I was fifteen years old in 1941, and war was about the last thing on my mind. Like most kids, I was interested in my own world: music, drawing, baseball, roller-skating, and hockey. The war seemed very far away. But once Pearl Harbor was attacked, it wasn’t long before I saw my friends and relatives being drafted and sent away.
My brother John, who was three years older than me, was drafted into the air force in 1942 and stationed in Blackpool, England. Of course, we were all worried about him and anxiously awaited his letters and any news we could get about what was happening over there. Fortunately, he was never wounded. But soon it was 1944 and the war was still going strong. Things in Europe had reached a crisis point. We all realized that Hitler had to be stopped and that every available man was needed. I turned eighteen that August, and on November second, I received my draft notice. Soon both my mother’s boys would see combat.
I went down to the induction center and stood in line with a bunch of other eighteen-year-olds, wondering what was going to happen to me. When my name was called, I went up to the desk, and the induction officer asked me if I preferred the army or the navy. I said, “Navy,” and the guy stamped “Army.” I thought, “Oh, boy, so that’s the way it’s going to be.” Little did I know what I was in for.
Basic training was our first stop before being shipped over to Europe and into battle. I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, and from there to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a six-week stint at Fort Robinson. Everything you’ve ever heard about boot camp is true, only worse. I was in training to be an infantry rifleman and, man, was it tough. They’d send us out on bivouacs, mock-battle training missions that consisted of endless marches through wild terrain and muddy trails. These exercises were supposed to break us in for the rigors of battle. They called it “good training,” but from what I could tell it was really an opportunity for officers to brutalize us and break our spirit. They treated us like animals. I began to have a really hard time with the whole military philosophy. From top to bottom, it went against every single thing I believed in.
The biggest shock was the level of bigotry I encountered as soon as I arrived. Unfortunately that never changed much while I was in the army, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for it to begin in boot camp. Our sergeant was an old-fashioned southern bigot, and he had it in for me right from the start because I was an Italian from New York City. I wasn’t the only one who experienced prejudice—it was just as bad for other ethnic groups, especially the Blacks and Jews. I had a good friend from back home, Chet Amsterdam, a fine bass player and a wonderful guy. But because he was Jewish those bigots constantly gave him a hard time. I like to think they were particularly jealous because be was so good-looking—a dead ringer for Marlon Brando—and that was just too much for those guys to take. They’d pick fights with him on the smallest pretense. But he wouldn’t let them get away with it, and he always defended himself. Sadly, I saw many such incidents repeated throughout my time in the war.
I stuck up for myself too, although maybe it wasn’t always in my best interest. Our sergeant was always on my case. He’d scream at me, “Benedetto! You’re always late!” and accuse me of not being able to keep time while I was marching. Once during a bivouac mission he grabbed his crop and started hitting the top of my helmet with it and screaming at me. Well, that was it for me. I took my knapsack off and threw it into the nearby field and walked the seven miles back to camp alone. For that little rebellion I was put on KP (kitchen police) duty for a solid month (an awful job for even a day), in addition to being assigned the job of cleaning the company’s Browning automatic rifles (BARs), which were extremely difficult to clean. Each rifle carried thirty-five bullets, and when they were fired, the gunpowder soiled the hammer, a small piece of metal about the size of a dime. It took forty-five minutes to clean just one hammer, and the sergeant gave me fifteen at a time. Everybody else got to go into town on the weekends for R and R, but I was virtually imprisoned in the barracks. Between KP duty, BAR-cleaning duty, and regular basic training, there was little time left to me for rest and relaxation.
When I was finally given permission to go on leave, I went home to Astoria, and by the time I got to my house I was so exhausted I fell onto the floor in a dead faint when my mother opened the door. The combination of the abuse I’d taken at boot camp and the intense emotions I felt upon seeing my family were just too much for me. My mother revived me, but I really gave everybody quite a scare. Needless to say no one was excited about my going back to boot camp, least of all me, but of course I had no choice, and two days later I went back. Everybody got a furlough after six weeks of basic training, so when my training was over, I went home again and waited to be called up. I was to be sent with a group of other replacement troops to Germany.
The fighting in Europe had been fierce for months. When the German and British armies suffered severe losses in battle, they withdrew entire divisions of soldiers, but the Americans replaced individual soldiers in order to continuously replenish the unit. The U.S. Army felt that the replacements could simply join the veterans on the field and be taught firsthand the rules of combat and the tricks of survival. It was an unrealistic assumption, since in the heat of battle there was rarely time to teach the replacements anything. Many of the replacement troops had inadequate training, no combat experience, and—unbelievably—some had never even fired a gun. It was a disastrous situation, but those were desperate times, and I guess the U.S. Army felt they had no choice. The majority of the men in the campaigns of 1944—45 were, like myself, individual replacement troops.
