Once there was a war

PLANE FOR AFRICA

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), August 26, 1943—

At nine o’clock in the morning word comes that you have been accepted for Africa. You go to the office of the transportation officer. “Can you go tonight?” he asks. “Your baggage must be in at three. You will report to such and such an address at seven-thirty. Do not be late.”

It is then about noon. You do the thousand things that are necessary for a shift of continents. You pack the one bag and store the other things which you will not take, the warm clothes and the papers and books. You call the people with whom you have made appointments and call them off.

At seven-thirty you arrive at the address given and from then on the process is out of your hands and it works very smoothly. At a quarter of eight you get in an Army truck and are taken to the station. An Army train is waiting. It is called a ghost train because it has no given destination. All kinds of units are getting on board the train: combat crews going out to get their ships, colonels who are going home after months in the field, couriers with bags and packages of mail. The combat crews carry pistols and knives and they have the huge bags of flying equipment with them. They are brown officers who have been serving in the desert and they look a little sick with fatigue.

A bomber crew that has not yet gone into action, indeed has not had a ship since it got overseas, has been working on English beer and has managed to get to the singing state. The whistle blows and everyone piles into the train. It is a sleeper.

There is no place to gather. You go to bed right away. In the corridor the singing crew leans out of the window and the men shriek at girls as the train starts. Then they break into “Home On the Range,” but the noise of the train drowns them out. The beer was not strong enough to give them much of a lift. The blacked-out train roars through the night. The windows are shut and painted so that no light can shine out. The singing collapses and the crews retire to their staterooms.

At four-thirty in the morning the steward knocks on your door, sets a cup of tea on the little shelf over your bed, and leaves. You quickly drink the tea and shave in time to be out of the train at five. It is cold and rainy when you get out of the train. You don’t know where you are. You were never told. Army trucks are waiting to take you to the airfield. Deep puddles of rain water are standing all about the little station. You climb into a truck and in a short while you have come to a huge airfield. This is one of the fields of Air Transport Command, which moves men and goods all over the world. Fighter planes are dispersed about the field, dimly visible through the rain. The C-54s stand ready to go.

This is a large and comfortable station. There are club-rooms and a bar and a large restaurant. It is cold outside and inside the fireplaces are piled high with glowing coals. In the largest clubroom are many people waiting their time to go. There are men who have been here a week and some crews which just got in. A phonograph is playing something sung by Dinah Shore. The men sleep on the couches and wait for their time.

The control-desk officer says, “Come back at one-thirty and you will be told when you go.”

The nearest town is several miles away. The crews wander about for a while and then go back to the club-room to read comic books — Superman and the rest. They read them without amusement, but with great concentration.

The officer says, “You will probably go in eight hours,” and again the wandering. A ship is warming up. It is going home. The men on it will be in New York tomorrow. Even the ones who recently came over look longingly at these lucky ones. Just before they go they are cornered and messages given. “Call my wife and tell her that you saw me. Here is the telephone number.” There would be letters to carry, but that is forbidden.

The men going home actually write the numbers down. They look a little self-conscious to be going home, and very happy about it, too. They get into the big ship and the door closes. It is a four-motored ship and you have to climb high to get into it. The little crowd stands in the entrance and watches it go and then it has disappeared into the rain almost before it is off the ground. The field has suddenly become very lonely. The men go back to the coal fires and to old copies of magazines, Esquires and New Yorkers, months old, copies of Life from April and May.

The officer says, “The plane will leave for Africa in fifteen minutes.” It would seem the plane would be crowded, but it isn’t. There are on board only one combat crew and two civilians. It is a C-54-A, which means that it has bucket seats and is more than half cargo plane. Now the crew are gathering together their bags and their parachutes, slinging on their pistols and knives and web equipment. They are being very nonchalant about the whole thing. Africa means nothing to them.

For a while we stand shivering in the rain while our names are called off. Then each one climbs the ladder and goes through the door. The windows of the plane are not blacked out, the way they are at home. They don’t mind if you see. The big door slams, and outside you can hear the motors begin to turn over.

