Not to Reason Why: The Story of a One-Eyed Infantryman in World War Ii

By Glenn W. Fisher

On December 7, 1941, Glenn W. Fisher was a high school boy working in a drugstore three blocks from Mark Twains boyhood home. This book describes his journey to and from a muddy German beet field where green American troops with inoperable rifles attacked one of Hitlers best SS Panzer Divisions. Along the way the author visited five countries, received a year of engineering training, had his first romance, and lost the sight of one eye in a training accident.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 2, 2002
• ISBN: 9781462819027

Glenn W. Fisher

Glenn W. Fisher, born on a Missouri farm, was drafted at the age of eighteen. Wounded during the Siegfried Line campaign, he spent fifty-one weeks in an army hospital. He resumed his education by correspondence while in the hospital and later received three degrees in economics. He has been a professor of economics, business, political science, urban affairs, and public administration, and has authored or coauthored six books and more than a hundred journal articles and technical reports. He lives in Kansas with his wife, Marvel. They have three children and four grandsons.

Book preview

Not to Reason

Why

The Story of a One-Eyed Infantryman in World War II

Glenn W. Fisher

Copyright © 2002 by Glenn W. Fisher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

THE WORLD THAT WAS

CHAPTER 2

TRANSITIONS

CHAPTER 3

THE FIRST YEAR OF WAR

CHAPTER 4

I BECOME A TANKER

CHAPTER 5

COLLEGE BOYS IN UNIFORM

CHAPTER 6

CAMP SWIFT

CHAPTER 7

FORT DIX

CHAPTER 8

NORTH ATLANTIC CONVOY

CHAPTER 9

RED BALL EXPRESS AND A DEVASTATED FRANCE

CHAPTER 10

ON THE EDGE OF NO MAN’S LAND

CHAPTER 11

BATTLE

CHAPTER 12

GOING HOME

CHAPTER 13

CHICAGO

CHAPTER 14

WAR’S END

CHAPTER 15

RETURN TO BEECK

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Jim Peck was a brilliant student, an unselfish friend, and an agreeable companion. I dedicate this book to him as representative of the good and talented young men who were lost in World War II.

War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried. 86-87.

INTRODUCTION

World War II was the central event of the twentieth century. It affected the lives of almost everyone on the globe and has affected the lives of everyone born since. Sixty million died—or maybe it was closer to fifty-five or sixty-five million. No one can count the dead. How many wounded? How many homeless? How many orphaned? No one knows. Empires fell. New nations were born. Science and technology were set on new paths. Economies were transformed.

There can be no complete history of that war. There are millions of intertwining, overlapping histories, but most of them will never be written. The most competent historians cannot unwind the connecting strands of cause and effect, and most personal stories will go untold.

For most of my life, I felt no need to tell my war story. My experiences had nothing to do with being a husband, father, Christian, university professor, or tax policy expert. Or did they? Many war stories go untold because the telling is difficult. Military life is tedious and unexciting most of the time. Some experiences are exciting, but if you confine your tales to those experiences, listeners may suspect—or you may suspect them of suspecting—exaggeration and braggadocio. It’s better to keep these stories for those who have been there.

In spite of the problems, I have tried to write for those who were not there. I hope I have provided some insights into how I changed and how the world changed in the four years from Pearl Harbor until my discharge from an army hospital in Chicago.

Some of what I have written comes from clear and certain memories. Some of it results from my piecing together memory and other evidence. My parents kept most of the letters I wrote them. I have consulted military histories, newspapers, letters, and other veterans in an attempt to provide a full story. In a few cases I have not been able to reconcile conflicts, and this may have resulted in minor errors in chronology or place. I have used actual names when I have remembered them. I may have attributed some quotations to the wrong person, but I hope I have been true to the substance of events described.

I have used several general histories of the war. I have not cited these works when describing well-known events, but notes at the end of each chapter indicate the source of material about less-know events.

Unless indicated, all quotations are from my letters to my parents. In a very few cases, wording has been changed slightly or parenthetical material has been inserted to make the meaning clear to a present-day reader. Grammar and spelling have not been corrected.

Photographs are from my scrapbook or from the official division history published in 1947.

