Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 4

  When I returned to the beach more German prisoners were being brought down to await transportation to England. The bay and its immense weight of shipping was spread out before them. A German officer, when he saw that vast mass of ships, lifted his hand and let it drop in a gesture of utter despair, as if to say, “Who can win against this?”

  • • •

  But the thing I remember most clearly about this long day was a particular moment in the twilight. It is a picture frozen in my mind—the way a scream sometimes seems frozen in the air.

  I was aboard an LCT moving both American and German wounded from the murderous beach. The Nazi prisoners sat silently slumped side by side with the silent Americans. We were a few hundred yards offshore when there was a low-swooping air raid which came close enough for me to feel the desperate heat of one Hun plane. It hit like a bundle of fists against my face.

  Very few of the men aboard stirred. Most of them were immersed in the apathy that seizes a man when he knows he has done all he can possibly do.

  A large, sooty cloud of smoke sprang up from the beach as abruptly as if prodded. Our LCT trembled all over. There was debris in that cloud—big, black, torn chunks of it—and sitting on top of the cloud, poised delicately there for a moment many feet in the air, was a truck, all intact. It was silhouetted so sharply in the twilight that I could make out its wheels. Then the blasting sound of the explosion came clapping like a huge hand against our ears.

  A German officer told me the war would be over in October because the Americans and Russians could not fight longer than that. I told him that all the enlisted men among the Germans I had spoken to had agreed the war would be over in October because Germany could not hold out longer.

  “Your men seem very tired of fighting,” I said. “Do you have trouble convincing them that Hitler will lead them to a happy end?”

  “German soldiers,” he said, “fight for the Fatherland and there is no separation possible in any German mind between Der Führer and Das Vaterland.”

  As the officer delivered his pronouncement about Hitler and the German mind, an enlisted man sitting next to him winked at me. I smiled broadly back at him.

  Suddenly I saw a German Heinkel seemingly stuck in the air above me. I saw the first of its stick of bombs drop into the water. Then I threw myself against the iron deck. The German officer clamped down on his emotions and the pain of his wounds and stood erect to show that no German was afraid. He posed himself insolently against the rail, smoking a cigarette in a careful, graceful, stiff-handed way while one knee wilted slightly in the manner approved for gentlemen posing before a mantel. I looked away in disgust from this Nazi superman across the open deck where the brown-blanketed seriously wounded lay in silent rows.

  As we made our way out into the darkening sea we could see fires springing up from the town of Montebourg. The fires were the work of the Tuscaloosa—or, as I found out later when I got aboard the vessel, more specifically the work of the Army’s Lieutenant Joe PuGash, of Tampa, serving as spotter with a naval shore fire control party; and Lieutenants Theral O’Bryant, of Tampa, and William Braybrook, of Ohio, sitting deep in the ship, in the plotting room. These boys had been talking to each other over the radio.

  “German infantry is entrenching itself in the main square of the town,” Joe said. “Let’s ginger them up.” The guns fired.

  “Cease firing; mission successful, old boy,” said Joe.

  Two roads lead into Montebourg. The Germans were shoveling reinforcements down from Valognes. Joe was changing places to get a line on these roads when suddenly, in a very abrupt way, he gave a target and cried, “Open fire!”

  Immediately afterward there was silence from him.

  O’Bryant sat listening to the silence from Joe for a long time. A British voice from a plane overhead brought him back to work.

  “There are transports coming into town, troops getting out of trucks and taking up positions near a cemetery there.” The voice was tranquil and most British. “Would you care for a go at them?”

  After the Tuscaloosa had fired a salvo the British voice lost most of its tranquillity. “Beautiful!” it cried. “Oh, beautiful! What a lovely shot!”

  It seems that ten trucks full of Huns had been blown across acres of field by a single straddle. The British voice abruptly regained its calm. “I’m afraid I’ll have to be off now,” it said. “My covering plane has been shot down and a Jerry is shooting at me. Good-bye all.”

  “The best to you and thanks,” shouted O’Bryant. But he never heard the British voice again.

