“Where is your deputy?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Greeley is in the signal truck.”
Greeley opened the tent flap and entered at that moment, followed by a signal officer.
Hebert resisted. “Isn’t this something only my CO, General Franks, can do?”
“Franks does what I tell him,” Clay said, turning to the lieutenant colonel. “I’m ordering you to speak candidly. What has been wrong with Colonel Hebert’s command?”
Greeley made a small sound in his throat before saying, “At this time, sir, I don’t believe we have a choice but to pull back. But it seems our regiment is doing so a bit docilely, and with some confusion.”
Clay nodded. “Command of the 1st Armored Regiment is now yours. Pull it together.”
We left the tent. In light of General Clay’s widely known dislike of things French, a rumor circulated after the war that Hebert was cashiered simply because of his insistence on the French pronunciation of his name. This story ran in the Spokane Times, which Clay regarded as his hometown newspaper. I credit Associated Press with refusing to distribute this calumny. Nevertheless, the invention was accepted as truth by the credulous, stoking the controversy to come.
To my consternation, we then drove toward the sound of gunfire. I wanted to remind Clay he was a general, deserving of a desk, away from bothersome rifle fire, with his aide. The road was rutted, and my rear end received a pounding. We passed American APCs and artillery tractors going the opposite direction.
Clay said, “Goddamn retrograde operation, Jack.”
Our driver, Corporal Hubert Turner of the Royal Sussex Regiment, was home from Africa with a hand injury. He had told us it was a scratch and should not have put him on the hospital ship. I glanced at his right hand. He was missing three fingers. A Sten gun was tucked behind his feet. He had confided to me, “I’m not yet done with the Germans.”
The clamor of weaponry could be heard above the jeep’s engine. Clay pointed south, and we turned along a row of trees. A column of AEF troops marched raggedly toward the rear. When they saw the general, many looked away. We passed dug-in soldiers and two Shermans using a stone fence for cover. Shells hissed overhead. A hundred yards to my left, a fire ball erupted from the ground. Near it a cottage was burning, the flame whirling overhead.
Clay pointed again. We turned toward a squad of soldiers using a road embankment as a breastwork for their jeep’s pintle-mounted machine gun. Two soldiers were crouched behind their weapon, while a lieutenant leaned into the bank, binoculars at his eyes. Five others also rested against the embankment, their M1s pushed into the grass atop the slope.
Corporal Turner drove right up to the jeep. Clay hopped out, and I followed.
“Identify yourself,” Clay ordered.
“Lieutenant Bill Smolowe, 6th Armored Infantry, sir.” He was about twenty years old and had a shaving nick on his pink chin, and the look of an innocent.
A burst of rifle fire sounded from a glade beyond the burning cottage. A plane flew overhead, but smoke obscured it.
“What’s out in front of you, Lieutenant?” Clay asked.
“Sir, we think the enemy is over in those woods and maybe in the brush thicket in front of the trees.”
Clay bit crescents into his cheeks. “Why the hell aren’t you letting them have it?”
“Sir, we aren’t sure what their movement is at this point.”
“Jesus H. Christ, Lieutenant.” Clay brushed aside the gunner, grabbed the handles of the machine gun and pulled the trigger. The gun roared. Flame shot from the barrel and empty shell casings flew, some bouncing off my ankles. Clay slowly pivoted the gun as he fired. A private fed the metal link belt, hand over hand. When the 110-round belt was gone, Clay spun the gun’s handles to the lieutenant.
“Fire on infested areas, Lieutenant. If you wait to see the enemy before you fire, you’ll get his bayonet up your ass.”
The lieutenant nodded glumly.
“Get going, then.”
While the feeder hooked in a new belt, the lieutenant took the gunner’s position and lifted his leg to brace it against the side of the jeep. When the feeder nodded, the lieutenant yanked the bolt, then fired. The din rattled my teeth.
Clods of dirt jumped from the bank. A machine gun always attracts return fire. The infantrymen ducked. One of them pulled a grenade from his belt and held it in his hand, studying it. Clay jumped to the ground. Bullets cut the air all around.
He crawled up the embankment to the soldiers. “Men, you’ve got to fire your weapons.”
“Yes, sir,” several said.
A mortar round landed on the other side of the embankment. The ground trembled and dirt and brush rained on us. I think I was losing my hearing. I held my helmet on with both hands, as undignified a position as I’ve ever assumed.
One of the riflemen looked at me and asked, “You a lawyer or something?”
Clay said, “Men, after the Battle of Gettysburg, some Springfield rifles were found with as many as a dozen charges down the barrel.”
I wanted to yell at him, “For God’s sake, General, not now!”
Clay lectured, “In the noise and fire of battle, the soldiers just forgot to fire their rifles.”
“Yes, sir,” came from some of them.
“Now I want you to climb up there and fire. Marksmanship is a lot of crap. Fill the air with lead.”
They did so, firing repeatedly, their M1s sounding like toys next to the constant bawl of the M2 HB on the jeep. Clay waited until they began to change their clips. He used the lieutenant’s binoculars, then yelled over the bellow of the machine gun, “You men are firing too high. Too much front sight. Fire low.”
One of the soldiers looked over his shoulder at the general.
Clay yelled, “Your ricochets will frighten the German, and they do a lot of tissue damage when they hit.”
The infantryman turned back to his weapon. Clay patted him on the back and slid down the bank.
We returned to the jeep. Corporal Turner was gone.
Clay said as he lifted himself to the seat. “I figured that Brit wouldn’t last as my driver. The minute my back was turned, he ran forward and is now giving the German hell with that Sten gun he thinks I didn’t see. I wish I had a thousand like him.”
I drove us away from the line, my boot against the firewall. The story that General Clay spent the day acting as a rifle instructor, lost in the tiny technique of aiming an M1 while the island burned around him, is a blatant exaggeration. He was showing himself at the front. He said later, “Soldiers will not follow a man they think will let them die alone in the field.”
The general had three command trucks, which were mobile signal stations. They were three-quarter-ton 4x4 Dodges, called officially T 214-WC 56s, and they looked like enlarged jeeps. The trucks were armored and crowded with radio and coding equipment and maps. Whenever they pulled off a road, the driver raised three antennas. Dodge supplied the same chassis as a weapons carrier.
Because Clay usually travelled in the Cub, he posted two of the Dodges at roughly the corners of his command and one in the center. Each truck had a branch AEFHQ staff, including signalmen, G2 officers, sentries, mechanics, and drivers. We called them AEFHQ West, Central, and East. Whenever we touched down after the invasion, the nearest truck would either be waiting or would rush toward us. We did not use them often prior to the German landings, because Clay typically flew directly to divisional or regimental headquarters. They proved their worth after S-Day.
I go to some lengths to mention them here, because their existence was a secret, so much so that journalists who now suggest Clay abandoned his command for the field were not aware, and probably will not be aware until they read this narrative, of the mobile command vehicles. Nor do they know of the many times that day General Clay and I went inside the vehicles. That morning after the visit to the 6th Armored Infantry, Clay and I spent the next fifty minutes inside Command West, during which he received or reviewed forty-three messages and issued sixteen signals. I still possess my notes as proof.