Dead Men Do Bleed
Alternate blog for True Blue Sam.
Thursday, August 7, 2025
A New Rose For Alabama!
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Slippery Johnson! Gun Cleaner/Lube
Sea Foam is a mix of alcohol (smells like isopropyl), naphtha, (Coleman fuel) and kerosene. Marvel Mystery Oil is a light oil with oil-of-wintergreen added, which eats corrosion and is a degreaser. It has paraffin, which provides a protective coating to metal, and it smells good, too. Mix these together and you have a darn good gun cleaner/oil. I add about half an ounce of chainsaw bar lube to the mix, because it clings to metal really well. I keep a pump oil can in my cleaning kit for shooting this mix down the barrel, and it makes the bore shine. You can also put it on your barrel cleaning snake for a quick pull-through. Instead of paying $16 a pint for a name brand cleaner, you will have about $6 or $8 in a quart. You can use any oil you prefer; some folks like 5W-30 synthetic, some like ATF. Rather than buying Seafoam, you can substitute mineral spirits and isopropyl alcohol. You can get pure isopropyl in Iso-Heet gas line antifreeze from the car care section of popular stores or at an auto parts store.
Keep your mix in an airtight bottle, because the solvents will evaporate if given the chance. Don't use any gun cleaning product or solvent around an ignition source; and don't smoke while cleaning your guns. Beware of oily cloths from cleaning.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Time To Wake Up Now, MacKinlay Kantor
This video reminded me of an essay written by MacKinlay Kantor in which he tells about one of the bombing missions he was on over Germany, and of the aftermath of a V-2 strike on London.
"That’s what happened if you were within a certain radius of the spot where a V-2 came down. You died quickly and explosively, but it was only air which killed you: blast air. If a building fell on you, you would be squashed flat, but this blast air came just as hard as a building falling on you. It crushed your chest and still it didn’t leave a mark. ...
...So you stood beside her and you said, “Wake up, dear. Please wake up.” You said it very softly so as not to awaken her too abruptly; but she didn’t stir; and you had to keep whispering it and whispering it with your lips and in your mind."
Here is MacKinlay Kantor's entire essay:
Time To Wake Up Now---1945
That chilly March afternoon we got back from Germany around four o’clock, and promptly I went to my barracks and packed up for Paris. I was leaving the 344th Group of medium bombers, based at that time in a windy valley stretching from Cormeilles to Genicourt.
The 344th- especially the 495th Squadron, with which I had been flying-boasted a swell bunch of boys, and I was sorry to leave them. (Editorial Note by Author, 1967—Funny. Every squadron I ever flew with, in two wars, seemed like “A swell bunch of boys.” Shows I’m queer for squadrons.)
But more than that I found myself worrying about a gang of Germans I had never even seen or talked with.
Maybe they were good Germans; I didn’t know. I was convinced that a lot of them must now be good Germans in the traditional sense of the word (borrowed from our pioneer past: i.e., the only good Indian is a dead Indian). The trouble was, I couldn’t decide just how good those Germans at Olpe were, in the more ordinary sense of the word, before our B-26s came flashing overhead that afternoon.
We hadn’t intended to go to Olpe. We had been briefed for a target called Bad Oyenhausen, away up northeast of Hamm. The boys made a lot of cracks about this, naturally: they said they’d rather go to Good Oyenhausen, if such a place there were. Bad Germans, good Germans, Bad Oyenhausen, Good Oyenhausen…it was all rather mixed up in my mind.
As we twisted along the narrow road toward Paris in Colonel Witty’s car, I considered the facts of the matter. Some friends named Durato and Fender and Brady were riding with me, and we had a bottle of rather green cognac. Fender had finished his missions that day, so of course he was planning a celebration; indeed was already embarked upon it. I could talk with the others, and take an occasional swig with them.
I wished that I could get over being concerned about those Germans at Olpe.