  Instead he heard from Joe. The boy was back overlooking Montebourg.

  “I couldn’t keep on spotting for you,” he explained. He sounded very tired. “The Germans had us in a barrel for two hours and if I had lifted my head to see what was going on I’d have got it knocked off.” Joe began running around all over the place, spotting infantry positions, troop movements, observation posts and strong points. “You sure shot the hell out of them that time,” he kept saying in his tired voice.

  About the time we were huffing and clanking past the Tuscaloosa, O’Bryant came out on deck for a breather. He helped us watch Montebourg burn. “That Joe is sure building himself up a hot time there,” he said.

  The wounded to whom I talked gave some idea of what the day had been like. A paratrooper captain said, “When I landed I broke my leg. I had spent two years training, and four seconds after I go to work I’m out of it. I rolled into some kind of ditch. There the krautburgers were shooting at me but they didn’t hit me. I waited in the ditch and thought, Well, your total contribution to the war effort is that you spared the time of a man in the burying detail by finding your own grave. A German started coming toward me. What’s the German for Kamerad, I wondered, and remembered that Kamerad is the German for Kamerad. Then I thought, the hell with that. I’m going to get at least one lick in in this war. So I killed the German. I waited till he got close and aimed for his groin and walked my tommygun right up the middle to his chin. Then I passed out. But I got one. My training wasn’t altogether wasted.”

  A naval officer, suffering from exposure, said: “The whole stern blew up. You know, it’s a funny thing. There was a kid blown higher than the mast. I saw him in the air, arms flailing around, legs kicking, and recognized his face there in the air. That kid was picked up later and all he had was a broken leg.”

  A glider pilot, shot down behind German lines, said, “I walked all night. I went toward where the guns were shooting and then I met a Frenchman. I gave him my rations and he gave me wine.

  “Boy, did I get drunk! I walked through the whole German lines—and our lines, too—drunk as a goat and singing.”

  • • •

  There is no way to record all the events that take place in a typical beachhead day, not even in a typical beachhead hour. There are hundreds of thousands of men in and around this beachhead, and if each made a record of what startling violent things he saw the records would differ in hundreds of thousands of ways.

  Sergeant Erwin and the Blazing Bomb

  BY COREY FORD

  Sometimes I’m asked which I like best of all the pieces I’ve written. I guess the answer is something I wrote one night back in 1945, on the island of Guam. It was never published; I didn’t even sign it; but it was more rewarding than anything else I’ve ever done.

  Guam was our base in the Marianas from which the B-29’s took off for their nightly incendiary raids on Japan. As an Air Force colonel, I had flown with them, and I knew what those missions were like. The seven endless hours over the Pacific to the hostile coastline. The wink of ack-ack guns and the flak bursts all around us, the ground searchlights that lighted up our cabin as though an auto had parked beside us in the sky, and, after our bomb run, the red ruin of an enemy city burning. We would throttle down to cruising speed; there were 1500 miles of empty ocean between us and home.

  This particular night I was not flying. I sat in the Group headquarters ten
t with Col. Carl Storrie, waiting for the mission’s strike report. Storrie, a lean tough Texan, was the Group Commander, and he paced up and down the tent, restless as a caged animal, as the first news filtered in. The lead plane, commanded by Capt. Tony Simeral, had been forced to turn away from the target, and had made an emergency landing at Iwo Jima. It was on its way back to Guam now.

  We could make out the drone of its engines, see the red flares that signaled distress, and hear the fire trucks rumbling out to meet it as it touched down. A few moments later Captain Simeral entered the tent. His face was white; he seemed to be in a state of shock. He fumbled for a cigarette with his left hand, and I saw that the back of his right hand was pockmarked with deep ugly holes that had burned clear to the bone. He took several drags before he could trust himself to talk.

  It had happened as they approached the enemy coast, he said. They were flying the pathfinder plane, which drops a phosphorus smoke bomb to assemble the formation before proceeding to the target. On a B-29 this task is performed by the radio operator, back in the waist of the plane. At a signal from the pilot he releases the bomb through a narrow tube.

