There's the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way.
—World War II saying
This is the Army Mr. Jones!
No private rooms or telephones!
You had your breakfast in bed before,
But you won't have it there anymore!
—Words and music by Irving Berlin, 1942, This Is the Army, Mr. Jones
One hot summer day in 1941, a truck convoy from the 110th Quartermaster Regiment rolled by a Memphis, Tennessee, golf course. Seeing several women golfers on the course, the troops called out in typical army fashion, with whistles, shouts, invitations, and wolf calls. They saw a casually dressed man about to tee off and cried out, “Yoohoo,” “Fore,” and “Hey, buddy, need a caddy?” “Buddy” was sixty-two-year-old Lt. Gen. Ben Lear, commander of the Second Army. He was in civilian clothing, indulging in his favorite pastime of a round of golf.
Lear ordered the troops to behave, but they, having no idea who he was, told him to butt out, using slightly different and more obscene language. They found out who the aging duffer was when he ordered them to dismount and take a hike, literally—fifteen miles in record-breaking Memphis heat. The Arkansas Gazette got hold of the story and played it up big. The national press picked it up, and it became the ‘Yoohoo Crisis.” The War Department and General Lear were flooded with letters from indignant parents of draftees. One U.S. senator, Missouri's Bennett Clark, got into the act and tried to prevent Lear from being promoted. It didn't work, and ‘Yoohoo” Ben Lear went on to become Eisenhower's deputy in Europe.
Author Marion Hargrove wrote of a fictitious letter home going around the barracks at Fort Bragg.
Dear unfortunate civilian friend:
I am very enthusiastic about Army life. We lie around in bed every morning until at least six o'clock. This, of course, gives us plenty of time to get washed and dressed and make the bunks, etc., by 6:10. At 6:15 we stand outside and shiver while some [deleted] blows a bugle. After we are reasonably chilled, we grope our way through the darkness to the mess hall. Here we have a hearty breakfast consisting of an unidentified liquid and a choice of white or rye crusts.
After gorging ourselves with this delicious repast, we waddle our way back to the barracks. We have nothing to do until 7:30 so we just sit around and scrub toilets, mop the floors, wash the windows and pick up all the matchsticks and cigarette butts within a radius of 2,000 feet of the barracks.
Soon the sergeant comes in and says, “Come out in the sunshine, kiddies!” So we go out and bask in the wonderful North Carolina sunshine—of course, we stand knee-deep in the wonderful North Carolina sand. To limber up, we do a few simple calisthenics, such as touching your toes with both feet off the ground and grabbing yourself by the hair and holding yourself at arm's length.
At 8 o'clock we put on our light packs and go for a tramp in the hills. The light pack includes gun, bayonet, canteen, fork, knife, spoon, meat can, cup, shaving kit, pup tent, raincoat, cartridge belt, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher, ten pins, rope, tent pole, hand ax, small spade, and a few other negligible items. Carrying my light pack, I weigh 217/4 pounds. I weighed 131 pounds when I left home, so you can see how easy it is to gain weight in the Army.
When the draftees reached their training centers, their lives began to change dramatically. For some, the time in service represented years of lost opportunity. For others, the military itself was an opportunity.
For recruits and their loved ones, it was a time of sorrow. Karl Jensen, of Caldwall, New Jersey, had been gone only a short time when his wife, Sigrid, wrote him this letter:
My Darling:
You've only been gone a few hours and already the house is waiting for you. I came back from driving you out to the avenue and began mentally putting away our life together to make room for the new one. The main difficulty is there is too much of you here. Your magazines, your books, your ash receiver, your papers still where you dropped them last night, your clothes spilling out of your closet, and even your pajamas flung on the bed. But it wasn't till I picked up the shirt you'd worn last night that the feel of you was unbearable. … I stood there holding the shirt thinking it must go to the laundry. But I couldn't put it in the hamper. I couldn't even lay it down….
It's not yet 10:15, but I'm going to bed—I'll pretend we're together, and that every once in a while I must nudge you to make you move over, or stop snoring! And if I dream about you, tomorrow will be a lovely day.
