Editor: In my Perspective article, "Forging Unity Takes More Than Yellow Ribbons" (The Sunday Sun, June 30), an error occurred in the course of editing my submission.
The statement that "18-year-olds six weeks from civilian life were thrown into the breach" is incorrect. My original draft described a Pentagon meeting at Christmastime 1944 at which it was stated that "there is to be no publicity given to our latest measure expediting replacements" whereby men from the armed forces were receiving only six weeks of infantry replacement training. The 18-year-olds were receiving from 13 to 17 weeks of infantry basic training before shipping out.
& Richard E. Engler, Jr.
Crofton.
Crofton -- The flush of victory in the wake of the gulf war has brought on a wave of national celebrations honoring not only those who served, and especially those who fell, but honoring also that sense of strong support, if not total unity, that prevailed as the displays of flags and yellow ribbons flourished.
Some may reflect that this was the first time since World War II that such unity in wartime had been manifested in our country. Certainly the young have been taught that in that other "good war" Americans stood shoulder to shoulder, ready to share the sacrifices in opposing the enemies of freedom. Perhaps the "teachers" should re-examine their memories.
My own memory was jarred a few years ago when I finally got back to places in France that had haunted me for over 40 years with scenes of remembered fire and cold and terror. At the American cemetery at St. Avold, in Alsace, I was seeking the graves of two of the youngest members of my old infantry company: teen-agers who fell during our first attack in the last winter of World War II. Walter and Henry; they lay almost side by side. I hadn't known them very well. None of us had had much time to become close friends. It was doubtless the fortunes of war that took them at so young an age while others of us were spared. I still feel they could have had a better chance.
Walter had called out "Help me!" after the German shell sent shrapnel tearing into his chest. But the man he called didn't stop to help; everyone scrambled to get out of that frozen field where the barrage from the 88s was falling. Someone did help Henry, bandaged his wounds and propped him against a tree for the litter bearers -- who never came. In this makeshift attack, without artillery support, the litter bearers were from another regiment. They were strangers. Henry probably froze to death.
How many Americans today know how desperate their country was in the fall of 1944 to find the manpower to bear the rifles that would be needed to achieve victory over Hitler? The nation's mobilization planners were trying frantically to correct their errors of the mid-war years when air power and machines and technician specialists were considered the mostessential ingredients of victory. Now men with rifles were urgently needed: Of eight million men in the Army, only 700,000 were infantry. Yet the machinery of the great war enterprise was heavily staffed -- indeed, overstaffed.
A military analyst for Life magazine, Hanson W. Baldwin, wrote critique in early December that praised some achievements of our armed forces, notably in supply and transportation, but held strong reservations about many other facets of our army's efforts in Europe. Baldwin described the very large staffs formed in Europe at the expense of front-line manpower. He noted that command and headquarters personnel were occupying more than 150 hotels in Paris. "If the Army sloughed off its excess 'fat,' " Baldin wrote, "five to ten more combat divisions might be formed out of this personnel." He scathed the "yesmen in disguise" who populated those massive staffs, concentrating their energies, he said, on building up "positions of personal prestige and power, little private empires. . . ."
In our distorted national memory, that point of climax in World War II is recalled as a time of "all for one and one for all" on the home front. But it really wasn't that way. Check the newspapers and newsmagazines of that day. In the midst of wartime prosperity, people were eager to pursue the new opportunities the war economy had generated. Worker turnover in war industries was epidemic and brought strong warnings to job switchers that they might be drafted into the military. As politicians and businessmen anticipated reconversion to a civilian economy, ammunition shortages were being reported by our armies in Europe.
Before renewed war production got under way, the enemy lashed out with his great winter counter-offensive: first in the Ardennes, then, on New Year's Eve, in Alsace. And so the half-trained and the almost untrained, the disgruntled specialists-turned-infantrymen and the 18-year-olds six weeks from civilian life were thrown into the breach.
The unit to which Walter and Henry belonged had been rushed to Europe ahead of its artillery and other support elements after being filled with teen-aged riflemen in the last weeks before shipping out. Very soon after landing in France, without artillery support and with no planning or preparation, they made their first attack. It was a foul-up, common in war, and they left behind living and dead on that frozen field when they fell back from withering machine-gun fire and a barrage laid down by rapid-firing 88s. It was a shattering experience.