I had flown with a very sharp pilot named Ehart, and I remembered how we all cussed when the order for diversion came crackling in over the radio. We were across the bomb line by that time, or almost. I know that we were across the Rhine, and in those faraway days of March our bomb line still lay close to the Rhine. A bomb line is an imaginary barrier set up for the protection of ground forces; it is changed from hour to hour. You cannot drop your bombs on the nearer side of the bomb line: only on the farther side, for fear of killing your own troops on the ground. Sometimes mistakes are made. That’s the way General Lesley McNair got killed.
Anyway we were diverted, and at first we thought we were going to have to turn around and go home, but more information followed. We were told to attack Olpe instead of Bad Oyenhausen.
That was fine. Olpe was close at hand, and Bad Oyenhausen was a long way off, and we had been warned about a lot of Luftwaffe in those northeastern areas. So we would proceed at once to Olpe and get rid of our bombs on top of the road junction there; and we would receive credit for a mission after all. And we would be home before we had expected. As the RAF would say, “Good show, good show!”
Well, we reached Olpe in short order; our window-ship was right ahead. When I saw his bomb doors pull down, I went back and opened the door into our bomb bay. I had always enjoyed watching bombs fall on our enemies. In the 17s I never got to see much of that sort of thing, because there I flew as right-cheek gunner in the nose. Our bomb doors were wide open when I looked, and patches of cloud scudded past a couple of thousand feet beneath. Even as I looked, the bombardier pressed his switch up forward, and the big brown plummets sank rapidly and purposefully toward the overcast. Then miraculously clouds opened to admit them. And I saw Olpe—a little place with a lot of peaked gable roofs, pinkish tile roofs, such as they have in most of those towns in western Germany. I thought again, “Good Show,” and closed the door, and went up front to watch the flak which was already beginning to appear in startled black and silver buffets ahead of us and below us and to the left.
Also I started to worry about those Germans on the ground.
I imagined many old ladies, and they were simple dumb honest souls. They had the kind of wrinkled Teutonic faces which you see on old farm wives in Pennsylvania counties…their teeth gone, the flesh on their lips all squeezed like brown flower petals around their thin mouths; and their little blue eyes were bright, as I thought of them. They wore lace caps, or maybe shawls over their heads, and they liked to keep coffeepots warm and ready on the backs of their stoves. They had flowers growing in spring gardens and maybe there were kids who called them Grossmutter.
Then I started worrying about the kids. I saw them with yellow hair and engaging little faces, and I imagined them playing with cats or maybe picking up bright pebbles in the road to play with on their mother’s doorsteps. I put myself down in Olpe. I stood around while the bombs went wham and the bricks flew this way and that way, and the concussion blasted my ears. I thought I heard people crying.
This wasn’t like bombing those flak gun positions south of Limburg, which we had attacked the previous Sunday when I was flying with Tal Pearson. Then we were after our old flak enemies—those bastards who threw the black-and-silver at us, and had at one time or another torn to bits certain airplanes that we loved and certain people who rode in them—people whom we loved also. No; and it wasn’t like attacking a Jerry fighter field or a locomotive works which had been reconditioned to make Messerschmitts. This was attacking a town with harmless civilians in it. Our bombs had undoubtedly closed (for the moment) a very important transportation bottleneck. But a lot noncombatants must have been killed.
These thoughts lingered unpleasantly with me all afternoon. They didn’t vanish even after we reached the cool tired misshapen boundaries of Paris and felt a thin spring sunset on our faces.
I went to my hotel lugubriously. When I found that I couldn’t have a room to myself I was more lugubrious than ever.
The concierge shook his head, and got out a register with a long list of names on a certain page. “All the singles are taken. You’ll have to move in with someone who’s already registered in a double room. Do you know any of these people, Monsieur?”
Halfway down the list I saw the name of Grammer, S.
“Is that Stan Grammer from Press Wireless?”
“Mais oui.”
“O.K. I’ll move in with him. I’ve known him for years.”
