Section 5 of 14
A photograph of their unit shows the three brothers: Corporal John Otto Waskow has a square jaw and open, pleasant face; Sergeant August Waskow has a level stare and broad nose; and Corporal Henry T. Waskow has higher cheekbones, a longer jawline and a straight nose. His peaked hat sat square and even atop his head. They belonged to Company I of the 143rd Infantry Regiment. Because of the way units in the Thirty-Sixth Division were organized in towns throughout Texas, Company I was composed primarily of men from Belton. Company D, up the road, filled its ranks with Temple men. To the south, in Mexia, was Company B. Each comprised roughly 120 to 130 men before mobilization but swelled to around 200 when brought up to fighting strength.
Part of the Waskow brothers' Guard money helped take care of their youngest sister, whom they watched over. About once a week she ate lunch at a hamburger stand in Belton. She ordered an almond Hershey bar or a bag of Fritos or a cherry cola and charged it to one or another of her brothers; they settled accounts with the proprietor when they received their military paychecks. Henry Waskow also spent part of his pay from Guard duty and from substitute teaching in the Belton schools in 1939-40 to reimburse the Bell County civic organizations that had helped put him through college.73
Throughout, his college career, Waskow had gravitated toward discussion groups. The conversation often turned toward events in Europe that Waskow had followed in the newspapers. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, his prediction that his military responsibilities might keep him from teaching and preaching seemed likely to come true.
In the spring of 1940, while units of the Guard continued to drill in Belton and other towns throughout Texas, Congress introduced a bill to create the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Debate raged throughout the summer. The Guard, however, carried on as always, marching on the Fourth of July past the Bell County Courthouse as it did every year. It was unclear whether the bill would pass—and what effect a draft law would have on the Army's Reserve units if it did. Muddying the waters was President Roosevelt, who was slow to unequivocally endorse the bill in an election year because he feared the political consequences if it went down to defeat.74 But his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, endorsed the conscription bill in August as necessary to ensure a trained and competent Army if needed for defense. That freed Roosevelt from political risk. He thereupon endorsed the bill as "essential to national defense." The next month, as the German navy threatened to strangle Britain's lines of supply, Roosevelt swapped fifty destroyers to Britain in return for leases on British military bases. The swap was popular in America. That popularity, along with Willkie's and Roosevelt's support for conscription, led to congressional passage of the draft law by a comfortable margin in September.
On November 25, 1940, Roosevelt dropped the other shoe. Executive order No. 8594 brought the National Guard under federal control—and the Thirty-Sixth Division was no longer part of the Reserve. Waskow, the former schoolboy who wore the same clothes day after day, had graduated to a profession that guaranteed him a limited wardrobe.
Upon mobilization, the Thirty-Sixth Division was ordered to report to Camp Bowie, a flat patch of north Texas where construction of an Army base had begun that September. Outside the base's strangely incongruous art deco gates, the 14,000 people of the town of Brownwood prepared for 30,000 soldiers.
They had to wait. The Army planned to house the men not in barracks but in pyramidal tents, each composed of a canvas roof over a wooden base. Each tent was to hold sixteen men and get its heat from coal. However, at the last minute, the Army decided to switch to space heaters. Changing the heat source at the start of winter created a two-month delay as the Army hunted for enough heaters to equip hundreds of tents. Meanwhile, the men of the Thirty-Sixth Division had one last Christmas at home before reporting to the new camp in mid-January 1941.75
The winter was bitterly cold. The soldiers not only drilled to prepare them for battle but also worked in the open air to help finish camp construction.
"We pulled up corn stalks and made company streets out of it," said Tidwell, who had enlisted in the National Guard and was called up in the mobilization. "It was brand new."76
Waskow entered Camp Bowie as a corporal. He soon had news for Mary Lee. She collected hearts for her charm bracelet, and her brother bought her a charm in Brownwood and sent it home to her. It said "Lieutenant Snort" and commemorated his officer's commission, awarded March 14, 1941, on the basis of his college degree.
That single gold bar on Waskow's uniform meant he and his brother had to part company. It would have been awkward for August Waskow, a sergeant, to take orders from his baby-brother lieutenant. (The other Waskow originally in the National Guard, John Otto, had suffered a shoulder injury while training with a new rifle and did not join his brothers at Camp Bowie.) To separate the brothers, the Thirty-Sixth Division reassigned Henry Waskow to Company G. He stayed there a short time, trained for a while at Fort Benning, Georgia, and then transferred to Company B, First Battalion, 143rd Regiment, upon his return to Camp Bowie.
An officer is expected to give orders and to serve his men. Waskow went far beyond what was required of him in this regard.
