Duration Plus Six: A Wwii Memoir

By George DiGuido

Our hero spent three years in Africa and Italy. He was never shot at, hit no beach, dug no foxhole, but his memoir shows that it was was exciting behind the lines, too; not everyone could be in the front lines. In January of 1944 he joined the crew of a B25 bomber being ferried overseas to be used in "Operation Dragoon" - the invasion of southern France. In March, his troopship en route to Casablanca dodged a U-Boat in mid-Atlantic by turning back and sailing westward for half a day. He was stationed in exotic Marrakech, then Dakar, and then in Italy. He experienced rousing flights into Russian-controlled Budapest and Bucharest; encounters in Naples alleys with black marketers in cigarettes; young prostitutes pimped by kid brothers; and on days off, the Opera. At wars end he married a beautiful girl he had met in Chicago while in the Service. A Hollywood ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462841691

Book preview

Copyright © 2003 by George DiGuido.

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.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

17460

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

BOOK ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

8

9

BOOK TWO

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C.

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER AND TWO BROTHERS,

ALL OF WHOM I LEFT.

AND FORJOY, WHOM I FOUND.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A SINCERE THANK you to the two who gave their time in proofreading this memoir, and who courageously offered criticisms and suggestions : Fellow writer, Tom Wolfram, Ph.D., and my dear wife Barbara, who, additionally, put up with my reluctance to leave the computer despite her many cries of, Come to dinner. Your food is getting cold.

INTRODUCTION

IN A PREVIOUS book the author rhapsodized about the first nineteen years of his existence—from the mewling, puking baby of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man to the soldier—citing ten experiences that had profoundly influenced him and molded him into the person he would become. This narrative deals with the greatest of those experiences: his three years, three months and three days in the military service during World War II.

As the first book ended the soon-to-be soldier stepped aboard a train deep in the bowels of Pennsylvania Station in New York City, on his way to the Army Induction Center at Fort Dix, New Jersey. On the last page of the book following the last paragraph appeared this inscription: THE END. This was unnecessary because everyone knows that at the end of a book there are no more pages to turn and no more words to read. But the inscription set up an eight-point type sub-line:

And when the train starts to move, a beginning.

This is the beginning.

BOOK ONE

1

IN THE TUNNEL under the Hudson on the way to Dix, I tried not to think about my leaving home. Yet I couldn’t help wondering if I had told Mom and Dad I loved them. Oh, of course I did, but did I do it a number of times, and with feeling? Or was I too ashamed to display emotion? I was nineteen, not nine. And a soldier. Well, soon to be a soldier, and soldiers don’t cry. Did I hug my mother? How many times did I give her a kiss and embrace her? Those two kid brothers of mine who were always a pain in the ass to me; I would miss them. But did I tell them I would? I don’t know. I can’t remember. At the time my mind seemed a blur, like I was trying not to think I was leaving home for who knows where and for who knows how long. If I never came back to 791 Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn, would they know I loved them all intensely as I walked out the door that day? Wait! it wasn’t days ago, it only seems that way. It was this morning.

I pushed aside this mindset and thought of what lay ahead of me. I was leaving home for the duration plus six, an enigmatic phrase on the government document I signed. In it I agreed I would turn over my body and soul, my rights and my freedom, to the government for that undetermined period of time so as to ensure the preservation of said body, soul, rights and freedom in the future. And not of mine alone, but of all American bodies to come. Preserve them, that is, as long as Germany and Japan did not win the war. In which case Uncle

Sam could not guarantee us a thing. There would be no GI bill, no GI education, and no GI mortgage for a nice little GI home with a white picket fence all around it in the suburbs. No nothing.

Häl Hitler.

Speaking for every young American boy who eagerly enlisted, as well as those who were drafted, we knew this. We knew we had to win. What we didn’t know was how long it would take to win; how long, in other words, the duration plus six would be. (The six refers to months.) Even serial killers sentenced to two lifetimes know how long they have to serve. GIs did not. America had been caught with its military pants down; the war at the time I entered it was still going badly for the good guys, good (goodly?) for the bad guys, and it would probably take a long time to beat the bad guys. The bastards.

The train came out of the tunnel.

Fort Dix is plop in the middle of the central Jersey pine barrens. Beautiful country; chicken-shit camp. Of course we suffered the obligatory short-arm inspection as soon as we got to Dix. A short-arm inspection—for those of you who never knew the joys of military service—is a close scrutiny of one’s male appendage. On the command, OK, milk it down, the scrutinEE grabs said member and squeezes it from back to front, the idea being so the scrutinER, usually an officious PFC—a high ranking enlisted man to those of us just coming in as buck-ass privates—can determine if the scrutinEE has perhaps stuck said appendage into a wrong slot somewhere and thereby acquired a dread social disease. If a pus is discharged at milking time, you got it, buddy.

