A Chronicle
By A. E. Whinery
1991
"For what it's worth"
I arrived on the world scene in the early morning hours of December 17, 1921 at the farm house of my parents, Elmer Ernest and Goldie Galloway Whinery. Attending the birth was a country doctor. I only remember him as "Old Doc" Young," who made the trip three-and-a-half miles up the creek from Evansville, Arkansas by horse & buggy. My father would later joke to me that Doc's fee of $5.00 proved to be a bit excessive – considering the product!
Third of their five children, Marie and Mildred older, O'Neil and Wanda younger, Mother said she worried that I would not be strong because of small bones and skinny looks, but I can boast that I proved to be as tough as a pine knot. As I write this, I'm coming up to my seventieth birthday without having been hospitalized for a natural cause. Although emphysema has damaged my lungs, I require no doctor's appointments, nor medications – so Dad, if you're listening, I don't believe you're entitled to a refund!
The three sisters survive to now. O'Neil – a family name which came down from Mother's Irish ancestry – came two years after me. Five months after his birth the family moved by railroad train to near Seattle, Washington, where Dad got work with the timber and logging industry. Before O'Neil's first birthday, he contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. His grave is in the cemetery near Montesano, Washington, where we lived.
Woodrow Wilson was the nation's 28th president when I was born. His term was ending. World War One had ended three years previous… some things "ancient" seem to be creeping into my span of years. After three years in Washington State we returned to the farm in a model-T Ford. I started to school in a one-room building on Hale Mountain just a mile from the birthplace of Jennavie Cox, who would later become my wife – though neither of us could recall, that would have to be where we met and both endured eight grades of Readin', Ritin' & 'Rithmatic. Jenna said she never did, but I endured many sessions with the Hickory Stick. She attended high school and graduated in 1941 at Morrow, Arkansas. But during the early years of my schooling at Hale Mountain – and about the beginning of Jenna's – the notorious Wall Street Crash occurred and the country fell into the era of the Great Depression. 1929 being my eighth year of life and the Depression years not ending until the beginning of World War Two in 1941 – I would call it bad timing and be fully aware of the entire period.
After a record year of drought, heat, and crop failure in 1936, we sold the old home and moved to New Mexico where Mother's parents had acquired some ranchland near the railroad town of Clovis, where Dad could get some work at his building trade. Sister Marie was married then and she and her husband also made the move. The other two sisters and I started school in New Mexico, but building scaffolding fell with Dad, breaking his back. Unable to work for most of two years and before the days of compensation and having no assets, whatever it was that hit the fan was upon us! Having just had a sixteenth birthday in 1937, I became the breadwinner and my formal schooling came to an end.
A kind and caring gentleman who owned a mercantile business hired me on at seven dollars a week. A usual day was ten hours, Monday through Saturday and I only had to open up and sweep out on Sunday mornings, so the pay per hour was roughly in the neighborhood of ten cents. Mother cared for some neighbor kids and Mildred cleaned house for a loaded old widow, thereby boosting the family income by another 3 to 4 dollars a week. It sounds worse now than it seemed at the time. Mr. Foster allowed me a discount on purchases and prices were low; i. e., you could buy a gallon of gasoline for 14 cents, a pack of cigarettes for 10 cents, a gallon of milk from a farmer was only 25 cents and dried pinto beans went for 3 cents a pound. Also, when my eighteenth birthday came along, I was kinda in charge while Mr. Foster took leave and my salary was almost tripled. Dad was working again, and I purchased my first car and could afford Saturday night dates, but was too far gone to go back to being a Freshman or Sophomore so it hurt, but years later I could use what I'd learned when I had my own food market.
I enrolled in a trade school at Clovis Airport in 1940. Sponsored by the government, we were beginning to build a war machine. World War Two was raging in Europe and we weren't ready! However, my career turned from learning to build a machine to learning to operate it when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor and I had my nineteenth birthday. Years later I could benefit from that learning when I went to Wichita to help Boeing build the B-52.
Midway through 1941, war clouds were gathering fast. Those of us who were 18-year-old males needed not wonder what our status was, so lured by a hankering for adventure and reports of big pay in the East Texas Oil Fields, a car-load of us hit the road. Sure enough the pay was good and the real-life challenges were in good supply. It was a different breed that followed the oil fields & honky-tonks from Gladewater to Port Arthur and side trips to New Orleans on occasion. It was a good way to mark time while waiting for one's number to come up. I was living at the Pickwick Hotel in Gladewater, Texas when on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, the little radio put out the news of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese Air Force. I was nineteen years old and as ready as I'd ever be, but Christmas was coming up and I hadn't seen the folks for awhile, so I began closing out my oil field career and headed for Clovis… with thoughts of enlisting in the Navy.
After the holidays, Dad was involved by then in construction of Roswell Air Base facilities and insisted that I work with him awhile. He didn't have to beg. Though as I liked to think, I cannot in honesty say I was in any special hurry to get to the killing field. But Japan had done it to us – we declared our support of England in stopping Hitler and Mussolini… we were at WAR!!
I registered for the draft – let nature take its course and the chips fall where they may. My buddies who went into the Navy went on ahead of me – but not for long. The process was fairly steady after registration: physicals, classification, tests, etc. Finally, I got the date and place: be at Fort Bliss, Texas on July 10, 1942. Franklin Roosevelt was putting me on his team; the duty would be, for a basic period, twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, to sort of put me in a killing mood. The pay would be twenty-one dollars a month. That too seems worse now than it did at the time. The hourly rate would be way to hell and gone less than the dime I got at the Mercantile company, but everything I'd need was furnished – even though the chow was lousy and the clothing didn't fit – what the hell, during eight to twelve weeks of basic training I'd have no time to spend money if I had it.
It turned out that I got a pass to go into El Paso after being paid in two-dollar bills on September first. Harold Carpenter was the only friend from home with whom I'd been assigned a company, and we thought we'd tear El Paso up some, but it was disappointing to see more soldiers than civilians in town, so we had a couple of warm beers and crossed the Rio Grande into Juarez, Mexico. That was an experience in itself. An American dollar was worth a whole bunch in Juarez. Still, we were broke when we got back across the river in the morning, late getting back to camp, and it would be another month to the next 21 bucks! By then, I'd be shipping out to another base, thanks very much!
Camp Crowder, Missouri, south of Joplin, was like paradise after July and August in Fort Bliss; not distant from my native Arkansas and I would be here to attend Central Radio School. Having a run of luck on my I. Q. and aptitude tests at Ft. Bliss, I was allowed to apply for special training and was accepted. I don't remember all the dates; I didn't put any importance to them at the time. My Mother followed my every move and logged the data but I can't locate the log now – so I don't know the date of my arrival at Crowder. I know that after three months in the Army the recruit pay of $21.00 went to $30.00 per month and shortly after that a general pay increase raised it to $50.00, at which time I was raised to Corporal's pay, so within a time span of 30 to 40 days I went from $21.00 to $66.00 per month. That sounds puny as hell in 1991, but in 1942 in Joplin, Missouri you could have a hell of a weekend on $25.00. Fleabag hotels for instance, went for the room rate of a dollar a night; you could be decent for $2.50. Hamburger, fries and a coke would set you back a flat 25 cents. You could eat steak and drink wine for about $1.20 at a better place and beer at the clubs never a cost a G. I. more than a dime – so I was at last rising into lower middle class!
Thanksgiving weekend in 1942 was the single most eventful time of the rest of my life, as it were, for that was when I discovered Jenna as a grown woman as opposed to the spindly-legged dull girl in grade school. What a difference seven years could make! I went to my Grandparent's house at Morrow, Arkansas and Uncle & Aunt's on Hale Mountain. Jenna showed up with my cousin Virginia and we went riding in my Chevrolet – which my parents had brought to Crowder. I had become engaged to Beulah Mae in New Mexico and we planned to be married when I finished school and could get leave. Sometime in the interim, Jenna had met Eddie and he had given her a diamond that Cindy Morris described as being "large as a mule turd." It didn't seem to be as clear to Jenna as it was to me, but we definitely belonged together. She agreed to answer my letters, so I began a campaign to win her over to my way of thinking. I would feel sort of crappy about not asking for leave when I got out of school and encouraging Beulah Mae to establish other interests – which she did, anyway. I visited in Albuquerque years later at her new house, met her nice husband and three beautiful children.
The main problem was that Jenna was working in California – where Eddie was – and I could only compete by mail and telegraph for the duration of the war, which I had no guarantee of surviving. But it worked somehow. After arriving overseas, Jenna sent me her photograph and said she'd like to be my Girl – if somehow it would calm me a bit! She had returned the darn mule turd to Eddie and moved back to Arkansas. She, Lela and Nadine would work in Wichita, building airplanes till I could do the thing to Hitler and Mussolini and come home.
I did well in Radio School and was considered for assignment as instructor after graduation, but civil servants got the nod and I went to Camp McCain in Mississippi to help form a Special Service unit which would provide communication in the war just ahead in North Africa and the Middle East. Our training would last three months with a Ranger Battalion, and was hell for rugged. We learned Survival Tactics, and Sabotage. We would be able to handle any job we were called on to do… or so we were told.
In March of 1943, I was handed travel orders for myself and sixteen men. We were taken to Memphis where we boarded the train for Monmouth, New Jersey. There we would be joined by other teams which would make up our Special Service Company of 205 men which would be attached to the 45th Infantry Division – scheduled to ship out in early April for he Mediterranean area.
Never one to miss a good deal, we changed trains in Washington D. C. and decided to see some sights...
I had been joined upon my arrival at Camp McCain by a fellow radio operator from a school in Kansas City. This meeting was second only to meeting again with Jenna to the events of the rest of my life in wartime. Garvice Herald was his name. His home was listed as Bee Spring, Kentucky. We served just short of three years together in seven countries; we participated in five Major Battles and Operations; if anyone should ask me if there is a God, well, I never really say God, but it was clearly intended that we two, almost exact opposites in many ways, should take that trip together. Neither could've made it without the other. I don't understand why it was, but God had to arrange that meeting. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this today.
