When Connie Comes Marching Home, Part 1

“A World Saddened, War-Torn, With Thorns So Deep”

Tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of my 23-year-old Army corporal Uncle Connie’s uncelebrated and at first officially unacknowledged death on the opening day of a massive United States-British invasion of northwest Africa code-named Operation Torch.

Connie was the devoutly Catholic draftsman son of a semi-prestigious but down-on- his-luck, alcohol-challenged architect in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He was the older and beloved brother of my then ten-year-old mother Jane, who was known “Bugs” (because of her bulging eyes as a baby) to her family.

From “The Fields of Golden Grain”

My uncle was also something of a budding wordsmith with a poetic spirit.  On December 19, 1942, responding to the news that Connie had been declared Missing in Action, the Aberdeen Central High School’s Blue and Gold newspaper recalled that Connie had authored “one of the finest columns that has ever been the privilege of the paper to run. He has been honored as the writer of one of “the ten best feature stories submitted to the annual Quill and Scroll International Writing Contest” in 1939. The Blue and Gold, which held down a page in The Aberdeen American-News, printed a selection of passages from the late teenager Connie’s 1939-40 column:   

“Catching up on the diary: About a year ago January – a world saddened, war-torn, with human hatred and passion – midnight – the air moist and warm – the sky black – the steady, sobbing out of a January thaw – the earth wept – with thorns so deep.” (Here Connie was likely referring to the German invasion of Poland, the immediate spark to World War II).

“I’ve thrilled at this: Watching a red sun sink beneath a frozen prairie.  The lonely whistle of a departing train on a cold night. Walking home along dusty country road on an Indian Sumer day – to a cozy cottage – twilight across the lake – studying under a kerosene lamp – falling to sleep to the sound of lapping wave – on October moon rising.” (Here Connie was referring Lake Kampeska, in Watertown, where the family kept a cottage I recall from a late 1960s summer)     

“Memos of a metropolitan: Moving from a small South Dakota town to the Nebraska metropolis…empty feeling of the small-town lad…homesickness that comes with it…gradual routine of the ‘big town’…consistent ten minute interludes od of a fire or ambulance siren…ever rising groan of the street car…monotonous tone of the paper boy.” (Connie must have spent some time in Omaha, perhaps on a job for his father’s firm).

“Elbowing up to the front line of a massing mob for a glimpse of ‘FDR’ and the First Lady at new Union depot…driving over to Lincoln for a view of the new South Omaha bridge…wondering if ever going back to Dakota prairies where:

The sky grows all ablaze

Toward the end of the day

And there is no smoky haze

To spoil the twilight’s stay

Where the fields of golden grain

Hide the furrow’s steady turn

And thank God for a little rain

When your lips begin to burn

Letters From “This Man’s Army”

My mother had a penchant for throwing stuff out, including a few boxes of my childhood baseball cards that would probably be worth a few thousand dollars today. One thing she held on to that I found in her Chicago apartment after she died in 2007 were two small boxes full of letters from Connie to his family while he trained for his possible European deployment in the giant Army base in Fort Dix, Kentucky and letters from friends and relatives to his parents after he was declared “missing in action.”

In his voluminous correspondence, Connie boasted of his increasing skill in the use and care of rifles, machine guns, and artillery and his promotion to corporal on the basis of his drafting skills. “There’s fifty thousand soldiers training here,” he wrote his parents, “and everywhere you look all you see is barracks…there’s lots of ‘you all’ boys from every state in the Union plus plenty of Negroes and boy are they kept in their place” (November 2, 1941).  (It’s retrospectively disappointing that Connie did not express displeasure at Black soldiers being “kept in their place” in the viciously segregated US armed forces.)

The “handsome,” “popular,” and “well-spoken” (my mother’s wistful recollections) Connie was something like “Bugs’” substitute father. He watched out and cared for his much younger sister in ways that her older and somewhat booze-dissipated parents, nominal Catholics who did not attend mass like their Army son.

Connie expressed concern for “Bugs,” worrying about her happiness after the family was relocated to the Clake Hotel in Hastings, Nebraska while the father found work designing a new army facility. He wrote to Jane directly, telling her to “mind your teachers,” “say your prayers every night,” and attend mass.

