Autumn in Oxford: A Novel Read online

  Be careful what you wish for.

  One morning in the middle of October, I was leading a convoy of five trucks, all carrying jerrycans of gasoline. About fifty miles beyond Paris, one of the MPs who controlled traffic all along the Red Ball Highway signaled my trucks onto a side road, following signs marked CRECY-LA-CHAPELLE. I’d been dozing in the front seat of the jeep while Jenkins drove. The turn woke me. “Why’d we just turn off the Red Ball route, Sergeant?”

  “Oh, happens here every few trips, especially when we’re carrying gas cans, sir. MPs signal us to pull off, and they unload about half the cans here.”

  A half mile down the road toward Crecy, another MP came forward and signaled the convoy into a dead end between the plastered back walls of two barns that bracketed the lane. Once we came to a stop, a dozen men came forward to unload. None was a GI. Several wore the sleeveless leather vests common in the French countryside, and some had armbands with the letters FFI—Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur. Others wore armbands marked FTP for Francs Tireurs et Partisans. A few others, with British-made STEN submachine guns slung over their shoulders, watched the unloading proceed. The soldier drivers had all left their cabs and begun to stretch. Some moved well away from the trucks and lit up. Nothing seemed quite right about what was going on, so I walked over to the MP, who came to attention and saluted.

  “Say, soldier, why are we unloading here, and who are these guys?” I tried to make my question conversational.

  “Dunno, Captain. Maybe the brass over in that staff car can tell you.” He jerked his head back down the lane to the main road. There a fastback four-door Dodge in the green paint of a US Army staff car was parked. The winged ball device on the side indicated it was a quartermaster corps vehicle. As I watched, a Frenchman in civilian clothes got out of the car, and a black Citroen Traction Avant sedan pulled up. He got in, and it drove away. As did the quartermaster’s Dodge.

  Was the US Army supplying the French resistance? Was it doing so this far behind the front? I thought about the armbands worn by the men unloading the trucks. The FTP, the Francs Tireurs et Partisans, were the Communist resistance. The others, with the FFI armbands, were the Gaullist résistance. These two organizations hated each other almost as much as they hated the Germans. Why were they working together here?

  Suddenly it seemed pretty obvious that this wasn’t resupply for the resistance. It was a diversion of fuel onto the French black market. I shouted out, “OK, men, saddle up, double-time. We’re getting out of here, now.” My unit ran back to their trucks and began backing them out of the cul-de-sac so quickly the men unloading had to jump off.

  The MP reached my jeep just as we turned around and were about to drive off behind the trucks. “Sir, they haven’t finished—”

  “But we have.” I saluted him with a wry smile. Turning to the man at the wheel, I gave the order. “Drive, Sergeant.”

  When we got to Soissons, I made my way to the command tents. There to my surprise was a fastback four-door Dodge staff car with the same quartermaster insignia I’d seen in Crecy-la-Chapelle. The tent flaps were open, and I could see the officers inside. There, on the telephone, in a heated conversation, was Lieutenant Colonel Folsom again, crossing my path: first, dressing me down in front of Omar Bradley on that dusty parade ground in Louisiana, then handing me a promotion to captain without even looking at me, and finally, sending us across the channel to man the Red Ball Express. Now he was the officer I’d have to report black marketeering to. This was strange, like drawing a full house three times in a row. I entered the tent and stood before the clerk. “I’d like to see Colonel Folsom, Corporal.”

  The man turned from his typewriter to the colonel and back to me. “Soon as he gets off the phone, Captain.”

  I stood there and could not help listening to the colonel’s side of the sharp, loud, and obscenity-laced conversation: “What the fuck . . . Calm down and start over . . . Why did they stop unloading? . . . What do you mean, an officer ordered the trucks to leave? . . . A white officer with the colored troops? . . . I’ll find out what I can . . . Yes, yes, I’ll make it up to you. How much?”

  I had heard quite enough. “Corporal, I don’t think I’ll bother the colonel after all, thanks.” I tried to look casual enough not to be noticed as I left.

