Telling Jack
I PUT all the letters I had written to those press outlets away in a bottom drawer. I didn’t destroy them because… well, right then I wasn’t absolutely sure what I was going to do. Because right then, frankly the idea seemed so well… daunting. So I didn’t, just in case. Instead I went round to see Jack that evening, and landed up having an early dinner with him and his wife Mary.
“How’s weapons training going?” I asked him.
“A few more weeks and I’m done.”
“Then what?”
“More training, or waiting it out in a repple-depple.”
“A what?”
“A military personnel replacement center.”
“I really thought you’d opt for intelligence, or something high-brow like that. Not the infantry.”
“Why not the infantry?”
“Aren’t modern wars fought by planes and tanks, not men with rifles?”
“The infantry was good enough for dad, so I decided to follow in his footsteps.”
“I guess he was a doughboy too, wasn’t he.”
“They don’t call us that anymore, now they call us dogfaces,” Jack corrected me.
“You don’t look anything like a dog?”
“I didn’t realize generals had their own photographers. I thought only Presidents rated that,” Mary said.
“It was news to me too,” I nodded.
“So what are you going to do?” Jack asked me.
“What do you think I should do?”
“We’re all getting told this war’s going to last a long, long time,” Jack said, as we sat down at the dinner table.
“But we are going to win it, aren’t we?” asked Mary.
“That’s what they tell us anyway.”
“Maybe that’s what they tell German soldiers too,” said Mary, clearly a good deal less enthusiastic about what Jack was doing than Jack was.
“Our side has just too many men and too many resources,” he continued. “You realize Germany and Japan are now at war with not just us, Britain and the Soviet Union, but with most of South America, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and China.”
“Doesn’t sound like they’ve much of a chance,” I said to Mary trying to be as comforting as I could.
“It’s still going to take years to beat them,” Jack said covering Mary’s hand.
“What about you, Mary, what are you going to do?”
“It looks like I’ve got myself the one kind of deferment you can’t hand back.”
“What’s that?”
“Being a mother.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Not the best timing in the world, but yes.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, without quite being sure whether I meant it.
“It was an accident of course. We weren’t trying to have one, but the rhythm method isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.”
“I’ll make sure to tell the Holy Father that, when I reach Rome,” I said.
“Do,” Mary smiled knowingly.
“I take it you haven’t told Margaret anything about this yet?” Jack asked.
“I wanted to talk to you first. To get your opinion if it was the right thing to do.”
“Liar,” said Mary laughingly. “I’ve never heard you ask Jack for his opinion about anything since the day I first met you.”
She was right of course, I never had. “Isn’t there a first time for everything?”
“Not for fibbing, no.”
“Okay. I just wanted to know how Jack thinks Margaret will take it.”
“I think she’d much prefer it if you stayed a lot further out of harm’s way,” said Jack.
“She doesn’t seem to be staying out of harm’s way. And you seem hell-bent not to either.”
“I’m a man.”
“And what’s Margaret’s excuse?”
He shrugged and we had a nice meal, as Mary was a very good cook. We made a lot of small talk to try and avoid dealing with the issue any more. But then there were probably lots of families all over America having dinner that evening, and not dealing with their issues either. Then I left, but only after I made sure neither Mary nor Jack would mention anything about it to Margaret when they next wrote to her.
Then I sat alone in the park for a while wondering if I could really go through with it. Then I looked around the streets at all the uniforms and wondered whether I could not go through with it, and have to handle living in a country where just about every other able-bodied person was on some kind of war-footing, everyone except me.
