except the Ardennes region. Even though the Germans had launched their invasion of France from there in 1940, nobody thought that they would do it again. The region is a maze of small, twisted roads, tiny farms, and thickly forested areas that makes it nearly impossible to move a sizable force through. Before we went up there just now, somebody in something I read said the area was like the Berkshires in the US which is a pretty accurate description.
Hitler’s plan, and it was Hitler’s plan alone, (all his advisors warned him that it almost certainly wouldn’t work) was to break through the lightly defended line in the Ardennes and split the Allied forces in half, thereby making it easier to destroy them. Then they’d march west through to Antwerp and retake it. Once they regained Western Europe that way, they could then concentrate their forces against the Russians to the north. The plan depended on surprise, the bad weather holding out which made flying impossible, and speed - they had to get to Antwerp in a week before they started running out of supplies.
Some months before this, on July 20, 1944, a group of conspirators, including some Generals, had tried to assassinate Hitler. There had been several attempts before this that had all failed and, ultimately, sadly, this one did too. A bomb in a briefcase was brought into a meeting by a Lieutenant Colonel named Claus von Stauffenberg. While the bomb did explode, the conference table the intended victims were all sitting at shielded the worst of the blast and Hitler survived with only minor injuries. He was, of course, apoplectic. More than 7,000 people were then arrested, some of whom were just relatives or friends of the conspirators along with some who had no connection to the plot at all. Nearly 5,000 of them were executed.
Unfortunately, one of the things that happened after this was that Hitler’s popularity actually grew in Germany. This is when the German army replaced the military salute with the “Heil Hitler” salute. The attempt on his life galvanized the population behind him. A survey taken in 1951 found that two-thirds of the German people still had a negative opinion of the conspirators six years after the war was over.
About two weeks later, back in the US, my father officially washed out of Officers Candidate School. After a furlough, he was sent to join the 87th Division at Fort Jackson in September. At Fort Eustice, he had been training on antiaircraft artillery. The Corporal who interviewed him at Jackson asked if antiaircraft artillery was anything like field artillery. My father, who didn’t have a clue, said, “Sure,” and he was promptly assigned to Headquarters Battery 912th Field Artillery - Survey Section.
The Survey Section had five men in it - the sergeant, the jeep driver, and two other men besides my father to do the surveying. They would be sent out into the field to figure out the distance between two things using aerial photographs, topographical maps, transits, and powerful telescopes. Given the age of the guys, it was inevitable that the telescopes would occasionally get aimed where they shouldn’t. “Once as we focused a whole row of high-powered optical equipment on a couple of not very remarkable women (wives of the non-coms), we were taken aback to find them staring back at us with field glasses.” My twenty-year-old dad might not have found them remarkable, but clearly, they were smarter than the masses of boys around them.
That fall, Major General Frank L. Culin, the 87th Division’s commander, gave the troops a speech. In it, he said that they would all go to Europe first and finish off the Nazis and then they’d all go over and, “whip those dirty little yellow bastards.” While that was taken with a grain of salt, my father started to get worried that he would be sent off to another unit. He had been made a corporal in OCS and now that he was out, he was considered, “Excess in Grade.” He was still a corporal, but he was treated like a private. Many people in his same position were being sent to various companies as replacements. His chance to make sure he stayed came when another corporal got busted for being drunk. He hit up a friend of his who worked in battalion personnel for that guy’s job, and he got it.
In Dad’s words, “The job I got was wire corporal in one of the three liaison sections the battalion had for coordinating artillery fire with the infantry units we supported. These sections were supposed to have the most dangerous assignments in the headquarters battery since we would be with the infantry when we were in combat. I don’t know whether I didn’t really think it would be dangerous or what, but it sounded interesting, and I was glad to have a slot to fit in. In many of my letters home I had expressed a desire to go overseas, which was true. I wasn’t particularly interested in going into combat but figured the field artillery would not be particularly dangerous and that even after you got overseas you wouldn’t go into combat for some time. I was wrong on both counts.”
Days later, on November 4, 1944, he shipped overseas.