I THOUGHT I HAD run the gamut of command posts, from half-destroyed farmhouses to elegant castles on the Rhine—but this one was the pay-off: an ancient little convent on a hillside overlooking a gingerbread Alsatian village and the German lines beyond. A special recon outfit with the 7th Army lining up for the jump across the Rhine had moved in, but the sisters had not moved out, and so the two organizations were living side by side under the same roof, the French nuns industriously devoted to peace, the recon group industriously devoted to war. It was hard work, dangerous work, infiltrating enemy lines at night to determine troop movements and gun emplacements, but at evening mess most of the conversation was joke and banter, punctuated by the regular Jerry artillery fire that sounded as if it were passing directly overhead. “Alsace Alice,” the youthful CO said. “She’s been trying to find us for a week. She isn’t even close tonight.”
The nun who served us conscientiously, silently, and without ever changing expression, as if she had lived all her life among American officers who sat down to dinner without taking off their .45’s, refilled our empty coffee cups. The coffee was so good that nobody wanted to finish it, so we lingered over our cups, drawing slowly on the cigarettes or pipes we lit from the flickering candles that threw a soft yellow glow over the table. Everybody felt well fed and relaxed, the war, for the moment, wasn’t breathing down our necks, and it was too early to crawl into our bed rolls. A good time for talking. At first we talked about the things that everybody in the ETO wanted to talk about that winter. How long the war would last, how long our guys would have to stay on after the supermen folded up, and what we’d do when we finally got back to the States again. I talked and the young CO talked and a lieutenant from Brooklyn, he talked plenty, and a former cavalry officer from Texas told us how he was going to open a riding academy in New York City.
But the captain didn’t say a word. He had a grave, weather-beaten face, and a slow, deliberate way of eating, of moving and of listening to what was being said. All I knew about him was what the CO had told me, that he was a professional, a company commander with the 1st Division. What he was doing down here in Alsace I wasn’t told. Conversation was beginning to run down when I happened to mention Aachen. I forgot just what I said, something about the unbelievable destruction that was still new to me, something about the unexpected docility of the people there.
Then, to draw him into the group, I asked the captain casually, “Let’s see, the 1st Division was up around Aachen, wasn’t it?”
The captain drew his cigarette from his mouth. “Yes, we were at Aachen,” he said.
“Rough, rough, hey, Captain?” said the lieutenant from Brooklyn. The captain waited so long that I thought that was the end of it. Finally he said, “My outfit was held up for sixty-four days outside of Aachen.”
“Heavy losses?” the CO asked.
The captain drew another cigarette from his pack and offered the rest around. “By the time we got through, our battalion wasn’t even a good-sized company. We finally got through it all right. But it was close, very close.”
He inhaled slowly, took the cigarette out of his mouth with that poised deliberateness of his and again I thought this might be all there was to it. But all of a sudden he was into his story. He told it with such an economy of words and emotions that it wasn’t until he had finished that I realized what kind of story he had told. There wasn’t much more to say after the captain got through. The CO blew out the stubby melted candles. I went upstairs into one of the cold, narrow bedrooms that the nuns had evacuated for us, stripped down to my long-johns and wriggled into my bed roll. I closed my eyes, but I was still thinking about the captain and his story. After a few minutes I reached out for my flashlight, a pencil and pad, and, at the risk of burning out my battery—which at night in a theater of war is like losing the sight of both eyes—I tried to put the story down as the captain had told it. Not word for word, for I do not have that kind of memory, but next morning, as soon as it was light enough, I read it over and I felt satisfied that it was as close as I would ever get it to the way the captain told it. So here it is, a little better spelled, a little more legible, better punctuated here and there, but otherwise exactly as I had scribbled it down that night in the convent with the Führer’s artillery lobbing them systematically but futilely over our heads:
I don’t remember exactly when I first noticed Shapiro. (That’s not his name, but if you don’t mind, that’s what I’ll call him, because in view of what finally happened I think it would be better just to call him Shapiro and let it go at that.) I think the first time he came to my attention was on the transport going up from Africa. I was a company commander at the time. Ordinarily the only men I would have come in contact with were the lieutenants who lead my platoons and the sergeants who lead the squads. But the first day out, this lad Shapiro, a new replacement, was brought to my attention. Yes, that’s right, now that I think of it I remember it very well. Sergeant McCardle reported him. He caught Shapiro lighting a cigarette on deck after dark. The first time he warned him, just warned him, that’s all. But the next night he caught him again. Those were the days when the Heinie U-boats were raising hell with our convoys, so this was no joke. The second time McCardle reported him to me. “Sir, if you want to know what I think, he’s a smart-aleck Jew-boy from Brooklyn,” said McCardle. “If he’s a soldier, I’m a rabbi.”
