Dream Catcher: A Memoir (11 page)

“It’s good to see you, Babe. . . . G.I.’s—especially G.I.’s who are friends—belong together these days. It’s no good being with civilians anymore. They don’t know what we know and we’re no longer used to what they know. It doesn’t work out so hot.”

Babe nodded and thoughtfully took a drag from his cigarette. “I never really knew anything about friendship before I was in the Army. Did you, Vince?”

“Not a thing.”

At dinner, Babe lambasts his father for romanticizing war the way they do in the movies and goes into a typical long and emotional Salinger diatribe (for which Babe, again typical of my father, later feels embarrassed). Babe, in a sentiment similar to that expressed by Philly Burns, tells him that war will continue until we stop making it look heroic, “instead of the stupid, bloody mess it really is.”

Searching for a landsman, Babe goes into Mattie’s room, where she is sleeping, to wake her up and talk to her. In a scene very like Holden waking his sister, Phoebe, who guesses he’s been kicked out of school again, Mattie guesses, correctly, that Babe has received his orders to ship out. Mattie, like the aunt in the previous story, is terrific about it. He kisses her good-night and leaves her room, finally at peace with himself about going to war.

. . . this is where Mattie is sleeping. No enemy is banging on our door, waking her up, frightening her. But it could happen if I don’t go out and meet him with my gun. And I will, and I’ll kill him. I’d like to come back too. It would be swell to come back. It would be—

His mother, too, guesses that he is going overseas. She tells him calmly that she is not worried. “You’ll do your job and you’ll come back. I have a feeling.” The story ends with him feeling happy, following her suggestion to wake Vincent and go down to the kitchen for some cold chicken.

Babe appears again in two more stories, one set on a battlefield in France, the other set just after the war ends and it’s not so swell to be back suffering from “battle fatigue.”
⁷

Babe found some peace about going to war, as well as some peaceful good-byes. I don’t know how my father felt until he got on board the
ship. His bunkmates, he told me, were having a farting contest and laughing like hyenas about it. He lay back on his bunk and sank into utter despair.

S
TAFF
S
ERGEANT
S
ALINGER WAS IN
England for the next few months occupied in much the same way as is his character Staff Sergeant X, in the story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” The fictional X, like my father, attended a planning and training course for Counter-Intelligence Corps agents in the south of England in preparation for the D-Day invasion. X is sitting in a tea shop, having a lovely conversation with Esmé, a young girl of about thirteen, and her little brother, Charles. When queried, X tells Esmé that he is a writer of short stories by profession. Like my father, X is assigned to the Twelfth Infantry Regiment (combat) of the Fourth Division. “I landed on D-Day, you know,” he’d say to me darkly, soldier to soldier as it were, as if I understood the implications, the unspoken. Although he said it a number of times when I was a child, he never once elaborated beyond the stark statement. I found out, among other facts, in a terrific book by their regimental historian, Colonel Gerden F. Johnson,
History of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment in World War II,
that it was Utah Beach their regiment hit that day.

My father’s story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” goes abruptly silent when Sergeant X leaves England’s shores, the way his saying “I landed on D-Day” stood for a million things unsaid, bodies and body parts strewn across beach and field and town, miles of white crosses, the slaughter and misery of war. In the story, the scene shifts abruptly from pre–D-Day England to somewhere in Germany shortly after VE day (victory in Europe and the surrender of Germany). Staff Sergeant X is sitting on a bed, vomiting into a wastebasket:

His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.

The war that left him that way is entirely offstage. It’s a tremendously powerful way to tell the reader that something terrible has happened without telling you what. It’s left to your imagination, which for most of us is a pretty spooky place to be left. Especially when you aren’t allowed to ask further questions.

As I began to fill in the pages that had been crossed out of my own family’s personal history during the war, things my father never told me, and I never asked, I was, once again, rather horrified to find that I shared with many of my peers a general view of our American story that was missing vital pages. Much like the myth of perpetual progress and widening opportunities for all Americans in the twentieth century, I had been taught that we, as a nation, went to war to fight Hitler and the evil values and practices—genocide of the Jews being the most glaring example—for which he stood. I found out, I’m ashamed to say, that in actuality anti-Semitism in America appears to have been at its apogee from 1939 to 1945. It was a real slug in the stomach to find out how many Americans supported the war
despite
Hitler’s view on the Jews, with which many agreed. In a 1938 poll, for example, taken of Americans about ten days after Kristallnacht, it was found that the majority believed that Jews were “partially or entirely responsible for Hitler’s treatment of them,” and four separate polls revealed that 71 to 85 percent of Americans opposed increasing immigration quotas for refugees. Scores of anti-Semitic leaflets circulated on American military bases stateside. A typical bit of such excreta I came across was allegedly written by a U.S. marine, before he had something useful with which to occupy his time:

The Parable of the Shekels

I. And it came to pass that Adolph, Son of Abitch, persecuted the tribes of Judea and there was war.

II. And when the war was four years, many tribes came to the help of the Jews, but the Jews took up arms not.

III. They took up arms not lest in so doing they would take from their pockets their hand and it would come to pass that they would lose a shekel.

IV. And the Gentiles came up in great multitudes from all the lands to fight for the Jews and the Jews lifted up their voices
and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” We will make the uniforms.

V. And the Jews lifted up their eyes and beheld a great opportunity and they said unto one another “the time has come when it is good to barter the junk for pieces of silver” and straightaway it was so.