There was a late showing of a new movie I wanted to see about a café owner called Rick in a remote town in North Africa called Casablanca, who said he never took sides in anything either, even world wars. Of course it turned out he had taken sides in a lot of things without telling anyone, including the Italian invasion of Ethiopia where he’d run guns to help the Ethiopians, and the Spanish Civil War when he’d fought against Franco. So when he did join in at least it was invariably on the side Hollywood would agree should get the white horses. But then this Rick was Humphrey Bogart wasn’t he, and that’s what Humphrey Bogart types do, don’t they? But then one fateful day his old girlfriend Ilsa arrives, God Ingrid Bergman’s ravishing, what a Christy Girl she’d make. But by now she’s married to a dashing Czech resistance leader. “Deux cointreau,” Paul Henreid always said as he ordered cocktails for both of them, as if it was unbecoming for a lady to do that for herself. Which I kind of agree with, at least I did when I saw the movie. But as he’s still carrying a major torch for Ilsa, that forces Rick to choose between love and virtue; that is slipping off into the night with her, and she seems to be quite up for that, helping them both to escape, so she could help her husband keep up the fight against Germany. Of course Rick eventually did the right thing. But like I said, that’s what Humphrey Bogart types do, isn’t it? And I even recognized the Belgian roulette player in it that frequented Rick’s Café. That was a good omen, I remember thinking. He was the same guy who played the German pilot Greer Garson had one-handedly arrested in Mrs. Miniver. That was a clear sign what I should do if there ever was one. And by the time I came out I had made up my mind that if a North African café owner and a Belgian roulette player could both chose the right side and fight Hitler up close and personal, then so could I, and I could sell Margaret on it into the bargain.
So the following morning I burned all those letters to all those press outlets and called my godfather at the War Department number he’d left for me. He was in a meeting so I talked to Major Landers. “It’s Patricia Hampton. I’ve decided to accept the general’s offer,” I said.
“What offer?” I heard him say.
“To come over to Italy and cover his campaign.”
“Oh you have, have you?” he responded.
“Will you let him know, please?”
“I’ll be back in touch,” he said, and that was the end of that conversation.
***
A few days later I received a somewhat more co-operative call from Major Landers informing me I was to spend four weeks in something called basic non combatant women’s junior officer and NCO training, or NCJWN as he termed it. He further informed me that the instructors there would be aware that I was a photographer, but should not be privy to the fact of what my exact function would be. I asked him what kind of training I would receive, and he responded with something to the effect that it would involve skills that would assist me in learning the ‘Fifth Army way’. He did not see fit to elucidate on what exactly that ‘way’ was either. There would be a lot of other girls there he further informed me, from the Women’s Army, Navy and Marine Corps. It was to take place at Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Officer Training School, or FDMPAOTS as he called it. And towards the end of the course I would receive further instruction as to where I would be sent next. I asked him whether it was possible to speak to General Clark, and he said that was classified. I asked him what could possibly be classified about whether I could speak to him or not, and received no response other than being told I would be representing Fifth Army at Des Moines, and therefore not to do anything that brought it into disrepute.
It turned out to be a nice enough facility Fort Des Moines did, though I’d prefer not spending my whole career locked up there, as I had an increasingly sneaking suspicion large parts of the instructional staff may have. There was about a hundred of us gals all still in civvies, and at our introductory lecture were told it had been the place where they trained the first black American officers in the First World War. All of us girls, who were exclusively white I should note, nodded thoughtfully at that. Whether those nodding thoughts were all similar thoughts I can’t be sure. I remember what mine was though, that I hadn’t been aware we had black officers in the First World War, or for that matter planned on having any in this one either. We were also told that somewhat hammy actor Ronnie Reagan trained at Fort Des Moines too, so we were all in good company. You probably won’t remember him, but he played in that silly boys’ film Knute Rockne, All American and then in the only slightly more intelligent King’s Row, that time as a man who had no legs. It’s none of my business, but I for one never thought he was ever going to make it as an actor anyway, and it was probably smart of him to start looking for some other gig to make ends meet.
We were then marched off to a store room, to the extent any of us could march, and each given a package. Mine contained a pair of drab-olive officer’s jackets, two drab olive skirts, drab olive dress pants, six drab olive shirts, a drab field hat, drab shoes and assorted other drab accessories. Thankfully the package did not also contain drab lingerie, so presumably we were left to accessorize those any way we chose. Although I heard later they did start doling even them out to the nurses in the field. They also informed us with much pride that the whole uniform combination had been specially designed for us Army gals by one of the finest couturiers in New York; one of the finest near-sighted ones maybe. Because when I got back to the dormitory, and I thought I’d seen the last of dormitories at Sarah Lawrence, I discovered that on closer inspection the official drab shoes looked like farmers’ boots with the tops cut off, the official issue drab hose were of a style even a nun wouldn’t be seen buried in, and the drab workaday fatigues… well let’s just say they brought new resonance to the word ‘formless.’ And the dress uniform, well let’s just say they were not up to Christy Girl standards. I did discover however in the rest room mirror that the field hat could be made to look far cuter if worn at a rakish angle. But the first time I tried pulling that act in class the instructor announced that none of us on any account should wear them at any sort of angle, rakish or otherwise. War, he said, was serious business and not to be taken flippantly, except if you were a flyer with the U.S. Army Air Corps. And flippancy was only permitted amongst them because they didn’t tend to live very long.
