Stage Door Canteen (38 page)

“Say you’ll get engaged.”

“Well—” She hesitated. “Yes—YES!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. At that moment a sailor bumped into them on his way to the rest rooms.

Startled, he stopped and peered at them. “Hey, excuse me. I didn’t know anybody was back here.”

Swearing under his breath, Gene pulled her out into the light. “Come on outside and meet Lieutenant McElsmore. I want him to see how beautiful you are.”

She pulled back. “Gene, you know I can’t leave the Canteen while I’m on duty.”

“You don’t have to leave. Hey, you’re going to have to quit, anyway, did you realize that? You dated a soldier, and now you’re engaged to be married.” He lifted his voice to yell over the noise. “You broke all the canteen rules. Come outside now while we catch a cab, and say goodbye.”

Annmarie van Troup caught up with them at the stairs. “Dina, are you leaving? I wonder if you could sort of tell these Polish fliers how to get to the hospital? Or even better would you have time to take them over there? I have the address, it’s—”

“I’ll be right back, I’m just going outside for a minute. I just got engaged,” Dina shouted, breathless. “Just tell them to wait.”

TWENTY

December 26th, 1942

IN THE DESERT SOMEWHERE

Jen darling—

Merry Christmas, sweetheart. Yesterday, Christmas Day, Martha Raye and a four piece band showed up in the middle of this muddy highway in the desert, and played what was announced as a Christmas concert out of the back of a truck to a tank corps, part of an infantry division and assorted Arabs, goats and camels. And in the rain. Yes, it rains in the desert in the winter, and it has been raining ever since we set foot on it some weeks ago. I have had no letters from you since I landed here, and I think I wrote you about the desert, I’m not sure; I’ve been so damned sleepless the past few days I probably wouldn’t have known it was Christmas if Martha Raye hadn’t shown up. When I saw her I thought of you, and it was a good thing it was raining because you couldn’t see the tears running down my cheeks. I cried like a two year old when she and the other girls sang I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas. But then so did every GI here. Nobody seemed to think it was highly inappropriate to sing a song about snow right in the middle of a desert downpour, we were just so damned glad to see a USO troupe. Afterward cellophane bags of Christmas candy were passed out. I’ve been sucking on my portion ever since.

I’m writing this to you standing in a doorway out of the rain in a building where camels and donkeys are also stabled, writing on a piece of paper propped on my helmet. Yes, dear wife, I have a helmet. I also have boots, I have side arms, I have a three day beard and a coating of mud at least that old, and I have been sleeping in one of the division staff’s jeeps for the past four nights. Jen, my love, you would not recognize your husband, I could pass for one of Bill Mauldin’s battle-weary GIs in his cartoons in Stars and Stripes. A few days ago I was still guiltily returning the salutes of these tough, squinty-eyed kids carrying guns, their column strung out along these desert roads as I passed them riding in my lordly fashion in a staff jeep. Now, in all my grimy, sleepless glory I am one of them, and just snap a salute back at ‘em. For I, too, have been shot at. We were on the road as it was being shelled, and actually ran into an ambush. The driver of the jeep, a corporal from Nashua, New Hampshire, named Chuck, was wounded, and we have now his replacement, Howie, from Norfolk, Virginia.

Today we are crossing great roadless expanses that are rimmed by what look just like bare Nevada mountains. The desert floor is pale green with plants that might be the cousins of cactus, and some sort of small, low-growing bushes. And it rains. Imagine the Nevada desert with miles-wide shallow pools of muddy water.

