One Tough Ombre

By John Sandifer

The 90th Texas Oklahoma Division was nick-named The Tough
Ombres. The men wore a T/O patch on their shoulders. But it was
anything but tough when it hit Utah Beach and tried to move inland.
Taking terrible casualties and making stupid mistakes, the Division was
called the worst on the continent by top brass. Charles Sarge Goodson,
a farm kid from Childress, Texas, came to the 90th Division as another
green replacement. He was intensely proud of the Tough Ombres. But both
Charles and the 90th Division had some fast growing up to do if they were
going to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469157146

John Sandifer

John Sandifer was raised in Amarillo, Texas, and Sedro Woolley, Washington. Mr. Sandifer spent 40 years as an award-winning broadcast journalist for radio and TV stations and networks After retirement, in 1994, from KING TV, the NBC affiliate in Seattle, he served for 15 years as the Executive Director for the Seattle Local of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. Having written thousands of news stories and dozens of documentaries, during retirement he has produced two books, both involving family members at war. “One Tough Ombre” follows a favorite uncle in Patton’s Army in Europe.

Book preview

Prologue

The thing I feel bad about, what I really feel bad about, are the ones we left there in the ground. They never had a chance to come back and participate in the milk and the honey. They gave everything they could to make it happen and people don’t even give a shit.

C.M. Sarge Goodson, 1996

I give a shit. But then, World War II is part of my psyche. I started life with it in the background. I was a little pre-elementary school kid then, but everything around me had something to do with the war. Subsequently I have stood in the American, British, French and German cemeteries in Europe where tens of thousands of the men of my father’s generation are buried. I have contemplated the many gravestone inscriptions that admonish against the pain of war and remind of the terrible price of peace.

Still, it has been more than a half-century since Uncle Sarge’s war ended and he’s probably right. Few people in my generation and the ones succeeding it give an indication that they believe there is a strong connection between that war and who we are today. On the other hand, World War II remains immensely popular in books, movies, video and board games. Next to the Civil War, it must be the most documented event in U.S. history. Many people consider it the last good war, when our nation fought not for revenge, status, economic or territorial gain, but rather against despotic dictators, oppression, slavery, genocide; against evil incarnate. World War II is exciting in its scope, brutality and sacrifice.

These days, video gamers, many of whom weren’t alive when the events were happening, storm the beaches shooting at German and Japanese pill boxes, they fly P-57’s after ME 109’s, they captain German U-boats trying to sink allied shipping with realistic graphics accompanied by the sound of bullets ricocheting and explosions going off. Each year seems to bring another blockbuster movie featuring the derring-do of our hero against the backdrop of the global war.

So, why one more book about it? Because, the generation that fought it has almost completely passed into history. When the last of them are gone, their stories will be lost forever. Many of the stories, particularly from the combat veterans, are similar. But they are also unique to each individual and ought to be preserved to the benefit of history. They cannot be told enough.

When I was still a working TV News Reporter, I used to be assigned to those Memorial Day stories. The day was another excuse for the clothing and tire stores to have another sale and for the office workers to have a day off. In the news business we didn’t get these holidays off and Memorial Day was traditionally slow. So, I would usually find myself at another of those parades where old farts marched behind the flag to some cemetery and some one, usually a city or county politician, would say a few words on a subject about which he or she knew little.

When I could, I would always try to corner one or two of the old geezers and ask them where they had served and what they did. When we had time, they usually opened up and told me a lot. They wanted me to know, because hardly anybody gives a shit any more. I saw tears indicating their experiences had left indelible pain somewhere down inside, but I also saw their eyes light up and those leathery faces take on life as they relived some of the experiences that were the most exhilarating of their lives, experiences that changed their lives and gave them much of their meaning.

I still do that. Whenever I meet an old vet from World War II, and they are disappearing fast, I talk to him. I have bent Uncle Sarge’s ear on the subject until the cows come home. I don’t know what went on over there. I got my knowledge from the movies and books like everybody else in my generation, and from Uncle Sarge and those other old geezers. I believe he is right when he says, I think the generation that went through a great depression, then a world war, you’ll probably never see a generation like that again. And they contributed more to the betterment of the world than any generation ever.