A Note on Political Correctness:

Some of my best friends are German, but… this is a book about war. Sergeants don’t say Let’s go kill some patriotic young Germans. I have called enemies, ethnic groups, and allies by the names they would have been called at the time.

CHAPTER 1

THE WORLD THAT WAS

It was an awesome sight. Waves of men struggled up the slope toward the German lines. With each incoming shell, dark plumes of mud, steel, and body parts bloomed above the men then fell back to earth to reveal a gap in the line. The thinning line disappeared into the mist at the top of the hill.

Perhaps time has expunged it from my memory, but I do not remember being horrified or frightened. I recall only fascination. This was history. It was the Charge of the Light Brigade without horses. It was men going over the top in World War I.

Twenty-four hours later I pulled myself from a water-logged communication trench just feet from a grassy slope. The medics had spaced the wounded along this island in the sea of mud. The red cross on the arm of the medic was smeared with dirt, but in contrast to the gray mudscape, his grimy uniform seemed as clean as a hospital gown.

He spoke cordially: Let me see your hand. He grasped my wrist and raised my hand for a better look. The remains of the little finger dangled by a sliver of skin. He gave it a gentle tug and tossed it to the ground. A white bone end protruded through bloody flesh where my ring finger had been. Perhaps the bullet had turned my high school ring into an instrument of amputation. The index finger, attached by a ribbon of flesh, flopped crazily.

Are you hurt anywhere else?

No.

He detached the tin first-aid box from my pistol belt, and a bandage blossomed into an incongruous spot of whiteness in the muddy landscape. Quickly he sprinkled sulfa powder on the bloody stumps of my fingers and expertly taped the bandage over them. Do you have lots of pain? I have a little morphine left.

No, I’m okay. Save it for somebody who needs it.

Then gently, like a kindly doctor trying to sound upbeat when he diagnoses cancer, he said, We’re surrounded. You can’t be evacuated until the situation improves. Find a spot and get some sleep.

My hand throbbed, hunger gnawed at my stomach, cold mud penetrated my clothes, water sloshed in my shoes, weariness threatened to overwhelm me, but I felt a curious serenity. I had done my duty.

My parents, my teachers, and my church had taught me that duty is doing your job well. It’s following orders. It’s helping your neighbors. When I failed to pull back the bolt on the fifty-caliber machine gun, I had failed to do my duty. It could have cost the life of my buddies. I felt ashamed. When I set a truck on fire in the middle of a gasoline dump, I could have caused a catastrophe. Humiliation overwhelmed me.

Those failures, before the battle began, were my failures. I alone was responsible for them, but responsibility for the fiasco at Beeck was not mine. I didn’t know why we had attacked with inoperable rifles. I didn’t know why we got little artillery support, but I had followed orders. I carried supplies all night. When I became separated from my unit, I crawled through the mud trying to find it. Now exhausted, surrounded by the enemy, lying between wounded buddies and boxes of K rations, there was nothing I could do. It was someone else’s duty to take care of me. The future was out of my hands. I slept.

My journey to the muddy battlefield began on May 23, 1924, in the front bedroom of the house on Twin Maple Farm in northeast Missouri. It was a difficult beginning. Dr. Rouner, only a few months out of medical school, struggled to help the young woman give birth to a nine pound boy. My father, watching the suffering of his beloved Venus, pledged, You will never go through this again. As usual, he kept his word. I would be an only child.

Twenty-six years before Dad had been born in the same bed. Because his half brothers and half sisters were much older, he had been raised as an only child of doting, elderly parents. Spoiled, the neighbors said.

In a community in which size and physical strength were important, he was only average. He was a tenderhearted man in a community where macho men were admired. Sometimes others walked all over him, and Mother would lash out, You have no backbone.

He was never elected president of anything, but he was influential in the community. The informal social process of a rural community slotted him into jobs where book learning and integrity were important. When it was time to elect the clerk of the school board or the treasurer of the church, someone would always say, Ray Fisher’s the man for that.

After Dad finished high school, he taught school for a year and spent two winters taking the short course in dairy husbandry at the University of Missouri. He studied practical things such as black smithing, machinery repair, soil science, and livestock judging, but the important thing was the project. The professor said, Develop a long-range plan for your farm.