Garvice had the ability to lie down and relax at any time under any conditions, so I called him Horizontal. For some reason he referred to me as Lum. We saw the sights in Washington, D. C. alright! A four-hour layover ran into two and a half days, and when I delivered the orders to Fort Monmouth, it took a while to redeem my status. But we had time and opportunity to visit lots of interesting points along the East Coast area. We spent most of a month at Ft. Monmouth, NJ and Camp Shanks, New York, before shipping out for North Africa.
An old Swedish Luxury Liner with a name like Eriksen was anchored alongside a deepwater peer in New York Harbor one day in April, 1943. Built to accommodate about 2,000 tourists, she had been bought by Uncle Sam and converted into a troop carrier and would take on 8,000 men and their gear in the next two days. We lined up in order on the dock – someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
When the name Whinery came up, I became one of the 8,000. Trying not to show it or even admit to myself, later I would confess that a sort of knot came into my throat. Looking back now, it was a valuable experience and I really wouldn't want to avoid it, but I could have agreed that Mama needed me back home at that moment.
Ours would be one of more than 250 vessels gathering out in the Atlantic off New York to form a convoy aimed at the Straits of Gibraltar, 15 days or 6000 miles, whichever came first, anyway… turned out to be both. We'd have destroyers as escorts all the way to protect us from German U-boats, but they weren't entirely successful and we lost some vessels to them on a regular basis. We had no air protection whatever – since Jenna and her gang hadn't time enough at that point to build the planes – but they did good, and within a year our Air Force began to tear the opposition a new some-kinda-hole!
Going into Hostile War Zones and coming under attack by enemy gunfire has been described by so many writers and portrayed by all kinds of movies and stuff until my experiences seem to pale when compared to John Wayne's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's. I can only say that I got there early and stayed late. Had some good assignments and some real Dogs. No heroics and trying to beat back cowardice but always aware of that knot in the throat when fear set in. At those times, Horizontal would say, "Never up-chuck any knot, it could be something you'll need later – like an asshole."
We entered the Mediterranean Sea after heavy U-boat action in the Gibraltar Straits, and turned toward the coast of Morocco, where we took fire from French Legion nuts. They supposedly fought for hire. We off-loaded at Oran because it had a deepwater port and then proceeded to Algiers where my first job was to work with taking and operation of Radio Algiers main station until the area was secured and we moved east toward Tunisia and on to meet the British forces engaging Rommel in the Sahara desert. By summer, that phase of the war was over after a real nasty mess and thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war were on hand.
We had, meanwhile, gained a new friend: Skippy, the Arab Sheep dog. Horizontal literally stole him from an Arab sheep herder when he was so tiny that he could be concealed in the pocket of a field jacket. We raised him on whatever we could scrounge and he became one of us as we continued through Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and into Austria. His story would take a long time to tell. We smuggled him on board ships at each trip to a different operation but couldn't swing it on the homeward journey, so I contracted for a merchant seaman in Marseilles to deliver him to me in the States, but whatever went wrong was my loss. I paid half the agreed-upon price and would pay the other C.O.D., but I never heard from him.
Sicily was a fairly short campaign. We assisted with the landing and withdrew to prepare for the thrust into Italy in October of 1943. The Italian troops were supposed to defend Sicily – the Germans had chained some of them to the big guns, but the Italians would not fight and the mainland people kicked Mussolini out, strung him up and came over to our side.
But the War in Italy became pure hell for us before it ended. I got shot up some at the Messina Straits during the landing operations at Salerno in October, 1943. We were moving our equipment from cargo ships to landing barges when hit by German bombers and torpedoes. I had no bones busted and no vital organs ruptured, so they put me ashore where the medics picked the iron out of me, swabbed my hide down with some solution, packed the holes with sulfa drugs and sent me back to work. But we went into Salerno with a friend named Dodge and came out without him. I suppose he will be forever 23 years old. He was the first teammate I had lost. He would not be the last one. The road to Rome would cost us five more. Before leaving Italy in August, 1944, Horizontal and I visited a field of white crosses west of Caserta, and said what we had to say. It now seems strange that I was that guy who could alternate between praying and cussing, but not to cry. Now tears come too easily and there is really no point in talking about it. I'd like to mix strength and compassion as well as I once could mix the praying & swearing.
In the early days of 1944 I drew an assignment with the British Eighth Army while our troops were bogged down in the mountains of central Italy. It was the second time to be attached to the Brits, having provided hot-line communications between American commanders and a squadron of Mosquito night bombers based on the Egyptian desert in 1943. This time, it was Allied Control Commission on the Adriatic coast. We reported at Brindici and followed up the eastern side of the "Boot" for about two months, then back to the Americans for the Anzio Operation. I got along well with the British and appreciated the exposure to some of their ways. I'd hoped to get to London but never did. Also, the Germans didn't give up Venice before we left Italy, so I missed that too… but did get to sneak into Rome after it had been declared an open city. We stopped at the Coliseum and moved back to prepare for the August 15, 1944 invasion of Southern France.
Any wisdom I might possess tells me not to elaborate on personal escapades of good or bad times; but there were some. Too much wine and little provocation could trigger violent reactions in Horizontal at times and my willingness to back him up could get us both in trouble. This cost us rank and pay several times, but we really were good at our jobs so they kept us on through the long haul.
On the French Riviera I hit the beach with the Big Boys. It was D-Day and noisy as hell; a lot of smoke, fire and confusion all over the place. Horizontal and I sacrificed a jeep in order to gain safe haven – we weren't rookies any more. I'd long since learned that a shovel is more useful than a rifle when you need a hole to hide in until it cools down some. But we did good, and later were awarded some more ribbons and metal trinkets, which would at least be worth discharge points a year later when the party was over. We weren't there to do the shooting anyway. Our Company's mission was to photograph and document the operation for historical purposes. I had been instructed on the fine points of a new Radio-photographic process – no small chore with mobile equipment, but we did have limited success. When a German General was captured near Monaco, I transmitted a picture of him to London, where it was boosted to Washington and appeared soon afterward in newspapers back home. We lost a newsreel photographer as he recorded his own demise when a German Machine-gunner cut him down near Cannes, France on D-Day plus two.
My crew put up in an abandoned villa where Horizontal and I laundered our G. I. shorts in our helmets – they needed it – and hung them out to dry, when an air raid occurred. Again, we went underground; emerging later to find that bomb fragments & flack from ack-ack had all but shredded our underwear. Our luck charm, whatever it was, was still working. Our drive northward where we would eventually link up with Normandy Invasion forces went fairly well until we reached the Western Alps where winter came early and suddenly. We were snowed in and bogged down. But not before I had met Simone, an English-speaking chemistry major at the University of Grenoble. We enjoyed a pleasant and honorable friendship for a time and corresponded for much of the rest of the War, but Jenna had promised to be my Girl if I'd simmer down, and that was the bottom line. After V. J. Day, I would pass through Grenoble again on my way to Marseilles but I wouldn't stop.
Things got kind of nasty again as we rounded Switzerland and crossed the Rhine River into Germany – we lost McCormick in the Vosges Mountains. As my 23rd birthday approached in December, 1944, on the 17th, Hitler committed his all in a last attempt to win, and the famous Battle of the Bulge in Belgium ensued. I was dispatched to Paris before Christmas with a five-man crew, where we set up radio equipment in General Eisenhower's headquarters at Hotel Scribe.
Six months in Paris would be too much to write about! Skippy enjoyed it immensely! I could meet some important and famous people including Eisenhower himself and members of the Glen Miller Band, with whom I billeted while in Paris, and some of whom I'd see later in screen and television productions. When Hitler got his, we returned to our unit in Heidelburg, Germany. From there we could make a trip to Austria and eyeball a couple of the infamous concentration cams. The mess wasn't quickly or easily cleaned up and again I could thank my God that it was not part of my job. My company was told to go to China, Burma or India and meet some Japanese troops. Horizontal began to acquire some books and bone up on the basic words in those languages which he might need to bolster his social inclinations there. He would commit nothin' to nobody! But President Truman dropped the Big Bomb on Japan and our plans were changed.
We moved to Marseilles and had time to kill. I had accumulated enough broken French to spend some weeks operating a telephone switchboard in Arrignon, France – a trick I really enjoyed, before we lined up on a dock in Marseilles and someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
It was October 2, 1945.
The S.S. Marine Angel would bring us to New York on October 12th. Horizontal and me had three days to wind it up. We made one more trip to the Big Apple and vowed to sever all connections with World War #2… File the good memories and make an honest effort to forget the rest. We had been to hell and back together. For some reason fate had provided a round trip ticket and we were thankful.
For a guy who swore to forget it all, I've rambled on here to perhaps an excessive amount, but my son asked me to write about it and it would take more skill than I possess to condense it into a few words. On a cattle-car type troop train, I rode from New York to El Paso, Texas where it began. I got the discharge papers in my hand October 22, 1945, and hurried back to increase the pressure on Jenna. I did good, and we were married on New Years Eve, 1945. I'd had my 24th birthday and she her 22nd. That's a whole other and a wonderful story for the most part, and it will be up to my children and grandchildren to determine an ending.
POSTSCRIPT
If I could write a book, I might title it Six Months in Paree. Names being changed to protect the Wayward and Uncouth.
Another should be simply HORIZONTAL. I'd owe it to him to tell it like it was – so it would probably be banned in Sunday School, but the bad was all tolerable and the good abundant, for he rescued me several times – twice for sure – the Grim Reaper had me nailed down and Horizontal came and hauled me out. I heard from him twice after we got home. Once he sent me pictures of his Whiskey Still in Kentucky – later he wrote to tell me that he had met and married Helen and her three young daughters who had lost their man in the Navy in the South Pacific. He was employed by General Motors Corporation, and living in Indiana. I filled him in on my status and then we fell back on our pledge.