  The radio operator on Simeral’s plane was a chunky, red-haired youngster from Alabama, Staff Sgt. Henry Erwin. His crewmates liked to mimic his soft southern drawl, and he was always with a grin, always quiet and courteous. He received the routine order from Simeral, triggered the bomb and dropped it down the tube.

  There was a malfunction. The bomb exploded in the tube and bounced back into Erwin’s face, blinding both eyes and searing off an ear.

  Phosphorus burns with a furious intensity that melts metal like butter. Now the bomb at Erwin’s feet was eating its way rapidly through the deck of the plane, toward the full load of incendiaries in their racks below. He was alone; the navigator had gone up to the astrodome to get a star shot. There was no time to think. He picked up the white-hot bomb in his bare hands, and started forward to the cockpit, groping his way with elbows and feet.

  The navigator’s folding table was down and latched, blocking the narrow passageway. Erwin hugged the blazing bomb under an arm, feeling it devour the flesh on his ribs, unfastened the spring latch and lifted the table. (We inspected the plane later; the skin of his entire hand was seared onto the table.)

  He stumbled on, a walking torch. His clothes, hair and flesh were ablaze.

  The dense smoke had filled the airplane, and Simeral had opened the window beside him to clear the air. “I couldn’t see Erwin,” he told us, “but I heard his voice right at my elbow. He said—” Simeral paused a moment to steady his own voice. “He said, ‘Pardon me, sir’ and reached across to the window and tossed out the bomb. Then he collapsed on the flight deck.” A fire extinguisher was turned on him, but the phosphorus still burned.

  Simeral’s instrument panel was obliterated by the smoke, and the plane was out of control. It was less than 300 feet off the water when he righted it. He called to the formation that he was aborting, jettisoned his bombs and headed back to the field hospital at Iwo, three hours away. The crew applied first aid to Erwin, gave him plasma, smeared grease on his smoldering flesh. “He never lost consciousness, but he spoke only once the whole way back. He asked me—” Simeral took another drag on his cigarette. “ ‘Is everybody else all right, sir?’ ”

  At Iwo, he was still exhaling phosphorus smoke from his lungs, and his body had become so rigid that he had to be eased out through the window like a log. They carried him to the hospital. When they removed the unguent pads there and exposed his flesh to the air, it began to smolder again. The airplane flew on to Guam—with 11 men who would not be living save for the one they left behind.

  Simeral finished talking. A young lieutenant looked at the holes in his right hand, where the phosphorus had spattered, and said tactlessly, “You ought to put in for a Purple Heart, Captain.” Simeral, his control snapping, took a wild swing at him. Then the flight surgeon arrived and gave him a sedative, and led him away to have his burns treated.

  We spent the rest of the night writing up a recommendation for the Congressional Medal of Honor. It was simply worded. There was no need to speak of heroism and sacrifice; the facts were enough. It ended with the conventional military phrase: “Above and beyond the call of duty,” but that seemed to express it pretty well. At five in the morning Colonel Storrie carried the single typewritten page to Air Force headquarters. Gen. Curtis LeMay was awakened. He read and signed it, and the recommendation was flashed to Washington. The reply arrived in record time: Approved.

  Iwo reported that Sergeant Erwin was still alive, but no one could say how much longer he would survive. There was no Congressional Medal of Honor on Guam; the nearest was in Honolulu, and a special B-29 was dispatched to fly the Pacific to Hawaii.

  The medal was in a locked display case in Gen. Robert C. Richardson’s headquarters, and the key was missing. They smashed the glass, took the medal from the case and sped back to Guam. General LeMay flew to Iwo and personally presented it to Sergeant Erwin, in a ceremony at his bedside. He repeated the final line about the call of duty, and Erwin said, “Thank you, sir.”

  Several years after the war I heard that Erwin was back in Alabama, happily married; he had regained the use of his hands and partial vision in one eye. I hope he can read over his citation now and then. I hope it gives him as much satisfaction as it gave me to write it.