It was not an easy assignment. My grandfather had deeded the 160-acre family farm to him in return for a promise to stay on it and take care of him. It was not prime agricultural land. There was not enough arable land for a grain farm. There was not enough pastureland for a cattle ranch. The forty steeply wooded acres that made up the back forty were good only for the production of firewood or fence posts.

If Dad had been a card player, he would have said, You play the hand that’s dealt you. But he wasn’t, so he just asked, What’s the best way to use this farm? He found an answer, submitted the project to the professors, and returned home to put it into operation. He would raise Jersey cows and sell sweet cream to the ice cream factory in Quincy, Illinois. He could grow most of the feed for the livestock and much of the family’s food. Money from the sale of sweet cream and surplus cows would buy equipment, supplies, and the food that could not be grown on the farm.

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Author’s father and grandparents on the farm. About 1920.

Dad visited Jersey farms all over Northeast Missouri. He studied the production records and lineage of cows and heifers and went into the fields to compare their body shapes with the image of the ideal Jersey. He bought several registered cows and stretched his budget to buy the best available bull. These became the foundation of one of the best Jersey herds in the area.

The secret was careful record keeping and selective breeding. As soon as a female calf was born, Dad went to the house, filled out a registration application, made out a check for two dollars, and mailed it to the American Jersey Association. Within days the association mailed back a registration certificate and a registration number. Dad would say, Let’s get her tattooed right now.

Cream and cows were the end product, but the operation of a diversified farm was a complex operation. Planting and harvesting had to be done when the season and the weather were right. Other jobs such as building fences and cutting the winter’s supply of wood were essential but could sometimes be postponed. Mowing the lawn and planting flowers were frills that made life better. Somehow, my parents were able to do them all. We raised grain and hay to feed the horses that powered the machinery. We cut ice from the pond to cool the cream. We cut fuel, fence posts, and sawlogs from the back forty. We raised and preserved much of our own food. Every person and every piece of land contributed according to ability.

Mother’s primary duty was to cook, take care of the house, and help with the milking, but at busy times she helped plant or harvest. When Dad had to be away at milking time, she milked all seventeen cows, processed the milk, and fed the hogs.

Mother was no stranger to work and responsibility. During her sophomore year in high school, she dropped out of school to manage the house and take care of her dying mother. For that she got little credit. Often she said, Papa worshiped my mother, but he didn’t pay any attention to us kids.

Heartbroken at my grandmother’s death, Grandpa Turner tried to make a new start by taking mother, her older brother, and youngest sister to California. He bought a fruit farm near Fresno, sold it a few months later, and moved to Oakland. Then came another heartbreak. His youngest daughter, Hazel, ran in front of a truck and was killed. He and my mother returned to Northeast Missouri. She kept house for him until, at age twenty, she married my father. I was born nine months later.

Mother never tired of talking about California. She related stories of wading in the ocean and picnicking under huge redwood trees. In my imagination, I felt the wind blowing my hair as I rode the San Francisco ferry. I believed her when she said, Someday they will build a bridge. It will be one of the wonders of the world, and you will see it.

Grandfather Fisher, now in his eighties, presided over the garden. His long, white beard and his thin, white hair blew in the breeze as he carefully hoed the vegetables that provided much of our food. After each row, he returned to rest in the hickory-bottomed chair under the tree. Sometimes he gently instructed me in the art of gardening:

It’s important that the soil be plowed deeply in the spring.

Hoeing kills weeds and helps preserve the moisture.

When picking up potatoes begin at the far end of the row with an empty bucket. That means less carrying.

As I grew Dad and Mother gave me more responsibilities. These were not make-work chores designed to build esteem, but tasks essential to the success of the farm. If I did not carry in wood the house was cold, and the supper uncooked. If I did not feed the chickens on time, egg production declined. I complained at having to do chores, but when my parents gave me a new responsibility I bragged to my schoolmates, From now on I have to feed the chickens every night.