Most replacement troops were sent to the port city of Le Havre, France, ultimately to be deployed to other destinations in Europe. That’s where I was shipped off to after basic training, and that’s where I had my next shocking experience. When I arrived in Le Havre, I was sent, along with my fellow replacement soldiers, straight to a replacement depot, unaffectionately referred to by the troops as the “repple depple,” essentially a holding area for the newly arrived. We were all total strangers. None of us had trained together, since we had all been pulled from different divisions, and there was no time to get to know anybody in the few days before they herded us up and shipped us out. We arrived alone, we were trained—if at all—alone, and soon, as groups of strangers, we would be shipped together to the front.
I hated the repple depple system. We all did. It was demoralizing, impersonal, and terribly lonely—although fast friendships and a keen sense of camaraderie would soon develop. Here we were, all these eighteen-to twenty-year-old kids who had just recently been at home with our families, suddenly thrust into a completely alien and terrifying environment with not even a friend to commiserate with.
Of course, what happened to me was typical of what happened to most replacement troops in the final year of the war. The American army had suffered so many casualties it simply became a matter of maintaining a flow of warm bodies through the system to repopulate the depleted divisions, no matter how ill-equipped we were for combat. More than half of the replacement soldiers became casualties within the first three days on the front line. Unfamiliar with combat, and unable to be broken in by exhausted veterans, many replacements had no idea what to do, so they stuck together and died together. Anybody who thinks that war is romantic obviously hasn’t gone through one. Actually the war comedies like M*A*S*H and Catch-22 are probably a more accurate depiction of war than the “guts and glory” films, because they show how pathetic the whole enterprise is.
I was assigned to the Seventh Army, 63rd Infantry Division of the 255th Regiment, G Company. We were loaded into army trucks and made our way east across France during the harsh winter months of January and February 1945. By March, we had entered Germany. We all went straight to the front line. It became evident upon our arrival that our basic training was just that; nothing could have prepared us for what was in store.
The Battle of the Bulge had just taken place in France over the fall and winter of 1944. The Germans had been retreating since the invasion of Normandy in June, and by all accounts it seemed as if Hitler were on the verge of surrendering. But Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his generals and sent all of his resources to the front line in the Ardennes in a last-ditch effort to prevent the Americans from crossing the Rhine River and occupying Germany. Fierce battles broke out along the front line. Hitler sacrificed everything in this final push, but the Americans refused to give in. The Allies eventually broke through the lines and crossed the Rhine, the Germans once again retreated, and the Battle of the Bulge came to an end. We then replaced the exhausted and battered American troops.
It was such a horror to see the veteran soldiers returning from the front mourning the friends they’d left behind on the battlefield, victorious in battle yet defeated in spirit. I immediately felt the weight of their sorrow. They seemed to me to suffer from what we now call survivor’s guilt. I remember there was this one kid named J.R. who’d been killed before I arrived, and all the older troops kept talking about him. He must have been very special. Everybody seemed affected by his death. It’s as if he represented the entire tragic reality of war. They just kept asking, “How the hell could he have died? How could a kid like that just disappear?” They couldn’t get over it. They acted as if they would rather have died instead.
The winter months were rough. Snow covered the ground, and the front was a front-row seat in hell. It was an absolutely terrifying spectacle: air battles raging above me, with the roar of the airplane engines and the swirling sound of bombs; and artillery battles all around me, with shells bursting everywhere. I watched as my buddies died right before my eyes. All I could think of was, “When am I gonna get it?” No less than General Patton once woke us up at four AM and gave us a speech, saying: “Now listen up! Forget your mothers and everything else you’ve ever known! You’re going up to the line.” That was because we were all just teenagers, kids really. Can you imagine saying that—“Forget your mothers!”—to a bunch of terrified kids?
What we were most afraid of were the eighty-eight-millimeter cannons that the Germans used. Those eighty-eights would come whistling right down on us. What a nightmare. Shrapnel flew and hot metal strafed anyone in its path. The only protection we had on the front line was the foxhole. Every soldier had to dig himself a hole before he could go to sleep at night. Sometimes it took hours to dig through the frozen ground, and by the time you were done, you’d have only a few hours of sleep before you’d have to get up again. Once the holes were dug, we had to secure the surrounding area with booby traps and set up communications lines back to the command post. We ate cold or frozen food before going to bed. And all this after a fall day of marching or fighting. My first night on the line I had a terrifying experience. I finished digging my foxhole, but I was so exhausted I just passed out on the ground before I could even get into the hole. When I woke up, my face and body were completely covered with snow. I was really disoriented, and once I realized what had happened, I started to look around. Directly behind me was a tree, and embedded in the trunk was a huge piece of shrapnel, right above where I’d been sleeping. If I’d been just a few inches higher off the ground, I would have been killed that first night.
