In addition to clearing mines, combat engineers were taught to build makeshift structures to span small rivers or creeks. They were called Bailey bridges. It’s like a giant erector set. It’s constructed on one side of a river or a creek, and then it’s swung over the water and drops down on the other side. They were light, practical, and strong enough to support the weight of 6x6 trucks or even a Grant or a Sherman tank.
One night, while assembling a Bailey bridge I thought I heard Germans singing on the other side of the river. The ja, ja at the end of each phrase was a dead giveaway. I thought the sound of the singing was terrible, and I decided to teach them what real singing sounded like. So I picked up a big bullhorn, went to the bank of the river, and started singing à la Al Jolson:
“Toot Toot Tootsie goodbye.
Toot Toot Tootsie, don’t cry.
That little choo-choo train
That takes me
Away from you, no words can tell how sad it makes me.”
When I finished the song, I thought I heard coming from the other side of the river （where the Germans were） a round of applause and, “Sehr gut! Sehr gut!” （“Very good!”） Maybe it was my imagination, but anyway it makes for a good story.
When our training in Normandy was over we boarded more 6x6 trucks and made our way through Belgium down to Alsace-Lorraine. I was lucky to get through Belgium on my way to Germany a couple of months after the Battle of the Bulge. Had I been born six months earlier, I probably would have been fighting in that and who knows what would have happened? Anyway, luck was with me and the Germans were finally in retreat and life got a little better and a little safer.
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We were stationed in Saarbrücken, which was right on the border of France and Germany. Even though the war was still on, there was a French-German restaurateur who kept his restaurant open. It was a blessing in disguise. You could actually get Alsatian dishes. So instead of Army chow my buddies and I would get to eat onion soup, bratwurst, sauerkraut, German potato salad, and French bread. And to drink there was either German beer or French wine! It was a lucky little island of gastronomic happiness. As I said, it was right on the border between France and Germany. There was a huge period painting hanging over the fireplace of the restaurant and it was double-sided. Depending on which side was winning, the painting would either display a picture of the kaiser on one side or, on the other side, Napoleon. We were lucky to get the Napoleon side.
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The 1104th combat battalion was attached to the Seventh Army, and, like I said before, the Germans were retreating. Our job was to use our combat engineer training in land mine and booby trap detection to clear the dwellings in newly captured territories. It was hard work, not to mention scary work, but we went over everything with a fine-toothed comb. To this day, even though I’m not a soldier and I’m not in Germany and I’m not in a war, if I enter a toilet with a pull chain behind the commode I have a tendency to stand on the bathroom seat and peer into the tank above to see if there is a booby trap…which hardly makes any sense in a restaurant in New York. Needless to say, I never saw any—but I still breathe a sigh of relief every time I look in and just see water.
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One day I was out on patrol with my platoon and we found a case of German Mauser rifles near an old railway siding. They were beautiful sharpshooting rifles with bolt action. Sure enough, there was a box of ammunition right next to them. So we had a contest. There were these white ceramic insulation things up on the telephone poles, and any man who shot one down won a dollar from each of the others. I was pretty good at that, and I’d made about twenty-one dollars when suddenly we got a strange call on our command car radio: “Get back to the base immediately!”
When we arrived back to our base there was a lot going on. Platoons of men were moving rapidly all over the place. My company commander told us that Army communications had been severed. It seems that some telephone and telegraph wires had been destroyed. Uh-oh!
I quickly realized that we were the destroyers. Those white ceramic insulators were the wrong things to make a target-practice game of. So knowing that we were really not in danger, I gallantly offered to take my men out again and search for the enemy snipers that had sabotaged the phone lines. My company commander gave me permission and sent us off with a salute that connoted something like, “You men are a brave bunch.” We never let on.
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It was the beginning of May 1945, and it looked like the war in Europe was rapidly coming to a close. My unit was stationed in a little German town called Baumholder, in the southwest part of Germany. We occupied a small German schoolhouse. There was a fellow soldier with me named Richard Goldman, who later became a well-known tax lawyer. He had been with me on the boat coming over, with me when we were transferred from the artillery to the combat engineers, and generally slogged through the mud by my side as we tried to stay alive during the war. Richard was very smart. A lot smarter than I was. Because on V-E Day, that glorious day that the war ended in Europe, he marched me down to the cellar of the schoolhouse and showed me some K rations and a bottle of wine that he had procured for us to eat and drink.