By A. E. Whinery
1991
"For what it's worth"
I arrived on the world scene in the early morning hours of December 17, 1921 at the farm house of my parents, Elmer Ernest and Goldie Galloway Whinery. Attending the birth was a country doctor. I only remember him as "Old Doc" Young," who made the trip three-and-a-half miles up the creek from Evansville, Arkansas by horse & buggy. My father would later joke to me that Doc's fee of $5.00 proved to be a bit excessive – considering the product!
Third of their five children, Marie and Mildred older, O'Neil and Wanda younger, Mother said she worried that I would not be strong because of small bones and skinny looks, but I can boast that I proved to be as tough as a pine knot. As I write this, I'm coming up to my seventieth birthday without having been hospitalized for a natural cause. Although emphysema has damaged my lungs, I require no doctor's appointments, nor medications – so Dad, if you're listening, I don't believe you're entitled to a refund!
The three sisters survive to now. O'Neil – a family name which came down from Mother's Irish ancestry – came two years after me. Five months after his birth the family moved by railroad train to near Seattle, Washington, where Dad got work with the timber and logging industry. Before O'Neil's first birthday, he contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. His grave is in the cemetery near Montesano, Washington, where we lived.
Woodrow Wilson was the nation's 28th president when I was born. His term was ending. World War One had ended three years previous… some things "ancient" seem to be creeping into my span of years. After three years in Washington State we returned to the farm in a model-T Ford. I started to school in a one-room building on Hale Mountain just a mile from the birthplace of Jennavie Cox, who would later become my wife – though neither of us could recall, that would have to be where we met and both endured eight grades of Readin', Ritin' & 'Rithmatic. Jenna said she never did, but I endured many sessions with the Hickory Stick. She attended high school and graduated in 1941 at Morrow, Arkansas. But during the early years of my schooling at Hale Mountain – and about the beginning of Jenna's – the notorious Wall Street Crash occurred and the country fell into the era of the Great Depression. 1929 being my eighth year of life and the Depression years not ending until the beginning of World War Two in 1941 – I would call it bad timing and be fully aware of the entire period.
After a record year of drought, heat, and crop failure in 1936, we sold the old home and moved to New Mexico where Mother's parents had acquired some ranchland near the railroad town of Clovis, where Dad could get some work at his building trade. Sister Marie was married then and she and her husband also made the move. The other two sisters and I started school in New Mexico, but building scaffolding fell with Dad, breaking his back. Unable to work for most of two years and before the days of compensation and having no assets, whatever it was that hit the fan was upon us! Having just had a sixteenth birthday in 1937, I became the breadwinner and my formal schooling came to an end.
A kind and caring gentleman who owned a mercantile business hired me on at seven dollars a week. A usual day was ten hours, Monday through Saturday and I only had to open up and sweep out on Sunday mornings, so the pay per hour was roughly in the neighborhood of ten cents. Mother cared for some neighbor kids and Mildred cleaned house for a loaded old widow, thereby boosting the family income by another 3 to 4 dollars a week. It sounds worse now than it seemed at the time. Mr. Foster allowed me a discount on purchases and prices were low; i. e., you could buy a gallon of gasoline for 14 cents, a pack of cigarettes for 10 cents, a gallon of milk from a farmer was only 25 cents and dried pinto beans went for 3 cents a pound. Also, when my eighteenth birthday came along, I was kinda in charge while Mr. Foster took leave and my salary was almost tripled. Dad was working again, and I purchased my first car and could afford Saturday night dates, but was too far gone to go back to being a Freshman or Sophomore so it hurt, but years later I could use what I'd learned when I had my own food market.
I enrolled in a trade school at Clovis Airport in 1940. Sponsored by the government, we were beginning to build a war machine. World War Two was raging in Europe and we weren't ready! However, my career turned from learning to build a machine to learning to operate it when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor and I had my nineteenth birthday. Years later I could benefit from that learning when I went to Wichita to help Boeing build the B-52.
Midway through 1941, war clouds were gathering fast. Those of us who were 18-year-old males needed not wonder what our status was, so lured by a hankering for adventure and reports of big pay in the East Texas Oil Fields, a car-load of us hit the road. Sure enough the pay was good and the real-life challenges were in good supply. It was a different breed that followed the oil fields & honky-tonks from Gladewater to Port Arthur and side trips to New Orleans on occasion. It was a good way to mark time while waiting for one's number to come up. I was living at the Pickwick Hotel in Gladewater, Texas when on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, the little radio put out the news of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese Air Force. I was nineteen years old and as ready as I'd ever be, but Christmas was coming up and I hadn't seen the folks for awhile, so I began closing out my oil field career and headed for Clovis… with thoughts of enlisting in the Navy.
After the holidays, Dad was involved by then in construction of Roswell Air Base facilities and insisted that I work with him awhile. He didn't have to beg. Though as I liked to think, I cannot in honesty say I was in any special hurry to get to the killing field. But Japan had done it to us – we declared our support of England in stopping Hitler and Mussolini… we were at WAR!!
I registered for the draft – let nature take its course and the chips fall where they may. My buddies who went into the Navy went on ahead of me – but not for long. The process was fairly steady after registration: physicals, classification, tests, etc. Finally, I got the date and place: be at Fort Bliss, Texas on July 10, 1942. Franklin Roosevelt was putting me on his team; the duty would be, for a basic period, twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, to sort of put me in a killing mood. The pay would be twenty-one dollars a month. That too seems worse now than it did at the time. The hourly rate would be way to hell and gone less than the dime I got at the Mercantile company, but everything I'd need was furnished – even though the chow was lousy and the clothing didn't fit – what the hell, during eight to twelve weeks of basic training I'd have no time to spend money if I had it.
It turned out that I got a pass to go into El Paso after being paid in two-dollar bills on September first. Harold Carpenter was the only friend from home with whom I'd been assigned a company, and we thought we'd tear El Paso up some, but it was disappointing to see more soldiers than civilians in town, so we had a couple of warm beers and crossed the Rio Grande into Juarez, Mexico. That was an experience in itself. An American dollar was worth a whole bunch in Juarez. Still, we were broke when we got back across the river in the morning, late getting back to camp, and it would be another month to the next 21 bucks! By then, I'd be shipping out to another base, thanks very much!
Camp Crowder, Missouri, south of Joplin, was like paradise after July and August in Fort Bliss; not distant from my native Arkansas and I would be here to attend Central Radio School. Having a run of luck on my I. Q. and aptitude tests at Ft. Bliss, I was allowed to apply for special training and was accepted. I don't remember all the dates; I didn't put any importance to them at the time. My Mother followed my every move and logged the data but I can't locate the log now – so I don't know the date of my arrival at Crowder. I know that after three months in the Army the recruit pay of $21.00 went to $30.00 per month and shortly after that a general pay increase raised it to $50.00, at which time I was raised to Corporal's pay, so within a time span of 30 to 40 days I went from $21.00 to $66.00 per month. That sounds puny as hell in 1991, but in 1942 in Joplin, Missouri you could have a hell of a weekend on $25.00. Fleabag hotels for instance, went for the room rate of a dollar a night; you could be decent for $2.50. Hamburger, fries and a coke would set you back a flat 25 cents. You could eat steak and drink wine for about $1.20 at a better place and beer at the clubs never a cost a G. I. more than a dime – so I was at last rising into lower middle class!
Thanksgiving weekend in 1942 was the single most eventful time of the rest of my life, as it were, for that was when I discovered Jenna as a grown woman as opposed to the spindly-legged dull girl in grade school. What a difference seven years could make! I went to my Grandparent's house at Morrow, Arkansas and Uncle & Aunt's on Hale Mountain. Jenna showed up with my cousin Virginia and we went riding in my Chevrolet – which my parents had brought to Crowder. I had become engaged to Beulah Mae in New Mexico and we planned to be married when I finished school and could get leave. Sometime in the interim, Jenna had met Eddie and he had given her a diamond that Cindy Morris described as being "large as a mule turd." It didn't seem to be as clear to Jenna as it was to me, but we definitely belonged together. She agreed to answer my letters, so I began a campaign to win her over to my way of thinking. I would feel sort of crappy about not asking for leave when I got out of school and encouraging Beulah Mae to establish other interests – which she did, anyway. I visited in Albuquerque years later at her new house, met her nice husband and three beautiful children.
The main problem was that Jenna was working in California – where Eddie was – and I could only compete by mail and telegraph for the duration of the war, which I had no guarantee of surviving. But it worked somehow. After arriving overseas, Jenna sent me her photograph and said she'd like to be my Girl – if somehow it would calm me a bit! She had returned the darn mule turd to Eddie and moved back to Arkansas. She, Lela and Nadine would work in Wichita, building airplanes till I could do the thing to Hitler and Mussolini and come home.
I did well in Radio School and was considered for assignment as instructor after graduation, but civil servants got the nod and I went to Camp McCain in Mississippi to help form a Special Service unit which would provide communication in the war just ahead in North Africa and the Middle East. Our training would last three months with a Ranger Battalion, and was hell for rugged. We learned Survival Tactics, and Sabotage. We would be able to handle any job we were called on to do… or so we were told.
In March of 1943, I was handed travel orders for myself and sixteen men. We were taken to Memphis where we boarded the train for Monmouth, New Jersey. There we would be joined by other teams which would make up our Special Service Company of 205 men which would be attached to the 45th Infantry Division – scheduled to ship out in early April for he Mediterranean area.
Never one to miss a good deal, we changed trains in Washington D. C. and decided to see some sights...
I had been joined upon my arrival at Camp McCain by a fellow radio operator from a school in Kansas City. This meeting was second only to meeting again with Jenna to the events of the rest of my life in wartime. Garvice Herald was his name. His home was listed as Bee Spring, Kentucky. We served just short of three years together in seven countries; we participated in five Major Battles and Operations; if anyone should ask me if there is a God, well, I never really say God, but it was clearly intended that we two, almost exact opposites in many ways, should take that trip together. Neither could've made it without the other. I don't understand why it was, but God had to arrange that meeting. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this today.
