THEY ALSO SERVE

FREDERICK J. O. BLACHLY

Wartime memories of playing music and playing soldier

It all started in the summer of 1941. The war in Europe had been going on for two years. But the mood in the United States was “stay out.” In August 1941, the US House of Representatives adopted, by a single vote, a proposal to extend the draft of young men into the armed forces.

In June, I had graduated from the Peabody Institute of Music (now part of Johns Hopkins University) with a teacher’s certificate in cello. There was no work for either cellists or teachers. Luckily, I had an A.B. degree from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and decided to use this to secure a commission in the US Navy. My application was accepted pending a physical exam. Application denied: underweight; slightly deaf in left ear; and colorblind with respect to certain shades of pale blue and pale green. Hardly fit material for the Navy, which apparently required perfection.

In November 1941, I became an assistant to William Hard, Sr. (CC 1917-1962), who was then a Roving Editor of the Reader’s Digest. My title was “Labor Researcher.” When my draft number came up, one of the top Digest editors wrote a letter to the draft board explaining that I had an essential job with a magazine that was essential to morale, both civilian and military.

In January 1945, I was promoted to “Associate Editor” and my name was placed on the masthead. By that time, however, our troops in Europe had suffered through the Battle of the Bulge and the Army decided that the war was going to last indefinitely, making it necessary to draft every man who could stand up without help and every mouse who could squeak. By that time, I had acquired a wife, three children, and a mortgage. The letter about an essential job on an essential magazine did not work. I was drafted and told to report at 6:00 A.M. on 3 April 1945 for transportation to Fort George G. Meade to be inducted into the Army.

ARMED WITH A GLOCKENSPIEL

One cold April morning about two weeks later, my fellow inductees and I were assembled outside our barracks for roll call. After I responded “Yes, Sir” to the acting private first class who was in charge, I was told to report after chow to a Sergeant “Zipper” Bagg at the Rec Hall. So, after breakfast I wandered over to the Rec Hall and saw a grumpy-looking man with three stripes on his sleeve.

“Are you Sergeant Bagg?”
“Yes.”
“Sergeant ‘Zipper’ Bagg?”
“Ye-es.”
“Well, I’m Recruit Blachly and I was told to check in with you.”
“Yeah, what instrument do you play?”
“Cello.”

From the sergeant’s mouth came a string of colorful profanities, ending with the observation that there was no need for any “blankety-blank cello in a blankety-blank marching band.” Then he asked, “Any other instrument?”

I replied, “Double bass.”
More profanity. “What else?”
“A little piano.”

After a few more minutes of even more colorful language the sergeant said, “Go in the back room and see if you can play that @#$%& glockenspiel.” I went into the back room and found an instrument shaped like an old Greek lyre, with squirrel tails hanging down each side. It had two rows of metal bars that were struck with an ivory ball on a stick. The metal bars on the right-hand side corresponded to the white keys on a piano. The bars on the left-hand side were the black keys. These were noted in sharps and most band music is written in flats. The instrument was mounted on a metal pole that fitted into a socket on a contraption that was a combination of belt and suspenders.

I told the sergeant I thought I could handle it. This wasn’t too hard, because the glockenspiel (otherwise known as the bell-lyre) only had an occasional “ping” to play. Thus, I joined the Fort Meade Reception Center Band, whose members did not belong to any part of any recognized Army organization. We had no badges, buttons, collar insignia, or anything else to identify us, but wore just our basic Army uniforms.

The band existed because the colonel in charge at Fort Meade liked a little music on special occasions. Therefore, anyone who showed up at the Reception Center and had any music in his background automatically was put in the band. On an instrumental proficiency level of one to ten the individual band members would rate between five and six. Most of the band members were recent high school graduates from the backwoods of Maryland and the hills of West Virginia.

We were a motley crew. The oldest was about 35 and had been a general foreman at a machine shop in Baltimore. The shop, which had a direct contract with Wright Field in Ohio, made some kind of little widget without which no airplane could fly. The machine shop production fell apart when the general foreman left, and the owner went to Wright Field and personally tore up the contract. Another member of the band had been a research engineer with Sikorsky, where he worked on helicopters. His draft board, in all its wisdom, thought he would be more valuable to the war effort as a lowly Army recruit.