We talked about it from time to time. In about 1969, when I was working at ABC News in New York, I wrote to Uncle Sarge because I was reading a book called Decision at St. Vith. I asked him what he was doing during this part of the Battle of the Bulge. He responded with a three page letter that whetted my appetite for more and started this exploration. We didn’t do any real interviews until December, 1996, when I had finally decided I wanted to write down what I had learned about Uncle Sarge and his part in the big war. I didn’t know if a theme would develop. I just knew he had started at Utah Beach, he fought with George Patton and ended up at the Battle of the Bulge. As it turned out, a theme did develop. Sarge’s story is also the story of the division in which he served. It is a story of being in war without being ready for the horror of it, the deadly mistakes green troops inevitably make, and the slow, painful progression from naïveté and fear to the battle-tested proficiency of the veteran and the killer. It is a story about survival against the odds.

After I wrote a few pages and fiddled around another ten years, I realized I knew Sarge’s history and that of the 90th Division, but not enough about how he changed. So I went back to him, now 89 years old, hoping he could and would recall those catalytic moments.

The story is meaningless unless placed into the context of strategic considerations and tactical plans that Sarge knew little about. He was a very small cog in a very big machine, a replacement cog at that. So, I have tried to use the source materials that form the bibliography to structure the big picture and tactical events that form the backdrop for what Sarge saw and did. In fact, as a rule, Sarge doesn’t recall what he was doing during a particular battle or at a particular locale. That’s not unusual for the dog-soldier.

While Uncle Sarge has no specific memory of single cities, battles or campaigns, there have been a number of books published by others who were there, many of which reach down into the details of divisional, regimental, battalion and even squad action. Martin Blumenson, Gordon Harrison, Charles McDonald and John Keegan wrote from an all-encompassing point of view at the Corps or Army level. Joe Abrams wrote about the 90th Division. Wm. McConahey, John Colby, Hobert Winebrenner and Charles Bryan wrote from the perspective of the combat regiment. The latter two were among the few authors inside Sarge’s 358th Regiment. As we follow their stories we know Sarge was close at hand and learn what he was going through.

Fortunately too, the 90th Division Association developed a project to place all of the after-battle reports for the division on its website. This gives the researcher a daily look at what army officers were reporting to their superiors, broken down into regimental and battalion size actions. Interesting enough, the official histories don’t always follow the daily battle reports. This is probably because perspective is gained by time. Also, the battle reports were written by soldiers who wanted their units to appear in the best light. Using these sources, we know where Sarge was and what was going on around him. Some of it borders on the unbelievable.

I want to acknowledge help in editing and consultation from Kathleen Wood, Chick Sandifer and Larry Cali.

As a reporter I learned early on that no matter what the story, you will always know more about it if you will go and stand on the land. So, during two trips to Europe, I spent much of the time exploring the lay of the land and what remains of the conflict. There isn’t much today. Most of my journey was over the battle route, through the patchwork of villages, hills and cities through which the 90th Division passed. Now I want to invite you along. Most of the pictures, maps and artwork are my own. This project gave me the opportunity to dig out my camera, pen and ink and water colors. So, this is the result of a journey of mind and distance. I hope you find it interesting, maybe valuable.

Chapter 1

PEORIA

Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday, Dear Saaaarge. We sang, clustered in the family room, after he rolled in from his bedroom using his electric power cart. He could still stand, and do dishes and stuff, but it was uncomfortable. And he could play the electronic keyboard and sing too. And he did. He sang Crazy. The old body was frail and his latest transfusion had happened only a week or so ago, but he was hanging in there.

His daughter and my cousin, Lynda, had arranged this 90th birthday party in October of 2011, and invited relatives to come to his house in Peoria, Arizona, from where-ever they were. A pretty good crowd turned out. Sarge’s wife since 2005, Barbara, flew in from Missouri, where she was staying with her daughter and undergoing liver cancer treatments. His son, Chocky, was on hand from San Antonio, retired as an Air Traffic Controller. Chock’s daughter Alexis, and her daughter, Addison came. Niece and nephew Carolyn, from Dallas, and Monty, from Santa Fe, were on hand; the grown children of his brother J.B. I was down from Seattle. Sister-in-law Jimmie Wren and Lt. Col (Retired) Les were over from Tempe, along with daughter Sally and her husband, Rich. Sarge’s sister, Mary, was in from Amarillo. Granddaughter Heather arrived from Williamstown, Mass., and Grandson Josh from Carlsbad, CA. Granddaughter Kimberly was there with the three little great-grand kids. So, with the addition of friends and neighbors the party was on.

There was a lot of food. We stuffed ourselves with fruit salad, macaroni salad, potato salad, tomato salad, green salad, white cheese, bleu cheese, orange cheese, Tostitos, Doritos, ham, turkey, roast, meatballs, cocktail wieners, deviled eggs and Sarge’s favorite; pinto beans with ham-hock. This was between drinks.

