Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  "It was on the outskirts of Dessau a week or so ago," he said.

  "It was April 22," one of the other kids, listening said. "We were firing on a pillbox."

  "Was the pillbox built against a building," I asked him, "or was it out in the open?"

  "It was out in the open," the kid said, "covering a field."

  "Did you get the pillbox?"

  "Hell, we got 'em all," one of the other kids said.

  We turned back to the lieutenant. He had been standing and listening, a little bored by our questions.

  "What will you people do now?" I said. "After all, it's V-E Day, and are you going to do anything special?"

  "Well," the lieutenant said, "at noon we're going to drink a toast to General Eisenhower. He sent the division champagne after we crossed the Rhine, and there's enough for one glass for each man."

  "Then what?"

  "We have a ball game on this afternoon," the lieutenant said, "and there's some German museum near here, and one of the platoons will visit that."

  We walked around with the lieutenant for a while, looking in at the kids in the barracks. Most of them were lying on their bunks in the barracks, brown uniforms on the brown Army blankets, reading or writing letters, and when we stopped to talk with them they wanted to know if we knew where they were going next, and if they could get home soon. It was strange, having them ask us the questions, and there was one who wanted me to put his lieutenant's name in the paper. He said his lieutenant's name was Loren Cantrell and that the lieutenant came from Springfield, Illinois, and that the kids under him wanted to get him a citation.

  We got back into the jeep, and as we started to drive out of the quadrangle we could hear a guitar being played, and we could hear the voice of a G.I. singing. The G.I. was singing that song they retitled, "Those Eighty-eights Are Breaking up that Old Gang of Mine."

  They had been a great outfit, the Third Armored, and suddenly in one day they weren't anything that was important any more. Riding along, I thought about how great they had been at Mons where, with the First Infantry Division, "The Big Red One" that had been in it since Africa, they cut off the Germans trying to get back to the Siegfried Line and killed nobody knew how many and took 8,000 prisoners, including three generals. On the day we crossed the German border with them and they took Roetgen, they were the first to capture a German town since Napoleon, and when they breached the Siegfried Line and were pinned down by the shelling on a hillside outside of Stolberg, their general came up, erect, immaculate and handsome, and got them out of their holes and up the hill.

  I remembered them, with their tanks painted white, in the snow and fog of the Ardennes, and then driving across the brown-gray Cologne plain in the mist and the rain and then taking the city, fighting around the cathedral and knocking out a German tank at the cathedral steps. After they broke out of the bridgehead across the Rhine, I was with them the day they went more than ninety miles behind the German lines. It was the longest single combat advance in the world's military history, and the next evening, in the dusk and on a dirt road outside of Paderborn, their general was killed.

  "It can't be him," the young lieutenant said. "I'm sure it ain't him."

  "They've identified the body," the major said.

  "I sure hope it ain't him," the lieutenant said.

  We had spent the night where they had coiled the tanks and halftracks in a field next to a woods. It was eight o'clock in the morning, and I was standing, talking with some tankers around a fire, when the major called me over and the colonel told us that they had found the general's body. We got our typewriters out of the jeeps and we walked over to a fieldstone farmhouse and we wrote our pieces. I wrote about what the young lieutenant said, and why at first he couldn't believe it, and about the risks the general had always taken and how, two nights before, he had called us over to his CP to tell us that at six o'clock the next morning we would be starting that drive to the north that took us that more than ninety miles.

  "This thing is almost over now," one of us had said. "When it is, what are you going to do?"

  "I have a son," the general had said. "He's four years old now, and I don't know him. We're going to get acquainted, and that's going to take a lot of time."

  Now, in the stone farmhouse, we finished our pieces about the death of the general, and they gave us an armed jeep to escort us back around the pockets of Germans who were still holding out. In places on the way back we left the roads and drove across fields and over low hills, following the tracks the tanks and the halftracks had made, and when we got to Marburg we found the press camp set up in a big private mansion on a hill. We turned our pieces in to the censors, and then gave the rest of them the word that Major General Maurice Rose was dead.

  "He was a Jew, wasn't he?" one of them asked me.

  "A Jew?" I said. "How would I know? All I know is that he was a great general, and he's dead."

  We learned later that he was the son of a Denver rabbi, and that a congressman from Colorado—so far from it all—had stood up in the House of Representatives and made an impassioned speech calling for a Congressional investigation into the general's death. To me he was a great general, as two years later, when Jackie Robinson came up to the major leagues, he was a great ballplayer. It should have been as simple as that, and after the general was killed, the Third Armored linked up with the Second Armored, coming down from the north, and they sealed off the Ruhr pocket with 374,000 German prisoners inside.

