Roll Me Over

  ROLL ME OVER

An Infantryman'south World War Two

Raymond Gantter

booksuch • Chu Hartley Publishers • New York

Copyright © 1997 by The Estate of Raymond Gantter

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

ISBN

To the Infantry— the Queen of Battles

Curlicue me over

In the clover;

Whorl me over, lay me down,

And exercise information technology again!

—A vocal of the infantry

Foreword

People go on talking about another war as though it were inevitable and only the moment of its coming uncertain, tomorrow, or maybe next calendar week. Self-appointed prophets of doom, all of us. We talk a lot about it, but we don't actually call up about it because it doesn't behave thinking on: We know (and hibernate the knowledge from ourselves) that when it comes, if or when this "common cold state of war" becomes a blaze, information technology will ravish the world. Atomic warfare, biological warfare, the swift murder of cities and civilians—warfare to brand a mockery of the conventions of war, transforming armies into bewildered huddles of uniformed men who scamper crazily to catch upwards with an adversary who struck 10 minutes ago and is now gone and away.

Nevertheless I believe that the next war, similar the last ane, will require the foot soldier. New weapons and new techniques in that location volition be, new devices to boom and devastate with laudable efficiency, simply when the weapons and devices have finished their work, the battered target, the precious, battered inches of footing, will have to be secured and held, and that's a job for the infantry.

This book, then, is at once a tribute to all former infantrymen, a personal narrative for my family, and a rough notebook of sorts for the young men who will be the human foot soldiers of the next war.

My original purpose in writing was nothing so lofty. I started to write because I was scared. Almost of the fourth dimension I was scared—not past bullet and shell alone, simply past the huge and brutal impersonality of the whole business. Writing about it gave me a measure of control over my fears.

Some of the material in this volume is taken from letters written to my wife, Ree. Nigh of information technology, nevertheless, is fatigued from crude notes jotted during the gainsay months, hastily scribbled observations that, for reasons of security, could not be included in letters home. I started those notes on the day I finished with the homeless misery of the Replacement Depots and joined an outfit, became a member of a family. I wrote as the circumstances permitted, employing whatsoever cloth was at manus—the backs of envelopes, paper bags, fifty-fifty the wrappers from our miniature packets of GI toilet paper. I carried the notes between my underwear and my shirt to protect them confronting the weather.

A lot of war books have been written, and perhaps there's naught in this one that someone hasn't already said. But now that it's over and a caste of perspective becomes possible, a couple of things have hit me hard and hit me fresh. One concerns heroism and heroes. It'due south a commonplace to say that heroes, virtually of them, are accidental. The affair that surprised me is that a guy can exist a hero and a bastard at the aforementioned time. I'm talking about truthful heroes, of grade, not guys who wear decorations. A lot of phonies are wearing ribbons they never earned, and that's no secret. Simply I mean a man who does something truly gallant, something that rings inside you lot like the surging memory of Hector before the walls of Troy. And yet you don't like him. If you didn't like him before, you're surprised to find you lot don't similar him whatever ameliorate now, even though y'all recognize the magnitude of his human action and are awed by it. He's a hero, sure, but he's nevertheless a jerk. That contradiction belongs to war. War is a marriage—almost a rape—of behemothic opposites. Information technology's everything and all things and all at the same time: bad and skillful, heroism and cowardice, terror and serenity, banquet and starvation, gallantry and bestiality. The wonder is that you can continue to be surprised.

Something that always angered and frightened me was the small horizon of the man in the ranks. Most of the fourth dimension you don't know what'south happening, or why. You don't even know where you are. It's something you force yourself to accept—the big flick is for the contumely, simply it's none of your damn business organization. You lot have a chore to exercise, a boondocks or a hill to accept, and you lot do your job. Sometimes you lot know the name of the town; sometimes information technology remains forever in your retention only as That Place Where. I puzzle all the same over maps, striving to find certain villages that were significant in my odyssey, but they are like cities on the moon, having no geographical context.

