Dream Catcher: A Memoir by Margaret A. Salinger Read Free Book Online Page B

feature of the terrain, and the tanks werenearly useless) behind which a German panzer division and parachute regiment were well defended. Each field was gained at a tremendous cost of human life. A day’s fighting often yielded only a few hundred yards of ground. Colonel Gerden F. Johnson of the Twelfth Infantry wrote, “The carnage was frightful. . . . The next morning it took three two-and-one-half-ton trucks to remove all the German bodies” from the field where they fell.
    After a brief rest, shower, and regrouping outside Deauville, Colonel Johnson tells us that the men of the Twelfth Infantry “climbed from their slit trenches to watch one of the war’s greatest dramas unfold in the skies west of St. Lô.” Three waves of fighter bombers—350 planes in the first wave, 350 in the second, and 1,300 in the third wave—“as far as the eye could see . . . rolled out a lethal carpet of bombs on the terror-stricken Germans, saturating every field and hedgerow from one end of the bomb pattern to the other. . . . As suddenly as this hellish inferno had begun, it ceased, and the silence that followed was eerie.” There were far more dead bodies than trucks to handle them, and they lay where they were. The entire Fourth Infantry Division (of which the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was part) began a night march on a narrow road jammed with tanks and vehicles and dead bodies. A breakthrough had been accomplished, and the need to exploit it was urgent. The road they were on came to a dead end in a swamp. The intelligence officers went on ahead and succeeded in locating a new route. They were headed to Mortain, a battle General Bradley said involved the most critical decision he had to make during the entire war.
    In four and a half days of fighting at “bloody Mortain” the Twelfth sustained 1,150 casualties, bringing the division’s death totals for June, July, and first weeks of August to 4,034, that is to say about 125 percent of the original 3,080 men. Nasty. The few men who lived through it were left with much to sicken them, body and soul.
    I remember standing next to my father—I was about seven at the time—for what seemed like an eternity as he stared blankly at the strong backs of our construction crew of local boys, carpenters building the new addition to our house. Their T-shirts were off, their muscles glistening with life and youth in the summer sun. After a long time, he finally came back to life again and spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one inparticular, “All those big strong boys”—he shook his head—“always on the front line, always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them,” he said, his hand flat, palm out, pushing arc-like waves away from him.

    O N A UGUST 23, the Twelfth Regimental Combat Team started the 165-mile march toward Paris. It was slow going; trucks slipped off the wet, treacherous roads into ditches, and the convoy was forced to stop every three hours to let the cramped, soggy troops stretch. On August 25, they entered Paris. They were the first large military force, the first American troops, to enter the city. The Parisians went berserk. My father told me that when he and his Jeepmate John Keenan arrested a suspected collaborator, the crowd spotted the man, tore him from their arms, and beat him to death on the spot. My father said there was nothing, short of gunning down the entire crowd, that they could have done to stop them.
    In Paris, he was able to get away from his duties long enough to pay a visit to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was, at the time, a war correspondent attached to the Fourth Division. They had never met, but according to John Keenan, when my father heard that Hemingway was at the Ritz, he suggested they go and see him. Their visit was, apparently, a warm one. Hemingway asked to see my father’s most recent work, and he showed him “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Hemingway had read it and said he liked it very much. 13
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