I love you,
Sigrid
A divisional camp needed 40,000 acres of varied terrain. It needed a good supply of water, good roads, and good rail facilities. Training camps spotted the country, with every state having at least one or two. The majority were on the West and East Coasts and in the South; land in the South literally was dirt cheap, so many camps were built there.
In 1945, Fort Benning, Georgia, was the largest of all the training camps; with 95,000 men, it was as large as many cities. Fort Jackson, South Carolina, had 65,000 men; Fort Bragg, North Carolina, had 76,000. Farther south were Fort Blanding, Florida (54,000), Fort Clai-borne, Louisiana (55,000), Fort Hood, Texas (68,000), and Fort Shelby, Mississippi (86,000).
Wherever they were, camps all looked pretty much alike. Usually they were built from the Quartermaster Corps’ 700 Series plans, which were drawn up in the 1930s: bare, angular, wood construction two stories high—“nothing above two stories except the flagpole”— housing bunks for sixty-three occupants with banks of toilets, lavatories, and showerheads. The original plans specified unpainted buildings, but Eleanor Roosevelt once visited an army post and she, with help from the Painting and Decorating Contractors of America, succeeded in getting the buildings painted—all the same color. Mrs. Roosevelt's suggestion to curve camp streets to make them more pleasant failed, however. The sameness made it difficult to tell one military camp from another, one camp street from another. Recruits often got lost.
In the beginning, the nation's military training machine ran a bit wobbly. Improperly trained men were unfamiliar with either the system or their weapons. The story goes of a new replacement plunked down in a firefight near the Rapido River in Italy. With the Germans only ten yards away, he looked at his Ml rifle and shouted, “How do you load this thing?” In America's Civil War, Union general Ulysses S. Grant once complained that his men, too, were so green that they didn't know how to load their weapons. The more things change….
In World War II, entire National Guard units often were feder-alized, leaving entire towns wondering what would happen if their young men didn't come home again. Many divisions, however, were a hodgepodge of ethnic, regional, and economic backgrounds. Still, amidst this hodgepodge, recruits found friends. An Italian American soldier might find himself surrounded by other Italian-speaking draftees; the same held for many other ethnic groups. Without trying too hard, you could get together a group of musicians—jazz, country and western (hillbilly, it was called then), or even classical. Card and dice games were everywhere, even though the military officially frowned on them. A former New York bartender said he'd “seen all kinds of characters, but this place has got me doubled in spades.”
Just as letter receiving became the major way that draftees kept up with life back home, letter writing became a major way to let the folks know how great or bad or tough or easy life was in the training camps. Because many training camps were in the South, northern recruits often wrote home about being stationed in “Tobacco Road” or “somewhere in the damn Alabama woods.”
When new recruits found themselves thrown in among others, they learned how different a world it was beyond their hometown. The guy in the next bunk could be just about anybody, especially if you believed tales reminiscent of boys’ camps. One soldier wrote home about his new buddy who'd been an elephant trainer in the circus; another told of having met someone who “knows the Lone Ranger personally.” And, of course, there was the almost daily refighting of America's Civil War, with each side easily identified by their accents and each side giving the other hell when the barracks’ lights went out at night.
As a college graduate, Elliot Johnson (the man who'd had his new army pants tailored for fifty cents) was sent to officer candidate school at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. It was, he said, “my first real taste of the South.” He remembers reporting to his battery commander, saluting, and saying, “Lieutenant Johnson reporting for duty as ordered, sir!” His commander waited, not returning his salute, while Johnson stood rigid, sweat “rolling down my forehead” and a “fly on the end of my nose.” Finally, after a very long time, the officer asked, “Northerner or Southerner?” Johnson said, “I'm a Westerner, sir.” The commander threw him a salute and said, “Relax, you'll do.”
Sooner or later, barracks became much like small villages. As in a village, small talk and gossip were among the means of diversion, often with persons as the objects of conversation. Each barracks had its share of wise guys (know-it-alls who spoke out about everything in a degrading manner) and sad sacks (generally inept and unlucky individuals). Former Walt Disney artist George Baker had a cartoon strip in Yank magazine featuring Sad Sack, a soldier who became the epitome of incompetence.