If I were concerned with trying to evidence you the sweep of war, I'd have to exercise a lot of research, and then I'd be able to tell you that on such and such a day, when we'd been ordered to take such and such a boondocks, the strategic movie was this and this, and we did what nosotros did because of its relationship to the big programme. Just I leave all that for the memoirs of generals. My purpose is to evidence you lot the dark side of the medal: how it was to be fumbling and blind, moving because we'd been ordered to motion, but not knowing where or why. If some faint tingle of that unreality touches you, yous will understand how it was that we were sometimes overwhelmed by black and crawling fearfulness.

You lot'll find errors, possibly some misinformation in this. I'll try to avert them and give the true and accurate story, just I'chiliad not going to worry much about a few errors of fact. If you lot at home lived in a earth ruled by rumor and misinformation, so did we. You ought to know something about that rumor world of ours.

In marshaling my notes and letters and memories together to form some semblance of continuity, I take frequently been nudged by the disturbing reflection that portions of this book would seem false or distorted or incomplete to many of the men who shared these experiences with me. To all those familiar voices, raised in reproach, incredulity, or shock, I plead only that men, sharing a mutual feel, saw unlike things and saw them differently. My view was not complete nor even authentic necessarily, just it was mine.

Ane last thing: War is supposed to exist a boyfriend's business, and maybe it is. And though the age of thirty doesn't usually indicate senility, it's not what you lot'd call springtime, either. What I'g getting at is this: I went in with a group of men my own age. High school, even college, were long past, and we left wives and children behind us and well-used marriage beds. Because of these circumstances, we saw some aspects of war rather differently from younger men. I'thou not implying a moral judgment: I say but that we saw some things differently. Sometimes, listening to the talk of the younger men, watching them, I felt old and sagging. They had sap in their veins, which I was aware had run a fiddling thin in mine. Just I did all right. I have no complaints.

Raymond Gantter

September 1944-June 1949

Chapter One

"… they were nonetheless picking up bodies from D Day."

September 1944.

I made the crossing on the Queen Elizabeth. There'south nix to say about it except that we were too damn crowded, and our quarters were deep in the belly of the transport. Nosotros were so hot that we slept naked and dripped waterfalls of sweat through the thick canvas of our bunks. Sometimes we tried to sneak up to the decks to slumber, but always the guards would discover us and brand united states become back down. The food was lousy.

A few days before leaving Army camp Shanks, I'd been named an "interim noncom" (noncommissioned officer) to serve equally assistant to the orientation officer of our shipment. The consignment made me pretty happy because I idea it was a little more upwards my alley than toting a gun in the ranks, and I attended the three-day orientation school at Shanks with zest I believed ardently in the importance of finding out what we were fighting for, and I thought I knew some of the answers. Unfortunately, the orientation officeholder on the Elizabeth shared neither my ardor nor my convictions. He was a fuzz-faced college boy, not nonetheless xx-one—I was painfully conscious of my seniority in

age and his seniority in rank—and he didn't believe in books, didn't believe in theories that roughshod short of a solid, unequivocal QED, and thought the entire Orientation Programme of the army a lot of damn-fool nonsense. In bollix-tongued bluster he stated that unless a book contained 'facts that you could bear witness"—he named a text on applied science as an case—or was written for amusement only (similar the Thorne Smith novel he was reading), it served no legitimate purpose and might ameliorate be burned or thrown away. I tottered away and sat in the latrine with my caput in my hands, cursing the army and bemoaning my lot in life.

Nosotros landed in Scotland, boarded a train, and sped to the south of England. At the first letter-writing opportunity I tried in oblique manner to tell my married woman, Ree, virtually my journey thus far. But the censor, canny human being, caught the giveaway word "moors," and snipped it out with a nail scissors, spoiling a lush bit of prose. Yet, he missed "rowan berries," "crofts," "heather," and "Blackness Angus cattle," and she guessed correctly after all.

October 2-7, 1944. Warminster Barracks, England.

