My Life As A Hero Part 2

It is highly likely that the Allies would have won World War II even had I not volunteered for service in early 1944. But my unanticipated assignment to the 95th Infantry Division, as it prepared to join General George Patton as he marched across Europe, had its memorable moments for me if not for history. Perhaps a few are worth mentioning to my friends and relatives.

By the late spring of 1944, several thousand of us had assembled at Boston's Constitution Pier and boarded the once chic ocean liner USS America, for the trip across the Atlantic. My first cruise.

We were told we would go it alone, no convoy, because we could outrun the feared German subs prowling the north Atlantic. This made me a bit nervous.

Except for endless hours of seasickness, it was uneventful. We landed in Liverpool, a dreadful looking industrial city, boarded a train and headed into the guts of southern England to an air force base in Andover, between Salisbury and Winchester. Two quiet cathedral towns that the war had somehow spared.

But London was another matter. By 1944 it had become a brutally devastated city, in desperate search of survival. Battered by the blitz bombings for several horrible years, it was World War II at its bleakest, at least in the European theater.

 

There were memorable moments for us as we waited our turn to head for the battle grounds of France. The weekends were spent in London only a short train ride away. Much of our time was spent walking around the totally blacked out streets, accosted by whores in Soho, and almost everywhere else. But for one reason or another, I remained a virgin. Honest. I was still a kid of 18, only months out of Heights High, still faithful to my lovely girlfriend, Rita Barnett.

I admired the grit and bravery of the Brits as they fought off the hated Hitler for several years while we had stood by as FDR declared our neutrality. “America Firsters” led by Lindberg and others had insisted successfully that this was not our war.

From our base in Andover, we watched the unmanned B bombs (something like our drones of today) fly over, turn themselves off, and dive toward greater London, almost indefensible, as were the nasty V2 rockets that came later. They dropped silently out of the sky to do their devastation without warning.

One day the word came that we were going to Southampton and then on to Europe to join Patton, who was bogged down in France. He needed help for his weary divisions, as well as gasoline for his tanks.

Our particular unit almost let him down. We missed the boat that was supposed to take us from Southampton across the channel on to the beach at Normandy.

This was not like missing a plane from Cleveland to La Guardia. This was big time. We were headed to war, but our bags did not show up.

Can you imagine the look on our platoon leader Lt Connolly's face when he discovered the luggage was missing?!

"We're not going, guys," he declared.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

He repeated, "We're not going into Omaha Beach without our bags."

I thought half seriously, “What will Gen. Eisenhower say? Will we all be court marshalled for missing the landing of the 95th at Normandy? What will Gen, Patton think of us? Cowards?”

Permit me to digress for a moment and look back to another rather meaningful moment in the lives of Lt. Connelly and Private Weidenthal. Wind the clock back a number of months, to just before we shipped overseas. For some god-awful reason we were moved to the mountains of West Virginia for "mountain maneuvers." Some genius in headquarters dreamed that up. They called it Snake River Canyon. Pretty serious stuff, pretending to be the real thing. As a member of the crucial message center unit, I was assigned to the pigeon patrol. It was a dirty and dangerous job, considering that these birds had no choice but to go the bathroom in the cage on my back.

It was in the name of good communications, since we had no equipment to talk from battalion to battalion over the mountains, we depended on the dirty birds. Somehow they knew instinctively where to go and like magic they got us connected. It really worked. I learned to love those birds. Truth be told, it was a love hate relationship.

One day Lt. Connolly announced that we were going to learn to "rappel".

“What!” I said to myself.

I get dizzy looking off the sides of those cliffs.

Well you know the story...when my turn came up I jumped off the cliff and let myself down a few feet with the rope. Then I flipped upside down, and found myself staring into the abyss below .

"Hang on!" the guys shouted. "Hang on".

At the moment there was very little choice. I felt my life was in the balance and I really did not want to die in West Virginia, of all places.

It was Lt. Connolly who came to the rescue. With two guys hanging on to him, he slid over the edge and grabbed me. The rest is history.

Back to Southampton and the missing duffle bags:

It turned out all right. After a few hours of tension, the duffles finally arrived by truck. We loaded them on to a British ship and headed east to rejoin the 95th on the beach the next day.

I shuddered a bit as we clamored off the ship and on to the beach where so many brave Americans and Brits had died only a month or so earlier.

But there was no time for philosophizing as we marched across the sand and under that historic sign erected just after D day. “Through these gates

march the bravest men In the United States Army".

Brave, perhaps. 

Scared, more like it.

And it was only the beginning.

(to be continued...)

My Life As A Warrior (Chapter One)

   As I may have said before, from the moment I emerged from my mother's womb hanging on to my twin sister's big toe for dear life, it became clear that I had not been born to be a warrior. I wasn’t even the passive aggressive type. In the cradle when my twin sister kicked me, I rarely kicked back. And when I did, I wasn't happy about it. I wasn't combative.

