|
As the years have passed I have become more proud of my service in WWII and still have my Eisenhower jacket with my Eighth insignia and my ribbons and sometimes marvel that I got a good conduct ribbon. I was neither a hero nor a coward, and was not often in great danger, but sometimes I was and I did my job.
The story about the engagements we were in has been well written. This memoir is about some of the personal, sometimes absurd things that happened to me during the war. I'm sure others experienced some similar events.
I grew up in inner-city Chicago and had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, but got cured pretty quickly in the army. My second day in the army made me realize I had found a home; for a very strange reason. I grew up an only child in a quarrelsome household, went to bed at night hearing arguments and was awakened by them in the morning, so that my stomach was in a knot and I walked to school without having been able to eat the breakfast my mother gave me, which I thought at that time was just my nature. On my second morning in the army they piled eggs, pancakes, bacon, ham, fruit on my tray and I thought I'd try to eat but I knew I couldn't.
I went back for seconds. No nervous stomach.
I loved the army!
I was drafted at Camp Grant, Illinois, and was placed in the ASTP college engineering training program and was sent to infantry basic at Fort Benning, Georgia. I had never met such a variety of young men, and they seemed exotic and strange to me. The Southerners seemed more polite to me than the young guys in Chicago, where if you wandered out of your neighborhood, you might be challenged to a fight. I thought the Southerners were almost courtly, but it didn't mean they weren't tough, and they were nearly all great marksmen. There were fellows from the great eastern cities, talkative with city accents, farm boys who almost leaned forward as if at a plow, very reserved. Among my two best friends were Dave Quigley, a handsome, smooth-talking Irish guy from Cleveland who always conned me out of clean shirts and ties, but was great to go out with because he knew how to get the girls. Of course, after the war he became a lawyer. But Dave ended up in the 101st Airborne and lost a leg parachuting into Bastogne during the battle of the bulge.
My other closest friend was Ralph Scanga, a bulky guy from St. Louis, who had been shot-put champion of the state of Missouri. He also had a brilliant mathematical mind and later became chief electrical engineer in the construction of the St. Louis Centennial Arch.
Since I thought I was a tough kid from Chicago, I got into a tiff with a Corporal Bischoff and challenged him to a fight. We met at the appointed place, where our sergeant met me and promoted me to five days of KP.
One week later I was one of the most disciplined guys around
One thing I loved was the mix: city boys, country boys, Italians, Irish, Polish, German descent, Jews, southern guys still fighting the Civil War, multi-generational Americans, Martinez, a New Yorker from Puerto Rico, an ROTC guy by the name of Patton, a southerner, who hinted he was related to General Patton and might have been. One of the most down to earth, decent and smartest guys I ever knew was a southerner from Atlanta, Creed Taylor. He survived the war, but has passed away. I was deeply fond of him. Of course there was one pathetic guy who was a scapegoat, but for the most part I was surprised by how little ethnic strife there was. We even had a couple of guys who were gay (we called them 'queer' then), but I saw very little antipathy to them. When there were ethnic slurs, Frank Sirianni from New York, a well built guy with attitude would get in that person's face and challenge him to give an intelligent reason for his prejudice or for slurring a guy he might have to count on someday. I never admired anyone as much as I did Sirianni for his moral courage. In our barracks prejudices were rarely expressed, partly because of Sirianni, and partly because we were all in it together.
He was in Company A of the Thirty-Sixth Tank Battalion and was killed at Rheinberg. I was told he was erect in the tank when a shell took him in the head. After the war I wrote to his parents and received a kind letter from them in which they told he had always been that upstanding a guy. Martinez was also killed.
After basic, we were scheduled to be sent to college. If you were from New York you'd probably wind up in Seattle. I couldn't believe it when I was sent to the University of Illinois, a bus trip from Chicago. But then, in a relatively short time the ASTP program
(Take down your service flag, mother, your son's in the ASTP) became politically unpopular, and practically overnight I went from a cushy dorm at the University to bivouac in a Louisiana swamp with Company A of the 36th tank battalion of the Eighth Armored Division.
From heaven to hell in about 72 hours. Welcome to Camp Polk.
Here's how I learned to drive.
When we were back from bivouac a sergeant ordered me to back a tank into an overhead shelter. I'd never even had a bike or roller skates in Chicago, but I had gotten into the habit of never back-talking a non-com, so I slowly climbed into the tank, and Johnny Cain, one of the sweetest, most gentle guys I ever knew, a southern boy who was also killed at Rheinberg, gave me quick instructions, but I guess I missed the one about the brake, because I hit the tank behind me which hit a supporting post, and the whole roof collapsed. 'Teach this idiot how to drive!' yelled the sergeant. (he didn't use the word 'idiot')
Many years later my fourteen year old daughter backed a car into the back of my garage at home when I was away and took the wall off the foundation. When I got over my anger and caught her, I said, “Okay, I'm going to teach you how to drive.” Such are some of the lessons of the service.
We used to go on leave to Shreveport, but I met my first great love, Hazel, in New Iberia, which girl and which place I've never forgotten.
