Some pictures from the archives

Lisa Keithley and Dale Albee

   In 1999, Lisa Keithley of Vancouver, Washington, contacted me via email after finding a story by her great-grandfather, Walter Galbraith, on my web site, tankbooks.com. She said that after her great-grandmother passed away, she inherited Walter's memorabilia from World War II, including his uniform, and she was doing a school project on his service.

   I immediately remembered Walter Galbraith. He was one of the most upbeat, humorous veterans I'd interviewed, even though he was in remission from cancer and would pass away only a year or two after the interview. I used a couple of his stories in my first book, "Tanks for the Memories." Like the story about the time he went to check on "Little Joe." Little Joe was the generator in the tank, which was parked near the side of a building during what likely was the Battle of the Bulge. It was early in the morning and the rest of his crew was inside the building.

   A 75-millimeter round was in the chamber of the tank's cannon, and as Walter climbed into the tank, his foot accidentally hit the solenoid that fired the gun. There was an explosion in the ground in front of the tank, and Walter immediately feared that he might have killed somebody. As he climbed out of the tank prepared to "face the music," as he said, the sergeant came running out of the building, nobody had been injured, and the sergeant muttered an expletive and said something like "I drove over that spot three times last night and didn't go over that mine!"

   Relieved, Walter then heard Andy Schiffler, the driver of another tank in his platoon, begin to say "That was no mine ..." so Walter grabbed Andy and told him to shut up.

   I also remembered Dale Albee, who was Galbreath's tank commander, telling me how he teared up when he heard that Walter had died. Galbreath was Albee's gunner during a particularly harrowing incident during the Battle of the Bulge when the platoon stopped a counterattack in the middle of the night, as well as through many other incidents.

   Lisa mentioned in her email that she lived in Vancouver, Washington. I had traveled to Prospect, Oregon, to interview Albee, and I thought, heck, northern Washington, southern Oregon, heck, they're practically neighbors, how far could that be? (279 miles, thank you, Mapquest). So I asked Lisa if she'd like to meet her great-grandfather's lieutenant.

   Dale said he had a daughter he was going to visit in Vancouver over the holidays that year, so he visited with Lisa, resulting in the above meeting, which was covered by the Vancouver Sun.

 

A Company officers, 712th Tank Battalion, Amberg, Germany, 1945



   I used this picture on the cover of the first edition of "Tanks for the Memories." It shows six officers from A Company -- five lieutenants and a captain -- in Amberg, Germany, where the 712th Tank Battalion was stationed after the war in Europe was over.
   Because my father was in A Company, I took a special interest in the veterans of A Company, and although none of the men in the photo are alive today, I was able to meet all six of them, interview four of them at length, and one of them briefly a couple of times during reunions.
   The two men standing are Morse Johnson, on the left, and Sam MacFarland. I wrote an earlier blog entry about Johnson, although I failed to mention that there are only two statues that I know of dedicated to veterans of the 712th. One is of Tullio Micaloni, a sergeant who was killed at Seves Island in Normandy and who is one of four soldiers on the 90th Infantry Division monument in Perier, France. The other is Morse Johnson, and it stands near the Playhouse in the Park in Cincinnati's Mount Adams district. Unlike most statues dedicated to heroes, Johnson isn't riding a horse or sticking his head out of a tank, in fact you likely wouldn't know it was him unless you read the plaque, as the statue is an abstract figure of a human form. After the war, Johnson was a patron of the arts, and was a founder of the Playhouse in the Park, which even today has a Morse Johnson Society for donors.

The Morse Johnson Memorial

 

   Johnson entered the horse cavalry and became a sergeant, later receiving a battlefield commission with the 712th. His platoon withstood nine counterattacks at Oberwampach during the Battle of the Bulge. When I interviewed Morse in 1992 during a trip to Cincinnati, he apparently was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which would claim his life a few years later.

   Standing to Morse's right is Sam MacFarland, who introduced me to the 712th Tank Battalion Association, and helped me find three veterans who remembered my dad (who was wounded twice but survived the war, and passed away in 1980). I would love to have interviewed Sam, but he died of cancer before I attended another reunion. Shortly before passing away, Sam wrote in a letter to Ray Griffin, then the battalion association president, that "Time is succeeding where Adolf Hitler failed."

   I heard many stories about Sam, including one where he learned while in combat that his wife, Harriet, had given birth to a daughter. He was a sergeant at the time, and conferred with the members of his crew as to what she should be named. They came up with Lucky. Sam was one of 14 members of the battalion to receive battlefield commissions.

   If a picture is worth a thousand words, I'd better post this before the rest of the day flies by, and I'll get to the four men sitting in the front row, from left, Bob Hagerty, Ellsworth Howard, Howard Olsen and Jule Braatz, in my next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



A remarkable voice of World War 2

The most unique literary voice to come out of World War 2 that I've encountered belonged to Morse Johnson, a veteran of A Company of the 712th Tank Battalion. Morse was a Harvard educated lawyer from the ritzy Far Hills section of Cincinnati and could have had a cushy desk job during the war; instead he allowed himself to be drafted, became a sergeant in the horse cavalry at Fort Riley, and was one of 14 members of the battalion to earn a battlefield commission.

When the war in Europe ended and the battalion was stationed at Amberg, Germany, as occupation troops, the 712th was given an opportunity to write its unit history. Every original copy that I've seen has had its cover worn off and its pages tattered from being read and shown about so much. And although there is no clear indication of who wrote what, it's clear from the eloquence of the prose that only one person could have written it.