ALGIERS

ALGIERS (Via London), August 28, 1943—

Algiers is a fantastic city now. Always a place of strange mixtures, it has been brought to a nightmarish mess by the influx of British and American troops and their equipment. Now jeeps and staff cars nudge their way among camels and horse-drawn cars. The sunshine is blindingly white on the white city, and when there is no breeze from the sea the heat is intense.

The roads are lined with open wagons loaded high with fresh-picked grapes, with military convoys, with Arabs on horseback, with Canadians, Americans, Free French native troops in tall red hats. The uniforms are of all colors and all combinations of colors. Many of the French colonial troops have been issued American uniforms since they had none of their own. You never know when you approach American khaki that it will not clothe an Arab or a Senegalese.

The languages spoken in the streets are fascinating. Rarely is one whole conversation carried out in just one language. Our troops do not let language difficulties stand in their way. Thus you may see a soldier speaking in broad Georgia accents conversing with a Foreign Legionnaire and a burnoosed Arab. He speaks cracker, with a sour French word thrown in here and there, but his actual speech is with his hands. He acts out his conversation in detail.

His friends listen and watch and they answer him in Arabic or French and pantomime their meaning, and oddly enough they all understand one another. The spoken language is merely the tonal background to a fine bit of acting. Out of it comes a manual pidgin that is becoming formalized. The gesture for a drink is standard. Gestures of friendship and anger and love have also become standard.

The money is a definite problem. A franc is worth two cents. It is paper money and comes in five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, and one thousand franc notes. The paper used is a kind of blotting paper that wads up and tears easily.

Carried in the pocket, it becomes wet and gummy with perspiration, and when taken out of the pocket often falls to pieces in your hands. In some stores they will not accept torn money, which limits the soldier, because most of the money he has is not only torn but wadded and used until the numbers on it are almost unrecognizable. A wad of money feels like a handful of warm wilted lettuce. In addition there are many American bills, the so-called invasion money, which is distinguished from home money by having a gold seal printed on its face. These bills feel cool and permanent compared with the Algerian money.

A whole new tourist traffic has set up here. A soldier may buy baskets, bad rugs, fans, paintings on cloth, just as he can at Coney Island. Many GIs with a magpie instinct will never be able to get home, such is their collection of loot. They have bits of battle debris, knives, pistols, bits of shell fragments, helmets, in addition to their colored baskets and rugs. In each case the collector has someone at home in mind when he makes the purchases. Grandma would love this Algerian shawl, and this Italian bayonet is just the thing to go over Uncle Charley’s fireplace, along with the French bayonet he brought home from the last war. Suddenly there will come the order to march with light combat equipment, and the little masses of collections will have to be left with instructions to forward that will never be carried out. Americans are great collectors. The next station will start the same thing all over again.

The terraces of the hotels are crowded at five o’clock. This is the time when people gather to get a drink and to look at one another. There is no hard liquor. Cooled wine and lemonade and orange wine are the standard drinks. There is some beer made of peanuts, which does have a definite peanut flavor. The wine is good and light and cooling, a little bit of a shock to a palate used to bourbon whiskey, but acceptable.

On these terraces the soldiers come to sit about little tables and to meet dates. The French women here have done remarkably well. Their shoes have thick wooden soles, but are attractive, and the few clothes they have are clean and well kept. Since there is little material for dyeing the hair or bleaching it, a new fashion seems to have started. One lock of the hair is bleached and combed back over the unbleached part. It has a strange and not unattractive effect.

About five o’clock the streets are invaded by little black Wog boys with bundles of newspapers. They shriek, “Stahs’n Straipes. Stahs’n Straipes.” The Army newspaper is out again. This is the only news most of our men get. In fact, little news comes here. New York and London are much better informed than this station, which is fairly close to action. But it seems to be generally true that the closer to action you get, the more your interest in the over-all picture diminishes.

Soldiers here are not so much interested in the trend of war as the soldiers are in training camps at home. Here the qualities of the mess, the animosities with the sergeant, the price of wine are much more important than the world at war.

This is a mad, bright, dreamlike place. It is probable that our soldiers will remember it as a whirl of color and a polyglot babble. The heat makes your head a little vague, so that impressions run together and blot one another up. Outlines are hazy. It will be a curious memory when the soldiers try to sort it out to tell about after the war, and it will not be strange if they improvise a bit.