   In the fourth grade, at Coventry school when Reno Koepke, whose father was the manager of Mayfield Cemetery, viciously tackled me in a touch football game, I didn't fight back. I walked away and never played football in the schoolyard again. I didn't even blame anti Semitism.
   I just didn't do contact sports. I did try out for the track team, but was not anywhere fast enough.
   I occasionally got angry with my twin sister, and I remember chasing her around the dinner table with a sharp pencil and swinging out at her face. (I missed, Doctor Carson.) But I remember feeling very angry. Can't remember why, Doctor.
   So by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was perhaps the last person you might expect to volunteer to be inducted into US Army in the middle of World War II.
That was 1944. There was this ethos: War on. And for some inexplicable reason I signed on with the other guys, to be inducted the morning after graduation, it was the thing to do, to avoid being thought of as something less than a real man. I signed on. I was ready. I told every one who would listen. Particularly my girlfriend Rita Barnett, a nice Jewish SDT sorority girl. Her dad was manager of the shoe department at Sterling’s, a classy women's store downtown.

   At the time I really believed that I would be assigned to an officer training program on some college campus, since that is what happened to my good friends who went before me. Tom Schattenfield was at the University of Michigan, Larry Coben at the University of Kansas, and Bob Saslaw at Penn State. So I plowed forward.

   Reality struck when I got to Columbus after a tearful goodbye to my mother at Pennsylvania station at 55th and Carnegie. After a day of painful shots in the arms and all kinds of tests much like the SAT that I was sure I had aced, the minute the group of about 50 of us were assembled the captain called us to attention. I felt like top dog. Maybe an appointment to West Point, Dr. Carson.
But the mystique of any sort of academic future faded quickly as the captain barked:
   “We've had a new order from headquarters, the ASTP program has been cancelled."
I nearly wet my pants. He went on, “Private Weidenthal, you got the highest grade on the test. You are assigned to the 95th Infantry division at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania.”

   At that memorable moment in my life, I had become a warrior, first class. Like it or not.
And although I squirmed a bit, I accepted reality and decided to go with the flow. None of the cheap psychotic tricks that some of the guys talked about, like the peanut butter on the toilet seat trick, or simply feigning insanity. Not for me. This neurotic kids from Cleveland Heights was playing it straight, Doctor.
   It turned out that the 95th had been training for combat for two years at Camp swift in Texas, and was assembling in Pennsylvania for the trip to the war zone and had been assigned to join General George Patton’s famed army for the march across Europe. It was not all fun and games. I saw it as historically significant, but personally dangerous.
Basic training for this kid from Cleveland was more than learning the “F word” as the adjective preceding every course of every meal.
   “Basic” had its memorable moments. Like the day someone shoved an M 1 rifle under my arm and ordered me to crawl in my belly through 50 yards of Pennsylvania mud while a fifty caliber machine gun mounted on a Jeep fired real bullets over our heads.
I remember being petrified, Doctor.
   We heard later that one terrified young man stood up and his body was torn apart by the the deadly bullets. They say the shooting ceased for awhile so they could remove his remaining body parts. I didn’t see it, but they say it happened, Dr. Carson.
   Or the day on mountain maneuvers in the Snake River Canyon of West Virginia, where I was assigned to carry tree pigeons in a cage on my back. They were geniuses. So smart, you could tie a note to their feet telling them where to go, and by God, they would make it. Of course my back was covered with more bird droppings in one day than the Ciivil War monument on Public Square gets in an entire summer. So much for basic training.
   Sometime during this period, my magnificent, caring mother, taking view of reality as only a mother can, came to Pennsylvania. She was on her way to New York on business and took me to dinner with some people she knew, including dear friend Leo Shore and his wife Shirley.

   Leo was a tough 32 year old Jewish business man who happened to be assigned to my unit. It was toward the end of the evening that she looked Leo in the eye, wagged her finger him and declared,
“You take care of my boy!”
Her words turned out to be more meaningful than we at that table in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1944, could ever imagine.

To be continued…

Next week:
B-bombs and blackouts
Missing the boat to Omaha Beach
“I Always Wanted to Kill A Jew”
Having lunch with Gen. Patton
Winning the air medal
The Battle of the Bulge
Losing best friends
My life as a muckraker

The Day General Patton Came To Lunch

  It was one of those fortunes of war that brought me to KP duty in the officer’s mess the day that Gen. George Patton decided to come to lunch.

  We were in the battle scarred town of Saarlautern on the French/German border which we had just wrested from the hated enemy.  Our unit had completed a somewhat ingenious maneuver that had outfoxed the enemy and captured a bridge across the Saar River.

  The so-called “genius” behind it all was out regimental commander, Col. Robert Bacon, who looked every inch the part. A rugged, macho regular army type, whose adult life apparently had been dedicated to what we had just achieved.

  The word came down from Third Army headquarters that Gen. Patton had heard about our end around play and was mightily impressed.  He had decided to pay us a visit the next day.

Finding Leo Shore

How Two Jews and 24 Red Necks Agreed to Bury the Hatchet And Fight the Germans Instead

Through the years, my memory has often taken me back to the night in Normandy in 1944 when “Swede” Jensen held an M1 rifle on me, sputtering through a drunken haze;

“I’ve always wanted to kill a Jew. If you move you’re dead.”

I huddled in a corner paralyzed for perhaps 20 minutes (it seemed like hours) until Swede passed out in a stupor. I beat a hasty retreat to my tent in the compound where we were holed up in France as our unit was waiting to join Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, as he chased the Germans across Europe.