The Good Life (9 page)

I’d have to say that only one good thing happened while I was at the front. I was pulled off the line, along with thousands of other Gls, to see Bob Hope give his show. He was there with Jane Russell and Jerry Colonna and Les Brown’s
band. I was in the stands enthralled. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Bob was just fantastic, and all the GIs loved him so much for boosting our dismally low morale. He became a big part of the reason that I went into show business, because at that moment he made me realize that the greatest gift you can give anybody is a laugh or a song. Ask any of the legions of servicemen who saw him at that time and they’ll tell you it felt like he had saved their lives. And it wouldn’t be the last time I felt like Bob saved mine.

After we got back to the front, we continued to push east until we reached the Kocher River. We established a bridgehead at Weissbach by the first week of April, and by the end of the month we had reached the Danube River. We captured a bunch of SS troopers. One guy was really stubborn, and he kept screaming at us, “You aren’t better soldiers than us; you just had more equipment than we had!” That really made me mad. I demanded their wallets. I decided I was going to show them that since they had lost the war, their money was worthless. I took their marks to the top of a hill, threw them into the wind, and watched them float down to the town below. So much for German superiority, I thought. My buddy took me aside and said, “You idiot! Don’t you realize what you just did? You could have taken those marks to Berlin and cashed them in for American dollars!” I was floored. I had thrown away a fortune! Shades of
Sierra Madre
.

It was gratifying that the last official mission of the 255th Regiment was the liberation of the concentration camp in the town of Landsberg. It was thirty miles south of the notorious Dachau camp, on the opposite bank of the Lech River, which we were approaching. The river was treacherous and difficult to cross because there were still German soldiers protecting it,
but we wouldn’t let anything stop us from freeing those prisoners. Many writers have recorded what it was like in the concentration camps much more eloquently than I ever could, so I won’t even try to describe it. Just let me say I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the prisoners as they wandered aimlessly around the campgrounds. Once we took possession of the camp, we immediately got food and water to the survivors, but they had been brutalized for so long that at first they couldn’t believe that we were there to help them and not to kill them. Many of the survivors were barely able to stand. To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed long before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot. We were relieved to find that many of the soldiers from the 63rd Division who were taken prisoner had been sent to Landsberg, and so we were able to liberate them as well. The whole thing was beyond comprehension. After seeing such horrors with my very eyes, it angers me that some people insist there were no concentration camps.

Hitler committed suicide on April 30. Berlin fell to the Russians on May 2, and the rest of Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945.

The main thing I got out of my military experience was the realization that I am completely opposed to war. Every war is insane, no matter where it is or what it’s about. Fighting is the lowest form of human behavior. It’s amazing to me that with all the great teachers of literature and art, and all the contributions that have been made on this very precious planet, we still haven’t evolved a more humane approach to the way we work out our conflicts. Although I understand the reasons why this war was fought, it was a terrifying, demoralizing
experience for me. I saw things no human being should ever have to see. I know I’m speaking for others as well when I say that life can never be the same once you’ve been through combat. I don’t care what anybody says; no human being should have to go to war, especially an eighteen-year-old boy.

After Germany surrendered to the Allies, the fighting continued in the Pacific, and the men there wouldn’t be able to come home until Japan surrendered and World War II ended. But Washington immediately started working out a plan to bring home the troops from Europe. They came up with a point system: soldiers were given a certain number of points for how many months or years they were in the service, a certain number of points for combat versus other types of service, a certain number of points for going overseas versus staying stateside. The guys who had the most points, like my brother Johnny, were able to come home right away.

Because I had only served four months, I had to stay behind in Germany as part, of the Occupying American Army Fortunately, I managed to get myself assigned to Special Services, the division of the military that had the task of entertaining the occupying troops. The immediate goal of Special Services was to provide as much distraction as possible, to help the troops keep their minds off the fact that they weren’t going home yet. Of course, this was made even more difficult because there was a regulation that the Gls were not allowed to fraternize with German women. That lasted about a week and a half—who else were we going to fraternize with? Even the officers “fraternized” like crazy, if you know what I mean. Before the actual surrender there had been a general call put out that anyone who could entertain—guys who sang, danced, played instruments, did imitations or comedy, anything—should
report to Special Services. The way I found out about it was pretty funny: I was singing in the shower, and a passing officer heard me. He said to me, “You know, you’ve got a great voice. You should get into this band they’re forming.” That was the 255th Regiment band.

The band had originally been organized about a year and a half earlier, in 1943, back at Camp Van Dorn in Centreville, Mississippi. Marlin Merrill, who had been a music teacher back in civilian life, started it. He was something of a misfit in the army—in fact, we all were, and proud of it—and when they first drafted him, he was assigned to drive jeeps. Eventually, whoever was in charge had the good sense to ask him to put together a drum and bugle corps. He found a few guys who could play saxophone and gradually shaped them into a swing band. He eventually gathered up enough musicians to form two full bands. They played dances, USO shows, and other military social functions throughout Mississippi and Louisiana.

