Halfway down the Danube: Guest-blogging with Leon Maurer, part one

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

HDTD readers may know Noel Maurer as an occasional commenter and guest poster here. Some of you may even know that he and I have been working on a project together. But most of you don't know Noel's dad Leon; and you should. The word 'raconteur' was devised to describe him. I remember sitting spellbound at a diner on Broadway, listening to the man's tales. He was a young man in World War Two:

Did I tell you the story of how I was picked on by the gumba Mafiosi tough guys when I first arrived in the company and had to beat up a punk twice my size to get my reputation as someone to contend with in the company? Besides the supply sergeant named Goldstein, I was the only other Jewish guy in outfit, but they soon forgot all about that. The rest of the outfit were Midwesterners and Southerners whom I got along with easily. The gumba guys later became my buddies too when I told them all about Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and the rest of the Brooklyn mob that were my Dad's high school buddies.

But maybe we should start at the beginning. Mr. Maurer?

Well, the story goes like this...
It was around February 1944. There I was, hanging out at the overseas staging camp in Newport News, Virginia, waiting for a bunk on the next departing ship.

I had just finished a twelve-week course of combat training at Jefferson Barracks, in St. Louis, Missouri. Besides the usual tough infantry training, with all the usual gripes familiar to any soldier today who has gone through modern infantry basic, the only highlights I remember -- besides crawling under barbed wire over a field of mud with .50 caliber machine gun bullets flying a foot or two over my head -- was learning how to do body building exercise using "Dynamic Tension" or "isometrics" as they call it today, in lieu of weights and apparatus...
It was taught to me by a farm kid from upstate New York who had a body like Schwarzenegger that he said he got by swinging an axe, throwing bales of hay on trucks, and following the teachings of Charles Atlas. He said he wanted to train me when he spotted how, after a long obstacle course, on the way back to the barracks, I paused at a high bar, and being a gymnast since I was about 14, did a front kip up and over, with a soft dismount that he said looked as smooth as a cat when I landed without losing a beat right back in my place in the column...

And lastly, there was assisting Sgt. Calhoun (who was a buddy of mine from Signal Corps School) in building an 8-foot scale model of a Japanese Zero that, along with recorded sounds and explosive ground charges, was to come zooming down over the tops of the trees on unsuspecting rookie squads supposedly on a scouting mission in enemy territory.

We did a great job, and it was very scary for the rookies; but fun for us, watching them scatter or stand gaping as the Zero swooped down from the tree tops, hanging from a pulley cable system we rigged, spitting fire from the two fake guns in the wings. The guns actually were flashlights, each with a spinning plastic toy 4-blade wind propeller with one blade: an orange filter, one yellow, one clear, and one red.

The alternate mixture of red, white, and yellow flashes were very effective as firing machine guns; and the squids in the ground which blew little puffs of dirt under the soldier's feet, along with the sounds of the plane engine, the wing guns firing, and a series of ground charges in soft dirt on the sides of the road simulating bomb drops made the whole show (which took less than a minute) so realistic that it became a standard part of the combat training, after we set up a cadre crew to handle the backstage work, before we were transferred out for shipment overseas to combat duty.

(BTW, Calhoun's son contacted me some years ago after his Dad died -- he found me through Google which led him to my online resume. I told him this story, and he was as flabbergasted by it, as he was when he found that his Dad and I were buddies, although he got assigned to D Company, and I rarely saw him after we got to Italy.)

Anyway, back at the ranch -- the waiting around for a week or so, with nothing to do and no place to go but to the commissary, since we were not allowed out of the camp or near a telephone to call home: it was the usual 'hurry up and wait' that was par for the course in the Army.

When we finally got the call to board, we found ourselves on a troop transport ship called the General Anderson. It held about 9,000 troops in bunk room holds, four cots high, with very narrow corridors between the bunks. When we got on board, there was a sign that said "volunteers wanted" pointing to a room on the bridge deck. My buddies and I decided we might look into it, since we heard the volunteers ate in the ship's crew mess, and maybe even had separate bunkrooms with the Navy crew.

When we got there, the jobs were listed on the bulletin board. The one that caught my attention was the "incinerator squad." I was curious, and dragged my friends over to the desk where a sailor was waiting for volunteers. I thought that might be a good job, since the sailor said it would take us out of the stuffy and crowded army bunkrooms below, and let six of us sleep on the top deck, in a separate bunkroom, next to the big smokestack which had the incinerator at its base. We also would have the full run of the upper bridge deck, and would get good Navy style food in the crew's mess.

Since the ship was to make the crossing without an escort, following a random zig-zag course, it was absolutely essential that all the garbage was incinerated at extremely high temperatures so as to prevent any smoke, and not leave any debris behind that could indicate a trail or that a ship had passed. Incidentally, because of this zig-zag, we were told that the normal 5 day straight line crossing would take at least 9 days. We knew then that we were on our way to North Africa, and could look forward to passing under the Rock of Gibraltar. That alone convinced us that it was good to be on the topmost deck, and we immediately volunteered.

So I went up to the incinerator with my buddies and the petty officer in charge of incineration for our basic training. And, boy, was that interesting. For one thing, the incinerator was kept at about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and when you opened the door to throw in the garbage, the draft from the 60 to 70 foot stack was so strong you felt like it would suck you in. In fact, when we opened the incinerator gate, we had to make sure that the outer hatch door was closed so the incoming air was through the built-in side slots. If we forgot and left that hatch open, the draft from behind us could easily blow us into the incinerator.

The incinerator door was almost four feet wide, so we could easily throw in two-foot square corrugated board cartons full of garbage. You can imagine how careful we were to batten down the hatches before starting work.

Anyway, besides the cheek warming we got when the gate was opened for a garbage toss, coupled with the sweat we poured out in the hot room, the gig was a cinch... since most of the day we could loll around on the bridge deck, schmooze with the Navy crew, and watch the porpoises racing the ship.

After nine days of that, we finally arrived in the Straits of Gibraltar. I had my view of the Rock and the monkeys before landing in Algiers. From there, we were transferred to a truck convoy, and whisked off to the gigantic staging area camp in Oran to await our replacement assignments for duty in Southern Europe.