Infiltration

Johnny describes the final elements of basic training and looks forward to coming home soon.

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Transcript

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More than 504,000 U.S. troops were removed from duty due to psychiatric collapse. This represented the loss of the equivalent of nearly 50 infantry divisions. Welcome to Dog Tags and Paper Hearts, a chronicle of my grandfather's letters home during his time in the service. I'm your host, Don Friega, and in each episode we'll travel back to a time when swing bands ruled the airwaves, ration books shaped the dinner table, and handwritten letters carried love across oceans. Join me as we uncover the stories, sounds, and surprises of an era defined by courage, change, and a touch of romance. From the battlefront to the home front. On today's episode, Infiltration, Village Fighting, and Nervous Fatigue. So pull up a chair, slip into some comfortable bellbottom trousers, and let's rewind the clock together. Because the 1940s weren't just about war and worry, they were about hope, humor, and heart. This is Dog Tags and Paper Hearts. A couple of news items from the front on the day this letter was written, January 23rd, 1945. For Americans following the war from home, the news arriving from Europe carried a sense that the long struggle might finally be entering its last chapter. The fighting remained fierce, but on nearly every front the Allies were moving forward. In Belgium, American troops had recaptured the battered town of St. Vith. Just weeks earlier, this crossroads community had been at the center of Germany's desperate Ardennes offense, the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans had seized the town during the surprise attack in December, but now U.S. forces had taken it back. To military observers the message was clear. Hitler's last great gamble in the West had failed. Far to the east, events were unfolding even more dramatically. Soviet armies were advancing across Poland at a pace few had thought possible. On this day, Red Army forces reached the Oder River, bringing them within striking distance of Berlin itself. German soldiers and civilians alike watched with growing alarm as the front collapsed. For many, the unthinkable was becoming a reality. The war was no longer approaching Germany's borders, it was now moving into Germany itself. The speed of the Soviet advance sparked another major development. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz ordered the beginning of what would become one of the largest sea evacuations in history. Known as Operation Hannibal, it involved German ships rushing into Baltic ports to carry soldiers and civilians away from the advancing Soviet forces. Over the coming months, hundreds of thousands would flee westward across the icy waters in a desperate bid to escape the fighting. Meanwhile, the war against Japan continued across Asia. In Burma, British and Indian troops pushed steadily forward against Japanese positions. Allied commanders viewed the campaign as a crucial step toward reopening supply lines and weakening Japan's hold on Southeast Asia. Progress was often slow and difficult, but the advance continued. Overhead, the air war showed no signs of easing. American bombers struck targets in both Germany and Japan. In Europe, transportation networks and industrial centers remained under constant attack as Allied planners sought to cripple Germans' ability to move troops and supplies. In the Pacific, B-29 superfortresses carried the war directly to the Japanese home islands, attacking industrial targets despite fierce resistance from enemy fighters. For Americans listening to their radios or reading the evening papers, the headlines painted a picture of momentum. The Battle of the Bulge was ending in Allied victory. Soviet armies were racing toward Berlin. German civilians were fleeing westward. Allied bombers dominated the skies. Everywhere, the signs pointed toward the same conclusion. The war was not over, thousands would still lose their lives before victory was achieved. But on January 23rd, 1945, many could sense that the end was drawing near, and for families with loved ones overseas, that possibility offered hope. And in other news? On January 23, 1945, 37-year-old Helmuth James von Moltke was executed at a Berlin prison by hanging. Born in 1907 into a distinguished Prussian family, Moltke was a lawyer, intellectual, and committed Christian. He was the great nephew of the famous Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, but unlike his military ancestor, the younger Moltke opposed Nazism from the beginning. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Moltke rejected Nazi ideology on moral and legal grounds. He was particularly appalled by the regime's contempt for the rule of law and its persecution of Jews and political opponents. During the war, Moltke worked in a legal position within Germany's military administration. This gave him access to information about German atrocities and the inner workings of the regime. Rather than serving the Nazi state enthusiastically, he quietly used his position to help victims, warn friends of impending arrests, and cultivate contacts among anti-Nazi Germans. As part of the Krischow Circle, a resistance group consisting of aristocrats, clergy lawyers, socialists, educators, and civil servants, Moltke shared the belief that Nazi Germany was morally bankrupt and that a new Germany would need to be built on human dignity, Christian ethics, democracy, and the rule of law. The Kreyshaw Circle envisioned a constitutional government in place of dictatorship, with guaranteed protections of individual rights, religious freedom, and an end to racial ideology. The group