Part 6 (1/2)

THE SHORT SNORTER WAR MENACE.

SOMEWHERE IN AFRICA (Via London), September 2, 1943 September 2, 1943-The growth of the Short Snorters is one of the greatest single menaces to come out of the war so far. The idea started as a kind of joke in a time when very few people flew over an ocean in an airplane. It became the custom then for the crew of the airplane to sign their names on a one-dollar bill which made the new ocean flyer a Short Snorter. He was supposed to keep this bill always with him. If at any time he were asked if he were a Short Snorter and he did not have his signed bill with him he was forced to pay a dollar to each member present at the time when the question was asked. It was good fun and a kind of general joke and also a means of getting someone to pay for the drinks.

But then came the war and the building of thousands of s.h.i.+ps and the transporting of thousands of men overseas by airplane and every single one becomes a Short Snorter. There are hundreds of thousands of Short Snorters now who have actually flown over an ocean and there are further hundreds of thousands who carry signed bills. And the new Short Snorter goes much farther than having his bill signed by the crew which carried him on his initial crossing. The custom has grown to have the bill signed by everyone you come across. At a bar you ask your drinking companion to sign your bill. You ask generals and actors and senators to sign your bill.

With the growing autographing one bill soon was not enough. You procured another bill and stuck it with Scotch tape to your first bill. Then the thing went farther. You began to collect bills from other countries. To your American dollar bill you stuck a one-pound English note, and to it a fifty-franc Algerian note, and to it a hundred-lira bill. Every place you went you stuck the money to your growing Short Snorter until now there are people who have streamers eight and ten feet long, which, folded and rolled, make a great bundle in the pocket, and these streamers are covered with thousands of names and represent besides considerable money. Even the one-dollar original is disappearing. Many new Short Snorters use $20 bills and some even $100 bills.

These are the new autograph books. The original half of the joke has been lost. In bars, in airports, in clubs, the first thing that must be done is a kind of general exchange of signatures. Serious and intelligent gentlemen sign one another's bills with an absolute lack of humor. If the party is fairly large it might take an hour before everyone has signed the bill of everyone else. Meanwhile the soup gets cold.

There are favorite places on the bill for honored and desirable autographs. The little s.p.a.ce under Morgenthau's name is one such. The wide s.p.a.ce beside the portrait on the bill is another. If you get an autograph you want to show, you have it written on a clear s.p.a.ce, but if it is just one of the run-of-the-mill signatures it is put any place in the green part, where it hardly shows up at all. It is a frantic, serious-minded, insane thing. Men of dignity scramble for autographs on their Short Snorters. A special case, usually made of cellophane, is sometimes carried to house the bill, or the long streamers of bills, because these treasures are handled so much that they would fall to pieces if they were not protected.

The effort and time involved in this curious thing is immense. Entertainers who travel about to our troops sign literally thousands of Short Snorter bills. For no longer do people have to fly an ocean to be members. The new method is that any Short Snorter can create a new Short Snorter. The club is pyramiding. Probably there are ten million Short Snorters now and every day new thousands begin to scribble on their bills. It would be interesting to know how many bills are withdrawn from circulation to be used as autograph books. They must run into the millions.

The use of large bills as Short Snorter bills has a curious logic behind it. The man or woman who used a $20 or $100 bill feels that he or she will not spend this money because of the signatures on it, but he also feels that if he needs to he can spend it. Thus he has a nest egg or mad money and a treasure, too. He will not toss it over a bar nor put it in a c.r.a.p game, but if he really should get into a hole he has this money with him.

Very curious practices grow out of a war and surely none more strange than this one has taken over the public recently.

THE BONE YARD.

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), September 5, 1943 September 5, 1943-On the edge of a North African city there is a huge used tank yard. It isn't only tanks, either. It is a giant bone yard, where wrecked tanks and trucks and artillery are brought and parked, ready for overhauling. There are General Shermans with knocked-out turrets and broken tracks, with engines gone to pieces. There are trucks that have fallen into sh.e.l.l holes. There are hundreds of wrecked motorcycles and many broken and burned-out pieces of artillery, the debris of months of bitter fighting in the desert.