  How long could I hide from a light colonel in my own chain of command, one that might even remember where he had seen me before, all the way back through Portsmouth to Camp Claiborne in 1942?

  Three days later I was leading another gasoline-heavy convoy back to Soissons. In the brightening early morning haze just at the Crecy-la-Chapelle turnoff, there was an MP, flagging us to turn off the Red Ball route again.

  I leaned over to the jeep driver. “Sarge, don’t stop. Go right past this MP and speed up.” Then I pulled off my helmet, slipped down to the floorboards, and pulled my poncho over my head. I was counting on the fact that all black men looked alike to a white policeman. The jeep lurched forward, and after a few minutes, the driver leaned over and shook me.

  “All clear, Captain. Trucks all still behind us.”

  When we got to the unloading area, I told the men that I was heading back immediately, and then I found an empty deuce-and-a-half truck heading back and climbed up to the running board. “Mind if I ride along in the back, soldier?”

  Looking at the two bars on my helmet, the man replied, “Be my guest, Captain.” Suddenly those two bars began to make me feel very conspicuous. I walked to the back of the truck, and before I climbed in, I grabbed a handful of mud and covered the bars on my helmet.

  I got back to Saint-Lô late in the afternoon. Without getting much sleep bouncing around the back of the truck, I went to my tent and sacked out. Early the next morning, Sergeant Jenkins shook me awake.

  “Sorry, Captain, but I need to talk to you.”

  I rolled over and looked up at him. “No problem, Sarge. What is it?”

  “Yesterday, two MPs came to the company clerk’s tent asking for you by name. I told them you were up at the bridgehead east of Paris, and I thought you wouldn’t be back till tonight.”

  “I grabbed a truck right back after we got there this morning.”

  “Well, sir, I didn’t like the look of them MPs. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen one of them detour jerrycan convoys outside of Soissons.”

  “And he knew my name?”

  “Yes, sir. You’ve been a thorn in a lot of sides for a long time, Captain. I think you’d be wise to make yourself scarce the next few days.”

  I rose from the cot. “Good advice, Sergeant Jenkins.”

  “One more thing, Captain.” He handed me a First Army field-orders envelope. “This came for you just after you left two days ago.”

  I opened it, looked at Jenkins, and asked, “Can you keep things under control for a day or two?”

  He nodded and left me.

  I studied the field order more carefully.

  To: Wrought, T., Captain (acting), Quartermaster Corps

  From: David Y. Hurwitz, Major, Office of Chief of Staff, G-2 Intelligence, Twenty-Eighth Infantry Division, First Army

  Subject: Report to this officer, SHAEF Headquarters, 14:30 hours, 29 October 1944

  SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces—was in Rambouillet, halfway back to Soissons, and the meeting time on the twenty-ninth was exactly eighteen hours from that moment. I showered, shaved, put on as close to a class A uniform as I could contrive, and headed for the convoy assembly area. Within an hour I found a jeep headed to SHAEF and showed my orders to the officer driving it.

  “Hop in, Captain. I’m Major Faubus. What’s your name?” That’s how I met the future governor of Arkansas. We had a lot in common back then and found it out driving for a long day toward the war.

  As I waited outside Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rambouillet, I had to salute so many staff officers my arm and shoulder grew weary. Five minutes before the appointed time, a major in combat uniform—the first I’d see
n there—arrived and began looking around. We saw each other at the same moment. I smiled and saluted.

  He frowned and beckoned me over. “Wrought? I’m Major Hurwitz. Follow me, Captain.”

  We entered the chateau and found our way into G-2—the intelligence unit—where he took an empty desk, pulled a file from his worn map case, and pointedly did not invite me to sit. The man was gaunt and pale, with dark rings of sleeplessness round his eyes. His face was twisted into a permanent expression of worry.

  “Captain, you should be court-martialed for violating the chain of command. Trying to get your pinko congressman to interfere in War Department business.”

  “Did it work, sir?”