One band member had been a refrigeration engineer on cargo vessels that carried perishables to Army bases all over the world. The Merchant Marine was so short of refrigeration engineers that it was forced to assign only one engineer per ship, rather than the previously required two. He carried the equivalent rank of a full lieutenant in the Navy (two full stripes.) Three times, this engineer had had his boat torpedoed out from under him. The last time he was adrift for 30 days before he was picked up. His employer gave him a 30-day vacation. On the 29th day his draft board got him.

Our refrigeration engineer decided to have some fun, so he asked a friend in the Pentagon if decorations acquired in one branch of the armed services (in wartime the Merchant Marine was considered one of the branches) could be worn on the uniform of another branch. The answer came back “Yes,” for General “X” by Colonel “Z.” On the otherwise bare uniform of an Army recruit he attached three rows of Merchant Marine “fruit salad”—those colorful ribbons signifying where he had served, what dangers he had been exposed to, and what awards he had been given. In the pocket of his uniform he kept the letter from Colonel “Z.”

We counted the day lost if some brand-new second lieutenant didn’t stop us and say, “Hey! You! What are doing with all that stuff on your uniform and you only a recruit?” Our hero never answered directly, but unbuttoned his pocket and handed over the letter from Colonel “Z.” The reaction was always the same: “Uh-yeah- OK.”

One day, Sergeant Bagg decided that the trumpet section needed beefing up and told me and my glockenspiel to do the beefing. Trumpets are “transposing instruments” and the note they are to play is written as a C, but comes out a B flat. That is confusing enough, but, as explained earlier, on my glockenspiel, the left-hand bars had no flats (only sharps), so that a B flat on the piano was an A sharp on the glockenspiel. Eventually, I discovered that if I forgot about sharps and transposing and just read the music, not in the familiar G clef on the piano, but in the tenor clef which is used by cello players (middle C is the second line from the top) and added a few flats, I could bang out the trumpet part.

Then I asked Sergeant Bagg if I could take on the morning rehearsals. He was delighted to get some extra sleep, and thus I became the band conductor. There is hardly any thrill in this world equal to the thrill of being a conductor, giving a down beat and having the music come right at you. And being able, by waving a baton in the right hand and making motions with the left, to have the group play louder or softer, faster or slower, with more or fewer accents. No wonder conductors live to about 100 years of age!

One of the most poignant memories of the band was playing at a small town cemetery on Decoration Day 1945. We headed through a rusty gate up to a scene that looked like a Norman Rockwell painting. Preceding us was a Color Guard from the local American Legion Post. Next came the Boy Scouts. The band followed, playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Then came the veterans, some on foot, others pushed in wheelchairs. Last in the procession were the relatives of the deceased: white-haired widows from World War I; bereaved parents of sons killed in World War II; and a young widow carrying a baby while holding the hand of a toddler, children who would never see their father except as a photograph of a smiling young man in uniform.

On a bare hilltop were headstones marking the graves of soldiers from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II. Each patriot’s grave had a small American flag. Some of the graves had flowers. After a moment of silent prayer, a local soprano, accompanied by our muted band, gave a wavering rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The high notes were out of tune, but no one cared about that. When she came to the end with “the la-and of the far-ee and the ho-ome of the ba-rave,” strong men wept and the band found it hard to keep going. The local minister gave a benediction. Our lead trumpeter played “Taps.” The band played “America the Beautiful,” and then we descended in silence until we reached the bottom of the hill.

LOOKING TO MARCH ON

I had heard of a job in the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) which seemed tailor-made for me: Liaison with American Labor Unions. Because of my job as a labor researcher at the Reader’s Digest I knew almost all of the principal leaders of the various labor organizations. So I applied for a transfer to the O.S.S. My first boss at the Digest talked to “Wild Bill” Donovan, the O.S.S. head, and got him to request my services.

Nothing seemed to be happening, at least on the transfer front. The weeks went by: FDR died; Harry Truman was sworn in as president; Hitler committed suicide; Germany surrendered one week later; and the entire United States went into paroxysms of joy. But there was still the bitter war in the Pacific.