One thing that recruits grew competent in was the fine art of cursing. Words that to a later generation became known as “the seven words you can't say on television” were environmentally acceptable. Words they'd never thought of using at the corner drugstore became commonplace, to the extent when they went home on furlough or leave they often caught themselves saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. “I get stuck with a lot of chickenshit duty,” a new soldier might complain in a letter home, not even thinking about how the word likely would shock mom, who'd refuse to let the recruit's younger siblings read the letter. Snafu (situation normal, all fucked up) and tarfu (things are really fucked up) were accepted in the barracks but weren't customary at a soldier's or sailor's dining table back home. A recruit would shock the folks he'd grown up with by asking for “more fuckin’ peas.” It caused consternation around the dining table on Elm Street, but it didn't bother most recruits in the mess hall.
This change in language mores shocked mom and amazed sociologists and psyc hologists, experts who never could agree on why the “sociologically obscene” became everyday words and phrases. Some claimed that it was the recruits’ way of getting around a lack of vocabulary in their new life; others called it an “aggression against all of those who accept the taboo.” Most social scientists had trouble writing of the phenomenon because they were afraid to use the words that concerned them.
Cursing essentially was a way of getting along with a recruit's new friends, a way of becoming accepted by your barracks mates, and a way of protecting your sanity in a new social order. Subconsciously, you all knew you'd need one another when the pretend war of training turned to the real thing of killing and being killed.
GIs exchanged civilian clothing for uniforms and accepted military demands and orders, but at heart they remained pretty much as they had been before receiving the government's “greetings.”
They took physical education (PE) and ran obstacle courses, the most grueling aspects of basic training. PE varied in intensity from camp to camp. Por all personnel under the age of 40, the army prescribed a mandatory 25-mile road march with full equipment. Sometimes, troops did more. The 351st Infantry Regiment once covered 62 miles in full gear in a 29-hour period; nobody fell out, and General Marshall gave them a special commendation. At the 351st's training center, the culmination of physical training was the requirement that the soldier with rifle and 30-pound pack negotiate a 1,500-foot obstacle course in three and a half minutes. Specific requirements were that he take off with a yell (yelling or singing frequently accompanied physical activity), mount an eight-foot wall, slide down a 10-foot pole, leap a flaming trench, weave through a series of pickets, crawl through a water main, climb a 10-foot rope, clamber over a five-foot fence, swing by rope across a seven-foot ditch, mount a 12-foot ladder and descend to the other side, charge over a four-foot breastwork, walk a 20-foot catwalk some 12 inches wide and seven feet off the ground, swing hand over hand along a five-foot horizontal ladder, slither under a fence and climb another, and cross the finish line at a sprint. Recruits learned how to climb ropes, read maps, and survive a tear-gas attack. They learned how, when, and what to salute; when in doubt or if it moved, they saluted it.
They trained with old Springfield .275-caliber rifles because the army didn't have enough of the new Garand Ml gas-operated, semiautomatic rifles. The Ml was their dream weapon. If a soldier could eject and reload eight-round clips fast enough, the Ml fired twenty .30-caliber rounds a minute. The U.S. Army loved the Ml; a lot of U.S. Marines did not. It had passed the army's tests, but because some Marine Corps noncommissioned officers (noncoms, or NCOs) didn't like it, they found a way to make the Ml jam; they dropped the ammunition clips in the sand, and the sand jammed the rifles. One reason that Marine Corps noncoms didn't like the Garand Ml was that it meant requalifying for expert rifleman under a more difficult marksmanship course, which they would rather not have taken. Yet an expert rating was worth five dollars a month, and to NCOs making thirty dollars a month before the war broke out, five dollars a month more was worth getting upset about.
Sure, the Ml had problems—“seventh-round stoppage,” when the seventh round in the eight-round clip jammed, and a rear sight that had a tendency to jump up—but it was effective at 550 yards and was generally noted for its reliability and accuracy. The army adopted the Garand Ml in 1936, but it wasn't until 1942 that the Marine Corps gave in and adopted it over their NCOs’ objections. More than 4 million Mis were produced during World War II, but its developer, John Cantius Garand, never got a penny in royalties. He was a government employee at the Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S. Armory and as such couldn't take out a patent on his invention.
Quickly, recruits learned that the Ml was a “rifle,” not a “gun.” Call it a gun and you might be ordered to report outside the barracks, naked except fo r helmet, socks, and boots. Carrying your rifle at port arms, you'd shout and point at appropriate locations—weapon or groin—“This is my rifle; this is my gun. This is for shooting; this is for fun.”