I know you are wondering why I am in the desert. It’s because somebody in a place I can’t mention because the military censor will cut it out of this letter, found out that I speak fluent French, a legacy of the college year I spent debauching my youth in Paris. It turns out HQ has been searching for anyone who can communicate with the petty officials of our contentious allies, the French, as we cross the desert landscape and into these little towns. So I have been plucked out of my happy life, separated from Malcolm and the girls, and put upon the road to follow the war and see what I can do. It is a hell of a job just to keep up. Tanks and jeeps have been pouring in a steady stream as they follow our leader, an independently wealthy individual who, I am told, does not have to do this for a living, but who graduated from West Point, and whom the Army (not the air force but the regular army) has promoted to general. I have seen him and he is a strutting, table-pounding lunatic wearing not one but TWO pearl handled revolvers strapped to him, plus a chrome-plated helmet. He leads us onward, in a jeep painted with his general’s gold stars, to meet the enemy. The trouble is, the two gun-toting general is so afraid the Brits will have trounced Rommel before he can get there, that he has driven this army mercilessly. With the result that his devoted, gung-ho officers have plowed their tanks and other assorted armored equipment into mud-filled wadis and have gotten stuck. There are days when I can visualize the desert like an enormous mud pudding with US army equipment bogged down in it like so many raisins.

But by damn, I want you to know we are going forward, somehow. Morale is high among the general’s troops, they regard him as one helluva soldier. The worse it gets, the more rain, the more mud, the more officers screaming and cursing, the greater the shouted exhortations by our revered leader, the stronger our determination. Yes, mine, too, Jen. I keep forgetting I am a part of this military structure and that I am now, by the grace of God and the US Army, a major. I can’t explain to a bunch of tank commanders that I am here only to speak French to the petit bourgeousie of some rain-drenched, godforsaken colonial backwater of four hundred souls or less, and not do much more.

However they expect more. As a consequence, I have been told to scrounge food—and wine if I can manage it—look for lost units (I am useful in French on the telephone) and even liberate a couple of gallon cans of motor oil from a local garage. I have grown proud of the “Yes, sir, major sir!” I hear sometimes from the hard-bitten boy soldiers around me when I have done good.

They say Eisenhower is being roasted for the American failure to move an army across the desert the way they (the Brits) feel they do so well. We’re clumsy, we’re inexperienced, we waste materiel, etc. But after two days of helping Howie and our other regular passenger, the division adjutant, dig our jeep out of the knee-deep muck while listening for the sound of enemy airplanes in case we should have to throw ourselves in the nearest ditch—only there is no ditch—I can tell you, to hell with the Brits. When our pistol-toting general finally gets us there, we’ll be ready to fight. Mud, adversity, the terrible weather makes you want to fight. Makes Americans want to fight. I tell you, if these weary, hard-eyed kids can do it, so can I.

I love you, sweetheart, even though I have had no letters from you since I left home. My guess is when mail finally caught up with me at headquarters, I had been sent on to go to war in the desert. But I dream of you, Jen, and that is no joke. Last night it was you standing in the back of an army truck singing to me, my darling, sharing billing with Martha Raye, four gorgeous, bedraggled little movie starlets in tight sweaters and extra short skirts, and the four-piece band. I knew you wouldn’t mind—sharing billing, that is. You sang your song from Showboat, Only Make Believe and I started yelling “Hey that’s my wife!” and I ran toward the back of the truck but just then the damned thing drove away, taking you with it. And the dream ended.

Oh shit, here comes Howie to tell me he’s got the jeep top up again, nevermind that it’s full of holes and doesn’t make much difference one way or the other, we’re always wet. We are ready to get back on what we laughingly call the road. The next stop is a little town in this wheat-growing district where we will meet with the mayor and the town officials and inform them that we have come to liberate them and make them happy. I have done this before, and somehow they never are. Happy, that is.

I promise you I will run after that truck tonight in my dreams, darling, and this time you will not escape me.

Your loving husband,

Brad

I love you.

TWENTY-ONE

Below deck, the cook’s helper was playing O Tannenbaum on his accordion in honor of the season. The tune drifted in snatches up the tower to the U-426’s bridge where Kapitanleutnant Ensmann, along with the navigator, who was the third watch officer, and the bosun and two seamen stood scanning a blurry vista of snow and icy rollers that broke over the submarine’s bow. Now and then one wave, larger than the others, would travel the distance of the U-426 and slam against the tower, drenching those on watch. The constant buffeting, as the U-426 charged into the mountainous green swells and lifted, only to nose down heavily into the next, brought on a notoriously hypnotic fatigue. Since alertness was essential, even after hours of peering through binoculars at a monochrome gray sea and sky, and a dull gray blob that was the sun, the amount of hot coffee consumed by any watch to stay awake was phenomenal. In the North Atlantic, as the saying went, the enemy was the weather. The watch on the U-426 was aware that there was a fully-alerted human foe also searching for them.