A WATCH CHISELER

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), August 37, 1943—

It was well after midnight. The sergeant of MPs and his lieutenant drove in a jeep out of Sidi Belle Road from Oran. The sergeant had carved the handles of his gun from the Plexiglas from the nose of a bomber and he had begun to carve figures in it during off times with his pocket knife. It was a soft African night with abundant stars. The lieutenant was quite young and sensible enough to depend a good deal on his sergeant. The jeep leaped and rattled over cobblestones. “Let’s go up to the Engineers and get a cup of coffee and a sandwich,” the lieutenant said. “Turn around at the next corner.”

At that moment a weapons carrier came roaring in from the country, going nearly sixty miles an hour. It flashed by the jeep and turned the corner on two wheels. “Jeezus,” said the sergeant, “shall I go after him?”

“Run him down,” said the lieutenant.

The sergeant wheeled the jeep around and put his foot to the floor. Around the corner he could see the tail lights in the distance and he seemed to gain on it rapidly. The weapons carrier was stopped, pulled up beside a field. The jeep skidded to a stop and the sergeant leaped out with the lieutenant after him.

Three men were sitting in the weapons carrier, three in the front seat. They were quite drunk. The sergeant flashed his light in the back. There were two empty wine bottles on the floor of the truck. “Get out,” said the sergeant. As the men got out he frisked each one of them, tapping the hind pockets and the trousers below the knees. The three soldiers looked a little bedraggled.

“Who was driving that car?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know him,” a small fat soldier said. “I never saw him before. He just jumped out and ran when he saw you coming. I never saw him before. We were just walking along and he asked us to come for a ride with him.” The small fat soldier rushed the words out.

“That’ll be enough out of you,” the sergeant said. “You don’t have to tell your friends the alibi. Where did you dump the stuff?”

“What stuff, Sergeant? I don’t know what stuff you mean.”

“You know what I mean all right. Shall I take a look about, sir?”

“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said. The sergeant went to the border of the field and flashed his light about in the stubble. Then he came back. “Can’t see anything,” he said, and to the men, “Where’d you get this truck?”

“Just like I told you — this soldier asked us to come for a ride, and then he saw you coming and he jumped out and ran.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. We called him Willie. He said his name was Willie. I never saw him in my life before. Said his name was Willie.”

“Get in the jeep,” said the sergeant. “I’ve got the keys, lieutenant. We’ll send out for the truck. Go on now, you guys, get in that jeep.”

“We ain’t done anything wrong, Sarge. What you going to take us in for? Guy named Willie just asked—”

“Shut up and get in,” said the sergeant.

The three piled uncomfortably into the back seat of the jeep. The sergeant got behind the wheel and the lieutenant loosened his gun in its holster and sat on the little front seat with his body screwed around to face the three. Only the little man wanted to talk. The jeep rattled into the dark streets of Oran and pulled up in front of the MP station, jumped up on the sidewalk, and parked bumper against the building. Inside brilliant lights were blinding after the blacked-out streets. A sergeant and a first lieutenant sat behind a big, high desk and looked over at the three ranged in front of them.

“Take off your dog tags and put them up here,” said the sergeant. He began to make notes on a pad from the dog tags. “Put everything in your pockets in this box.” He shoved a cigar box to the edge of his desk.

“But this here’s my stuff,” the little man protested.

“You’ll get a receipt. Put it up and roll up your sleeves.”

The two men who had been with the little fat man were silent and watchful. “Who was driving the truck?” the desk sergeant asked.

“A fellow named Willie. He jumped out and ran away.”

The sergeant turned to the other two. “Who was driving the truck?” he asked them.

They both nodded their heads toward the little fat man and neither one of them spoke. “You bastards,” the little fat man said quietly. “Oh, you dirty bastards.”

“Roll up your sleeves,” the desk sergeant said, and then: “Good God, four wrist watches. Say, this one is a GI watch. That’s government property. Where did you get it?”

“I lent a fellow money for it. He’s going to get it back when he pays me.”

“Put your wallet up here.”

The little fat man brought out a wallet of red morocco leather and hesitantly put it up. “I want a receipt for this. This is my savings.”

