Richard Wilbur in World War II, Part Two: Jeeps Full of Kisses, Eyes Full of Snow

I. "The Whole World's Wild"

On August 15, 1944, American troops invaded the south of France at eight locations on the Riviera from Nice to Cape Nègre. Corporal Richard Wilbur had come ashore at Fréjus midmorning with the second detachment of the 36th Texas Division Message Center. Wilbur then waited for transport to Boulouris, the village along the coast road where the message center would first assemble in France.

The message center's rapid movement north required frequent dismantling and repacking of heavy electronic gear into 6 x 6 trucks. On arriving in recently secured towns, the advance party would locate and requisition suitable working space and sleeping quarters, then race to get radios and code machines operational. Throughout many months of these departures and arrivals, Wilbur almost always found time to write both letters and poems. His daily watches at the SIGABA machine lasted eight hours, but there were slow days and long stretches when no code traffic distracted him. Best of all, he could type and print out his poems and letters right on the code machine (a bit larger and taller than the L. C. Smith typewriter he has owned since childhood and still uses). Dozens of poems passed through his SIGABA machine and emerged on the page in its CAPS-ONLY font.

Every few days the message center packed up and chased the troops of the Seventh Army under General Lucian Truscott, advancing headlong through the Alpes-Maritimes on the vertiginous Route Napoleon—to be welcomed in town after town by the festive, affectionate, and usually well-provisioned French of the Midi. The signalmen set themselves up, as circumstances allowed, in abandoned barracks, hotels, schools, large residences, and garages; when no permanent structures were available, they pitched a capacious command tent.

Accommodations for message center staff in private homes were usually comfortable, the food hearty and often splendid, the soft mattresses, baths, and showers a recovered feature of their lives. The soldiers shared meals with their hosts and enjoyed an active social life everywhere they billeted. A French couple once relinquished their own feather bed to Wilbur and slept in the hallway; one woman laundered his trousers overnight.

The pleasure Wilbur's unit took in French civilians, and the opportunities for conversing, visiting bars and cafés, showering in public baths, getting haircuts, dining en famille, and conducting brief romantic affairs on these stopovers, is a recurrent theme in his written and oral memories. As the designated chronicler of the message center's experience, his tone took on the era's Anglo-American understatement when recounting exposure to enemy fire. Explosions that failed to kill anyone appear as momentary inconveniences. The earliest post-invasion entries in his semi-official history convey the high spirits that prevailed. "The message center stayed several days at Collet Redon [just north of Fréjus]," from August 17 to 20, he wrote, at "a communal farm of six families . . . One farmer had an ample wine supply, which made our duties lighter." Having had several years of French in school and college he was frequently called on to translate for his unit, in both official and social situations: "My French works pretty well; sometimes I don't even have to think before I gabble, but I haven't managed to coordinate my face and my words. I speak always with a worried look, & suspect the answer is to forget the damn syntax and just talk." When Lieutenant John Mercaldo found himself passionately in love with a mademoiselle in Duxelles—in whose language he could speak his needs but not do justice to his affection—he asked Wilbur to ghostwrite a billet-doux in the woman's native tongue.

Though the message center was not often exposed to close-range German fire, artillery barrages cost his company more than a dozen dead and wounded by war's end. A few days after the landings at Fréjus, the German divisions cornered near Marseille began to surge north up the Rhône Valley, intent on returning...