Fellowship of Dust: Retracing the WWII Journey of Sergeant Frank Shaw

By William Shaw

I began this project for personal reasons: my uncle had made an enormous personal sacrifice for his family and his country; yet, because of his silence, no one in my family ever fully knew what he endured. As the last living relative who knew him, I felt a responsibility to rescue his story from the shadows before it disappeared forever and to preserve it as a source of pride for my family and me.

But a second reason for telling my uncle’s story materialized as I assembled the details of his journey. I came to realize that while many GIs experienced extensive combat operations or the trials of being held in a POW camp, very few men survived the amount of combat my uncle experienced and six months in a POW camp. Frank’s five-year wartime journey, which included three monumental amphibious invasions, six major battle campaigns, and six months in three different POW camps, was breathtaking in scope. The odds against his surviving all this, or being seriously wounded out of the war, are almost incalculable.

Despite the unusual scope of Sergeant Shaw’s tour of duty, his day-to-day adventures are quite typical of what tens of thousands of combat infantrymen experienced during WWII. To that extent, the character who emerges in this story is a composite or representative figure, an American Odysseus, whose mission of extraordinary historical significance, requires him to define himself through trial, suffering, courage, and perseverance before he returns home in triumph.

But the similarity ends at the triumphant return. Earlier civilizations celebrated their returning warriors at ceremonial feasts. These men were expected to show their wounds and relate their adventures to their countrymen so bards might record them for posterity. Such rituals insured the warrior a rightful place in history, enshrined his virtues, and shed his reflected glory on his community. No such salutary ritual greeted a battered Frank Shaw when he returned from the war; no one saw his wounds or took his testimony. And his silence consigned his deeds to the shadows of time and dimming memory. But the ancient customs were correct — the hero’s deeds are not his alone. They are his legacy to his family and his country, and they deserve to be honored not shrouded. Therefore, since Sergeant Frank Shaw, like so many of his World War II comrades in arms, would not, and did not, tell his story, I did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662919909

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

HOME LIFE

The Shaw family lived at 85-10 Eliot Avenue from 1926 till 1966 in what was then called Elmhurst, in the New York City borough of Queens. This area is now known as Middle Village. The wooden frame two-story home was one in a row of six similar homes, near the intersection of Eliot and Woodhaven Boulevard, a very busy thoroughfare. Woodhaven Boulevard was the main route from the heart of Queens to the Rockaways. Eliot Avenue was a two-lane artery from Metropolitan Avenue to Queens Boulevard. The Long Island Expressway, now some quarter-mile away, had not yet been constructed, and surrounding hilly farm land had not yet been leveled for more row houses and the five-story high Lighthouse for the Blind. Still, traffic was heavy, constant, and noisy. Trolley cars, passing less than fifty yards from the Shaws’ front door, rattled and clanged throughout the day and night. Heavy trucks rumbled by, blasting horns, squealing air brakes. Horse-drawn vegetable wagons and tinkers’ carts still rumbled slowly and defiantly among their motorized brethren. The service station, directly across the street, kept four men busy from six in the morning until six at night, pumping gas and tuning engines. On a small hill behind the backyard, the Long Island Railroad had unceremoniously laid track, hurtling commuters from Penn Station in the heart of Manhattan to Jamaica, Queens, and beyond, and back again. A small fence provided no barrier to curious children wandering the tracks, flattening pennies on the rail, ghoulishly pondering the ill effects of being trapped in the path of an onrushing train or accidentally touching the electrified third rail. On the west side of six-lane-wide Woodhaven Boulevard and north two blocks of the Shaws’ home was the small A&P market where Frank Shaw and his brother, Bill, worked through high school as clerks, cashiers, and delivery boys. South, under the railroad bridge, and across Eliot Avenue, was Resurrection Ascension Church, where the family worshipped, married, then baptized its young, and buried its old. The Shaw boys did not attend Catholic schools; instead they attended P.S.102 and Newtown High School. Bill, the older boy, was more stolid and serious, harder working, athletic, driven, but afflicted with a stammer, which materialized after the boys’ mother suddenly died of pneumonia in 1925, when he was ten and Frank eight.