The desk sergeant shook out the wallet. “God Almighty,” he said, and he began to count the mounds of bills and he made notes on his pad. “Ten thousand Algerian francs and three thousand dollars, American,” he said. “You really are packing the stuff away, aren’t you, buddy?”

“That’s my life savings,” the little fat man said plaintively. “I want a receipt for that, that’s my money.”

The lieutenant behind the desk came to life. “Lock them up separately,” he said. “I’ll talk to them. Sergeant, you send a detail out for that truck and tell them to search the place all around there. Tell them to look out for watches, Elgins, GI watches. It will be a case about this size. It would have a thousand in it if they are all there. The Arabs are paying forty bucks for them. Okay, lock these men up.”

“A guy named Willie,” the fat man complained, “a guy named Willie just asked us to come for a ride.” He looked at the other two and his soft face was venomous. “Oh, you dirty bastards,” he said.

OVER THE HILL

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), September 1, 1943—

Sligo and the kid took their forty-eight hour pass listlessly. The bars close in Algeria at eight o’clock but they got pretty drunk on wine before that happened and they took a bottle with them and lay down on the beach. The night was warm and after the two had finished the second bottle of wine they took off their clothes and waded out into the quiet water and then squatted down and sat there with only their heads out. “Pretty nice, eh, kid?” said Sligo. “There’s guys used to pay heavy dough for stuff just like this and we get it for nothing.”

“I’d rather be home on Tenth Avnoo,” said the kid. “I’d rather be there than any place. I’d like to see my old lady. I’d like to see the World Series this year.”

“You’d like maybe a clip in the kisser,” said Sligo.

“I’d like to go into the Greek’s and get me a double chocolate malted with six eggs in it,” said the kid. He bobbed up to keep a little wavelet out of his mouth. “This place is lonely. I like Coney.”

“Too full of people,” said Sligo.

“This place is lonely,” said the kid.

“Talking about the Series, I’d like to do that myself,” said Sligo. “It’s just times like this a fella gets kind of tempted to go over the hill.”

“S’posen you went over the hill — where the hell would you go? There ain’t no place to go.”

“I’d go home,” said Sligo. “I’d go to the Series. I’d be first in the bleachers, like I was in ’forty.”

“You couldn’t get home,” the kid said; “there ain’t no way to get home.”

The wine was warming Sligo and the water was good. “I got dough says I can get home,” he said carelessly.

“How much dough?”

“Twenty bucks.”

“You can’t do it,” said the kid.

“You want to take the bet?”

“Sure, I’ll take it. When you going to pay?”

“I ain’t going to pay, you’re going to pay. Let’s go up on the beach and knock off a little sleep.”…

At the piers the ships lay. They had brought landing craft and tanks and troops and now they lay, taking in the scrap, the broken equipment from the North African battlefields which would go to the blast furnaces to make more tanks and landing craft. Sligo and the kid sat on a pile of C-ration boxes and watched the ships. Down the hill came a detail with a hundred Italian prisoners to be shipped to New York. Some of the prisoners were ragged and some were dressed in American khaki because they had been too ragged in the wrong places. None of the prisoners seemed to be unhappy about going to America. They marched down to a gangplank and then stood in a crowd, awaiting orders to get aboard.

“Look at them,” said the kid, “they get to go home and we got to stay. What you doing, Sligo? What you rubbing oil all over your pants for?”

“Twenty bucks,” said Sligo, “and I’ll find you and collect, too.” He stood off and took off his overseas cap and tossed it to the kid. “Here’s a present, kid.”

“What you going to do, Sligo?”

“Don’t you come follow me, you’re too dumb. Twenty bucks, and don’t you forget it. So long, see you on Tenth Avnoo.”

The kid watched him go, uncomprehending. Sligo, with dirty pants and a ripped shirt, moved gradually over, near to the prisoners, and then imperceptibly he edged in among them and stood bareheaded, looking back at the kid.

An order was called down to the guards, and they herded the prisoners toward the gangplank. Sligo’s voice came plaintively. “I’m not supposed to be here. Hey, don’t put me on dis ship.”

“Shut up, wop,” a guard growled at him. “I don’t care if you did live sixteen years in Brooklyn. Git up that plank.” He pushed the reluctant Sligo up the gangplank.