Recruits also learned to drive tanks and jeeps, the latter, for some unknown reason, referred to as “peeps” by General Patton. Before it became a copyrighted word, jeep apparently stood for the letters GP, indicating a general-purpose vehicle.
Recruits drove trucks: the 4-by-4 half-ton, Ford-built vehicles that the drivers called “Our Darling” and the 6-by-6 from General Motors. With its six wheels on three axles, it became the truck of choice for the Red Ball Express in Europe, rolling along with supplies that fed the army and its machines.
Troops learned how to fight with bayonets and knives, how to fight dirty, because, “The guy you'll be fighting ain't gonna fight clean.” They learned about land mines and booby traps, how to toss a hand grenade. They learned how to field-strip a cigarette butt: tear the paper into tiny bits, shred the tobacco, then spread them around. A drill sergeant who saw a recruit toss away a cigarette butt without field-stripping it ordered the recruit to strip the butt and bury it in a 6-by-6-by-6 foot hole. Later, the sergeant asked the recruit, “What brand of cigarette was it?” Of course he couldn't accept the recruit's claim and made him dig up the butt to show him, then rebury it in another 6-by-6-by-6 foot hole.
Recruits learned how to pitch a tent and how to camouflage their camp, how to make up a bed so tightly that a quarter would bounce on the top blanket. They learned how to peel potatoes and scrub garbage cans. They learned how to survive on what the army called food.
Troops met “nice girls” at USO-sponsored events, and they patronized prostitutes in nearby red-light districts. They learned to use the “Pro Station,” the prophylactic station, where they tried to wash off and be cured, of any and all diseases they might have carried back to the base with them. Troops also sat through hours of gruesome movies showing what syphilis could do to a man who was less than careful. Time for another shortarm inspection.
Let's face it, wherever there are soldiers or sailors, marines or airmen, prostitutes are likely to be found nearby, along with bars and tattoo parlors. In 1942, the Washington News ran the headline: “Enough VD Cases in D.C. to Overflow the Stadium.” The venerable Griffith Stadium seated 30,000 fans. The News claimed, “There are fifteen thousand more cases [of VD] than there are [stadium] seats.”
Cities sometimes tried to rid themselves of prostitutes by setting aside districts for their use. Sometimes whole sections of houses of prostitution were set up, either just out of town or in the same city but set apart. It was a way for a city to put, if you will, all of their bad eggs in one basket. Such areas became known as “The Strip,” “GI City,” “Boomtown,” or something of the sort. The saying was that “If you have to ask what kind of place The Strip is, you don't belong there.”
With Jefferson Barracks and a slew of army air forces facilities in the neighborhood, St. Louis's city fathers thought of instituting such a plan. St. Louis's city mothers didn't go for it, and the plan never came about.
Norfolk, Virginia, tried setting aside an enclave of sin known as East Main Street. Stretching from the Norfolk-Portsmouth ferry landing to Norfolk's Union Station, East Main Street was notorious: with glaring neon lights and blaring jukeboxes. It was fitted out with “everything a sailor could possibly ask for except peace and relaxation.” It held the dingy Gaiety burlesque theater, where sailors could get a close-up revelation of feminine charms. There were penny arcades with peep shows and shooting galleries and stands where an accurate baseball thrower could knock a girl out of bed. There were tattoo parlors and flophouses. Everywhere there were barrooms. There was plenty of wine, women, and song to be had for the right price.
On stage at the Gaiety, Anne Corio and Gypsy Rose Lee strutted and stripped as the crowd cheered its appreciation. Tavern waitresses would double as B-girls, offering to sit with any customer who'd buy them seven-dollar bottles of “champagne”; they'd slip ticket stubs into tight-fitting dresses and, at the end of the evening, split the profits with the bar owner. A B-girl usually made multiple dates with sailors, knowing that most would be so drunk they'd forget about it. At the end of the evening, however, there'd often be a line outside the front door, waiting for her. Fights among drunken servicemen were not unusual. It was the job of the navy's shore patrol to control things; Norfolk city police had handed over to the military any problems that came up on East Main Street.
