My Father's War

I am watching television when my father comes into the den. It is 1960 and I am 11 years old, and I know I'm going to get it. It's Sunday, the one day of the week my father is at home. My dad is quick to anger, and in this case I've given him a good excuse. I watch too much TV. Both parents have warned me, and I know my father will lance me with a dark look of suppressed violence and snap off the set.

But he never says a word. Instead, what's on the screen seizes him, a historical documentary about World War II featuring a scene of grimy men feeding shells into howitzers and retreating as the huge guns pound back into the earth. I am watching only because it's Sunday morning, when the viewing choice is generally limited to preachers and adults talking to one another. But for my father this footage from the European Theater is not a matter of casual interest. I can see that he has left the present. His eyes do not waver as the black-and-white reflection flickers on his brow. When he finally breaks away minutes later, he leaves the room at once, with no memory of my infraction.

From moments like that I absorbed the news that something had happened to my father on those battlefields. He was a physician but one who had been "in the war," although I did not really understand as a child exactly what that meant, especially to him.

My mother was unambiguously proud of my father's service. When my dad turned 40, my mom assembled several framed tributes to him. The one I remember best represented his war service by displaying the hardware he had worn: his silver captain's bars, the winged caduceus of the Medical Corps, his battle ribbons for service in Europe. In the middle hung his first Bronze Star and the oak-leaf cluster that came when he was awarded a second. My mother's brother, who had been a medical school classmate of my father's and had served in the Pacific, told me more than once (continued on page 169)My Father's War(continued from page 145) that my father had been a hero.

But my father never seemed to want to claim that title. He loved meeting other veterans, lighting up whenever he found out that some random acquaintance had also been over there. The conversation would quickly become a hash of numbers incomprehensible to me, references to the units with which they'd served and their battles.

Yet other subjects brought a more troubled response. From the time I was quite young, five or six, I remember hearing talk of "the camps." My father had been there, at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, as a doctor sent to assist in the care of the liberated inmates, an experience that shook him for the rest of his life. As a child, I could register only my father's intense agitation whenever the subject came up. When I was 10 or 11 my mother showed me the box of my father's war memorabilia. I remember a black SS armband and a Mauser brought back as war trophies. But the most searing items were the pictures from Dachau.

Occasionally, in the midst of gatherings of family and friends, my father could be cajoled into talking about the war. In his rendition he was only an inept and grateful survivor, always overwhelmed by circumstances. Near the end of March 1945, as the Germans and Americans were leapfrogging positions in the course of the Nazi retreat, my father had been captured. The H on his dog tags--for Hebrew--could have spelled trouble, but his skills as a field surgeon were indispensable to the ravaged German forces. His driver, however, an 18-year-old from Kentucky, was executed. My dad and he had been traveling under the Red Cross, which, according to the Geneva Convention, required that they be unarmed; the boy had pocketed a bayonet tip he had found on a battlefield as a souvenir. A day or two later, Americans overran the German camp, freeing my father. When Dad told the U.S. commander what had happened to his driver, the officer lined up every German soldier involved and had them gunned down behind his tent.

But my father's most colorful story was about parachuting into the Battle of the Bulge, the determinative engagement of the European war. He said he'd been summoned by his commanding officer, whom my father detested because, in Dad's parlance, the colonel was "a souse" and "a fruit" who unapologetically seduced many of the young soldiers under his command. Now he told my father that Bastogne was surrounded and in dire need of medical assistance. A team was being assembled to parachute in. My father was ordered to find a volunteer in his company. When he failed, the CO informed Dad that he would have to go. And so my father, without a minute's parachute training, was placed in an Air Corps plane and dropped over Bastogne. He said the airmen literally had to boot him through the door because he refused to jump and that when they did he passed out from fright. Once he came to on the ground, he found he had shit in his Army-issue woolen trousers.

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My father was not an easy person for me to know. This is a persistent theme in our society between fathers and sons, at least under the kinds of child-rearing arrangements that were common in my generation and before. My mother was at home and wonderfully attentive to my sister and me. My father, on the other hand, worked relentlessly and, like millions of men his age, was clueless when it came to the hands-on role of being a parent. I do not recall a single moment when my sister and I were left in his unassisted care. I know he never changed a diaper. He made the time to take me to Cubs and Bears games, which fostered a lifetime passion for both baseball and football, but he was always ill at ease with me--and I with him, for that matter.

And so because I did not know my father in the intimate way I wanted, I guess I took it upon myself to imagine him and the experiences that seemed to have had the greatest impact on him. In these musings the war loomed large. For boys of my age--the boomers who were bathed in World War II imagery on TV and in movies as we came of age during the 1950s--the war defined much of what we assumed to be essential about being a man. It was a war that unambiguously needed to be fought after the Pearl Harbor attack, and thus it demonstrated that patriotism, sacrifice and solidarity--and even lethal violence--are sometimes the inescapable obligations of adult manhood. (I'm convinced that many of us resisted service in Vietnam because that war suffered so much in comparison with our fathers'.)