Garvice had the ability to lie down and relax at any time under any conditions, so I called him Horizontal. For some reason he referred to me as Lum. We saw the sights in Washington, D. C. alright! A four-hour layover ran into two and a half days, and when I delivered the orders to Fort Monmouth, it took a while to redeem my status. But we had time and opportunity to visit lots of interesting points along the East Coast area. We spent most of a month at Ft. Monmouth, NJ and Camp Shanks, New York, before shipping out for North Africa.
An old Swedish Luxury Liner with a name like Eriksen was anchored alongside a deepwater peer in New York Harbor one day in April, 1943. Built to accommodate about 2,000 tourists, she had been bought by Uncle Sam and converted into a troop carrier and would take on 8,000 men and their gear in the next two days. We lined up in order on the dock – someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
When the name Whinery came up, I became one of the 8,000. Trying not to show it or even admit to myself, later I would confess that a sort of knot came into my throat. Looking back now, it was a valuable experience and I really wouldn't want to avoid it, but I could have agreed that Mama needed me back home at that moment.
Ours would be one of more than 250 vessels gathering out in the Atlantic off New York to form a convoy aimed at the Straits of Gibraltar, 15 days or 6000 miles, whichever came first, anyway… turned out to be both. We'd have destroyers as escorts all the way to protect us from German U-boats, but they weren't entirely successful and we lost some vessels to them on a regular basis. We had no air protection whatever – since Jenna and her gang hadn't time enough at that point to build the planes – but they did good, and within a year our Air Force began to tear the opposition a new some-kinda-hole!
Going into Hostile War Zones and coming under attack by enemy gunfire has been described by so many writers and portrayed by all kinds of movies and stuff until my experiences seem to pale when compared to John Wayne's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's. I can only say that I got there early and stayed late. Had some good assignments and some real Dogs. No heroics and trying to beat back cowardice but always aware of that knot in the throat when fear set in. At those times, Horizontal would say, "Never up-chuck any knot, it could be something you'll need later – like an asshole."
We entered the Mediterranean Sea after heavy U-boat action in the Gibraltar Straits, and turned toward the coast of Morocco, where we took fire from French Legion nuts. They supposedly fought for hire. We off-loaded at Oran because it had a deepwater port and then proceeded to Algiers where my first job was to work with taking and operation of Radio Algiers main station until the area was secured and we moved east toward Tunisia and on to meet the British forces engaging Rommel in the Sahara desert. By summer, that phase of the war was over after a real nasty mess and thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war were on hand.
We had, meanwhile, gained a new friend: Skippy, the Arab Sheep dog. Horizontal literally stole him from an Arab sheep herder when he was so tiny that he could be concealed in the pocket of a field jacket. We raised him on whatever we could scrounge and he became one of us as we continued through Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and into Austria. His story would take a long time to tell. We smuggled him on board ships at each trip to a different operation but couldn't swing it on the homeward journey, so I contracted for a merchant seaman in Marseilles to deliver him to me in the States, but whatever went wrong was my loss. I paid half the agreed-upon price and would pay the other C.O.D., but I never heard from him.
Sicily was a fairly short campaign. We assisted with the landing and withdrew to prepare for the thrust into Italy in October of 1943. The Italian troops were supposed to defend Sicily – the Germans had chained some of them to the big guns, but the Italians would not fight and the mainland people kicked Mussolini out, strung him up and came over to our side.
But the War in Italy became pure hell for us before it ended. I got shot up some at the Messina Straits during the landing operations at Salerno in October, 1943. We were moving our equipment from cargo ships to landing barges when hit by German bombers and torpedoes. I had no bones busted and no vital organs ruptured, so they put me ashore where the medics picked the iron out of me, swabbed my hide down with some solution, packed the holes with sulfa drugs and sent me back to work. But we went into Salerno with a friend named Dodge and came out without him. I suppose he will be forever 23 years old. He was the first teammate I had lost. He would not be the last one. The road to Rome would cost us five more. Before leaving Italy in August, 1944, Horizontal and I visited a field of white crosses west of Caserta, and said what we had to say. It now seems strange that I was that guy who could alternate between praying and cussing, but not to cry. Now tears come too easily and there is really no point in talking about it. I'd like to mix strength and compassion as well as I once could mix the praying & swearing.
In the early days of 1944 I drew an assignment with the British Eighth Army while our troops were bogged down in the mountains of central Italy. It was the second time to be attached to the Brits, having provided hot-line communications between American commanders and a squadron of Mosquito night bombers based on the Egyptian desert in 1943. This time, it was Allied Control Commission on the Adriatic coast. We reported at Brindici and followed up the eastern side of the "Boot" for about two months, then back to the Americans for the Anzio Operation. I got along well with the British and appreciated the exposure to some of their ways. I'd hoped to get to London but never did. Also, the Germans didn't give up Venice before we left Italy, so I missed that too… but did get to sneak into Rome after it had been declared an open city. We stopped at the Coliseum and moved back to prepare for the August 15, 1944 invasion of Southern France.
Any wisdom I might possess tells me not to elaborate on personal escapades of good or bad times; but there were some. Too much wine and little provocation could trigger violent reactions in Horizontal at times and my willingness to back him up could get us both in trouble. This cost us rank and pay several times, but we really were good at our jobs so they kept us on through the long haul.
On the French Riviera I hit the beach with the Big Boys. It was D-Day and noisy as hell; a lot of smoke, fire and confusion all over the place. Horizontal and I sacrificed a jeep in order to gain safe haven – we weren't rookies any more. I'd long since learned that a shovel is more useful than a rifle when you need a hole to hide in until it cools down some. But we did good, and later were awarded some more ribbons and metal trinkets, which would at least be worth discharge points a year later when the party was over. We weren't there to do the shooting anyway. Our Company's mission was to photograph and document the operation for historical purposes. I had been instructed on the fine points of a new Radio-photographic process – no small chore with mobile equipment, but we did have limited success. When a German General was captured near Monaco, I transmitted a picture of him to London, where it was boosted to Washington and appeared soon afterward in newspapers back home. We lost a newsreel photographer as he recorded his own demise when a German Machine-gunner cut him down near Cannes, France on D-Day plus two.
My crew put up in an abandoned villa where Horizontal and I laundered our G. I. shorts in our helmets – they needed it – and hung them out to dry, when an air raid occurred. Again, we went underground; emerging later to find that bomb fragments & flack from ack-ack had all but shredded our underwear. Our luck charm, whatever it was, was still working. Our drive northward where we would eventually link up with Normandy Invasion forces went fairly well until we reached the Western Alps where winter came early and suddenly. We were snowed in and bogged down. But not before I had met Simone, an English-speaking chemistry major at the University of Grenoble. We enjoyed a pleasant and honorable friendship for a time and corresponded for much of the rest of the War, but Jenna had promised to be my Girl if I'd simmer down, and that was the bottom line. After V. J. Day, I would pass through Grenoble again on my way to Marseilles but I wouldn't stop.
Things got kind of nasty again as we rounded Switzerland and crossed the Rhine River into Germany – we lost McCormick in the Vosges Mountains. As my 23rd birthday approached in December, 1944, on the 17th, Hitler committed his all in a last attempt to win, and the famous Battle of the Bulge in Belgium ensued. I was dispatched to Paris before Christmas with a five-man crew, where we set up radio equipment in General Eisenhower's headquarters at Hotel Scribe.
Six months in Paris would be too much to write about! Skippy enjoyed it immensely! I could meet some important and famous people including Eisenhower himself and members of the Glen Miller Band, with whom I billeted while in Paris, and some of whom I'd see later in screen and television productions. When Hitler got his, we returned to our unit in Heidelburg, Germany. From there we could make a trip to Austria and eyeball a couple of the infamous concentration cams. The mess wasn't quickly or easily cleaned up and again I could thank my God that it was not part of my job. My company was told to go to China, Burma or India and meet some Japanese troops. Horizontal began to acquire some books and bone up on the basic words in those languages which he might need to bolster his social inclinations there. He would commit nothin' to nobody! But President Truman dropped the Big Bomb on Japan and our plans were changed.
We moved to Marseilles and had time to kill. I had accumulated enough broken French to spend some weeks operating a telephone switchboard in Arrignon, France – a trick I really enjoyed, before we lined up on a dock in Marseilles and someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
It was October 2, 1945.
The S.S. Marine Angel would bring us to New York on October 12th. Horizontal and me had three days to wind it up. We made one more trip to the Big Apple and vowed to sever all connections with World War #2… File the good memories and make an honest effort to forget the rest. We had been to hell and back together. For some reason fate had provided a round trip ticket and we were thankful.
For a guy who swore to forget it all, I've rambled on here to perhaps an excessive amount, but my son asked me to write about it and it would take more skill than I possess to condense it into a few words. On a cattle-car type troop train, I rode from New York to El Paso, Texas where it began. I got the discharge papers in my hand October 22, 1945, and hurried back to increase the pressure on Jenna. I did good, and we were married on New Years Eve, 1945. I'd had my 24th birthday and she her 22nd. That's a whole other and a wonderful story for the most part, and it will be up to my children and grandchildren to determine an ending.
POSTSCRIPT
If I could write a book, I might title it Six Months in Paree. Names being changed to protect the Wayward and Uncouth.
Another should be simply HORIZONTAL. I'd owe it to him to tell it like it was – so it would probably be banned in Sunday School, but the bad was all tolerable and the good abundant, for he rescued me several times – twice for sure – the Grim Reaper had me nailed down and Horizontal came and hauled me out. I heard from him twice after we got home. Once he sent me pictures of his Whiskey Still in Kentucky – later he wrote to tell me that he had met and married Helen and her three young daughters who had lost their man in the Navy in the South Pacific. He was employed by General Motors Corporation, and living in Indiana. I filled him in on my status and then we fell back on our pledge.