And so I had, and so had most of the other correspondents in the ETO. Stan Grammer is a dapper Englishman, middle-aged, and he manipulates Press Wireless with a skillful hand. I used to know him in London earlier in the war, when he wore civilian clothes, when we used to play poker down at the Savoy night after night while the sirens screeched outside and the windows shook in their casings.
Now Stan was wearing an American correspondent’s uniform, people had told me, with his Raf wings from the last war neatly stitched on the right breast of his blouse; and I supposed that he must be having a very good time in this war, because I was sure that he rather liked war.
The concierge said, as the porter gathered up in my bags, “You are fortunate. You will have the room to yourself, after all. Monsieur Grammer is with the Army at the Front—has been, for weeks.”
About ten o’clock I finished with dinner and with what reading I had to do; I crawled into one of the two beds in our room, and smoked for a while. I contemplated the miscellaneous chunks of luggage piled on top of the wardrobes, and I guessed rightly that Stan Grammer’s room was a repository for stray bits of personal belongings left there by other correspondents who had drifted off in one direction or another. I say, I tried to count the pieces of luggage and speculate as to their contents; but I couldn’t get those old Grossmuttern and minor yellow-haired Maedchen out of my head.
Finally I turned off the light and went to sleep, but that gang of Germans came all the way from Olpe and climbed into bed and crowded me. They were dead and bloody, and still crying as if their hearts would break.
Then I was awake, and it was twelve o’clock. Someone was pounding on the door which I had bolted before I went to bed. I got up and tramped groggily to the door and I looked out into the hall. There stood Stan Grammer and a porter with Stan’s luggage, and we blinked at one another for a few seconds and then I welcomed him into his own room. The porter went away, and still Stan and I were saying that it was good to see each other again. I got out what was left of my cognac and we had a couple of drinks.
“How are things up at the Front?” I asked him, but even then I was wondering why he had that big wad of cotton sticking out of his right ear.
“Front, hell,” said Stan. “Who said I’d been at the Front?”
“The concierge.”
“Nonsense. I’ve been home; on leave, in Britain.”
I told him, “I’m going over tomorrow or next day, to go back to the 305th.”
He made a wry face. “See that you go quickly to Chelveston, old boy. Don’t linger in London. It’s not nice.”
“What do you mean? V-2s?”
“They’ve been damn bad all week. Look at this.” Stan touched the cotton protruding from his ear.
“What’s the matter with your ear? Don’t tell me you got hit?”
He walked around the room, swishing the brown cognac in his glass. It was chilly; I got back into bed and watched him.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t get hit. It was concussion. It cracked my eardrum. It’s painful, and a damn nuisance, too. I have to keep putting medication in my ear.”
He said, “Larry Rue and I were just coming out of the Savoy when the thing hit. It was up in High Holborn. It was just about noon.”
I watched him twisting a tuft of cotton into a sharp point between his thumb and first finger.
“You know how the Savoy is: There’s that little court where you come in off the Strand? We were in that court, and I guess that made the difference. The concussion gave us a bloody hard wallop. I didn’t realize anything had happened to my ear at the time; but later it got to making noises and paining me, so I went to a doctor.”
He drank the last of his cognac, put down the glass, and began to take off his clothes. “God,” he said, “I’m tired! Frightfully tired. I had a frightful time getting back to Paris, frightful trouble with transportation. All the damn fools there are in world…I’m sick of this bloody war. Aren’t you?”
He put on his pajamas and got out the medicine with which to dose his ear, and went into the bathroom. I picked up a cold cigar butt on the ashtray beside my bed, lighted it, and lay there with my hands behind my head, until Stan came back and began to turn down the other bed, He said, “We counted one hundred and ninety-six bodies.”
“In High Holborn?”
“Yes,” he said, crawling into bed. “It was about noon, and all those old clerks and little office girls were just going out for their bite of lunch. The street was full of them, when the thing came down.”
…It was the girl in the light blue dress that bothered him more than the others, I think. He kept talking about her after we switched out the lights, and lay there marked only by the orange stare of our respective cigar and cigarette.