Connie worried also about the state of mind of his father, whose business was down and who visited Connie early in his son’s Fort Dix stay. The father and son had Thanksgiving dinner together in Louisville – the last time they’d see each other. “Dad said the office seemed pretty lonesome now,” Connie wrote his aunt Hazel (of whom I have fond Aberdeen memories) later in the fall of 1941.  “I imagine it does with no work and not having me around as usual. Things certainly turned around in a hurry.”  He reported that his father told him that he “envied” the “adventure” of Connie’s deployment in “this man’s army.”

Connie later wrote to his father about the promising future architects would enjoy once “this whole mess is over.”  He rhapsodized about the spread of “Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired styles across the country.”

“Almost Everything Went Wrong from the Start”

By the onset of the fall of 1942, Connie was based in England. Contrary to previous letters in which he doubted that he and his comrades would be fed into the great European war, he was about to be thrown into “this whole mess.” He’d die before he fired a single shot.

Operation Torch was launched with the goal of removing the fascist Axis from the African continent. The fascist forces in northwest Africa were French, under the command of the Vichy regime, which collaborated with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich after the Nazi occupation of France in May of 1940.

The Soviet Union had for months been pushing the Allies, the United States and Britain, to start a western (European) front against the genocidal and fascist Third Reich, which had launched an epically mass murderous invasion (Operation Barbarossa) of Russia in June of 1941. United States (US) generals wanted a landing in France and were confident it could succeed.  Consistent with the anti-communist British and US ruling imperial classes’ hope that Nazi Germany would soak “Marxist Russia” in as much blood as possible before falling to the Allies, US president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill chose instead to attack the Nazi-led Axis in North Africa. (Less than four years later, the virulent anti-communist Churchill would go to Kansas City, Missouri, to help spark the Cold War by denouncing the Soviet “iron curtain” that had “descended across the [European] continent.”)

Operation Torch, the World War 2 Facts website accurately reports, “marked the first time that British and American forces worked together on an invasion plan and would take place from November 8-16, 1942. The operation would result in a major victory for the Allies and would also include the first major airborne assault carried out by the United States during the war.”

Super.  Cold comfort for my uncle and hundreds of other US and British troops on two British ships, the HMS Hartland and the HMS Walney. The opening Allied water assault on Oran was nothing short of a fiasco, reflecting “bad intelligence” claiming that the French forces defending the port were on the side of the Allies and not with the Vichy regime under the French Nazi collaborator Marshal Petain. As US Naval History and Command reports, relying on the prolific US naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison:  

“Almost everything went wrong from the beginning. French searchlights quickly picked up the two ships, and shore batteries opened up…Oran had a number of French navy destroyers and submarines in port, and their crews reacted very quickly and effectively. By the time Walney and Hartland broke through the booms into the narrow harbor after 0300 on 8 November, they were being hammered mercilessly from all sides by French warships. After she unsuccessfully attempted to ram an underway French destroyer, the bridge of Walney was completely shot away as she drifted to the head of the harbor before sinking. At one point, the French destroyer Typhon, still pier-side, poured salvo after salvo of 4.7-inch fire into Hartland from a range of 100 feet. Fires below drove U.S. Army troops topside, where they were slaughtered by point-blank machine-gun fire before Hartland sank. Casualties were very heavy. Of 393 U.S. Army raiders embarked, 189 were killed and 157 wounded. A total of 113 British crewmen were killed and 86 wounded…The survivors were all taken prisoner by the French and held until the Vichy French in Algeria switched sides a few days later.”

“Helpless and Useless”

It was a turkey shoot for the fascists – a sadistic mass slaughter.  I have declassified eyewitness accounts sent to me by the Department of the Army.  One account, dated July 25th, 1948, comes from John C. Dietel, one of the troops on the Hartland – Connie’s ship – to survive:

“On the morning of November 8, 1942, two ships, the Hartland and the Walney, entered the port of Oran, Algeria, by breaking a submarine cable…Once inside the harbor shore batteries and machine guns opened fire on us.  After a few shells hit we were ordered below decks. Soon shells were exploding where we were…Our officers had abandoned ship except those that were killed or wounded.  I managed to get back to deck where I discovered the bridge had been hit and set afire with most of the officers in there dead. There were men jumping off the ship into the water and as they did, they were machine gunned in the water.”