We were also each given a raincoat which was not quite drab, more sort of off-white I’d say, and slightly reminiscent of the one Humphrey Bogart wore in Paris before he became a café owner in Casablanca. You remember it, don’t you? One minute it was soaked by rain, and the next it had dried as if by magic? Well I guess that’s what being stood up by Ingrid Bergman does for you. Except the first time I tried mine out in an Iowa rainstorm it didn’t keep any water out, and then wouldn’t dry for four days. Apparently the local Des Moines male population didn’t think too much of them either, because on the few occasions we were given passes into town and wore them, the one half who were quite sure we weren’t some new official military comfort girls presumed we were actually Russian, there being many rumors going round the somewhat isolated town of Des Moines that half the Soviet military was female.
Before commencing any kind of assignment-specific training as they called it, we were made to do a lot of calisthenics to ensure we promptly reached a physical condition necessary to learn whatever else it was the Army was going to later ask us to. But as none of our male physical trainers ever really thought gals should be in uniform in the first place, the exercises we were required to perfect seemed more suitable to a circus act than military office. Much of those calisthenics revolved around a young lady prominent in the Fort Des Moines exercise manual who went by the name of Josephine Jerk – sounds a lot like Violet Bott, doesn’t it? Poor Josephine alas was apparently not made of the right stuff to help defend her country either, and did not engage in her physical training with, as they say, a full heart. Ergo whatever Josephine did we were to do the exact opposite, that was the theory anyway, but perhaps an impractical one, as most of the time it wasn’t clear from the aforementioned manual what exactly Josephine was doing.
Thereafter we spent an intensive few days all being taught how to differentiate the many ranks above, below and equivalent to us in the U.S. Armed Forces, so we’d know who to salute and when, and who to make sure saluted us, as men of a junior rank should get used to seeing girls in military uniform. “Why’s that?” I asked our instructor, in an attempt to make it clear I was paying attention.
Alas though, my instructor had I feared spent too much time in the bars of Des Moines bonding with the locals, and responded, “Because if any of our men ever found themselves in a dogfight with the Soviet Air force they could find themselves getting shot at by them too.” I did not quite understand what he meant by that remark, but told him I believed the Russians were on our side now. He said he hadn’t been briefed on that, but would check and get back to us.
We were also shown a rather extensive list of training films, including some on personal hygiene. They did not as yet have any about female hygiene, but showed us some about men’s instead. They were not useful, at least not as regards hygiene, though they did wonders for the morale of the youngest gals among us. They also showed us all a film called Report from the Aleutians. It was about soldiers preparing for combat and they told us it was made by John Huston who also directed The Maltese Falcon. They told us it was hot off the presses and we should consider ourselves fortunate to be amongst the first recruits to see it. It was a rather odd piece if you ask me, that seemed to stress the monotony of war, how much soldiers like to get letters from their folk back home, how much they smoked, a filthy habit in my opinion, and how they went about digging latrines. It also had a rather poignant funeral scene after one of the flight crew was killed in an emergency landing. All in all it did not strike me as particularly useful either. We also saw Huston’s new documentary December 1941, a very stark and factual newsreel-based account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It affected me deeply, and the Boadicea still lurking somewhere inside my bosom whispered that when I was done liberating Italy, I should consider maybe heading for the Pacific, and showing the Japs a thing or two as well.
