The Little Words Mean the Most

wish you were here

 

https://www.amazon.com/Fathers-War-Stories-Told-Toys/dp/1949790029/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Tom+Ahern+War+Stories&qid=1607292778&sr=8-1

 

 

Chapter 10: My Father's War Stories

 

 

In 1947, the year Matty and I slid onto this earth, the war was two years done.

And gone.

General Electric ran full-page ads announcing the technological wonder of "electronic television," a communications meteor soon to be slamming into the human race and changing everything.

R.J. Reynolds Tobacco had health news, reporting that in "a recent Nationwide survey: More Doctors Smoke Camels than any other cigarette." So, see....

I was born August 3rd.

The next day, as it happened, Life magazine ran a cover feature on "Renaissance Venice: Fourth in a series on the history of Western culture." America was looking outward. Confidently. Eagerly. During the war, newspapers had carried campaign maps by the thousands. U.S. readers got a refresher course in world geography. Radio news broadcast events taking place far away, in places with exotic names; you could hear the difference. The far away became familiar. The U.S., introspective during the Depression, was curious now about the world at large. Education was on a rampage. Life readers wanted to know more about what they'd fought for, this Western civilization they'd ostensibly saved.

Had the long encounter with death provoked a nationwide lust for life, too?

American bedrooms were sizzling. Bed boards beat the walls like tom-toms, have a child, have a child, have a child; and Baby Boom nests filled. And would continue filling for another 15 years.

------

The immediate big problem? Making more nests.

In 1949, William J. Levitt opened a modest sales office on Long Island and found more than a thousand couples lined up that first sunny morning to buy his basic four-room house. On a 1,500-acre ex-potato field 17,500 homes would sprout, assembled by efficiency experts.

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 9: [the truth of guts? they come in just one color] How White People Won the War

 

 

"The ... 761st Tank Battalion (an all-Black unit)...fought across Europe with Patton for an unheard-of duration — six straight months without relief — capturing or liberating more than 30 major towns along the way," Ann Banks told New York Times Sunday Magazine readers in 1995. Fifty years after VE day, she hoped to set the record straight once and for all on the question of "colored guys" in combat.

Johnnie Stevens, a platoon sergeant with the 761^st, told her: "I was drafted in June 1942, and they took me to Fort Benning, Georgia. At the time, they were taking I.Q.'s on black guys to see if they could qualify to do technical things that had to do with tanks.

"It didn't make any difference to me where I went, but I didn't want to drive trucks. I didn't want to load materials and stuff. I'm going to give it to you straight. I didn't want to wait on the white boys. We completed our advanced training in Texas. But there was no intention of sending this black outfit into combat. It was a big show for the public. Then General Patton came into the picture. He was on an inspection tour and watched how we handled tanks, how we fired guns. Patton said: 'I like them. I want them.' That's how we ended up in the Third Army. They called us Patton's Pets and Eleanor's Niggers.

"When we landed in France, we went directly into combat. All I remember is fighting and killing and freezing and starving and fighting and killing. We mostly spearheaded. The Maginot line, the Siegfried line, the Ardennes Forest, Battle of the Bulge.

"A lot of people asked us: 'Why did you guys earn such a record? Why did you chalk up so many kills? With all the hatred and segregation, why would you fight like you did?'

"I lost a tank on Hill 309 in France. We were in support of the 26th Infantry, a Yankee division, meaning they were white. We fought well with them guys. They liked us, we liked them, and most of them said they liked our support better than the white tankers because we took care of them.

"I led the attack that morning. My tank was hit by a round from a German 88. I used the ejection seat to dismount. When I hit the ground I had a bullet hole in the chest. I had shrapnel sticking out the left side of my head. My leg was bleeding. My right hand had shrapnel in it. There was a white infantry sergeant over by the embankment. He and I had got to know each other pretty good in a couple of days of combat, and he yells, 'Sergeant, you hear me?' I said, 'Yeah — I'm hit hard as hell, man.'

"The Germans ... were raking the field with machine gun fire. They didn't intend for us to get out because tankers kill too many people. The sergeant crawled over and gave me a hand." The short of it: Stevens lived, the white infantry sergeant got shot — and died right there — helping Stevens to safety.