Finally, in late June, my orders came through: Report to O.S.S. Headquarters. On a hot July day, wearing—as required at the time for soldiers in transit—my winter uniform and a helmet liner, and carrying my Army-issue overcoat and duffel bag, I boarded the train for a 25-minute ride to Union Station in Washington, DC. Those of us who were headed for the O.S.S. were met by a young lieutenant, who hustled us into a bus with all the shades pulled down (security, you know), and were taken to O.S.S. Headquarters. We were dumped into an aptly named “waiting room,” and after an hour we were individually escorted to the offices and the officers to whom we were supposed to report.

I saluted the captain behind the desk, hung up my overcoat, and put my duffel bag in a corner, and then stood at attention waiting to be told where to report for my liaison duties with American labor unions. Instead, the captain said, “Blachly, we have a surprise for you. The only way we could get you away from the Army was to promise to send you as far east as possible. You will go into training to become a member of a radio unit that will be dropped behind the Japanese lines in China to send out intelligence about Japanese orders of battle, troop strength, troop movements, and any other information you believe might be useful.”

I gulped a couple of times, thought what an excellent target I would make at six feet three inches, and then asked, “When do I start?”

“It will take about two weeks for the security clearance to come through.”

“Oh,” I said. “Then I can go home to Chevy Chase (about seven miles from the office) to my wife and children.”

“No,” said the captain, “if you were an officer perhaps it could be arranged, but as a private that would be impossible. You are going down to an O.S.S. installation in Petersburg, Virginia.”

At this camp, near Fort Lee, I began to learn Morse Code. We had gotten as far as the letter “P” when the orders came in to report to the O.S.S. training center on Catalina Island, 26 miles off the coast of California. We traveled under sealed orders, which read on the outside “Not to be opened until arrival at final destination.” We were told not to reveal anything to anybody and if we were questioned by Military Police, we could show them the sealed orders and the message on the outside.

After about a week of sitting up, day and night, in a hot and cindery railway coach, we arrived at Long Beach, where we transferred to a boat and were taken to our new quarters on Catalina Island. In peacetime, it had been a boarding school for the recalcitrant children of movie stars. It was an isolated spot, miles by boat, and even more miles by road, from the only town of Avalon. Catalina is 22 miles long, one to eight miles wide, and mountainous, rising abruptly from sea level to about 2,500 feet. At that time, it was populated mostly by wild goats and buffalo.

On our transcontinental trip, a middle-aged regular Army sergeant and I had become friends. He had spent 20 years in China and spoke both Chinese and Russian. The sergeant was a superb naturalist and knew both the common and Latin names of animals, birds, insects, plants, and trees. He had been employed by the Cincinnati, Ohio, Park Service, and had been a guest lecturer at the University of Cincinnati, an institution of higher learning that was happy to have him lecture, but would not let him enroll because he had never finished high school. His name was Warren Wells.

After Wells and I had found our bunks, showered (how great the need, how satisfying the soap and water!), and changed into fatigues, there was nothing else to do, so we decided to go exploring. Our camp was located at the back of a wide cove banked by cliffs of rotten rock, 100 feet high. We chose the one to our right as we faced the ocean. It looked easier to climb.

We were halfway up when we got stuck. There seemed to be no way to get farther up, and getting back down seemed hopeless. Suddenly, we realized we were on the receiving end of rocks and hot metal. Below us, in the next cove, a class in demolition was busy demonstrating the result of shaped charges. Warren and I seemed to be part of the demonstration. Although climbing up had seemed impossible before, we somehow scrambled up and over.

Training at this camp was arduous. We went on long hikes up the mountains, down into valleys, and up more mountains. We had to climb 100 feet up a rope suspended from a cliff, and crawled under coils of barbed wire while live ammunition whistled three feet overhead. We were taught hand-to-hand combat and many ways of killing an opponent with our bare hands. We learned the WEFT system for identifying enemy airplanes. Officially, the initials stood for “Wings, Engine, Fuselage, and Tail,” but everyone knew it really meant “Wrong Every Flippin’ Time.”

We were also taught how to use rifles, pistols, and bazookas. I thought I was doing a pretty good job with a pistol, scoring three bulls eyes and two nines with the first five shots, until the instructor yelled at me, “You’re holding that pistol wrong.”

I protested, “Look at the target.”

