Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Read online

  We began drill that morning far enough out on the drill fields so that no one noticed.

  By the end of the week, I thought the men were ready to be seen by others. So, I led the company out into the middle of the parade ground, stood back with the first sergeant, and ordered the four master sergeants to drill their platoons.

  We had been at it for an hour or so, with breaks, when I noticed a group of officers watching us from the edge of the platform tent area. Suddenly a runner came up to me from the group. “Report to General Bradley, Lieutenant.”

  My career as an officer was about to come to an end, I realized. I followed the runner back to the group from which he had been sent, came to attention in front of Bradley, and saluted. “Lieutenant Wrought reporting, sir.” He returned the salute.

  “Son, what are those colored boys doing out there marching without their weapons?”

  “Sir, their weapons were taken away for a white unit that arrived without any.”

  “I see.” He turned to an aide. “Take care of that, will you, Major James?”

  Now another officer addressed me, a large lieutenant colonel, young for his rank, but with a paunch that began where the necktie was tucked into his shirt and lapped over his belt. His collar bore the tabs of the quartermaster corps. In a deep Southern accent he said, “Lieutenant, do I see four colored sergeants in front of me?”

  “No, sir. There are five, including the company master sergeant.”

  The colonel looked at me. “Who promoted those”—I could see the word niggers forming on his lips, but he must have thought better of it—“colored boys to noncommissioned officers?”

  I was silent till General Bradley added, “Answer Colonel Folsom, Lieutenant.” It was a name I was to learn better.

  “Sir, I did.”

  Here Bradley intervened. “Why did you do that, Lieutenant?”

  “Sir, I am the senior officer commanding the company pending arrival of a major or a captain. The unit had lost all its white noncoms as well as its white officers before I arrived. I was told by the divisional staff not to expect any replacements. All the white officers and NCOs were needed elsewhere.” I stopped for a moment. “Did I do wrong, sir?”

  Instead of answering me directly the general said, “Carry on, Lieutenant.” I saluted, made an about-turn, and walked off as quickly as I could.

  The next morning, twenty crates, each containing a half-dozen M1 rifles, arrived at my command tent.

  I didn’t stick my neck out again until one afternoon two months later, when I noticed a company of infantry packing to leave its platform tent billets. By this time I’d been in the army long enough to know that quartermasters don’t really keep track of much. In a war like this, no one was encouraged to be a bean counter. I knew we couldn’t move into white quarters. But I also knew that if no one were to occupy these tents for a few days or more, they would simply vanish from army records.

  I watched for twenty-four hours. Then I called my sergeants together. “Tomorrow morning, I want every man to fall out into carpenters’ parties; distribute hammers, saws, crowbars, and anything else you can get your hands on. Then I want the men to take down those tents and platforms and rebuild them here.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jenkins paused for a moment. “Won’t anyone stop us?”

  “Stop a party of colored soldiers doing non-combat-related labor? Nothing to worry about.”

  A year later I was ordered to report to division headquarters, where I found an almost entirely new set of staff officers, who knew and cared no more about the 609th than did their predecessors. The one holdover was Folsom, the quartermaster corps lieutenant colonel who had challenged my promotions. He didn’t seem to remember me when I reported and didn’t bother to return my salute either. He looked up briefly from his desk, handed me a few pieces of paper, and said, “Dismissed.” I saluted again, made an about-turn, walked out of the building, and read the flimsy sheets. They were pro forma division orders. The first one promoted me to first lieutenant, the second one promoted me to temporary captain, and the third one authorized me to promote a sergeant of my choice to lieutenant. I wasn’t entirely surprised at these orders. A company required a captain to command it, and its usual complement of lieutenants was at least two. But no officer had arrived at the 609th since my posting.

  “Sergeant Jenkins.” I beckoned my top NCO into the company headquarters tent.

  “Yes, sir.” He came to attention.

  “At ease, Sergeant. I have authority to promote you to lieutenant as from today.” I smiled broadly and put out my hand. “Well done, Lieutenant Jenkins.”