VI. And they grieved not when a city was destroyed for when a city is destroyed there is junk and where there is junk there are Jews and where there are Jews there are money [
sic
] [and sick].
⁸

Such overtly anti-Semitic incidents and leaflets were most prevalent at points of induction.
⁹
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson issued orders forbidding the circulation of such anti-Semitic publications at all naval and military posts. It is hard to outlaw or legislate attitudes, but the experience of service together changed the attitude of many a soldier. When the Army publication
Yank
magazine asked soldiers, in August of 1945 just before the Japanese surrender, what changes they most wanted to see made in postwar America, the majority of GIs surveyed agreed that “above everything else, the need for wiping out racial and religious discrimination” was their major hope.
¹⁰
Whether this was due to the experience of Jew and Gentile fighting side by side or to the witnessing “up close and personal” of anti-Semitism put into practice, it is impossible to say. Perhaps it is as my father told me when I was a little girl: “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
¹¹

It was particularly depressing to find how much the virtual elimination of the Jewish GI’s story continues to this day in current histories of World War II.
Citizen Soldiers,
a critically acclaimed book that was on the
New York Times
best-seller list for many months as I was writing my own book, purports to be the story of the American soldier from D-Day to VE day. The author, Steven Ambrose, is a noted writer of best-sellers—
Undaunted Courage
and
D-Day
as well as multi-volume biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon—and founder of the Eisenhower Center and president of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Two years ago, before I asked questions about what things were like in my father’s day, I’m not sure I would have noticed the virtual X-ing out, the elimination by silence, of all but the Gentile GI’s stories. In an otherwise fascinating book, bringing to life the GI’s experience of battle, this stuck in my craw. I’m not speaking of the author’s motivations, but of the
effect
of “talking that way.” It’s not dissimilar to the tradition of referring to all human beings as “men”: someone’s story gets overlooked, devalued, or silenced. When you’re talking about a war of genocide, something more than being politically correct is at stake when you tell the American citizen soldier’s story in a way that excludes Jews. (He devotes a chapter to the African-American soldier.) Imagine you are a Jewish war veteran, or the surviving friend or relation of a soldier who didn’t happen to be a Christian, and reading the beginning of chapter 9 of Ambrose’s book:

During Christmas season of 1944 there were some four million young soldiers on the Western Front, the great majority of them Protestants or Catholics. They said the same prayers when they were being shelled, directed to the same God. . . . In World War II, no hatred matched that felt by Americans against Japanese, or Russians against Germans, and vice versa. But in Northwest Europe, there was little racial hatred between the Americans and the Germans. How could there be when cousins were fighting cousins? About one-third of the U.S. Army in ETO were German-American in origin. The Christmas season highlighted the closeness of the foes. Americans and Germans alike put up Christmas trees . . . the men on both sides of the line had an image of a manger in Bethlehem in their minds.

Or this, the opening of the chapter entitled “Victory, Apri1 1–May 7, 1945”:

Easter came on April 1 in 1945. In many cases the celebration of the Resurrection brought the GIs and German civilians together. . . . The GIs were surprised to find how much they liked the Germans. Clean, hardworking, disciplined, cute kids, educated, middle-class in their tastes and life-styles—the Germans seemed to many American soldiers to be “just like us.” . . . They were regular churchgoers.

Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, an Army chaplain at the time, writes in his memoirs an account of the day before Easter, in 1945, when he went to ask his superiors to reconsider an order that all soldiers on base be required to attend Easter services. He was met with hostile incredulity and told that the Jewish soldiers had a choice of Protestant services or Catholic. “We all stand in formation to salute a General and show respect, what’s wrong with being required to show respect for our Savior?”

“What’s wrong?” Where to begin? Perhaps with a version of the Bible issued to service men and women in 1943 that included such section titles as “The Jews Are a Synagogue of Satan” and “Israel’s Fall: The Gentile’s Salvation.” It wasn’t until the 1980s that prominent Catholic and Protestant theologians began to address systematically the problem of how to have a Christian identity that isn’t profoundly anti-Jewish.
¹²

Let’s just say that attending Easter services in 1945 might not have been a big morale booster for Jewish service men and women.

Citizen Soldiers
ends with a John Doe sketch of the typical everyman GI:

There is no typical GI among the millions who served in Northwest Europe, but Bruce Egger [meet John Doe] surely was representative. . . . He served out the war in almost continuous front-line action. He never missed a day of duty. He had his close calls, most notably a piece of shrapnel stopped by the New Testament in the breast pocket of his field jacket, but was never wounded. In this he was unusually lucky. G Company had arrived on Utah Beach on September 8, 1944, with a full complement of 187 enlisted men and six officers. By May 8, 1945, a total of 625 men had served in its ranks. Fifty-one men of G Company were killed in action, 183 were wounded, 166 got trench foot, and 51 frostbite. Egger rose from private to staff sergeant.

My father, too, rose from private to staff sergeant, landed on Utah Beach—on D-Day, June 6, 1944, however, not in September—never missed a day of service, was on or near the front lines with the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Fourth Division from D-Day to VE day, from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, on through the battles of the Hedgerows and bloody Mortain to Hürtgen Forest, Luxembourg and the Battle of the Bulge. He, too, was lucky. The Twelfth Infantry landed on D-Day with a company of 155 officers and 2,925 enlisted men. By June 30, less than a month later, in fighting from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, the total casualties for officers was 118, or 76 percent, and for enlisted men, 1,832, or 63 percent.