Always dreaming of being a writer, I had started a short story rooted in my dad's wartime experiences by the time I was a senior in high school. The protagonist, Joseph Silvers, is an Army doctor from New York. Taciturn and somewhat depressed, Silvers is nominally Jewish but regards his ancestry as something that means more to the people who shun him because of it than it does to Silvers himself. In the last days of combat Silvers is dispatched to a German prisoner of war camp that turns out to be Dachau, where most of what he has assumed about the limits of human cruelty and the meaning of identity is vastly transformed.

The story was never really finished, but for four decades I knew I wanted to go back to it and to the other tales I had heard from my father. Together they became the radioactive core for my novel Ordinary Heroes, a brief excerpt from which appears on page 146. The main character, David Dubin, is no longer a replica of my old man. He is a lawyer, not a physician, and his personality and affectations are drawn more from one of my dad's relatives. Most of the action of Ordinary Heroes is invented. The novel turns on the quest of Dubin's son, Stewart, to discover the circumstances that led to his father's court-martial in 1945. As such, this book is as much a son's story as a father's; it's about both generations trying to decipher the meanings of a war that is present only in a lingering silence.

Indeed, most men and women my age will tell you their fathers did not talk about World War II. Theirs was a stoic generation, which for the most part lacked a vocabulary to discuss its emotions, especially the horror of the battlefront. Because of that, like warriors before and after, they had no way to incorporate those extreme experiences into the peacetime life they returned to. Only as the end approaches have many begun to relate some of what they endured--to their families or, quite often, on the Internet.

My father, too, talked about the war with greater reluctance as the years wore on, although when I asked direct questions he would respond. I heard the story about the American commander gunning down the Germans who'd killed my father's driver that way. But when Saving Private Ryan came out, in 1998, and Dad was in the last stages of his life, I wanted to take him and my son to see the picture together. My dad refused. "I can't go back there," he told me from his wheelchair. "Not now. It would kill me."

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Two years ago I asked my mother's permission to go through my father's wartime correspondence. His letters were stored with the box I had seen when I was a boy, the one containing the SS armband, the Mauser and the pictures of Dachau. There were well over 100 letters, most written once he arrived on the Continent in October 1944. After the end of hostilities in Europe in May 1945, he had also marked a large foldout map for my mother so she could see where his unit, the 413th Medical Collecting Company, had been stationed, since wartime censorship had often previously prevented him from saying. And finally, he had taken dozens of black-and-white snapshots, photos that ranged from stiff portraits of buddies to scenes of wartime devastation.

Going through these things was a little like sitting in a low-voltage electric chair. Much of what I read deepened my admiration for my father. He was a tender and devoted young husband and often wrote my mother twice a day. I was also somewhat surprised to find that a man who was sometimes tongue-tied in conversation wrote vividly: "All the country is snow-covered, and white and clean--you climb a tremendous hill and on the left, hidden by the hills--a beautiful little town--nestling right between the upright arms of two pine-covered plains." Although he constantly reassured my mother that he was in no danger and said repeatedly how happy he was not to be seeing action, he relished his transfer to a field hospital barely behind the front lines. "It will break my heart if they take me out of this field hospital, as we see more, do more, and our work is more important than any Evacuation or General hospital. It is here that they live or die.... It is real medicine and surgery. I am happy here for the first time in the Army."

He mourned the patients he lost--the death of a young medic he'd struggled to save for two nights brought him to tears--and lamented the logic of an Army doctor's life:

"Last nite, dearest, I had nine infantry officers in my [command post], all casualties, some wounded for the second and third times, returning with other wounded men back to the front lines. They were so glad that I let them stay around my fire and that they would have someplace to sleep for their last nite before moving into foxholes. I asked them what they think of, and after a lull of a few minutes one of the men answered, 'I think I speak for all of us, Captain, when I say that when we get up there, and crawling over foxholes, we will start praying. We pray that as soon as we get moving, we will get shot, so that we can get out of that hell again. There are only three things we can look forward to--(1) Get shot. (2) Get killed. (3) The war ends.' They all started talking after that, agreeing that they would give an arm or a leg, part of their bodies, to get out.... It brought back the power and will of some men--the guts they have--to know they have to walk into sure fire--and welcome it--just so they can get back out of it. It was hell just to listen to them."