Getting our new, all olive-drab-dull duds was a laugher. Hundreds of bedraggled, befuddled recruits fresh from all points of the compass line up and pass in front of a bunch of guys behind a counter, each one in charge of gleefully flinging a different piece of uniform at you, including a solid steel helmet and boots that surely weigh ten pounds each. Since these guys are not tailors they don’t do too good a job of sizing you up. Oh, they may ask your size, or you may volunteer to guess at it, but I don’t know any of mine; only my mother does, and most of the guys are in the same boat. It is quite possible, then, that when you try these things on later they may not fit. So you keep trading with the other guys until you are the very model of a GI fashion plate. We also got our ASNs, Army Serial Numbers. This, along with your name, is stamped onto a metal tag that must be worn on a metal chain around your neck at all times. My number was 12159869, which is so branded onto my brain that even today if someone would wake me from a deep and peaceful sleep at 3 AM and ask, Quick, what’s your Army Serial Number? I could spout it out without a millisecond’s hesitation. Talk about 950 Megahertz, ha!

OK, so we gather up the duds, sling the dog tags around our necks and slouch out to find our barracks, each and every one of us already the very model of an Army sad sack, a phrase made famous later by Army cartoonists who insisted on sticking us valiant warriors with that designation. We also were called dogfaces, and GIs. For those not familiar with military parlance, GI meant, Government Issue—as if we had not at all been born, but instead were issued by the Army. Which, after a year or so, you begin to believe. Who’s yer daddy, soldier boy?

Why, Uncle Sam, who else?

That first night, October 29, 1942, will be etched in my memory forever. In a barracks with fifty or so dogfaces, a supercilious sergeant is demonstrating how he expects us to make a hospital corner on our bed sheets and blankets. My God, I moan, I never made a bed in my life let alone with a sheet that Super Sarge has ordered to be razor sharp. I’m doomed, I thought. A guy with the bed next to mine, having a hard time with his sheets, looks at me helplessly. Don’t know shit from Shinola ‘bout makin’ no bed, he says. In perfect agreement I throw a shrug his way and we somehow muddle through the technicalities. Why a sharp corner on a GI bed will make us better able to fight Hitler or Tojo I didn’t know. Never did find out.

At Dix we also learned how, at our sergeant’s command, to police the area, the area being the parade grounds or grass around the barracks. Pick up everything that moves, he said. An’ if it don’t move, paint it. All I wanna see is assholes and elbows. This helpful explanation resulted in a bunch of dogfaces bending over to pick up gum wrappers and cigarette butts, an endeavor alternately known as dive bombing. But whatever the name, this—as did hospital corners—also made us better able to fight our enemies.

Another thing we learned at Dix: We were nobodies.

On November 2 we were taken to Atlantic City via Army bus convoy for basic training. I had never been to Atlantic City, otherwise known as AC. Uncle Sam had commandeered all the famous old resort hotels: the Traymore, President, Marlborough-Blenheim, Ambassador, and they were to be our quarters. It was a grim and bleak November that year, made bleaker still by the prospect of a Christmas ahead without family. And though I knew my roommates only superficially, I could tell they were as homesick as I. In fact, regarding this emotion and other soldierly feelings noted in this narrative: anger, bitching, moaning and lusting—the reader may reasonably assume that the writer is speaking for every GI who never got around to writing his own wartime memoir.

Atlantic City at the turn of the century and through the swinging decade of the 1920s, was the resort and playground mecca for affluent Easterners; for those who wanted more than just Coney Island. A contemporary magazine article described it thus: Rich Philadelphians and New Yorkers strolled the Boardwalk in tuxedos and ball gowns, or had themselves pushed about in rolling chairs.

By the ‘30s most entertainers worth their fifth curtain call—comedians and song belter-outers such as Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson, had played the city’s clubs, restaurants, and music halls. Top and Second Bananas classed up their acts for audiences more sophisticated than those in the provinces. Even before the Big Band era began, many notable bands of the day booked into the city’s famous night spots: Whiteman to the Ambassador Hotel, Pollack at the Million Dollar Pier and Goodman on the Steel Pier. The Miss America Pageant was born in Atlantic City and the place jumped. But that was then.