  No Medals for Joe

  BY MAYO SIMON

  The December sun was barely edging over the horizon when Joe Bulgo, a 21-year-old shipyard worker, walked through the gates of Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. It was Sunday morning, so the big shop buildings and repair basin were nearly deserted. Beyond them lay the entire Pacific Battleship Fleet, peacefully at anchor.

  Joe had come to this base from a pineapple plantation on the island of Maui, where he was born. At six feet, with broad shoulders and thick arms, he seemed never to tire, and never complained. He would do any job, anytime. After all, he had taken an oath to do what the Navy said.

  Today his orders were to caulk and test a new sea valve on the destroyer Shaw. He changed into his work clothes and picked up his pneumatic hammer, the biggest one made. When other workers tried to use this chipping gun, it would fly out of their hands. But Joe could hold it. On his way to the vessel, he heard a ship’s band playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” for the morning flag-raising.

  Then a familiar drone filled the sky. When Joe saw waves of aircraft flying in formation across the harbor, he assumed it was an Army exercise. He thought, I didn’t know we had that many planes. But within seconds, plumes of water began kicking up among the ships, and he saw the planes’ insignia: the rising sun.

  Pandemonium broke loose, and Joe ran for cover. Screaming planes swooped low, bombing and strafing the docks and harbor. The Shaw rose up in a fiery cloud, its bow blown off. Torpedoes shuddered into the Oklahoma; the Arizona exploded. Ship after ship—destroyers, cruisers, minelayers—turned over and sank.

  After two hours of hell, the invaders vanished, leaving behind an eerie silence—and unbelievable destruction. All the workers were enraged. They wanted to fight back, but had nothing to fight back with. Eventually Joe received new orders.

  “Get down to the dock with your chipping outfit,” a supervisor shouted to him. “They want you on the Oklahoma!”

  A launch took him across the channel. Half obscured by black clouds of smoke, battleships were settling to the bottom of the harbor. Hundreds of bodies floated in the water. The Arizona was burning, huge flames engulfing its twisted superstructure.

  The Oklahoma was unrecognizable. All that was left of the huge ship was a curving piece of hull sticking out of the water. It looked like a stranded gray whale.

  Standing on the hull under the smoky sky were the chipping gang from Shop 11 and Joe’s boss, Julio DeCastro. “Come on,” he yelled at Joe. “Let’s get going!”

  At least three torpedoes had capsized the Oklahoma, DeCastro told Joe. Its masts were
stuck in the mud at the bottom of the harbor, and some 400 sailors were still inside. “Listen,” DeCastro said. Joe could hear the trapped sailors tapping on the steel beneath his feet.

  The workers tried to cut into the hull with their chipping guns, but it was hard going. “Chipping guns not made to cut through steel this thick,” Joe finally told DeCastro. “Why not burn them out?”

  DeCastro showed him an open black patch in the hull. Before he arrived, the burner gang from a Navy ship had tried using acetylene torches. A cork-lined compartment had been set afire, and two trapped sailors had suffocated. “We have no choice,” said DeCastro.

  Joe started up his gun with an earsplitting clatter. He leaned into the bulkhead, made two cuts and helped bend out a patch. Then he went down into the ship and relieved several exhausted workers chipping at a deck inside.

  It was boiling hot. No air. They kept looking for a way to get to the trapped men. But the ship was upside down, and it was impossible to figure where they were. As they drilled, they hit oil tanks, waste tanks, dead ends, and would have to plug up and start over. They knew that, little by little, they were letting out all the ship’s trapped air—the only thing keeping the water level down. The more holes they made, the closer the men were to drowning.

  Joe worked tirelessly, opening bulkhead after bulkhead, only to find himself in a maze of tiny compartments filled with debris. Sometimes he came upon smashed bodies of sailors in passageways, but he had to keep going.

  Whenever Joe paused, he could hear desperate tapping reverberating through the ship. Save me, save me, the terrified sailors were saying. Give me life. . . . That sound would live in Joe’s marrow forever.