This is a story about America's
innocents, the boys of the Great Depression, whose fate it would be to grow
into young manhood and to be hurled into the most savage war mankind had ever
seen.
The Depression, strangely enough,
had prepared them for that war. They
long understood and were hardened to the need for the basic essentials of life;
food, shelter, clothing, and a warm stove when the blizzard blew outside. Even before the army and combat taught them,
they had learned that all pulled together, all sacrificed together; all helped
their neighbor, to the best of their ability.
I was one of them, graduating
from high school five weeks after Pearl Harbor. I suppose I was more innocent than most, and
caught up still in that Depression, when at twelve I had stood before the
bakery door until the "After 4 p.m. all baked goods are half-price."
sign went up, then was first in the door to stretch my mother's pennies and
nickels. As a child, I remember giving
my father my treasured cigar box of 750 Indian head pennies to buy food. I remember it not because of the minor
sacrifice on my part, but because of the expression of pain on his face as he
took it. I will never forget that, though
sixty years have gone by since.
Eventually, over those war years,
sixteen million men were in uniform, swept together from every corner of the
nation. In that America
of 1941 we were still stamped with the habits, customs and accents of our
respective regions. Strangers
all, thrown together, who would learn in time that in our diversity was our
strength.
This story is not about the great
sweep of the war, nor the strategies of the campaigns. Few G.I.s, the ones
who carried the battle, could tell you why they were where they were, or the
planned goal of a major action. They could
say, "We are to hold here, whatever comes, or take that position, whatever
the cost."
The men I write about were with
the fighting men, took their losses with the fighting men, but by the unique
nature of their mission, were not, and would not claim to be, of the fighting
men. Their branch of service was the
Army Signal Corps and their job was to photograph and film the war around
them. There were three men in a Jeep,
one driver, one still cameraman, and one movieman. Each unit out to document
the war of a 15,000-man infantry or armored division. These Combat Assignment Teams (mine was CAT
Thirteen) had a freedom to perform their role that was rare in the
services. We made our own decisions,
sought out the action of the day, and photographed it. At night we left the front, for the paramount
need was for captioned film be rapidly delivered by courier on its long journey
to the nation's press and the military leaders in Washington.
Most of what is recorded here
really happened, though the characters are fictional. This is my war, a unique war, shared with
fewer than fifty other men. From the
deep Italian mud to the Vosges Mountain snow drifts;
to the shattered wine villages of Alsace; to the total destruction of German
cities and ending with those monuments to Nazi culture, the concentration camps
and the tens of thousands of silver-gray stick-like people, the walking or
crawling dead, just a fraction of the monstrous whole tallied neatly in
official German Archives, it all happened.
I remember the comradeship of
good men, ours and many other nationalities, on a common mission to literally
save civilization. I remember the
frequent spells of boredom and of occasional panic. There was danger and daily discomfort,
balanced by glimpses of glory, when soldier and civilian alike rose like saints
in sacrifice for others.
I still hear the sounds of
war. The rumble of summer thunder will
always be the mutter of artillery to me.
I still see the weary, grimy soldier faces, men trudging along, fatigued
into willing robots.
I still smell the citric acid
aroma of the dusty lemons and oranges that overhung the sweltering road in the
summer furnace of Italy. Ahead is Rome,
the glittering prize, glittering as though to tell us its liberation is worth
all the dead left behind in the mountain passes and craggy heights of the Apennines.
I have tried to be true to these
memories, as an obligation to those other young men who sailed off in the
uniform, did their duty, and did not come home.
If you find some humor in these
pages, do not be surprised. We were
still growing up and despite everything; there were still boys among us.