An ex-sailor named China Solly ran an establishment near the Norfolk Naval Base called The Stars and Stripes Forever. Its inside walls were complete with paintings of fire-belching battleships. Because Virginia law at the time banned the sale of liquor by the drink, China Solly got around it by claiming that his was a “club” serving members only. At its height, The Stars and Stripes welcomed week-night crowds of 12,000 or more sailors; Saturday nights were really busy.
Joints by the hundreds catered to the military: the “Krazy Kat” and “Arab's Tent” among them. On the windows of bawdy houses, working girls put up signs, using the titles of recent movies to get their point across: Boys’ Town, It Happened One Night, and All That Money Can Buy.
It was the same at camps, forts, and military bases all over the country. Near the training camp for the 3d Armored Division at Camp Polk, Louisiana, off-duty GIs patronized the Red Dog Saloon, the Tip Top Inn, and the Roof Garden. About ten miles west of Columbus, Georgia, an entire Alabama town was built to service Fort Benning's paratrooper trainees. According to one report, “The principal industry of the small town of Phenix City, Alabama, is sex, and its customer is the Array.… The town is at least eighty percent devoted to the titillation and subsequent pillage of that group it affectionately calls ‘Uncle Sam's Soldier Boys.'”
Military trainees went looking for girls who were easy, but they also looked for someplace to meet decent girls in real companionship. Often, they confided this to USO dance hostesses or chaperons at church socials, who were themselves “decent girls.” It was the old story of soldiers wanting to date a girl with round heels but insisting that her heels be on the square for marriage.
“It was … a very hectic, exciting time,” Patricia Livermore remembered. She followed her fiance to San Diego, hoping to see him before he shipped out.
There were girls in San Diego marrying servicemen right and left during the war, partly because they felt sorry for them. The other reason was the serviceman's fifty-dollar-a-month allotment—that's what the government gave the wives. A girl would marry a man. He'd go overseas and make out the allotment to her before he went. While he was gone, she'd go down to Tijuana, Mexico, and marry another serviceman, get another allotment.
The military had a name for such ladies: “Allotment Annies.” Pat Livermore says she knew of one girl who married six men that way. She was “very true to the first one, until she met the second, and true to the second until she met the third.”
Everywhere recruits went, they marched. They drilled, went on bivouacs, and stood inspection. Training during 1942 took up forty-four hours over six days; Sunday they were off and many went to chapel, even though it wasn't compulsory. It was almost as if, with the deadly reality of war facing them, they were repeating what they'd done in high school or college: cram for their final exams, with ministers, the “Holy Joes,” ready to help them study.
Reveille was at 6:10 A.M. and lights out was at 9:45 P.M. Officers in charge of the Army Ground Forces Replacement and School Command admitted that the training schedule was too tight, the programs were too full, the days were too concentrated, and the men were too seldom able to relax, so they were not fresh and fit each day for the training they were to receive. Men agreed and wrote home about it, often complaining that basic training was “hot and tough.” Frequently, they added, “I hope I have guts enough to really take it like I should.”
An Indiana soldier wrote about camp life in Texas:
I cannot picture everything clearly to you, for I cannot send you a box of Texas dust to pour liberally over your whole body. I cannot send you a long, hot road and a fine set of blisters or a pair of heavy G.I. shoes to be broken in. I cannot send you an overcoat which you will not be allowed to wear at reveille when it is freezing, but which you will be required to wear during the sweltering afternoon.
Soon, the hard part of basic training was over. Soon, all they had to do was fight for their lives.
The American military man complained about his food, yet in general it was far superior to that eaten by other armies around the world. The basic meal of troops in garrison was the A ration, with about 70 percent made up of fresh foods. They ate B rations, which were much like A rations but had canned meats, fruits, and vegetables, and even those delectable items, powdered eggs and potatoes. A too-frequent mess hall item was chipped beef on toast, known universally as “shit on a shingle.”
Each B-ration pack was supposed to provide enough food for ten men for three meals for one day, so it sometimes earned its nickname the“10-in-l.”
