The First Time I Saw Paris by Norman Spivock

We tried to get a message to the people sending off the boats. The cannon gunners could only see the far half of the river because of the bend. The boats stayed in the swiftly moving river longer by paddling upstream in order to go straight across the river. We, observing all from behind our machine gun, wanted them to head straight across the river and let the current drift them downriver, thus keeping them out of the range of the German cannon for the entire trip and landing. We couldn't get the message to them because, after all, we were only privates. One boat finally did just that; we cheered and expected all the rest to follow suit, but they didn't. Why?

Suddenly Frankie, a member of my platoon, came rushing up the stairs, urgently calling for the sergeant. We all went to see what the emergency was. "Mail call!" he shouted. Go figure. Mail was distributed to us, and I found a stash of cookies some secretary had left, so there we were, reading our mail and eating German cookies while our buddies were exposing their lives to danger. It wasn't real. By the time my group crossed the Rhine, others had taken out the cannon, so there was no more danger.

After we crossed the Rhine, we would march all day until dusk, even eating from canned rations while walking. When we were ready to stop for the night, whoever was in charge always wanted to take one more town, and that was always the one where the Germans had decided to fight. However, at one town many German soldiers had become reconciled to defeat. What we did was stand in the street and direct hundreds of German soldiers, with no weapons, hands on their heads, down the road to where they could surrender. Therefore, I can say I helped capture hundreds of enemy soldiers. Soon it became evident the most determined German soldiers who resisted us were teenagers. If a teenager shot you, you would still be dead. We acted accordingly.

During the entire war, the other three platoons of my company lost men and so had replacements of from fifty to seventy-five percent. My heavy weapons company stayed behind to resist and stop any counterattack, so we lost fewer menthan can be counted on your fingers. One such loss occurred in a beautiful small town surrounded by mountains.

We entered the town, or rather took it, in the evening as usual. My machine gun, as usual, was set up in a house at the edge of the town. The next day we stayed there all day and all night and all the next day. On that next day, I saw Larry walking, near crying. He said Jerry had been killed. Jerry, his best friend, was one of those jovial, always happy guys, a natural storyteller. Larry believed it happened like this: Jerry had been on guard duty and, when he heard something, called out the usual "Halt! Who goes there?" Jerry got no response and, not wanting to hurt some friend roaming around where he shouldn't be, Jerry stepped forward to see who it was. Jerry was shot in the head and died on the spot. While the other three companies fought and became battle-hardened, our company had it too easy. Jerry learned too late, if he had time to realize it. It's an empty feeling to think about it when you are there. It still is now.

The next day, we left that town, wondering why we had stayed there so long. Two weeks later, someone told me there had been six hundred of us surrounded by two thousand SS troops, and we had to wait to be rescued. Rumors, rumors, but I couldn't find a contrary explanation for the three-day.stay. It certainly wasn't for R & R.

One member of my squad of seven soldiers was George, a Hopi Indian. One afternoon, we had to cross an open road in a convoy of vehicles under fire from German eighty-eights. My squad had four guys in the jeep and three on the trailer. We had to make a dash to town over a road that was being fired on by German artillery. George showed no fear. When we stopped in town, George wanted to run off to where the shells were landing to see if he could see an eighty-eight missile descending on him. I said he'd get killed. "No," he replied. "My father told me I won't die until I'm ready to die." Obviously George believed it.

We stopped in a street opposite a courtyard and were told to stay with our jeep. Being adventurous Americans, we soon left and milled around the courtyard. During that time, an eighty-eight missile exploded near our jeep. It didn't do any damage, but the shrapnel could have injured or killed yours truly or his buddies.

We moved to another part of town and, after the company settled in many houses for the night, I was walking around the side of a neighboring house. Just in front of me a window "exploded"; shattering glass landed in my path. It was a window broken by someone pushing his pistol through it. The gunman then fired the pistol into the ground, happily missing me by three feet. I discovered it was an Indian who was drunk. Later I saw George get drunk. The way Indians got drunk made me understand why, in the old Wild West, it was prohibited to serve them. Genetically, it seems, they just cannot hold their liquor. But George was my buddy. We spent much time together, and shared many experiences.