I loved being in the Eighth, tanks and half-tracks, and non-coms and older army guys that thought we college kids were useless, so I believe most of us worked harder to prove ourselves. Never say 'sir' to a non-com. And of course we all know something most folks don't know, that what they think are jeeps are really peeps.
We were shipped to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey and I got into New York a couple of times, which was quite over-whelming, but of course a few of us headed for an upstairs ball-room, where the music was sweet and jazzy and so were the girls.
We were in a convoy of ships heading overseas and I got lucky in a crap game and won $3,000, which was an astronomical sum at the time, but I probably should have hidden the money in my shoes and laced them tight, but I didn't and the next day the money was gone. I would go on to do some more stupid things in the war.
For example: somewhere in the north of Germany I liberated a motorcycle, had never been on one, and took it for a wonderful spin up a lonely highway about twenty miles and came to a nice little town where the people gathered around me, apparently never having seen an American soldier. When I tried to speak with them, I could not understand the accent, although I had a pretty good command of German. Seeing my frustration, a gentleman came forward and in perfect English explained to me that I was now in Holland, the people were speaking Dutch, and with all due respect the Germans were right outside the town, we had not taken it yet.
I hurried back to base toute de suite.
Another time I got on a horse for the first time in my life. Stirrups, bridle, no saddle, and I headed up a hill along a stream to my right. This very smart horse did not want me on him and stayed off the path with both right legs slipping and sliding in the stream, with untrimmed boughs and branches slapping me as we went. How did I make it back? I have a picture of me on the horse. I guess they let us grow our hair overseas.
One time my buddy, Jimmie Newell, did something even sillier. We were guarding about 200 German prisoners in a beer hall, they downstairs, we on a second floor balcony. I came to relieve Jimmy, and he was sitting at a table with four or five prisoners around examining his carbine which they had taken apart together to see how different it was from theirs. I slowly herded them back downstairs and let Jimmie take his break.
One of the most horrible things I ever saw was when we had crossed the Rhine, and there was total devastation on the other side because of our tremendous artillery fire. I was in a half-track and saw the bottom half of a woman with a pig nibbling at her entrails. Two of us jumped off and shooed it away, but as soon as we got back aboard, it returned.
At this time I was in the military police, having been pulled out of my tank company because we needed German speakers to deal with prisoners.
To go back a moment, the time I realized what the Germans had done to Europe, was when the Division was in Pont-a-Mousson in France, and the people were skinny, hungry, and women were offering themselves to soldiers for a loaf of bread.
Because of my ability to speak German which I had learned from my mother and in high school, I was made an MP, part of Eighth Armored Headquarters. Suddenly, I was a cop! I didn't like leaving my tank company, but as Bill Mauldin once said, a moving target attracts the eye.
This came true, of course, when my old Company A was decimated at Rheinberg. As soon as I heard of it I got to them. It was late at night and a group of my friends who had survived were sitting around a campfire in a state of shock and I felt such guilt that I apologized to them for not being with them and they told me that was crazy, that I had been lucky.
Jim Volski was there and crying because he'd seen Sirianni get killed and he'd always said he didn't like him, but when he was dead Volski was grief-stricken. I believe Volski was killed sometime later. Bernard Steinberg had pulled Sergeant Gauldoni out of a burning tank and would later get a bronze star, but Gauldoni was in such a state of shock, he didn't even say “Thank you”. My sweet southern friend, Johnny Cain, (Alabama?) was killed in the tank of which I'd been a crew member. Well, yes, I'd been lucky, but to this day I feel the guilt at not having been with my friends.
The history of the engagement at Rheinberg, the dug-in Tigers, has been written, but the next few weeks are a burning haze in my memory. Going through Cologne and seeing the famous Cathedral standing was amazing. The roof was destroyed and we'd knocked out the windows, but what the Germans had done to the spirit of that great Cathedral that should have stood for peace was much worse than what we had done.
I remember passing through a German city named Paderborn which was nothing but rubble except for one apartment building three or four stories high that was slashed right down vertically so that you could see some apartments like a model house with a missing wall so you could see the furniture still in place, and I wondered what had happened to the occupants.
One of my most intense experiences was filled with horror and humor side by side. I had been placed on a four way corner in a Dutch town through which the Division was passing and it was my job to signal the vehicles to make a left turn. The Germans were not far away and they were lobbing shells at the corner periodically, hoping to hit one of our vehicles, or maybe me.
It was a wet muddy day and as our tanks skidded around that sharp left the tracks would fling mud on the front steps of a house on that corner. Each time that occurred, a Dutch lady would pop out like out of a cuckoo clock and sweep off the mud. Then the next vehicle would come by and she'd do it again. And again.
Two of the houses on the corner had been shattered, but when there was a vehicle slow-down, I'd duck into the ruins of one of them. When the Division had finally passed through, they forgot to pick me up, so I went into the basement to spend the night and I saw the dark side of the humor. A husband, wife, and two daughters were huddling there in a state of shock. They shook, they couldn't speak, their eyes were wide open and they stared right through me, and they would sort of jolt when one of the periodic shells landed nearby. So there it was, the busy Dutch housewife, and these folks in their hardly human condition, humor and tragedy, side by side. As I think of it, the cuckoo clock lady was probably in a mental condition also from the continual shelling.