Lynda had put up a visual display near the front door reminding us that Sarge was a special guy; one of the few remaining men who served under Patton in World War II; a Purple Heart winner, one of the survivors. Ninety years old and the war had put its stamp on him. After the party and while Lynda was supervising cleanup, Sarge asked how the book was coming along and I said fine. I was happy he was living long enough to read it. I recalled the many visits with Uncle Sarge when we would talk about the war.

During my most formative years the war was in the advertising we saw, the movies we attended, the heroes we adopted. Comic books were full of bad-ass Nazi villains. Children we met at school had escaped from places like Lithuania or Poland and had Hitler horror stories to tell.

I remember my mother dressing me up in soldier and sailor outfits. I had summer and winter uniforms for both Army and Navy. I was taught a snappy salute.

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Author at 4

Some of my first toys were models of Thompson sub machine guns. The first great gift my Dad carved for me from wood was an M-1 rifle with bayonet. I went right out and tried to stab our neighbor, a kid we called Geronimo Nelson, with it. I decimated an entire company of Japanese soldiers who had infiltrated our back yard in Amarillo, Texas. Dug a fox hole out there. When Mom brought home a cardboard refrigerator box, I marked out dials, gauges and buttons on the inside with crayons and flew it over Berlin, bombing and strafing. I took it underseas into the wide Pacific and blew up Japanese battleships.

Out in the driveway, our family had a 1939 Ford that never moved. We couldn’t get tires or gasoline for it. Our moms shopped with little red, blue and yellow food tokens or coupons required to buy sugar, meat and other things.

And I remember my uncles and the friends of my parents putting on uniforms and going away to war. Our family was lucky. Everyone who went returned; but they were all different when they got back. Uncle LeRoy, who worked on PT boats in Samoa, had great stories about the native booze brewed by Samoans, how they could sit motionless for a full day, or about hungry sharks that circled his boat. Uncle Cottie, told about his clothes rotting off in the Philippines and his sadness about shooting a little native boy by mistake; a kid moving around in the grass at night too close to American lines. He got some kind of crud in one lung and had to have it removed. Dad’s friend Wayne Prescott, came back with a big hole in his shoulder and told how a premonition that someone was aiming at his backbone resulted in his diving for cover just before the bullet hit. Uncle Billy spoke French phrases all the time; Cohm-in-tahlly-voo? He brought home a small parachute for me. I didn’t know it was just an opener parachute, one to help open the big one. I jumped off the peak of the garage with it. I had visions of floating gently to earth. It didn’t even open and it almost killed me. Uncle Les flew as a navigator in B-25s. He could tell you every constellation in the sky. Carl, Dad’s friend, dived under a table whenever a plane flew overhead.

Dad worked at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, uranium plant. He had no idea he was helping to produce the world’s first atomic bomb. He had weird stories too, like co-workers who seemed to disappear after being exposed to some vapors in the plant, and being shadowed by G-men after asking questions about what they were producing.

Uncle Sarge was just angry. He didn’t say much at all. He seemed to be the one still at war, the one with a latent danger lurking somewhere below the surface. My fascination with Uncle Sarge is because he was so rough, tough and wily, not entirely straight arrow (if I am to believe some relatives), but, at the same time, he has an endearing softness, creative urges and can cry during emotional times with the best of them. I knew he had changed in the war. I just didn’t know why or how. He had been bitter when he came back. He hated Germans. And he didn’t talk much to the family about his experiences. In fact, Aunt Mary said, You know, Little John, (my dad was Big John) I have learned more about what Sarge did in the war since you started talking to him about it than he ever told me.

I remember talking to or reading something from a Seattle veteran named Les Habegger, who had four brothers in the war. He said, We never talked about our experiences with anyone who had not been there because we figured they would not understand or care. It is impossible to tell someone who wasn’t there what it is like to live in a foxhole, hugging the ground, waiting for shrapnel or the next bullet to get you.

I think that is right. I have been trying to understand, but I don’t feel the anxiety, the wet, cold, the fear, the hunger, none of it. I think Sarge soon learned, after the war, that the people around him had experienced their own war too and just wanted to put it all behind them and get on with their lives. They wanted their children to live in a better world and they went to extra lengths to spoil the hell out of us. Then there is the pain. You can see it when Sarge starts to get too close to his memories. More often than not he will check himself and move on to some other topic.