Now I hope I’m not offending anybody here with what I am about to say, but to tell the truth, I didn’t look forward to the idea of having Jews in my outfit either. Not that I’m prejudiced or anything, I just had an idea that they weren’t cut out for our kind of work. But of course I couldn’t allow that sort of talk in my company. So I said, “Look here, McCardle, I’m not interested in a man’s race or religion. All I care about is whether he toes the mark as a soldier or not.” “Yes sir,” said McCardle. He was a big, athletic, rugged-looking boy. A ball player from Boston. Two years in the National Guard.
One of the men I was going to be able to depend on to bolster my green replacements, I was pretty sure of that.
Well, we didn’t hold a court-martial or anything but I threatened to throw the book at Shapiro, talked at him pretty hard, told him we were going to make a soldier out of him whether he liked the idea or not. As a matter of fact I never saw such a sad excuse for a soldier in my life. He was a small, bow-legged little guy who looked as if he didn’t have strength enough to pick up an M1, much less fire it. But it wasn’t the size that was so much against him. I’ve seen some little men from the Point who were the fightingest sons of bitches you ever saw—take our own little Terry Allen for instance. But this fellow Shapiro just didn’t seem to have any soldier in him. His uniform was a mess. I had to make him tighten his tie and button the top button of his jacket. His shoes weren’t shined. And when I called this to his attention, he said, “I know, Captain, the service on this ship is just terrible. I put my shoes out to be shined last night and they came back this morning looking just the way I left them.”
Well, I handed Shapiro some sort of punishment, I forget just what it was now, but if I thought that was the last time I was going to have him in my hair, I was sadly mistaken. After we went to the staging area outside of London—I suppose there’s no point in maintaining security on it any longer, but I just got in the habit of forgetting the name—I must’ve had more trouble with Shapiro than with all my other men put together. Sergeant McCardle was always turning him in. I knew that McCardle had this prejudice of course, the one I referred to before, so I always checked personally to make sure that Shapiro was really guilty of McCardle’s charges. It was never anything big, you understand, just a string of irritating little things, taking his time to fall in, not keeping his weapons clean, going into places in town that were off limits and half a dozen other things I can’t remember at the moment. We made him stand extra guard duty, cut down his passes to town, even had him in the guardhouse for a few days, but nothing seemed to change Shapiro. I’m afraid McCardle, for all his prejudice, had pegged him right. A smart-aleck Jew-boy from Brooklyn.
One Monday Shapiro failed to appear for morning muster. When he finally showed up, half a day AWOL on his week-end pass to London, I decided to get tough. I had him restricted to camp grounds for the duration of our training in England. We were working hard in those days and the boys counted pretty heavily on that thirty-six to London, but I was sick and tired of fooling with Shapiro.
One Sunday I came back from London early in the afternoon to write up some reports. There was Shapiro sitting on a bench in front of the CP. It was drizzling a little, you know, English weather, and Shapiro was just sitting there with his hands in his pockets and his neck pulled in, as sad-looking a joker as you ever want to see. When he saw me he stood up and saluted, so it looked like this restriction deal wasn’t doing him any harm. “How are you getting along, Shapiro?” I said. “Lousy, sir,” Shapiro says. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Well that was when I got the idea. As things turned out, it was one of the best ideas I had all the time I was in command of that company. “Why don’t you go out on the range and do a little target practice? It won’t do you any harm.”
You see, Shapiro’s marksmanship was one of the company’s favorite jokes. He was the most hopeless shot I had ever seen, and believe me, in these days of civilian soldiers, I’ve seen some sad ones. So I told Shapiro that I would see to it that he got all the ammo he wanted if he spent his restricted week-ends out on the range.
Well, Shapiro had nothing better to do, so he went to work. After a while he got to like it. I saw it myself because a month or so later when I was working on some more reports—that’s the only thing I don’t like about the army, those damn reports—I went out on the range to do a little shooting with my .45 and there was Shapiro banging away. He had improved about 500 per cent. Every Sunday for the next six weeks while the rest of the company were sitting on their tails in their favorite pubs, Shapiro was out there on that range getting better and better. By the end of May, Lieutenant Ainsworth told me Shapiro was high man in his platoon. And he was still practicing every spare minute he had. Damn, when I gave him that ammo, I really started something.