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 9: [more and worse] How White People Won the War

 

 

"When they bombed St. Lô," Dad said, "they blew a path through it something like five miles wide and two miles long."

Almost 18,000 bombs fell.

Imagine each bomb as a dynamite-packed car engine falling from the sky.

Now imagine 18,000 such car engines falling and exploding as they hit, churning every foot of ground, digging into history yet filling the air with flying razor-sharp metal casing fragments, subsonic wickering steel.

The Americans on the ground remarked on how lazy the ordinance looked tumbling down and how confidently and slowly the planes flew. The Allies owned the skies. "I don't understand how any of (the Germans) even survived," Lt. Wilson wondered. "Bomb craters big enough to swallow a jeep were so close together in some areas it was difficult for our tank drivers to zigzag through."

Keegan quotes Panzer Lehr commander, Major General Fritz Bayerlein: "...back and forth the bomb carpets were laid, artillery positions were wiped out, tanks overturned and buried, infantry positions flattened and all roads and tracks destroyed. By midday the entire area resembled a moon landscape, with the bomb craters touching rim to rim.... The shock effect on the troops was indescribable. Several of my men went mad and rushed around in the open until they were cut down by [bomb] splinters."

Panzer Lehr was not an easily rattled formation. They did not ordinarily run around like madmen. "The strongest armored division in the German army," Keegan rates it. "Perhaps the best." These were Nazi bad boys, a well-armed, disciplined, ideologically hardened gang capable of living off raindrops and maggots.

But even Panzer Lehr had never seen anything like this: carpets of bombs landing unobstructed — with every watch tick: twenty bombs a second — in one extended blast that flipped entire fields. "The planes kept coming over as if on a conveyor belt," reported the grief-stricken Bayerlein. About 1,000 of his men died, "and at least 70 per cent of my troops were knocked out — dead, wounded, crazed or numbed."

"What Germans were still alive were so shaky they couldn't hold a gun," Dad said. "You couldn't believe the noise. You couldn't distinguish an individual motor. It was just one continuous roar."

Sixty tanks were promised to Bayerlein as reinforcements. Five made it through.

Confronted with a hold-or-die directive from his superior, Bayerlein countered: "Out in front every one is holding out. Every one. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews — they're all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post. They are lying silent in their foxholes for they are dead. You may report to the Field-Marshal that the Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated."

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 9: How White People Won the War

 

 

"I had a Frenchman with me. He was a Canadian. And we got along pretty good, the pair of us. And he could talk the old language."

The nights were soft, almost warm, within sound of the breakers along the coast if the cicadas ever shut up. "We rolled up in a couple of blankets in a field there, and about seven in the morning, he woke me and said, 'Breakfast?'

"I said, Where the hell are you going to get breakfast up here?

"'Come with me.'

"There was a big farmhouse, you could see the roof of it over in the woods. We rapped on the door, and this farmer came out, and Frenchie started talking."

The farmer was beside himself. "Oh, he greeted us with open arms. We walk in there, in that big old kitchen. He put big pitchers of milk on the table, his wife was cooking eggs, and big loaves of bread. We had a breakfast, I'm telling you!

"And he was telling us about the invasion."

On D-Day, the first Allied invasion forces that jammed their heels into French soil were American and British airborne troops, a mix of parachutists and glider-mounted infantry. They dropped inside enemy lines in the dark hours before dawn, to block German reserves from coming up and reinforcing the beaches.

"The farmer said, 'I don't know what woke me up, but I walked out, and I could see these round shapes coming down from the sky. I said to myself, This is the invasion.

"'I went back in the house, and about half an hour later, there's a rap on the door. I open the door, and there's this German lieutenant, and he's got about fifteen soldiers around him. And he wants to know if I've seen any American G.I.s. I told him no.

"'The Germans walked out of the yard here, onto the street, and they no more than hit the street and a machine gun opened up and wiped them right out. They didn't have a chance to run or anything else.' Who was it? Two paratroopers."

I knew the punch line. Dad had told these blood-curdling tales since I was an infant. Still my arm hairs stiffened. "Wiped the whole fifteen of them right out."

