Lichfield Barracks to the 101st Airborne Division

Jay Stone, Formerly Sergeant

321st Glider Field Artillery Battalion

101st Airborne Division

 

Tenders took us from the Queen Mary to the docks of Greenock where we boarded trains for the trip south to the 10th Replacement Depot in Lichfield Barracks. I recall nothing of the journey to the replacement depot or our reception there. However, after a couple of days I was told that I had been reclassified from Anti-Aircraft to Field Artillery. My understanding at the time was that there were no Anti-Aircraft Artillery units in the European Theater of Operations (ETO). I have come to believe that there may have been one, organic to the 29th Infantry Division which was training hard for the invasion of France. There were four Field Artillery battalions organic to the 29th and I have to wonder why, with my new branch, I wasn't sent to one of them. In any case I had been reclassified and I was to be a Field Artilleryman for the rest of my military career.

A week after my arrival at the 10th I was assigned to the Shipping Company of the 1st 

This is an aerial view of Lichfield Barracks.

Provisional Replacement Battalion and was a member of the permanent party (cadre) of the depot. As replacements arrived they were assigned to the holding companies of the battalion. Forty-eight hours before they were to leave for their new units they were most often transferred to the Shipping Company and housed in barracks with room for 150 – 200 soldiers built for the British Army. I was placed in charge of one of these barracks. Many of these replacements were non-commissioned officers, to include a master sergeant one time. My responsibilities included having the men on a shipping order ready for shipping and taking them to any appointments that had been scheduled for their group. On the appointed day they were turned over to other members of the company who took them to trains for the journey to their new units.

There were so many replacements coming into the theater that not all could be quartered on Lichfield Barracks. Just off the barracks were rows of civilian houses from which their owners had been displaced by British authorities and many American soldiers were quartered in them.

These houses on Nottingham Road in Lichfield are
similar to the houses in which American soldiers
were quartered.

I had been in the Army for five months, was a private, but held a position which should have been filled by a non-commissioned officer. It was an awkward situation and I felt the irritation of those senior to me, which was everybody.

A provisional battalion is just that: provisional. The 1^st was not meant to be permanent and had no Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE) which details the organization and equipment of every unit in the Army. No soldiers were permanently assigned to it. Replacement soldiers were attached to the battalion and assigned to positions with no regard to their rank, e.g., the first sergeant of the Shipping Company was a sergeant. Everybody had an acting rank and could wear the insignia of that rank. However, they were paid for their actual rank. Some soldiers wore the insignia of their acting rank while others did not.

Ed Koontz, a fellow barracks supervisor, was a corporal, acting sergeant. He had been graduated from Indiana State University with the Class of 1942 and had been an ROTC cadet. Normally, ROTC cadets, who had completed the four year ROTC program and a summer active duty period were commissioned as second lieutenants upon graduation. Because of the rapid expansion of the Army during the time Ed was in college, the summer training was abolished. Cadets who were graduated in 1942 were ordered to active duty as corporals and assigned to an Officer Candidate School (OCS) where, after successful completion of the course, they were commissioned as second lieutenants. Ed completed the course at Fort Benning, Georgia but on the last day, after he had purchased his officer uniforms, he was washed out and did not graduate. Ed was smart, knew much of the material in the OCS program from his days in ROTC and said that he had pulled several of his fellow candidates through the course but claimed that the tactical officers had it in for him. I knew many officers in the Army and Ed should have been one of them but the Gods of War decreed otherwise. He was one unhappy soldier but made the best of his situation.

There is, of course, no indispensable soldier but Private Ira Rosenfield, the morning report clerk of the Shipping Company, came as close to indispensable as a soldier could be. 

This is a copy of a morning report without
Ira Rosenfield's improvement.

Morning reports are created each morning. They are an exception based system in that they contain information only about those soldiers not “present and accounted for.” One of the reasons for being listed is being assigned to, or leaving, a unit. The shipping company sometimes had 2,000 soldiers either being assigned to the company or leaving it. There was no way Ira could enter so many names on the report so he devised a method of not having to list each soldier. He attached the special order affecting those soldiers to the morning report. Even then the morning report was a thick document and he was a busy soldier.

One of the pleasures on a British Army post was the canteen run by the Navy, Army, Air Force Institute (NAAFI). It compared roughly to a United States Army post exchange (PX) but emphasized food service more than did the PX. A specialty of the NAAFI was warm apple pie. Many mornings I would go there for the pie and a pot of tea. It was delicious.

