Wwll Goes to War Again Youtube
IN Early 1944 I was 17 years one-time, in my senior twelvemonth at Eastern Commune Loftier Schoolhouse in Brooklyn, New York, and, after several summers spent working every bit a comic at Catskills resorts, knew that I wanted to go into prove business. Only Hitler had started a war.
Ane day a U.Due south. Army recruiting officeholder came around and said that if everyone in the class scored high enough on an bent test, they could bring together the Ground forces Specialized Training Reserve Program, the ASTP Reserve. If you were accepted, you would graduate early from high school and be sent to a higher paid for by the authorities. So when you turned eighteen and joined the ground forces, y'all would exist in a ameliorate position to cull your field of service. This sounded great to me. I knew I was destined to be drafted anyway. And then I took the examination. I think they really wanted everybody they could become. Some of the questions were not too hard, like "2 + 2 = what?" Needless to say, I passed. I was sent to college at VMI, the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, for special grooming.
Life there was wonderful and terrible. The terrible function was getting up at 6 a.g. to shave, shower, and have breakfast. And having to make my own bed with hospital corners. The wonderful part was that the VMI cadets were so welcoming to the states ASTP Reserve trainees. They never resented our sharing the school with them. VMI was not just an academic college. Founded in 1839, it was known equally "the Due west Point of the Due south." In addition to my academic studies of electric engineering and learning all almost cosines, tangents, slide rules, and such, they also trained you to be a cavalry officer. Then I learned to ride a equus caballus and wield a saber—something I had never seen whatsoever kid from Brooklyn do.
When I turned 18, I was officially in the ground forces. They sent me to Fort Dix in New Jersey, which was an induction center. And fifty-fifty though I had spent a semester studying electrical engineering science at VMI, the army in its not bad wisdom decided that I should exist in the field artillery. They shipped me out to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center. When reduced to its initials, it spells FARTC. (Which somehow lingered in my subconscious and later made its way into a comedy scene in my film Blazing Saddles. Waste not, desire not.)
Fort Sill is in the southwest corner of Oklahoma. Information technology's cold, it'southward flat, and it'southward windy. If you ever have a chance, don't go there.
Having gone to VMI, bones training at Fort Sill wasn't that hard. Y'all learn how to behave a burglarize, how to drill with a rifle, and how to shoot a rifle. And we'd go on long marches—5, 10, occasionally 20 miles—with only x-infinitesimal breaks. That was tough. Then there'd be the infiltration form, where they tested your skills and used live ammunition while you lot kept your caput downward and crawled on your elbows and your knees. That was scary.
The more reassuring part was that I was trained to be a radio operator. That was going to exist my job when I went overseas with a field artillery unit.
No 'Shortcutting' the jam
THE Regular army was an didactics. A really rough education. I'd never gone to the toilet before with 16 other guys sitting side by side to me. I would go crazy waiting for the latrine to exist free of people so I could rush in, do my stuff, and rush out. It took a lot of getting used to.
Sitting with 12 other guys having breakfast was another new experience. Everything was "Pass the butter! Pass the milk! Pass the sugar! Pass the jam!" There was a strict code. When somebody said, "Pass the jam," you weren't allowed to stop the jam and put any on your own plate. That was chosen "shortcutting" and was not allowed. You had to laissez passer the jam to the person who said "Pass the jam," even though the jam looked good, and you lot wanted to take a little on the way. Information technology was forbidden.
When we were on bivouac—a temporary campsite abroad from the barracks—we'd stand in the chow line with our mess kits. Mess kits were two small oval aluminum trays with indentations for food and an aluminum knife, fork, and spoon fastened. Y'all waited with your mess kit, and they'd throw some beef stew in 1 of the indentations. Then came the mashed potatoes, and even though in that location were other indentations for the mashed potatoes they always threw it correct on superlative of the stew. And so—you won't believe this—for dessert there were normally sliced peaches. Which of course, you expected they would put into 1 of the remaining empty places in the mess kit. Only what did they practice? They hurled it right on top of your potatoes and beef stew. They simply didn't care. And we were starving then we gobbled it down. (For some reason, to this day I'm vaguely cornball for some sliced peaches on top of my beef bourguignon.)