I learned by watching adults, by helping adults, and, as I grew older, by doing it myself. To be a farmer one had to be able to plant and nurture plants, care for animals, run and repair machinery, work in the forest, and do construction work. I watched my father do many tasks and was impatient for the day when he would say, You are old enough to do this. Sometime I didn’t wait. I would surprise him by doing a new task such as harnessing the horses or throwing the hay down from the loft. If I succeeded, it was a happy surprise for him and a proud moment for me. If I messed up he would grin and say, You got too big for your britches, didn’t you? If I did something that he thought was dangerous, his reaction was a sharp rebuke, Don’t ever try that again.

My parents valued, but did not worship, education. My dad had developed the plan for the farm at the university. He built our new dairy barn to specifications provided by the Agricultural Extension Service and mixed dairy feed using formulas developed at the university. The county agricultural agent was an important resource who served as a bridge between the scientists at the university in Columbia and the farmers in their fields. When a new disease infected crops or animals, Dad would ask the county agent for help. Once our farm was used as the site of a demonstration of grasshopper control methods. The agent helped my Dad plow furrows and dig holes to trap the grasshoppers, and neighbors came to observe the results and ask questions. Mother served lemonade.

On the other hand my parents and our neighbors made it clear that education should have a purpose. The stereotypical college professor was the brunt of many jokes—perhaps it was the engineering professor who couldn’t work the can opener or the agriculture professor who couldn’t milk a cow. One of my mother’s favorite stories was about the man who was refused a job as a school janitor because he hadn’t finished high school. Disappointed, he went into business for himself and became a millionaire. At a testimonial banquet the master of ceremonies   asked, What would this man be if he had been educated? The millionaire replied, I would be a school janitor.

Jokes about fuzzy-headed professors notwithstanding, my parents were determined that I get a good education. It began at Overton School, a mile across the fields. The schoolhouse stood on a couple of acres of land in the corner of a cornfield. It was a white, one-room, wooden building without anteroom or basement. There was a cistern near the front door. Outdoor privies stood on either side of the woodshed.

My first grade teacher, Miss Eva, had just graduated from high school. She boarded with a family in the neighborhood, arrived early to start the fire, taught from 8:00 to 4:00, and stayed after school to clean the schoolhouse. Once a month my father put her thirty-dollar salary warrant in my dinner pail and warned me not to forget to give it to her. Small chance. Dad had entrusted me with an important task. I would not fail.

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Author’s schoolmates. Author is on the extreme right, back row.

Books were a window to the geographic and intellectual world far beyond the dirt roads and small towns of Missouri. Books were among my favorite gifts, and my father owned a small library. I read his copy of Robinson Crusoe, borrowed Swiss Family Robinson from the Canton library, and planned what I would do when I was marooned on an island. I read the Horatio Alger stories about virtuous young men who did right and became rich. They reenforced what I learned in Sunday School—right living would be rewarded. I read about beautiful, intelligent animals such as Black Beauty and Lassie and wondered why my black Indian pony, Bouncer, and our dog, Shep, were not as smart. I thrilled to accounts of exotic places written by Martin and Osa Johnson. I marveled at Richard Halliburton’s accounts of audiences with kings, queens, princes, and other famous people. I was impatient to grow up so that I could visit exciting places and do exciting things.

In school we read English poetry, much of it about war and the glories of empire. My favorite was Tennyson’s, The Charge of the Light Brigade. Often when I rode Bouncer, I would hang onto the saddle horn and give him a sharp slap with the ends of the bridle strap. As we dashed across the field, I was part of a great cavalry charge:

Boldly they rode and well

Into the jaws of Death

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred

It was a romantic image of a world far removed from the Missouri dairy farm. Brave, skilled horsemen did their duty in a faraway land. I did not wonder why they were riding into the jaws of death. What cause was worth death? Why would men obey an order when they knew that someone had blunder’d? I only know what Tennyson had written:

Their’s not to make reply,

Their’s not to reason why,

Their’s but to do and die.

A few years later, clutching an inoperable rifle, I would crawl through the mud of a foreign field in an equally hopeless attack. It would not be heroic or romantic, and no one will ever write a poem about the infantry charge at Beeck.