Since the beginning of December, the U-426, patrolling from the tip of Long Island and into Massachusetts Bay had, with her sister ships the U-410 and the U-168, decimated Allied shipping in those waters. The U-426 alone had accounted for two tankers, both of which burned spectacularly off the tip of Long Island with few, if any, survivors, and a freighter that exploded and broke apart amidships, sinking in a matter of minutes after taking a torpedo in what must have been a cargo of munitions. A handful of the freighter’s crew, that those watching on the bridge of the U-426 could observe as shadows running about in front of the flames, had managed to drop life rafts in the water. But as the sea was only a degree or so above freezing there was little hope of their surviving. The watch of the U-boat had observed their fate in silence.

The previous winter of 1941-42 had been the worst on record in fifty years. A terrible season in which to wage war. By November, the crew suspected the coming months would be just as bad. In the North Atlantic, even that portion where Allied shipping hugged the shoreline on the way to Halifax was, for a U-boat crew, a dangerous place. Four-hour watches in foul weather along a course laid down by the High Command in Bremershaven gradually wore down a submarine crew. The U-426’s men badly needed a rest. None, however, would be forthcoming. Instead of returning to the U-boat pens in St. Nazaire, the U-426 had been ordered to rendezvous with a supply ship, one of the outsized submarines known in the German navy as “milch cows,” which had supplied the U-426 with provisions, much-needed torpedoes, and ammunition for its guns. ‘Keep up the good work,’ had been the message from Bremershaven.

At least, the Kapitanleutnant Ensmann told himself as he scanned the fog-dimmed ocean, the kriegsmarine could console itself that things had greatly improved since the beginning of the war. In 1939, the Greater German Reich had only 57 U-boats in its entire fleet, of which some 27 were actually fit to range the Atlantic. Now, in this third year of the conflict, there were that many U-boats alone off the east coast of the United States. A huge map at high command headquarters had several hundred little flags indicating the position of all the Reich’s U-boats at sea. From time to time, as the U-boats emitted short coded radio signals saying where they were, the flags at headquarters were moved accordingly. As soon as a U-boat signaled that it had sighted the enemy, particularly a convoy, other U-boats were directed to that area.

The U-426’s own radio room, which was not a room but an alcove next to Kaptanleutnant Ensmann’s own cramped, curtained area, transmitted and received messages twenty four hours a day from the U-boat net spread across the Atlantic. At any hour one could hear, if one knew radio code, a U-boat ordered to shift its position 80 miles westward, as a convoy was expected to pass through that quarter. Or a U-boat south of Greenland sending a coded message to headquarters, the steady dit dit dit of the signal going on for almost half an hour. Far southward at the western approaches to Gibraltar, another U-boat reported in. All pertinent radio messages were carried to the kapitanleutnant to be recorded in the submarine’s war log by the radio operator, a nineteen year-old who had apparently learned to listen in his sleep and wake at the U-426’s coded call.

In the last twelve hours the U-426 had monitored various messages concerning a convoy designated “VY” leading westward, already in sight of the waiting U-boats, who would then proceed to stalk it. At 05:00 hours, high command headquarters ordered a U-boat code name “T” to occupy “O”‘s previous attack area. Listening brethren could assume U-boat “O” was headed home. By late afternoon messages of the success of wolf pack attacks on convoy STXW, westerly course, 9 sea miles, west wind 7, rain, were coming through: three steamers hit, although one not actually verified sunk. An hour later, submarine U-431 reporting heavy seas, low temperatures, steamer B of convoy sunk. Then, U-boat U-82, ominously: depth charges from enemy. Then silence.