  Jenkins visibly grimaced. “Is that an order, sir? ’Cause if it is, it’ll be the first one of yours I’ll disobey.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased. You earned it. First Negro officer in the unit, maybe the only one in the whole division.”

  “Exactly, sir. That’s the trouble.” Jenkins continued, “You Northerners don’t understand, sir. But down here in the deep South, if I took to wearin’ lieutenant’s bars on my shoulders, it’d be like walking around with a bullseye on my back. Not just in town, if we ever got there, but on the base. Every cracker redneck in the division would have to salute me.” He stopped, and together we shared the image. “And that would be about as bad for me as if I had been caught wolf-whistling a white girl.”

  “I see.” Jenkins’s analysis was irrefutable. I’d do him no favors enforcing my order.

  The 609th reached Britain in the fall of 1943. We were billeted in what the Brits called “Nissen huts” and we called Quonset huts, just outside the town of Arundel, east of Portsmouth. The town wasn’t much more than a single street of whitewashed, timbered, two-story buildings. A post office, a tea shop, a millenary, dry goods, a hotel—The Swan—and a pub across the bridge over the River Arun. Beyond what passed for a high street, there were clusters of thatched-roof farm buildings and grain fields that ran down to a shingle on the English Channel.

  Arundel was surrounded by vast parks of army stores, and especially motor vehicles. The 609th was responsible for readying jeeps, amphibious vehicles—DUKWs or “ducks” as they were called—and most of all, hundreds of “deuce-and-a-half” trucks for use after their shipment to Britain. These triple-axle, two-and-a-half-ton trucks were the backbone of our army, and increasingly of the Brits’ and the Russian armies too. To withstand the transatlantic crossing, they had been drained of oil, sealed shut, and then covered in grease. It was the very dirty job of the 609th to degrease and make them ready for use. The first thing many of the men had to do was learn how to drive these trucks.

  Ours was among the first American units in that part of Sussex. I still remember the stupefaction with which the men returned to the billets after their first visit to the town. There had been no off-limits signs, no colored washrooms, no separate facilities whatever. They had been served in tea rooms, welcomed in pubs, sold goods at the counters of the small shops along with everyone else. There was no colored bar in Britain, and for the first time in their lives, they were being treated as equals.

  Men who went into nearby Worthing, or farther afield to Portsmouth or Southampton, reported that the US Army had begun to impose Jim Crow in these larger towns. But Arundel remained unaffected.

  One afternoon a white staff sergeant led a half-dozen soldiers on a break into the Swan. He looked around at the black faces. Then in a loud voice he announced, “This pub is off limits to colored troops. As of now.”

  Trying not to sound provocative, one of the 609th’s master sergeants—a higher rank—stepped forward to contradict him. “Sorry, Sarge, you’re mistaken. If the place were off limits to anyone, there’d be a notice. You know that.” Then with the slightest pause, he went on, “Buy you a drink?”

  A white corporal could no longer repress himself. “Goddamn, nigger, who made you a fucking sergeant?”

  The white sergeant looked at his companions and smiled. “Run these coons out of here.” When the fight wa
s over, three minutes later, the two whites still standing were permitted to help their wounded comrades out.

  Three days later a squad of MPs arrived to erect an OUT OF BOUNDS FOR COLORED SOLDIERS sign in front of the Swan. It was then that the citizens of Arundel showed their mettle. No sooner had the MP squad erected the sign than a half dozen of the local women, together with a pair of elderly men, swarmed over it. With hammers and crowbars, they pulled it down.

  I had nothing to do with all this, of course. But it was part of what has made life in Britain possible for me.