After grub, you waited in line over again to clean your mess kit. Beginning you lot swirled it around in a garbage can bubbling with hot soapy water. Then you moved it to the next garbage tin of rinse water, still filled with the remnants of soap. And so the last garbage can with clear hot water. That did the chore. It never occurred to me to inquire my sergeants and officers: Why exercise we have to do all this stuff? Isn't there a better style? Couldn't we take a little more time for reading a volume we liked, or mayhap taking a nap once in a while? And then I realized: That'south why the army likes 18-year-olds. No questions asked. You do what you're told.
When I finished basic training at Fort Sill, I was shipped dorsum to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. I was lucky to go a weekend in New York then I could see my mom, my grandma, my aunts and uncles, and the few friends who were also in the service only hadn't shipped out withal. I stuffed as much of my mom's delicious food every bit possible down my gullet. She made me things I loved like matzo ball soup, murphy pancakes, and stuffed cabbage—things I knew were hardly ever served on an army chow line.
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Seasick and sleepless
AND And then I NIGHT—I remember it was effectually February 15 or 16, 1945—together with 3 or four hundred other guys, I boarded a troop ship at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the SS Body of water Owl. I remember going downward below to the third or fourth deck, and I was greeted with the sight of rows and rows of stacked metal bunks. Each row was half dozen beds high. It looked like hundreds of bunks. Unfortunately, in my row I got the third one, which was right square in the center of the stack with what looked like a 200-pound G.I. above me.
Things were fine until the ship got to the open sea. Nobody told me about the North Atlantic in February. Huge waves slammed the states from side to side and and then, similar a corkscrew, moved us way upward and plunged u.s.a. way down. And I realized there was no manner to stop it.
Soon the throwing up began. Information technology quickly became a cacophony of puking that never stopped. I was strong and brave for about 8 days, but and so I could no longer take sleeping downward in the incredible stench that permeated the lower deck. Non simply were we weathering a stormy Northward Atlantic in belatedly February, nosotros were as well zigzagging every few miles to avoid High german U-boats.
It occurred to me that even though the sinkings of Allied ships were getting dramatically lower in early on 1945, in that location was notwithstanding the bad-luck run a risk of a U-boat deciding to sink our troopship. So I decided to have my chances sleeping on the top deck. With $20, I bribed a merchant marine sailor to let me put my sleeping purse under a lifeboat, and he was nice enough to give me some all-weather condition tarps to cover me against the sea spray. It was rough up on deck, simply then much meliorate, both odour-wise and torpedo-wise, than sleeping downwardly below.
Reassigned again
Fortunately I only had to do information technology for ii nights, for on the third dark, there it was—the rugged declension of French republic. Soon we were moored at the port of Le Havre. Only even though I was sent overseas as a radio operator in the field arms, the ground forces once once more decided that I should be something else. This time information technology was a combat engineer. The army moved men to diverse units as needed; I was transferred with some of my shipmates to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion. We were put on long troop transport trucks and sent further inland in Normandy for combat engineer training. Small groups of men were deposited at different villages.
Viii men, including me, got off at a niggling farmhouse with a sign on the archway that said "Mon Repos." It occurred to me that Mon Repos—"My Repose"—was a rather grandiose name for, maybe, the summer home of a retired nobleman. But it turned out to be only a country farmhouse. It was in the village of Saint-Aubin-sur-Scie. The hamlet was virtually a larger boondocks called Offranville, not far from the fairly big and busy port of Dieppe on the English Channel.
