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

Clerk-Typist: Versailles, France

C Uric- Typist Versailles, France May 12- June δ , 1945 After V- E Day, I may have felt light as air, but I was still on the ground with the troops. A group of us, sitting in the uncovered bed of a two- and- a- half- ton truck, were on our way to an unknown destination . We didn't go far. About thirty- five miles down the road, the truck turned onto the broadest boulevard I had ever seen. Looking across the cab's roof, I saw ahead a tall iron fence and gates in front of a sprawling palace that resembled photos of the palace at Versailles I'd seen in movies and books. What a piece of luck to be passing a famous historical site on our way to Paris, which we had arbitrarily decided was our final destination . Our truck bore straight toward the gates, as if we were going to park on the cobblestone expanse out front and tour the palace. But at the wide intersection of the cross street in front of the palace, our truck turned sharply right and passed through a small gate into the courtyard of a building directly across from the palace. The familiar strains of Glenn Miller's music engulfed us inside the broad courtyard. A band in Army uniforms was playing on a platform beside a long, stone building. In front of them, at a microphone, was a short, brunet soldier singing "Serenade in Blue" to a scattered crowd of American soldiers, standing and sitting around the courtyard. But some GIs, hurrying across the cobblestones and disappearing through the many doors leading off the courtyard, paid no attention to the band and singer. By the time our truck stopped, we were sure it was 249 Glenn Miller's American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force and that the young singer wasJohnny Desmond. A master sergeant nonchalantly strolled over to where we unloaded. One of our group asked, "Hey, Sarge, what outfit's this?" "SHAEF," the sergeant replied casually. I couldn't believe I was at Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. And I wasn't. By that time, his forward HQs was in Reims. The sergeant asked, "You guys from a replacement depot?" We nodded affirmatively. "Grab your bags and follow me." As he led us through the high wooden gate of an archway in the big building facingus, one southern boy exclaimed, "I'm so-o-o happy to be near Pair-EE! I'm gonna see the EYE-FULL tower that my daddy told me about." Inside a smaller courtyard, the sergeant said, "You guys'll get assignments in a few days. Meantime, bed down upstairs in the barracks. Over there through that door." The sergeant's nonchalant attitude pervaded all of SHAEF, especially in the manners of GIs who had been servingin the top command for a long time. By adopting their lackadaisical informality, I almost relaxed myself into trouble. Our group crossed to the door the sergeant pointed out and climbed steep, narrow stairs to a large second-floor room filled from wall to wall with canvas cots, most of them already claimed and neatly made up or with someone sitting or lying on them. When I asked a soldier which beds were free, he said, "If it's empty, take your pick, Mac!" Luckily, I saw a bed in a far corner, while others searched in the next room. After making my bed, I roamed through the building to find the toilet. The main toilet and shower room was on the ground floor, near the front entrance; another, equipped for showers only, was at the back. The front room had regular shower heads, duckboards on the floor, and a bench against one wall to sit on to dry your feet and put 250 Clerk-Typist on your shoes. The back shower was an empty room with a network of perforated one-inch pipes suspended about seven feet above a raw concrete floor, which had a single drain at its center. In the daysahead, most guys bathed in the front showers, but I preferred the primitive back one, which was seldom used. Back upstairs, I found a kid lying on a cot next to mine. The first thing he proudly let me know, without my asking, was that he was from Nutley, New Jersey, as if naming his hometown explained every...