But wait. There's more.

"One day, Frenchie and myself we were walking through this town, and all of a sudden this civilian came out, and he's yammering like mad.

"And I said to Frenchie, What's the matter? He says, 'There's a dead German up there in a barn. Come on, we'll take a look.'

"So we walk into the barn. Sure enough, there's a German soldier there with his throat cut. So pretty soon, along comes this paratrooper.

"We said, 'Dead German up in that barn there, with his throat cut.' He said, 'I know, I cut it this morning.' He was walking along like he was delivering papers. Sure. Nothing to it."

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

 

Chapter 7: Sex with Mom

 

 

I got my first sex education (little did I know) from my father's tales of wartime England. "Another night I was on guard duty down at this motor pool on the outskirts of Swindon. About six o'clock at night I see all these G.I.s coming down with girls on their arms. Everybody's got a couple of blankets with them.

"They come up to me, and they said, 'When do you go off?'

"I said, 'Another hour.' They said, 'We're going to use the ambulances.'

We had about twenty-five ambulances.

"I said, 'Go ahead. I don't care.'

"So in they went. They said, 'What time do you come on in the morning?'

"I said, 'Six o'clock.' 'Well,' they said, 'when you come on, wake us up.'

"I said, 'I better wake you up. The officer of the guard will be here at seven. And you boys better be out of here before that.'

"So the next morning I walk around the ambulances, pounding on them with the gun. 'Come on, get out of there.' They all trooped out, and off they went."

------

What this boy-child learned: men hung out with women in ambulances.

And Dad woke everybody up in the morning. To avoid shame and blame.

I couldn't imagine at my young age what was going on behind those closed doors painted olive drab with a big red cross in a white circle so you could see it clearly.

I couldn't imagine the thumps and the clumsiness in the dark. Shared cigarettes. A bottle. Two sipping mouths, wet and ready. Cloth moving from decency, moving north and south of the waist. Becoming a curtain. And a hand through the curtain. I didn't know anything about hands. Not consciously. Not with a sense of shame.

My entire sex life until the third grade was with my mother.

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

 

Can I haul you back to Chapter 5 a bit: Re: Racism at the time

 

 

Training to hate proceeded along conventional lines: demonize and dehumanize. The Germans were cruel, barbaric, robotic monsters of war. Sadists by nature and preference. Even so, the Japanese were far, far worse. Not even human. Not really.

     Racism became a weapon of mass destruction, at least in the Pacific. Allied propaganda variously characterized the Japanese as angry sheep, rats, mad dogs, rattlesnakes, lice, ants or cockroaches stirred from their nests, wildcats, terrified cattle, and jackals.

...

The subhuman Japanese, so visibly different, might invite extermination. But the average G.I. — so polls would show — felt little deep hatred for the German soldier during the war.

     After, when news of the death camps became commonly known, a permanent stink attached to Germany, a country that could allow such a thing. Who were these monsters? Even so, complicit civilians and their political masters smelled far worse than the common soldier, whose reputation for blind obedience and competence preceded him. When the German soldier took cover behind the stock excuse, "I was just following orders," it actually sounded plausible. Von Clausewitz and Bismarck had shaped a German military that was the envy of the ruthless: they got results on the battlefield. If you had the ends, they had the means.

     Not everyone was fooled. LIFE photographer Robert Capa thought they were nasty whiner-schnitzels: "The Germans are the meanest bastards. They are the meanest during an operation, and afterward they all have a cousin in Philadelphia." After you've captured them. "That is what I like about the French. They do not have cousins in Philadelphia."

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 6: England

 

 

"I see England. I see France. I see Judy's underpants." That jibe, I believe, first developed some small desire in me to visit France. A country that was mostly about female undergarments was the country for me, as I entered puberty.

            Aboard my father's convoy, transporting him from American shores to England. "You never saw so many boats in your whole life. As far as you could see: boats.

            "Then one day!

            "The sun is out. Nice day. Everybody's up on deck. It was a big English liner. Twenty thousand troops on this one boat."

            Rounded up to the nearest ten grand. It was sailing past the tub my father was consigned to.