That night in the cellar of a house in a tiny Alsatian village where the survivors awaited the next call to duty, something very strange began to happen. At first men huddled alone against the cold, trying to shut out the sounds of war interjected by the "chungs" of heavy mortar just outside the cellar door. Then someone spoke up in the darkness.
Ray Willemssen, an Iowa farm boy who one day would become a Protestant minister in a small South Dakota town, said things were going to be all right and that they'd probably never have another day like this one. Another voice spoke up, and then another. Soon men were moving into little clusters, helping one another to prepare for whatever came next.
There were no formal proclamations that night. But somehow they became friends bound in a common fate. Somehow they realized that none was going to make it unless each began to work for one another as well as for himself. And after that night, they never again left friends behind as they withstood the terrible trials of that winter and then pushed on across the Rhine and finally to Dachau and Munich.
As a teen-aged rifleman in that cellar at Kilstett, I thought I was witness to a miracle as that motley, disgruntled, self-serving crew began to work together. Many years later I discovered that the "miracle" I had witnessed was a common occurrence in times of crisis.
In his book "The Americans: The National Experience," Daniel Boorstin describes the wagon-train companies of the mid-19th century. In most instances they were made up from small clusters of strangers who gathered near Independence, Missouri, to form a larger party for the dangerous trip across the Western plains and deserts. The members of these groups of people usually shared just one thing in common: a desire for opportunity and a better life. As one emigrant wrote in his diary, "All appeared to be determined to govern but not to be governed." But once out on the prairie beyond Independence, these parties of strangers came to the realization that no one was going to make it to opportunity in the West unless they began to work for one another as well as for themselves.
Listen to the pledge one party of emigrants in 1849 adopted and signed after calling a halt on the prairie beyond Independence: ,, "In case any members of the company . . . are deprived of the ability to proceed with the company in the usual manner, we pledge ourselves never to desert them, but from our own resources and means of support we pledge ourselves to stand by each other, under any justifiable circumstances to the death."
Commitments unto death on the road to opportunity and individual fulfillment. And I saw this repeated almost 100 years later.
Poor, demented Adolf Hitler. With his ideology proclaiming the racial superiority of his unified German volk. According to Albert Speer, Hitler believed that the Americans would never withstand a great trial by fire. He told Speer that "no such thing as an American people existed as a unit" and that the Americans "were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and races," incapable of the disciplined and sacrificial unity he demanded of his purified race of Aryan volk. How could Hitler comprehend the potential strengths in diversity when the many discover what they owe to one another?
They didn't all make it to Dachau and Munich and to the peacetime goal beyond. But under the caring leadership of a second lieutenant who crawled out after dark from that icy field where they had left him for dead, they pooled their talents for the good of all and never stopped working to keep one another alive. Frank Bulkley, a ski instructor from Colorado, shepherded them across Europe like a big family. He made it almost to the end, but finally he was hit on a pitch-dark night checking out a roadblock on the road to Dachau.
At first he lay unattended because of his exposed position near the roadblock. Then George Merlock, a tough little machine-gun sergeant from a steel town in Ohio, pulled his pistol and forced a tank commander, at gunpoint, to take his armored vehicle up the road so they could use its cover to get to their lieutenant, bring him out and start him on his way home.
For Walter and Henry, I'm so sorry that we hadn't reached our prairie beyond Independence before that first attack when they fell. They deserved a better chance.
The deep mutual commitments in that company ended with the passing of the crisis. After a stint in occupation duty, men scattered to the new opportunities a grateful nation opened for its veterans of World War II. And to a society that through the years created ever larger organizations that required leaders to become more and more the managers and manipulators of people.
For today, as in wartime 1944, we are again short on infantry and long on staffing. And the higher echelons of "staff," where all the important movers and shakers, decision makers and power brokers are holding forth, lose sight of the hidden strengths of people: the tremendous creative energies in our diversity when we come to the realization that, at times, free people must work for one another as well as for themselves as they journey toward opportunity.
From the trials of that winter, many of my generation learned that lesson. Maybe we've forgotten it. Too bad. It could be as $H important today as it was then.
Richard E. Engler Jr., a social scientist, is completing "The Final Crisis," a book on World War II.