It was the little girl in the blue dress, and she had a kind of pink bow on the dress—rather like a necktie—and her hair was brown.
Stan said that they hurried to High Holborn after they had gulped back their breath; and they stood around and watched—watched the ARPs and the ambulances—watched London taking charge of its dead and its living in that kind of fumblingly, bumblingly efficient manner which London employed in such matters all through the war. Stan said that many of the bodies didn’t have a mark on them. No blood, no wounds, no nothing.
That’s what happened if you were within a certain radius of the spot where a V-2 came down. You died quickly and explosively, but it was only air which killed you: blast air. If a building fell on you, you would be squashed flat, but this blast air came just as hard as a building falling on you. It crushed your chest and still it didn’t leave a mark.
So all the prissy, middle-aged clerks, shabby grey bookkeepers in their shiny office coats, they were laid out in rows on the sidewalk, and so were the women laid out. The fat old dame with straggly hair, who’d just stepped out of the milk bar around the corner; and the trim young upper-class mother in her rough tweed suit, and the two little kids who had been tripping along the street with her, and had tripped into Infinity fresh-faced and capable by their mother's side. And all the little Waafs and Ats who had errands in the neighborhood, they were laid out, too—the Ats with the ugly yellow-ribbed stockings which would never worry them again, the blue and khaki uniforms in slow-settling plaster and brick dust.
The two-day-old carnation in the worn lapel; the shabby well-mended shopping bag; the Malacca walking stick; the crumpled pink handkerchief that it cost a coupon to buy. They were all there on that sidewalk in High Holborn, said Stan Grammer; and distant bells pealed the cry of noon, and dust drifted its powder on everyone who came into the area.
And there lay the girl in blue dress, the one whom Stan admired, the one he talked about so much. I guess that maybe he fell in love with her after she was killed…he’d never known her before.
She had brown hair and lashes, and her eyes were properly closed: they weren’t open and staring. They weren’t the peeled-grape kind of eyes which dead people have so often. They were just pretty sleepy-time eyes with soft heavy lids and lovely long lashes; and the girl in the blue dress was sound asleep.
…He said that she might have lain that way on a couch. You could imagine that you loved her, because she was so very young and had such a candy-flower smell about her, and her legs were very pretty too; the knees were especially nice. You could see her knees because the dress was pulled up rather high as she lay there amid a powder of window-glass.
You could imagine that she was on a couch, and perhaps you and she had been making love; and then you had both gone to sleep, and then you awakened and looked over and saw her. She was still asleep—brown hair and white little ears and slim throat and everything.
So you stood beside her and you said, “Wake up, dear. Please wake up.” You said it very softly so as not to awaken her too abruptly; but she didn’t stir; and you had to keep whispering it and whispering it with your lips and in your mind.
“She was very beautiful,” Stan said, there in the dark; and then he turned over and rubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “Just as if she were asleep. You couldn’t believe that she was dead. God,” he said, “I do hate the Germans, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Just as if she were asleep.” Said Stan, turning over in his bed and flouncing around until he made himself comfortable. “You wanted to keep asking her to wake up. You wanted to say, ‘Wake up, dear. You’ve been asleep a long time. It’s time to wake up now.’ ”
The smoke arose from his cigarette ash a few minutes longer; I could smell it; I had put out my cigar sometime before. Finally I heard Stan snoring, and then I turned over and went to sleep.
From: The Day I Met A Lion; MacKinlay Kantor, Doubleday, 1968
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Captain Ephraim Wilson At River's Bridge




In a letter to the Oquawka Spectator, William Tweed complained of the care he and other wounded soldiers received in the hospital in Beaufort. He related that the army doctors were keeping all of the whiskey for themselves and were not dispensing it to the sick and wounded. It may seem a bit funny now, but whiskey would have been one of the few methods of gaining relief in 1865. If you look closely at the photo of William, you can see that his shell jacket has a shoulder that has been stitched. This is the jacket he was wearing when he was wounded at River's Bridge.
