The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (47 page)

But Eisenhower’s flatness should not preclude a glance at what he had accomplished and what he had to celebrate, had he had the energy to do so. The problem is that, like Smith, one searches in vain for the fitting accolades to acknowledge the accomplishments of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Second World War-of what he had endured, of what he had contributed to the final victory, of his place in military history.

Fortunately, George C. Marshall, next to Eisenhower himself the man most responsible for Eisenhower’s success, spoke for the nation and its allies, as well as the U.S. Army, when he replied to Eisenhower’s last wartime message, “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare,” Marshall began. “You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. You have met and successfully disposed of every conceivable difficulty incident to varied national interests and international political problems of unprecedented complications.” Eisenhower, Marshall said, had triumphed over inconceivable logistical problems and military obstacles. “Through all of this, since the day of your arrival in England three years ago, you have been selfless in your actions, always sound and tolerant in your judgments and altogether admirable in the courage and wisdom of your military decisions.  “You have made history, great history for the good of mankind and you have stood for all we hope and admire in an officer of the United States Army. These are my tributes and my personal thanks.”

It was the highest possible praise from the best possible source. It had been earned.

Many units had a ceremony of some sort to mark the unconditional surrender. In the 357th Combat Team, 90th Division, the CO had all the officers assemble on the grassy slopes of a hill, under a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. The regimental CO spoke, as did the division commander. “I can’t remember their words,” Lt. Col. Ken Reimers said, but he remembered counting the costs. “We had taken some terrible losses-our infantry suffered over 250 per cent casualties.  There was not a single company commander present who left England with us, and there were only a half dozen officers in the whole regiment who landed on Utah Beach.”

The 90th Division had been in combat for 308 days-the record in ETO-but other divisions had taken almost as many casualties. The junior officers and NCOs suffered most. Some of America’s best young men went down leading their troops in battle. Dutch Schultz paid his officers and NCOs a fine tribute: “Men like Captains Anthony Stefanich, Jack Tallerday; Lieutenants Gus Sanders, Gerald Johnson; and Sergeants Herman R. Zeitner, Sylvester Meigs, and Elmo Bell, to name only a few, were largely responsible for my transformation to a combat infantryman able to do his job. They taught me to overcome my fears and self-doubts.

“Not only were these men superb leaders both in and out of combat, but, more importantly, they took seriously the responsibility of first placing the welfare of their men above their own needs.”

There is no typical GI among the millions who served in Northwest Europe, but Bruce Egger surely was representative. He was a mountain man from central Idaho.  At the end of 1943 he was in ASTP at Kansas State. When the ASTP program was cut, he got assigned to Fort Leonard Wood for training. In October 1944 he arrived in France and went into a Repple Depple. On November 6 he went on the line with G Company, 328th Regiment, 26th Division. He served out the war in almost continuous front-line action. He never missed a day of duty. He had his close calls, most notably a piece of shrapnel stopped by the New Testament in the breast pocket of his field jacket, but was never wounded. In this he was unusually lucky. G Company had arrived on Utah Beach on September 8, 1944, with a full complement of 187 enlisted men and six officers. By May 8, 1945, a total of 625 men had served in its ranks. Fifty-one men of G Company were killed in action, 183 were wounded, 116 got trench foot and 51 frostbite.  Egger rose from private to staff sergeant. After the war he got a degree in forestry in 1951 and served in the U.S. Forest Service for twenty-nine years.  In his memoir of the war, Egger speaks for all GIs: “More than four decades have passed since those terrible months when we endured the mud of Lorraine, the bitter cold of the Ardennes, the dank cellars of Saarlautern. . . . We were miserable and cold and exhausted most of the time, we were all scared to death.  . . . But we were young and strong then, possessed of the marvelous resilience of youth, and for all the misery and fear and the hating every moment of it the war was a great, if always terrifying, adventure. Not a man among us would want to go through it again, but we are all proud of having been so severely tested and found adequate. The only regret is for those of our friends who never returned.”

19 - The GIs

I FIRST BECAME AWARE of the phenomenon when I was interviewing the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. I ran into it again and again in doing the interviews for my books on D-Day and the campaign in Northwest Europe. Pvt. Ed Tipper summed it up with a question: “Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E Company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions.”

Indeed. One became a roofing contractor in Sacramento, another a structural ironworker on buildings and bridges, another a supervisor for the Washington State Highway Department, another superintendent for a heavy construction contractor in Louisiana, another spent forty-five years working with granite in the polishing trade, another a supervisor for installing new lines for the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, another a carpenter, another a worker on high-dam construction. Nine men from the company became high school or college teachers. In this, the men of Easy Company were typical of the GIs.  They were the men who built modern America. They had learned to work together in the armed services in World War II. They had seen enough destruction; they wanted to construct. They built the Interstate Highway System, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the suburbs (so scorned by the sociologists, so successful with the people), and more. They had seen enough killing; they wanted to save lives. They licked polio and made other revolutionary advances in medicine. They had learned in the army the virtues of a solid organization and teamwork, and the value of individual initiative, inventiveness, and responsibility. They developed the modern corporation while inaugurating revolutionary advances in science and technology, education and public policy.

The ex-GIs had seen enough war; they wanted peace. But they had also seen the evil of dictatorship; they wanted freedom. They had learned in their youth that the way to prevent war was to deter through military strength, and to reject isolationism for full involvement in the world. So they supported NATO and the United Nations and the Department of Defense. They had stopped Hitler and Tojo; in the 1950s they stopped Stalin and Khrushchev.  In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy described the men and women of his generation: “The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage-and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.”