By 1942 the formerly opulent resort was on its way to becoming a paradise for plebeians. This was still before the arrival of the tawdry souvenir shops and stands on the boardwalk that sold foot-long hot dogs and frozen custard, which, in truth, would have been most welcome to the troops—a democratic lot. But this was war and there was no time for snacks and salt water taffy or pretty postcards from Atlantic City By The Beautiful Sea. The famous boardwalk which previously had known happier feet—not a pair of them, presumably, in any particular hurry—now shook and rumbled ominously with the cadenced tread of heavy GI boots.

Hut,, two three four, the troops bellow between quick intakes of air, marching, jogging, running—faces salted with spray from breakers across the barren sands.

"Left, left, I had a good home and I left. (Gasp.) Left. Left. I had a good home and I left." (Gasp.) Far on down the snaking wooden ribbon.

Paralleling the walk, a wall of splendid hotels rise in various shades of sun-bleached brick, tall, fancy, with many setbacks and sash-hung windows in the style of the early 1900’s skyscrapers. Stark they loom against the non-touristy November sky, their rooms—a shadow of what they’d formerly been—stripped of all luxury, the better to house a maximum number of GI double-decker bunks affectionately known as fart sacks.

Several miles north of the city lies a vast sand-filled waste of low-rolling dunes, green marshes, and watery inlets: Brigantine

Field. The birds love it. There we participated in calisthenics, ran obstacle courses till we dropped, and fired carbine rifles at targets in a distant bunker. None of this appealed to me; I hated calisthenics just as I had at Textile High School’s gymnasium in New York. And guns were not for me; I was no sharpshooter. Some guys were, but I got a marksman classification, meaning, I think, that I could perhaps hit an enemy with a bullet if he was standing in front of me.

When the sharp wind that blew continuously in off the ocean had the troops moaning, Hey, Sarge, my balls are freezin’, the ever-merciful Army permitted us to do our calisthenics inside the huge Atlantic City Convention Center—home of the Miss America Pageant. It was warm inside, though not one Miss America was in sight.

I wrote to my folks every day. I tried not to show my homesickness, but think that ability was beyond me. Nevertheless I put home—where I had been, what I had done, whom I loved and missed—far back in my mind. I focused instead on this new experience, and, truthfully, a good part of me relished it. To take it in a positive light made it an adventure. This was how I was successfully able to endure being wrenched (ripp’d untimely from my mother’s womb, as Shakespeare said) away from everything I had ever known and loved before.

At the end of one long tiring Brigantine day, my knees and shins bruised from scurrying over tall wooden walls on the obstacle course, and under low hurdles in the sand, a telegram awaited me at the hotel desk. A jolt shook my frame as I took the yellow envelope in hand; something happened to Mom or Dad, I knew it, or to kid brothers Charlie or Mike. But the message said that my Grandmother, my Mom’s mother, had died and my family wanted me to come home. The Red Cross had been notified and had verified the death to the proper military authorities. Accordingly I boarded a train the next day for New York. I was sorry for Mom that she had lost her mother, but, though it may seem cold-hearted, the old lady’s passing did not mean all that much to me. Yes, she was a good and kindly old crone, as grandmothers are wont to be, but she spoke little English and all the years I was growing up I can remember no profound communication between us, save: Mangia, mangia, Giorgio. Or, Heeza niza boy. I was happy to be going home, whatever the reason. I had a five-day pass.

On the train I couldn’t wait to get to the ferry terminal at Weehawken where I would disembark. I thought of how sad my mother must have been to lose me to the Army and, so soon after that, her mother to death. My mind slipped back to the day Mom woke me to tell me it was time to get up and leave home. It was barely two weeks before, but it seemed much longer.

missing image file

Brothers Mike Jr. (12), Charlie(17) and me. Third Avenue, Brooklyn. November 1942.

What can one make of a mother who wakens her son to send him on a mission from which he might never return? I can imagine the emotions she felt:

I’m sending my son to war. He’ll be killed and it will be my fault because I got him up to go. I didn’t want him to. He argued with me and his father for six months and finally convinced us he’d be better off if he enlisted than if he waited to be drafted. Which was inevitable as we knew. Still—I just couldn’t take that last move—my assent. His father did, much before I did. I suppose it was because he had been in WWI—also at age nineteen.

Georgie finally won me over. It seemed safer to me if he joined the Army Air Corps, which choice was his if he enlisted. The thought of him flying up there almost killed me. People were born to stay on the ground, where God put them. But, Georgie said, draftees get thrown in the Army as foot soldiers—cannon fodder as he put it. I didn’t know what cannon fodder was, but Georgie explained it to me and how could I argue against cannon fodder?

The interment at GreenWood Cemetery was typically Italian.