The American soldier is an incurable wishful thinker.  At that time the average soldier in North Africa, despite the slow going in Tunisia and the long distances we still had to go, though the war would be over by April of 1943.

The censors told me that the soldier’s letters home were full of such belief, and I know that in the camps they were willing to bet good money on it whenever they could find a taker.  If I tried to point out that such a quick victory was against all logic, and that even a year from then would be pretty optimistic, they looked at me as if I was nuts.

Our soldiers were all over being seriously homesick but they did constantly think about home.  Even a general said one day, “What I wouldn’t give for twenty-four hours in New York.  I’d just like to see how it looks and hear what people are saying.”

And as I traveled about the camps the question I most frequently heard was, “What are the folks at home thinking about?” —never “What are the papers saying?”

Unfortunately I didn’t know any more about it than they did.  All I knew was what I read in the French newspapers, such as an item about America building thirty-two thousand “chars” in the past year.  I assumed that “char” was a chair or a charwoman, but my French dictionary swore it meant chariot.  So all I could tell the boys at the camps was that there was apparently some mighty funny business going on in America.  Thirty-two thousand chariots, indeed!

[. . .]

Only a very small portion of our troops in North Africa were in action.  The remainder of the combat troops were just waiting, and a huge organization of supply troops was busy day and night back of the lines.

We were, it seemed to me, in another period of waiting to strike, as Mr. Churchill said, when it suited us best and Hitler least.  I had no idea when or where that would be.

On the map El Ahgheila looks like an afternoon’s drive from Algeria, but actually it’s as far as from New York to Kansas City.  I hoped the people back home wouldn’t get impatient if nothing much seemed to happen for a while.

 

Suddenly we had a flood of mail both from England and from America.  Mail sacks were piled on the docks by the thousand, making mounds as big as strawstacks.  The Army Post Office, working with remarkable speed, sorted and delivered all of it in three days.

Some people got as many as seventy-five letters all at once.  One fellow I know got two letters—one a notification that a friend had subscribed to the Reader’s Digest, which he already knew, and the other a mimeographed letter which his wife had sent him, about some church festival.  The recipient used very unchurchly language when he told about it.

Another man I knew, a colonel from San Francisco, hadn’t heard from his wife in three months or from his friends in longer than that.  The deluge of mail brought him just one letter.  It was from a vice-president of the Goodrich Tire Company, warning him that it was his patriotic duty to conserve his tires.

But this I think was the best one: Captain Raymond Ferguson of Los Angeles had a Christmas box from his aunt.  It was the first one she had sent in many years, and he was quite toucched when he saw it came from her.  Ferguson opened the box with eager fingers.  Then his face fell.  The gift was a large stack of blank V-mail forms, for him to write home on.  And Captain Ferguson, being head of the army’s postal service in that section, already had millions of V-forms.

Lieutenant Herbert Desgorges, a friend of mine from Gallup, New Mexico, got twenty letters from his wife.  Another friend, Lieutenant Bill Wilson of Des Moines, got thirty personal letters in one day.

They told a story about one soldier who hadn’t heard from his wife in three months, and finally was so disgusted he wrote her and told her to go to hel, saying he was going to get a divorce.  Then in one huge batch came fifty letters, covering the whole three months.  So he had to cable her and take back the divorce threats.

As for me, I was the recipient of only two letters—one from a girl in Pittsburgh wanting me to say hello to her soldier sweetie and one from a man in Iowa telling me that eggs were plentiful and only thirty-eight cents a dozen.  I could only suppose that my fifty family letters were at the bottom of somebody’s ocean.

[. . .]

. . . Lieutenant Colonel Gurney Taylor took to visiting me in town in order to use my bath.  Once he had two baths in less than a week.  It made him so damned clean he was conspicuous . . .