they received their commissions as ensigns, USNR, Mendelsohn and Miller were assigned to train naval amphibious crews for the coming invasion of Europe. In the long, anxious days and nights preparing for D-Day in the English Channel they shared a longing for sleep, a desire to get the damn war behind them, and unsettling fears about what was waiting for them in Fortress Europe.
On D-Day they hit the invasion beaches together but saw each other only one more time before Ted was assigned to the Normandy beachhead and Miller got orders to return to his ship and proceed to New York to prepare for the invasion of Japan. From that point on, the friendship was nurtured by V-mails and letters.
One letter from Max caught up with Ted when he returned to England after the beachhead had been secured.
Teddy,
If you get to London again, look up Alex Hanson, an old buddy who’s working for Yank Magazine. I’m seeing his sister, Maggie, while my ship is in dry-dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Terrific girl, Maggie. You’d like her. You ever coming home? It’ll be lonesome in the Pacific without you, pal.
Max
After VJ-Day, Max was discharged and was eagerly embraced again by Newsweek magazine. When Ted’s discharge papers came through, he found himself adrift in London, hungry to see beyond the beachheads and liberated ports of Fortress Europe that had been his truncated world since D-Day. He wanted to explore Rome, visit Vienna, cross the Alps, and, after the ennui of his goddam beachhead, enjoy Paree! And he wanted to write about this new world, not the one of marketing milk in Atlanta. When he met with Alex Hanson at Yank magazine, his stars started to come into alignment.
Yank was beginning its final months of publication, and was trying desperately to find the reporters needed to tell the liberation story. Hanson enthusiastically introduced him to the managing editor, and Mendelsohn was taken aboard. For six months he wrote a column for Yank that he called “Kilroy Was Here,” vivid recollections from the sailors and soldiers who had liberated the beaches and braved the killing thickets and hedgerows of France. When Hanson sent the reportage to his new brother-in-law, Max, in New York, Ted received his first American assignment as a reporter.
Teddy,
When you’re done with Fleet Street, Newsweek can use you to tell our readers what our kids are leaving behind. Your word pictures are as graphic as Bill Mauldin’s drawings in Stars and Stripes. We’ll pay you a hundred bucks a column, once a month. Tell us what you find in what’s left of Hitler’s Europe. Your press card will be in the next mail.
Max
With the first paycheck from New York, Ted bought an English bike and began the personal exploration of Europe he had promised himself. Within 36 hours the tour was nearly aborted when he swerved into a canal trying to avoid a hurtling Red Ball truck convoy outside of Saint-Lô. He was scrambling out of the slimy water, hauling his wrecked bike, when the driver of the last truck in the 30-truck convoy saw him and wheeled the loaded truck off the rutted highway. The black GI leapt from the cab. “You okay?” He extended his hand and helped the bleeding and shaken Mendelsohn to his feet. “Good reflexes, man! I’ve seen worse slides into second base. You sure you’re all right?”
Ted wiped the muck from his face and stared at the wrecked bicycle. “I made second safe, but my bike was out by a mile.” With disgust he tossed the bike back down in the weeds and sank, exhausted, to the roadbed. “Thanks for the hand, Mac. You got a load to deliver. I don’t want to keep you.”
The driver squatted beside him, exploring the cut on Ted’s forehead, trying to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief soaked from his canteen. “Doesn’t seem deep. I don’t think it’s much to worry about. I got a truckload of medic supplies, but you’re not going to need them.” He sighted down the empty and silent highway, seeing only the clouds of dust from his convoy that still lingered like ghosts in the dusk. “Gotta catch up with the trucks in Chartres and then I got a detail to deliver to a place called Dachau. You know Dachau?”
“Dachau? Never heard of it. But if you’re really going into Germany can I hitch a ride with you? I’ve been stuck in Normandy since D-Day and I’d like to see Hitler’s playground and the Supermen. The Krauts have just been mostly the invisible bastards who’ve kept me from going back to Atlanta.”
“Atlanta! You must be kidding. You’re going back to see my mammy in old Dixie? You really from Atlanta? I can’t believe that! I’m from the south side. Went to Carver High.” He grinned. “Don’t guess you went there, too. Wrong color, man. Name is Sam. Sam July.”
Ted took his extended hand. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
“Climb aboard. I can always use a back-up driver.” July threw the truck in motion. “We ought not be out here alone. The krauts love to surprise us.” He stared out the grimy windshield. “Watch the sky on your right.” When the convoy came into view he lit a cigarette and passed Ted the deck. “What did you do in Atlanta?”
“I worked for Eli Dairy.”
July slapped his hands against the wheel. “Best damn milk in all of Atlanta!” He turned and looked at Mendelsohn with a new interest. “Mendelsohn,” he said, “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn?”
Ted tried to smile. “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn.”
“My Grandpa Phineas on my mama’s side had a route with Eli, horse-drawn,” said July. “Horse’s name was Moses.” He laughed. “Used to let me feed Moses once in a while. He and Moses delivered for Eli for twenty-seven years.” He smiled, watching Ted out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, now you can deliver for me!”
“I’m not as dependable as Moses,” said Mendelsohn. “But I do land in the bulrushes.”
They were laughing as they rolled into Chartres.
From Yank magazine:
KILROY WAS HERE
There is no way, no way I know, for an American born in the twentieth century to really understand what I am seeing. This is the concentration camp of Dachau, a German invention. It was erected as the very first camp for political prisoners by Adolph Hitler in 1933. Just beyond these bullet-riddled and now deserted guard towers is an unrecognizable nightmare world, created by the same nation that blessed us with Bach, with Beethoven, with Mozart. There is no way.
What I enter now is a killing ground, an extermination camp with a still-warm crematorium, rail tracks still shivering from the last transport of the men, women, and children who have been delivered here to be murdered. In front of me is a rotting pile of 2300 human corpses, and the riddled bodies of wild carrion dogs who had been feeding on the flesh, shot by outraged GI’s when they broke into the camp, and the ashes of 400 innocents whose bodies were set on fire by the terrified Nazi guards as our troops stormed the gates. I wondered if some of them were Mendelsohns who never reached America. There is no way.
There was no way for General Eisenhower either. The unspeakable horror assaulted him when we liberated Dachau. In his fury he ordered our troops to go outside the camp and round up every German male in the village and march them slowly, one by one, through the entire slaughterhouse. The Nazi commandant was laid on the top of the rotting corpses, and the villagers were forced to spit upon him. Even for this five-star General, born in Abilene, Kansas, just before this century began, a man from a family rooted in Germany, there was no way. Dachau was such an obscenity that his very humanity felt assailed. No way to understand how his family’s spiritual home could be so profoundly defiled.
There