Frank wore round, horn-rimmed glasses on his full, rosy face and had an easy smile that flashed a gold cap on his left incisor and a thick thatch of brown hair that billowed on either side of a part in the middle. He was more sociable, more agreeable, less driven than his older brother. He was not interested in sports. When he wasn’t working at the A&P, he preferred hanging out at the malt shop, listening to music, dancing to Paul Whiteman, later Glenn Miller or the Dorsey Brothers. Despite modest effort, he was a very successful student, possessing what his teachers thought was a photographic memory. Certainly his older brother often envied Frank’s ability to master subjects with a fraction of the effort he expended. Both boys inherited their father’s appetite for reading. Books, books of all kinds, were found in every room of the house. Both boys read at least one book a week. House tastes were wide-ranging and indiscriminate: westerns, classics, mysteries, economics, science, science fiction, nonfiction. Bill and Frank delved into every genre but romance. Frank, unlike his father and brother, read widely in history, geography, Shakespeare, and the poetry of Frost, Eliot, and Yeats. His favorite author, however, was Charles Dickens. His eighth-grade teacher, Miss Carolyn Lahr, had excited his interest and encouraged him, frequently lending him books from her own collection. Though Frank easily possessed the intelligence and the grades in high school to enter college, the family did not have the money. More significantly, perhaps, no member of the family had ever been to college; it was beyond consideration. So Frank read for pleasure and fascination and graduated in 1934 with a vocational-technical diploma from Newtown High School.

Frank Shaw, age 12.

Peter, their father, was a machinist who moonlighted as a cab driver to meet expenses. The machinist job disappeared with the Depression, leaving only Peter’s meager earnings from the dwindling taxi business and the boys’ income to pay the bills. Peter had not thrived after his beloved wife, the former Marguerite Furey, contracted bronchial pneumonia and died on October 31, 1925. She had been a wonderfully loving and nurturing woman who had embraced and protected Peter and her boys with charm and warmth. Her death left Peter near desolation. With two young boys and two jobs, he married again, necessarily, but too soon for himself, too soon for the boys, and unwisely. He married a neighbor, a friend, Mary (May) McGillicuddy. She was a fellow bridge and canasta player. They had cards in common, but little else. Peter was a mild, temperate, overweight man, with piercing brown eyes, and large ears. His darkening fate drew him to excessive smoking and eating. May was a short, chubby, tart-mouthed, chattering harridan whose cheery face and cackling laugh thinly disguised a mean spirit and a will to control others. She treated the boys like hired help, taking their earnings, creating long lists of house chores to keep them busy. And complaining: nothing was ever quite done to her satisfaction. Peter felt helpless and became despondent; still, he remained dutiful, loyal to her and his boys. But his health failed. He had two heart attacks in late 1944 after Frank was reported missing in action, and he recovered gradually but not fully. At fifty-five, he resembled a seventy-five-year-old man. He died a few years after the war, a domestic casualty of the events that transpired.

Frank, who had graduated near the top of his class in 1934 continued to work as a clerk and cashier at the A&P store on Woodhaven Boulevard, hoping to become a store manager.

After high school, Bill trained at Delahanty’s Gym, preparing to take the exam for the police force. Frank, who had graduated near the top of his class in 1934 continued to work as a clerk and cashier at the A&P store on Woodhaven Boulevard, hoping to become a store manager. When that didn’t happen after four years, he quit and worked as a cab driver with his father for three years, until March 1941.

Frank Shaw, while he was in Advanced Infantry Training at Fort Devens in 1941.

CHAPTER 2

PREPARATIONS FOR WAR

Having received his draft notice in December 1940, Frank appeared at the Jamaica induction center on March 7, 1941, and was subsequently shipped by train to Camp Wolters, Texas, where he did his basic training. Frank’s response to being drafted into the army was casual, resigned. He was not particularly swayed by clichéd appeals to God and Country. He was called to serve, and that is what he intended to do. Leaving New York caused him no grave pain. He was twenty-five years old. His prospects seemed dim. He felt no urge to drive a cab the rest of his life. His brother was now married to their neighbor and old high school chum, Margaret Hanlon, and he was left alone to suffer his father’s decline and his stepmother’s agitation. The army might well be better than this. If it were not an adventure, he would settle for change. He had never been beyond New Jersey. Trips to the Catskills had been considered long journeys into the country. Texas—or any place beyond New Jersey—was more no more concrete to him than a rumor, or a paragraph in a geography text. A mythic place of cowboys and gunfighters.