Nighttime was the worst. We couldn’t light any fires to keep warm; we couldn’t even light a cigarette, because the glow would be detected by the Germans and give away our position. The winter nights were brutally cold, and sometimes they would last sixteen hours—sixteen hours of lying underground in a foxhole, alone, watching and listening for the enemy. I learned the rules of the front line pretty quickly: don’t move. Someone is watching. Stay in your hole whenever you can. It was just awful. The whole thing was a big, tragic joke: the Germans were hiding from us, and we were hiding from them. Sometimes we were close enough to hear the Germans talking to each other. They must have been able to hear us too, but neither of us wanted to make a move unless we had to. Nobody wanted to get hurt. Everybody just wanted to stay alive.
Incredibly, there were some guys who actually enjoyed the war. There was one private who couldn’t wait to kill Germans. He just lived to fight and kill. The rest of us would be completely exhausted from fighting all day and he’d say “I want this war to end sooner than later, so you guys stay here, I’m going out!” It was really spooky. We’d all look at one another and think, “What’s with this guy?” He used to take his BAR and go out looking for soldiers in the trees. We all tried to stay away from him as much as possible.
Most nights we’d be awakened by the bombs that were going off around us. On the front line we’d see dead soldiers, dead horses, and big holes in the ground where bombs had exploded. To me, it’s a joke that they make “horror” movies about things like Dracula and Godzilla and they make “adventure” movies about war. War is far more horrifying than anything anyone could ever dream up.
We’d crossed the Rhine at the end of March, successfully occupying Germany and driving back the German army, but there were still German soldiers who were holding out until the absolute bitter end, defending the small towns and outposts along our path. Our job was to flush out the Germans, either fighting house to house against the remaining Germans or by taking them prisoner. We did this in town after town. We checked each house from top to bottom, and once we were sure the house was clean and abandoned, wed bunk for the night in the cellar, first checking around for any traps the enemy might have left for us. One particularly terrifying incident happened to me shortly before the fighting stopped. We were moving through a small German town. On our first day checking out a house I was standing in front of a window when one of the older soldiers tackled me. I had no idea why, until he told me that to even walk in front of a window could mean instant death; there might be a German sniper watching, waiting to pick you off.
G Company’s numbers had been severely depleted, and there were only myself and a few other men left when we were passing through a town on our way to meet up with the rest of the 63rd Division. One of the remaining men was Herbert Black, a fellow I’d met when I joined G Company and with whom I became fast friends. Suddenly a German tank came out of nowhere, and we were under attack. “Blackie,” as we called him, was the only man among us with any sort of usable ammunition left. He was in charge of the bazooka, and as he was getting ready to fire it, he yelled, “You’d better get down, Tony because I’m going to let this thing fly, and it’s gonna be either us or them!” With that he fired the missile, scoring a direct hit and disabling the German tank and saving our lives. It all happened in an instant. Blackie was awarded the Silver Star for his quick thinking and bravery, and I’ll forever be in his debt for saving my life.
I’d have to say that only one good thing happened while I was at the front. I was pulled off the line, along with thousands of other Gls, to see Bob Hope give his show. He was there with Jane Russell and Jerry Colonna and Les Brown’s band. I was in the stands enthralled. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Bob was just fantastic, and all the GIs loved him so much for boosting our dismally low morale. He became a big part of the reason that I went into show business, because at that moment he made me realize that the greatest gift you can give anybody is a laugh or a song. Ask any of the legions of servicemen who saw him at that time and they’ll tell you it felt like he had saved their lives. And it wouldn’t be the last time I felt like Bob saved mine.
After we got back to the front, we continued to push east until we reached the Kocher River. We established a bridgehead at Weissbach by the first week of April, and by the end of the month we had reached the Danube River. We captured a bunch of SS troopers. One guy was really stubborn, and he kept screaming at us, “You aren’t better soldiers than us; you just had more equipment than we had!” That really made me mad. I demanded their wallets. I decided I was going to show them that since they had lost the war, their money was worthless. I took their marks to the top of a hill, threw them into the wind, and watched them float down to the town below. So much for German superiority, I thought. My buddy took me aside and said, “You idiot! Don’t you realize what you just did? You could have taken those marks to Berlin and cashed them in for American dollars!” I was floored. I had thrown away a fortune! Shades of Sierra Madre.
It was gratifying that the last official mission of the 255th Regiment was the liberation of the concentration camp in the town of Landsberg. It was thirty miles south of the notorious Dachau camp, on the opposite bank of the Lech River, which we were approaching. The river was treacherous and difficult to cross because there were still German soldiers protecting it, but we wouldn’t let anything stop us from freeing those prisoners. Many writers have recorded what it was like in the concentration camps much more eloquently than I ever could, so I won’t even try to describe it. Just let me say I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds. Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe that we were there to help them and not to kill them. Many of the survivors were barely able to stand. To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed long before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot. We were relieved to find that many of the soldiers from the 63rd Division who were taken prisoner had been sent to Landsberg, and so we were able to liberate them as well. The whole thing was beyond comprehension. After seeing such horrors with my very eyes, it angers me that some people insist there were no concentration camps.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30. Berlin fell to the Russians on May 2, and the rest of Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.