advocated for local self-government and reconciliation with other European nations based on cooperation rather than conquest, the very ideas that would later influence the democratic institutions of post-war West Germany. In January of 1944, the Gestapo arrested Moltke because he had warned acquaintances about impending arrests and maintained contacts with foreigners. After the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in July of 1944, Nazi authorities cast a wide net over anyone connected to resistance circles. Although Moltke had actually opposed assassination, his association with resistance figures sealed his fate. Moltke appeared before the notorious People's Court, and, as was the norm, the proceedings were little more than a show trial. The foregone result was execution by hanging at the Berlin prison. Moltke's story complicates the common image that all Germans either supported Hitler or passively accepted the regime. The Krishaw Circle demonstrates that there were Germans who opposed Nazism not simply because Germany was losing the war, but because they believed the regime was fundamentally immoral. Their resistance was intellectual, spiritual, and political rather than military. They were trying to preserve an idea of Germany that could survive after Hitler's inevitable fall. Given the impending defeat acutely felt by Nazi Germany, Maltke's execution was one of the last acts of a dictatorship determined to destroy even the idea of an alternative future. Many historians today regard Helmuth James von Maltke as one of the most important figures in the German resistance, not because he platted violence, but because he articulated a moral and democratic vision that helped shape the Germany that emerged after the war. And now the letter. It was held to within one hundred yards of our front, and the concussion was enough to jar your eye teeth. Enough metal exploded in front of us to fill a good sized scrapyard. However, there were no casualties and they called it a success because of that. What they expected I couldn't say. It was nerve wracking for a while, but we soon got used to it and finally didn't even notice it. That took all the morning and the afternoon we spent dodging bullets on another target range. They came just a little bit closer, but there were no hits or errors, but plenty of runs as the boys tried to keep undercover and out of the line of fire. A little bit dangerous, but it kept us aware and on our toes. Nobody went to sleep in that class. This morning, Tuesday, was a little bit tougher. Infiltration is what they call it, a seventy five yard course covered with barbed wire and machine gun fire eighteen inches overhead. Besides that, TNT charges are set off every fifteen yards. There's only one way to cross that course, and that is on the belly. Or back when we hit the barbed wire. We soon learned to keep our heads down while going across there. Outside of a few rips and tears, a little mud and one or two scratches, I pulled through it all right. Some of the boys didn't do so well on the mud. They didn't watch where they were going and consequently crawled through some pretty deep mud holes. What a sight they were, soaked to the skin and covered from head to toe with this grand and glorious Texas goo. It will take at least a week for them to get it out of their ears alone. This afternoon is another sweet job. Village fighting, and what a job, ducking and running from building to building, shooting at anything that pops up. If it turns out to be one of the boys, well, that's too bad. It costs the army only eighty-nine cents to buy a man. But nothing like that ever happens. Everyone is pretty careful and sticks to the rules. After all, furlough time is pretty near and no one wants to spend it in the hospital. In village fighting, one building is taken at a time. Hand grenades are tossed in and then riflemen clean up whatever is left. Some boys fight from the rooftops and others go out to either side of the town and clean up the outskirts. There's lots of ammunition flying around as well as TNT charges going off. Plenty of excitement all the time. But just the same, I'm glad I'm through with my share of it. The experience is something to remember, but I wouldn't care to do it as a daily task. It's too wearying on the nerves and body. I can easily understand why men are being discharged daily for nervous fatigue. I don't know what the rest of the week holds in store for us, probably something just as tough as we have passed through. Well, we have only five more days out here, and then back to camp. Bad as it is, it will look good to me. Then only a week or two more and then homeward bound. It doesn't seem possible that I am so close to seeing you and the children. I've been looking forward so much to the day when I would be home that it became more or less a dream, and now that it's become almost time I have to keep punching myself to make sure it wasn't a dream. I can't say in words just what it does to me to think of being with you again, to hold you close in my arms and feel you tight against me. To know that you are beside me and not somewhere far away that I dream about. Darling, I've missed you so much that my heart has become just one big ache that won't be erased till you can relieve the pain. You are the only girl in the world for me, sweetheart, the only one who can make me feel alive and living. I never knew just how much you meant to me until I had left you. Now that I am awake, I can promise you that our future life will be a lot happier. My greatest worry is that you won't forgive me my mistakes in the past. I want to make sure our future is as happy and full as possible. With you beside me to love me and have me, nothing will be too big for me to tackle, and I know now that