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Upstarts
Finally I decided that the sniper must have seen me looking and gotten away before I
found him. However we still got occasional bullets whizzing by. We finally figured out that the
"sniper" was just a few stray machine gun rounds that were aimed too high and came in over the
trees from the front lines, which were only a kilometer or two away.
Here let me digress to tell you a little bit about the senior officers in the 915th, because
although artillery commanders are less vital than infantry commanders to a unit's operation, they
do make a difference.
Lt Col James Costain was the most junior of the artillery battalion commanders, having
been promoted to Lt Col at Fort Dix, less than six months before the Normandy landing. He
made up for his junior status by his intensity. Among his subordinates, Costain was more
respected than popular. He was a West Pointer and proud of it. He knew field artillery. He was
also a slave driver and a perfectionist who rarely was satisfied.
He had an odd, unexplained background: he was in the Pacific with the 43rd Division,
New England National Guard, and was on a transport ship, the Coolidge, when it was torpedoed
and sunk. Shortly after that, he was shipped back to the US as a major, and sent to us as battalion
commander at Camp Barkeley, just before we went to the desert.
In 1950 I was assigned to the 43rd Division, also as an outsider, a Regular Army man
surrounded by National Guardsmen. I got along with them fairly well, but when I mentioned
Costain, those who remembered him were pretty hostile. I deduce that, as a West Pointer
surrounded by National Guardsmen, he was such a misfit that someone in authority pulled
enough strings to get rid of him. Apparently after that he felt he had to prove himself. In any
event, his abrasive tongue had honed us to a sharp edge by the time we hit Normandy. Every
officer knew what was expected of him and was afraid to be caught not doing it. And of all the
things Costain was death on, the primary one was communications. In training exercises on the
desert and in England our radios were never dependable: Costain was convinced that unless we
had telephone wire laid, we couldn't communicate. Ironically, our radios worked just fine in
Europe, but Costain wasn't there to witness it.
There is a tradition that the executive officer should be a son-of-a-bitch, so the
commander can be a nice guy. In our case it was reversed. Major Bob Hughes was as nice a guy
as you would ever meet. A wiry little Oklahoma red-neck, he loved all his subordinates and
thought they all were as dedicated as he. If he had faults, they were that he was too easy on
people, and that he was an incurable optimist. He also was proud of his knowledge of artillery,
and he tended to prove it by doing jobs that were the duty of subordinates, so they would be done
right - unlike Costain, who expected everyone to do his own job, and it had better, by God! be
done right. Bob Hughes was universally popular, though not as deeply respected as Costain.
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