One day we were camping out on the floor of a ruined factory. Corporal Schock was sound asleep and I was tinkering with a German P-38 revolver, when I absent-mindedly pulled the trigger, and I saw that it was pointed straight at the corporal. My heart stopped because he was not moving, and I went to see where I had hit him, but I could find no blood. Still, when I shook him he didn't move. Finally, I could find no wound and began to punch him on the shoulder, and he woke up to complain. He had slept right through the shot that had just missed him. I'd been careless with a firearm.
One of the things I observed was that in every country we passed through, the people were often hungry and very much deprived. In Germany they had the loot, they were rich and fat and I was astonished when we might stay a night or two in someone's house and see how much food and stuff they had.
Something else is important to say. After we had crossed the Rhine, and even earlier, as I have read history since, the scholars tell us everyone knew the war had already been lost by the Germans. That was not the feeling we had as the V-I and V-II rockets passed over our heads. One time we were on a road and strafed by a strange airplane that had no propeller. My God, we thought, what was that? Well, we'd never seen a jet airplane before, but the Germans had them. Of course, they went so fast the bullets were far apart and their strafing was ineffective. But we were always worried about what they would come up with next, always hints of a new secret weapon.. The Battle of the Bulge was never forgotten. Now, you can read history and see how close they came to getting the atom bomb before us. They were an ingenious and determined people and very dangerous. As early as l942 they were producing heavy water in occupied Norway. Who can forget Werner Von Braun and Von Heisenberg
Finally, my one act of real heroism and the secret reason behind it.
I was with four or five other men in the back of a small truck doing about 45 on a narrow highway when we came under continuous fire from the sides of the road. At about the same time the door of the trailer we were towing with all our worldly possessions in it came open and some our backpacks began to slide toward the opening. Someone asked the driver to stop so we could close it, but he was not about to do so. Who would volunteer to stand on the hitch and snap and latch the door shut? Nobody wanted to do it or throw fingers or whatever, so I finally volunteered and stepped out onto the hitch, balancing myself on the bumpy road, under periodic fire, reached out, closed and snapped the door tight, and tight-roped back to the truck. Why was I so heroic?
I had a picture of Hazel in my backpack.
From having been an undisciplined kid I became a decent obedient soldier. I was more content with my life in the army than with my civilian life and I learned things I would never have learned about other folks in my own country, about other countries and other cultures, and above all about being part of a group where your life was often in their hands and where their lives were sometimes in yours.
At one time we were on a road which became impassible because, although a wide road, it became crowded with the people we called PDP's, displaced persons, who were being released from various prison or work camps, or fleeing the Russians who were moving west very rapidly. One night I slept in the cold basement of a building with many of them; two teen-age sisters, whose language I didn't understand, expressed gratitude for their freedom by sleeping, one on each side of me, with their arms around me. No sex. They were keeping me warm. How do you forget something like that?
After the war in Germany we were in a Czech town named Dobzany near the city of Pilsen, where the people were good to us, but somewhat wary for pretty complicated political reasons. A few weeks later I was in Camp Lucky Strike, preparing for deployment to the Pacific and the invasion of Japan. I have never doubted the correctness of our use of the atom bomb, although in later years it became controversial. I have always believed that you take care of the troops that have taken care of you, first and above all. The Japanese had been fighting to the death. Why would they stop on their own shores?
I have always been proud to have been a member of the Eighth Armored Division, proud of my devotion to my comrades, of the depth of my feeling for those who were wounded or lost, and of my personal grief that I was not with Company A of the 36th Tank Battalion when it was assaulted at Rheinberg. I have always been proud to have served the country to which I owe so much gratitude. If I were asked, I would go again tomorrow.
Right after the war I went to a Cleveland VA hospital to visit Dave Quigley, but he was hard to find, since, lost leg and all he had been scooting all around the hospital in his wheel chair. All the nurses knew him. After the war he married his Mary with whom he had a life-long marriage. Who would have thought?
It is gratifying to me to find my name on the roster of the Eighth under Headquarters, Military Police. It is a roster that owes much to the people who have created the archive. It is history.
My name on the roster is Louis Rabinovitz which I changed right after the war to Bartfield, my mother's maiden name, to honor her and Soldier Bartfield, her first cousin who brought her to the United States in I920, and whom I idolized. He had been an armed forces boxing champion in WWI.
My mother's family, my grandparents, Jonah and Frieda, two uncles and three aunts and many cousins whom I never met all died in the Holocaust because only my mother came to the United States. So my service in WWII has many levels of meaning for me and I am forever grateful to this incredible country and to all of my comrades.
After the war I spent one year working in Wadsworth Neuron-Psychiatric Hospital in Los Angeles, with veterans who had experienced severe emotional trauma.
Also, Hazel dumped me.
| 