Today I opened the unit history, titled "Well Done," to a random paragraph. This is how it goes:

"October was a month of nibbling -- at the Metz bastion -- and waiting -- for more gas, for more ammo, for warmer clothing. Fall weather had set in and with it incessant rain. The roads became mucky; the fields in which the tankers did their indirect firing became big seas of mud. Firing used up 24 hours a day and all crew members became experts with the Azimuth Indicators and Gunner's Quadrants which though inexact did not prevent one gunner from putting a shell through a window when the forward observer called for it. Ingenuity was at a premium as the tankers dug caves in the mud and built elaborate houses -- even mess halls -- with the crating slats and cardboard shell cases. In the north the 1st Army fought and won the battle for Aachen and Germany proper was at last penetrated. In the relatively quiet 3rd Army sector Metz still stood, taunting and fearsome. And as the month closed the 712th knew that it was destined to be once again involved in one of the vital campaigns of the whole war."

I don't know about you, but I get choked up when I read stuff like this; but when I first read it, more than two decades ago, I had no idea who Morse Johnson was. I even interviewed him in 1992 and still didn't know he was the author of the unit history, and the subject never came up. We talked about his youth, his time in the horse cavalry, his experiences in combat, and especially about Oberwampach, where he was a platoon leader when his tanks and infantrymen from the 90th Division withstood nine German counterattacks. Nor did I know it then but he was already exhibiting early signs of the Alzheimer's disease which would claim his life a few years later.

Morse is probably the only veteran of the 712th Tank Battalion who has a statue named after him. I was unable to find a picture of it on the Internet although I know there was one a few years ago when I first discovered it. It isn't your typical soldier on a horse with his sabre held high; in fact, you'd never know he'd been in combat, or that the statue even represented a person. In other words, it's kind of abstract. Morse, you see, was a patron of the arts, and the Morse Johnson Statue stands in front of the Playhouse in the Park in Cincinnati's artsy Mount Adams section.

After the war, when he was a prominent Cincinnati lawyer, Morse dedicated much of his time to a group called the Shakespeare Oxford Society, which is dedicated to proving that William Shakespeare didn't exist. "Founded in 1957," the society's mission statement says, "Founded in 1957, "the Shakespeare Oxford Society is a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to exploring the Shakespeare authorship question and researching the evidence that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604) is the true author of the poems and plays of “William Shakespeare.”

Morse Johnson

Morse Johnson was rather passionate on this subject and was probably one of the founders of the society. But it was a collection of his letters that his mother and sister saved -- his father died when Morse was young, 16 if I recall correctly -- that led to the realization that not only did Morse write the eloquent text of the unit history, but that he had one of the most unique literary voices to come out of World War II.

There are excerpts from 20 letters in the collection, which is posted at my original web site, tankbooks.com. Here are two of them (I suspect that in the second one, his mention of the "umpteenth counterattack," is a reference to Oberwampach):

* * *

We were in the process of taking a fair-sized town in which we had found little resistance. Oh, there was an occasional sniper from a window which forced us to throw several rounds into some of the houses and we spotted a Heine column of some 20 infantrymen retreating over a hill in the distance. But nothing else. Our tanks clanked through the streets, with the infantrymen riding on them. I noticed the door of a house begin to open and the face of a young man appeared. Instantly he beamed and turned with a beckoning gesture to his rear. At once, a little waif of a young woman – say 22 years – came out. She was thin and had an impish face which obviously never concealed emotions. The man pointed to our tank and the girl stared unbelievingly at us for a few seconds. She suddenly screamed "Viva! Viva!" clasped her hands together and then threw them outstretched heavenward. She babbled and punctuated each new burst of emotion by throwing her arms around the young man. Then started the frenzied throwing of kisses and mad dancing around like Ophelia, as we moved past and out of sight. Whether she was French or Polish or, perhaps, a German Jew, I do not know but it made me tingle all over to know that I had assisted in liberating her.

* * *

I don’t believe I ever told you about "Brooklyn." At one of our tight spots, we shared a room with an infantry squad, all of the members of which we got to know quite well. One was "Brooklyn," obviously from Brooklyn. One night he mentioned having written a song for his C.O. and with little urging sang it for us, with a song plugger’s voice and style – like Irving Berlin or even Eddie Cantor.

"Good," I applauded and it really was, "let’s hear some more of your stuff."

Here was an extrovert of the first order and for a half-hour he stood in the middle of a Heine kitchen singing his songs and telling the story behind each with a smart vaudevillian patter. I began to doubt whether all these songs were his and told him so. At once he asked me the name of my girl – which I faked – and my home town. Not five seconds later, he was singing a catchy ditty about me, the girl, Cincinnati, etcetera.

I told him to do the same for Mac, my driver, and he had just started when the guard rushed in and we had to rush out to repel the umpteenth counterattack. We worked a lot with those boys and Oley’s and my crew were always happy to see them.

The other day "Brooklyn" rode on my tank and I coaxed him to write a song for us. At once he burst out with a really dandy tune, the first words of which were: "There will be no more falling arches, there’s no more walking Yank; going to hitch a ride, going to hop inside, going to Berlin on a tank." The tank stopped and "Brooklyn" was just about to write it all down for me when his squad was called to clean out a slight pocket.

We tanks were in close support but the terrain did not permit us to be right with them. I guess I heard the shots – there were a lot of them – but I didn’t see him get it. I did see him, however, and fortunately he had died instantly.

* * *

The collection of 20 letters is at http://www.tankbooks.com/stories/stories2/morse/morse1.htm.