The farmers on the hilly land around Overton School were our immediate neighbors, and their children were my schoolmates, but I obtained an important part of my education in Ten Mile. Once there had been a store and post office, but now there was only a church, a cemetery, a Grange hall, and one house. It was located across the North Fabius River northeast of our farm. The ancestors of those who lived around the church had chosen the sod-bound prairie land rather than the rolling woodland my grandfather chose. The prairie lands were difficult to plow and provided no wood for fuel or fences. Later, when the settlers obtained large ox-drawn plows specially constructed to break the prairie sod, it became clear the prairie lands were the better choice. Now the prairie farmers were more prosperous, had larger houses, and were much more active in church and community organizations.

The white-frame Baptist church had a belfry, but no bell. Its Gothic style windows were glazed with uncolored glass. Within the main part of the church there were oak pews for perhaps 100 people. That part of the church was never called a sanctuary; that would have been too Catholic. For the same reason, there were no crosses or candles. There was a pulpit and a table for the Lord’s Supper, but no altar. The message from the Bible, not communion at the altar, was the focus of the service.

The sandbox filled with celluloid figures and the little red chairs in Mary Garnett’s Sunday School class are among my earliest memories. We sat in the chairs while Miss Mary told us

Bible stories. Then she gave us time to play with the animals from Noah’s Ark or arrange the camels and donkeys into a caravan to carry the wise men to baby Jesus’s manger. As we grew older the morals of the Bible stories were emphasized. Love Jesus. Obey your parents. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t work on Sunday. Give at least one-tenth of your income to God. Don’t fight.

Don’t fight. That was the commandment that gave me trouble. As an only child I had been spared the joys and sorrows that come from learning to get along with siblings, and, except at school, I rarely had playmates my own age. I wanted my schoolmates to like me, but I suspect they saw me as an arrogant little prude who sometimes lost his temper. This led to fistfights which turned into wresting matches that ended when one of us «gave up.» The loser’s ego was bruised, but there was no damage and, if the teacher didn’t see it, no penalty.

Actually, knowing when to fight was one of the hard parts of growing up. Adults urged us not to fight, but they also advised us «Stand up for your rights.» and «Don’t give in to a bully.» It was hard to know which advice applied in a given situation, but I did learn that one should not fight during the festivities that marked the last day of school.

The teacher had handed out the grade cards and announced that I received an E (excellent) in every subject except spelling. I also received a certificate for perfect attendance and a good-health citation. I knew my parents were proud of me, and I strutted around the school yard flaunting my success: «I got all Es but one.» That goaded one of my schoolmates into growling, «Smarty pants, you’re to big for your britches.»

I doubled my fists in front of my ten-year-old chest, ran toward him, and leaped. My fists struck him in his chest, his body sagged, he fell backward, and lay motionless. Was he dead? An adult knelt beside him and, after what seemed like an eternity, pulled him into a sitting position. «He’s just had the wind knocked out of him. He’ll be okay.»

There were no more than a dozen people in the circle around my fallen classmate, but it seemed that a hundred eyes stared at me. Dad grabbed me by the arm, marched me to the car, opened the door, and shoved me into the backseat. «Venus, get the picnic basket. We are going home.» My parents stared straight ahead. The only sounds were made by the Model A Ford as it rattled over the rough road. When we got home, Dad said, «This is the second year in a row that you got into a fight. I’m ashamed. You disgraced us. When will you learn to behave?»

When would I learn? One thoughtless act had hurt a friend, destroyed my happiness, and hurt my parents. I prayed for forgiveness: «God help me do right.» It was a prayer I would repeat many times, but later it would be supplemented by another: «Tell me what is right.» Sometimes I got an answer. Sometimes I seemed to be speaking to a vacuum.

Garnett Grange was just across the road from the church. It was a white building, about the same size as the church. There was a small anteroom, needed for the Grange rites, a main room, and a large, raised stage with green draw curtains in front and beige back curtains.

The Grange was the oldest farm organization in existence. It originated as a radical movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but by the 1930s it had become a conservative, family-oriented lodge. It was a secret organization with a ritual loosely based on the Masonic ritual. Women were admitted as full members, and my mother was elected to