tool name
closePHILIPSBURG -- One of the most famous, or infamous, incidents of World War II was Gen. George S. Patton's slapping of a U.S. soldier who had been hospitalized for combat fatigue.
The American public and Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower were so outraged at Patton's actions that Patton was made to publicly apologize and was stripped of his command for a time.
Bob Johnston can identify with Patton's ire, having experienced it firsthand. The difference was that their encounter was never made public, at least until now.
"He threw me out of the back of a truck," said Johnston, 82.
Naturally, the fiery Patton thought he had a reason to throw the Signal Corps corporal from Philipsburg out of a truck.
"We were in France, setting up his headquarters," Johnston recalled. "He had this van-type of truck, and on one side he had his bed and on the other side he had his clothes hung up. My lieutenant told me to go into the van and install a phone. He said that Patton was in there sleeping but I should just sneak in there and hook up the phone.
"So I went in. I was on the floor, and he (Patton) was snoring away. But then he woke up, saw me and said, 'What the hell are you doing in here?' He grabbed me by the shirt collar and the seat of the pants and threw me out of the truck.
"My lieutenant asked me if I had hooked up the phone, and I told him no. He told me to get back in there and do it, and I told him I wasn't going back in there."
Johnston's lasting impression of Patton was that "he was never consistent."
"One time, in Nancy, France, we had confiscated a house for his headquarters, and I was in his bedroom putting in a scrambler phone," Johnston said. "He had left his ivory-handled pistols there, and I strapped them on and was practicing my draw when he walked into the room. He just said, 'Nice gun, isn't it?'
"But the next day, I had blocked his driveway, and he was going to court-martial me. He said, 'Soldier, you're holding up the war.' "
Johnston, who was in the 301st Battalion of the 3rd Army, had plenty of occasions to cross paths with Patton. He was with him in England when Patton was put in charge of a dummy army designed to mislead the Germans into thinking it would lead the invasion of Normandy.
Once the invasion was under way, Johnston's outfit was shipped to Normandy, where it landed six days after D-Day and started its drive through France. It was a memorable trip for Johnston for a couple of incidents that nearly brought him under fire from Patton and one that got him in trouble with his girlfriend back home.
"One time, we found this 50-gallon barrel of cognac in this town, and we tied it on the back of our truck," Johnston said. "One of our (phone) operators at headquarters called us and warned us that Patton had found out about it and was sending MPs to look for it. So we hid it in this empty house. The MPs came and searched and couldn't find it and left. Then we got it back out of the house.
"Another time, we found all of these bottles of champagne, and headquarters found out about it. One of our operators called and said the MPs were coming to get it, so we buried it in a hole. They came and searched for it, couldn't find it and left. We went to get it, and this anti-aircraft outfit had moved in right where we buried it. We started digging it up, and before we knew it there were about 20 of those guys with their rifles pointed right at us. They said, 'You guys taking our champagne?' We managed to get a few bottles of it."
Johnston, who spent his entire working career after the war with Bell Telephone, became an accomplished souvenir hunter during his time in Europe. He managed to send home 10 German rifles, four pistols, 20 brand-new German canteens and three silk German parachutes. He also sent some live machine-gun ammunition, which his father, the postmaster in Philipsburg at the time, advised him to stop doing.
But it was a haul from a French garment factory that rankled his girlfriend.
"It turns out it was a factory that manufactured undergarments, so I sent her about six pairs of black, lace-trimmed panties," he recalled with a laugh. "I explained that they came from a French warehouse.
"She wrote back to me and said she hoped I didn't expect her to wear undergarments I got from a French whorehouse. My penmanship wasn't very good, and she thought I had written 'whorehouse' instead of 'warehouse.'
"But she married me anyway."
Johnston was one of the fortunate ones during the war. He was never exposed to combat, never had to deal with the bullets and shrapnel that were part of an infantryman's daily existence.
When he volunteered to be drafted in 1943, he had been told he'd have his choice of branches of the service and had chosen the engineers. The Army had other ideas.
"We boarded a train in Bellefonte that took us to New Cumberland," he remembered. "Once we got there, we were in formation and the sergeant said that when our name was called out we should get on the train that was waiting. So my name was called and I asked him where we were going. He said we were going to the Signal Corps and were headed for Mississippi. I said I had enlisted in the Engineers and he just said, 'Get the hell on that train.' "
Johnston's outfit stayed with the 3rd Army throughout its campaign in Europe, through the Battle of the Bulge and on into Germany in the closing days of the war.
It was in Germany that Johnston saw the war at its worst at the concentration camp at Dachau.
"We went there the day after it was liberated," he said. "What got to me was that in these barracks they had a latrine built at the end of each one. I looked into one, and there were arms and legs sticking up out of the (fecal matter). When someone died during the night, they were just thrown into the latrine and taken out the next day. No one wanted to sleep next to a dead person.
"That was the bad part of the war."
Ron Bracken can be reached at 231-4641.
In Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@