The Ghost Mountain Boys - James E. Campbell [17]
Two things they did know was that Smith was a stutterer, and he had a volatile temper. The guys mocked him behind his back.
“Look out for St-St-St-St-Stutterin’ Smith. He’ll ch-ch-ch-chew your ass right out.”
According to Erwin Veneklase, “when Smith was really mad, the stutter completely disappeared.” The guys of the 126th learned to listen for the stutter as a kind of barometer of Smith’s mood. Nobody wanted to be dressed down by “Stutterin’” Smith.
On April 7, Colonel Lawrence Quinn, the popular commanding officer of the 126th Infantry, tried to impress upon his men the importance of their mission.
“Our path will not be smooth,” he said. “We have much to do in the way of training to attain the goal we have set for ourselves—a rugged, powerful, hard-hitting, fast-maneuvering infantry team…But what we lack in perfection we more than make up for in espirit de corps…Our destination is secret; and, except for curiosity, is unimportant. What is important, however, is the fact that we are on our way to meet the enemy. War is a grim business. It is a killer business…Should you experience difficulty developing this desire to kill, you have but to recall what we are fighting for—our homes, our loved ones, our freedom, the right to live as we please.”
On April 8 at 5:40 a.m., thirteen freight trains and twenty-five passenger trains departed Fort Devens. The railroad yard, according to one of General Edwin Forrest Harding’s staff officers, was a “madhouse.” Harding, the 32nd Division’s new commander, and most of his staff had left for San Francisco almost two weeks earlier. They would be waiting when the men arrived.
Despite Colonel Quinn’s stirring speech, when the train rolled west, few of the men felt the impending doom of battle. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was four months old, and the Japanese had not followed up with other attacks on the American mainland. The men were being shipped off to war—they knew that—but how that war would manifest itself was impossible for them to imagine. As they boarded the train, they shot the bull and joked as if the train ride were just another chance to play cards, pull practical jokes, and see the sights.
Outside of a small cadre of officers, no one knew where the trains were headed. They traveled west via Albany and Buffalo and reached Chicago twenty-four hours later. In Chicago, they stopped so repairs could be made to one of the locomotives. It would be a while before they were moving again, so the men were allowed to disembark to stretch their legs.
They were all curious—just where in the hell were they headed? That’s when a sergeant recognized a relative in the train yard. He slipped by the guards at the depot platform who had been posted there to stop the soldiers, for security reasons, from talking to anyone and said, “C’mon, give me the skinny.”
As the train headed for Kansas City, the word circulated among the troops.
“Oakland,” Jastrzembski heard one of the guys say. “We’re headed for goddamn Oakland. I wonder what that means? One thing’s for sure, we ain’t going to Europe to fight the Krauts.”
In Oklahoma, the train stopped and the men took a half-mile run. By noon, it was bound for Clovis in the flat grasslands of eastern New Mexico. En route, Captain Medendorp gave a lecture on Japanese weapons.
Afterward the guys got together in small groups. “That’s it. Now it’s for sure. It’s the Nips; we’re going to fight the Nips. Those sons-a-bitches.”
If the men were headed to “fight the Nips,” no one was in a hurry to get them there. The route to Oakland via the desert Southwest was a puzzling one to say the least. In Winslow and Seligman, Arizona, they disembarked and were ordered to run again. Then there was the train itself; the farther west it got, the slower it traveled. Inexplicably, it was given low-priority status and lost “rail rights” to trains hauling freight.
As far as Simon Warmenhoven was concerned, the train could crawl to the coast. The farther he got from Michigan, the farther he was from Mandy and his daughters.