            The record was 15,028 troops aboard the Queen Elizabeth, virtually the entire U.S. 1^st Infantry Division. With two fast British liners, the Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, the Allies transported about 420,000 U.S. troops to England, a quarter of the total, in just 37 trips. The Queens usually traveled alone, their 28.5 knot speed their chief protection against submarines.

            Dad: "We had a couple of destroyers with us. All of a sudden one of these destroyers starts cutting circles in front of us, and there's the cans" — depth charges — "coming off it like crazy. And every time they explode underneath, it's just like you took a hammer and hit the side of the boat.

            "What a bang! Oh, boy, I'm telling you. We were scared. 'Cause they had orders: if any boat gets hit with a torpedo, the other boats keep right on going. They don't stop and pick up anybody."

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

 

Chapter 5: Boot camp

 

 

"The first day we were up at Devens, they threw all the uniforms and everything at you."  

    Fort Devens was a military reservation and assembly point in Ayre, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. "Had this fellow with me, Bill Ryan. Bill Ryan was a tobacco salesman. But he had an uncle in the shoe business.

    "Well, there's an expression they have just in shoe factories. They have names for different sizes. They never say 'C.' They say 'Charlie.' Or 'D.' They say 'David.' When Bill Ryan came through in line, he said to the sergeant who was handing out the shoes, 'I take an eight and a half Charlie.' The sergeant says to himself, 'Oh, here's a wise guy.' He turns around and gives Ryan an eight.

    "The next morning, Ryan said, 'I can't get my feet into these shoes. He gave me the wrong size.'

    I said, 'Go on sick leave. Get a slip from the doctor.'

    "OK, he goes on sick leave. He went over to where they were handing out shoes. There's two sergeants standing there talking. He tries to tell them about his shoes. They don't even listen. One says to the other, 'Had your coffee yet?' And they leave. So he comes back crying, 'They won't change the shoes!'

    I said, 'Come on, I'll take you over.'

    "There was a corporal there. I said to the kid, 'Do us a favor, will you?' He said, 'What's that?' I said, 'Change this guy's shoes. He doesn't wear this size.' Corporal said, 'What size does he wear?'

    "So Bill Ryan got a new pair of shoes. I said, 'See, all you've got to do is talk to people. If you're reasonable, they'll go along with you.'"

            Lesson #3 from my father.

            Watch for brake lights. Life is hard. Talk reasonably.

 

 

Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."

 

Chapter 4: Tom and Hazel

 

 

The most influential economist of the 20^th century, John Maynard Keynes, when asked if he could recall anything else like the Great Depression of the 1930s, said he certainly could: "It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years."

 

What Keynes referred to was the tempering of my father's generation. Part, anyway.

Dad remembered the Great Depression as a healthy time. "Nobody had a dime." But no one cared. You helped each other, he said. Faded laundry flapping on the line, a family goat, milk bottles clinking, the account at the grocery carried until you could pay.

Economies creaked to a standstill all over the globe. A young century ceased to be promising. William Manchester later wrote, reaching for the rear of the hall: "This was calamity howling on a cosmic scale...."

 

"And do you, Thomas Francis Scanlon Ahern...."

            Scanlon? My father winced. The priest had to say that?

            "...take this woman...." Hazel, his June bride, ready top and bottom for delivery into Dad's trembling hands.

            He heard the predictable whispers skitter through the front pew where three of Hazel's sisters sat, mostly in judgment as the family was wont; three short women with exceptionally pale skin and practical hair. A well-dusted St. Joseph looked down from a pedestal. Frank Smith witnessed for the groom; honest and plain. Hazel's sister, Philomena, a busy mouse, was the maid of honor. Five Presbyterian sisters altogether, counting Hazel, female splinters from a thick plank of Scottish mother. Nervous enough in a Catholic church, with the Pope's finger pointing this way and that. Even though most of them had their own Catholic husbands and had accepted Catholic baptisms for their babies, relinquished — as the Church of Rome demanded in exchange for its blessing on a "mixed" union — to an upbringing in "the One True Faith." The One False Faith, the McKays would insist if cornered. What did the Church of Rome ever do for Scotland except get us killed?

           So: Scanlon?

           The sisters' pew calculated. Hazel knew the story but hadn't told.