Unsung Valor: A GI's Story of World War II

University Student: Oxford, Mississippi

University Stuacnt OxforJ, Mississippi November ly^-February 1944 We left Columbus for Oxford, Mississippi, on an afternoon train, passing through Montgomery, Alabama, and getting off for a layover at Birmingham at twilight. We waited for our train connection to Memphis, Tennessee, sitting up on the station's mezzanine level, gazing through a broad window across the wide, busy railroad yard. Since the train for Memphis didn't depart until quite late, we scrambled for our supper, paying out of our own pockets. When we arrived in Memphis around 0330, an NCO from the ASTP unit at the University of Mississippi met us and led us through the noisy throng filling the station*The crowd of civilians and military men was colorful; sailors in their blues with wide collars and bellbottomed trousers, their white caps tilted rakishly over their foreheads; and the soldiers a mix of enlisted men in olive drab and officers in forest green and pink. The number of sailors at the station surprised me until someone reminded us of the naval training base at Memphis. The train station bustled so much like midday that pushing through the crowd with our bags was difficult. Alongside the endless stream of travelers who struggled toward ticket windows and gates to different tracks were black porters in red caps and shoeshine boys in stocking caps and porkpie hats begging for business. Providing background to the spectacle was a small band of lively black musicians serenading the passengers with jazzymusic. A few played homemade instruments; the most unusual was an upside-down washtub with a catgut string ex55 tending from the center of its bottom to the top end of a broom handle held upright on the tub's outer edge by the player. Balancing the handle and varying the tension of the string, he plucked the catgut with his fingers, making a deep hollow twang like a bass violin. The passersby, showing either sympathy or appreciation, tossed coins into a tin bucket on the floor beside the band. Outside at the curb, we packed our duffel bags into the storage compartment of an old chartered bus. All the way along the bumpy highway to Oxford, most of us were weary enough to sleep. Two hours later, we awoke when the bus stopped at a small station about the size of a taxi stand, near Oxford's silent, dimly lit square. Dragging our duffels off the bus, we fell in line to march in route-step to the campus, singing quietly along the narrow, empty streets of an obviously tiny town. A boy from up North sneered sarcastically, in a dreadful imitation of a Southern accent, "We-all's going to the You-all-iversity of Mississippi ." A southern boy asked him, "Is you-all ready to be a Rebel? You-all is in the heart of the Confederacy now, boy, and that's the name of their football team." Only a few blocks farther down the street, at the front of the campus , we crossed a bridge spanning railroad tracks below in a deep ravine. Looming ahead in the faint morning light were the high pediment and plain columns of an old building at the top of a circular drive, off the campus's central avenue. It was the Lyceum, which, we later learned, was where our mathematics classes met. Bearing to the right of its white columns, we followed the narrow road past a small chapel and an equally old but undistinguished three-story, red-brick classroom building with a tower, where our military science class later met. Reaching the center of the campus, we faced a cluster of contemporary red-brick buildings, which included the student union, cafeteria, and several dormitories. The time was shortly before reveille, and our j6 University Student ASTP guide left us standing in the street outside the dormitories, waiting for someone else to tell us what to do next» Suddenly the dorm doors flew open, and the ASTPers in residence barged out, forming platoons in the street beside us. Altogether there were five hundred soldiers at Ole Miss. After a desultory roll call, the old first sergeant asked us to join the others at breakfast in the cafeteria across from the dorms. Inside the large dining room, we encountered not only soldiers but lots of girls and a few civilian boys. What a welcome change for breakfast in the Army! After ogling and...