Back on the pile of boxes the kid watched with admiration. He saw Sligo get to the rail. He saw Sligo still protesting and righting to get back to the pier. He heard him shrieking, “Hey, I’m Americano, Americano soldier. You canna poot me here.”

The kid saw Sligo struggling and then he saw the final triumph. He saw Sligo take a sock at a guard and he saw the guard’s club rise and come down on Sligo’s head. His friend collapsed and was carried out of sight on board the ship. “The son of a gun,” the kid murmured to himself. “The smart son of a gun. They can’t do nothing at all to him and he got witnesses. Well, the smart son of a gun. My God, it’s worth twenty bucks.”

The kid sat on the boxes for a long time. He didn’t leave his place till the ship cast off and the tugs pulled her clear of the submarine nets. The kid saw the ship join the group and he saw the destroyers move up and take the convoy under protection. The kid walked dejectedly up to the town. He bought a bottle of Algerian wine and headed back toward the beach to sleep his forty-eight.

THE SHORT SNORTER WAR MENACE

SOMEWHERE IN AFRICA (Via London), September 2, 1943—

The growth of the Short Snorters is one of the greatest single menaces to come out of the war so far. The idea started as a kind of joke in a time when very few people flew over an ocean in an airplane. It became the custom then for the crew of the airplane to sign their names on a one-dollar bill which made the new ocean flyer a Short Snorter. He was supposed to keep this bill always with him. If at any time he were asked if he were a Short Snorter and he did not have his signed bill with him he was forced to pay a dollar to each member present at the time when the question was asked. It was good fun and a kind of general joke and also a means of getting someone to pay for the drinks.

But then came the war and the building of thousands of ships and the transporting of thousands of men overseas by airplane and every single one becomes a Short Snorter. There are hundreds of thousands of Short Snorters now who have actually flown over an ocean and there are further hundreds of thousands who carry signed bills. And the new Short Snorter goes much farther than having his bill signed by the crew which carried him on his initial crossing. The custom has grown to have the bill signed by everyone you come across. At a bar you ask your drinking companion to sign your bill. You ask generals and actors and senators to sign your bill.

With the growing autographing one bill soon was not enough. You procured another bill and stuck it with Scotch tape to your first bill. Then the thing went farther. You began to collect bills from other countries. To your American dollar bill you stuck a one-pound English note, and to it a fifty-franc Algerian note, and to it a hundred-lira bill. Every place you went you stuck the money to your growing Short Snorter until now there are people who have streamers eight and ten feet long, which, folded and rolled, make a great bundle in the pocket, and these streamers are covered with thousands of names and represent besides considerable money. Even the one-dollar original is disappearing. Many new Short Snorters use $20 bills and some even $100 bills.

These are the new autograph books. The original half of the joke has been lost. In bars, in airports, in clubs, the first thing that must be done is a kind of general exchange of signatures. Serious and intelligent gentlemen sign one another’s bills with an absolute lack of humor. If the party is fairly large it might take an hour before everyone has signed the bill of everyone else. Meanwhile the soup gets cold.

There are favorite places on the bill for honored and desirable autographs. The little space under Morgenthau’s name is one such. The wide space beside the portrait on the bill is another. If you get an autograph you want to show, you have it written on a clear space, but if it is just one of the run-of-the-mill signatures it is put any place in the green part, where it hardly shows up at all. It is a frantic, serious-minded, insane thing. Men of dignity scramble for autographs on their Short Snorters. A special case, usually made of cellophane, is sometimes carried to house the bill, or the long streamers of bills, because these treasures are handled so much that they would fall to pieces if they were not protected.

The effort and time involved in this curious thing is immense. Entertainers who travel about to our troops sign literally thousands of Short Snorter bills. For no longer do people have to fly an ocean to be members. The new method is that any Short Snorter can create a new Short Snorter. The club is pyramiding. Probably there are ten million Short Snorters now and every day new thousands begin to scribble on their bills. It would be interesting to know how many bills are withdrawn from circulation to be used as autograph books. They must run into the millions.