A Chronicle
By A. E. Whinery
1991
"For what it's worth"
I arrived on the world scene in the early morning hours of December 17, 1921 at the farm house of my parents, Elmer Ernest and Goldie Galloway Whinery. Attending the birth was a country doctor. I only remember him as "Old Doc" Young," who made the trip three-and-a-half miles up the creek from Evansville, Arkansas by horse & buggy. My father would later joke to me that Doc's fee of $5.00 proved to be a bit excessive – considering the product!
Third of their five children, Marie and Mildred older, O'Neil and Wanda younger, Mother said she worried that I would not be strong because of small bones and skinny looks, but I can boast that I proved to be as tough as a pine knot. As I write this, I'm coming up to my seventieth birthday without having been hospitalized for a natural cause. Although emphysema has damaged my lungs, I require no doctor's appointments, nor medications – so Dad, if you're listening, I don't believe you're entitled to a refund!
The three sisters survive to now. O'Neil – a family name which came down from Mother's Irish ancestry – came two years after me. Five months after his birth the family moved by railroad train to near Seattle, Washington, where Dad got work with the timber and logging industry. Before O'Neil's first birthday, he contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. His grave is in the cemetery near Montesano, Washington, where we lived.
Woodrow Wilson was the nation's 28th president when I was born. His term was ending. World War One had ended three years previous… some things "ancient" seem to be creeping into my span of years. After three years in Washington State we returned to the farm in a model-T Ford. I started to school in a one-room building on Hale Mountain just a mile from the birthplace of Jennavie Cox, who would later become my wife – though neither of us could recall, that would have to be where we met and both endured eight grades of Readin', Ritin' & 'Rithmatic. Jenna said she never did, but I endured many sessions with the Hickory Stick. She attended high school and graduated in 1941 at Morrow, Arkansas. But during the early years of my schooling at Hale Mountain – and about the beginning of Jenna's – the notorious Wall Street Crash occurred and the country fell into the era of the Great Depression. 1929 being my eighth year of life and the Depression years not ending until the beginning of World War Two in 1941 – I would call it bad timing and be fully aware of the entire period.
After a record year of drought, heat, and crop failure in 1936, we sold the old home and moved to New Mexico where Mother's parents had acquired some ranchland near the railroad town of Clovis, where Dad could get some work at his building trade. Sister Marie was married then and she and her husband also made the move. The other two sisters and I started school in New Mexico, but building scaffolding fell with Dad, breaking his back. Unable to work for most of two years and before the days of compensation and having no assets, whatever it was that hit the fan was upon us! Having just had a sixteenth birthday in 1937, I became the breadwinner and my formal schooling came to an end.
A kind and caring gentleman who owned a mercantile business hired me on at seven dollars a week. A usual day was ten hours, Monday through Saturday and I only had to open up and sweep out on Sunday mornings, so the pay per hour was roughly in the neighborhood of ten cents. Mother cared for some neighbor kids and Mildred cleaned house for a loaded old widow, thereby boosting the family income by another 3 to 4 dollars a week. It sounds worse now than it seemed at the time. Mr. Foster allowed me a discount on purchases and prices were low; i. e., you could buy a gallon of gasoline for 14 cents, a pack of cigarettes for 10 cents, a gallon of milk from a farmer was only 25 cents and dried pinto beans went for 3 cents a pound. Also, when my eighteenth birthday came along, I was kinda in charge while Mr. Foster took leave and my salary was almost tripled. Dad was working again, and I purchased my first car and could afford Saturday night dates, but was too far gone to go back to being a Freshman or Sophomore so it hurt, but years later I could use what I'd learned when I had my own food market.
I enrolled in a trade school at Clovis Airport in 1940. Sponsored by the government, we were beginning to build a war machine. World War Two was raging in Europe and we weren't ready! However, my career turned from learning to build a machine to learning to operate it when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor and I had my nineteenth birthday. Years later I could benefit from that learning when I went to Wichita to help Boeing build the B-52.
Midway through 1941, war clouds were gathering fast. Those of us who were 18-year-old males needed not wonder what our status was, so lured by a hankering for adventure and reports of big pay in the East Texas Oil Fields, a car-load of us hit the road. Sure enough the pay was good and the real-life challenges were in good supply. It was a different breed that followed the oil fields & honky-tonks from Gladewater to Port Arthur and side trips to New Orleans on occasion. It was a good way to mark time while waiting for one's number to come up. I was living at the Pickwick Hotel in Gladewater, Texas when on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, the little radio put out the news of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese Air Force. I was nineteen years old and as ready as I'd ever be, but Christmas was coming up and I hadn't seen the folks for awhile, so I began closing out my oil field career and headed for Clovis… with thoughts of enlisting in the Navy.
After the holidays, Dad was involved by then in construction of Roswell Air Base facilities and insisted that I work with him awhile. He didn't have to beg. Though as I liked to think, I cannot in honesty say I was in any special hurry to get to the killing field. But Japan had done it to us – we declared our support of England in stopping Hitler and Mussolini… we were at WAR!!
I registered for the draft – let nature take its course and the chips fall where they may. My buddies who went into the Navy went on ahead of me – but not for long. The process was fairly steady after registration: physicals, classification, tests, etc. Finally, I got the date and place: be at Fort Bliss, Texas on July 10, 1942. Franklin Roosevelt was putting me on his team; the duty would be, for a basic period, twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, to sort of put me in a killing mood. The pay would be twenty-one dollars a month. That too seems worse now than it did at the time. The hourly rate would be way to hell and gone less than the dime I got at the Mercantile company, but everything I'd need was furnished – even though the chow was lousy and the clothing didn't fit – what the hell, during eight to twelve weeks of basic training I'd have no time to spend money if I had it.
It turned out that I got a pass to go into El Paso after being paid in two-dollar bills on September first. Harold Carpenter was the only friend from home with whom I'd been assigned a company, and we thought we'd tear El Paso up some, but it was disappointing to see more soldiers than civilians in town, so we had a couple of warm beers and crossed the Rio Grande into Juarez, Mexico. That was an experience in itself. An American dollar was worth a whole bunch in Juarez. Still, we were broke when we got back across the river in the morning, late getting back to camp, and it would be another month to the next 21 bucks! By then, I'd be shipping out to another base, thanks very much!
Camp Crowder, Missouri, south of Joplin, was like paradise after July and August in Fort Bliss; not distant from my native Arkansas and I would be here to attend Central Radio School. Having a run of luck on my I. Q. and aptitude tests at Ft. Bliss, I was allowed to apply for special training and was accepted. I don't remember all the dates; I didn't put any importance to them at the time. My Mother followed my every move and logged the data but I can't locate the log now – so I don't know the date of my arrival at Crowder. I know that after three months in the Army the recruit pay of $21.00 went to $30.00 per month and shortly after that a general pay increase raised it to $50.00, at which time I was raised to Corporal's pay, so within a time span of 30 to 40 days I went from $21.00 to $66.00 per month. That sounds puny as hell in 1991, but in 1942 in Joplin, Missouri you could have a hell of a weekend on $25.00. Fleabag hotels for instance, went for the room rate of a dollar a night; you could be decent for $2.50. Hamburger, fries and a coke would set you back a flat 25 cents. You could eat steak and drink wine for about $1.20 at a better place and beer at the clubs never a cost a G. I. more than a dime – so I was at last rising into lower middle class!
Thanksgiving weekend in 1942 was the single most eventful time of the rest of my life, as it were, for that was when I discovered Jenna as a grown woman as opposed to the spindly-legged dull girl in grade school. What a difference seven years could make! I went to my Grandparent's house at Morrow, Arkansas and Uncle & Aunt's on Hale Mountain. Jenna showed up with my cousin Virginia and we went riding in my Chevrolet – which my parents had brought to Crowder. I had become engaged to Beulah Mae in New Mexico and we planned to be married when I finished school and could get leave. Sometime in the interim, Jenna had met Eddie and he had given her a diamond that Cindy Morris described as being "large as a mule turd." It didn't seem to be as clear to Jenna as it was to me, but we definitely belonged together. She agreed to answer my letters, so I began a campaign to win her over to my way of thinking. I would feel sort of crappy about not asking for leave when I got out of school and encouraging Beulah Mae to establish other interests – which she did, anyway. I visited in Albuquerque years later at her new house, met her nice husband and three beautiful children.
The main problem was that Jenna was working in California – where Eddie was – and I could only compete by mail and telegraph for the duration of the war, which I had no guarantee of surviving. But it worked somehow. After arriving overseas, Jenna sent me her photograph and said she'd like to be my Girl – if somehow it would calm me a bit! She had returned the darn mule turd to Eddie and moved back to Arkansas. She, Lela and Nadine would work in Wichita, building airplanes till I could do the thing to Hitler and Mussolini and come home.
I did well in Radio School and was considered for assignment as instructor after graduation, but civil servants got the nod and I went to Camp McCain in Mississippi to help form a Special Service unit which would provide communication in the war just ahead in North Africa and the Middle East. Our training would last three months with a Ranger Battalion, and was hell for rugged. We learned Survival Tactics, and Sabotage. We would be able to handle any job we were called on to do… or so we were told.
In March of 1943, I was handed travel orders for myself and sixteen men. We were taken to Memphis where we boarded the train for Monmouth, New Jersey. There we would be joined by other teams which would make up our Special Service Company of 205 men which would be attached to the 45th Infantry Division – scheduled to ship out in early April for he Mediterranean area.
Never one to miss a good deal, we changed trains in Washington D. C. and decided to see some sights...
I had been joined upon my arrival at Camp McCain by a fellow radio operator from a school in Kansas City. This meeting was second only to meeting again with Jenna to the events of the rest of my life in wartime. Garvice Herald was his name. His home was listed as Bee Spring, Kentucky. We served just short of three years together in seven countries; we participated in five Major Battles and Operations; if anyone should ask me if there is a God, well, I never really say God, but it was clearly intended that we two, almost exact opposites in many ways, should take that trip together. Neither could've made it without the other. I don't understand why it was, but God had to arrange that meeting. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this today.
