CHAPTER TWENTY
“I'D HAD MY SHARE OF PAIN IN THIS WAR. I WAS RUNNING OUT of whatever it takes to deal with pain. You have to take it because there's nothing to do about it, but on top of that you feel the reserve tank going dry. Then you have to accept that too. Accepting that is accepting death, whether you're ready or not. Now I didn't feel I was ready anymore—not like Berlin when I was ready to take a bullet in the head. The difference was being free again, a soldier with a weapon and a lot to live for, including revenge. My battalion took revenge the way they took vodka. It was something like compensation. It had kept my new buddies going, right out there where death was facing them across the Oder.”
It was infuriating that he could no longer take revenge, the vodka of a soldier's soul. Now wounded worse than ever before, Joe watched himself slipping toward a final weakness and nadir of the psyche. What he saw was his young but much tried body going to the rear: in one of myriad trickles of casualties that became streams, then a river, filtering through eddies, many men dying, fewer continuing, all stopping here or there with Halloween masks of pain, body parts grotesquely mutilated, gasping voices heralding premature death for boys sucked down by the whirlpool of pitiless war between two pitiless tyrants. Like an oddly colored leaf, he was being caught in that vortex, but unlike the Russians he was not prepared to go gentle. And he didn't feel justified to go. As back at the prison farmhouse at St. Come-du-Mont, there were so many other wounded worse off than he.
Somewhere behind the front, Joe was pulled out of the flow when his medics indicated there were certain Russians nearby who wanted to speak with him. They were a unique group of about a hundred technical officers and NCOs who had been following the advance but hadn't done any fighting. To Joe that sounded like a good outfit to be with.
He asked them who they were, and after a little hesitation they didn't mind revealing it was a rocket research unit. Some of them spoke English because they were scientists in uniform.
To Joe, rockets meant Katyushas, but the scientists just smiled when he said so. Their goal was not Berlin but a town about a hundred miles north of there, Peenemunde, on the Baltic Sea, where V-2 guided missiles were tested before being launched against England. Peenemunde was second only to Berlin in Stalin's priorities. This unit lived well and bragged how they could order generals around. Much later Joe learned that they succeeded in their mission of capturing most of the top German rocket scientists—Wernher von Braun was the exception—thus beginning the Soviet space and ICBM program, which became the biggest threat to the West in the Cold War. Back in the States Joe's debriefers were most interested in this unit. He was the only American who ever had any contact with it.
“They were a threat to my health at the time!” Joe said. “I had bomb fragments in my groin and knee and should have been moved back immediately in medical channels. The rocket scientists must have known that I needed treatment, but they had this rare opportunity to talk to an American, so they detained me though I could tell they didn't feel really good about doing it. They compensated by giving me plenty of the all-purpose medicine: vodka. I had a ton of fever from infection and barely recall anything we talked about except American industry in general.
“They weren't interrogating me, they were just very curious about how things worked in a democracy. One scientist was pretty outspoken; he said minds couldn't do their best when they were under government control. I don't think the research unit had a commissar, but this guy's colleagues told him to keep such opinions to himself. Shut up, in other words, because there was no telling where 'Sergeant Yosef'—that's what they called me—would go or who I would speak to. They were right to be suspicious. My debriefers in the States were very anxious to know this officer's name and were frustrated that I'd forgotten it. They showed me some photos, but he wasn't among them.”
Upon his return to the United States, Joe, still in uniform, was offered to a press conference because of his unique experiences. The officer in charge abruptly terminated the interview when Joe reached this point in his time with the Russians. A secondary reason for sending the reporters away was that Joe was insinuating “political” views about the USSR. He'd expressed that he liked Hitlerism only slightly less than Stalinism. At this point in 1945 it was not yet politically correct to make such a comparison.
“I was released by the rocket scientists to the care of a woman doctor they knew. She took a liking to me and treated me with everything she had. So I arrived at a field hospital as a special patient, as much as an enlisted man could be. There wasn't much medically, but the food was better than anything on the front lines. There was not only kasca but also thick soup with bread, sausage, and scalding hot tea.”
He was told this field hospital was near an unpronounceable Polish town the Germans had renamed Landsberg in what they called Silesia.* The hospital was formerly a school-house. There were blackboards that still had German writing on them. In Joe's small ward were a dozen beds and four dozen mattresses on the floor. It was as much a morgue as a recovery/emergency room. There was not even a stove, so covers were piled on the wounded, layers up to a foot thick, a tapestry of sheets, blankets, throws, spreads, and rugs confiscated from German houses.