By the end of the second week I’d learned that practically all the rest of the class were headed for more intelligible functions than anyone ever seemed to think I was. Some were on the way to being Yeomanettes, that’s what the Navy girls were called, and others Hello Girls, which was what the Army Signal Corps gals were called. So they both got taken into lectures to which I was apparently not to be made privy, and received a lot of training in yeomanetting and helloing. They did not however have anyone on the staff who knew how to shoot wartime photographs. So having heard through the grapevine that I was also going to be writing for the Army vewspaper Stars and Stripes I was instead given typing instructions. Being the completely honest person I then presumed myself, although I don’t anymore, I promptly made clear to my instructors they would have as hard a time making me proficient at that as the staff at Sarah Lawrence had. In fact it was the only class I ever took there that I fully flunked, though I didn’t tell them that. But they told me very pointedly that after this war like as not there would be far less men around, and American girls who didn’t type would never find husbands. I responded that I wasn’t sure I really wanted one. That was a mistake, for any lingering doubts that I should henceforth be labeled arrogant, uncooperative, not a team player, and worst of all somewhat un-American, were gone.
I was in fact considering an official protest to the powers that be that my whole time there was fast becoming pointless, when owing to an administrative error, of which there were many at FDMPAOTS, a rumor started doing the rounds about me. It proposed that one of the reasons I was such a misanthropic loner, was that my real function was to be dropped behind enemy lines in an incredibly dangerous assignment to photograph certain ultra-secret Italian military installations. The rumor also apparently had it that was why I was forced to be so disagreeably evasive. This rumor of course was most likely the result of no-one being able to come up with an explanation of what an Italian-speaking photographer was doing at FDMPAOTS in the first place; and nature as they say does abhor a vacuum. Overnight their whole attitude to me changed however, and as my life expectancy now seemed even less than U.S. Army Air Corps flight crew, I was told they’d turn a blind eye if a wanted to wear my new drab field hat slightly, but not excessively, rakishly.
Immediately they also came up with an assignment specific training course for me that I was told I should in no event communicate with any of the Yeomanettes or Hello Girls. I was escorted off into far away buildings and taught how to shoot something called an M1942 rifle and how to field strip and re-assemble it. The stripping I had no problem with but alas the re-assembling I never quite cottoned on to. I also found that carrying the aforesaid M1942 rifle made me look like Al Capone and enquired if it came with a violin case to make it less ostentatious, that being an important consideration given my real assignment. They said they didn’t quite get my point, but could understand such gallows humor given my dim survival prospects. So I said it just looked kind of old for what I had to do, and did they have anything newer. They told me the M1942 was soon being replaced by the M1A1, but they didn’t as yet have any, and if I could delay the operation they could maybe find me one. I said that was unfortunately not possible. They said that was indeed unfortunate, but satisfied I could manage firing the M1942 as long as someone put it together and loaded it for me, another problem I had with the damn thing, the aforesaid M1942 was promptly taken away from me and never returned, which struck me as rather illogical.
I was then given a course in differentiating American tanks from German ones, and turned out to have quite a knack for it. But then it was probably in the blood, as I was very good at bird-spotting at Shady L too. I did not fare quite so well however in recognizing naval warships, and kept on getting confused between the German battle cruiser Bismarck and the U.S.S. Iowa, which was a serious gaffe given we were in Des Moines. I comforted myself that this might not be crucial, as neither ship was very likely to ever turn up in the Mediterranean, particularly the Bismarck, which as I pointed out to the instructor had been sunk two years before. He did not believe that either, and asked me how a photographer could know such things. I told him that the photography thing was just a cover too, and I wasn’t being dropped behind enemy lines in deepest Italy to take pictures of anything. “Then what are you being dropped there to do?” he asked. So I told him that I was the leader of a suicide team tasked with assassinating Mussolini. To which he replied, “Who’s Mussolini?”