A depressing interlude. We pitched tents in the middle of a dirty clay field and endured the raw cold and the rain with as much noisy self-pity as our officers would tolerate. At least one time a day we'd accept to strip to the vitrify, don overcoats and shoes, and march in long, shivering lines to some befouled of a barracks where the medics waited. Sometimes information technology was to become a "shot" of something, although we never could figure out why it was necessary to strip naked in order to have a needle stuck in our artillery. But most of the time the trip meant another short-arm inspection. Since the curt-arm consisted of shuffling along in the line until yous reached the medic, opening your coat for a second—shyly or with bravado, depending on how much cause for pride you had—whipping information technology close again and shuffling along, information technology seemed fourth dimension wasted. Nosotros'd been short-armed only before boarding the Elizabeth on the other side of the Atlantic, short-armed on the Elizabeth, herded from a dock in Scotland to this bleak camp in England without more than than a glimpse of a female talocrural joint, and denied pass privileges to town since arriving at Warminster. We began to experience that the army was taking an unnecessarily heavy interest in keeping united states pure.

In spite of these cloistered and aseptic precautions, the army pressed safety kits and contraceptives upon u.s.a. in such profusion that, lacking more purposeful use for them, the men treated the latter equally toy balloons. And many a sweating officer, conducting a grooming moving picture lecture, was forced to pause and chew ass for a while considering the screen would be obscured past the floating shadows of air-filled, grossly distended contraceptives. I have a depression sense of humour: the spectacle always fabricated me laugh like hell. Some grotesque and telling effects were achieved past the skilful tying together of three balloons in strategic organization. The regular army is a wonderful identify.

Something very agonizing occurred before we ended our brief stay in England and sailed for the Continent. One solar day our unabridged package was ordered to assemble earlier the captain'south tent. We shifted from pes to pes in the mud and wondered what was up. Nosotros found out fast. An officer whose duties included the censorship of our letters strode from the helm'southward tent, thrust his jaw fiercely in our direction, and delivered a savage and blindly hot diatribe well-nigh the anti-British sentiments we were expressing in our letters home. The official mental attitude was, and I quote: "It will non be tolerated!"

The incident had grave implications, it seemed to me. In the start place, I was baffled by the allegation of prejudice. I'd heard a few wisecracks, a few sour comments, simply I dismissed them equally the escape-valve griping of men who were frightened, homesick, and ill at ease in a foreign state. It hadn't occurred to me that anti-British feeling was truly bitter or widespread. Why should it be? All of us were fresh from us, new to Europe, and new to the regular army. We'd been in England but five or six days, had met possibly a dozen English men and women—most of them workers in the canteens of Warminster Barracks, and kindly folk—and even so, according to the officeholder admonishing us, an anti-British wave of serious proportion had engulfed our group.

Another aspect of the incident that bothered me was the official attitude as expressed by the lieutenant—who was a schoolteacher in civilian life. "It will non be tolerated!" Will not be tolerated? Were these words to speak to a noncombatant army, to costless Americans? (Remember, I hadn't been in the army very long! I learn slowly.) I felt my hackles rise and yearned to moving ridge former battle flags and yell old battle cries: "Don't tread on me!"... "54-xl or fight!"... "Remember the Maine!"

The prejudice I heard expressed in the army was often provoking and sometimes giddy, but I maintained (silently, of course) that the men had every right salvage the right of intelligence to speak their piece. If they believed what they said, no thing by what subterranean groping they'd reached their conclusions, then by God, they had a correct to say information technology, fifty-fifty as those who would disagree had a right to contend about it. So long as wartime rules of security were observed, no officeholder had whatsoever goddamn right to stand in front of us and tell us that certain things we were saying in our letters "will not be tolerated."