On the edge of this great bone yard are the reconditioning yards and the rebuilding lines. Into the ma.s.ses of wrecked equipment the Army inspectors go. They look over each piece of equipment and tag it. Perhaps this tank, with a German .88 hole drilled neatly through the turret, will go into the fight again with a turret from the one next to it, which has had the tracks shot from under it. Most of the tanks will run again, but those which are beyond repair will furnish thousands of spare parts to take care of the ones which are running. This plant is like the used-car lots in American cities, where you can, for a small price, buy the gear or the wheel which keeps your car running.

The engines are removed from the wrecked trucks and put on the repair lines. Here a complete overhaul job is done, the linings of the motors rebored, with new rings, tested and ready to go finally into the paint room, where they are resprayed with green paint. Housings, gears, clutch plates are cleaned with steam, inspected, and placed in bins, ready to be drawn again as spare parts. One whole end of the yard is piled high with repaired tires. Hundreds of men work in this yard, putting the wrecked equipment back to work.

Here is an acre of injured small artillery, 20- and 37-mm. anti-tank guns. Some of them have been fired so long that their barrels have burned out. Some of them have only a burst tire or a bent trail. These are sorted and put ready for repair. The barrels are changed for new ones, and the old ones go to the sc.r.a.p pile. For when everything usable has been made use of there is still a great pile of twisted steel which can be used as nothing but sc.r.a.p metal. But the s.h.i.+ps which bring supplies to the Army from home are going back. They take their holds full of this sc.r.a.p to go into the making of new steel for new equipment.

It is interesting to see the same American who, a few months ago, was tinkering with engines in a small-town garage now tinkering with the engine of a General Grant tank. And the man hasn't changed a bit. He is still the intent man who is good with engines. He isn't even dressed very much differently, for the denim work clothes are very like the overalls he has been wearing for years. Beside these men work the French and the Arabs. They are learning from our men how to take care of the machinery that they may use. They learn quickly but without many words, for most of our men cannot speak the language of the men who are helping them. It is training by sign language and it seems to work very well.

The wrecked equipment comes in in streams from the battlefields. Modern war is very hard on its tools. While in this war fewer men are killed, more equipment than ever is wrecked, for it seems almost to be weapon against weapon rather than man against man.

But there are many sad little evidences in the vehicles. In this tank which has been hit there is a splash of blood against the steel side of the turret. And in this burned-out tank a large piece of singed cloth and a charred and curled shoe. And the insides of a tank are full of evidences of the men who ran it, penciled notes written on the walls, a telephone number, a sketch of a profile on the steel armor plate. Probably every vehicle in the whole Army has a name, usually the name of a girl but sometimes a brave name like Hun Chaser. That one got badly hit. And there is a tank with no track and with the whole top of the turret shot away by a heavy sh.e.l.l, but on her skirt in front is still her name and she is called Lucky Girl Lucky Girl. Every one of these vehicles lying in the wreck yard has some tremendous story, but in many of the cases the story died with the driver and the crew.

There are little tags tied to the barrels of the guns. One says: ”The recoil slaps sideways. I'm scared of it.” And another says: ”You can't hit a barn with this any more.” And in a little while these guns, refitted and painted, with their camouflage, will be back in the fight again.

There is hammering in the yard, and fizz of welders and hiss of steam pipes. The men are stripped to the waist, working under the hot African sun, their skins burned nearly black. The little cranes run excitedly about, carrying parts, stacking engines, tearing the hopeless jobs to pieces for their usable parts.

Italy REHEARSAL.

SOMEWHERE IN MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, September 29, 1943 September 29, 1943-American troops trained on the beaches of North Africa for the beaches of Italy. It was hot and dusty on the land, and back from the coast there were many training props for them to work with. There were wooden landing barges standing on the ground in which dusty men crouched, until at a signal the ramp went down and they charged out and took cover. To get ash.o.r.e quickly, and to get down behind some hummock of earth where the machine guns can't get at you, is very important stuff in landing.