We made a family trip to the battleground several years ago. The Mrs and I are pictured here, next to the Salkehatchie. In the next photo, you can see some of the Confederate breastworks.

Sunday, October 20, 2024
Busman's Holiday
DMW Photo
Sunday, June 16, 2024
I Don't Like Spiders And Snakes
I pulled it off after a few minutes to have a look, and we were astounded at the amount of blood that had come out. Evidently, brown recluse venom has anti-coagulant properties. We put the suction cup on again, and pulled less blood out on the second go. The third time pulled very little. The patient has no redness or swelling, only a tiny scab at the bite site.
If you read about the Cutter kits on the Internet you will find that medical folks despise them, and say they do more harm than good. I have never been snakebit, and I can sure understand the harm that can come from using one of these kits instead of seeking prompt medical attention, but I also appreciate the way they work for me on bee stings, and insect bites. Now we know the little suckers are good for spider bites, too.
This is a brown recluse spider. They like to hide in dark places, under boxes, rags, or etc., and can deliver devastating tissue damage with their venom. If one gets on you, brush or shake it off; don't smash it on your skin. Get it on the floor and then step on it.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out....
Whether you are a soft-bodied mammal or a hard-hearted hickory, there is something waiting for you at your demise. We do our part to send them up the chimney to heaven, and avoid all the munchiness.
The wood seasons quickly if the tree is dead for a while, so long as it is vertical so rain runs off rather than soaking in through the bark. Those seasoning cracks in hickory in less than a week are amazing and gratifying. Back To The Old Grind!
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Hard Hat Reminder
Also, that Escape Rule should not be ignored. The hickory tree's fibers slipped, and I stayed in place to get my video. A tap on the head is always a reminder that you should have been somewhere else.
Little Six Point Carcass
Our friend Dusty was out in the timber looking for shed antlers and found this little buck that has been cleaned by coyotes and other varmints. We have a lot of hunting pressure around us. There are two outfitters selling hunts, and deer hunters are all around our timber through the deer seasons. We saw more than a dozen impressive sets of antlers on social media that were harvested around us. This deer was probably killed by one of those hunters. The shooter should have contacted us and collected it, but did not. Maybe the shooter was not competent to track a wounded deer, maybe the shooter wasn't brave enough to contact us and ask permission to retrieve it. Maybe he shot this deer, saw a better one, and then shot and tagged the second one. Maybe he shot when this little deer was in line with the one he was aiming at. Who knows? It's an aggravation. The outfitters charge well up into four figures for a successful deer hunt, and there have been many trophy quality racks taken around us. This little guy will not mature to be one of those trophies in the future, so sloppy hunting is not just bothering us, it will be hurting the outfitters. The heavy pressure* around our island of habitat for trophy bucks is not sustainable, and I am sure we will be seeing fewer big racks in the next few years.
*We are skeptical about the ethics of some of the hunting that goes on around us. We commonly hear rifle shots at night during both bow and gun seasons while we are out with the dogs. Deer carcasses discarded off of bridges are big red flags.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
Valentine Countdown Finale! I Can't Help Falling In Love With You, Elvis Presley
Valentine Countdown Extra Credit! Whispering, Comedian Harmonists
Valentine Countdown! These Foolish Things, Rudy Vallee
Monday, February 12, 2024
Valentine Countdown! Love Is Like A Butterfly, Dolly Parton
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Valentine Countdown Bonus! Toot Toot Tootsie, Goodbye! Al Jolson, 1922
Valentine Countdown! That's Amore, Dean Martin
Saturday, February 10, 2024
Valentine Countdown! For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her, Simon And Garfunkel
Friday, February 9, 2024
Valentine Countdown Bonus! Tyler Childers Performs John Prine's They Ought To Name A Drink After You!