The main thing I got out of my military experience was the realization that I am completely opposed to war. Every war is insane, no matter where it is or what it’s about. Fighting is the lowest form of human behavior. It’s amazing to me that with all the great teachers of literature and art, and all the contributions that have been made on this very precious planet, we still haven’t evolved a more humane approach to the way we work out our conflicts. Although I understand the reasons why this war was fought, it was a terrifying, demoralizing experience for me. I saw things no human being should ever have to see. I know I’m speaking for others as well when I say that life can never be the same once you’ve been through combat. I don’t care what anybody says; no human being should have to go to war, especially an eighteen-year-old boy.
After Germany surrendered to the Allies, the fighting continued in the Pacific, and the men there wouldn’t be able to come home until Japan surrendered and World War II ended. But Washington immediately started working out a plan to bring home the troops from Europe. They came up with a point system: soldiers were given a certain number of points for how many months or years they were in the service, a certain number of points for combat versus other types of service, a certain number of points for going overseas versus staying stateside. The guys who had the most points, like my brother Johnny, were able to come home right away.
Because I had only served four months, I had to stay behind in Germany as part, of the Occupying American Army Fortunately, I managed to get myself assigned to Special Services, the division of the military that had the task of entertaining the occupying troops. The immediate goal of Special Services was to provide as much distraction as possible, to help the troops keep their minds off the fact that they weren’t going home yet. Of course, this was made even more difficult because there was a regulation that the Gls were not allowed to fraternize with German women. That lasted about a week and a half—who else were we going to fraternize with? Even the officers “fraternized” like crazy, if you know what I mean. Before the actual surrender there had been a general call put out that anyone who could entertain—guys who sang, danced, played instruments, did imitations or comedy, anything—should report to Special Services. The way I found out about it was pretty funny: I was singing in the shower, and a passing officer heard me. He said to me, “You know, you’ve got a great voice. You should get into this band they’re forming.” That was the 255th Regiment band.
The band had originally been organized about a year and a half earlier, in 1943, back at Camp Van Dorn in Centreville, Mississippi. Marlin Merrill, who had been a music teacher back in civilian life, started it. He was something of a misfit in the army—in fact, we all were, and proud of it—and when they first drafted him, he was assigned to drive jeeps. Eventually, whoever was in charge had the good sense to ask him to put together a drum and bugle corps. He found a few guys who could play saxophone and gradually shaped them into a swing band. He eventually gathered up enough musicians to form two full bands. They played dances, USO shows, and other military social functions throughout Mississippi and Louisiana.
Most of the guys at Camp Van Dorn were given extensive training in jungle warfare and therefore assumed that they’d be shipped to the South Pacific. So they were surprised when they wound up being sent to Germany to fight the Battle of the Bulge.
The 255th Regiment had been taken out of combat by the middle of May and stationed in the town of Mosbach. To keep the morale of the troops up, the officers in charge began distributing sports equipment and musical instruments. Marlin was given permission to reassemble his band, and he started by trying to find as many men as he could from the original Camp Van Dorn unit. He managed to round up eight of them.
I was there on the second day of the band’s reformation. I found out where the band was staying, and I approached one of the musicians and told him that I wanted to try out for the singing job. It turned out I couldn’t have picked a worse guy to ask, since he happened to be the band’s vocalist, George Duley. Half jokingly he answered, “Nobody gets my job, son.” But he helped me get an audition, and when they liked what they heard, George and Marlin went to the colonel and arranged for me to be transferred to the band. George quickly put together three background singers, and together we formed the band’s vocal quartet.
Marlin Merrill was a remarkable guy. He was never officially made an officer, even though he was in charge of all of us and even though there was at least one corporal in the band. He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old, but he seemed ancient to the rest of us. We were only eighteen or nineteen, so we affectionately called him Pops. Marlin conducted the band and wrote all the arrangements. He would get what we called hit kits, a collection of lead sheets or piano lines to the latest songs from back home, and he’d score them himself He had such a great ear that he didn’t even need a piano. He’d work out all the difficult transitions and create a chart, which consisted of writing out the individual musical parts for every instrument in the orchestra, in an hour. The band always sounded great.
We’d go to a different location in Mosbach every day and entertain the soldiers. I remember how glad I was to get rid of the steel helmet and the rifle that I’d been carrying around all those months. We were “billeted,” as they called it, in a fabulous house in Mosbach, one of many houses that the invading army had taken over from the conquered Germans. The place was a three-story mansion that had been owned by a local beer baron—it was right behind his brewery—and he was so rich he had a piano on every floor. We weren’t exactly the gracious uninvited guests, to tell the truth: we really messed the place up.
