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Essay Three
Of Telephones, Wire, and Upstarts
Two a. m. The night is black dark, and the sentry at the entrance to the CP hears
before he sees the little truck chugging up the narrow road at three miles per hour without
the aid of headlights. Soon he can see the cat-eye lights on the front of the vehicle: they
are faint and blue and shaped like the quotation marks on a typewriter. Now it is close
enough to see (or feel) some of the shape: a square, blocky shadow, with large reel of
field telephone wire silhouetted high in the back.
Just before the truck is close enough to touch, the sentry sings out, "Halt! Who's
there?"
The truck stops and a voice comes from the passenger side of the front seat,
"Friends. "
Something in the voice is not quite right. The sentry flicks off the safety on his
carbine. "What's the password?" he demands.
"Vyerless," comes the response, followed by a slap and a gurgle. Then another
voice, loud and frantic, this time from the back of the truck. "Wireless! Wireless! Don't
you shoot, you son-of-a-bitch!"
It was one of the 915th's wire trucks, and the Wire Corporal, whose name I
believe was Erich Gergs, was a loyal American soldier, although he was born in Germany
and had two brothers in the German Army. Passwords were deliberately selected as ones
hard to pronounce if you had a German accent. [This was an ancient custom, going back
to Old Testament times. See Judges 12:6]
So that was why Corporal Gergs almost got his head shot off by the sentry. But
what were he and his truck and wire crew doing out in the middle of the night, when they
would rather have been in bed? That takes some explaining.
In the olden days of WW II, there were no information super-highways, no
communications satellites, not even any cellular phones. If you were to talk to someone
by telephone, there had to be an electrical wire going from your instrument to his. The
wire might pass through various switchboards, T-splices, or other shunting devices, but it
basically had to be unbroken. A wire that was broken, grounded, or shorted out was
worthless until repaired.
That is why we needed wire crews. Those unrecognized heroes, armed with pike-
poles and pliers instead of rifles and bayonets, did four things: (1) Lay the wire between
all the people who needed to talk to each other, (2) Fix it so it would not get broken or
shorted, (3) Repair it if it did break or short out, and (4) Pick it up again for future use
when we moved somewhere else.
Wire crews had to be among the first to get to a new position, because we couldn't
get any thing done until we could talk to each other. On the other hand, wire crews had to
be the last to leave an old position, because they weren't allowed to pick up any old wire
while a conversation was still going on over it. Consequently, you had to have several
crews available.
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