Valentine Countdown! Dancing In The Moonlight, Rudy Vallee
Before New Math, Before Common Core
...kids learned the multiplication and division tables, and were able to work out problems in their head when they went out into the world. Ernie Pyle was with engineers on Sicily during WW II, and saw them work out complex problems firsthand. The general waiting on the finished product was the first one across.
Sicily, 1943, with Ernie Pyle: "When the Forty-fifth Division went into reserve along the north coast of Sicily after several weeks of hard fighting, I moved on with the Third Division, which took up the ax and drove the enemy on to Messina.
It was on my very first day with the Third that we hit the most difficult and spectacular engineering job of the Sicilian campaign. You may remember Point Calava from the newspaper maps. It is a great stub of rock that sticks out into the sea, forming a high ridge running back into the interior. The coast highway is tunneled through this big rock, and on either side of the tunnel the road sticks out like a shelf on the sheer rock wall. Our engineers figured the Germans would blow the tunnel entrance to seal it up. But they didn't. They had an even better idea. They picked out a spot about fifty feet beyond the tunnel mouth and blew a hole 150 feet long in the road shelf. They blew it so deeply and thoroughly that a stone dropped into it would never have stopped rolling until it bounced into the sea a couple of hundred feet below.
We were beautifully bottlenecked. We couldn't bypass around the rock, for it dropped sheer into the sea. We couldn't bypass over the mountain; that would have taken weeks. We couldn't fill the hole, for the fill would keep sliding off into the water.
All the engineers could do was bridge it, and that was a hell of a job. But bridge it they did, and in only twenty-four hours.
When the first engineer officers went up to inspect the tunnel, I went with them. We had to leave the jeep at a blown bridge and walk the last four miles uphill. We went with an infantry battalion that was following the retreating Germans.
When we got there we found the tunnel floor mined. But each spot where they'd dug into the hard rock floor left its telltale mark, so it was no job for the engineers to uncover and unscrew the detonators of scores of mines. Then we went on through to the vast hole beyond, and the engineering officers began making their calculations.
As they did so, the regiment of infantry crawled across the chasm, one man at a time. A man could just barely make it on foot by holding on to the rock juttings and practically crawling. Then another regiment, with only what weapons and provisions they could carry on their backs, went up over the ridge and took out after the evacuating enemy. Before another twenty-four hours, the two regiments would be twenty miles ahead of us and in contact with the enemy, so getting that hole bridged and supplies and supporting guns to them was indeed a matter of life and death.
It was around 1 P.M. when we got there and in two hours the little platform of highway at the crater mouth resembled a littered street in front of a burning building. Air hoses covered the ground, serpentined over each other. Three big air compressors were parked side by side, their engines cutting off and on in that erratically deliberate manner of air compressors, and jackhammers clattered their nerve-shattering din.
Bulldozers came to clear off the stone-blocked highway at the crater edge. Trucks, with long trailers bearing railroad irons and huge timbers, came and unloaded. Steel cable was brought up, and kegs of spikes, and all kinds of crowbars and sledges.
The thousands of vehicles of the division were halted some ten miles back in order to keep the highway clear for the engineers. One platoon of men at a time worked in the hole. There was no use throwing in the whole company, for there was room for only so many.
At suppertime, hot rations were brought up by truck. The Third Division engineers went on K ration at noon but morning and evening hot food was got up to them. regardless of the difficulty. For men working the way those boys were, the hot food was a military necessity. By dusk the work was in full swing and half the men were stripped to the waist.
The night air of the Mediterranean was tropical. The moon came out at twilight and extended our light for a little while. The moon was still new and pale, and transient, high-flying clouds brushed it and scattered shadows down on us. Then its frail light went out, and the blinding nightlong darkness settled over the grim abyss. But the work never slowed nor halted throughout the night.