  As the winter of 1944 turned to spring, it was clear that the invasion of France was approaching. By the end of May, there were hardly any trucks left in our compound, and no new ones were coming in anymore. In the first few days of June, the roads toward Portsmouth and Southampton were choked with military vehicles moving toward the embarkation points. The weather was poor—cold, rainy, with a strong chop on the channel visible from the beaches just south of Arundel. The night of the fifth, we watched the steady stream of C-47s towing gliders pass over the town heading across the channel. White men were going to fight and die, and the men in the 609th wanted to join them and do so at their sides. It’s remarkable how the martial emotions obliterate reason.

  The next evening I was in the Swan pub along with a dozen other men from the 609th when Eisenhower’s voice came over the BBC.

  “People of Western Europe: A landing was made this morning on the coast of France by troops of the Allied Expeditionary Force. This landing is part of the concerted United Nations plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies.”

  It was the last sentence that made me remember his words so well. Who made him add them?

  The 609th had almost nothing to do for the next three months.

  One morning at the very end of August, Sergeant Jenkins came into my office. “Message for you, Captain. They want you at battalion headquarters in Portsmouth, ASAP.” Before I could give an order he continued, “Jeep’s ready, sir.”

  “OK, Sarge. Have we done anything wrong?”

  He shook his head.

  The roads were empty now as the jeep drove to Portsmouth, but on either side one could see the detritus, the remnants, the waste of an infinitely rich nation at war. I kept thinking, It’s just the same—wasting my men and a million more like them, keeping them out of combat, tossed away like trash.

  Upon my arrival in Portsmouth, I found myself facing for the third time the same paunchy quartermaster colonel who had been at General Bradley’s side back at Camp Claiborne when all he commanded was the Eighty-Second Airborne instead of the entire US Army in Europe. By this time I even knew the quartermaster corps officer’s name, Folsom, though mine still appeared to make no impression on him. He evidently had no memory of our meeting on that parade ground in Louisiana two years before.

  Folsom looked up at me from his desk, took my salute without more than a glance, and turned back to the papers. He did not ask me to sit, and he certainly showed no sign that we had met before. His accent had lost none of its Southern drawl. “Captain, how many of the . . . colored boys”—why, I wondered again, didn’t he just say niggers—“in your company can drive a deuce and a half?” The deuce and a half was the two-and-a-half-ton truck on which my men had worked for the better part of six months.

  “Every one of them, sir.”

  “Every last one of them?”

  “Yes, sir. They all learned while setting them up for the combat troops.”

  “Alright.” He looked up at me. “Your boys are going to France after all. Seems the First and Third Armies’ breakouts from Normandy are outrunning their supplies. Supreme headquarters is organizing a convoy system from the port at Cherbourg to wherever the front is. They need drivers, and your men aren’t doing anything much here in England.” He handed me a file full of orders, requisitions, and authorizations. “Get on with it. Dismissed.”

  I saluted and turned. Every man in the Second Company of the 609th was about to find himself a lot closer to combat than we ever thought we could get.

  Tom was deep enough into his recollection of the war that he did not hear the guard open his door. The man poked his head in and, seeing Tom on his cot, said, “Exercise time, Wrought.”

  Once the warder had turned away, Tom pulled a hair from his head, moistened its ends with bits of saliva, and pressed them carefully under the front and back covers of the composition book he had nearly filled. It was a simple trick he’d been taught by the OSS in Stockholm after the war. When he returned forty-five minutes later, everything looked untouched in the cell, but the hair was no longer over the pages. Someone, he thought, was evidently very interested in Tom Wrought’s autobiography. He had come back to the cell eager to continue. But now he hesitated. The realization that his readership might not be limited to his solicitor frightened him, even though—in fact, because—he had no idea why anyone else would care what he wrote.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Folsom was not mistaken about how urgent the need was for the 609th in France. Within a few weeks after D-day, the US First and Third Armies were outrunning their supplies of gasoline and ammunition. So someone dreamed up a radical solution. Every spare truck on the Normandy beaches was going to be inserted into an endless conveyer belt reaching from the beaches and the port of Cherbourg right to the front and then back again. But there weren’t any drivers for what they called the Red Ball Express. And that’s when they thought of all those Negro service troops left back in England. Their subsequent achievement in winning the war was so important that when Hollywood came to make a movie about it in 1952, the drivers were mostly all white.