Garvice had the ability to lie down and relax at any time under any conditions, so I called him Horizontal. For some reason he referred to me as Lum. We saw the sights in Washington, D. C. alright! A four-hour layover ran into two and a half days, and when I delivered the orders to Fort Monmouth, it took a while to redeem my status. But we had time and opportunity to visit lots of interesting points along the East Coast area. We spent most of a month at Ft. Monmouth, NJ and Camp Shanks, New York, before shipping out for North Africa.
An old Swedish Luxury Liner with a name like Eriksen was anchored alongside a deepwater peer in New York Harbor one day in April, 1943. Built to accommodate about 2,000 tourists, she had been bought by Uncle Sam and converted into a troop carrier and would take on 8,000 men and their gear in the next two days. We lined up in order on the dock – someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
When the name Whinery came up, I became one of the 8,000. Trying not to show it or even admit to myself, later I would confess that a sort of knot came into my throat. Looking back now, it was a valuable experience and I really wouldn't want to avoid it, but I could have agreed that Mama needed me back home at that moment.
Ours would be one of more than 250 vessels gathering out in the Atlantic off New York to form a convoy aimed at the Straits of Gibraltar, 15 days or 6000 miles, whichever came first, anyway… turned out to be both. We'd have destroyers as escorts all the way to protect us from German U-boats, but they weren't entirely successful and we lost some vessels to them on a regular basis. We had no air protection whatever – since Jenna and her gang hadn't time enough at that point to build the planes – but they did good, and within a year our Air Force began to tear the opposition a new some-kinda-hole!
Going into Hostile War Zones and coming under attack by enemy gunfire has been described by so many writers and portrayed by all kinds of movies and stuff until my experiences seem to pale when compared to John Wayne's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's. I can only say that I got there early and stayed late. Had some good assignments and some real Dogs. No heroics and trying to beat back cowardice but always aware of that knot in the throat when fear set in. At those times, Horizontal would say, "Never up-chuck any knot, it could be something you'll need later – like an asshole."
We entered the Mediterranean Sea after heavy U-boat action in the Gibraltar Straits, and turned toward the coast of Morocco, where we took fire from French Legion nuts. They supposedly fought for hire. We off-loaded at Oran because it had a deepwater port and then proceeded to Algiers where my first job was to work with taking and operation of Radio Algiers main station until the area was secured and we moved east toward Tunisia and on to meet the British forces engaging Rommel in the Sahara desert. By summer, that phase of the war was over after a real nasty mess and thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war were on hand.
We had, meanwhile, gained a new friend: Skippy, the Arab Sheep dog. Horizontal literally stole him from an Arab sheep herder when he was so tiny that he could be concealed in the pocket of a field jacket. We raised him on whatever we could scrounge and he became one of us as we continued through Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and into Austria. His story would take a long time to tell. We smuggled him on board ships at each trip to a different operation but couldn't swing it on the homeward journey, so I contracted for a merchant seaman in Marseilles to deliver him to me in the States, but whatever went wrong was my loss. I paid half the agreed-upon price and would pay the other C.O.D., but I never heard from him.
Sicily was a fairly short campaign. We assisted with the landing and withdrew to prepare for the thrust into Italy in October of 1943. The Italian troops were supposed to defend Sicily – the Germans had chained some of them to the big guns, but the Italians would not fight and the mainland people kicked Mussolini out, strung him up and came over to our side.
But the War in Italy became pure hell for us before it ended. I got shot up some at the Messina Straits during the landing operations at Salerno in October, 1943. We were moving our equipment from cargo ships to landing barges when hit by German bombers and torpedoes. I had no bones busted and no vital organs ruptured, so they put me ashore where the medics picked the iron out of me, swabbed my hide down with some solution, packed the holes with sulfa drugs and sent me back to work. But we went into Salerno with a friend named Dodge and came out without him. I suppose he will be forever 23 years old. He was the first teammate I had lost. He would not be the last one. The road to Rome would cost us five more. Before leaving Italy in August, 1944, Horizontal and I visited a field of white crosses west of Caserta, and said what we had to say. It now seems strange that I was that guy who could alternate between praying and cussing, but not to cry. Now tears come too easily and there is really no point in talking about it. I'd like to mix strength and compassion as well as I once could mix the praying & swearing.
In the early days of 1944 I drew an assignment with the British Eighth Army while our troops were bogged down in the mountains of central Italy. It was the second time to be attached to the Brits, having provided hot-line communications between American commanders and a squadron of Mosquito night bombers based on the Egyptian desert in 1943. This time, it was Allied Control Commission on the Adriatic coast. We reported at Brindici and followed up the eastern side of the "Boot" for about two months, then back to the Americans for the Anzio Operation. I got along well with the British and appreciated the exposure to some of their ways. I'd hoped to get to London but never did. Also, the Germans didn't give up Venice before we left Italy, so I missed that too… but did get to sneak into Rome after it had been declared an open city. We stopped at the Coliseum and moved back to prepare for the August 15, 1944 invasion of Southern France.
Any wisdom I might possess tells me not to elaborate on personal escapades of good or bad times; but there were some. Too much wine and little provocation could trigger violent reactions in Horizontal at times and my willingness to back him up could get us both in trouble. This cost us rank and pay several times, but we really were good at our jobs so they kept us on through the long haul.
On the French Riviera I hit the beach with the Big Boys. It was D-Day and noisy as hell; a lot of smoke, fire and confusion all over the place. Horizontal and I sacrificed a jeep in order to gain safe haven – we weren't rookies any more. I'd long since learned that a shovel is more useful than a rifle when you need a hole to hide in until it cools down some. But we did good, and later were awarded some more ribbons and metal trinkets, which would at least be worth discharge points a year later when the party was over. We weren't there to do the shooting anyway. Our Company's mission was to photograph and document the operation for historical purposes. I had been instructed on the fine points of a new Radio-photographic process – no small chore with mobile equipment, but we did have limited success. When a German General was captured near Monaco, I transmitted a picture of him to London, where it was boosted to Washington and appeared soon afterward in newspapers back home. We lost a newsreel photographer as he recorded his own demise when a German Machine-gunner cut him down near Cannes, France on D-Day plus two.
My crew put up in an abandoned villa where Horizontal and I laundered our G. I. shorts in our helmets – they needed it – and hung them out to dry, when an air raid occurred. Again, we went underground; emerging later to find that bomb fragments & flack from ack-ack had all but shredded our underwear. Our luck charm, whatever it was, was still working. Our drive northward where we would eventually link up with Normandy Invasion forces went fairly well until we reached the Western Alps where winter came early and suddenly. We were snowed in and bogged down. But not before I had met Simone, an English-speaking chemistry major at the University of Grenoble. We enjoyed a pleasant and honorable friendship for a time and corresponded for much of the rest of the War, but Jenna had promised to be my Girl if I'd simmer down, and that was the bottom line. After V. J. Day, I would pass through Grenoble again on my way to Marseilles but I wouldn't stop.
Things got kind of nasty again as we rounded Switzerland and crossed the Rhine River into Germany – we lost McCormick in the Vosges Mountains. As my 23rd birthday approached in December, 1944, on the 17th, Hitler committed his all in a last attempt to win, and the famous Battle of the Bulge in Belgium ensued. I was dispatched to Paris before Christmas with a five-man crew, where we set up radio equipment in General Eisenhower's headquarters at Hotel Scribe.
Six months in Paris would be too much to write about! Skippy enjoyed it immensely! I could meet some important and famous people including Eisenhower himself and members of the Glen Miller Band, with whom I billeted while in Paris, and some of whom I'd see later in screen and television productions. When Hitler got his, we returned to our unit in Heidelburg, Germany. From there we could make a trip to Austria and eyeball a couple of the infamous concentration cams. The mess wasn't quickly or easily cleaned up and again I could thank my God that it was not part of my job. My company was told to go to China, Burma or India and meet some Japanese troops. Horizontal began to acquire some books and bone up on the basic words in those languages which he might need to bolster his social inclinations there. He would commit nothin' to nobody! But President Truman dropped the Big Bomb on Japan and our plans were changed.
We moved to Marseilles and had time to kill. I had accumulated enough broken French to spend some weeks operating a telephone switchboard in Arrignon, France – a trick I really enjoyed, before we lined up on a dock in Marseilles and someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
It was October 2, 1945.
The S.S. Marine Angel would bring us to New York on October 12th. Horizontal and me had three days to wind it up. We made one more trip to the Big Apple and vowed to sever all connections with World War #2… File the good memories and make an honest effort to forget the rest. We had been to hell and back together. For some reason fate had provided a round trip ticket and we were thankful.
For a guy who swore to forget it all, I've rambled on here to perhaps an excessive amount, but my son asked me to write about it and it would take more skill than I possess to condense it into a few words. On a cattle-car type troop train, I rode from New York to El Paso, Texas where it began. I got the discharge papers in my hand October 22, 1945, and hurried back to increase the pressure on Jenna. I did good, and we were married on New Years Eve, 1945. I'd had my 24th birthday and she her 22nd. That's a whole other and a wonderful story for the most part, and it will be up to my children and grandchildren to determine an ending.
POSTSCRIPT
If I could write a book, I might title it Six Months in Paree. Names being changed to protect the Wayward and Uncouth.
Another should be simply HORIZONTAL. I'd owe it to him to tell it like it was – so it would probably be banned in Sunday School, but the bad was all tolerable and the good abundant, for he rescued me several times – twice for sure – the Grim Reaper had me nailed down and Horizontal came and hauled me out. I heard from him twice after we got home. Once he sent me pictures of his Whiskey Still in Kentucky – later he wrote to tell me that he had met and married Helen and her three young daughters who had lost their man in the Navy in the South Pacific. He was employed by General Motors Corporation, and living in Indiana. I filled him in on my status and then we fell back on our pledge.
