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EXCERPT Chapter 14: Jerks,
Sad Sacks, Profiteers, and Jim Crow
The GIs in ETO were highly selected in age and physical health, somewhat selected in
intelligence, well disciplined. The Army's training system added inches to their chests
and leg and arm muscles. It also instilled a sense of responsibility, along with a fear of
the consequences of disobeying an order, not to mention criminal behavior: nicely summed
up in the old drill sergeant's saying, "The Army can't make you do something, but it
sure as hell can make you wish you had." It also did a good job of recognizing and
promoting talented young men who were capable of standing the stress and leading
effectively.
War brings out the best in many men, as the tiny sample of the men of ETO quoted or cited
in this book testifies. To generalize, a large majority of the GIs in Northwest Europe in
1944-45 did their best at whatever they did, and in most cases they discovered that they
were capable of doing far more than they had ever imagined possible. Thousands of men
between twenty and twenty-five years of age responded to the challenge of responsibility
magnificently. They matured as they led and, if they survived, they succeeded in their
postwar careers. In one way, they were lucky: only in the extrernity of total war does a
society give so much responsibility for life-and-death decision-making to men so young.
Together, the junior officers and NCOs who survived the war were the leaders in building
modern America. This was in some part thanks to what they had learned in the Army,
primarily how to make decisions and accept responsibility.
The Army was unlike civilian society in most ways, but ETO and the home front were
together in their shared sense of "we." It was a "we" generation, as
in the popular wartime saying, "We are in this together." In the Army, this
general attitude was greatly reinforced. The social bond within the Army was like an
onion. At the core was the squad, where bonding could be almost mystical.
Lt. Glenn Gray (after the war a professor of philosophy) put it well: "Organization
for a common and concrete goal in peacetime organizations does not evoke anything like the
degree of comradeship commonly known in war. At its height, this sense of comradeship is
an ecstasy. Men are true comrades only when each [member of the squad] is ready to give up
his life for the other, without reflection and without thought of personal
loss."
After the squad came succeeding layers, the platoon, company, on up to division, all
covered by the loose outermost layers of corps and army. The sense of belonging meant most
GIs wouldn't dream of stealing from or cheating a buddy within the squad or company, or of
slacking off on the job, whether as front-line infantry or driving a truck.
But the Army was so big -- eight million men at its peak, from a low of 165,000 four years
earlier -- and put together so quickly, that thousands of sharp operators and sad sacks,
criminals and misfits, and some cowards made it through the training process and became
soldiers in ETO. Some were junior officers in infantry divisions and the price for their
incompetence was casualties. More were rear-echelon soldiers, completely free of a sense
of "we," who in one way or another took advantage of the opportunities presented
by the war.
Joseph Heller's character Milo Minderbender in Catch-22 is an exaggeration, but not an
invention. The United States was sending to Europe colossal quantities of goods. Given the
amounts involved and the constant need for haste, there was a vulnerability that a few
soldiers found irresistible. More than a few, really -- the figures on stolen goods are
staggering. The matÇriel for the Americans fighting in Italy came in through the port of
Naples. It came in day and night -- weapons, ammunition, rations, fuel, trucks, electrical
equipment, and much more. Every item was eagerly sought on the black market. One-third of
all the supplies landed in Naples was stolen. In Italy, once an entire train carrying
supplies to the front simply disappeared.
The cornucopia of American goods coming into a Europe that had been at war for five years
led to the greatest black market of all time. Most American soldiers participated in it to
some extent, if in no other way than by trading cigarettes for perfume, or rations for
jewels. A few got rich off it.
At the opposite extreme from the young entrepreneurs were the sad sacks, those guys who
could never be found when there was a patrol to run or a job to be done, who had mastered
the art of getting lost in the Army so well they became practically invisible. In between
were the jerks and assholes, usually men who had been made NCOs or junior officers who
exploited their rank in chickenshit ways, but at the head of the list there stood the
formidable figure of the general in charge of all supplies in ETO. At the bottom of the
list were the cowards, and Jim Crow.
They were all part of the U.S. Army in ETO, and this chapter is a glance at a few of
them.
Most GIs did their job, fought well, managed to stay out of serious trouble, and were
generally regarded as "good guys." The ones who slipped and became jerks for a
night, or a day, or a week, could usually blame it on wine, which was present in almost
every cellar in France and Belgium (in sharp contrast to the Pacific Theater, where the
men drank homemade stuff, always vile, but with a punch). Paul Fussell, in Wartime,
catches the situation exactly in his chapter title "Drinking Far Too Much, Copulating
Too Little."