nothing in this world can stop me as long as I have you. I'll have to close now, dear. It's getting too dark for me to see and would probably just be scribbly all over the paper if I kept on. I have no news as yet about the discharge, but I haven't given up. As soon as I can get back in camp, I'm gonna jump anybody and everybody I can to get that business on the ball. Good night for now, dear. Here's a lot of love for the children and a lot more for you. I'll be seeing you soon. I love you, Johnny. A few notes from today's letter Infiltration. Infiltration training was just as Johnny describes in the letter, a late stage basic training exercise in which recruits crawled under live machine gun fire, navigated barbed wire, crossed shell-torn terrain, and advanced towards simulated enemy positions. Its purpose was to condition soldiers to move under fire, overcome fear, and learn small unit movement techniques in realistic battlefield conditions. The U.S. Army had learned from World War I that soldiers needed conditioning to noise, confusion, and the psychological shock of combat. Fast forward to the early days of World War II, with millions of draftees entering service, the Army needed a standardized way to toughen civilians quickly. Infiltration courses became a centerpiece of this effort, an intense, memorable rite of passage that every soldier would recall. While infiltration courses varied by camp, most shared the same core elements, live round machine gun fire overhead, barbed wire and obstacles, which might include logs, mud pits, or simulated booby traps, and explosions, often TNT detonations, meant to desensitize recruits to sudden noise and concussion. While standard infantry infiltration courses were universal, specialized units developed even more demanding versions. Now these might include nighttime operations, cliff scaling, amphibious landings, and urban fighting. In the end, infiltration training built the skills necessary for successful operations, psychological conditioning, physical toughening, tactical skill building, and most importantly, unit cohesion. By the end of World War II, infiltration courses had become a defining feature of American soldier training. Veterans often describe it as the moment that they truly felt like soldiers. The concept survived long after the war and remains part of modern U.S. Army basic training, though with updated safety standards. Also in today's letter, Johnny talks about village fighting. Village fighting training in World War II was one of the most vivid hands-on components of U.S. Army basic and advanced infantry training. It wasn't as universally standardized as the infiltration course, but where it existed, it was designed to do one thing, prepare American soldiers, many of whom had never left their hometowns, to fight and survive inside the tight, chaotic confines of European towns and villages. By 1942-43, U.S. planners understood that the war in Europe would not be fought only in open fields. American troops would have to seize French and Belgian villages, German towns and industrial districts, road junctions, farm clusters, and stone-built hamlets, and the urban edges of cities like Aachen, Metz, and Cologne. The Army needed a way to simulate the environment for recruits who had grown up in suburbs, farms, or cities with very different architecture. So training centers began building mock villages, sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, to teach soldiers how to fight house to house. These were usually built from plywood, sandbags, scrap lumber, and in some of the more permanent camps, bricks or stone. The structures included some of the hallmarks of European villages, narrow streets, courtyards, two-story buildings and cellars. Some were designed to resemble French farmsteads, while others mimicked German villages with tighter street grids. Village fighting training was very physical and very exhausting. Exercises included street to street movement, where recruits learned to hug walls, move from cover to cover, avoid silhouetting themselves in doorways, and cross open streets at a sprint. It also included clearing buildings. Now this was not usually live fire in basic training, but it was realistic. Grenade simulators thrown into rooms, squads entering in stacked formation, bayonet and rifle butt techniques for close quarter fighting, and the use of smoke to obscure movement. They also learned how to fight from houses. Soldiers practiced firing from windows without exposing themselves, reinforcing doors and windows, using upper floors for observation, and moving between buildings via holes smashed in walls. This was a tactic borrowed from British and German doctrine. They learned defense and ambush as well. Recruits learned how defenders might set up machine gun crossfires, use snipers and attic windows, booby trap stairwells, and fight from rubble. Understanding the defender's mindset was crucial for assault troops. Village fighting was chaotic, loud, and disorienting. Instructors hammered home some basic principles don't bunch up, don't skyline yourself in a window, don't enter a room without covering fire. Don't assume a building is empty, and don't run down the middle of a street. By the time U.S. forces reached Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest and the Siegfried Line, village fighting was constant. Veterans later said the mock village training helped them understand the concepts that would later save their lives in battle. And finally in today's letter, discharges due to nervous fatigue. Discharges for nervous fatigue in World War II were extraordinarily common. So common, in fact, that psychiatric breakdown became one of the largest medical causes of troop loss in the U.S. Army. It's important to note that