By A. E. Whinery
1991
"For what it's worth"
I arrived on the world scene in the early morning hours of December 17, 1921 at the farm house of my parents, Elmer Ernest and Goldie Galloway Whinery. Attending the birth was a country doctor. I only remember him as "Old Doc" Young," who made the trip three-and-a-half miles up the creek from Evansville, Arkansas by horse & buggy. My father would later joke to me that Doc's fee of $5.00 proved to be a bit excessive – considering the product!
Third of their five children, Marie and Mildred older, O'Neil and Wanda younger, Mother said she worried that I would not be strong because of small bones and skinny looks, but I can boast that I proved to be as tough as a pine knot. As I write this, I'm coming up to my seventieth birthday without having been hospitalized for a natural cause. Although emphysema has damaged my lungs, I require no doctor's appointments, nor medications – so Dad, if you're listening, I don't believe you're entitled to a refund!
The three sisters survive to now. O'Neil – a family name which came down from Mother's Irish ancestry – came two years after me. Five months after his birth the family moved by railroad train to near Seattle, Washington, where Dad got work with the timber and logging industry. Before O'Neil's first birthday, he contracted pneumonia and died suddenly. His grave is in the cemetery near Montesano, Washington, where we lived.
Woodrow Wilson was the nation's 28th president when I was born. His term was ending. World War One had ended three years previous… some things "ancient" seem to be creeping into my span of years. After three years in Washington State we returned to the farm in a model-T Ford. I started to school in a one-room building on Hale Mountain just a mile from the birthplace of Jennavie Cox, who would later become my wife – though neither of us could recall, that would have to be where we met and both endured eight grades of Readin', Ritin' & 'Rithmatic. Jenna said she never did, but I endured many sessions with the Hickory Stick. She attended high school and graduated in 1941 at Morrow, Arkansas. But during the early years of my schooling at Hale Mountain – and about the beginning of Jenna's – the notorious Wall Street Crash occurred and the country fell into the era of the Great Depression. 1929 being my eighth year of life and the Depression years not ending until the beginning of World War Two in 1941 – I would call it bad timing and be fully aware of the entire period.
After a record year of drought, heat, and crop failure in 1936, we sold the old home and moved to New Mexico where Mother's parents had acquired some ranchland near the railroad town of Clovis, where Dad could get some work at his building trade. Sister Marie was married then and she and her husband also made the move. The other two sisters and I started school in New Mexico, but building scaffolding fell with Dad, breaking his back. Unable to work for most of two years and before the days of compensation and having no assets, whatever it was that hit the fan was upon us! Having just had a sixteenth birthday in 1937, I became the breadwinner and my formal schooling came to an end.
A kind and caring gentleman who owned a mercantile business hired me on at seven dollars a week. A usual day was ten hours, Monday through Saturday and I only had to open up and sweep out on Sunday mornings, so the pay per hour was roughly in the neighborhood of ten cents. Mother cared for some neighbor kids and Mildred cleaned house for a loaded old widow, thereby boosting the family income by another 3 to 4 dollars a week. It sounds worse now than it seemed at the time. Mr. Foster allowed me a discount on purchases and prices were low; i. e., you could buy a gallon of gasoline for 14 cents, a pack of cigarettes for 10 cents, a gallon of milk from a farmer was only 25 cents and dried pinto beans went for 3 cents a pound. Also, when my eighteenth birthday came along, I was kinda in charge while Mr. Foster took leave and my salary was almost tripled. Dad was working again, and I purchased my first car and could afford Saturday night dates, but was too far gone to go back to being a Freshman or Sophomore so it hurt, but years later I could use what I'd learned when I had my own food market.
I enrolled in a trade school at Clovis Airport in 1940. Sponsored by the government, we were beginning to build a war machine. World War Two was raging in Europe and we weren't ready! However, my career turned from learning to build a machine to learning to operate it when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor and I had my nineteenth birthday. Years later I could benefit from that learning when I went to Wichita to help Boeing build the B-52.
Midway through 1941, war clouds were gathering fast. Those of us who were 18-year-old males needed not wonder what our status was, so lured by a hankering for adventure and reports of big pay in the East Texas Oil Fields, a car-load of us hit the road. Sure enough the pay was good and the real-life challenges were in good supply. It was a different breed that followed the oil fields & honky-tonks from Gladewater to Port Arthur and side trips to New Orleans on occasion. It was a good way to mark time while waiting for one's number to come up. I was living at the Pickwick Hotel in Gladewater, Texas when on Sunday morning, December 7th, 1941, the little radio put out the news of the Pearl Harbor attack by the Japanese Air Force. I was nineteen years old and as ready as I'd ever be, but Christmas was coming up and I hadn't seen the folks for awhile, so I began closing out my oil field career and headed for Clovis… with thoughts of enlisting in the Navy.
After the holidays, Dad was involved by then in construction of Roswell Air Base facilities and insisted that I work with him awhile. He didn't have to beg. Though as I liked to think, I cannot in honesty say I was in any special hurry to get to the killing field. But Japan had done it to us – we declared our support of England in stopping Hitler and Mussolini… we were at WAR!!
I registered for the draft – let nature take its course and the chips fall where they may. My buddies who went into the Navy went on ahead of me – but not for long. The process was fairly steady after registration: physicals, classification, tests, etc. Finally, I got the date and place: be at Fort Bliss, Texas on July 10, 1942. Franklin Roosevelt was putting me on his team; the duty would be, for a basic period, twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week, to sort of put me in a killing mood. The pay would be twenty-one dollars a month. That too seems worse now than it did at the time. The hourly rate would be way to hell and gone less than the dime I got at the Mercantile company, but everything I'd need was furnished – even though the chow was lousy and the clothing didn't fit – what the hell, during eight to twelve weeks of basic training I'd have no time to spend money if I had it.
It turned out that I got a pass to go into El Paso after being paid in two-dollar bills on September first. Harold Carpenter was the only friend from home with whom I'd been assigned a company, and we thought we'd tear El Paso up some, but it was disappointing to see more soldiers than civilians in town, so we had a couple of warm beers and crossed the Rio Grande into Juarez, Mexico. That was an experience in itself. An American dollar was worth a whole bunch in Juarez. Still, we were broke when we got back across the river in the morning, late getting back to camp, and it would be another month to the next 21 bucks! By then, I'd be shipping out to another base, thanks very much!
Camp Crowder, Missouri, south of Joplin, was like paradise after July and August in Fort Bliss; not distant from my native Arkansas and I would be here to attend Central Radio School. Having a run of luck on my I. Q. and aptitude tests at Ft. Bliss, I was allowed to apply for special training and was accepted. I don't remember all the dates; I didn't put any importance to them at the time. My Mother followed my every move and logged the data but I can't locate the log now – so I don't know the date of my arrival at Crowder. I know that after three months in the Army the recruit pay of $21.00 went to $30.00 per month and shortly after that a general pay increase raised it to $50.00, at which time I was raised to Corporal's pay, so within a time span of 30 to 40 days I went from $21.00 to $66.00 per month. That sounds puny as hell in 1991, but in 1942 in Joplin, Missouri you could have a hell of a weekend on $25.00. Fleabag hotels for instance, went for the room rate of a dollar a night; you could be decent for $2.50. Hamburger, fries and a coke would set you back a flat 25 cents. You could eat steak and drink wine for about $1.20 at a better place and beer at the clubs never a cost a G. I. more than a dime – so I was at last rising into lower middle class!
Thanksgiving weekend in 1942 was the single most eventful time of the rest of my life, as it were, for that was when I discovered Jenna as a grown woman as opposed to the spindly-legged dull girl in grade school. What a difference seven years could make! I went to my Grandparent's house at Morrow, Arkansas and Uncle & Aunt's on Hale Mountain. Jenna showed up with my cousin Virginia and we went riding in my Chevrolet – which my parents had brought to Crowder. I had become engaged to Beulah Mae in New Mexico and we planned to be married when I finished school and could get leave. Sometime in the interim, Jenna had met Eddie and he had given her a diamond that Cindy Morris described as being "large as a mule turd." It didn't seem to be as clear to Jenna as it was to me, but we definitely belonged together. She agreed to answer my letters, so I began a campaign to win her over to my way of thinking. I would feel sort of crappy about not asking for leave when I got out of school and encouraging Beulah Mae to establish other interests – which she did, anyway. I visited in Albuquerque years later at her new house, met her nice husband and three beautiful children.
The main problem was that Jenna was working in California – where Eddie was – and I could only compete by mail and telegraph for the duration of the war, which I had no guarantee of surviving. But it worked somehow. After arriving overseas, Jenna sent me her photograph and said she'd like to be my Girl – if somehow it would calm me a bit! She had returned the darn mule turd to Eddie and moved back to Arkansas. She, Lela and Nadine would work in Wichita, building airplanes till I could do the thing to Hitler and Mussolini and come home.
I did well in Radio School and was considered for assignment as instructor after graduation, but civil servants got the nod and I went to Camp McCain in Mississippi to help form a Special Service unit which would provide communication in the war just ahead in North Africa and the Middle East. Our training would last three months with a Ranger Battalion, and was hell for rugged. We learned Survival Tactics, and Sabotage. We would be able to handle any job we were called on to do… or so we were told.
In March of 1943, I was handed travel orders for myself and sixteen men. We were taken to Memphis where we boarded the train for Monmouth, New Jersey. There we would be joined by other teams which would make up our Special Service Company of 205 men which would be attached to the 45th Infantry Division – scheduled to ship out in early April for he Mediterranean area.
Never one to miss a good deal, we changed trains in Washington D. C. and decided to see some sights...
I had been joined upon my arrival at Camp McCain by a fellow radio operator from a school in Kansas City. This meeting was second only to meeting again with Jenna to the events of the rest of my life in wartime. Garvice Herald was his name. His home was listed as Bee Spring, Kentucky. We served just short of three years together in seven countries; we participated in five Major Battles and Operations; if anyone should ask me if there is a God, well, I never really say God, but it was clearly intended that we two, almost exact opposites in many ways, should take that trip together. Neither could've made it without the other. I don't understand why it was, but God had to arrange that meeting. Otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this today.