"He was a friend to everybody. He took the little man's case many, many times," said Julian Philips, a retired colonel who enlisted in Company G before earning a commission and who knew Waskow at Camp Bowie. One time, he said, the enlisted men at Camp Bowie were too rowdy to suit one of the non-commissioned officers, who was a veteran of the Regular Army. "The first sergeant came out and made a statement to all of us [that began] 'As long as I'm. running this damn company,'" Philips said. He quoted Waskow, a freshly minted second lieutenant, as telling the sergeant, "'Let me tell you something—you're not running this company.' The first sergeant was much older than Waskow, but Waskow ate him alive."77
Goad, who earned his commission shortly after mobilization, usually saw Waskow when the officers of the 143rd Regiment gathered to work out textbook battlefield problems, such as the proper tactics when a rifle platoon fights in support of a machine gun. The training at Camp Bowie was intended to simulate battle conditions, with the pastures of West Texas filling in for the plains of Europe. Barns took the place of enemy strongholds; flour sacks dropped from airplanes took the place of bombs. The sacks disintegrated on contact with a bridge or truck, marking it with a white splotch that meant it had been "destroyed."
"We took every windmill and every cow barn and every outhouse there is in West Texas," Tidwell said. "All of them should belong to us, because we attacked them."78
Waskow did his part in the drills and maneuvers. He also demonstrated that he knew how much more there is to leading men than giving them orders to drill, march and fight. Goad said:
He'd talk with you and visit with you about folks, about home. And the men could talk to him. Wife troubles, or something like that. . . . He never did raise his voice much, never did get mad. When he said something, he meant it to be done. And that's one reason [his men] respected him so much. He didn't chew their ass out -- pardon my language -- or things like that. And he led, instead of driving. If his company was going into attack, he was going to be out there with them. He wasn't going to be behind the lines.... He'd be where the action was. Which was unusual in some ways.79
Tidwell, who had a fifth-grade education and as a boy had never belonged to a church, began a special relationship with Waskow at Camp Bowie, although it did not fully develop until a year or so later. Tidwell, born September 3, 1923, in east Texas, was raised as an orphan after his mother died. He never knew much about his father, and was sheltered and fed by various families around the town of Fairfield, including his grandparents and a family named Ritter that raised cotton, corn, peas and beans. He entered the National Guard as soon as he could. He was a few days shy of the age of legal consent, but he fibbed to the recruiter in Mexia. "He asked me how old I was, and I said, 'Seventeen,' and he said 'How many kids you got? and I said 'None,' and he said, 'You're in,"' Tidwell said with a laugh.80
He joined because he had an uncle in the Guard and because he could get a paycheck. Not long after joining, Tidwell discovered he had become a soldier in the U.S. Army. He never rose higher than the rank of private first class, but that suited him fine. He enjoyed having what he called "the best job"—radio operator and company runner. Each company has four platoons, and each platoon has its own runner to communicate with company headquarters. In addition, each company's headquarters has a runner to send messages up through the ranks. When Tidwell arrived at Camp Bowie, he was chosen as Company B's runner because he was tall—six feet, five and one-half inches—and skinny. He had the job before Waskow made the move to Company B, and he kept it afterward.81
They first met, Waskow's Mutt to Tidwell's Jeff, on guard duty at Camp Bowie while the older man was still a non-commissioned officer. Waskow was corporal of the guard and Tidwell was walking four hours of guard duty that night. After Waskow became a lieutenant, he left camp for special classes and did not return to the company until months later, by which time the Thirty-Sixth Division had left Texas.
Waskow could have picked anyone to be his runner but quickly settled on Tidwell. Perhaps the sensitive and serious Waskow felt that the younger man needed a parental figure, or he saw something in Tidwell's unschooled enthusiasm that appealed to the part of him that wanted to be a teacher. Or maybe Waskow simply realized that Tidwell's long hours in the job had made him the best candidate to continue to fill it.
"It was the position I'd had ever since I'd been in the service, so he kept me on," Tidwell said. "He was a real nice young fella. And I was, like I said, not too well-educated, but I knew what I was doing, and what I did I tried to do it right. And he kind of got to liking me."82 He said Waskow spoke of wanting to be a teacher, and he taught Tidwell how to protect himself, and what he should and should not do. Tidwell said:
That's the way it was. 'Course, I had a better relationship with him 'cause when we were out on maneuvers, or out in the field, I was with him, so I could talk to him more, arid make coffee for him—stuff like that. And I did. In that respect, I had a good relationship with him. He was very good to work for, very good to be with, and one of the best officers in the five years, ten months and nine days that I was in the service, that I'd ever met.83
Waskow left Camp Bowie sometime after getting his commission in order to take officer's classes at other Army posts around the country. Meanwhile, the Thirty-Sixth Division moved from base to base to hone its fighting skills in various kinds of terrain. First came the Army war games in the piney woods near Leesville and De Ritter, Louisiana. Then came a move to the sandy country of Camp Blanding, Florida, where the enlisted men played baseball games when they had free time. From there, the division moved northward, through Georgia and the Carolinas—where some of the men found the farmers' watermelons too sweet to resist stealing in late July—before settling into its final training ground in the United States: Camp Edwards, near Falmouth on the rocky cape of Massachusetts. There, Waskow, who had risen to the rank of first lieutenant, rejoined his men in the fall of 1942.