  “Shut up and listen.” This man was not going to allow me to engage in anything like a conversation. “I’m assistant intelligence for the Twenty-Eighth Division. My division commander, General Cota, needs infantry replacements, and he’ll take them anywhere he can get them. Go back to your unit. Pick out a platoon, twenty-four of your best men. Report to me at division headquarters in Aachen. Just one platoon is all. And take off those captain’s bars. You have to resume the rank of first lieutenant if you want this assignment.”

  “Sir, you know my unit is composed of Negro soldiers only?”

  “Of course I know it. But they’re the only source of able-bodied men we can find for infantry replacements. You don’t think the regular army wants to do this, do you?”

  “Why not, sir?”

  “Because they think Negroes can’t follow orders, aren’t smart enough to fight, and are cowards to boot.”

  I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. “And maybe they don’t have much to fight for either.”

  He looked up at me and sighed heavily. “Sit down, Captain . . . Lieutenant?” There was a question in the word. I nodded, agreeing to his terms. “Some of us have been trying to get colored troops into combat since we joined up. But the career army was built on generations of brass from the South, where segregation is a way of life.”

  “I trained in Louisiana, sir.”

  “Well, our division commander, Cota, he’s from Massachusetts, and practically the whole staff are college men from Pennsylvania. So, when the infantry units began scraping the bottom of the barrel, a couple of us talked him into trying out Negro soldiers.”

  “Isn’t this against regulations, sir?”

  “Absolutely. If it doesn’t work, heads will roll. But the army isn’t my career. If they send me home, that’s fine with me. Same goes for most of us in G-2 of the Twenty-Eighth Division. And General Cota’s been scorched by Ike already. He doesn’t care. We need the men.” He paused, lit a cigarette, offered me one, and finally seemed to relax a little. “Here’s the problem. The same squads, platoons, companies, divisions have been doing all the fighting in this war practically since North Africa two years ago. No rotation.” He spat the words. “Well, by now we’ve lost thirty percent of our men, and there aren’t enough replacements coming in from the States. In the last few weeks, the Twenty-Eighth Division has had five thousand casualties fighting in the most awful place.”

  “So, is that where I’m headed if I can round up a platoon to come with me?”

  “Yup. The Hürtgen Forest.”

  At the beginning of November 1944, Sergeant Jenkins and I took twenty-four men into the Hürtgen Forest. Three weeks later, only eight of us came out. We were just a small part of the worst defeat the US Army suffered in the entire campaign in Europe.

  The Second Battalion of the 112th Infantry Regiment, to which we were assigned, didn’t have much use for two dozen black soldiers with no infantry training led by an inexperienced lieutenant. The captain commanding it left us just beyond the village of Vossenack, well before the woods that sloped steeply down to a river called the Kall. “Dig in down at the river at the bottom of the ravine, Wrought.” Then he got into his jeep and headed one kilometer back to the village.

  We watched the rest of the regiment, the First and the Third Battalions, as they passed us heading down to the footbridge crossing the Kall and began moving north up along the ridge on the other side that paralleled the water. It was a narrow track that headed toward the town of Schmidt. The last noncom who passed us called back to us in a friendly way, “After we take Schmidt, we’ll send back for you to serve dinner.”

  The Kall River was just a stream. Looking across it and back up the ridge behind me, I made my first tactical decision. It would be suicide digging in where we’d been ordered to, on the bank of the Kall with a steep forested ridge rising behind us. We needed to be at the top of that ridge, with the town at our backs, looking down at the stream.

  “Sergeant Jenkins, have the men go back up this ridge the way we came. Get them to dig in at the top, make some fires, and cook up some C-rations. Then send half of them back to the church in the town. They can bed down for the night.”

  It had been gray all day. The canopy of the pine trees kept us in a perpetual dusk, and the ground was a deep bed of sodden pine needles. The C-rations were warmed over the small fires, and then we rigged the shelter halves of the pup tents for the night. We could hear small arms fire, the burp of machine guns, the whoosh of mortars up ahead of us toward Schmidt. Meanwhile a steady stream of medics and aid men were bringing wounded up the narrow uphill track now churned into mud. Many of the medics had large nonregulation improvised red crosses on their helmets.