My final judgment, expressed frequently and with a nifty display of indignation, was: Why the hell didn't the army do something intelligent about it? During training nosotros'd been fed a lot of pap about the value of orientation, the importance of instruction in this, the most honest and necessary war in all history. Yet, faced with a state of affairs that could be cured only through the techniques of education, our officers were turning their backs on intelligence and open sincerity and giving capricious orders for the governing of our thinking. Logically, there could exist but 1 consequence: the grievances would exist driven cloak-and-dagger, to fester unseen and grow poisonous.

Thus ran my complaint, unheard relieve by a shut circle of friends. And feeling as I did that this war would exist the same bloody waste as the last unless we emerged from it with increased agreement and tolerance, the "this will non be tolerated" incident made me pretty sick for a while.

Oct 1944. Normandy, somewhere virtually Le Mans.

Nosotros had our first casualty equally we transferred gingerly from the transport in which we'd crossed the Channel to the LST that would deliver united states of america to the coast of France. One of our officers, a grinning and likable guy, was crushed to death between the LST and the Channel steamer. Climbing down the landing net hung over the side of the larger vessel, he hesitated a moment too long before leaping for the LST. A bad omen.

Nosotros landed on Omaha Beach, scene of the D Day invasion. Attempts had been fabricated to clean it up, discipline it into some kind of order, but expressionless vessels still thrust gaunt fingers from the tossing water, rusty barbed wire was snarled in savage tangles on the sand, and the beach was littered with broken and abandoned equipment. One of the guards on the embankment said they were still picking up bodies from D Day. Every day a few were washed ashore or uncovered by the vagrant sand. We looked with frightened eyes at that grinning, naked beach and the sheer cliffs leaning over it, studded with the vast wreckage of High german pillboxes. We muttered in profane gratitude our deep thanks that we'd been safe in united states of america on D Day.

It was a helluva long hike upward the hill from the embankment to an apple orchard flanked past peachy hedgerows where we pitched tents, in the pelting once again. So more waiting.

Simply earlier we left Warminster to board ship for France, our sergeant toured our expanse, stopping at every tent to give the occupants a generous supply of contraceptives. (I don't actually have a fixation on the discipline of nativity control or sex hygiene, but don't let anyone child you that this was a pure war.)

The next advent of the safeties was in a kind of parade of virility. With skies that opened and flooded the states every mean solar day and every dark, information technology was something of a problem to forbid the bore of a rifle from rusting. So, with true Yankee ingenuity— and after all, at that place had been no occasion thus far to put the prophylactics to the use for which they'd been designed—the men utilized them equally rubber caps on the muzzles of their rifles. I feel that there was a certain insouciance to our marching columns, although I've often wondered what

the French villagers thought, if it seemed to them the virtually arrogant kind of boasting.

Sometimes the mud in Normandy has the thick, rich creaminess of melted milk chocolate, a quality so smoothly silken that you walk through it with a kind of dreamy pleasure in the lazy gulping and gurgling created past your moving feet. Only well-nigh of the fourth dimension it'south just plain mud, and you curse information technology and flounder and splash, and yearn for a comfortable, dry desert.

CHAPTER TWO

"... a kind of boring struggle to proceed warm and get enough to eat."

November 1944. A pine woods, three miles from Bastogne, Belgium.

It took the ruined villages of French republic and Belgium to teach me a proper humility earlier civilians. My stateside experience with civilians had been a lilliputian embittering, and it didn't help much to tell myself that my point of view was lopsided. I didn't like the army; I didn't like the infantry. I resented the separation from my family and the intermission of my career. By God, if I had to suffer all these miseries, information technology seemed to me that the least civilians could practice to repay me for my sacrifices (all the same reluctant) was to stand at attention as I went by, and buses and streetcars stop and the passengers go out and bow.

Seriously, it oftentimes angered me to see civilians doing business as usual, with careless unconcern or open rudeness for the men in uniform. Since the war had broken into my life and kicked me effectually and forced me to recognize its existence, I felt that all these civilians should point by some small sign that they also recognized the enormity of the cataclysm that had swallowed me. Afterward all, I argued, it was their calamity, too! Life should cease for them or be vastly changed considering it had stopped or been vastly changed for so many of us.

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