I’ll be sending two copies of the book World War II Arroyo Grande to young active-duty soldiers. This makes me a happy new/old writer: one reason I wrote the book, I think, was to reintroduce the World War II generation to my generation and to my students, and I’ve always had a soft spot for students who’ve gone into the service. I’m also very happy that I’ll be sending a copy to Judith, a favorite student who achieved the highest grade ever in my U.S. History classes. Judith is from Germany. She loved learning American history.
The photo is of my father when he was a young man on active duty in 1944. I’ve told Judith this story, but once the war had ended in the spring of 1945, Europe went hungry–the Continent’s infrastructure had been obliterated by ground combat and by the Allied air campaign. The footage of German kids eating out of garbage cans in 1945, in the long months before the Marshall Plan, always stunned my students. In the meantime, thousands of POW’s in our care died of hunger or of opportunistic diseases because civilians got first priority for food, and there never was enough.
A Wehrmacht major, who outranked my father, then a U.S. Army captain on occupation duty, somehow latched onto him and for a few weeks became his personal bodyservant: the German officer cooked for him, cleaned his quarters, washed and pressed his uniforms, the works.
He did that because Dad was a Quartermaster officer and so had access to food. (A year before, my father repaid an English family’s kindness to him with a bag of oranges. The mother’s British reserve crumbled. She wept. Her family hadn’t seen oranges in five years.) The young German officer wanted to live: his pride meant nothing when compared to the wife and children he wanted in his arms again once he was cashiered. My father was his ticket home.
In summer, he would begin the long walk home along roads choked with refugees and gaunt, tired soldiers. Dad never learned what happened to him but hoped, in talking about him years later, that the German major had lived a long and happy life. What started as a relationship of expedience had begun to edge into a friendship. Perhaps, very faintly in the recesses of my imagination, there was the unspoken thought that my student Judith was the major’s great-granddaughter. I owed it to this soldier to be the best teacher I could be for her.
The tough American soldiers of Easy Company–-the “Band of Brothers”–-liked the English, for the most part, loved the Dutch, but, like my father, felt most at home with Germans.
It does make you wish that British Pvt. William Tandey had shot Hitler in 1918, when he had the man in his sights at Marcoing. We could have done without Clemenceau as well, I guess, in his 1918-19 incarnation, but a younger Clemenceau had done great good for France and for the revolutionary ideals of tolerance and of the equality that citizenship confers.
These are ideals that Hitler despised because, of course, they included Jews, like Alfred Dreyfus. Clemenceau had been one of Dreyfus’s most adamant defenders. Dreyfus was a good French soldier, but the older Clemenceau dominated the drafting of a foolish, vindictive peace treaty dictated, in his mind, by a generation of good French soldiers whose bones littered the nation’s soil. Even today, farmers in northern France, in turning over fields there, find the bones of boys their harrow blades.
A generation after that war, there were more good soldiers, good young men on both sides who in a better world should never have been enemies. But they didn’t live in a better world; theirs had been penetrated by evil.
Americans had fought a war in the face of great evil once before. There was a lull in a Civil War campaign that gave a Union army band, its vast audience in bivouac, time enough for a concert. Confederates on a nearby hillside were listening. One of them called “Yank! Play one of ours!” So the band played “Dixie,” and at the song’s conclusion, both sides erupted, thousands cheering, tossing their caps in the air. They embraced a vivid moment when they were at peace together, before the close-quarters murder so characteristic of that war—and, sadly, so necessary for its resolution—resumed.
Similarly, once their war was over, a German soldier reached across the divide to make a necessary peace with my father. I hope my book will allow two young soldiers today to reach across the divide that time imposes to meet other young soldiers, including some who died such a long time ago. In a small way, it gives them life again.
Walt Whitman may have articulated this idea best in what I think is one of his finest poems, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Time and distance avail not, Whitman wrote. They are irrelevant. Indeed, when you read the poem you have the uncanny sense that Whitman is reading with you, just over your shoulder, or that you’re leaning on the ferry’s rail, together with the old man, the harbor’s breeze in his whiskers.
In the same way, we are all of us on the road together in the journeys of our lives. I think that sometimes, without recognizing them, we walk alongside our ancestors, and among them is the German major who yearns for home.
A Work in Progress 