during the war, the U.S. military did not yet use terms like PTSD. Instead, it used labels such as combat fatigue, battle exhaustion, war neurosis, or psychiatric collapse. The administrative discharge for such conditions was titled Section 8, and the scale of these discharges was staggering. More than 504,000 U.S. troops were removed from duty due to psychiatric collapse. This represented the loss of the equivalent of nearly 50 infantry divisions. About 40% of all medical discharges in the U.S. Army during World War II were for psychiatric reasons. In some campaigns, especially in North Africa, psychiatric casualties at times outnumbered physical wounds, overwhelming medical systems. It's not difficult to understand why this happened. World War II exposed soldiers to long, unbroken periods of combat, intense artillery bombardment, harsh weather and terrain, high casualty rates, and sleep deprivation and malnutrition. Unlike World War I, where units rotated more frequently, many World War II campaigns kept soldiers under fire for weeks or months. This produced cumulative psychological trauma that the Army was not initially prepared to treat. Symptoms of this psychological trauma varied wildly. They could include tremors, shaking, paralysis, panic attacks or uncontrollable fear, mutism or inability to speak, disorientation, confusion, emotional numbness, or uncontrollable crying, gastrointestinal distress such as nausea, diarrhea, and the complete inability to function in combat. Now these were not signs of weakness, they were normal human reactions to extreme prolonged trauma. Many soldiers later described feeling ashamed because the culture of the time did not recognize psychological injury as legitimate. Once these systems were identified, a soldier was typically removed from the line, evaluated by a medical officer or psychiatrist, and then either returned to duty, reassigned to non-combat duties, or medically discharged on psychiatric grounds, a move that often ended a soldier's military career permanently. The enormous number of psychiatric casualties in World War II forced the U.S. military to rethink mental health entirely. These experiences directly shaped post-war psychiatric care, including the creation of the Diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, in 1980. The top song in the U.S. on this date, January 23rd, 1945, remains Don't Fence Me In by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Since I've shifted to counting down the 100 most popular songs of 1945, though, we now arrive at number 94 on our list, Jerry Kalana with the song Bellbottom Trousers. Born in 1904, Jerry Kalana was one of the most recognizable comic entertainers of the World War II era. Born Gerardo Luigi Colonna in Boston, he began his career as a trombonist before moving into radio, where his booming voice, enormous handlebar mustache, and absurd sense of humor made him a star. He became famous as a regular on Bob Hope's radio programs and films during the 1940s and 1950s, often playing a wildly exaggerated version of himself. His trademark bug-eyed expressions and pronounced vocal style made him instantly recognizable to audiences of the day. Although primarily remembered as a comedian, Colonna also recorded a number of novelty and popular songs. His recording of Bellbottom Trousers became one of his biggest musical successes, reaching the Billboard bestseller chart in 1945. Bellbottom Trousers has roots that stretch back far before World War II. The song was an old sea shanty adapted from a traditional folk song Rosemary Lane, which had circulated in Britain and among sailors for generations. Songwriter Mo Jaffe created a sanitized wartime version in 1944, transforming a much baudier sea shanty into a patriotic and romantic tune suitable for radio audiences. The song quickly became a wartime hit and was recorded by numerous artists, including Guy Lombardo, Tony Pasteur, Louis Prima, and Jerry Colonna. The song tells the story of a young woman who falls in love with a sailor, distinguished by his bell bottom trousers and navy blue uniform. The sailor leaves for sea and the woman remains faithful while awaiting his return. On the surface, it's a simple romantic story, but for wartime listeners it represented, as so many songs of that time did, the emotional reality of separation. With millions of husbands, fiances, sweethearts, brothers or sons serving overseas, the image of waiting faithfully for a sailor's return resonated powerfully in 1944 and 1945. What makes Kelowna's version unique is its performance. Unlike the more earnest recordings by dance bands of the era, Kelowna's booming voice and comic personality bring a playful quality to the song. He doesn't mock the sentiment, but he gently exaggerates it. His performance walks a fine line between novelty record and genuine wartime ballad. And this was classic Jerry Kalana, taking material that might otherwise be sentimental and adding just enough humor to make audiences smile without undercutting the song's heart. For modern listeners, Bellbottom Trousers serves as a snapshot of wartime popular culture. It captures how Americans often coped with the stress of war not through grim realism, but through songs that mixed romance, humor, and optimism. During the darkest years of the war, entertainers like Kelowna and Bob Hope helped Americans and servicemen alike maintain morale through humor. Even in a sentimental song about separation, Kelowna's larger-than-life personality reminds listeners that a smile could be as valuable as a tear.com. And most importantly, if you have a story about World War II and really would like to say anything about World War II, if you're willing to share that on this podcast, drop me a line and let's make that happen. Until next time,