The bus that carried Frank from the railroad station to Camp Wolters left a wake of white dust as it came to a stop. Spread before him was a flat, dry, hot, and dusty horizon that was speckled with sage and tumbleweed. The army post was a dreary, monochromatic vision of white wooden and sheet metal houses and huts. Frank waited in a loosely packed formation as the recruits’ names were called out and each man was assigned quarters. When his name was called, Frank with his barracks mates shambled off to their new home. Frank dropped his bulky duffle bag next to a bunk and threw his jacket and a few magazines on the top bed, marking his turf. He then looked around at the other thirty-odd men who would share this Spartan facility for the next twelve weeks. A sudden feeling of loss for his old way of life rushed over him. He wished he was back home.

Basic training in March 1941 consisted primarily of military indoctrination: short-cropped hair, calisthenics, hiking, tedious hours polishing brass and leather, congested, open living quarters with dozens of strangers, and close order drills administered by a foul-mouthed, impatient, taunting, seemingly demented drill instructor from Alabama who hated everybody, but especially New Yorkers whom he considered wiseasses, Bolsheviks, and homos. Frank clearly was not prepared for any of the alterations the army made in his life. As a civilian, he had always worn his hair long and bushy—to cover the big ears the Shaw men inherited. He wore simple, but well-tailored clothes. He hated exercise; hence his portly frame and the not-too-clever nickname Fat—Fat Shaw. He belonged to no athletic teams, fostered no driving competitive spirit like his older brother who sought challenge everywhere—in boxing, wrestling, basketball, or gymnastics.

He had never been in a fight. Any time school bullies had ever threatened him, older brother Bill would intervene and settle the issue, usually violently. Frank liked to dance. He loathed polishing things. He only shined his shoes for special occasions. He had to wash and polish the taxicab all the time and hated every second of it. He also hated marching. He enjoyed big band music but disliked anything that sounded like military music and marching.

He then looked around at the other thirty-odd men who would share this Spartan facility for the next twelve weeks. A sudden feeling of loss for his old way of life rushed over him. He wished he was back home.

Frank read books. He had always enjoyed the privacy of his own room at home. He laughed easily and freely and enjoyed the company of clever, funny people. He also loved practical jokes, the more bizarre and outrageous the better. Before joining the army, Frank had been accustomed to sleeping long hours and even took naps in the afternoon when he was not working. He whistled all the time wherever he went. In short, he was a cheerful, unassuming, reasonable man now thrown into an environment where reason and common sense were discouraged at best and totally absent at times.

Frank adapted slowly to the rigors of basic training. The running and calisthenics were painful. It took him several weeks to keep pace with the better-conditioned men. But he gradually came around. Where Frank excelled was in his exams and weapons. Even though he wore glasses he quickly got comfortable with the rifle and earned his "Expert’s Badge. And he scored almost perfect scores on all his exams.

When Frank was not training, he liked to play cards, read, or write letters home. During his whole basic training, he had only two one-day passes. So he seldom strayed far from the base. He reached a point where he didn’t mind it that much. The closest cities were too far away, and his meager salary did not permit wide-ranging tours. This also gave him some extra money to send home to his folks.

By the end of basic training, Frank was beginning, however unwillingly, to sever his ties with the sane life he had formerly led and to reorient him to the army’s way of doing things. Significantly, for the first time in his life, Frank was physically fit. He noticed a remarkable overall improvement in his muscle tone and conditioning. The layers of soft tissue he transported from New York had melted and solidified. Running had hardened and thinned his frame, had improved his wind and endurance. The calisthenics had added muscle to his arms, shoulders, and chest. So, if Frank’s three-month journey to Texas had not provided the new insights, the sense of adventure he had wished, he could at least take solace in the newly crafted body he brought to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where he was installed in the First Platoon of E Company, 26th Infantry Regiment of the famous 1st Division, the Big Red One.