The famous G ration was the canned variety that contained ten different meat combinations—chicken and vegetables; franks and beans; ham, eggs, and potatoes; ham and lima beans; meat and rice; meat and vegetable stew; and meat and spaghetti. C rations also provided cereal, crackers and jam, powdered coffee, and sugar. They even included powdered lemonade for vitamin C, but few soldiers drank it. Instead, they used it as a stove cleaner or for the finicky a hair rinse. In 1937, the Hormel Meat Company came out with SPAM—chopped ham and pork shoulders, or so the manufacturer claimed. GIs learned not to ask what SPAM really was made of. But, then, military troops didn't get the real SPAM; instead, they got a cheap imitation cooked up by the army Quartermaster Corps. As part of Lend-Lease, tons of SPAM were shipped to the Soviet Union, where it was fondly (believe it or not) referred to as “Roosevelt sausage.”
C rations contained toilet paper and even a small pack of cigarettes, usually an unknown brand. “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War,” the advertising slogan went. The government needed the green ink for metal production, so the package became the current white with a red bull's-eye. Luckies or Camels or Chesterfields, themselves, hardly ever showed up in C rations.
All military rations were well packaged and at least semi-impervious to humidity and immersion, which was both the good news and the bad news: good news in times of war, bad news when the military wanted to store its leftovers. Unused crates of C rations were stored in warehouses until years later when someone declared millions of them spoiled, begging the question, “How can you tell?” By the Korean War, cigarettes left in stored C rations were so dry they burned faster than the match it took to light them, burned so fast that soldiers often tossed them aside or used packs of them for target practice.
D rations, the so-called “iron rations,” were 600-calorie emergency meals, vitamin-packed chocolate bars, marked off in segments that troops were told could last for a day each, if the damned thing didn't break their teeth. They were hard as a rock and took from forty-five minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes to gnaw through.
Troops going into combat took K rations, individual meals carried for breakfast, dinner, or supper. Unlike C rations, which were meant to be heated (with the aid of a pocket-sized paraffin heater) to bring them close to an edible state, K rations could be eaten cold, while a man was huddled in a foxhole. A typical K-ration breakfast was a fruit bar, powdered lemonade mix for hair rinsing, crackers, and a can of ham and eggs. K-ration lunch and dinner was the same: a can of potted meat or cheese, crackers, more powdered orangeade or lemonade, sugar, chocolate, dessert, salt tablets, and chewing gum.
There was something referred to as “kennel rations”: meat loaf, but certainly not the kind mom made back home. Mom (and girlfriends, too) sent boxes of goodies, everything from cookies to salami to fruitcakes, and now you know where that fruitcake you got last Christmas originated.
Probably the most treasured item for many World War II soldiers was the small, folding can opener that was supposed to come with every C and K ration but often didn't. In Vietnam, you'd frequently see a soldier wearing a can opener hanging from his dog tag chain.
Each man carried an individual two-piece aluminum mess kit. It had a folding handle and included a three-piece set of utensils— knife, fork, and spoon; hook the utensils to the mess kit handle and immerse them in hot water for cleaning. Standard issue also called for an aluminum canteen and a form fitting cup with a folding handle for use with hot beverages. The canteen hooked onto the soldier's web belt; the mess kit and utensils went into his backpack. Neat. They later became standard, if unauthorized, camping gear for postwar Boy Scouts.
Army rations have changed little in the past fifty years. Not until the Persian Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 were they replaced by something called MREs, meals ready to eat. They, too, can be stored for years, and they, too, in years to come will be remembered, sometimes fondly, by American service personnel. Like C and K rations, they will be the subject of strange, late-night cravings by those who suffered and enjoyed them at an earlier date.
A telegram got the soldier into the army by announcing “Greetings.” Another telegram to many folks back home became an epilogue: “The Secretary of War desires to express his deep regret that your son, Private John Doe, was killed in action in defense of his country. … A letter follows.” The telegram was signed by the adjutant general.
A follow-up letter might come from the late man's unit commander, explaining how he died. Another came from the government, explaining that, as the man's beneficiary, the recipients would receive six months’ worth of their son's pay, as well as proceeds from the $10,000 insurance policy he'd signed up for the day he was inducted.
Occasionally, long after the initial telegram and follow-up letters went out, friends and relatives would receive letters from the dead man. If they'd been postmarked after he died, it inspired hope that the official report was an error. Sometimes it was; more often it was not.