Probably in order to keep the rodent population under control there were cats living in our barracks. Our cat was not a good mother because soon after I arrived she had a litter and ate one of her kittens but left three alive. Perhaps she hadn’t caught any mice that day and was hungry. Soon after, one of the soldiers who had been on pass returned drunk with a kitten about one month older than our kittens and placed it in with the cannibalistic mother. She didn’t like this and at times sat over the stranger with a paw lifted and threatening the newcomer. She must have picked up the idea from us that it would not be in her best interest to kill the stranger.

Birmingham, a major city in the United Kingdom, was about 30 minutes south of Lichfield. I went there several times on pass and discovered fish and chips. I also discovered the fun of taking a bus from the city center to the end of its run or to some point that appeared

Other than London, Birmingham was the
most bombed city in the United Kingdom.

interesting. From there I would walk back to my start point and was able to get a close look at a bit of life in a strange city. On my first trip I found a fish and chips stand. Fish and chips consist of some sort of fish, frequently cod, breaded, then fried in deep fat. The chips are French fried potatoes. In those days the food was placed on some old newspapers so as to be carried away. The oil in which the food was fried dripped on to the newspaper and mixed with the ink making for a less than appetizing, but still edible, mess.
There were other pleasures in Birmingham. Throughout the United Kingdom, at least during the war, there were the Paramount Dance Halls. I visited them in Edinburgh, London and in Birmingham. Women and men, mostly young, paid an admission fee to enter a large hall with live music. Most of the women, who outnumbered the men, came with a friend and the men alone or with friends. Cutting-in was prevalent with some women cutting-in on other women as the dancers moved counter-clockwise on the 

Soldiers and young women dance at a
 Paramount Dance Hall in the
United Kingdom during World War II.
The young woman in the foreground
facing the camera wears the uniform of
the Women's Land Army. Note the
woman on the right side waiting for
someone to ask her to dance.

floor. Despite having dated girls for three years before I entered the Army, I was unsophisticated where they were concerned. I didn’t know what was going on. I met Janice Shelton (a pseudonym) at this dance, we danced and I asked her if I could walk her home. I could and we did. When we arrived outside of her home she invited me into meet her parents. Wow! I was smart enough to know that such an event usually took place when a relationship was more developed but wasn’t smart enough to think of a response that would keep us outside so that I wouldn’t have to meet her parents. Nevertheless we went inside where her parents were kind to me. Perhaps too kind, I had the feeling that they would like to see more of me as a possible husband for their daughter. This was not for me and Janice and I never saw one another again.

Provisional units are not meant to last and the end for the 1^st Provisional Replacement Battalion came with the arrival of the 10^th Replacement Battalion, a TO&E unit, at Lichfield Barracks. The 1^st was disbanded we were assigned to the 10^th. Many of us were replaced by soldiers of the 1o^th and transferred to other duties or locations. I lost my large British barracks and was sent to a row of the houses that had been taken over from their British owners for use by the 10^th Replacement Depot. I began to feel that housing and sending other soldiers to combat units and on to combat was not for me. In November of 1943 Major Ned Moore, an assistant G1 in the 101^st Airborne Division, came to Lichfield Barracks looking for volunteers for assignment to the division. I had brought a group of replacements to a meeting with Major Moore and after he had made his presentation I asked if he would accept me as a volunteer. He replied that if I received a release from my company commander I would be reassigned to the division. I asked for the release, received it and was transferred to the barracks for replacements. I was no longer part of the cadre.

One morning as I was going through the line for breakfast I saw a soldier, with his head down, dishing up the oatmeal. He looked like one of my classmates from Holy Trinity High School, Jack “Wick” Van Wettering. As I got up to the oatmeal station I began to ask him if he was indeed Wick when he looked up and we recognized each other. It was wonderful to find someone from my old school and so we made plans to meet that evening which we did. Wick told me that another member of our class, Chet Stepnowski, was with him. At the time there were two Catholic priests, circuit riders, who were holding a mission in the area. At a mission the priests preached eternal damnation for sinners who did not repent. It was fiery stuff and put fear for our souls into our lives. We three attended the mission services and spent other time together. Wick and Chet were going to the 1st Infantry Division which had just arrived in the UK from the Mediterranean Theater. In November of 1942 it had landed at Oran in Algeria and fought through to Tunis and then was in the vanguard of the invasion of Sicily in November 1943. In the UK it prepared for the invasion of Normandy. It was a hot division and anyone going to it knew that he was in for heavy combat. The three of us were headed for divisions that would land in France on D-Day. I have often wondered what the odds were on three members of a class of 65 (5%) meeting in a replacement depot about two years after their graduation. We had a few days together, then were off to our divisions. My great adventure gathered speed when I arrived at the 321st Glider Field Artillery Battalion, 101^st Airborne Division at Whatcombe Farms, Berkshire, England.