  From the moment I issued the orders, the excitement of the move to France was palpable. The men packed only what one would take going into combat, including the M1 rifles General Bradley had given the unit back in Louisiana. Nothing could dampen their enthusiasm, not the seasickness of the channel, nor the cold and wet of the open trucks that took the company to Saint-Lô where the Red Ball began, nor even the prospect of a bivouac in pup tents again.

  Less than four days after I got my orders, the 609th Quartermaster Service Battalion was inducted into the conveyer belt of trucks that moved around the clock for the next three months across a loop of one-way roads from the coast to the battlefield on the other side of Paris and back.

  The 609th began to drive the very night we arrived, in three convoys, each led by a jeep, navigating the route through Vire, Argentan, and Dreux to Soissons on the other side of Paris. No headlights were allowed, so the trucks had to stay close just to follow in the dark. Traveling faster than the trucks were designed for, carrying ammunition and gasoline, kept every man at the wheel, and their relief drivers, on the edge all night.

  I was in the lead jeep of our first convoy when the sun rose at about five fifteen on the French countryside fifty kilometers west of Soissons. There was a streak of gold across the horizon, glimmering through the leafy plane trees that lined the road. The rising sun was turning the fields from deep purple to the tawny yellow of a lioness’s coat. The villages of Aisne were rousing themselves from a night probably made sleepless by the never-ending din of a thousand deuce and a halfs passing through in an endless ribbon. I was struck that la France profonde had been untouched by the war. The neat brick homes, the carefully pruned plane trees, the high fences, and even the plump cows and calmly grazing sheep testified to the wisdom of losing their 1940 war quickly and allowing others to win the 1944 war for them.

  The Soissons bridgehead was a vast field of mud that morning, strewn with trucks, moving cranes, stacks of crates, fields of jerrycans and motor oil, over which men swarmed like ants tending colonies. Our trucks were being unloaded even before the drivers had climbed down from their cabs.

  Walking to the drivers’ billets, I watched the men unloading the several hundred trucks that had arrived with ours. Most trucks were emptied into two equal but ever-increasing stacks. I stopp
ed and asked a soldier about it. He replied, “Not sure, sir. I think one is for First Army—Hodges, and the other is for Third—Patton. Each one suspects the other is getting more.”

  “Thanks, soldier. Makes sense.”

  I tumbled into the first cot I found free. It was in the enlisted men’s tent, but no one had the heart or nerve or perhaps interest in rousing me and sending me to officer quarters. We were allowed four hours rest, and then we drove back in the daylight to Saint-Lô, not the way we came but on another one-way route that ran north of the outgoing one, 240 miles, eight hours back to Saint-Lô.

  Once my unit was on the ground in Europe, the temptation to find a way into the shooting war proved overpowering. That’s when I realized there might be a way to force the army to allow the 609th to fight. Back in New York, one of the most left-wing political figures was the congressman from the twentieth district on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Spanish Harlem. His name was Vito Marcantonio. Like other Communist Party members, I had worked for his American Labor Party congressional campaign in ’38, and again in ’40 after I had quit the party. The congressman knew me by name and had even sent me a note of congratulations when I passed through the army’s second Officer Candidate School. Now, after a month in the Red Ball Express, I would ask him for a favor.

  The army censors who read all V-mail would never deliver the letter I intended to write. So, I went to a French post office in Saint-Lô, bought an aerogram, wrote to my congressman, and dropped it in a French postbox. In my letter I told Marcantonio about the Red Ball and its success, the splendid work Negro soldiers were doing, their esprit de corps, and the waste of their fighting qualities by the War Department. I made it plain that, as a white officer, I was prepared to lead my Negro soldiers anywhere against the Germans. Then I asked the congressman to press the War Department to allow my unit to fight.