“We still shivered with cold,” Joe remembers. “I've often wondered why under such unsanitary conditions our wounds didn't become infected enough to kill us, though many died every day. Maybe the cold kept infection from spreading.
“The ward was purgatory. I've read a lot about the Civil War, how wounds were judged. If you were hit in a limb, you could hope to survive an amputation. Hit in the body and you'd better forget about this world and get ready for the next. It was just that way in Landsberg. Soldiers hit in the chest or gut were just trying to find peace and die. They all seemed to be communicating with their mother. Trouble was they were in the most pain and had no painkiller except vodka. The medics, triaging, didn't pay much attention to them. I couldn't help but pay attention. Theirs were like the cries I'd heard in my mind in Berlin. Only God knows how much suffering it takes to fight a war.”
Joe was still pretty much his own and only doctor with a grim prognosis: he had a new extremity wound but also a much more significant one in the body that had received no treatment except snow, vodka, and sulfa powder. Nevertheless he felt that if someone would just take the metal out of his knee and groin, he'd have a fighting chance.
In an American field hospital a guy would bitch and yell till a doctor came along and removed the bomb fragments in a proper operation. Russians in the beds beside Joe made no such demands, though they were at least as bad off. But he was an American and made his feelings known. A woman doctor came along and said she'd heard what he wanted. Joe nodded. Okay—she took out forceps, threw back the sheets, and pulled out the fragments on the spot.
“I screamed louder than any of my fellow patients ever had. It was like pulling wisdom teeth, appendix, and tonsils one after another—without even a shot of vodka for anesthetic. She seemed to be saying, hey, soldier, this is the Eastern Front—get used to it. I felt I'd done all I could do for myself at that point. If only I could have a little painkiller, I was ready to die again.
“I wanted to. Where there had been bomb fragments there were now big holes. A medic packed them with sulfa, or something like it, that burned like hell. I could feel myself growing weaker as I thrashed around in pain. The wounds kept draining. Usually the medics were too busy to change the dressings, so I'd turn them over till both sides were soaked, then ask for more. The new ones were taken from Wehrmacht casualties. They didn't get any.
“I'd reached another low in my young life. I'd been praying, but the purpose had changed. Before I'd prayed to get away and be a credit to my family and country. I felt I'd done that with God's help; now I was free but dying among people who cared about me. So what was I to pray for? I needed to get away from the caregivers, into the hands of American doctors. I was sure they could bring me back to life.”
God stepped in once more. One afternoon there was the biggest commotion Joe had witnessed since Rommel's visit back in France. Doctors and medics came around to check all the patients, changing dressings, laying on new blankets, plumping pillows, and generally straightening up. From nearby wards Joe faintly heard something like Ohh-ah among the wounded. A VIP was coming through the hospital—that was the word spread around the ward. A Russian word Joe knew was “who?” A nurse looked at him proudly and announced it was none other than Marshal Georgi Zhukov. As good generals do, he was visiting unfortunate men to whom he owed his fortunes.
Zhukov came in at the opposite end of the ward from where Joe's bed was, so Joe could view the marshal's progress down the slew of beds and mattresses. The patients looked at him like he was the pope rather than a general. They praised him to his face before he could say a word. He didn't have to. Zhukov was the most impressive general Joe ever saw, including Ike, Montgomery, and Rommel. The first two were sort of slouchy and casual, qualities that appealed to soldiers of a democracy. Rommel was all business, coldly yet charis-matically professional. Zhukov had a bearing, a presence resembling Churchill's but more victoriously erect. He carried himself the way Russia was carrying out the war: with much pride, and understanding of the suffering necessary for victory. He was a great captain. On the one hundredth anniversary of Zhukov's birth, the U.S. Army held a symposium about him at Fort McNair, which Joe attended.
His most noticeable feature was a large dimple in his chin. It would have almost been cute had not his chiseled face commanded instant and sober respect. He was accompanied by an English-speaking officer, who came to Joe's bed and identified him as the American casualty. Zhukov reached out with a crushing handshake. It was painful to bend forward, but Joe was proud to do so.