Most of the guys at Camp Van Dorn were given extensive training in jungle warfare and therefore assumed that they’d be shipped to the South Pacific. So they were surprised when they wound up being sent to Germany to fight the Battle of the Bulge.

The 255th Regiment had been taken out of combat by the middle of May and stationed in the town of Mosbach. To keep the morale of the troops up, the officers in charge began distributing sports equipment and musical instruments. Marlin was given permission to reassemble his band, and he started by trying to find as many men as he could from the original Camp Van Dorn unit. He managed to round up eight of them.

I was there on the second day of the band’s reformation. I found out where the band was staying, and I approached one of the musicians and told him that I wanted to try out for the
singing job. It turned out I couldn’t have picked a worse guy to ask, since he happened to be the band’s vocalist, George Duley. Half jokingly he answered, “Nobody gets my job, son.” But he helped me get an audition, and when they liked what they heard, George and Marlin went to the colonel and arranged for me to be transferred to the band. George quickly put together three background singers, and together we formed the band’s vocal quartet.

Marlin Merrill was a remarkable guy. He was never officially made an officer, even though he was in charge of all of us and even though there was at least one corporal in the band. He couldn’t have been more than thirty years old, but he seemed ancient to the rest of us. We were only eighteen or nineteen, so we affectionately called him Pops. Marlin conducted the band and wrote all the arrangements. He would get what we called hit kits, a collection of lead sheets or piano lines to the latest songs from back home, and he’d score them himself He had such a great ear that he didn’t even need a piano. He’d work out all the difficult transitions and create a chart, which consisted of writing out the individual musical parts for every instrument in the orchestra, in an hour. The band always sounded great.

We’d go to a different location in Mosbach every day and entertain the soldiers. I remember how glad I was to get rid of the steel helmet and the rifle that I’d been carrying around all those months. We were “billeted,” as they called it, in a fabulous house in Mosbach, one of many houses that the invading army had taken over from the conquered Germans. The place was a three-story mansion that had been owned by a local beer baron—it was right behind his brewery—and he was so rich he had a piano on every floor. We weren’t exactly the gracious uninvited guests, to tell the truth: we really messed the place up.

Not long after V-E Day the band was moved about twenty kilometers east to a town called Kunzelsau. We set up shop in what they called “the castle,” a beautiful old structure that looked like a schoolhouse. I shared a room with Manning Hamilton, one of the band’s trumpeters, who also sang in the quartet. The house in Kunzelsau had been owned by an elderly banker, and though he didn’t have a brewery in his front yard, he had something even better: a small farm.

We’d been living on C rations for so long that we’d almost forgotten what real food tasted like. You can’t imagine how good fresh fruit and vegetables taste after months of army food. The old banker also had a few chickens, and he came around and begged us not to kill them. We promised we wouldn’t, for a very practical reason: we’d rather have the eggs for breakfast every morning than a single chicken dinner. Each morning we waited for the hens to lay an egg or two and there was always a race to snatch them. I’ll never forget how wonderful genuine eggs tasted after eating the army’s powdered ones for so many months. It was grand!

We were having a high old time in Kunzelsau. The army had hastily put up signs all over the area directing other groups of soldiers to this battalion or that headquarters. We took all the direction signs for the 255th Regiment band and stuck them every which way so that no one could find us. We were like phantoms: the only guy who knew where we were or where we would turn up next was the officer who handed Marlin our daily assignments. Once a week we’d go down to headquarters and pick up essentials like underwear and food, and then we’d hurry back to our house. We were free to jam all day long. It was a glorious time.

We didn’t even mind that the paymasters couldn’t find us. In fact, when George was about to be shipped home, he received a check for $875, a fortune for a soldier back then.
He got his entire year’s salary all at once because no one had known where to find him. Money wasn’t important because there wasn’t much to buy anyway.

What was important to us was getting down to the PX to pick up our allocation of cigarettes. It wasn’t only that we smoked a lot, which we did; cigarettes were the “legal tender” of the time. You could get anything you wanted with cigarettes. Anything. Jack Elliott, the pianist with my second army band, traded twelve cartons of smokes for a really fine camera, a prewar Leica. Red Mitchell, who played in the band, found an old German violin maker who agreed to make him a bass fiddle in exchange for fifteen cartons. That deal worked out spectacularly for both of them—the violin maker gradually bartered the cigarettes into a fully outfitted machine shop, and Red Mitchell became one of the great bassists in jazz history.