Not long after V-E Day the band was moved about twenty kilometers east to a town called Kunzelsau. We set up shop in what they called “the castle,” a beautiful old structure that looked like a schoolhouse. I shared a room with Manning Hamilton, one of the band’s trumpeters, who also sang in the quartet. The house in Kunzelsau had been owned by an elderly banker, and though he didn’t have a brewery in his front yard, he had something even better: a small farm.
We’d been living on C rations for so long that we’d almost forgotten what real food tasted like. You can’t imagine how good fresh fruit and vegetables taste after months of army food. The old banker also had a few chickens, and he came around and begged us not to kill them. We promised we wouldn’t, for a very practical reason: we’d rather have the eggs for breakfast every morning than a single chicken dinner. Each morning we waited for the hens to lay an egg or two and there was always a race to snatch them. I’ll never forget how wonderful genuine eggs tasted after eating the army’s powdered ones for so many months. It was grand!
We were having a high old time in Kunzelsau. The army had hastily put up signs all over the area directing other groups of soldiers to this battalion or that headquarters. We took all the direction signs for the 255th Regiment band and stuck them every which way so that no one could find us. We were like phantoms: the only guy who knew where we were or where we would turn up next was the officer who handed Marlin our daily assignments. Once a week we’d go down to headquarters and pick up essentials like underwear and food, and then we’d hurry back to our house. We were free to jam all day long. It was a glorious time.
We didn’t even mind that the paymasters couldn’t find us. In fact, when George was about to be shipped home, he received a check for $875, a fortune for a soldier back then. He got his entire year’s salary all at once because no one had known where to find him. Money wasn’t important because there wasn’t much to buy anyway.
What was important to us was getting down to the PX to pick up our allocation of cigarettes. It wasn’t only that we smoked a lot, which we did; cigarettes were the “legal tender” of the time. You could get anything you wanted with cigarettes. Anything. Jack Elliott, the pianist with my second army band, traded twelve cartons of smokes for a really fine camera, a prewar Leica. Red Mitchell, who played in the band, found an old German violin maker who agreed to make him a bass fiddle in exchange for fifteen cartons. That deal worked out spectacularly for both of them—the violin maker gradually bartered the cigarettes into a fully outfitted machine shop, and Red Mitchell became one of the great bassists in jazz history.
We moved again sometime in June, this time to Seckonheim, a small town between Heidelberg and Mannheim. The band kept growing as we found more and more good musicians who wanted to join up with us. The most special to me was Freddy Katz, who played the piano. He would have a very meaningful impact on my life. By now we were a full-fledged “big band” and had worked out a regular routine. Late in the afternoon, just when it was getting to be quitting time for the troops, a big army truck showed up at our house to pick us up. The driver knew where we were supposed to be playing that day and we’d all pile into the truck with our gear and drive off, usually singing the dirtiest limericks you’ve ever heard in your life. The truck had a piano on it, and a little PA system. When we got to the site where the GIs were working, which was often out in the middle of a field somewhere, we got out our instruments and started playing and singing and the soldiers would gather around and listen.
At that time I was singing a lot of blues, things like “How Long Blues,” “Don’t Cry Baby,” “Blues in the Night,” and Louis Jordan’s “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” I also sang a blues tune that reflected the place and time we were stuck in called “The Non-Fraternization Blues.” We always went over great with the men; they were thrilled that we took the trouble to come out to entertain them. We’d play until it got dark. We never had any lights, so when we couldn’t read the music anymore, we’d pack up and drive off. Sometimes we’d play dances at an officers’ club, like the Starlite Club in Heidelberg, which General Dwight D. Eisenhower had recently dedicated, but most of our gigs were right in the trenches—literally.
Because of the stress we’d been under in combat for all those months, the comic relief provided by being in the freewheeling regiment band was a welcome change, but we knew it couldn’t last. I was taken out of the band by midsummer. I was still an infantryman and had never been officially assigned as an entertainer. At the time, we all thought we’d be shipped to the South Pacific to participate in the impending invasion of Japan. But, as anyone reading this knows, we never did invade Japan. It turned out that the soldiers assigned to the planned Pacific invasion force wound up going home long before the rest of us, since Japan surrendered before ground combat began. So I was assigned elsewhere in Special Services.
Up until 1945, the Special Services guys who put on shows for the servicemen were well-known performers who’d been drafted, guys like Mickey Rooney, the well-regarded screenwriter Alan Campbell (who was author Dorothy Parker’s husband), and Joshua Logan, the famous Broadway producer and director. But they’d all been at it long enough to qualify to go back home as soon as the fighting ended. So once again, I was a replacement, only this time for the musicians who were sent home. Many of the guys in Special Services had been up-and-coming performers before the war started and were able to get a little more experience while they were over in Germany. It was in the Special Services unit that I met remarkable people like Arthur Penn, who would later go on to direct such great films as The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man, and Bonnie and Clyde.