Russia's premier marshal looked him over as if “Yo” were a kid who'd done all right in school, nothing great but adequate. The interpreter whispered that Joe was a paratrooper. Zhukov brightened, flashing a smile of bemusement and amusement. He'd heard that D Day drops were widely dispersed but
“Did Yo drift all the way to Poland?”
Everyone within earshot broke into laughter, a venting laughter when there had been little humorous in their lives. In quick, clipped tones Zhukov expressed the wish that he could have more time to hear about the American Airborne. He ordered his chief of staff that when Joe recovered he was to report to Zhukov's headquarters for a debriefing.
“He asked how was my family? I couldn't say because I hadn't received any mail in the stalags.”
Zhukov winced, for he had a most personal connection to stalags. His son had been captured in 1941 and resisted Gestapo coercion for two years before his fear of succumbing caused him to charge the barbed wire, where he was shot to death in an act of suicide.
“How was I being treated now? Very kindly, I answered. He gave a little speech to everyone in the room, which was so cold you could see his breath. The interpreter told me the gist of it later, that Zhukov said the Allies would finish the war shoulder to shoulder, and if Hitler thought otherwise, he should see this young American comrade who bravely chose to fight with us.”
Zhukov then raised his fist like a toast and said in English, “Sherman tanks!” Joe chuckle-chortled, in his characteristic way, and said the same thing back. Zhukov shook his hand again, as only soldiers who understand each other can do, and moved on to other beds, as only commanders of soldiers must do.
When the VIPs left the ward the interpreter came back to Joe and asked if there was anything Zhukov could do for him. A light went on in his head. Yes, if the marshal would be so kind as to put something in writing that stated Joe was an escaped American POW, that would be a big help to get through the Soviet system and assure return to America. The interpreter said something like “No problem.”
The next day he came back and handed over an envelope of heavy paper with a red hammer and sickle surrounded by a wreath embossed on it and a lot of stars underneath. It was the most beautiful stationery Joe has ever seen. He asked permission to open the envelope. Inside was the same elegantly raised letterhead and a few sentences written in Russian. He asked for a translation, and the interpreter said proudly that it was written by Zhukov himself and was a sort of passport, directing anyone to provide Joe with every assistance when moving through Soviet-controlled territory.
“I thanked the interpreter profoundly and shook his hand with both of mine. He then said about the same thing that Schultz and Major had: the war will soon be over, and I could go home to my family.
“You know how much I followed Schultz's advice. Now, with Zhukov's letter, I started planning my last escape. Actually there would be one more after that—from the U.S. Marines!”
Casualties were pouring in now from the Oder, terrible cases whose screams and moans never abated. There were even worse sounds during operations without anesthetic. Bodies were being carried out as fast as wounded were carried in. Joe couldn't take it any longer. He really didn't escape from that field hospital, merely went AWOL. His bed was probably occupied within the hour. He left by putting on his brogans and uniform, complete with overcoat and pile cap, as if to go to the frigid latrine outside.
“Without all your clothes there was a good chance for frostbite if you stayed on a crapper very long,” Joe remembers. “The first phase of my plan had been to complain to a nurse that I felt diarrhea coming on, though my real problem was exactly the opposite. So when I dressed and went out no one noticed. The staff was much too busy with incoming casualties, and the patients around me were deep in personal pain.”
Joe started walking in the direction where there was the most military traffic. About a half mile from the hospital he came to a headquarters, greeted the guards with “Tovarish,” and handed them his passport from Zhukov. If this didn't work, he planned to ride the rails toward Warsaw, where he assumed there was an American embassy.
The sergeant of the guard came back with the passport and indicated that there was no one in his headquarters who spoke English but he would drive Joe over to a bigger headquarters. The way he eyed Joe and tried to make conversation demonstrated that the passport had made an impression. At the second HQ an English-speaking captain took charge of him, saying there was a convoy leaving for Warsaw that afternoon. Let's go over there now, he suggested, and you can get out of the cold in the cab of a truck. It was a Studebaker. Joe sprawled out on the seat till the driver showed up and the convoy got under way.
They drove for hours and hours. The groin wound was draining and bothered Joe badly. He figured Warsaw was about three hundred miles east, but first the convoy made a big swing south to Cracow. There it broke up, apparently unplanned, but the driver indicated that if Joe wanted to go to Warsaw, that wasn't this truck's destination. He pointed toward the rail yard. They both took a slug of his vodka.
