The quiet heroism of doing what must be done
May 8 is the anniversary of the close of the European Theatre of the Second World War, but even before the end of hostilities, the myth of the Greatest Generation was already being born. The narrative that would shape the next half century of square- jawed, citizen soldiers coming from all corners of America, resolutely banding together to rid the world of fascism.
But while myth and reality don’t always match, most WWII storytelling makes sure it’s the myth that gets published. Luckily we have museums for reality and in 2014 the National World War Two Museum added an essay titled “Men Weep” by my uncle, artist and novelist George Mandel. Far from being a gung- ho memoir of the type of heroics Hollywood usually presents, George’s story is about ordinary American kids just trying to ride out the end of the war without getting killed. As George always told it, they weren’t fighting for some noble cause, they were fighting for each other.
In 1945, after dictating a final letter to his sister from a French field hospital where he wasn’t expected to recover, George arrived home to the astonishment of his family and would go on to be friends and contemporaries with other literary greats of the time including Joseph Heller, William Styron, Norman Mailer, Mel Brooks and Mario Puzo. In his writing and the way he lived his life, he never strayed from his conviction that he was simply a soldier whose job it was to have the backs of his comrades. George passed away earlier this year, but in writing “Men Weep” in 2011 when he was 91 and one of a dwindling few who had fought in Europe, he illustrated that what makes a generation great isn’t about cinematic heroics and swashbuckling leading men, it’s the quiet heroism of doing what you have to do because others are counting on you.
‘ Men Weep’ by George Mandel
Eddie Hagen was the oldest, weariest, most gentle- minded combat soldier I met in all of World War Two. Eddie Moran was the most toughminded. The one had been vice president of The Hagen Insurance Company of Jersey City, and I never learned how he came to be an ordinary GI like the rest of us draftees. The other was a former singing waiter in Brooklyn, and served as a Browning Automatic Rifle man, who survived by sheer luck to warn others never to become one. Not that anybody needed such advice. You didn’t have to be in action long before you learned that a BAR man was the natural target of entire enemy forces as soon as he opened fire with his requisite bursts of twos and threes. Moran had attracted heavy German retaliation that was still working its way out of him in emissions of shell fragments that kept driving him back to the medics.
There were other interesting men in our barracks of recuperating casualties in England, but I can no longer recollect even the surname of another Eddie who entertained us by getting beat up in a fist fight with a buxom blonde nurse. I remember the main pair of Eddies for two reasons. One, that they were the most colorful, the other that they came up with cold, life- and- death insights for my group.
The first thing Moran did when we were transferred to that convalescent camp from our hospital wards was to eat up a salami chunk from the customary package my mother sent. Next he taught us the A to F system that determined when a man was well enough for return to combat duty. “Every Monday they march us to the infirmary,” he instructed, “for a doc to probe our hits. Soon as he gets an inch near your scar, let out a yelp of pain, and you’ll stay high on the scale.”
Then he ate up my mother’s Danish pastry as Hagen rested his disillusioned eyes on each of us, and said, “Holler loud enough, you could stay up near Group F.” One sensitive glance at my look of possible misgivings and he added, “Give some other guys a chance to become heroes.” The savage realities of war were heavy on me without that pert little homily, but his face crystallized them at lunchtime that day with the mask of war’s despair it seemed to become when a woman employed in the vast crowded mess hall screeched, in refusing him an extra pat of butter, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
All the jeopardy and horror we had endured seemed pointless. I felt again the misery of mud we slogged through up to our hips, that autumn of 1944. Acutely I recalled lost buddies, the agony of Europe’s severest winter in history, the two consecutive wounds I took in the tumult of my last action, and the even worse dread of seeing new hospital arrivals with their toes forfeited to frostbite. More beneficent ladies accommodated us to their brazen wartime pleasure, voiced amid the buzz bombs in the popular tune of
“Roll me over in the clover, roll me over, lay me down and do it again, “and to the good- natured resentment of Englishmen out in the hazardous noonday sun with complaints that we were “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.”
But for the chatter of recovering comrades Eddie Moran had no patience. “I de- test GIs,” he would enunciate, and amuse me distinguishing some we strolled past with “Looks like he must have been an undertaker,” or “That one sold for two cents halvah,” and so on. Yet when not back in the wards spewing metal from his hide, he got us drinking with him in pubs loud with their exchanges as high- pitched as our noisy hostesses — until the night the news broke about the Battle of the Bulge.
It’s history book now that on Dec. 16 Marshal Gerd von Runstedt hurled three armies at the Allies on a ninety-mile front, every tank and aircraft the Germans still possessed in a surprise attack, but we heard nothing about it till our north and south assaults were stalled. We were already having some Christmas fun at a Birmingham pub when word spread about the enemy breakthrough in Belgium.
I had been out of action since October the third, and so had the others for months. In fact we were enthusiastically celebrating the infirmity of our crowd, which still managed to range from C to Group E and betrayed no sign of improvement. But suddenly big cynical Moran was in tears. The news was shocking. The breakthrough had caught our troops off- balance and entrapped them. They were mercilessly being slaughtered at Bastogne. It threw Moran into a crying jag, and next to go was old Hagen, whimpering about the green kids left all alone on the line to face quick and seasoned Panzer divisions. The rest of us broke down weeping over word that the Nazis were taking no prisoners.
We knew that to be more than just a rumor because no other tactical way remained for the Germans. This was their last whisper of a chance. They needed every drop of gasoline, they could not even afford a morsel of food for prisoners of war, much less the fuel to transport them behind the lines, and thus could not spare their lives. Hardened men became again the boys we were, and wept.
We had it made when we first arrived at the convalescent barracks. The Nazis were through. Nothing could save them. It was going to be just one big mop- up until our people made contact with the Russians and closed the book on the European Theater of Operations. Everybody believed that. All we had to do was to scorn the buzz bombs, have our fun, and stay no lower than Group C by crying pain at the slightest examining touch of our wounds while playing easy kindergarten games for slow rehabilitation to humor garrison non- coms in gym clothes. But the bubble had burst.
Now, incredibly, with shocking suddenness, our men were being butchered on the line, most of them too inept to chop back fast enough, and dying just for the lack of combat experience. It took a funny guy who thought he loathed GIs to make so many war- weary men break down and go bucking for the Group A fully healed status in the middle of a holiday night.
We took leave of the blubbering goodbyes of our playmates. By morning we had the examining doctors out though it was not Monday, and the next morning we were all in gear, lined up in formation, all set for shipment back to our respective outfits. No one spoke. Just before the trucks came for us a small weathered voice echoed through the eerie silence of the snowbanked frost. “I never got to see Germany,” Beneath his steel helmet Eddie Hagen gave a weary smile.
Well, we knocked out the Nazi horde, out of Belgium and back into their own hapless territory again. Whenever we passed long timber the enemy erected to resemble cannon from the air, I thought of Eddie Hagen. Whenever I saw old women wring their hands and moan, “Alles Kaput,” I wondered how he took his tour of the wasteland called Germany, and the “master race” of Hitler that had learned to feel so sorry for itself.
By March my armored cavalry reconnaissance squadron turned into task force had probed hell to the Rhine and, minus our casualties, stood there for the massing assault forces to catch up with us. We attacked on the Eighth.
That morning I became a casualty again, with a sniper’s bullet in my head. There I quit the war, too disabled, disoriented and agonized to find out how it went for Moran and Hagen. Later on the terrible impairment kept me reluctant to search out news that might be bad. I don’t know what happened to any of the others. I never looked back. But I guessed that if they lived, like me they never regretted going back to get the dirty job done for the kids who died en masse.