Arthur first got involved with the Soldiers’ Show unit of Special Services in Paris. When he got to Germany, Arthur became stage manager of a production of Clifford Odets’s play Golden Boy, which toured liberated Europe. Then in August, the Enola Gaydropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the Japanese surrendered. Now that the war was over in the Pacific as well, even more guys were shipped home from Europe and Arthur was promoted. Arthur himself was very new to show business then. He was just a few years older than me, and even though he hadn’t had much experience, he found that he knew more than anybody else over there, so he was officially mustered out of the service and put in charge of the whole Soldiers’ Show project as a civilian government employee. In order to really occupy the minds of the troops, Arthur arranged for the army to ship over one hundred American actresses to take part in these productions.
The new unit was started in Wiesbaden, and that’s where I met Arthur. I was basically just hanging around the set sharpening pencils or doing any other little job I could until I got a chance to sing for him. Arthur told me that I bowled them over, and he immediately invited me to perform in a musical production he was mounting.
Arthur had heard that there was a big hit on Broadway called On the Town about three sailors on leave in New York. He thought the plot was perfect for his group to perform, but he had no script and no score so he cobbled together his own version, writing an original script and using whatever new hit songs and show tunes he could find. We didn’t even have sheet music for the songs—we’d simply pick up records or V-discs (records produced especially for American soldiers) and the piano player would learn them by ear. Arthur made the leads soldiers instead of sailors, but nobody knew the real story line anyway, so it hardly made any difference, I played one of the three leads in our very eccentric version of On the Town.
Everything about the show was like one of those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “Let’s-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn” movies. Most of the cast couldn’t sing, I didn’t have any acting experience, and Arthur, who couldn’t dance two steps, was choreographing the dance numbers. We staged it in the magnificent Wiesbaden opera house, which had miraculously been untouched by the bombing that had destroyed much of the city. The show ran there for several months.
I spent Thanksgiving of 1945 in Mannheim. The town was completely flattened. You could see clear to the other end of the city from any point. It was totally leveled except for the Ford Motor plant. It was really strange. I was out walking around Thanksgiving afternoon and I ran into my old friend Frank Smith, who had sung with me in our quartet back at the High School of Industrial Arts. I couldn’t believe it. Frank Smith, in Mannheim, Germany! I was thrilled to see a familiar face from back home after being surrounded by strangers for so many months. He took me with him to a holiday service at a Baptist church he’d found. We wanted to spend the whole day together—it just felt so good to be with a friend—and since I was allowed one guest at Thanksgiving dinner, I asked him to come along. We were going to get a real home-cooked meal and not the dreaded C rations.
We got as far as the lobby of the building when some bigoted officer came up to me and screamed, “Get your gear, you’re pulling out of here!” For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. Even though Frank was in the army too, he was Black, and therefore he wasn’t permitted into the white servicemen’s mess hall. It’s a sad fact that segregation was official U.S. Army policy during World War II, and obviously this officer was determined to pull rank on me. At some point during my career in Special Services I had made corporal, but that didn’t last long. This officer took out a razor blade and cut my corporal stripes off my uniform right then and there. He spit on them and threw them on the floor, and said, “Get your ass out of here! You’re no longer a corporal; you’re a private again!”
This was another unbelievable example of the degree of prejudice that was so widespread in the army during World War II. Black Americans have fought in all of America’s wars, yet they have seldom been given credit for their contribution, and segregation and discrimination in civilian life and in the armed forces has been a sad fact of life. The War Department believed that Black soldiers had to be separated from whites or all sorts of problems would arise. The type of “problems” they cited were standard-issue racial prejudices, and I don’t even like thinking about it after all these years. Blacks had their own units, their own mess halls, barracks, and bars. It was actually more acceptable to fraternize with the German troops than it was to be friendly with a fellow Black American soldier! I just hadn’t been brought up to think this way about people, and neither had Frank. Needless to say it was a terrible shock when this officer treated us both with such contempt. And this institutional racism continued until Harry Truman officially integrated the military after the war ended. In the meantime we all suffered because of it.
As a result of my inviting Frank to eat with me, we were denied Thanksgiving dinner and I was immediately reassigned to Graves Registration, which was just as horrible as it sounds. During the heavy battles that had been fought earlier in the war, there often hadn’t been time for the soldiers to properly bury the men who died on the battlefield. The surviving soldiers often had to wrap the bodies in the dead soldiers’ own mattress bags and bury them in common graves. Men like myself in Graves Registration came along later to retrieve them. I’d spend all day digging up dead bodies and reburying them in individual graves. They fed us horrible, starchy foods like rice and potatoes to dull our senses.
For a while the whole affair soured me on the human race. Frank was one of the sweetest guys I ever met. I couldn’t get over the fact that they condemned us for just being friends, and especially while we served our country in wartime. I’ve thought back to that incident so many times. There we were, just two kids happy to see each other, trying to forget for a moment the horror of the war, but for the brass it just boiled down to the color of our skin.