About that time I could feel D-Day creeping up on us. I didn’t know the date or the hour yet, but I had been in the army too long not to feel something in the wind. So I called Shapiro in to see me and I said, “Shapiro, I’ve decided to lift the restriction on you. This Saturday at 1800, you will receive a thirty-six-hour pass with the other men of your company. But if you are one minute absent over leave, Monday morning, by God, I’m going to throw the book at you with everything I’ve got behind it.”
Well, Shapiro went down to London and he must’ve had quite a week-end. Ainsworth ran across him in one club that Saturday night, playing the bass fiddle with a limey jazz band. And Sunday night he must have celebrated right on through till Monday morning. But Monday morning there was Shapiro right on the dot. I remarked to his squad leader, Sergeant McCardle, on the improvement in Shapiro’s behavior, as well as his amazing development as a marksman. But Mac still stuck to his guns. “Sir, if you’ll pardon me for saying it,” he said, “I still don’t think you can make a soldier out of a Jew-boy.”
I didn’t think much about Shapiro those next few days. I had my own worries getting things ready for the move to the point of embarkation. We still hadn’t been given the date, but it didn’t take a West Point grind to know we had one foot on the boat. Then we went down to the coast, waited, got our LCI, and waited again until the fleet finally started forming up. But that is not what I wanted to tell you about. Let me tell you about Shapiro, and about McCardle, because in a way this story is about both of them.
Our outfit went in at Omaha Beach. If any of you fellows were there you know what that means. If you weren’t there, you probably heard about it. Omaha was—well, it was the toughest thing the old Red One had hit yet, and if you remember the plums they picked for us in Africa and Sicily, you know what that means. The Jerries were all ready for us at Omaha, and they were looking down our throats and for a long long time that beach was so hot that I never will know how we managed to keep from getting pushed right back into the Channel. All we could do was dig in and hang on. The air was rattling with machine-gun fire and the Jerry artillery had us nicely spotted. It looked like we were going to have to sweat it out in those foxholes the rest of the war. All of a sudden I noticed somebody jump up about thirty-five yards in front of me. It was Shapiro. He was doing the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen on a battlefield. There didn’t happen to be any latrines on Omaha at the time, so Shapiro was standing up there making a beautiful target of himself, calmly taking down his pants and attending to nature with bullets and shells cracking all around him. I guess you’d have to see it to believe it. I think it did something to everybody who saw it. Hell, if that kid can squat up there and take his own sweet time about it, they seemed to say, I guess we can take a chance.
When he was finished, he took off his helmet a moment, produced a ration packet of sanitary paper he had cached in the liner, then adjusted his uniform again, grabbed his M1 and ran forward. Everybody who saw Shapiro that day agreed with me that his work was magnificent.
Battle conditions didn’t seem to have any effect on his shooting eye, except maybe to sharpen it a little. I was proud of every man in my company, but I don’t think I was prouder of anybody than I was of Shapiro. When we finally weathered that first storm and fought our way up off the beach, I made Shapiro our company sniper. Everybody agreed he was the best man for the job. Everybody except maybe McCardle. McCardle had to agree that Shapiro had become a very talented soldier, but he wasn’t sure how he’d stand up under the constant pressure. You see, McCardle had a prejudice, a set of preconceived notions as to how a fellow like Shapiro would operate, and once you get those notions in your head, it takes a lot of powder to blast them out.
Anyway, Shapiro fought like a madman all the way across France. I could tell you a hundred things he did, but it would take too long. Well, maybe this will give you some idea. One time late last summer we were dug in for the night in a field near the Meuse in Belgium. About three A.M. Shapiro woke up and looked over the edge of his foxhole. Parked smack in front of him, with the muzzle of its .88 extending right over Shapiro’s foxhole, was an enemy tank, a Tiger. The funniest thing about it is that McCardle saw the whole thing, from his foxhole fifty or sixty feet away. Shapiro kept his head down and waited. He even tried not to breathe too loud, he told us later. It must have been a long wait for Shapiro, but finally the night began to lift. A few minutes later the first Jerry opened the hatch and climbed out. He was quickly followed by the rest of the crew. They were just climbing out for a morning stretch. They weren’t more than thirty feet from Shapiro. In slow motion, the barrel of Shapiro’s rifle inched over the edge of his foxhole. Even from where McCardle was, he could see that Shapiro’s hand was trembling. But when he squeezed the trigger, a German fell. The others wheeled in surprise.