Nosotros were taught to safely unearth land mines. Some of them were big, and some of them were smaller. The large ones were called Teller mines. They carried a lot of explosives in them. Yous would have to probe the earth lightly with your bayonet and if you heard Tink! Tink! Tink! you knew there was something dangerous underneath. Y'all had to be very careful. So y'all would articulate away the dirt so ask the aid of the one guy in your platoon who was an expert at defusing mines—who really knew what and where all the wires were. He would take out a whisk broom and lightly dust away the earth surrounding the mine and continue to disengage the fuse. I couldn't really meet exactly what he was doing, because we were a expert 20 yards away hunkered down beneath our steel helmets. Lucky for me, our adept always defused them without a mistake.
Other land mines were trickier. They were prepare with tripwires. Soldiers could be walking, hit the tripwire about them, and and then you lot'd hear a click and an Due south-mine—a canister filled with all kinds of shrapnel nicknamed a "Bouncing Betty"—bounced upward about chest loftier and, for a radius of twenty anxiety, destroyed anything around it. If you heard that click, y'all knew that the mine was in the air, and you hitting the ground as quickly as you could and buried your confront in the globe because information technology exploded in a conical fashion. The closer you could go to the ground, the safer you were. Running was not an option.
We were also taught to search and clear unoccupied houses of booby traps. What'southward a booby trap? Well, for example, if y'all were sitting on the john and pulled the chain behind yous, sometimes instead of the flushing sound you might hear a loud explosion and notice yourself flying through the air. Which would mean that a booby trap had been positioned in the water cupboard in a higher place the toilet. So earlier troops could occupy a domicile, we had to be certain information technology was cleared of booby traps.
To this day, even though I'grand not a soldier and I'yard non in Deutschland and I'k non in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode, I have a tendency to stand up on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap—which hardly makes whatever sense in a restaurant in New York. Needless to say, I never saw any, but I still breathe a sigh of relief every fourth dimension I look in and just come across water.
In addition to immigration mines, gainsay engineers were taught to build makeshift structures to span small-scale rivers or creeks. They were called Bailey bridges. It's similar a giant erector set: the bridge is constructed on one side of a river or a creek, and and then swung over the water and dropped downwardly on the other side. They were light, practical, and strong enough to support the weight of 6×half-dozen trucks or even a Grant or a Sherman tank.
When our preparation in Normandy was over, we boarded more than half-dozen×6 trucks and fabricated our way through Kingdom of belgium down to France'southward Alsace-Lorraine region, on the German edge. I was lucky to go through Kingdom of belgium on my way to Germany a couple of months later on the Battle of the Bulge. Had I been born vi months earlier, I probably would have been fighting in that and who knows what would have happened? Anyhow, luck was with me, the Germans were finally in retreat, and life got a little amend and a little safer.
fortune favors the brave
Nosotros were stationed in the German city of Saarbrücken, right on the border with France. The 1104th Combat Battalion was fastened to the Seventh Army. Our job was to use our gainsay engineer training in land mine and booby trap detection to clear the dwellings in newly captured territories. It was hard work, not to mention scary work, merely we went over everything with a fine-toothed rummage.
One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we establish a instance of German language Mauser rifles nigh an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt activeness. Sure plenty, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a competition. There were these white ceramic insulation things upwards on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I'd made near $21 when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: "Go back to the base of operations immediately!"
When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving speedily all over the place. My company commander told us that army communications had been severed. It seems that some phone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh!
I chop-chop realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. Then knowing that we were actually not in danger, I gallantly offered to accept my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent u.s.a. off with a salute that connoted something similar, "Y'all men are a dauntless agglomeration." We never allow on.
'Is there anybody who can tell a joke?'