At the end of all that well-meaning nonsense I bad goodbye to Fort Des Moines, was sent back to Washington, and over the course of a week inoculated against every disease known to man, including, but in no way limited to, tetanus, typhus, typhoid and malaria. I was then taken to the top floor of a rather unprepossessing warehouse and given a whole load of other things that were apparently deemed necessary for the execution of my new responsibilities. These included a helmet, mosquito net, camouflage summer fatigues, strange waterproof green coveralls – purpose unknown, gloves that allegedly resisted gas attacks, a water canteen, and a gas mask, presumably in case the gloves didn’t work. They told me that given I was not joining the infantry I would not be getting an entrenching tool, a bayonet, a meat can, which I was advised was army-speak for a mess kit, or a bed roll. I enquired of the sergeant who supplied me with all these items what exactly I should do with them, and he gave me something called a musette bag to put them in. He also told me I was one of the lucky ones as only officers, paratroopers and specialist engineers got musette bags at all, and everyone else had to make do with something called the M-1928 haversack, which he told me was very much inferior. Truth to tell, as he admitted to me, there was such a textile shortage that some poor folk had even had to settle for an M-1910 haversack which had seen service in the First World War. I made the mistake of saying how dreadful that was, and as a reward got to hear a few more minutes worth about the new secret haversack they were working on, which was to be called the M-1944. I told him I would look forward to getting one someday, and he told me not to mention it to anyone else as it was real hush-hush. As it turned out not all my kit would fit in my musette bag, so I was given a barracks bag too. Before leaving, I asked him why every piece of American battle equipment seemed to be known by only letters and numbers, and wouldn’t they all be the better for some catchy names. He told me that kind of decision was well above his pay grade.
Shortly thereafter I received orders to put on my new fatigues and turn up at some obscure military airport north of Washington for debarkation to the U.K. Jack came with me and we found ourselves standing on the apron of a temporary airport. He was in his rather dashing new Captain’s uniform, lucky him, ‘pinks and greens’ I now know they called it. Me, I looked more like a bag lady. “So what kind of plane’s that?” I asked him while I suspiciously inspected a stubby two-engine thing with its props already fired up and bearing British markings. “Looks a bit like the DC-3 we flew back from Rome in.”
“It’s a converted one. We call it a Gooney Bird.”
“Where did that name come from?”
“It’s some kind of albatross.”
“How fitting.”
“Seems the Brits don’t like the name either. They to call it a Dakota,” a female voice behind us added.
“South or North?” I enquired as I turned round to see who it was.
“Stands for Douglas Aircraft Company Transport Aircraft. There’s hundreds of them across the pond,” our pilot said. Well the owner of the voice certainly was a pilot, and was replete with a pilot’s helmet, a pilot’s set of goggles, a pilot’s leather windbreaker, a pilot’s rather devil-may-care white scarf, and a pilot’s hat set at the kind of suitably rakish angle my instructors had not permitted until learning of my limited life expectancy. Except this particular pilot was a girl like me, and so was her co-pilot. “First Officer Helen Calder, British Air Transport Auxiliary,” she said in a Canadian accent. I couldn’t remember if First Officer’s outranked me but as I was learning that most everyone else in the world did, I saluted anyway. “They let girls pilot these things?”
“As long as we don’t loop the loop we can transport anything we’re rated on. Everything except flying boats.”
“Why not them too?”
“Oh you know men,” she said, eyeing Jack with a grin. “They have to be certain there’s some things they can do that we can’t.” And they went on board.
“I guess it’s time then, eh?” I said to Jack slipping my musette bag on my back.
“They gave you one of those eh, lucky girl,” he said as he checked it out. “Amazing how much you can cram into it. And it’s got a semi-hidden compartment on the inside bottom too, you know.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Officers like to use it to stash letters from their wives, or anything else they want to keep away from prying eyes.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“It’s a long flight. You’ve got to go up the coast to Gander, then over to Iceland, down to Prestwick, Scotland then London. I brought you some reading material,” and he gave me a bag of books. I pulled one out. It was by somebody called Karl von Clausewitz, was very thick, and entitled On War. “They made us read it at officer’s school,” Jack laughed. “Couldn’t understand a word of it myself, but maybe you’ll find it good for something.”
“Best of luck when you get your orders,” I said and I saluted him too.
“You don’t have to salute your own brother, you know.”
“I do if he’s a Captain.”
He laughed and saluted back, “And best of luck when you give Margaret the news.”
“How do you know I haven’t already?”
“Because I know you, never put off till tomorrow what you can push till the day after.” And I gave him a big hug, kissed him on the cheek, and headed on board.
I watched him standing on the apron for as long as I could. He wasn’t just my favorite inner city schoolteacher anymore. He was America, everything that was good about us and nothing that was bad, if there was such a thing.
And I was so very, very proud of him.