Another US soldier who survived the pathetically one-sided “Battle of the Port of Oran” was Ralph R. Gower, who reported this on July 26, 1948:

“These ships were formerly [U.S.] Coast Guard Cutters that had been traded to Britain [under the Roosevelt administration’s pre-Pearl Harbor Lend Lease program with England].  There were about two hundred soldiers each the night of November 8.  The French allowed us to break the boom at the harbor entrance and enter the harbor with no other resistance than minor machine gun fire. After we had gotten in, and almost to the piece, all the resistance the French were capable of was brought into action against us.  The Americans were below top deck and were, of course, helpless and useless. Shells from the French Cruiser which was in the harbor, and from a submarine were fired into every compartment in the two boats…causing the men to panic and many were killed by machine gun fire as they tried to escape through the hatchways. I personally saw several shot as they were attempting to swim ashore…The Sub as well as the Cruiser after shelling each compartment began firing incendiary shells and they each [ship] went down burning, carrying many men with them…I knew nearly all the men who were members of my company, but as I was one of the last off the boat I didn’t see then except the following: Sgt Fred Barnes had his head blown off and I saw it lying in the helmet before I left.”

In another report, a Hartland survivor reported seeing his lieutenant dead with “both of his legs blown off.”

Quite an “adventure” in “this man’s army.” My mother’s big brother never fired a single shot in “the good war.” On his very first day of combat, he was likely trapped below decks, “helpless and useless” on a sinking ship or perhaps picked off while trying to swim to shore. All thanks to bad intelligence and, more importantly, to the general ruling class understanding – shared by imperialists on both sides of the “good war” – of frontline troops as expendable cannon fodder,

The US War Department changed my mother’s big brother’s status from MIA to KIA in the summer of 1948 as US movie audiences thrilled to Key Largo, a classic John Huston film noir in which Humphrey Bogart starred as a World War II vet who became embroiled in a conflict with mobsters while trying to pay his respects to the family of a dead late war buddy including his buddy’s sultry widow, played by Lauren Bacall.

A Boyhood Memory

Operation Torch was hailed by the knighted British historian Martin Gilbert as “the largest amphibious invasion force thus far in the history of war [as of the fall of 1942]…The invasion of French North Africa,” Gilbert wrote in his massive tome The Second World War: A Complete History, was swiftly successful.  Within seventy-six hours of the first landings, Allied troops were in undisputed control of 1,300 miles of the African coast, from Safi to Algiers” (pp. 375-76)

Cold comfort for Connie’s family and friends, who lacked official notification of his death fate for more than five years (though the news must have been completely unsurprising by then.)  

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like for my fifth-grade mother, living in a Nebraska hotel room, far from her friends and classmates in Aberdeen, to learn by War Department telegram that her dashing older brother had disappeared “over there.”   

Once when I was a third grader suffering through Mrs. Oppenheimer’s piano lessons in Hyde Park, I happened upon a songbook with the musical score of the old World War One song “When Jonnie Comes Home.” 

When Johnny comes marching home again, Hurrah, hurrah!
We'll give him a hearty welcome then, Hurrah, hurrah!
The men will cheer, the boys will shout,
The ladies, they will all turn out,
And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.

The old church bell will peal with joy, Hurrah, hurrah!
To welcome home our darling boy, Hurrah, hurrah!
The village lads and lassies say,
With roses they will strew the way,
And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home.

As I plunked my way through this minor-key dirge, I noticed tears in my mother’s eyes.  Connie never came marching home, he just vanished without the slightest hint of fanfare before he got to take aim at a single Axis target.  The ladies never turned out, the men never cheered, the church bells never peeled, and the boys never shouted for my uncle Connie.

Perhaps someday I will drive over to see the Clarke Hotel, now a senior living facility in the “red” (try brown) state of Nebraska.  

While generally liberal in orientation, my mother was not especially political.  But she hated war and was an easy convert to the movement against the US War on Vietnam. One my favorite old photos of her shows her costumed up for a national Moratorium Day March against the US War on Vietnam. Connie’s death and the way it was handled by the War Department was part of that.

That’s the best part of this war story.

The real time story gets worse, however.  It has to do with what Connie and other US Americans thought – perhaps it’s better to say didn’t know or in some cases didn’t care to know – they were fighting against in what some of us like to call “the global war against fascism.”  

I’ll tell the rest of the story on Thursday, by which time I expect homegrown fascists tp to be celebrating the results of tomorrow’s mid-term elections.