  So we left them now to have their one drink of warm champagne in their tin cups and to their ball game and the visit to the museum, and we drove back between the same brown fields, with the Germans still working in them, and through the same little towns we had passed through coming out. In all of the towns there were duck ponds, and there were white ducks and geese and small yellow goslings paddling around in them. There were young German women wheeling their babies in the sun, and there were other women and children waiting patiently near the doorsteps of their small stone and stuccoed houses. They were waiting for the American trucks to come through, loaded with the German soldiers on the way back to the prison cages.

  In one town we stopped to let the trucks go by. The American trucks came through the town quickly, fast and high and with the dust rising around them and behind them, and with the grinding of their gearing and the noise of their exhaust loud in the tight aisle of the road lined by the small closely packed houses. Ahead of the convoy the women and children had spread, jumping into their doorways as the trucks passed through at high speed, each truck, after the first, fifteen feet behind the one ahead.

  In the open trucks the prisoners stood tightly, seventy packed into each half-ton truck. They stood facing the rear, their gray-green uniforms dirty and dust-covered, all of them rocking together with the motion of the trucks, the rush of air from the forward motion blowing at the backs of their heads.

  From some of the doorways the women and children threw bread. Some of the men in the trucks managed to catch some of the hard half-loaves, but more often the bread bounced off their hands or bodies or hit the sides of the trucks and then rolled in the dust under the trucks that followed. The women and children who threw no bread just stood, their heads turning back and forth in the doorways, as they tried to recognize in a second in the seas of faces on the trucks someone of whom they had not heard for many months, because they wanted to know if he was still alive now that peace had come to Europe again.

  When we got back to the hotel we went into the pressroom and wrote our last stories. We wrote them quickly, just telling what it was like where we were on V-E Day in Germany and not trying to tell everything that we wished we could tell. For the last time we turned our stories over to the censors, and then we had lunch. After lunch I went back into the pressroom, and I wrote a cable to Edmond Bartnett, who was my boss on the Sun. The cable said: "Hopefully request permission start homeward shortly." That night I got the answer back: "Gladly grant permission for homeward trip. Bartnett.
"

  We had written so hard every day for so long that it was a strange feeling. We did not know how to kill time. We just sat around a lot and talked some about the best moments, but mostly about our homes and our families and about what we might do now. I said that I had wanted to write sports ever since I had been in high school, and the irate one, who had taken off for London during The Bulge but had joined us again for the easier going after the Rhine crossing, said that he had already done that. He said that he had had enough of games and, as he put it, "the spoiled brats who play them." Then one night the word came.

  The next morning we walked across the street under the trees with our blankets and our helmets and our canteens and our mess gear, and we turned them in to a lieutenant behind a table set up just inside the doorway of a small one-family house. He gave us our slips of paper for them, and they put us in a weapons carrier, and we rode out to the small airfield on the top of the raised ground.

  While we waited for the C-47 to come in, we stood in the shade under the wing of another plane. There was a major there, and he had with him a young pilot in a leather jacket and dark green dress trousers.

  "This man has a hell of a story," the major said to me. "You should write it."

  The young pilot told me his story, standing in the shade under the wing of the plane. He said he had been shot down over the outskirts of Berlin, and when he parachuted down he landed in the walled garden of a large estate. As he came down in the garden, the S.S. guards grabbed him and took him into the big stone mansion.

  "I was standing in the living room," he said. "It was a great big room with a lot of rich furnishings and oil paintings, when the door opens and the big shot walks in. Who the hell is it but Herman Goering, himself. I recognized him right away from his pictures—a big fat guy with medals."

  The young flier said that Goering treated him very well. He said Goering knew a lot about American planes, and then he told me how he was liberated by the Russians, and I told him it was a good story.

  "Are you going to write it?" he said. "What paper will it be in?"

  "No," I said. "I'm sorry. The war is over. Two months ago it would have been a real good story, and two weeks ago it would still have been a good story. Now I think it's still a good story, but the war here is over, and the day it ended the people stopped wanting to read these stories from here. My own head is filled with good stories, but no one would print them now. I'm sorry about it."

  I don't think the young pilot quite understood why I would not write his story. He flew back in the plane to Paris with us, and I noticed that he was watching Victor Bernstein, who was sitting across from him and who had his typewriter on his lap, trying to write a story.

  Victor Bernstein came over late, not really to write about the fighting but to write about post-war Europe. He wrote some of the fighting, but now he was doing what he was meant to do, and I realized this as I watched him typing on his knees until the motion of the plane and his concentration on the lines of his typing became too much for him. Then he put the typewriter down and went to the back of the plane and was sick on the floor, and that meant that, for the moment, now even he could not do any writing.

  It took us four hours to get back to Paris by plane, and it had taken us eight months when we were going the other way. We sat in the plane trying to look out of the small windows at the country below, trying to recognize something when we flew over beaten towns, realizing now how rapidly we were putting it all behind us, all of the ground that had been taken so slowly and at that great cost.

  "Do you remember," I said to Gordon Fraser, "when we said we would go back the way we came?"

