In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r f o u r ........................................................... coast to coast, 1942 In January 1942, the 114th Infantry was ordered to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana . Dad went with the regiment, while Mom, Anne, and I cleared out of the house in Jobstown, loaded the car, and drove out to Columbus, where we picked up Homer, who would drive with us the rest of the way. Memories of the sights along the way are few and dim, except for the Irvin Cobb Hotel in Paducah, Kentucky, recommended by Duncan Hines because of its ‘‘splendid reputation for fine Southern hospitality and food.’’1 Tiger, our peripatetic cat, was with us, and we had to sneak her into the hotel. We probably motored along the old Natchez Trace, the history of which Homer explained. I liked the word ‘‘trace’’ and the romance the Natchez Trace implied. When I wasn’t tormenting Anne or she me, I thought I could glimpse Indians gliding through the woods, or maybe boatmen returning to Cincinnati on foot following their float down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Somewhere in Mississippi, I think, we visited one of the antebellum plantations with a driveway lined with live oaks leading to a hoop-skirted hostess waiting between white columns on a wide veranda. We crossed the Mississippi at the Natchez end of the trace and headed southwest toward Oakdale, the sleepy little town where we would live for the next two months. The house was a wooden one-story affair painted white and raised off the bare sandy ground on concrete blocks. The house came with the family of a Captain Mahoney. Anne recalls Oakdale as the nadir of her nomadic childhood, chiefly because of the Mahoney’s young son Skipper, who, but a year or two old, attached himself permanently to her. Perhaps it was to escape Skipper that Anne, now six, decided that school had more appeal than it had had in Society Hill four months earlier. Off she went every day, leaving a distraught Skipper with his nose indenting the screen on the front door. After school, Dad and I would throw a baseball until I had thrown ten straight strikes or darkness had fallen. I also learned to rollerskate . No booted skates these, mind you, but adjustable metal platforms on four metal wheels. Camp Claiborne was not the amusement park that Fort Dix had been. It was huge, at one time the largest army post in the continental United States. At Claiborne the Eighty-second Division, the ‘‘All-American’’ Division of World War I, Sergeant York’s old outfit, became the Eighty-second Airborne Division, and the 101st Division became the 101st Airborne—the ‘‘Screaming Eagles.’’ And out of the ashes of the old cavalry came the Third Armored Division. For the 114th Infantry, though, it was just another place to pitch tents and continue training. Exactly what the 114th Infantry was doing at Claiborne I don’t think Dad ever told us. Maybe the camp was used the way Indiantown Gap and Camp A. P. Hill had been—for its ranges and ample terrain on which a regiment could maneuver. Maybe in the confusion after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as officers and units were being sent hither and yon at the drop of an order, someone decided that the war effort would be significantly aided by sending the 114th to Camp Claiborne. Meanwhile, a regiment at Camp Claiborne was ordered to move to Fort Dix.2 The 114th picked up a new commanding officer, Colonel Manton S. Eddy.3 Born in 1892, Eddy was commissioned in the regular army in 1916, and in May 1918, as a captain commanding a machine-gun company in the Thirty-ninth Infantry Regiment, went to France. Twenty-three years later, Eddy caught the attention of his superiors during the Louisiana Maneuvers, where Mark Clark, George Patton, and Dwight Eisenhower played key parts. While the 114th under Colonel Schwarzkopf maneuvered in the Carolinas, Eddy was assigned to general staff duty as G-2 (intelligence) at III Corps headquarters in Baltimore. Soon, though, he was on his way back to Louisiana with his new command. At the end of February 1942, the regiment got orders to move again, this time to Fort Lewis, Washington. By February 1942, seventy-one thousand men had been shipped from the States to the Pacific. Most of these were bound for Australia, with others assigned to Alaska, the...

Share