One day our column stopped alongside a fence at the edge of a town. Unlike American towns that straggle outward with houses separated from each other, these German towns ended with a definite line, a fence, saving as much land as possible for farming. From the top of our Jeep trailer, we looked over the fence and saw about twenty curious German civilians watching us. George said he was hungry. We had our rations (a box called, I think, "K" rations), so we decided to jump over the fence to get into a house and warm the food. I jumped over the fence, landed on my feet, looked up immediately-and all the civilians had vanished. George and I walked around the house, found it contained four apartments, and rang the bell of one. The door was opened by a frightened man. We invited ourselves in. The four occupants, all adults, looked panicked.

We conveyed to the woman of the house that we wanted to heat our food. She insisted on doing it for us.When it came to plates, it was obvious she considered us barbarians whow would probably break them. She did everything, not wanting us to touch the plates or anything else. I did what I could to reassure everyone that we meant no harm. With each of our rations came a packet of four cigarettes, which I offered to the man. He was hesitant, took them, relaxed, then smiled a bit. They all started to relax. I told them George was an American Indian. I'm not sure what they thought when I told them I was Jewish. Then we left, having broken no dishes. I'm sure they had great stories to tell their neighbors after we left.

Once outside the house we could hear the jeeps engine revving up. Our buddies yelled to us that they were about to leave without us.With buddies like that who needs enemies? Really, we knew they had no choice.We hurried back to and over the fence onto the trailer of our jeep, just in time.

We were a disciplined army concerning the enemy civilians; there was no fraternizing, no looting, no rape, no needless destruction of property. But the possibility was there. I just felt it, the subservience of the civilians who were always ready to do our bidding. I felt the power, the dominance, the mastery of all I surveyed; I was free to do as I wanted, how I wanted, with what I wanted, when I wanted. It was a feeling of power, of being alive, of euphoria. I understood why, in the past manner of small wars on neighbors, a man would want to go to war for the spoils of victory. But we were restrained, and even at the time I was glad, as it made our tasks with the defeated far easier.

Another time, we stopped for the night in a farming area, at a place where the road ran between two hills, the road at the ottom of the valley. George and I were sent up on one hillside to a spot that had been dug for a German machine gun to set up our own machine gun. The hillside had been terraced, the end of each terrace rolling down to the next level. Toward dusk, with fog rising to obscure vision, while sitting several feet from the machine gun, I heard shots that were surely fired over my head. The safest place to be was in that machine gun nest, and it surprised me how fast I got there. George got there in a more leisurely fashion. Soon after I heard beating on the ground on the uphill side of us. Out of the now foggy darkness appeared a frightened running horse. It passed us and went out of my sight and hearing as it headed down the hill. I asked George if he still saw the horse.

"Yes," he said, pointing with his finger, "there it is. It's crossing the road and going up the hill." He was too serious not to be truthful. Extraordinary vision - perhaps compensation for not being able to hold alcohol? Back to reality. There we were, the road and valley below more and more fogged in, while we were above the fog under a now moonless starry sky. There was no way, even for George, to see or communicate with anyone else; we had no idea where our squad was or what to do, except stay where we were. I decided we were an outpost to warn the others by firing our weapons if we were attacked. I also decided the machine gun nest was not the place to stay. In short, I didn't know what to do. The Army says when in doubt do something.

I decided the safest place was at the bottom of one of the many terraced slopes, so I lay along the bottom of the slope. I had to do something to keep awake, so I decided to dig a trench to hide in. I told myself it would be a horizontal foxhole, knowing that to be an oxymoron. But I didn't have a shovel. I did have my mess kit, so the only thing I found to dig with was a tablespoon. It was better than doing nothing. I could see the Big Dipper and the North Star. I had no idea of the time, but found a way to tell the passage of time. I calculated the Big Dipper would move fifteen degrees in one hour. So I dug to keep awake, frequently consulting my clock, the Big Dipper, as I dug and listened, hoping German soldiers would not approach. It took hours of scratching the hard soil with a tablespoon before I finally got the trench to about six feet long by eighteen inches wide by six inches deep. The Big Dipper had moved sixty degrees, about four hours, so I decided it was safe to go to sleep, which I did. Next day, we rejoined the rest of the squad, who asked us why we hadn't returned the evening before.

Another night, in another place, our squad had no shelter. The farm boys knew what to do. They went to a nearby barn and decided to evict the pig occupying it. The pig did not agree, and we had quite a time getting it out of the barn. It was the first night I ever spent in a pigsty, though my mother might not agree.

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