When it came to drinking, the men of ETO were just boys. Growing up in the Depression,
their experience with alcohol was pretty much limited to a few beers on graduation night,
and a lot of beer on Saturday nights in training camp in Georgia or wherever, and in
English pubs. This in no way prepared them for the challenge France had to
offer.
On December 15 Dutch Schultz, 82nd Airborne, stationed in an old French army barracks, got
a pass to Reims, champagne capital of the world. There he ran into three high school
buddies from another outfit. The corks popped. "This was my first experience with
champagne," Schultz recalled. "I started drinking it like soda pop." He
can't recall anything that happened in Reims after the drinking started, but he does
remember what happened when he got back to barracks.
"I headed for my bed which was an upper bunk on the second floor of my building. When
I got to my bed, I found someone sleeping in it."
Dutch shook the man awake. "What the hell are you doing in my bed?" he
roared.
The soldier roared back: "It's my bed, what the hell do you think you are doing? Get
the hell out of here!"
They started throwing punches. The lights went on. Every man in the room wanted to kill
Schultz. To his consternation, he discovered he was not only at the wrong bed, but also
the wrong room, the wrong barracks, the wrong battalion. "I made a hasty
retreat."
"Jerk!" the men called out as he fled, using a variety of obscene adjectives to
express their feelings.
The guys who were permanent jerks were the usual suspects -- officers with too much
authority and too few brains, sergeants who had more than a touch of sadist in their
characters, far too many quartermasters, some MPs. The types were many in number and
widely varied in how they acted out their role, but the GIs had a single word that applied
to every one of them: chickenshit.
Fussell defines the term precisely. "Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes
military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open
scrimmage for power and authority and prestige...insistence on the letter rather than the
spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called -- instead of horse -- or bull -- or
elephant shit -- because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.
Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning
the war."
There were some at the front, not many. In most cases they were visitors who didn't belong
there. Captain Colby led an attack down a road in the hedgerow country. His company got
hit hard and dove into the ditches. A firefight ensued. After a half hour or so, Colby
looked up to see his regimental commander standing above him, "nattily attired in a
clean uniform, and his helmet was clean and sported a silver star. He was the picture of
coolness."
"You can't lead your men from down there," he snapped. "Come up here and
tell me what happened. Try to set an example of how an officer should
behave."
"Come down here, sir, and we can talk about it," Colby replied.
"Come up here," the general replied. "That's an order."
To Colby's relief, a mortar round went off a few meters from the general. "He joined
me in the ditch."
Most chickenshits were rear-echelon. There are innumerable stories about them. Sgt. Ed
Gianelloni remembered the time in Luneville when his division was temporarily out of the
line and the opportunity came to take the first showers in two months. For the officers,
there was a public bath, where Frenchwomen bathed them. For the enlisted, there were
portable showers in the middle of a muddy field. Everyone undressed, piled up clothes and
weapons, and stood around shivering, waiting for the hot water.
"All right, you guys," the engineering sergeant in command barked out, "you
got one minute to wet, one minute to soap, and one minute to rinse off and then you get
out of here."
A private standing near the weapons pile reached in, grabbed an M-1, pointed it at the
sergeant, and inquired politely, "Sergeant, how much time did you say we
have?"
The sergeant gulped, then muttered, "I'll tell you what, I am going to take a walk
and check on my equipment. When I come back you ought to be done."
General Patton had more than a bit of the chickenshit in him. He was notorious for being a
martinet about dress and spit-and-polish in Third Army. He ordered -- and sometimes may
have gotten -- front-line infantry to wear ties and to shave every day. Bill Mauldin did a
famous cartoon about it. Willie and Joe are driving a beat-up jeep. A large road sign
informs them that "You Are Entering The Third Army!" There follows a list of
fines for anyone entering the area: no helmet, $25; no shave $10; no tie $25; and so on.
Willie tells Joe, "Radio th' ol' man we'll be late on account of a thousand-mile
detour."
But it was no joke. Patton's spit-and-polish obsession some times cost dearly. It not only
had nothing to do with winning the war, it hurt the war effort.
Twenty-year-old Lt. Bill Leesemann was in a reconnaissance section of the 101st Engineer
Combat Battalion, attached to the 26th Division. On December 18, the 26th, along with the
80th and the 4th Armored, got orders to break off the attack in Lorraine, turn from east
to north, and smash into the German southern flank of the Bulge. This required frenetic
activity. Leesemann's job was to go from division headquarters in Metz to the Third Army
Engineer headquarters in Nancy, to pick up maps -- no one in the attacking divisions had
any maps of Luxembourg. It was a sixty-kilometer drive. Leesemann and his driver took off
late on December 19, as the 26th was forming up to head toward Luxembourg. It wouldn't be
able to move out until the maps arrived.
