I was one of those hyperpatriotic teenagers who obsessively followed the war fronts on a wall map with red and yellow thumbtacks. GIs were my heroes. I couldn’t wait to enlist. The war was almost over – so we thought – and I wanted to get in my licks. War to me was grainy Movietone Newsreel images and blood-stirring front-line dispatches in the Chicago Daily News. And, of course, medals. Almost every block in my neighbourhood had a window with a red star – for a family member away in service – and sometimes a gold star for Killed in Action.
Eventually, I went into the army, did my duty, saw no combat and came home, safely. An accident of birth meant that I missed, by only a few weeks, the Battle of the Bulge, initiated by Manteufel’s surprise Panzer tank breakthrough, and the subsequent deadly ‘treeburst’ Ardennes forest campaign. Classmates my age in John Marshall High School were thrown into the thick of it. Lucky them, I thought. Only later would I learn about the frozen American corpses in the snow, and the massive GI casualties – the worst since Gettysburg – especially among the untrained inexperienced young men of the ASTP, the army’s college-bound programme, who were never supposed to see a front line.
A whole division, the 106th, composed mainly of these 18- and 19-year-old Americans just out of high school, was destroyed by the Germans in 48 hours. Panicky US generals, caught off-guard by Hitler’s last offensive, flung untried replacements into their first battle who were then chewed up by the veteran Wehrmacht war machine.
By luck, almost all the neighbourhood pals my age came back whole. Jack, Oscar, Arnold, Milt, Victor and Marvin had scraped through even though some of them had spent months in consecutive combat in Europe and the Pacific. Back at home they hardly ever spoke, let alone boasted, of the war. This was Tom Brokaw’s ‘greatest generation’, schooled in uncomplaining Depression-era stoicism. Only recently, by accident, I learned that two close friends had outstanding war records with valour medals to prove it.
One survivor’s story
So everyone came home. But not quite. My closest corner-boy friend was Robert, or ‘Bobby’, a little hot-tempered fellow handy with his fists like most of us. His sole passion was playing the classical clarinet in the Marshall High orchestra. The instrument was for Bobby what the public library was for me, an escape from a fetid slum crawling with cockroaches and anxiety. In a way, Mozart was out of character for Bobby; he wasn’t ‘sensitive’ or ‘artistic’, just another hang-out kid. But he got transcendent joy tootling the Clarinet Concerto on his pawnshop-bought clarinet. He fantasized the impossible, a career on the concert stage.
Bobby landed with his unit at Omaha Beach on D-Day and he was not killed. Instead, two fingers of his right hand were blown off by machine gun bullets. He never played the clarinet again. Compared to the millions of war dead it was a loss of no special significance, perhaps. Bobby went on to have a perfectly decent, normal civilian life, raised a family, worked for the government, and died in an Illinois schizophrenic ward.
We boys did not grow up in a hugging, emotion-confessing culture. Keeping your mouth shut about feelings was a given. So I have never told the boys that their combat sacrifices saved my life. They fought in the place I should have been. They stood up to the worst evil of our time and beat it by sheer slog, tenacity, endurance and, in some cases, amazing courage. On D-Day I remember them, with gratitude.