The other men of the Third Division didn't just sit and twiddle their thumbs while all this was going on. The infantry continued to get across on foot and follow after the Germans. Some supplies and guns were sent around the road block by boat, and even some of the engineers themselves continued on ahead by boat. They had discovered other craters blown in the road several miles ahead. These were smaller ones that could be filled in by a bulldozer except that they couldn't get a bulldozer across that vast hole they were trying to bridge. So the engineers commandeered two little Sicilian fishing boats about twice the size of rowboats. They lashed them together, nailed planking across them, and ran the bulldozer onto this improvised barge. They tied an amphibious jeep in front and went chugging around Point Calava at about one mile an hour.
As we looked down at them laboring along so slowly, Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Bingham, Commanding officer of the Third Division's 10th Engineers, grinned and said, "There goes the engineers' homemade Navy."
During the night the real Navy had carried forward supplies and guns in armed landing craft. These were the cause of a funny incident around midnight. Our engineers had drilled and laid blasting charges to blow off part of the rock wall that overhung the Point Calava crater.
When all was ready, everybody went back in the tunnel to get out of the way. When the blast went off, the whole mountain shook and we quivered too-with positive belief that the tunnel was coming down. The noise there in the silent night was shocking.
Now just as this happened, a small fleet of naval craft was passing in the darkness, just offshore. The sudden blast alarmed them. They apparently thought they were being fired upon from the shore. For just as our men were returning to their work at the crater edge, there came ringing up from the dark water below, so clear it sounded like an execution order, the resounding naval command, "Prepare to return fire."
Boy, you should have seen our men scatter! They hit the ground and scampered back into the tunnel as though Stukas were diving on them. We don't know to this day exactly what happened out there, but we do know the Navy never did fire.
Around 10:30 Major General Lucian Truscott, commanding the Third Division, came up to see how the work was coming along. Bridging that hole was his main interest in life right then. He couldn't help any, of course, but somehow he couldn't bear to leave. He stood around and talked to officers, and after a while he went off a few feet to one side and sat down on the ground and lit a cigarette.
A moment later, a passing soldier saw the glow and leaned over and said, "Hey, gimme a light, will you?" The general did and the soldier never knew he had been ordering the general around.
General Truscott, like many men of great action, had the ability to refresh himself by tiny catnaps of five or ten minutes. So instead of going back to his command post and going to bed, he stretched out there against some rocks and dozed off. One of the working engineers came past, dragging some air hose. It got tangled up in the general's feet. The tired soldier was annoyed, and he said crossly to the dark, anonymous figure on the ground, "If you're not working, get the hell out of the way."
The general got up and moved farther back without saying a word.
The men worked on and on, and every one of the company officers stayed throughout the night just to be there to make decisions when difficulties arose. But I got so sleepy I couldn't stand it, and I caught a commuting truck back to the company camp and turned in. An hour before daylight I heard them rout out a platoon that had been resting. They ate breakfast noisily, and loaded into trucks, and were off just at dawn. A little later three truckloads of tired men pulled into camp, gobbled some breakfast, and fell into their blankets on the ground. The feverish attack on that vital highway obstruction had not lagged a moment during the whole night.
It wasn't long after dawn when I returned to the crater. At first glance it didn't look as though much had been accomplished, but an engineer's eye would have seen that the groundwork was all laid. They had drilled and blasted two holes far down the jagged slope. These were to hold the heavy uprights so they wouldn't slide downhill when weight was applied. The far side of the crater had been blasted out and leveled off so it formed a road across about one-third of the hole. Small ledges had been jackhammered at each end of the crater and timbers bolted into them, forming abutments of the bridge that was to come. Steel hooks had been embedded deep in the rock to hold wire cables. At the tunnel mouth lay great timbers, two feet square, and other big lengths of timber bolted together to make them long enough to span the hole.
At about 10 A.M. the huge uprights were slid down the bank, caught by a group of men clinging to the steep slope below, and their ends worked into the blasted holes. Then the uprights were brought into place by men on the banks, pulling on ropes tied to the timbers. Similar heavy beams were slowly and cautiously worked out from the bank until their tops rested on the uprights.