  By four o’clock in the morning, the novelty of being combat troops had worn off, and every man along the ridge, including me, was rapidly becoming frightened. In my case it was cold hands and an uncontrollable tremble. Several of the men complained of stomach cramps and came back from a hastily dug latrine in as much pain as when they had left their foxholes.

  “What are you doing here?” I heard myself asking no one in particular but loud enough for the man in the next foxhole to hear. The same three or four thoughts kept rotating through my consciousness. It’s nice to fantasize fighting for your country. But that doesn’t last a moment in combat. Oh, for a flesh wound and a ticket out. I had gone out of my way to get here, and these foolish men had eagerly followed. Now we all might as well be dead. After about an hour, I was able to calm down.

  In the morning the men were relieved by the platoon I had sent back to the village church.

  That next day there was nothing more to do but dig in further. We felled some trees, cut some boughs to make lean-tos against the intermittent rain, and waited.

  Before sunrise on the third morning, the fourth of November, our shooting war started. Suddenly the trees above us were splintering from artillery airbursts. The first time the sound of a German 88 millimeter or a howitzer penetrates your body, you are certain that you are dying. It doesn’t come in your ears. The sound wave just crumples your entire body, forcing you into the ground. You find mud in your mouth, and you are vibrating with the burst of acoustical energy. You don’t even notice the limbs and branches striking your body, or the rocks and clumps of dirt rebounding from your helmet. And before you have pulled yourself together, another airburst arrives, and it starts over again. I tried to shout to the men in the line. I couldn’t actually hear myself shouting. My ears weren’t working.

  By the previous morning we had already begun to see men from the First and Third Battalions coming back from Schmidt. They came in twos and threes—with rifles slung, quietly, not looking left or right, and not under any command. That third night the trickle turned to a stream of men. Then the shelling began.

  Suddenly we found ourselves in the midst of what looked like a retreat, then a rout, and finally sheer, mass desertion. Men streaming up the track back from Schmidt, dropping weapons and ammunition at the riverbank when they saw the ridge they’d have to climb. As they came up and passed through, between the airbursts, we shouted at them to tell us what was happening down in Schmidt. All we heard was “Too much artillery,” “They’re coming,” and “No tanks, no support.” Evidently the First and Third Battalions had not been able to hold S
chmidt, and their officers had lost control of their men.

  In midmorning a weasel—a small, tracked vehicle—came down from the village carrying a couple of machine guns and ammunition. It reached the crest of the ridge and stopped. The corporal driving looked down at the steady stream of men coming back up the ridge from the Kall and immediately pushed the weapons and equipment off the vehicle. Then he backed up his weasel, turned it toward a large tree stump, and drove it over the obstacle until it was motionless, tracks moving in the air, listing dangerously down the slope. With his weasel now immobile, he had a good excuse and began walking back toward Vossenack with the other retreating men. That was how we finally secured some automatic weapons. Even before I had given any orders, two of the master sergeants had sent men to the weasel to strip it of anything we could use.

  Frightened men who looked like combat veterans were streaming up the ridge past us, heading for the shelter of the village. But my men were staying in their foxholes. Why? Was it because they had not seen any Germans yet? Was it foolhardiness? None of them was becoming accustomed to the constant barrage of airbursts, to the cold, wet misery of a hole in the ground now four feet deep, the lack of warm food, or even the chance to relieve oneself against a tree. But they wouldn’t move, except for the twelve-hour rotation Sergeant Jenkins had set up.

  That fourth day we suffered our first two real casualties, both to shrapnel from an airburst. I was worried that our wounded would not be treated, but I was wrong. Two corpsmen coming up the ravine leading some walking wounded immediately found stretchers, and the men were carried to an aid station in the village.

  Then the barrage lifted, and it became silent.

  After about an hour of the eerie silence, through the woods to our right and north, well before we could see them, we heard the sounds of running men, their equipment jangling on their belts. Suddenly they were upon us, dozens of American soldiers, running for the track back to the village. I rose and grabbed a private by the arm. Holding tight I said, “What’s your unit, soldier?”