Frank Shaw’s advanced infantry training began at Fort Devens. After a bumptious journey from Texas, with overnight camps scattered through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Virginia, Frank found living conditions at Fort Devens, which was near the city of Ayer, Massachusetts, more civilized than the primitive huts and tents of the previous months. Red brick barracks, here, were replete with modern kitchens and baths, bunk beds with clean sheets, recreation rooms, a gymnasium. It even had a firing range in the attic and in the basement. Frank’s workday too was, for the moment, less rigorous. Short and long hikes were a standard routine. Troops traversed the scenic roads and trails through apple orchards and small farms. Standing orders forbade the picking of apples in season, not even off the ground—those were cider apples. Training exercises usually took the entire morning, but Frank’s afternoons were often free for reading, writing home, visiting town, and mingling with civilians. After a steak dinner at the Hotel Ayer, troops might head to Worcester for a night of boozing and chasing women. If they missed a cab back to Fort Devens, they could catch the morning milk train that stopped at every farm between Worcester and Ayer. Boston was about thirty miles east. The city’s famous combat zone with its bars, strip joints, and whorehouses was a weekend lure to soldiers and sailors alike. The Palace was the sleazy centerpiece of this sordid playground. Returning to base with VD and a knife wound was a genuine risk; a two-day hangover was guaranteed. But these were treatable. The mental imprint of fat, toothless strippers with assorted tattoos and appendix scars, however, was permanent. There were no Rockettes in the combat zone.

Frank enjoyed his drinks with his buddies, but he was not a skirt-chasing ladies’ man, and he kept a safe distance from the squalid joints. He had begun dating a high-school friend, Florence Williams, before he was drafted. They had hung out in the same crowd for years. While they were not engaged, or even going steady, they wrote to one another on a regular basis. The previous September Frank was best man at his brother Bill’s wedding, and Florence was his date. They danced and chatted enthusiastically and seemed to be circling in the same orbit. But deeper romance seemed inadvisable to the cautious Frank, and Florence reluctantly agreed. Frank had no money saved. Their lives seemed too uncertain, the future dark and unstable.

At Fort Devens, the 26th Regiment was beginning to build up to full strength. Frank was part of the last group added to a company that had been training together at Fort Benning, Georgia, since early 1940. Frank, at age twenty-five, older than most, enjoyed the card playing and the raucous, competitive banter during free time. He was also amused by the intensity of the sectional rivalries that cropped up among the younger troops, many of whom suddenly found themselves in company of men from regions they had been taught to distrust and caricature. Hayseed versus City Slicker antagonisms existed primarily on the level of light-hearted joking, but sudden eruptions into fist fighting were not uncommon. In time, such incidents subsided as troops became more familiar, idle hands became busier, and genuine friendships grew.

In the early autumn 1941, maneuvers were held in the hills of upstate New York. Frank’s company played the enemy against National Guard troops who, in the manner of Gilbert and Sullivan, attacked them with broomstick rifles and stovepipe mortars. Amphibious training began in earnest as the 26th Regiment spent several weeks at Buzzards Bay in Cape Cod abroad an old Army transport ship, the USS Kent, climbing up and down cargo nets with full equipment, lowering wavering bodies into moving landing craft, again and again. The training was rigorous, exhausting, and uncomfortable. In addition to chronic seasickness, salt water and sand stuck to the skin, and the belts and packs carried by troops chafed their skin raw. At the end of such a day, Frank and his buddies would return to the ship for a warm saltwater shower, which some troops considered worse than no shower at all.

The training was rigorous, exhausting, and uncomfortable. In addition to chronic seasickness, salt water and sand stuck to the skin, and the belts and packs carried by troops chafed their skin raw.

When the 1st Division went to Camp Blanding in Florida in the spring of 1942, some of its training was ceremonial. Here a company of the 26th Infantry Regiment passes in review.