Although Massachusetts was as far from home as Waskow had ever been, small things reminded him of Texas. Soldiers from all over the United States had swelled the division to its full complement of men, but the division indoctrinated them with Lone Star lore and pride. "We'll make a Texan out of you," a soldier was told when he joined the Thirty-Sixth.84 At the headquarters of the Thirty-Sixth Division flew the Texas flag, consisting of a single white star in a flag of blue, white and red—the red standing for the blood shed for Texas independence. Every soldier wore an insignia patch bearing the letter T, for Texas, in the center of a downward-pointing arrowhead, which symbolized Oklahoma. Soldiers from both states originally had made up the Thirty-Sixth, but many years earlier the Oklahomans had split off to form their own division, the Forty-Fifth. Still, the Texans kept their "T-Patch" unchanged, and called themselves T-Patchers.
The Texans hardly had settled in before they were visited by Major General George Patton. He paid a courtesy call on Fred Walker, the Thirty-Sixth Division's commander. In his memoirs, From Texas to Rome, Walker said Patton wanted to speak to officers of the Thirty-Sixth to orient them toward his way of thinking. Patton said he expected to have the division assigned to him for a special task force.
Patton required that a strong guard be posted around the assembly area to prevent outsiders from hearing what he had to say. Thus prepared to be briefed on a secret mission, the officers of the Thirty-Sixth instead heard Patton give a crude pep talk.
"There was nothing in it of value nor of a classified nature," Walker wrote. "I watched the faces of my officers during his 'oratory.' They showed surprise, bewilderment, and disgust. They were not favorably impressed by his profanity and vulgarity."85
Ultimately, Patton's reassignment order proved illusory. His visit did little more than create ill will among the officers, which he compounded by spoiling his reputation with the enlisted men. One day some of the soldiers were marching along a road. They yelled something toward a group of women playing golf. One of them apparently was Patton's daughter, Tidwell said, and the enlisted men "got in quite a bit of trouble then."86
At least Patton did not stay long. The same could not be said for the cold weather, which struck a few weeks after the division's arrival at Camp Edwards in late August. The temperature dropped to eighteen in mid-November and plummeted to ten degrees below zero a month later. Six inches of snow covered the ground—the most that many of the soldiers had ever seen. Two companies of a tank destroyer battalion suffered 109 frostbite injuries when they tried to keep to their schedule of overnight maneuvers.87 Soldiers on maneuvers subsequently were told to report to their beds at midnight. Fortunately, the beds were in barracks instead of tents.88
An artist in the division drew a picture of a Texas longhorn bull with its hooves covered in snow and its horns covered in icicles. It appeared in the division's newsletter, the T-Patch.
Waskow earned the second bar of a captain while at Camp Edwards and phoned Mary Lee to give her the news. She had told him to call collect because she worked at the phone company and because she knew how expensive it was to phone halfway across the continent. A call came through in mid-January 1943. The operator asked Mary Lee, "Will you accept a collect call from Captain Waskow?" That was his way of letting her know that he had been promoted.89
Waskow came home for the last time that winter. He was on furlough and traveled with Splawn, an acquaintance from childhood. They took a train to Providence, Rhode Island, caught another train to New York City, and then headed to Temple. Splawn recalled that when the two of them hit town, "we looked at the pretty girls and drank a whole lot of cold beer."90 Waskow's younger sister would have been surprised, for she believed he abstained from alcohol. Perhaps Army life had effected subtle changes in her brother, or perhaps he just did not share everything about his life with his sister. In any case, Splawn was quick to point out that Waskow "was not a drunkard, by no means in this world. But he would have a beer with you."91
Although Splawn and Waskow watched the young women at the honky-tonks that had sprung up in Belton after Prohibition, Waskow already had lost his heart to a Massachusetts woman named Agnes. They had met and dated while he was stationed at Camp Edwards. A photograph taken at the time shows Waskow standing next to an attractive young woman in a dark dress. Waskow's uniform is neat and crisp, the crease in his trousers knifelike. He wears a Sam Browne belt, and his slicked-back hair is parted on the left side. The woman on his left arm wears her dress well, the pleated cloth following her curves. Around her neck is a string of pearls, and on her head a black hat with a circular brim that appears to be eighteen inches in diameter. Man and woman smile confidently at the camera.92
Waskow missed a chance for his romance to develop. His sister believed he might have married Agnes if circumstances had been different. But the Thirty-Sixth Division learned in March 1943 that it would sail for North Africa.
