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4. DP Team 115
- State University of New York Press
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4 DP TEAM 115 I can forget about treating soldiers for a while. The DP situation must be serious, because orders arrive to report to Division Headquarters on April 10. A bottle of '37 champagne is opened for the brief farewell party. I am truly sorry to leave the company , a congenial outfit. I collect my souvenirs and luggage, don my oversized field coat with its bulging pockets, climb ungracefully into a jeep, and repeat the farewell cry of the training camps, "This is it, men! Give them hell!" The driver grits his teeth and we bounce away. A trip by open jeep along a war-beaten road is a detour-hugging , boulder-circling, mudhole-sliding ordeal. Dust covers my face and my clothes and fills my lungs. The shrieking wind jars my nerves. My back aches, my kidneys drop, my feet freeze, my eyes and ears burn, and my nose becomes numb. This life is for the outdoor man, willing to pit his fragile protoplasm against the mighty forces of Nature. I am a disciple of the quiet, sedentary life, of the hotel, not the tent, of the bed, not the sleeping bag, of the electric light, not the candle. Oh, give me a car with springs, a steel-enclosed body, upholstered seats, a rug on the floor, windows that close, and, above all, a heater. After a four-hour delay at Battalion Headquarters, I am routed to Division Headquarters in Mosbach, where I am informed that I am now a member of DP Team I 15. I check into the transient officers' quarters to await further developments. These quarters are in a private house in the outskirts of the city, commandeered by the Army. Requisitioning private and public buildings is standard practice by an advancing army. Nevertheless, it still bothers me to see people forced to leave I 31 their homes at short notice, carrying personal possessions hastily thrown into pillowcases, laundry bags, boxes, or valises, then transferred to small carts or wheelbarrows. The young women faint when they discover they are being dispossessed, and the babies cry, but the older men and women accept silently. I recall the days of the Great Depression when evictions were commonplace : people ejected from their houses or apartments onto the streets, where they would sit next to their shabby property, waiting for a Good Samaritan. Even though I rationalize the necessity for the seizure of the building in which I am now quartered, the family pictures hanging on the walls, the old letters, books, clothing, even the remaining dishes, and little things like an embroidered pillow or an old pipe, cast a depressing cloud over the house. The order establishing the Team is dated April 14, 1945, and is, of course, "RESTRICTED." Brevity being essential, the communication reads: "The fol named off and EM from units indicated are placed on TDY with Seventh A Displaced Persons Team and upon completion of TDY off and EM will ret to their proper orgns.... By command of Major General Hibbs...." I meet the man designated as the commanding officer (CO) of DP Team I 15, Lieutenant Charles Rosenbloom, a stocky, darkcomplexioned man with little to say. He has been in the service for three years, all in the infantry. Before that he worked with juvenile delinquents in New York, although his home is in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Rosenbloom introduces me to the two other officers on the Team. The supply-mess officer is Lieutenant William L. Howcroft of Steubenville, Ohio. Slender and blond, he wears fragile silver -rimmed eyeglasses over his light blue eyes. He, too, is naturally reticent, except when he displays his outstanding collection of four-letter words, an admirable asset for anyone responsible for military requisitions and vouchers. Howcroft has completed one year of engineering at Ohio University and believes that he is too old to return to school after the war-he IS 2 I. Our adjutant, also in his twenties, is Lieutenant Marion R. Williams of Kansas City, Kansas, a slim and poised handsome man who studied voice before his induction and knows many 32 I The Beginning operatic arias in their original Italian. I think this talent might help us if we were to be stationed in Italy, but I cannot think of its value in Germany. Perhaps he can brush up on Wagner. The new CO is all business. He has been studying the two assigned pamphlets, and asks us to do the same. We have little to...