And so they practiced over and over, and instead of getting wet they only raised clouds of dust, the light, reddish dust of Africa, in colors little like the red soil of Georgia.

And when the men had learned to leap out and charge and take cover and to run forward again, presenting as little of themselves as possible to the observing officers, they went to the set to learn how to conduct themselves on entering an enemy town.

There were sets like those in a Hollywood studio in the old silent days, wooden fronts and tall and short buildings with open windows and little streets between, and there the men learned how to crouch on a corner and how to slink under the cover of walls. They learned with practice grenades how to blast out a machine gun set up in a building. It was strange to see them rehearsing, as though for a play. It went on for weeks.

And when they had become used to the method and when they reacted almost instinctively, they were taken finally to the Mediterranean beaches, the long, white beaches, which are not very unlike the beaches at Salerno. The water is incredibly blue there and the beaches are white. And the water is very salty. You float like a cork on it. On the beaches they practiced with real landing barges. The teams put out to sea and then turned and made runs for the sh.o.r.e and the iron ramps clattered down and the men rushed ash.o.r.e and crept and wriggled their way up to the line of the sh.o.r.e where the grapevines began, for there are vineyards in Italy, too.

When they had practiced a little while, machine guns with live ammunition fired over their heads, but not very far over their heads, to give them a real interest in keeping low.

Now in larger groups they rushed in from the sea and charged up into the vines and crept up through the vineyards and moved inland. An amazing number of men can disappear into a vineyard so that you can't see them at all.

The dark Algerian grapes were ripe and as they crawled the men picked the grapes and ate them and the incidence of GI dysentery skyrocketed, but there is no way of keeping a dusty, thirsty man from eating ripe grapes, particularly if they are hanging right over his head, when he lies under the vines.

Over and over again they captured this little sector and climbed up and captured the heights. They had to learn to do it in the daytime because when they would really do it it would be in the dark of the early morning. But when the training for each day was finished, the men went back to the beaches and took off their clothes and played in the water. The water was warm and delightful and the salt stung their eyes. Their bodies grew browner day by day until they were only a little lighter than the Arabs.

At night they were very tired and there is not much to do in Africa after dark anyway. No love is lost for the Arabs. They are the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest. The whole countryside smells of urine, four thousand years of urine. That is the characteristic smell of North Africa. The men were not allowed to go into the native cities because there was a great deal of disease and besides there are too many little religious rules and prejudices that an unsuspecting dogface can run afoul of. And there wasn't much to buy and what there was cost too much. The prices have skyrocketed on the coming of the troops.

The men slept in their pup tents and drew their mosquito nets over them and scratched and cursed all night until, after a time, they were too tired to scratch and curse and they fell asleep the moment they hit the blankets. Their minds and their bodies became machine-like. They did not talk about the war. They talked only of home and of clean beds with white sheets and they talked of ice water and ice cream and places that did not smell of urine. Most of them let their minds dwell on snow banks and the sharp winds of Middle Western winter. But the red dust blew over them and crusted their skins and after a while they could not wash it all off any more. The war had narrowed down to their own small group of men and their own job. It would be a lie to suggest that they like being there. They wish they were somewhere else.

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, October 1, 1943 October 1, 1943-Week after week the practice of the invasion continued, gathering impetus as the day grew nearer. Landing operations and penetrations, stealthy approaches and quick charges. The whole thing gradually took on increased speed as the day approached.

The roads back of the coast were crowded with staff cars das.h.i.+ng about. The highways were lined with trucks full of the incredible variety of war material for the invasion of Italy. There are thousands of items necessary to a modern army and, because of the complexity of supply, a modern army is a sluggish thing. Plans, once made, are not easily changed, for every move of combat troops is paralleled by hundreds of moves behind the lines, the moves of food and ammunition, trucks that must get there on time. If the whole big, sluggish animal does not move with perfect cooperation, it is very likely that it will not move at all. Modern warfare is very like an automobile a.s.sembly line. If one bolt in the whole machine is out of place or not available, the line must stop and wait for it. Improvisation is not very possible.