“He asked to see my passport again. I handed it to him. I don't think he could read, but he shook his head with awe as he fingered the embossed letterhead. He did recognize the name Zhukov and said it out loud like it was the name of a saint. We shook hands warmly, said, Proshchai, and he pointed once more to the rail yard, where there were only two trains, both very long, and both steaming up.”
The way the engines pointed it seemed both trains would head east. Joe hurried to the nearest one and clambered on the closest car. His bad luck with trains continued. As the locomotive slowly chugged off, he realized it wasn't a passenger or freight car but a gondola for hauling coal. Joe wasn't agile enough to move up along the cars, so he painfully climbed the metal ladder welded to the sloping side of the gondola. It was empty. To get out of the cold wind he slid down the inside slope. The metal was rough cast iron. Immediately Joe realized that it was carrying away his body heat.
“I prayed as hard as I ever have for a way to get out of that gondola. At some point I stupidly took off a glove, maybe to sit on my hand to warm it. My skin stuck to the cast iron. The pain to pull it up was terrible, and if I did, I'd leave most of my palm. For the next hour I blew breath hard on my hand. Little by little, with awful pain, the skin released.”
After a couple of hours the train came to a halt. Joe started yelling. There was no way to climb the side of the gondola, so if someone didn't help, he'd end up another frozen corpse in Poland. His only hope was that someone would come along and pull him up. A Polish yard worker did happen by—God had decided to save Joe once more.
“I sure put God to a lot of work,” Joe says, “with all He had to do during World War II!”
Someone yelled back, and a stocking cap peeked over the ladder. A chain rattled down the gondola, and Joe was hauled to the top. Helped down the ladder, he stood shaking with cold and pointed to his groin wound. The yard worker nodded and walked him up the train. After a quarter mile he gestured to get on a car. It was a hospital train. When Joe realized that he looked back for the yard worker.
“He'd saved my life,” Joe says. “I had a wad of rubles from the III-C safe and wanted to give them all to him, but he was gone. I still commend him to Mary in my prayers.
“My passport put me in first class on the hospital train. The staff couldn't do much for my wounds but were experts in cold injuries and took care of my scorched hand with some wonderful salve that deadened the pain while increasing circulation. I wish I knew what that stuff was; I could sure use it in Michigan winters.”
Next stop was Lodz, where patients bound for Warsaw were to get off and then board a medical convoy. The train was continuing to Lublin for everyone else. Joe's train luck again. If he'd stayed on to Lublin, he'd have probably reached American control. But he thought the Americans were in Warsaw, so he got off the train and onto the convoy.
His journey to the east so far had been mostly during darkness and he'd hardly noticed the flat, featureless countryside. Now he traveled in daylight to Warsaw. Even with all he'd seen of the war and its effects, the route from Lodz to Warsaw showed that he'd seen little. The landscape was from World War I no-man's-land: craters, dead trees, destroyed cottages, farms, whole villages with little left except toppled chimneys and blackened foundations. This is what Hitler and Stalin meant by scorched earth. They invented it, tried it out on poor Poland. There were many more wandering people than livestock.
What Joe finds closest to describing those people is a movie about the aftermath of nuclear war. Bands, small groups, and scattered individuals drifting back and forth like trash blown by winds. They had a name in those days, DPs, displaced persons. Some were concentration-camp survivors—Auschwitz was only about thirty miles from Cracow. More were Polish peasants uprooted when the Soviets overran their half of Poland. Others were city dwellers whose cities had been reduced to cold rubble. Joe had no idea of the composition of the DPs till he studied the history of the war's end. What he saw of them was a staggering scattered rabble— begging, falling, dying during Europe's coldest winter of the century.
The Russians he was among did not impress him as callous, but instead unreachably resigned to the stupefying consequences of their war, as if such suffering was little different from killing cold and blizzards. War against the Hitlerites meant stark facts to reckon with, realities to protect against, or else enter the ghastly whirlpool of the dying. A concatenation to end only when Hitler's Germany was destroyed. Joe was with them on that, his main regret that he could not be part of the final destruction—and a reunion with the Gestapo goons on Prinz Albrecht Strasse.