It was raining; the road was muddy; troops moving north caused delays. It was full dark by
the time Leesemann got to Nancy. He stopped at a crossroads, where "a real
spit-and-polish MP was directing traffic." Leesemann asked directions to the
Engineers hq. The MP took one look at the dirty, unshaven lieutenant and driver and
ordered them to the MP post. He said they could not proceed into Third Army area until
they had washed the jeep, shaved, and put on clean uniforms. Leesemann replied that such
things were out of the question and explained the urgency of the situation. The MP called
his corporal.
Twenty minutes later the corporal arrived. After further interrogation, he called the
sergeant. The sergeant came, more talk, finally he called Engineers hq. Permission to come
on was granted.
Leesemann drove to the hq, "a large chateau with surrounding gardens. The sentries at
the large iron gate entrance gave us the same routine with threats of being arrested; 'No
way will we be responsible for admitting you two into the Command area.'"
Another call, another wait. Eventually, but not without further adventures in the maze of
Third Army, Leesemann got the maps and returned to 26th Division hq. It was 0500 hours,
December 20. The division had been ready to move since 0100 hours. It was waiting for the
maps.
The biggest jerk in ETO was Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee (USMA 1909), commander of Services of
Supply (SOS). He had a most difficult job, to be sure. And of course it is in the nature
of an army that everyone resents the quartermaster, and Lee was the head quartermaster for
the whole of ETO.
Lee was a martinet who had an exalted opinion of himself. He also had a strong religious
fervor (Eisenhower compared him to Cromwell) that struck a wrong note with everyone. He
handed out the equipment as if it were a personal gift. He hated waste; once he was
walking through a mess hall, reached into the garbage barrel, pulled out a half-eaten loaf
of bread, started chomping on it, and gave the cooks hell for throwing away perfectly good
food. He had what Bradley politely called "an unfortunate pomposity" and was
cordially hated. Officers and men gave him a nickname based on his initials, J.C.H. --
Jesus Christ Himself.
Lee's best-known excess came in September, at the height of the supply crisis. Eisenhower
had frequently expressed his view that no major headquarters should be located in or near
the temptations of a large city, and had specifically reserved the hotels in Paris for the
use of combat troops on leave. Lee nevertheless, and without Eisenhower's knowledge, moved
his headquarters to Paris. His people requisitioned all the hotels previously occupied by
the Germans, and took over schools and other large buildings. More than 8,000 officers and
21,000 men in SOS descended on the city in less than a week, with tens of thousands more
to follow. Parisians began to mutter that the U.S. Army demands were in excess of those
made by the Germans.
The GIs and their generals were furious. They stated the obvious at the height of the
supply crisis, Lee had spent his precious time organizing the move, then used up precious
gasoline, all so that he and his entourage could enjoy the hotels of Paris. It got worse.
With 29,000 SOS troops in Paris, the great majority of them involved in some way in the
flow of supplies from the beaches and ports to the front, and taking into account what
Paris had to sell, from wine and girls to jewels and perfumes, a black market on a grand
scale sprang up.
Eisenhower was enraged. He sent a firm order to Lee to stop the entry into Paris of every
individual not absolutely essential and to move out of the city every man who was not. He
said essential duties "will not include provision of additional facilities, services
and recreation for SOS or its Headquarters." He told Lee that he would like to order
him out of the city altogether, but could not afford to waste more gasoline in moving SOS
again. He said Lee had made an "extremely unwise" decision and told him to
correct the situation as soon as possible.
Of course Lee and his headquarters stayed in Paris. And of course there was solid reason
for so doing. And of course the combat veterans who got three-day passes into Paris could
never get a hotel room, and had to sleep in a barracks-like Red Cross shelter, on cots.
The rear-echelon SOS got the beds and private rooms. And their numbers grew rather than
shrank. By March 1945, there were 160,000 SOS troops in the Department of the
Seine.
The supply troops also got the girls, because they had the money, thanks to the black
market. It flourished everywhere. Thousands of gallons of gasoline, tons of food and
clothing, millions of cigarettes, were being siphoned off each day. The gasoline pipeline
running from the beaches to Chartres was tapped so many times only a trickle came out at
the far end.
Most of this was petty thievery. It was done at the expense of the front-line troops. As
one example, the most popular brand of cigarettes was Lucky Strike, followed by Camel. In
Paris, the SOS troops and their dates smoked Lucky Strikes and Camels; in the foxholes,
the men got Pall Malls, Raleighs, or, worse, British cigarettes.