And all over in the practice zones in North Africa the practice went on to make sure that every bolt would be in its place. The men went on field rations to get used to them. Canteens must always be full, but full of the evil-tasting, disinfected water which gets your mouth wet but gives you very little other pleasure.

While the men went through their final training on the beaches the implements of war were collecting for their use. In huge harbors, whose names must not be mentioned, transports and landing craft of all kinds were acc.u.mulating. They crept up to the piers and opened the doors in their noses and took on their bellyfuls of tanks and loaded tracks and then slipped out and sat at anchor and waited for the ”D” day at the ”H” hour, which very few in the whole Army knew.

On the freighters cranes slung full-loaded tracks and laden two-and-a-half-ton ”ducks,” which are perhaps America's real secret weapon of this war. The ”ducks,” big tracks which lumber down the beaches and enter the water and become boats, or the boats which, coming loaded to the beach, climb out, and drive as tracks along the dusty roads.

In the harbors the acc.u.mulations of waiting s.h.i.+ps collected, tank-landing craft and troop-landing craft of all kinds. The barges, which ran up on the beaches and disgorge their loads and back off and go for more. And on the piers Arab workers pa.s.sed the hundreds of thousands of cases of canned rations to the lighters and the lighters moved out and filled the s.h.i.+ps with food for the soldiers. The fleets acc.u.mulated until they choked the harbor.

Now the enemy knew what was going on. They had to know. The operation was too great for them not to know. They sent their planes over the harbor to try to bomb the gathering fleets and they were driven off and destroyed by the protecting Beaufighters and P-38s. They did not succeed in doing damage, for finally the enemy had lost control of the skies and the fleets could load at least in peace.

But at night they tried to get through and the flak rose up at them, like all the Fourth of Julys in history, the s.h.i.+ps and the sh.o.r.e batteries put up a wall of fire against the invading planes so that some of them unloaded their bombs in the open countryside and some of them exploded with their own bombs and some went cras.h.i.+ng into the sea. But they had lost control.

Now ”D” day was coming close and at headquarters the officers collected and held conference after conference and there was a growing tautness in the whole organization. Staff officers dashed in to their briefs and rushed back to their units to brief those under them. It would have been easy to know how close the time had come by the tempo, and then suddenly it was all done and a curious quiet settled on the whole invasion force.

Somewhere an order pa.s.sed and in the night the s.h.i.+ps began to move out to the places of rendezvous. And in the night the columns of men climbed into trucks and the trucks came down the piers to the s.h.i.+ps, and the men, like ants, crawled on the s.h.i.+ps and sat down on their equipment. And the troops.h.i.+ps slipped out to the rendezvous to wait for the moment to leave.

It was no start with bugles and flags or cheering men. The radios crackled their coded orders. Messages went from radio rooms to the bridges of the s.h.i.+ps. The word was pa.s.sed to the engine rooms and the great convoys put out to sea.

And on the decks of troops.h.i.+ps and on the flat iron floors of the landing craft, the men sat on their lumpy mountains of equipment and waited. The truck drivers sat in their trucks on the s.h.i.+p and waited. The tank men stayed close to their iron monsters and waited. The s.h.i.+ps moved out into their formations and the destroyers came tearing in and took up their places on the flanks and before and after the s.h.i.+ps. Out of sight, in all directions, the fighting s.h.i.+ps combed the ocean for submarines and the listening devices strained for the signal which means a steel enemy is creeping near.

Over the convoy the silver balloons hung in the southern sunlight, balloons to keep the dive-bombers off. And then the sun went down. The balloons kept the sun for half an hour after it had gone from the surface of the sea. There was radio silence now and the darkness came down and the great convoy crept on toward Italy. The sea was smooth and only the weakest stomachs were bothered.

There were no lights showing, but a pale moon lighted the dark s.h.i.+ps somberly and the slow wakes disturbed the path of the moon on the ocean.

The combat troops sat on the luggage and waited. This was what it was all for. They had left home for this. They had studied and trained, changed their natures and their clothing and their habits all toward this time. And still there were only a very few men who knew ”D” day and ”H” hour.