Luckily a certain Major Letkoff found out that I’d been assigned to Graves Registration and was able to pull some strings. Through the efforts of this man I was assigned to the American forces radio network in Wiesbaden, and that led to one of the great experiences of my life.
The 314th Army Special Services Band of the European Theater was the brainchild of Warrant Officer Harold Lindsay “Lin” Arison. Lin was the only one in either of my army bands who was a “lifer,” that is, someone who spent his whole career in the military and government services. He’d begun organizing army bands as early as 1941 and had been greatly influenced by the most celebrated of all military orchestras, Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band. Miller’s AAF Band was a milestone in both military and musical history and had a huge impact on us all. Miller was in active service when his plane disappeared over the Atlantic in December of 1944, and it was a huge loss to the entire country. It was devastating. His band valiantly continued to perform without him for about a year.
After the AAF Band was sent back to the States the chief of Special Services of the European Theater asked Lin to put together another band to take its place, and that’s when the 314th was formed. It had been Lin’s dream to put together a new band with new music that was on par with what was happening back in the States, a first-class American pop-jazz orchestra, and he got the go-ahead.
It was crucial that the new band’s home base be in occupied Germany. It was obvious that the German people felt animosity toward the occupying army, and we saw the new band as an opportunity for us to raise morale and serve as unofficial goodwill ambassadors. So in late 1945, Lin set up shop at the Herzog Hotel in Bad Schwalbach and announced that he was holding auditions for first-rate musicians. He immediately landed some great players, many of whom went on to successful civilian careers in music after the war, among them sax player Dick Stott and trombonist George Masso. In addition to being a tremendous trombonist, George is one of the great orchestrators of all time. Whenever we played one of his arrangements, the whole orchestra applauded. His pieces were simple to play, and it just felt great to perform them.
I was originally appointed as the band’s official librarian, but when Lin heard me sing, he said, “For Chrissake, take care of the library, but I want you to sing a couple of songs a week with the band!”
Our duty was to do a weekly broadcast of a show called It’s All Yours over the Armed Forces Network, the title being our gift to American GIs stationed in Germany and to our former enemies as well. We broadcast from the Wiesbaden opera house every Sunday, and our theme song was a number I later recorded, “Penthouse Serenade.” Wiesbaden was one of the few German towns that was left comparatively untouched by the Allied bombing raids. The British and Americans had agreed not to drop any bombs on the town, since they wanted to use it as headquarters once Germany was taken. Unfortunately a British plane had once messed up a raid and dropped its payload over Wiesbaden, but by and large the town was still standing, which was more than you could say for most of the rest of Germany. The opera house was acoustically perfect, and sometimes we’d cram in as many as two thousand GIs. Once we even performed a special show that was transmitted back home to the United States via shortwave radio.
The band was the whole focus of the It’s All Yours show, much as the Glenn Miller band had been spotlighted on the I Sustain the Wings transmissions. As an added attraction, the USO usually sent over a guest star, like Paulette Goddard or Bob Hope, to do a sketch or a monologue. The band was extremely versatile. On one hand we were a swing band, like Benny Goodman’s or Count Basie’s, and could play the dance music and current hits of the day. On the other hand, we could play light classical numbers by composers like David Rose or André Kostelanetz. At its peak, the orchestra included fifty-five musicians, including a fully symphonized string section.
We got another shot in the arm and an influx of new sounds with the arrival of Jack Elliott in 1946. Our first piano player, Bob Jacobs, was leaving, and we were so glad to get a new guy that Lin assigned a master sergeant to pick him up and carry his bags. Needless to say, that didn’t happen very often to a private, particularly one who’d spent most of his enlistment thus far doing guard duty. When Jack began to play for us, we heard a new kind of music we’d never been exposed to before. He explained that it was called bebop, and that it was the latest thing to hit jazz back home. We loved it. The first time I’d ever heard of Dizzy Gillespie was through Jack Elliott.
It was to the credit of Lin Arisen that he was able to incorporate new sounds into the band so successfully He was a remarkable guy who was able to inspire us all and draw out our best performances. Even though he was regular army, he wasn’t strictly by the book. Sometimes he’d come out and conduct a rehearsal wearing an outrageous pair of fuzzy green bear slippers—not exactly standard issue duds. Eventually Lin’s wife, Janie, came in from the States, and the two of them took care of us all.
I was one of four vocalists in the band, and I usually got to do one or two numbers per show. There were two “boy singers,” Bob Lawrence, who did the straight romantic ballads, and myself. At that time I was still using the name “Joe Bari.” (To this day Arthur Penn and Freddy Katz think of me as “Joe.”) I usually did the rhythm tunes, the blues numbers, and the novelties. The “girl singers” were similarly divided; Judy Brines handled the love songs and Janie Thompson was the army’s answer to Betty Hutton. On numbers like “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” Janie was loaded with energy and excitement, and she really thrilled the crowd when she launched into a boogie-woogie number and accompanied herself on the piano. That’s one thing we had that the Glenn Miller AAF Band never had: female singers.
