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

Returning Veteran: Little Rock, Arkansas

Returning Veteran LittU Rock, Arkansas January j-Fcbruary l6, 194.6 On the gray, frigid Monday afternoon of January 7, while I was packing to leave Berlin, Rote was preparing for a furlough with Howy, hitchhiking on Army vehicles to Switzerland. Rote helped me carry my duffel and smaller bag down to the truck. We chatted until the sergeant bellowed, "Saddle up, you're moving out!" Rote and I shook hands, urging the other to keep in touch by writing. He told me later that as I boarded the truck, he walked back into our billet with "a grenade-size lump" in his throat and watched me depart from his front window upstairs. Mother Leshak accompanied me to the train station. Before leaving the apartment, I inserted Reginald Pasch's gift, the Wannsee Lake watercolor, in a cardboard tube for Howy to mail to me. Carrying the watercolor on the train and ship would beawkward, and I trusted Howy to send it because he'd remain in Berlin for a few more months before going home. Threatening to snow, the cloudy afternoon was so severely cold that I wore my wool Army topcoat and gloves, even though I had usually avoided them in Berlin's clammy, intensely cold mist. But I was too excited about leaving for home for a heavy overcoat to hamper my movements. I didn't notice the stiffness. My single duffel held everythingI owned except my sleeping bag. I hadn't collected loot like so many soldiers. In the devastated cities I'd lived in, there wereno souvenirs I wanted badly enough to carry home, especially foreign weapons, which many GIs were smuggling home 33* against Armyregulations. There were a few men on the train platform carrying a few pieces of luggage like me, but others were struggling with lots of bags and boxes of different sizes. They appeared to have goods enough to open curio shops back in the States. We boarded the train's passenger coach without any idea of where we were going, only that we were heading west. For once, ignorance of my next destination didn't annoy me. All of us soldiers in our car appeared to haveone thing in common, a sense of relief and happiness to be heading home, even though we didn't know how long it would take. Doris Day's hit song, which I had heard dozens of times a day over the American Forces Network, drifted into my mind: "Gonna take a sentimental journey, gonna set my heart at ease." The melody played by Les Brown's Band of Renown echoed in my head as the locomotive jerked the train to a start, and I waved goodbye through the frost-fogged window to Leshak. The train chugged slowly through bleak ruins in parts of Berlin I'd never seen before, allowing a reflective farewell to the gray metropolis and the American zone, all totally surrounded by Russians. The sunless afternoon darkened as the train crawled through the forlorn outskirts into the countryside, and the scenes passing the car windows faded from sight. Unable to watch anything more outside the window,I settled down in the cozy warmth of the car, talking about Berlin, the Army, and going home to the strangers in the seats opposite and beside me. Among the congenial fellows was Pat Smith, the son of the president of the American Container Company in New York City, who had been in Berlin for the same length of time I was. He recounted short stories he'd been writing and how much he wanted to be aplaywright or novelist. I shared my theatrical ambitions with him, and we talked and smoked late into the night. The train plowed across and out of the Russian zone after we fell asleep, sitting up, thinking we'd wake at the port of embarkation. In the British zone, the metronomic clacking on the track slowed down and waked us. The train stopped, probably at Goslar, and we 332 Returning Veteran heard shouts and a whistle» To our surprise and dismay, an NCO came into the coach and ordered us to grab all our luggage and get off. Standing in the dark beside the train, watching the vapor of our breath condensing in the frosty morning air, we asked each other, "What the hell is going on now?" We got the shocking answer: we were boarding boxcars...