When you fight the enemy in his own backyard, he is familiar with the geography. That’s why guerilla warfare was so effective. This alerted us to our porous frontline, and I guess by now you know what that means. More foot patrols.
Our Captain, nice man that he was, set up a schedule. We were to spend two days in the trenches and one day in a house in town. Boy, it was cold and windy in the trenches. We would laughingly say that if the Germans attacked, we would have to pee on our machine guns to defrost them. I envied the Krauts in the bunkers. Sometimes I felt like peeing on my feet. They were so cold. That was one of our pet beefs. We were not supplied with proper winter footwear. I guess the Top Brass were preoccupied with the warm South Pacific.
After many cases of trench foot, the Brass decided to address the problem. They sent us footwear called Shoepacks. The only problem was you could not wear them for more than a couple of hours because they hurt so bad. Who said military intelligence was an oxymoron? I just did. You wonder what kind of testing they did in the states. What a waste. After the first week, no one even tried to wear them. An army may travel on its stomach, but they walk on their feet. That’s why whenever I ran across a Kraut stiff, I would rifle his pack for some clean woolen socks. Can you imagine stealing socks from a dead man? I never got trench foot though.
Well, the right time finally came. I was going to spend a day in town. We were going to sleep in a bed in a house. No stars tonight. Ceilings. It was months since that had happened at the front. Whenever we occupied a town, we would immediately set up a perimeter defense on the outskirts. We slept either under the stars, under a tank, or if it was very cold, a cozy double slit trench.
Let the gossip start. We hiked down from the trenches into this beautiful city, a ragtag bunch of GIs. When it was cold, we wore most everything we owned. I wore regular underwear, long Johns, a set of olive drab fatigues, combat jacket with two pairs of socks and a knit cap under my helmet and don’t forget gloves. You can see bowel movements came only when absolutely necessary. We did not look like the GIs you saw in the newsreels.
The Sergeant assigned us to a house with one room, two beds and four soldiers. We rushed in and tested the beds. Ah, I imagined sleeping in my skivvies with no shoes on. Now if I could only wash my feet. Then I remembered I changed my socks a week ago. So, what’s the rush? After eating dinner, we played poker. One of the reasons we were always looking for loot, like pistols, watches and cameras, was that we would sell them to the rear troops and use the money to play.
There was this older GI about 35 years old. His name was Mike Arendic. He told me he had sent home $10,000 since he was overseas. In those days, that was a fortune. We teenagers knew Hoyles Rules of the game. But the old dude knew how to win. Now I’m an old dude and I still lose after playing a while. We hit the sack the next morning. When we awoke, the beds were all unoccupied, beds were too soft, so we slept on the floor.
Go figure.
Editor’s note: Joe is recalling one of the great Troop A characters, Corporal Michael Arendec (35804274) whose page you can see here.