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Upstarts
radios. Bixby was only satisfied when we were actually firing. At any other time, he felt
we should be preparing to move. Faster. I think he intended to either inspire or intimidate
us into doing better, but all he succeeded in doing was making us nervous.
Reports on his private life, though irrelevant to his duties, did nothing to increase
his popularity. He made no effort to hide the fact that he had a mistress in England, and
he worked hard at getting leaves to go back and visit her. I heard later, after the war, that
his wife shot him when he returned home. Not fatally, however. I served under him twice
after that.
And then one day a stocky lieutenant colonel drove into our CP and introduced
himself to Eric Peach and us staff officers as John Theimer, newly assigned as Div Arty
Executive Officer (second in command). He had been transferred from a FA Group, he
said. He was pleasant and affable, and we were favorably impressed.
It just so happened that a captain, a liaison officer from one of the battalions in his
former group, was there at the time. Theimer spoke to him by name, and I was even more
impressed. After the colonel left to visit another battalion, I commented to the captain,
"He seems like a nice person." The captain looked at me and said nothing at all.
It didn't take long to find out why. We soon got used to Bixby and could guess
what he wanted even before he opened his mouth to roar at us. But Theimer was
completely unpredictable. The only thing one could be sure of was that he wasn't going to
like whatever he saw or thought he saw .
Once our Bn CO, Lt Col Peach, saw fit to locate one of our batteries outside our
assigned goose egg and into that assigned to the 345th FA Bn. He had often done this
before ["Hill 122" P 44], and no one had complained. But Theimer noticed it and
screamed as if a serious crime had been committed.
A few minutes later I saw Lt Col Frank Norris, who as CO of the 345th would be
considered the victim of the crime, and told him what had happened. He snorted. "Doesn't
he know about command liaison?" he asked rhetorically. [Command liaison means two
commanders talking to each other.] "If I didn't want your battery in my goose egg, I'd
have told Eric Peach myself!"
Theimer didn't like my situation map, either. The situation map is a map of the
area fastened to a board and covered with clear acetate. Locations of interest are marked
on it with grease pencil, using conventional military symbols for front lines, command
posts, etc. And two conventional colors are used: red for enemy information, blue for
friendly. However, I had long since found out - on desert maneuvers, as I recall - that
blue does not show up well against the background of a map, especially under artificial
light. So I was doing the friendly installations in black, which does. Since there were only
two colors in use, and since either I or Sgt Johnson was always there to explain, there
didn't seem to be a problem - until Theimer saw my map. I tried to explain the break with
122
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