  Fraser worked for the Blue Network, and we called him "The Little Colonel." I think he could have taken over a regiment, he knew so much about it, and one day during The Bulge when I went up to a company we had all been with some days before, the captain asked me about him.

  "How's that little radio fella who was here with you that time?" he said.

  "Gordon Fraser?" I said. "He's fine."

  "The day after you two were here," the captain said, "he came up alone, and he made the attack with us. The kid carrying the ammo for the machine gun got hit, so your friend picked up the ammo cases and carried them up to the gun. He's a hell of a guy."

  If I hadn't known it before, I knew it then, because Fraser had never mentioned it. Years later, when I used to drop in to see him at NBC in New York, where he was working on "Monitor," I knew the rest of them in that office didn't know what he was or what he had done in the war.

  "What we said we were going to do," I said to him, as we looked down out of that plane flying back, "was follow every side road and stop and walk in particular fields and examine hillsides we remember. We'd go into houses and cellars we slept in, and go over all of it again so we might understand it better and never forget it."

  "I know," Fraser said, "but now let's just get home."

  There were ten of us in the room on the ship in officer country, but down in the holds they were stacked in bunks four tiers high.

  There were 7,000 on what, when the Italians had her and called her the Conte Grande, had carried 1,000 passengers in luxury. Among the 7,000 there were 3,000 of what the Army called RAMPS, for Recovered American Military Personnel. They had been shot down over Berlin or captured at Kasserine or in the Ardennes, and they had survived the prison camps at Sagan and Barth and Hammelburg, and they had bad stomachs. They were supposed to be careful about what they ate, but they stood in the chow lines for hours like everyone else, and they ate everything and were sick.

  In that room we were just as we had been back in Weimar. We read and slept and played cards for eleven days. We didn't talk about any of it any more, until the last night out when somebody broke out a bottle we didn't know he had been saving and put it on the table—and we heard some truth.

  There was one I had traveled with a lot in the jeep because we wanted to see the same things and because he laughed a lot and relaxed me. If we were behind a wall and had to make a run for it, or if we had to go down a stretch of road, he always said the thing that got us out from behind the wall or down the road.

  He was a very good mimic, and at night he was our best entertainment. He turned the things that had happened to us during the day into comedy bits, and we spent much time laughing with him. We knew he had been in the Pacific before he joined us in Europe, and now he was sitting with us around the bottle and his voice was rising and cracking.

  "For Tarawa we drew lots," he said, "and I got it. I got it, but then I was afraid to go and they got slaughtered, and because I was afraid to go they sent me home."

  We did not know what to say. I had had no idea of what he had been carrying, behind those walls and facing those roads, when he got me out. I tried to say something and somebody else said something but it didn't do any good, and so we just let him try to cry it out in our room on the ship coming home.

  The next morning when we came through the Narrows, there was a fog over the Lower Bay, and they were lined four deep along the rails. On the starboard side in the last row there were three kids with First Armored patches on their shoulders, and they were looking over toward where you could just make out the parachute jump at Coney Island, and they said they were trying to see the Statue of Liberty. They said they had been captured at Faid Pass in Africa in February of 1943, and that one of the German guards at Fuerstenberg had told them they would never see the Statue of Liberty again, and I told him that the statue would show up off the other side.

  "Look, sir," the Marine guard who was standing there said. "I know they want to see the Statue of Liberty. There are seven thousand guys on this ship who want to see the Statue of Liberty, and if I let them all go on that side, this damn thing will tip over."

  "But these guys have been prisoners for more than two years," I said.

  "We got three thousand of them that were prisoners," the Marine guard said. "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Look the othe
r way," I said.

  I led them over to the port side, the big ship listing that way now, and all along the rows at the rail you could hear, "Where? Where?" I could just make it out, just a shadow in the fog, and I tried to point it out to the three kids.

  "I think I can see it," the one from Illinois said to the other two. "If you'd ever seen it before, I think you could make it out. You see that something a little dark and kind of sticking up in the gray?"

  "Yeah, I think I can see it," the one from North Dakota said. "I'm sure I can."

  "I'm sure I can, too," the one from Kentucky said. "That's got to be it there."

  "That Kraut has got to be dead now," the one from Illinois said.

  "Yeah, and we made a liar out of him, too," the one from North Dakota said.

  It was eleven days on the end of a long time, and when I reached out to push the bell in the apartment entrance, my finger shook so that I had to breathe deeply and steady it. When the buzzer sounded I kicked the door open and I held it with my body and moved my old black bag and my barracks bag and my typewriter into the lobby.

  I stood at the foot of the stairs and I was shaking. I swung the barrack's bag onto my back and took the typewriter in one hand and I left the old black bag and I climbed the three flights of stairs. I climbed the stairs as hard as I could to keep from crying, and my wife stood in the doorway. She looked small and frail, and I could not begin to tell her, no less write it. There was so much that had finally ended.