The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [12]
One of those new draftees was Samuel DiMaggio. DiMaggio was a first-generation American. His father, Giuseppi, came over from Sicily in 1902, using money that someone had agreed to loan him for the voyage. Having worked for two years to pay back his sponsor, Giuseppi traveled back to Sicily to fetch his bride, and after returning began his career as a railroad man in Albion, Michigan, roughly ninety miles west of Detroit. After a few years, he took a job with the largest local employer, Malleable Iron Company, which made parts for automotive manufacturers. Sam Dimaggio was born in 1916 in Albion on a table in a house owned by the company.
Like the Jastrzembskis, the DiMaggios cultivated a large garden in their backyard, growing most of the food they ate. By fourteen, Sam was working at the Malleable Iron Company in order to pay for school supplies and books. On the night shift, he stoked fifty potbellied stoves with coal; it was hard, grimy work. In 1935 he graduated from high schoool, fulfilling a dream. But the dream ended there, and shortly after, he returned to his old job.
In 1941 his life changed forever in the form of a draft notice. He viewed it as the break he had been waiting for. He would put in his year and, in the interim, figure out what he wanted to do with his life. When the gates of the Malleable closed behind him for the last time, DiMaggio glanced back and said, “I’m never coming back here, you son of a bitch!”
On April 11, Good Friday, DiMaggio reported to Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan. A few days after Easter, he was on a southbound train without the vaguest idea where that train was headed. Two days later, he arrived at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. He had never been farther than ten miles from home.
Physically, Camp Livingston was a far cry from Dis-regard. It was a spacious, thoroughly up-to-date camp with gas heaters in all the tents, heated latrines, bathrooms with an unlimited supply of hot water, washing machines, and raised walkways made of crushed stone or oyster shells. Livingston was a veritable military city with over fourteen thousand tents, fifteen hundred buildings, laundries, bakeries, post offices, fire stations, and hospitals.
At Livingston the 32nd’s training lacked a sense of urgency. DiMaggio was surprised by how “casual” it was. First Sergeant Paul Lutjens of the 2nd Battalion’s E Company admitted, “No matter how much our officers and non-coms talked about combat, we couldn’t help but think they were talking about somebody else.”
In late summer 1941, the army initiated the Louisiana Maneuvers, the largest peacetime war games in U.S. history. Four hundred thousand men trained in the unrelenting heat and humidity of the hills, valleys, and pine forests of Louisiana and east Texas. The experience was intended to toughen the men, and to develop their skills in the field. With an eye toward the European Theater of Operations rather than the SWPA, the men were trained in modern, mechanized, mobile warfare that emphasized World War I tactics based on big guns preparing the way for infantry.
The maneuvers were considered a great success, though they would have no practical application for the 32nd Division once it arrived in New Guinea, where jeeps, tanks, and trucks were neutralized by a terrain that reduced war to its most primitive. It was not that the opportunities for mimicking New Guinea’s conditions did not exist. “The swamps of Louisiana were so available,” Major Herbert C. Smith, then the 128th Infantry Regiment’s supply officer, wrote with the clarity of hindsight, “…but we did not train in them…. Had we only known.”
During the Depression, fathers earned money any way they could, and Alfred Medendorp was no exception. He had gone to chiropractic school, but after getting his diploma discovered that he did not enjoy practicing. Then he took a sales job with a biological supply company,