Information technology WAS THE Commencement of May 1945, and information technology looked similar the state of war in Europe was rapidly coming to a close. My unit was then stationed in a German boondocks called Baumholder, in the southwest function of Germany. We occupied a pocket-size High german schoolhouse. There was a fellow soldier with me named Richard Goldman, who later became a well-known revenue enhancement lawyer. He had been with me on the boat coming over, with me when we were transferred from the artillery to the combat engineers, and generally slogged through the mud by my side as we tried to stay alive during the state of war. Richard was very smart. A lot smarter than I was. Considering on V-East Day, that glorious 24-hour interval that the war ended in Europe, he marched me downwardly to the cellar of the school and showed me some 1000 rations and a bottle of wine that he had procured for u.s.a..
I said, "Dick, what'south this all nearly?"
He said, "Fifty-fifty though the shooting ended today, tomorrow is the official announcement of 5-East Day. Everyone volition become crazy. They will exist joyously firing their weapons into the air. No one in that country of euphoria will realize that what goes up must come downwards, and the bullets will surely come raining down on what's below. And then that's why we are going to spend the next 24 hours in this cellar, trading the joy of victory for the tired cliché of just staying live."
And then thanks to the savvy thinking of Richard Goldman, I'1000 still here.
The state of war was over, but I didn't become dorsum to America immediately. Nosotros became function of the Army of Occupation. It was much safer, but kind of boring.
One 24-hour interval, a lieutenant from Special Services who was touring army installations in our area said, "Is in that location everyone in this unit who tin sing? Dance? Tell a joke or play an instrument?"
I immediately raised my manus. He said, "What can you practise?"
I said, "All of the higher up! I can sing, trip the light fantastic, tell jokes, and play the drums." I told him all about what I had done from age 14 on in the Borscht Belt—an appreciating term for the area of the Catskill Mountains nearly 90 miles due north of New York City replete with Jewish summer resorts—where I'd discovered I was a comedian. He asked my CO if he could borrow me for a few weeks. Then I joined his Special Services unit of measurement and became one of the comics in a diverseness show touring different army camps. Needless to say, I was an exceptional addition to his staff. Equally a effect, the lieutenant asked my CO if he could permanently transfer me to Special Services. Permission was granted, and I was an entertainer one time again.
I reported to Special Services in Wiesbaden, Germany. I was made an acting corporal and put in accuse of the entertainment at non-com and officers' clubs. It was a corking gig. I was busy putting together German civilian talent with American G.I.southward who could sing, dance, and play instruments for diverseness shows that I would MC. I was about disappointed when I was told my time in Europe was upwards and I would exist going back to the U.s..
The journeying back to America in Apr 1946 was a lot faster and safer than the journey to Europe. We were on the Queen Elizabeth, a cute boat and a large footstep upwardly from the Sea Owl. It was seven or viii in the morning when we entered New York Harbor. At the sight of the Statue of Liberty smiling down at us, many a G.I. broke into tears. I recollect I was one of them.
I was sent to Fort Dix for a month or two before processing my reentry into civilian life. I did some camp shows with Special Services while at that place. I exercised my songwriting skills past writing parodies. For instance, instead of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine," we'd sing, "When we begin to clean the latrine." And for "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Male child of Company B" we rolled up our pants legs and became the Andrews Sisters.
I was discharged—honorably, I might add— in June 1946. Being a civilian again was wonderful and terrible. I didn't have to eat in a mess hall anymore; I could eat Chinese, Italian, or deli anytime I wanted to. But what to wear? In the army it was easy. You put on the same clothes every twenty-four hour period. Simply I had really grown about an inch and put on about 20 pounds while I was overseas, so I had to get a whole new wardrobe. My favorite fly-tipped black-and-white shoes were heartbreakingly too pocket-size to wear anymore. I had grown up.
The army didn't rob me of my youth; it really gave me quite an teaching. If you lot don't get killed in the regular army, you tin learn a lot. You learn how to stand on your own ii feet. ✯
From the book ALL ABOUT ME! My Remarkable Life in Show Business by Mel Brooks, published past Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random Business firm, a segmentation of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Mel Brooks.
Source: https://www.historynet.com/mel-brooks-goes-to-war/
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