The “we” generation of World War II (as in “We are all in this together”) was a special breed of men and women who did great things for America and the world.  When the GIs sailed for Europe, they were coming to the continent not as conquerors but liberators. In his Order of the Day on June 6, 1944, Eisenhower had told them their mission was: “The destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.” They accomplished that mission.  In the process they liberated the Germans (or at least the Germans living west of the Elbe River). In Normandy, in July 1944, Wehrmacht Pvt. Walter Zittats was guarding some American prisoners. One of them spoke German. Zittats asked him, “ ‘Why are you making war against us?’ I’ll always remember his exact words: ‘We are fighting to free you from the fantastic idea that you are a master race.’ “ In June 1945 Eisenhower told his staff, “The success of this occupation can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, then we shall have succeeded.” That mission, too, was accomplished.

In the fall semester of 1996, I was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I taught a course on World War II to some 350 students. They were dumbstruck by descriptions of what it was like to be on the front lines.  They were even more amazed by the responsibilities carried by junior officers and NCOs who were as young as they. Like all of us who have never been in combat, they wondered if they could have done it-and even more, they wondered how anyone could have done it.

There is a vast literature on the latter question. In general, in assessing the motivation of the GIs, there is agreement that patriotism or any other form of idealism had little if anything to do with it. The GIs fought because they had to. What held them together was not counry and flag, but unit cohesion. It has been my experience, through four decades of interviewing ex-GIs, that such generalizations are true enough.

And yet there is something more. Although the GIs were and are embarrassed to talk or write about the cause they fought for, in marked contrast to their great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, they were the children of democracy and they did more to help spread democracy around the world than any other generation in history.

At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.

At the conclusion of interviews, I often asked the ex-GIs to sum up what it all meant to them. Most men dismissed the question as impossible to answer. Some talked about friendship, comrades, buddies. Not one ever talked about patriotism and pride. Yet it was there. The best expression of it I ever heard came at the end of a group interview. I’ve long since forgotten the name of the speaker, but I’ll never forget what he said. “Imagine this. In the spring of 1945, around the world, the sight of a twelve-man squad of teenage boys, armed and in uniform, brought terror to people’s hearts. Whether it was a Red Army squad in Berlin, Leipzig, or Warsaw, or a German squad in Holland, or a Japanese squad in Manila, Seoul, or Beijing, that squad meant rape, pillage, looting, wanton destruction, senseless killing. But there was an exception: a squad of GIs, a sight that brought the biggest smiles you ever saw to people’s lips, and joy to their hearts.

“Around the world this was true, even in Germany, even-after September 1945-in Japan. This was because GIs meant candy, cigarettes, C-rations, and freedom.  America had sent the best of her young men around the world, not to conquer but to liberate, not to terrorize but to help. This was a great moment in our history.”

Another bright image came from a veteran who said that he felt he had done his part in helping to change the twentieth century from one of darkness into one of light. I think that was the great achievement of the generation who fought World War II on the Allied side. As of 1945-the year in which more people were killed violently, more buildings destroyed, more homes burned than any other year in history-it was impossible to believe in human progress. World Wars I and II had made a mockery of the nineteenth-century idea of progress, the notion that things were getting better and would continue to do so. In 1945 one had to believe that the final outcome of the scientific and technological revolution that had inspired the idea of progress would be a world destroyed.  But slowly, surely, the spirit of those GIs handing out candy and helping bring democracy to their former enemies spread, and today it is the democracies-not the totalitarians-who are on the march. Today, one can again believe in progress, as things really are getting better. This is thanks to the GIs-along with the millions of others who helped liberate Germany and Japan from their evil rulers, then stood up to Stalin and his successors. That generation has done more to spread freedom-and prosperity-around the globe than any previous generation.

John Lydon, a thirty-four-year-old attorney in Chicago, wrote me in 1998 that his father had served in SHAEF. “Most of my young life,” Lydon confessed, “I never really understood my father. I blamed him and his generation for everything from McCarthyism to the Vietnam War to Watergate. I never gave them credit for the Interstate Highway System, IBM, NASA, the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the fall of Communism, or any of it. Then I read your book [Citizen Soldiers]. You have helped me understand my father. When my son is old enough, I will give him your book so he can get to know his grandfather.” Sgt. Henry Halsted, who won a Bronze Star, participated after the war in some experimental programs that brought together college-age German and American veterans in England, and a similar one in France. The idea was to teach through contact and example. In 1997, Halsted got a Christmas card from a German participant living in Munich: “I think often of our meetings and mutual ideals.  Indeed, the 1948 program and everything connected with it was the most important, decisive event for me. Influenced my life deeply!” And a French participant wrote, “In 1950 France was in ruins. I saw only a world marked by war, by destruction, by the shadow of war, and by fear. I believed that it was not finished, that there would be a next war. I did not think it would be possible to build a life, to have a family. Then came the group of young Americans, attractive, idealistic, optimistic, protected, believing and acting as though anything was possible. It was a transforming experience for me.”

That spirit-we can do it, we can rebuild Europe and hold back the Red Army and avoid World War III-was the great gift of the New World to the Old World in the twentieth century. America paid for that gift with the lives of some of its best young men. When I read the letters from the veterans I’m almost always impressed by their brief accounts of what they did with their lives after the war. They had successful careers, they were good citizens and family men, and many of them made great contributions to their society, their country, and the world. Then I think about those who didn’t make it, especially all those junior officers and NCOs who got killed in such appalling numbers.