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Hedgerows
Our other major was the S-3, Robert (Swat) Swatosh, who was neither liked nor
respected. This was somewhat unfair to him: he was a big, affable, jolly youngster who had held
several jobs in another battalion and had served a hitch in the Division G-3 section. When he was
cut from their roster, he was sent to us as a very senior captain with instructions that he be given
a major's job. Costain did not want him, nor did several rival ambitious senior captains, including
me, who felt crowded out. Other officers under similar circumstances would eventually have
been accepted, but Swat was always an outsider. His primary job as S-3 in combat was to operate
the Fire Direction Center (FDC), where requests for fire got translated into commands for the
cannoneers at the firing batteries. It is a heavy responsibility, and I'm not sure Swat would have
been up to it if he had not had a very bright young man, Captain Donald Thomson, as his
assistant S-3. Don was not only capable, but he was super-alert as the result of many
chastisements from Colonel Costain.
These, then, were our top players up to the time, a couple of days into combat, when
Major Hughes was standing at a road intersection talking to an infantry officer and one of our
LnOs, Captain La Verne Sumner, just as a German shell came in. Hughes was seriously
wounded and had to be evacuated at once. Sumner was battered by concussion, but seemed to be
all right; however his back bothered him, and after a few days he too was sent back, never to
return.
There was no doubt as to who should replace Hughes as exec: Captain Doug Myers had
held the job ad interim and done well. He was S-4 (Supply Officer) and commander of Service
Battery, but Lt. I. W. Smith, our Motor Officer, was fully qualified for those jobs. Doug made a
good exec: he was both popular and respected. He did his job so easily that he once complained
to me that he felt useless. I assured him that if anything ever happened to the battalion
commander, he would speedily start earning his pay.
Colonel Costain must have been a Jonah. The Coolidge had sunk under him; I have heard
since that the Athlone Castle, which carried us across the Atlantic, was sunk, but fortunately after
we got off. He must have felt it too: while we were in England he told me that he did not expect
to survive the war, and asked me to write a letter to his wife after he was killed. I tried to laugh
him out of it, and finally made a reciprocal agreement that either survivor would write to the
appropriate widow.
Still, violent death does not happen to people you know, and when we got word back at
the CP that Costain and one enlisted man had been pinned down by machine gun fire, our first
thought was on how we might rescue them. Maybe if we fired smoke shells to blind the enemy
machine gunners, they could crawl out. I remember Don Thomson and Doug Myers crouching
over the FDC map, trying to figure how to do it without hitting the very people we were trying to
rescue. By then it was too late, but of course we did not know.
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