While we were staying at the Herzog Hotel, the first thing we did was find the wine cellar. The Germans were crazy about wine and champagne, possibly even more than the French. The cellar was behind a heavy, locked gate, but we figured out a way around that. Pretty soon we were sneaking our way in there every night. We stashed champagne everywhere. Since we didn’t have any refrigerators, the only way to keep the bottles cool was to run cold water over them, so of course every sink in that hotel was full of cold water and had a bottle of champagne in it. This being the army, we weren’t supposed to be drinking at all, but Lin made a rule that you were, allowed to bring alcohol into the hotel, so long as it was only one drink. Pretty soon the guys were carrying in bowls and buckets full of hooch and counting that as a single drink. We even made contact with a couple of guys from the air force who were flying in marijuana from Algiers, This was the first time I ever smoked pot. But after what we’d been through, we felt that anything that would help us forget was worth looking into.
There was a USO office across the street from our hotel, and soon some of the guys worked out a scheme to attract the attention of the ladies who worked there. Irv Luden, who played baritone saxophone in the band, would go over to the USO lobby with Jack Elliott. Jack would start playing piano in this melodramatic, hearts-and-flowers fashion, while Irv would recite poetry. Gradually, the ladies noticed these two guys doing their act, and they’d wander over to listen. It was only when they got closer that they discovered that Jack wasn’t reading poetry at all. He was reading aloud from the works of one of the leading writers of Victorian erotic fiction, Frank Harris. Jack was actually describing sex acts disguised in florid prose. Usually the serenade continued in private up in the ladies’ rooms.
During this period in the army I enjoyed the most musical freedom I’ve ever had in my life. I could sing whatever I wanted, and there was no one around to tell me any different. I remember I heard an Armed Forces Radio Service broadcast of Frank Sinatra doing Johnny Mercer’s “Candy,” and I felt like I just had to do that song. So I did. It was as simple as that. I heard all the latest songs on V-discs, which was an amazing collection of music. The first time I ever heard the voice and piano of Nat Cole was on a V-disc, and I fell in love with his sound right then and there. Postwar Germany was a hell of a place to discover an American institution like Nat.
I sang a lot of numbers in Germany that I did later on in my career, like “Body and Soul” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” which I did as a duet with Janie Thompson. But my big number was “St. James Infirmary.” I must have done that every other week, and I never stopped getting requests for it. Some of the shows were preserved on sixteen-inch radio transcriptions, the medium that most studios used to document live shows before tape was invented, and as far as I know, that’s the only vocal of mine with this band that still survives.
The whole band felt the same musical freedom. Whatever I wanted to sing, I sang; whatever the musicians wanted to play, they played. We couldn’t get enough music. When we weren’t playing or rehearsing, we were having jam sessions in the basement of the hotel. Lin gave us complete freedom to come up with the best and most interesting music. It was like a musical workshop, particularly for the arrangers, since it was free from all commercial constraints. What’s more, everything they wrote went over big. The GIs were the greatest audience in the world. They were never critical or judgmental, and they loved everything we did. Some of the pieces that George and Dick Dorsheck wrote were highly experimental. In many ways, they presaged some of the things that Stan Kenton did years later with his Innovations and Neophonic Orchestras. They were very “progressive” or even “avant-garde,” but the guys loved it. That’s really proof to me that the public is much more aware than they’re given credit for. I learned a big lesson with that group; an artist should never underestimate the public’s taste.
So many of my army buddies did well in the music world after the war, George Duley went into Les Brown’s band; George Masso began his postwar career playing trombone for Jimmy Dorsey and later became a composer; Dick Dorsheck became the principal composer for the BBC Radio and Television Orchestra; Red Mitchell was for many years the leading bass player on the West Coast jazz scene; Janie Thompson, a devout Mormon, has devoted her life to music education at Brigham Young University; and Jack Elliott became a major composer of movie and television soundtracks.
By August 1946, I had finally accumulated enough points to come home and I sailed home on the SS Washington, While on board I ran into my old friend Charlie Russo. I’d met him in Mannheim, where he was leading a quartet at the Truman Hotel and also putting on jam, sessions in the basement. He was organizing a big band concert featuring all the musicians who were traveling home on the ship and invited me to sing “St. James Infirmary” One of the soldiers on board had a portable disc-recording machine. He cut a disc of me singing “St. James,” and I played it for my family back in Astoria, but I don’t know what ever happened to that record. Chuck Russo later became a great classical clarinet player, one of the best in the world.
On August 15, I was officially honorably discharged as a private first class. I still remember coming into New York harbor a few weeks later. My mother and my aunt were waiting on the dock, and when they saw me holding a cigarette, they started crying. I had never smoked before I went to Europe. They couldn’t believe it, and neither could I. I was all grown up, and I was home.