Garvice had the ability to lie down and relax at any time under any conditions, so I called him Horizontal. For some reason he referred to me as Lum. We saw the sights in Washington, D. C. alright! A four-hour layover ran into two and a half days, and when I delivered the orders to Fort Monmouth, it took a while to redeem my status. But we had time and opportunity to visit lots of interesting points along the East Coast area. We spent most of a month at Ft. Monmouth, NJ and Camp Shanks, New York, before shipping out for North Africa.
An old Swedish Luxury Liner with a name like Eriksen was anchored alongside a deepwater peer in New York Harbor one day in April, 1943. Built to accommodate about 2,000 tourists, she had been bought by Uncle Sam and converted into a troop carrier and would take on 8,000 men and their gear in the next two days. We lined up in order on the dock – someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
When the name Whinery came up, I became one of the 8,000. Trying not to show it or even admit to myself, later I would confess that a sort of knot came into my throat. Looking back now, it was a valuable experience and I really wouldn't want to avoid it, but I could have agreed that Mama needed me back home at that moment.
Ours would be one of more than 250 vessels gathering out in the Atlantic off New York to form a convoy aimed at the Straits of Gibraltar, 15 days or 6000 miles, whichever came first, anyway… turned out to be both. We'd have destroyers as escorts all the way to protect us from German U-boats, but they weren't entirely successful and we lost some vessels to them on a regular basis. We had no air protection whatever – since Jenna and her gang hadn't time enough at that point to build the planes – but they did good, and within a year our Air Force began to tear the opposition a new some-kinda-hole!
Going into Hostile War Zones and coming under attack by enemy gunfire has been described by so many writers and portrayed by all kinds of movies and stuff until my experiences seem to pale when compared to John Wayne's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's. I can only say that I got there early and stayed late. Had some good assignments and some real Dogs. No heroics and trying to beat back cowardice but always aware of that knot in the throat when fear set in. At those times, Horizontal would say, "Never up-chuck any knot, it could be something you'll need later – like an asshole."
We entered the Mediterranean Sea after heavy U-boat action in the Gibraltar Straits, and turned toward the coast of Morocco, where we took fire from French Legion nuts. They supposedly fought for hire. We off-loaded at Oran because it had a deepwater port and then proceeded to Algiers where my first job was to work with taking and operation of Radio Algiers main station until the area was secured and we moved east toward Tunisia and on to meet the British forces engaging Rommel in the Sahara desert. By summer, that phase of the war was over after a real nasty mess and thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war were on hand.
We had, meanwhile, gained a new friend: Skippy, the Arab Sheep dog. Horizontal literally stole him from an Arab sheep herder when he was so tiny that he could be concealed in the pocket of a field jacket. We raised him on whatever we could scrounge and he became one of us as we continued through Sicily, Italy, France, Germany, and into Austria. His story would take a long time to tell. We smuggled him on board ships at each trip to a different operation but couldn't swing it on the homeward journey, so I contracted for a merchant seaman in Marseilles to deliver him to me in the States, but whatever went wrong was my loss. I paid half the agreed-upon price and would pay the other C.O.D., but I never heard from him.
Sicily was a fairly short campaign. We assisted with the landing and withdrew to prepare for the thrust into Italy in October of 1943. The Italian troops were supposed to defend Sicily – the Germans had chained some of them to the big guns, but the Italians would not fight and the mainland people kicked Mussolini out, strung him up and came over to our side.
But the War in Italy became pure hell for us before it ended. I got shot up some at the Messina Straits during the landing operations at Salerno in October, 1943. We were moving our equipment from cargo ships to landing barges when hit by German bombers and torpedoes. I had no bones busted and no vital organs ruptured, so they put me ashore where the medics picked the iron out of me, swabbed my hide down with some solution, packed the holes with sulfa drugs and sent me back to work. But we went into Salerno with a friend named Dodge and came out without him. I suppose he will be forever 23 years old. He was the first teammate I had lost. He would not be the last one. The road to Rome would cost us five more. Before leaving Italy in August, 1944, Horizontal and I visited a field of white crosses west of Caserta, and said what we had to say. It now seems strange that I was that guy who could alternate between praying and cussing, but not to cry. Now tears come too easily and there is really no point in talking about it. I'd like to mix strength and compassion as well as I once could mix the praying & swearing.
In the early days of 1944 I drew an assignment with the British Eighth Army while our troops were bogged down in the mountains of central Italy. It was the second time to be attached to the Brits, having provided hot-line communications between American commanders and a squadron of Mosquito night bombers based on the Egyptian desert in 1943. This time, it was Allied Control Commission on the Adriatic coast. We reported at Brindici and followed up the eastern side of the "Boot" for about two months, then back to the Americans for the Anzio Operation. I got along well with the British and appreciated the exposure to some of their ways. I'd hoped to get to London but never did. Also, the Germans didn't give up Venice before we left Italy, so I missed that too… but did get to sneak into Rome after it had been declared an open city. We stopped at the Coliseum and moved back to prepare for the August 15, 1944 invasion of Southern France.
Any wisdom I might possess tells me not to elaborate on personal escapades of good or bad times; but there were some. Too much wine and little provocation could trigger violent reactions in Horizontal at times and my willingness to back him up could get us both in trouble. This cost us rank and pay several times, but we really were good at our jobs so they kept us on through the long haul.
On the French Riviera I hit the beach with the Big Boys. It was D-Day and noisy as hell; a lot of smoke, fire and confusion all over the place. Horizontal and I sacrificed a jeep in order to gain safe haven – we weren't rookies any more. I'd long since learned that a shovel is more useful than a rifle when you need a hole to hide in until it cools down some. But we did good, and later were awarded some more ribbons and metal trinkets, which would at least be worth discharge points a year later when the party was over. We weren't there to do the shooting anyway. Our Company's mission was to photograph and document the operation for historical purposes. I had been instructed on the fine points of a new Radio-photographic process – no small chore with mobile equipment, but we did have limited success. When a German General was captured near Monaco, I transmitted a picture of him to London, where it was boosted to Washington and appeared soon afterward in newspapers back home. We lost a newsreel photographer as he recorded his own demise when a German Machine-gunner cut him down near Cannes, France on D-Day plus two.
My crew put up in an abandoned villa where Horizontal and I laundered our G. I. shorts in our helmets – they needed it – and hung them out to dry, when an air raid occurred. Again, we went underground; emerging later to find that bomb fragments & flack from ack-ack had all but shredded our underwear. Our luck charm, whatever it was, was still working. Our drive northward where we would eventually link up with Normandy Invasion forces went fairly well until we reached the Western Alps where winter came early and suddenly. We were snowed in and bogged down. But not before I had met Simone, an English-speaking chemistry major at the University of Grenoble. We enjoyed a pleasant and honorable friendship for a time and corresponded for much of the rest of the War, but Jenna had promised to be my Girl if I'd simmer down, and that was the bottom line. After V. J. Day, I would pass through Grenoble again on my way to Marseilles but I wouldn't stop.
Things got kind of nasty again as we rounded Switzerland and crossed the Rhine River into Germany – we lost McCormick in the Vosges Mountains. As my 23rd birthday approached in December, 1944, on the 17th, Hitler committed his all in a last attempt to win, and the famous Battle of the Bulge in Belgium ensued. I was dispatched to Paris before Christmas with a five-man crew, where we set up radio equipment in General Eisenhower's headquarters at Hotel Scribe.
Six months in Paris would be too much to write about! Skippy enjoyed it immensely! I could meet some important and famous people including Eisenhower himself and members of the Glen Miller Band, with whom I billeted while in Paris, and some of whom I'd see later in screen and television productions. When Hitler got his, we returned to our unit in Heidelburg, Germany. From there we could make a trip to Austria and eyeball a couple of the infamous concentration cams. The mess wasn't quickly or easily cleaned up and again I could thank my God that it was not part of my job. My company was told to go to China, Burma or India and meet some Japanese troops. Horizontal began to acquire some books and bone up on the basic words in those languages which he might need to bolster his social inclinations there. He would commit nothin' to nobody! But President Truman dropped the Big Bomb on Japan and our plans were changed.
We moved to Marseilles and had time to kill. I had accumulated enough broken French to spend some weeks operating a telephone switchboard in Arrignon, France – a trick I really enjoyed, before we lined up on a dock in Marseilles and someone said
"I'll tell you your last name, you tell my your first, then grab your baggage and climb the gang plank."
It was October 2, 1945.
The S.S. Marine Angel would bring us to New York on October 12th. Horizontal and me had three days to wind it up. We made one more trip to the Big Apple and vowed to sever all connections with World War #2… File the good memories and make an honest effort to forget the rest. We had been to hell and back together. For some reason fate had provided a round trip ticket and we were thankful.
For a guy who swore to forget it all, I've rambled on here to perhaps an excessive amount, but my son asked me to write about it and it would take more skill than I possess to condense it into a few words. On a cattle-car type troop train, I rode from New York to El Paso, Texas where it began. I got the discharge papers in my hand October 22, 1945, and hurried back to increase the pressure on Jenna. I did good, and we were married on New Years Eve, 1945. I'd had my 24th birthday and she her 22nd. That's a whole other and a wonderful story for the most part, and it will be up to my children and grandchildren to determine an ending.
POSTSCRIPT
If I could write a book, I might title it Six Months in Paree. Names being changed to protect the Wayward and Uncouth.
Another should be simply HORIZONTAL. I'd owe it to him to tell it like it was – so it would probably be banned in Sunday School, but the bad was all tolerable and the good abundant, for he rescued me several times – twice for sure – the Grim Reaper had me nailed down and Horizontal came and hauled me out. I heard from him twice after we got home. Once he sent me pictures of his Whiskey Still in Kentucky – later he wrote to tell me that he had met and married Helen and her three young daughters who had lost their man in the Navy in the South Pacific. He was employed by General Motors Corporation, and living in Indiana. I filled him in on my status and then we fell back on our pledge.
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Advertisement