Shapiro had stopped trembling now, McCardle said. Before the tank crew knew what hit them, Shapiro had turned them all into “good Germans.”
For that morning’s work, Shapiro got the silver star and a boost to buck sergeant. “What do you think of your Jew-boy now?” I asked McCardle. “I don’t know, sir,” said McCardle. “I could be wrong I guess, could be.” McCardle was a very stubborn Irishman.
We crossed the German border and moved up to Aachen. How those Jerries hung onto Aachen! The weather was bad and we had to sleep out in the rain and the mud night after night, waiting for the Jerries to break. But they didn’t break. We figured we’d be in Aachen in a week, but a month went by and we hadn’t moved. The outfit was taking a terrible shellacking. Night and day. Never any rest. The casualties were bad, very bad, every day. It was beginning to look as if none of us would ever get into Aachen alive. Except for the patrols that sneaked in at night, of course. Shapiro was in on a lot of them and always did a good job. On one of his missions he was nicked in the leg, but went on to carry out his assignment. Another time he brought in a man who stepped on a mine on the way back. I don’t know how he managed it, the size of him, he just had it in him to be a very good soldier.
One evening I called McCardle and told him I wanted him to lead a patrol in force, not just reconnaissance, but to try and knock out some Jerry machine-gun positions that were guarding the approaches to the city. McCardle was a second lieutenant now, filling the shoes of an officer we lost three or four weeks before. “You can pick your own men,” I told him. “Except for Shapiro. I want you to take Shapiro. He’s the best man we’ve got.”
Twenty minutes later, McCardle returned. “I can’t take Shapiro, sir,” he said. He had a handkerchief tied around his fingers and blood was beginning to spread through. “Why not Shapiro?” I said. Everybody’s nerves were pulled pretty tight and I was a little sore. I thought maybe McCardle had fixed it so he wouldn’t have to take Shapiro.
Then I found out what happened.
McCardle had called Shapiro in to the company CP, a half-destroyed farmhouse, and given him the order. As soon as Shapiro heard what he had to do, he ran out of the house. McCardle followed him. Shapiro ran around the farmhouse into the barn, where some of the boys were bunking, scrambled up into the hayloft and pulled a blanket over his head. McCardle could see his shoulders shaking underneath it, could hear him sobbing. McCardle went into the loft after him and put his hand on Shapiro’s shoulder. Shapiro growled, like a wild animal, McCardle said, just like a wild animal, and shook his hand off. Then McCardle reached under the blanket for him. Shapiro made a horrible sound and bit McCardle’s fingers. That’s what the blood on the handkerchief was from.
I went out to the barn to see if I could do anything with Shapiro, but he wouldn’t let me near him. Shapiro had had enough. He fought almost as hard against the medics as he had against the Jerries, but they finally got him down from the hayloft. That’s a hell of a way for a good man to have to leave his outfit, but that’s the way it is sometimes. Shapiro was a good man, but he had had enough.
McCardle and I walked back to the house and I briefed him on his mission. We didn’t say anything more about what had happened until after he reported back early next morning. “Too bad about Shapiro,” I said. “Yeah,” he agreed. “No matter how good those Jew-boys are, guess they’re too high-strung for this business.”
The battle for Aachen dragged on. All of us saw our buddies getting killed, the best officers gone, more men getting it every day. That’s when my platoon leaders came and told me they were afraid their men had had about enough. I knew from division G2 if we held out another week, two weeks, we were all right, because Aachen was too hot for the Jerries to hold forever. In fact, there were signs that some of the supermen were beginning to pull out. I decided to send another patrol down into town to find out just what was going on. I asked Lieutenant Ainsworth to send McCardle to me. In a few minutes Ainsworth came back with a funny look on his face. “I think you better come and talk to McCardle yourself, sir,” he said.
I followed him down the steep wooden steps to the cellar. There was McCardle sprawled full length on the ground, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and sobbing like a baby. I put my hand on his arm and tried to reach him, but it wasn’t any good. He couldn’t stop crying. “I want Shapiro,” he was sobbing. “I want Shapiro, that poor little son-of-a-bitch Shapiro.”
McCardle had had enough. It was a terrible thing to see this big tough Irishman gnawing on his fingers and crying as if his heart would break, but there was nothing you could do about it. He had had enough. We had to send him back next morning with some other Section 8’s.
We finally got into Aachen, or what was left of Aachen, a couple of days later. But I was sorry to have to get there without McCardle and Shapiro. They were two of the best men I ever soldiered with.