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On February 4, the 4th Infantry Division crossed the Siegfried Line at precisely the same place it had in September 1944. For most troops, this was a festive occasion, their first time on German soil. But for the few veterans like Salinger who had survived the first crossing, the event was dark with the memory of fallen friends. Haunted by the first incursion’s outcome, Salinger reentered Germany wary and bitter. It is not hard to imagine him surrounded by the excitement of new recruits, whose jaunty eagerness must have fallen on his ears as obscenely as the words of Babe’s frivolous news clippings.

With the division now largely motorized, its advance through Germany was swift. Making its way to the Rhine, it encountered resistance in towns such as Prüm and Oos, the same places Salinger would have engaged only months before; but it was becoming clear that Germany had lost the war and opposition would not reach the ferocity of Hürtgen. On March 30, Salinger and the 4th Division crossed the Rhine at Worms, from which they advanced southeast through Württemberg and into Bavaria.

Meanwhile, Salinger’s professional voice was being heard back home. The March–April issue of Story magazine featured “Elaine,” his study of unguarded beauty trampled underfoot. On March 31, Babe’s exhausted prayer emerged from the trenches as “A Boy in France” was published in The Saturday Evening Post.

Throughout the final phase of the war, the 4th Division increasingly turned its attention from combat to the job of occupation. Freed of the daily struggle for survival, Salinger began to employ his counterintelligence training in each town the unit secured. Upon entering a town, he would survey all public buildings, especially those involving communication and transportation. Those would be shut down to prevent anyone from slipping in or sneaking out. To avert communication between the locals and the enemy, radio stations, telegraph centers, and post offices were occupied immediately. Salinger would confiscate their records, review them, and send them to division headquarters for further analysis.

Vital to Salinger’s CIC role—and to the safety of the 12th Regiment—was his ability to communicate with the local populations in their own language. It was Salinger, for instance, who, on entering a town, would address its citizens and convey the regiment’s rules and regulations to them. He would then screen the inhabitants, interviewing as many as possible in order to gather information and weed out threats to his fellow soldiers: plots of resistance and Nazis concealed within the population.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Salinger’s intelligence duty was his mandate to arrest suspects and interrogate prisoners. The notion of J. D. Salinger rushing from house to house, seizing villains, and grilling them under naked lightbulbs might appear absurd to us today but that is exactly what happened. By all accounts, he performed his tasks with the same integrity he applied to his writing.39

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The archives of Salinger’s agent, Harold Ober Associates, contain a document dated April 10, 1945, that lists nineteen possible stories to be included in the proposed Young Folks anthology. The list includes all fifteen stories that Salinger himself suggested to Whit Burnett in September 1944 with the exception of “Soft-Boiled Sergeant.” In addition, two stories are named that appear for the first time. They are “Daughter of the Late, Great Man” and “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls.”

“Daughter of the Late, Great Man” was never published, but the Ober document describes it as “Daughter of author gets Old Man.”* Clearly, this story was about Oona O’Neill and Charlie Chaplin.

The remaining new story, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” was held by Salinger until 1948, at which time he sold it to Woman’s Home Companion. But the magazine’s publisher found it depressing and refused to print it. Salinger then took back the story and, by 1950, had submitted it to Collier’s. At Collier’s, it was purchased by Knox Burger, who was the magazine