Chapter 2

TOUGH OMBRES

I hopped on the Eurostar train at Waterloo Station in London and soon entered the English Channel Tunnel headed for Calais. I had been in the Chunnel before. That was in 1992, when KING TV, Seattle, assigned Laddie Kite as cameraman and me, as Reporter, to cover the construction of the Chunnel, up to that time the world’s largest civil engineering project. Why would a local TV station send a crew to England? I had argued that one of the prime contractors was a Seattle area outfit, the Robbins Company, which had invented the huge tunnel boring machines used for those kinds of big digs. We were duty bound to cover it.

I remember standing in a section of the tunnel 22 miles from the English shore, under the Channel, with torrents of sea water pouring down on us. I hoped like hell it didn’t mean the white chalk above us was giving away and suddenly the whole damned channel would be coming through.

During interviews in the English country side, we had discovered great discomfort among the citizenry with the idea of a tunnel linking the Brits to France. They said if the tunnel had existed in 1940, when Hitler sought to invade the island, a tunnel would have spelled doom. Now they were arguing against a feared invasion of foxes, rats, and other vermin from France, which would infect their livestock and ruin the economy. They also argued against French tourists who would not be particularly welcomed.

On the French side, near Calais, the locals argued that the Brits didn’t have to worry; Frenchmen don’t visit England. They vacation on the sunny shores to the south, just like many English do. And besides, they argued, it’s easy enough to prevent foxes from crossing channel tunnels.

Near Calais, we stood on the spot where Hitler and his generals had contemplated the invasion of Britain while they viewed the channel and the white cliffs of Dover, which can be easily seen in the distance. Laddie and I prowled around some of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall and marveled at the thickness of concrete emplacements and dark, narrow tunnels running between them. It was pretty clear where Allied bombs had made direct hits.

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Bunker near Calais

On this later trip, I picked up a rental car in Calais, and was on my way though Rouen to the Normandy Beaches and my head was getting into Sarge’s war.

Uncle Sarge was a Tough Ombre. He was 75 when we started talking about his experiences and approaching 90 when we did our last interview. We talked about the fact that we are losing about 1,000 WWII vets per day as a generation dies out. When they are gone, their first-hand stories will be gone. Both of us agreed we ought to get some of his experiences down in writing while we can. We also contemplated that renewed interest in past conflicts usually comes on anniversary dates and that Americans would be observing the 70th anniversary of D-Day soon as one of the world’s truly historic events. When last we spoke, he was looking frail, but was still someone you wouldn’t want to piss off.

Charles M. (Sarge) Goodson wasn’t really a sergeant. He was a private. The Sarge moniker was hung on him by members of the Childress, Texas, Bobcats football team, because Charlie had received some government sponsored training not unlike ROTC, but on the high school level.

His growing up years were tough. His family was poor and, he says, lived on the wrong side of the tracks.

If I got oranges and nuts at Christmas, I was fortunate. A kid of 15 has more money to spend nowadays on junk than my dad had to raise a family.

Sarge’s family had migrated over several generations from Georgia to Alabama to Texas. His father, Paul, had been born in Alabama around 1898. On the 1930 census, in Texas, he listed himself as head of household with wife, Bertie, and four sons; James V., J.B., Charlie and George. He said his father had been born in Georgia. Bertie was born in Texas. Paul was listed as a truck driver for a bottling works at 34 years old. Charles Morgan was born the third son in the family, in 1922. Paul, spent his life trying to scratch out a living in a hard-scrabble territory in the high plains of Texas.

Dad was a sharecropper, but not a very good one. He didn’t want to be in the fields. He wanted to be around people, so he took jobs in town. There was a series of railroad shops in town where they made railroad gear. He got work as a gandy-dancer for the railroads and later worked his way up to be a boilermaker. But he was never paid very much.¹

Charlie’s mother, Bertie, worked to make ends meet too. After preparing breakfast for a husband and four little boys, she spent her days out in the fields picking cotton.

Mom was only about 4 feet tall. She would go out at the break of day to pick cotton on her brother’s farm. Three of us boys would pull her cotton sacks along. She carried George, the baby, on her back and on her hip she carried a pail with our lunch, rice and beans most of the time.

Charlie said he was not beyond increasing the weight of his bag by salting it with stones and dirt clods. He was prone to do whatever helped him to get ahead. Summer nights were spent under the stars, partly because of the heat, partly because of the crowding.

"We lived in a two room shack. It had a living room, where the folks slept, a little kitchen in the middle and a bedroom on the other end, where us four boys slept in two beds. So we slept outside a lot. If it rained, we’d just pack up our blankets and head inside. I didn’t sleep in a real bed until I was about 16. When I was about 12, my mom got an old cattle trough from a neighbor and brought it home. That’s where I slept. She said if I would go out and get some cotton, she would make me a mattress. So I did, and she sewed the cotton