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Upstarts
I spent a miserable night at the 3d Battalion CP, huddled in a ditch that was deep
but damp. I found that I knew almost none of the officers there. As a matter of fact,
neither did the battalion commander. Lt Col Lawrence was an unimpressive man of about
fifty, who was so newly-assigned that he still called his staff officers by their job titles:
Exec, S-3, S-4, etc. He addressed me as "Artillery."
I was taken under the protective wing of the S-2, Lt. Drake, who was a fascinating
character. From his name you would have never guessed that he was a German Jew, and
he looked more like an Italian. But when he spoke, he had a German accent thick enough
to spread on toast. In addition, he was a screwball, as I was to discover later, when he had
become a legend.
Next morning Lt. Drake and I went to what they called the battalion OP
(observation post). In the artillery, we thought of an OP as a place on high ground where
you could see what was going on up ahead, and I wondered how they had found such a
spot.
They hadn't. In infantry parlance an "OP" was a sort of forward command post,
where the CO (commanding officer) and a handful of people controlled the fight, leaving
the rest of the command staff at the main CP to take care of administrative matters and
keep higher headquarters off the commander's back.
Drake and I were the only officers at the OP. The battalion commander was
supposed to be there, of course, but this one didn't arrive until mid-afternoon. In addition
to the two of us and a few men from my own crew, there was a runner for each rifle
company, some telephone men, and a radio operator carrying a walkie-talkie on his back.
The infantry walkie-talkie radio had its own internal batteries and could actually be
operated while in motion, but it had a short range. This one could communicate with the
Bn CP and, I believe, the Heavy Weapons Company (Co. M), but most of the
communications with the rifle companies were by written message, carried by runners.
My own radio, the standard artillery one, could be used when mounted on the
jeep, attached to the vehicle's battery for power. Or it could be carried by two men, one
with the radio and one with the battery pack, each weighing about 40 pounds; however,
you could not talk on it until you stopped and assembled the two parts. Clearly it made
sense to leave it on the jeep as long as possible, but on this day we were going over the
hedgerows, and the jeeps couldn't follow, so they waited where we had started in the
morning. My handful of men had to carry the radio and string wire on foot.
The runners kept going back and forth from the company commanders, bringing
Drake reports on the situation ahead and taking his instructions back to them. We had two
telephone lines, mine and the infantry's. Drake and I would tell our respective CP's what
was going on over the telephone. When the companies got so far ahead that the runners
had trouble making the round trip, we would move forward ourselves, stringing our wire
as we went. Sounds simple, doesn't it?
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