A half-naked soldier, doing practically a wire-walking act, edged out over the timber and with and air-driven bit bored a long hole down through two timbers. Then he hammered a steel rod into it, tying them together. Others added more bracing, nailing the parts together with huge spikes driven in by sledge hammers. Then the engineers slung steel cable from one end of the crater to the other, wrapped it around the upright stanchions and drew it tight with a winch mounted on a truck.
Now came a Chinese coolie scene as shirtless, sweating soldiers--twenty men to each of the long, spliced timbers--carried and slid their burdens out across the chasm, resting them on the two wooden spans just erected. They sagged in the middle, but still the cable beneath took most of the strain. They laid ten of the big timbers across and the bridge began to take shape. Big stringers were bolted down, heavy flooring was carried on and nailed to the stringers. Men built up the approaches with stones. The bridge was almost ready.
Around 11 A.M., jeeps had begun to line up at the far end of the tunnel. They carried reconnaissance platoons, machine gunners and boxes of ammunition. They'd been given No. 1 priority to cross the bridge. Major General Truscott arrived again and sat on a log talking with the engineering officers, waiting patiently. Around dusk of the day before, the engineers had told me they'd have jeeps across the crater by noon of the next day. It didn't seem possible at the time, but they knew whereof they spoke. But even they would have had to admit it was pure coincidence that the first jeep rolled cautiously across the bridge at high noon, to the very second.
In that first jeep were General Truscott and his driver, facing a 200-foot tumble into the sea if the bridge gave way. The engineers had insisted they send a test jeep across first. But when he saw it was ready, the general just got in and went. It wasn't done dramatically but it was a dramatic thing. It showed that the Old Man had complete faith in his engineers. I heard soldiers speak of it appreciatively for an hour....The tired men began to pack their tools into trucks. Engineer officers who hadn't slept for thirty-six hours went back to their olive orchard to clean up. They had built a jerry bridge, a comical bridge, but above all the kind of bridge that wins wars. And they had built it in one night and half a day. The general was mighty pleased."
Ernie then talks about a few of the men he got to know during this wartime engineering feat, and ends Chapter 6 with this: "During the last half hour of work on the Point Calava Bridge, I saw as fine a drama as ever I paid $8.80 a seat for in New York: The bridge was almost finished. The climax of twenty-four hours of frenzied work had come. The job was done. Only one man could do the final touches of bracing and balancing. That man was sitting on the end of a beam far out over the chasm. a hammer in his hand, his legs wrapped around the beam as though he were riding a bronco.
The squirrel out there on the beam was, of course, Sergeant Levesque. He wore his steel helmet and his pack harness. He never took it off, no matter what the weather or what he was doing. His face was dirty and grave and sweating. He was in complete charge of all he surveyed. On the opposite bank of the crater, two huge soldier audiences stood watching that noisily profane craftsman play out his role.
Their preoccupation was a tribute to his skill. I've never seen a more intent audience. It included all ranks, from privates to generals.
"Gimme some slack, Gimme some slack goddammit," the sergeant yelled to the winch man on the bank. "That's enough--hold it. Throw me a sledge. Where the hell's a spike, goddammit? Hasn't anybody got a spike?
"How does that look from the bank now, colonel? She about level? Okay, slack away. Watch that air hose. Let her clear down. Hey, you under there, watch yourself, goddammit."
Sergeant Levesque drove the final spike deeply with his sledge. He looked around at his work and found it finished.
With an air of completion, he clambered to his feet and walked the narrow beam back to safety. You could almost sense the curtain going down, and I know everybody in the crowd had to stifle an impulse to cheer.
If somebody writes another What Price Glory? after this war I know who should play the leading role, Who? Why, Sergeant Levesque, goddammit, who do you suppose?"
Excerpts from Chapter 6, The Engineers' War, Brave Men by Ernie Pyle, Henry Holt and Company, 1944
PS: Go HERE to read about some of the men who made this bridge happen, and to see some photos. The first photo has a soldier who is obviously Sergeant Levesque in the center, wearing his pack harness and helmet.