A subsequent phase of amphibious training took place in late fall off the coast of North Carolina close to New River on the USS Leonard. Loading onto landing craft at three in the morning, Frank bounced in choppy waters, turning pale and vomiting until the LCI (for Landing Craft, Infantry) accelerated, full speed, to the beach and disgorged its contents of thirty to forty men. Then, after a few hours on the beach where they attacked assigned objectives, the troops would get back on their landing craft and return to the ship. Frank would spend the balance of the day getting salt and sand out of his rifle, clothes, and ears. The best event of this trip was a ten-day stint at Charleston, South Carolina, while the ship’s boilers were repaired. Troops enjoyed the fine Southern food, dance halls, and sultry weather of the beautiful old city before returning to North Carolina, where Frank and his regiment began even more extensive combat maneuvers in Fort Bragg.

As E Company’s truck convoy returned north to Fort Devens, Frank received news of Pearl Harbor. The troops had assumed they were preparing for a European war. Now Japan. The Pacific. Then, two weeks later, Hitler declared war on the United States, and the nation was facing a two-front war. Farewell to broomsticks and stovepipes. The pace and intensity of training increased. No more afternoons free. Canceled weekend passes. Frank was faced now with continuous training: amphibious landings, rope climbing, fire and maneuver drills, hiking, bivouacking, weapons training, bayonet drills, hand-to-hand combat training. Every day, more of the same.

The one pleasant interlude in December 1941 for the men, many of whom were separated from their families for the first time, was the formal E Company Christmas Dinner. Company Commander, Lieutenant John Davis, had his mess sergeant, Alfred Collins, prepare a sumptuous menu for his men. Oyster cocktail and celery hearts were the appetizers for a main course of roast young turkey with cottage dressing, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, marshmallow sweet potatoes, asparagus tips, French peas, and fresh broccoli. For dessert, the men had a choice of pumpkin pie, mince pie, marble cake, or chocolate layer cake. Sweet cider and coffee were their beverage choices with cigarettes or cigars for their smoking pleasure.

Two days later, training resumed. Sites where the regiment conducted its training in early 1942 varied from the cold and snow practice landings at Virginia Beach, Virginia, in January and February, to the sand and dust at Camp Blanding, Florida, in March and April, to the miserable joint infantry, tank, and direct air support exercises in the heat, dust, sand, and hills of Fort Benning, Georgia, during May and June. In his few idle moments, as the certainty of war took hold of him, Frank pondered his fate, his chances of survival or being wounded. Like every other GI, he wondered how he would behave in the face of enemy fire. Frank had always been a modestly religious person, never ostentatious in any way. But now, fueled by quiet fears and uncertainties, Frank began to attend Sunday Mass regularly, knowing he would soon get his chance to discover what he was made of.

On June 30, Frank’s division moved to its staging area, Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. For several weeks, training subsided, consisting mostly of zeroing in weapons on the firing range. Afternoons were free. Married soldiers could stay with their wives off the post. Nearby Pottsville was a friendly and hospitable place. Friday and Saturday nights the Polish Polka club was a popular place—eating, drinking, women, and dancing. Friday night was potluck-supper night and troops were told to bring nothing but their dancing shoes and hearty appetites. It was exhilarating and diverting: sweaty, stomping polkas, kielbasa sausage with hot mustard, and lots of cold Shaefer beer from large kegs. This last post provided a friendly sendoff, a congenial last impression of a country some would never see again and others would never see in quite the same way.

Christmas Dinner Menu for E Company at Fort Devens in 1941.

The second weekend of July, Frank was given a furlough to visit his family. He knew it would be his last visit with them before he shipped out. It was a bittersweet occasion. Frank was delighted to see his old friends and visit with his family, but conversation was strained and there was little cheer. No one knew quite what to say. Frank and family consumed large quantities of beer, whiskey, food, and cigarettes; they chatted and joked amiably. But no one wanted to broach the dark undertone of the gathering. The furlough dragged and flew at once. When the taxi pulled up to the front door to take Frank to the bus back to Pennsylvania, the family labored to be upbeat. Peter failed miserably. He was sullen, ashen-faced; he muttered some few words to Frank about taking care of himself and awkwardly told him how proud he was of him. He gave him a prayer book to take with him. May was restrained; she awkwardly told him to stay well and come back in one piece. Despite her nature, she was seized by the solemnity of the occasion and revealed unexpected tenderness. His godfather, Frank Furey and his aunt, Mary Furey (Auntie) hugged him, slipped