Hate can be a tremendous stimulus, but by the time Joe reached Warsaw he couldn't draw on that kind of energy. He 'd seen too much killing and even enough Hitlerite bodies. They were as plentiful as road signs in the countryside, identified by what was left of their uniforms. The Poles had stacked them like cords of logs in a frozen woodpile, ten feet high and a hundred feet long, speckled by frosted eyes, pop-eyed as if shocked that death had reached them. There was such a stack at each crossroad; they became fertilizer after the spring thaw.
This was the Wehrmacht, its collective corpse, the echoing remains of its curse. Except within Germany, all that Hitler did had been enabled by the Wehrmacht. They were the school of sharks upon whose jaws the Gestapo and Einsatz-gruppen attached like pilot fish. Extraordinary soldiers the Wehrmacht, but animated only by a hateful superiority, finally disproven, finally cold and stiff in discreditation of values their enemies fought and died for. The Wehrmacht was good, usually very good, as the word relates to competence, efficiency, and proficiency* However, what they fought and died for was not their country but to subjugate. And that applied not only to the SS.
AT LAST JOE ARRIVED in Warsaw. Though a stretcher case, he left the hospital train with the ambulatory patients so it would be easier to get away. That wasn't hard, but there was no city to walk into, only rubble and rubbish, craters and devastation. He could make out where the streets were, but to walk down one meant weaving between buildings collapsed into the street. The only human activity was a few old people pulling scraps of wood from the rubble. Joe had learned the Polish words for American embassy, and he asked these people. They just shook their heads and didn't look up from then-scavenging. Off in the distance was what was left of a big church or cathedral. It looked like the center of town, so he headed that way.
The Warsaw Concerto affects Joe deeply. Warsaw was one of the most fought-over cities in World War II. First came the Hitlerites' invasion in 1939, followed by their obliteration of the Jewish ghetto, then the Polish uprising in 1944, then the Russian conquest in 1945. The only place Joe had seen so leveled and totally destroyed was St.-Lo, and that was a town, not the capital of a great and ancient nation. As he trudged toward the cathedral it began to dawn on him that if there weren't any whole buildings, how could there be an American embassy in Warsaw?
He kept looking for buildings in use. The only ones standing were gutted and roofless. What had been windows were jagged holes where daylight came in one side of a skeleton building and out the other. His boots kept crunching on broken glass. He had seen not one vehicle and only a single horse cart. He approached the ruins of the cathedral in despair, very much regretting going AWOL from that hospital train. The Russians would have sent him somewhere, not into the deadly cold of a lifeless city.
He was right, though, that the cathedral was at the center of what life existed. In what had been, he guessed, the cathedral square there was a small group of men trying to keep warm around a small fire of rubbish and scrap wood. The wood scavengers he'd spoken to before had dressed in scarves and piles of wraps like peasants. Maybe they were peasants from the country, scrounging stuff from the remains of the city.
The group of men by the fire weren't dressed like peasants; they wore heavy overcoats. Joe approached them. When he tried German, his best foreign language, they stiffened. A little Russian, and they relaxed some. When he said American-ski, they lightened up a lot and beckoned him over to the fire. One of them went to get an English-speaking Pole.
“He was the very old uncle of a boy in Milwaukee who was probably an American soldier like me. I said there was a daily ferry from near Muskegon to Milwaukee. Some of the others in that group had relatives in the U.S. They all wanted to know what they could do for me.
“In the cold I showed them my wounds. They knew just what I needed and led me there. The uncle said it was a convent, but I didn't see anything but rubble and a low bunker. That's right, he said, the convent was largely destroyed during the uprising, but the sisters were in the basement. If there was anything that could help me, they'd have it. Before we reached the entrance to the basement I saw a bullet-scarred statue of Saint Joseph outside. This seemed like a good sign. It sure was—the sisters were from the Order of Saint Joseph, a healing order.”
* A few months later the 506th liberated a concentration camp, previously a prewar prison, near Landsberg in Bavaria, where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.
* But not, in the last three years of the war, the military beau ideal as represented by its stunning successes in the first three years. In postwar interrogations, the principal Wehrmacht generals admitted to serious blunders at Bastogne for which American counterparts would have been relieved of command. After blitzkrieg failed to win the war early, the Wehrmacht's opponents learned how to both foil and imitate German tactics. Strategically the Wehrmacht was hamstrung by Hitler's micromanagement.