Confronting that kind of courage, my father was inclined to minimize his own valor. He treated his capture by the Germans as no more than a bureaucratic pain that had required him to spend a day reporting to the brass. When he won his first Bronze Star, he responded to my mother's complaints that he had barely mentioned it by saying, "It only signifies that the company was doing a good job, and I was wearing a medal for them." After the fighting was over, he began to take a more appreciative view of his awards, perhaps to please Mom. When he received the oak-leaf cluster on June 2, 1945, he sent my mother pictures. "Here is the citation for the original Bronze Star medal that I was awarded. The medal itself is coming by first-class mail, so put both away and we can show Posterity Turow what a hero his papa was when we get him." That remark naturally amused me, the firstborn child.

But reviewing my dad's memorabilia provided one shock. Nowhere was any mention of his parachuting into Bastogne. To be sure, he got to the town, but his letters describe an overland trip to Bastogne on January 27, 1944, when the Battle of the Bulge was essentially over.

At the time of my father's death I had told the story of his jump into Bastogne as I eulogized him before hundreds of mourners. The prospect that it hadn't happened left me dashed. My father, much as anybody else, had his faults. He could be brash in some moods, and he was one of those Depression-era urban ethnics who took exaggeration as the native right of any speaker. But those who'd heard my father tell the story of this jump--not just me but my wife, my kids, my cousins--had a hard time believing it was fictitious. If there is anything to what I've learned in judging a witness's credibility in the courtroom, my dad's self-effacing demeanor certainly warranted belief. My son theorized that his grandfather had omitted mentioning this adventure in his letters to avoid frightening my mother.

Nonetheless I sought out prominent historians, Roger Marquet and Henri Rogister of the Center of Research and Information on the Battle of the Bulge, in Bastogne. Marquet gave me a brief accounting of the very few troops, German and American, known to have parachuted into the battle, none of whom were physicians, then added:

"I never heard or read about a surgeon being dropped by parachute upon Bastogne in early January 1945. The breakthrough in the Bastogne perimeter was on December 26, 1944 at 4:45 P.M. on the Assenois Road, and the next morning the first ambulances were already using the corridor for evacuating the wounded. This corridor was enlarged every day, and I don't see why a surgeon would have needed to be dropped by parachute, since he could arrive by the roads at less risk.

"But of course I was not present, and during the war a lot of strange and curious things did happen. Anyway, if you could find proof of the fact your father arrived in Bastogne by parachute, please let me know. It would be a scoop!"

Just when I was ready to consign the tale of the jump to some act of self-mythologizing, I met a doctor in Stark County, Ohio, where I'd gone to give a speech. He was a man my father's age, another veteran, and he was excited when I told him I was writing a book inspired by my father's World War II experiences. The doctor asked where Dad had served.

"Say," he said, "he wasn't one of those doctors who parachuted into Bastogne, was he?" He swore the episode had been documented in a medical journal some years ago, although as yet I have been unable to find it.

But when I looked things over again, I realized that what Dad said was possible. Among his snapshots is one unexplained picture taken from the window of a plane aloft. His correspondence is sparse during much of the Bulge period, and I've realized my own memory is cloudy. Did he say he parachuted into Bastogne or just into the Battle of the Bulge? By December 31, 1944, while the battle was still at a ferocious pitch, my father's map shows him at a field hospital in Perle, less than 15 miles from Bastogne and far closer than that to the front lines, where he served with Patton's Third Army as it began to pierce the Nazi siege. As a field surgeon, he remained in perilous proximity to the epicenter of the action for weeks. By any definition, he was a doctor in the Battle of the Bulge. There's no record of how he got to Perle, and I can even imagine circumstances that might have required the quick movement of surgeons, whose services remained at a premium because the Germans had captured an American hospital and several doctors in the early stages of their offensive.

So maybe my father did jump. Or perhaps he absorbed someone else's story unconsciously and brought it back as his own, a well-known reaction, according to psychologists, to the common perils and solidarity of the battlefront. I am not likely to know. One of the lessons of history, even of this intimate variety, is that not every question will be answered. The past in some ways is always gone. In combat there are as many stories as there are soldiers, and one of the most startling lessons of writing Ordinary Heroes was to see how often the recorded recollections of individual veterans vary significantly from the standard histories.

By now I am at peace with the uncertainty. The truth is that I am full of admiration for what my dad and millions of others did in the war; they were all greater heroes than I will ever be. What my father endured on a daily basis--caring for the procession of maimed and wounded, the dangers he braved, like his capture, and the horrors he witnessed at Dachau and elsewhere--would be life-changing for anyone. No matter what the details were, I connected with far more of this crucial part of his life than I had before. And he told me some great stories, which, in the true manner of a legacy, I have now made my own.

In March 1945 my father was captured by the Nazis. The H on his dog tags--for Hebrew--spelled trouble.