Waiting -- xi

Somehow I remember my dad's friends, way back when, talk about the tedium of waiting in the military. What I remember about their comments was that waiting seemed interminable. It must have seemed especially so for those GIs stateside who were waiting for almost inevitable warfare.

One almost gets that sense from Chaplain Van's reminiscences and diaries. Now it's the reader who's forever in a stall. I know, for example, that the good chaplain--and my old religion prof--went to Europe somewhere along the line, but it seems like forever before his troop ship would depart. 

Meantime, what the men do is train, and training always brings with it immense discomfort--days are hot, nights are cold, rain is wet, etc., etc. Someday he'll go--you know that; but when?--who knows?--not even Chaplain Van.

Still, when I remember the almost programmed old man who stood up in front of classes 50 to 100 strong, a man almost oblivious to what was going on outside of his lecture notes, it seems a stretch to think of that man lecturing 150 men on sex, how, and more importantly, why, specifically, to refuse it.

February 8, 1944

Instruction: Aircraft recognition.

It rained last night but I had a goodnight. I received a box of candy from my wife and I studied a text for Sunday services. 

Col. Bettenburg said to me "At Division headquarters HQ they say that you are doing a h. . . of a job [his punctuation, not mine] as regimental chaplain.

The military has confirmed my ideas on the importance of discipline, the importance of faithful church attendance, catechism instruction, the Christian home and school.

It still seems a little premature for  him to so categorically maintain the benefits of military life, but he knows what he thinks. We'll see if any kinks ever appear  down the road. 

What the army appears to have taught him spiritually and morally is what his parents and church certainly did when he was a boy. It's hard not to get the feeling that Chaplain Van's piety didn't alter one bit during his days in the military. Even though what life threw at him was often another world altogether. He "kept the faith."

February 17:

There had been so much to do during the "D Series" [of bivouac] that I did not take my clothes off for three weeks. The nights were cold; but I had enough blankets to keep warm. Spring conditions are here in February.

It's clear that an ordinary soldier's understanding of the general scope of the war effort is generally limited, some news gets out.

An American troop transport was sunk by a submarine, 1000 soldiers were drowned. The American army south of Rome is having a difficult time. The Russians have defeated ten German divisions at the Denieper Bend and are driving forward on all fronts.

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For the record, Denieper Bend was one huge operation and a win for the Russians, as Chaplain Van says. One of the largest operations of the war, it involved almost four million troops at one point and stretched over a  870-mile front. Over four months, the eastern bank of the Dnieper was recovered from German forces by five of the Red Army's fronts. Hitler determined he couldn't fight Stalin offensively in the southern Ukraine, so he ordered a series of fortresses along the river. Driving Hitler's forces out of Russia required those fortresses to be taken. Soviet soldiers used floating devices of every kind and shape to cross the river, and did, not without immense casualties. 

2,650,000 Soviet troops--amazing!--were in the battle Chaplain Van correctly suggests was a Soviet victory. Such stories from the Eastern Front at this time must have buoyed the hopes of the GIs still waiting for their own troop ship. In Russia, Hitler's otherwise dominating forces were receding.

The tragic loss of a troop transport, on the other hand--likely the Rohna--was certainly not good news. The Rohna was downed by the Luftwaffe firing a new "radio-guided glide bomb." The Rohna was a reconditioned troop ship moving through dangerous waters but surrounded by many other ships. 

The event was, for the most part, kept under wraps. That Chaplain Van even knows about it is somewhat surprising. American military command determined that knowledge of this new and obviously dangerous weapon was not something ordinary Americans needed to know.

Not until the 1960s was the sinking of the Rohna fully described to the general public.