The use of large bills as Short Snorter bills has a curious logic behind it. The man or woman who used a $20 or $100 bill feels that he or she will not spend this money because of the signatures on it, but he also feels that if he needs to he can spend it. Thus he has a nest egg or mad money and a treasure, too. He will not toss it over a bar nor put it in a crap game, but if he really should get into a hole he has this money with him.

Very curious practices grow out of a war and surely none more strange than this one has taken over the public recently.

THE BONE YARD

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), September 5, 1943—

On the edge of a North African city there is a huge used tank yard. It isn’t only tanks, either. It is a giant bone yard, where wrecked tanks and trucks and artillery are brought and parked, ready for overhauling. There are General Shermans with knocked-out turrets and broken tracks, with engines gone to pieces. There are trucks that have fallen into shell holes. There are hundreds of wrecked motorcycles and many broken and burned-out pieces of artillery, the debris of months of bitter fighting in the desert.

On the edge of this great bone yard are the reconditioning yards and the rebuilding lines. Into the masses of wrecked equipment the Army inspectors go. They look over each piece of equipment and tag it. Perhaps this tank, with a German.88 hole drilled neatly through the turret, will go into the fight again with a turret from the one next to it, which has had the tracks shot from under it. Most of the tanks will run again, but those which are beyond repair will furnish thousands of spare parts to take care of the ones which are running. This plant is like the used-car lots in American cities, where you can, for a small price, buy the gear or the wheel which keeps your car running.

The engines are removed from the wrecked trucks and put on the repair lines. Here a complete overhaul job is done, the linings of the motors rebored, with new rings, tested and ready to go finally into the paint room, where they are resprayed with green paint. Housings, gears, clutch plates are cleaned with steam, inspected, and placed in bins, ready to be drawn again as spare parts. One whole end of the yard is piled high with repaired tires. Hundreds of men work in this yard, putting the wrecked equipment back to work.

Here is an acre of injured small artillery, 20- and 37-mm. anti-tank guns. Some of them have been fired so long that their barrels have burned out. Some of them have only a burst tire or a bent trail. These are sorted and put ready for repair. The barrels are changed for new ones, and the old ones go to the scrap pile. For when everything usable has been made use of there is still a great pile of twisted steel which can be used as nothing but scrap metal. But the ships which bring supplies to the Army from home are going back. They take their holds full of this scrap to go into the making of new steel for new equipment.

It is interesting to see the same American who, a few months ago, was tinkering with engines in a small-town garage now tinkering with the engine of a General Grant tank. And the man hasn’t changed a bit. He is still the intent man who is good with engines. He isn’t even dressed very much differently, for the denim work clothes are very like the overalls he has been wearing for years. Beside these men work the French and the Arabs. They are learning from our men how to take care of the machinery that they may use. They learn quickly but without many words, for most of our men cannot speak the language of the men who are helping them. It is training by sign language and it seems to work very well.

The wrecked equipment comes in in streams from the battlefields. Modern war is very hard on its tools. While in this war fewer men are killed, more equipment than ever is wrecked, for it seems almost to be weapon against weapon rather than man against man.

But there are many sad little evidences in the vehicles. In this tank which has been hit there is a splash of blood against the steel side of the turret. And in this burned-out tank a large piece of singed cloth and a charred and curled shoe. And the insides of a tank are full of evidences of the men who ran it, penciled notes written on the walls, a telephone number, a sketch of a profile on the steel armor plate. Probably every vehicle in the whole Army has a name, usually the name of a girl but sometimes a brave name like Hun Chaser. That one got badly hit. And there is a tank with no track and with the whole top of the turret shot away by a heavy shell, but on her skirt in front is still her name and she is called Lucky Girl. Every one of these vehicles lying in the wreck yard has some tremendous story, but in many of the cases the story died with the driver and the crew.

There are little tags tied to the barrels of the guns. One says: “The recoil slaps sideways. I’m scared of it.” And another says: “You can’t hit a barn with this any more.” And in a little while these guns, refitted and painted, with their camouflage, will be back in the fight again.

There is hammering in the yard, and fizz of welders and hiss of steam pipes. The men are stripped to the waist, working under the hot African sun, their skins burned nearly black. The little cranes run excitedly about, carrying parts, stacking engines, tearing the hopeless jobs to pieces for their usable parts.