But a large part of the black market was run by organized crime. Here is a story told to
me by a former lieutenant who worked as a criminal investigator for the SHAEF adjutant
general's office. There was a colonel from the National Guard, born in Sicily, who was in
Transport Command. His administrative job gave him the use of a C-47. On every clear day
he flew, with a co-pilot, from London to Paris and back. He took in cartons of cigarettes
and brought back jewels and perfumes. His trade flourished but there were a lot of payoffs
to make, too many people involved. By mid-December, SHAEF's criminal investigators were
ready to arrest him, but he got a tip and fled in his C47, with a co-pilot and a box
stuffed with jewelry.
"Over the Channel," the lieutenant told me, "he shot the copilot, then
smashed his face beyond recognition. He was a hell of a pilot; he landed on the edge of
the water at an extremely low tide near Utah Beach. The plane with the co-pilot's body
wasn't found until the next day's low tide -- and the major had left his dog tags on the
dead man. We learned later that a French farm couple had watched an American pilot as he
stole a donkey and cart, loaded a box onto the cart, slipped into peasant's clothing, and
was last seen headed toward Sicily."
The German army had its fair share of jerks. There too they were often quartermasters.
Colonel von Luck recalled that in early September, during the retreat through France, he
came on a supply depot. His tanks, trucks, and other vehicles needed fuel; his men needed
ammunition and food. He demanded it be handed over.
The sergeant in charge gave what Luck called "the typical, impudent reply: 'I can
issue nothing without written authority.' When I asked, 'And what will you do if the
Americans get here tomorrow, which is highly likely?' the answer was: 'Then in accordance
with orders I will blow the depot up.'
"As my men advanced threateningly on the sergeant, weapons at the ready, I replied,
'If I don't have fuel, ammunition, and food within half an hour I can no longer be
responsible.'" The sergeant looked at the grim-faced Luck and his men and gave them
what they needed."
Similar scenes were enacted a thousand times and more during the retreat. At the other end
of the scale, corps commanders in the Wehrmacht could be as crazy as Hitler. Like their
leader, they moved long-gone regiments and divisions around on their maps. From the safety
of their headquarters, they ordered counterattacks by phantom units. In January 1945 in
Belgium, Lt. Col. Gerhard Lemcke of the 12th Panzer Division, a career soldier, had a
typical experience. He had his hq in a farmhouse on a hill. From the kitchen window he
could see Sherman tanks in the process of surrounding his position. He got orders to
attack, which he ignored.
A staff officer drove up. He had been drinking, to bolster his courage -- staff officers
seldom came to the front, and when they did they were afraid of the combat commanders. In
this case, the officer informed Lemcke that he had come to take Lemcke into
custody.
"May I ask why?"
"You have not carried out the orders of the Corps commander."
"And what am I to do? Should I tell them to throw rocks? Or maybe snow, there's lots
of that -- I have nothing else. The artillery battery behind me, they don't shoot anymore
because they have no ammunition. But Corps has ordered them to stay and defend us. How
about telling Corps hq to take back their guns and send their personnel up here to become
part of my infantry."
"You tell them," the lieutenant replied.
Lemcke got on the radio. Corps repeated the order to attack. Lemcke again refused. Corps
then told the lieutenant to arrest that man and bring him in. As the lieutenant made to do
so, Lemcke's men surrounded him. "These were soldiers who had been with me since
Russia," Lemcke recalled. "A number of them had long since earned the Iron Cross
1st Class. They would not allow this lieutenant to take me anywhere."
Next to Hitler himself, the biggest jerks in Germany were Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering
and Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler. In November 1944 Himmler was put in command of the
eastern bank of the Upper Rhine. Himmler knew a lot about how to terrorize and slaughter
civilians, but nothing about military affairs. On January 3, 1945, he ordered Maj.
Hannibal von LÅttichau to attack.
"I don't doubt that these orders were developed with the greatest care,"
LÅttichau told Himmler. "But we must have fuel."
"You don't need to drive," Himmler replied.
"But a dug-in panzer is easily destroyed from the air," LÅttichau explained.
"The panzer's strength is to shoot and move. Suddenly pop up and fire and get out of
there! Besides, I don't have ammunition. It doesn't matter how much heroism we have, we
won't last a day before our soldiers know that we are crazy and stick their hands in the
air and give up. What should I do about that?"
Excerpted from CITIZEN SOLDIERS © Copyright 2001 by Stephen E. Ambrose. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
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