I was going to wait to see the guys, but if I had gotten together with one of those black guys from inside I would have killed him or gotten killed. I left the place and found me a jug and drank it and wandered around the town. I was mad. I was really confused. I was hurt. And finally I got on the bus and went back to the post.
I was drafted too late to get into a band. They needed people for combat, not for bands, but I had my horn sent to me anyway, at Camp Butner, so I could play. I was stationed right next to the 225th Army Ground Force Band, and when I realized that, I took out my horn and started practicing in my barracks, playing out the window so they could hear me. They ran over and just wigged out when I told them who I was. They had all heard of me because I’d been with Stan Kenton, and they started a campaign to get me into the band.
It was a difficult thing to do, but there was a warrant officer in charge of the band who played oboe and really dug me. He was a classical child prodigy from a wealthy family. I think he played with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He had blue eyes, blondish, curly hair, a pouting mouth and effeminate ways, delicate hands, long, slender fingers. He had a very refined manner of speaking and was brought up, I think, as a loner, like myself, only he was rich. He didn’t really care for anyone else in the band, and he had found a friend in me; in fact, he was a little overly friendly and I always felt strange around him. He never made any sexual advances, but whenever I’d mention my wife or anything like that he’d get uncomfortable and change the subject. It’s a thing I’ve run into lots of times, guys who liked me with almost a homosexual intensity but with no overt actions. This warrant officer had a lot of pull, and he kept working, and, finally, just before the outfit I was with went overseas, I got a transfer. That was right before the Battle of the Bulge, and most of the people in the outfit I was in were killed, but I got into the band.
When it was time for the baby to be born I got a furlough and went back to Los Angeles. Patti was living with my grandmother on Seventy-third Street. Her stomach was real big, and it was strange to feel the baby move. I was praying she’d have the baby before I had to go back, and just before I was supposed to leave she started getting labor pains close together. We took her to the hospital, and I sent a wire to the warrant officer requesting an extension. I got a wire back. He said if I came right away he’d guarantee we’d stay in the U.S., but if I didn’t come back I’d be AWOL and I’d probably be transferred into another outfit and sent overseas. I had to leave Patti in the hospital.
When I got to the base there was a telegram waiting for me saying that the baby was born, a girl, six pounds, eight ounces. She was born January 5, 1945, the day after I left. I thought, “Well, anyway, I won’t have to go overseas.” But the reason the warrant officer had told me to hurry back was that the band was going overseas immediately and he wanted me to go with them. We were shipped to Camp Miles Standish in Massachusetts and loaded onto a boat in a convoy and sent to France.
Everyone was scared. The war was raging. The trip was okay until about the fourteenth day on the water, when it got stormy. It was a bad storm, and everybody was seasick. In the latrine, the vomit and the urine would roll from one end of this long tin urinal to the other, hit the end, and fly out onto the floor. It was hard trying to stand up with all the vomit and the piss. And then, one evening, just as the storm was abating, I felt a huge lurching of the ship and heard an explosion. There were two more explosions; it sounded like they were right under the ship; and then all the lights went out.
They started talking to us over the loudspeaker, telling us to be calm, not to panic, and to put on our life jackets. Finally they called our group to get up on deck. We filed up, and it was night. The motors were all shut off. The captain kept talking over the loudspeakers as softly as he could. He told us the convoy had been infiltrated by German submarines. We were about twenty-six ships and there were six navy destroyers with us. On the trip sometimes we’d see them running through the convoy.
I was fortunate enough, when I came up, to get fairly close to the rail. I was able to see down, and even though the motors were off, the ship was drifting, and where it was floating through the water there was phosphorous. That was the only light. You could see it to the left and to the right and in front-, the light of the boat cutting through the water.
I had my life belt on. It was cold. It was February, and we were just approaching the tip of England, going through the Channel. This was the spot where the German submarines used to lie in wait to get the convoys. We were all scared to death. Every now and then the captain, I assumed it was the captain talking, would say that they were going to set off depth charges, don’t be frightened. And that’s what I’d heard at the beginning. We saw a huge explosion off the back side to the right, and a little while after that there was another. Two of our ships were hit and exploded. We thought at any moment a torpedo was going to hit us.
You can never find out what happens, but I heard later that three submarines were hit. They kept testing by radar until they found that all the subs had left and, after a long, long time, they turned the engines on and we started moving again, but we had to stay on deck just in case. Sometimes they’d turn off the engines and lay on the bottom and wait—the radar picked up the engine vibrations—and then start up again.
Up to this point we hadn’t known for sure where we were going—England, France, or North Africa—but at last we entered Le Havre, and I’ll never forget the sight of that harbor. There were all kinds of ships, sunk, huge hunks of wreckage, and I guess the harbor was shallow because they were just lying there in the water. There were gun turrets blown to bits; you could see these huge howitzers, broken, all bent. The harbor itself was nonexistent: there were no more docks, so the Seabees had made landing places out of metal stripping.
The people started unloading and we watched from a port-hole, but when our ship’s turn came to go to the landing area everybody was unloaded except us. We didn’t know what was happening. It was too good to think we wouldn’t have to get off there and go to the Battle of the Bulge. We had been trained in stretcher bearing. If we did go we served as medics, helpless, no chance of defending ourselves. At the end of the third day there was no one on the ship but the crew and the band. Our warrant officer couldn’t find out why we hadn’t received orders to debark. We wanted to know if we could get off the ship and see the town, so he inquired and found that no American soldiers could go walking around Le Havre because the French would kill them. The Germans had taken the town at first, and there was a little damage, but they did just what they had to do, nothing more. Then