He yelled, “I don’t give a damn, you hold the pistol the way I tell you or there’s going to be trouble.” After that I couldn’t even find the target.

The need for security was emphasized at all times. We were given a course in lock-picking; not that anyone expected us to become professional thieves, but to demonstrate to us how easy it was to open an average padlock. Warren took the course seriously and made himself a set of lock-picking tools, which came in handy later on. We were told how, in time of war, even an oil company map of Los Angeles could prove useful to an enemy; therefore, maps, when not in use, should be kept locked in a safe.

We took classes in the optimum uses of different kinds of explosives, including the best places to put the charges when blowing up railways, bridges, or tunnels. I wondered why we were not given courses in Morse Code until I discovered (a) that we were not going to use code, but voice transmission, and (b) that my job in the radio unit was to turn the crank that turned the wheel that generated the electricity to run the radio.

In the middle of all this serious study there were two moments of complete satisfaction and joy. The first was accidental, the second premeditated. We took turns in the kitchen doing the dishes. The rule was that diners, as they finished their meals, were supposed to deposit plates, silverware, and cups or glasses in a designated hole in the wall. First they were to scrape any food on the trays into a garbage pail. Then they were to put the paper napkins in a separate bin. And, last of all, they were to shove the trays through an aperture into the kitchen, where someone would put them in the dishwasher racks.

One lunchtime, I was on the receiving end behind the aperture. Someone tried to hand me a tray that hadn’t been cleaned. I could not see who it was (and whoever it was couldn’t see me) so I yelled, “Hey, soldier! You know the rules, clean off that @#$%& tray.” With that I became an instant hero. The only person in camp who thought the mess hall rules didn’t apply to him, and who was known as the meanest s.o.b. in the entire Army, was the gun instructor.

The second incident took place when we were doing pretend interviews. I had learned through the grapevine that we were supposed to devise cover stories for ourselves, in order to interview a Chinese government official about “topic A.” In the course of the interview, the person being interviewed was supposed to bring up (in a manner as subtle as a poke in the nose) “topic B,” which, if followed, would be much more important than “topic A.” I was the interviewer.

I pretended to be a Roving Editor of the Reader’s Digest, which meant I could ask anybody anything, and we began the interview discussing “topic A.” After about five minutes, the interviewee brought up “topic B.” I ignored the signal and kept talking about “topic A.” I could see the instructor getting puzzled and nervous. After a few more minutes, I brought the interview to a close by asking, “By the way, could you give me the name and address of the man in Shanghai who told you about ‘topic B?’ I’d like to look him up. It sounds like a good story.”

The instructor knew he had been had. He asked me, “Where did you learn to ask questions like that?” I told him I really was an associate editor of the Reader’s Digest, but he didn’t believe it. I told him to go look at the masthead on the inside front cover of the magazine. There in the list of Associate Editors was Frederick J. O. Blachly. When this word got around camp, my stock went up considerably. Everyone was afraid of annoying an editor of a magazine with an international circulation.

Then, on August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. In our camp on Catalina Island there were two reactions: (1) Thank God they dropped the bombs instead of dropping us; and (2) Now the war is over and we can all go home.

ROUGHING IT

The camp administration had other ideas, including sending us out on a combination map-reading course and survival mission. The six men in our group were issued compasses, water purification tablets, waterproof containers of kitchen matches, plus one rifle and plenty of ammunition. Starting at point A, we were to follow a compass course to point B, where we would find a birdhouse containing compass directions to point C, and so on to points D, E, and F, and a final compass course that would bring us back to camp. As for food, well, we were supposed to shoot our own food supply.

At this point, the lock-picking tools made by Sergeant Wells came into use. After “lights out,” he picked the lock on the commissary door. We all went in and loaded up on Idaho potatoes, corn on the cob, packages of dried soup, dehydrated eggs, coffee, and, for dessert, a few cans of peaches. With careful rationing, our stolen supplies lasted the entire trip.

We had two choices to find the birdhouses, neither one desirable or foolproof. We could try going from point to point in a straight line, using our compasses as guides. That meant going down and up steep mountains through brush and vines. Or, we could try to spot a landmark on the other side of the valley and then walk on the ridges of the mountains, going away from the designated course on one ridge and doubling back on another, in an effort to find what we hoped to be the landmark we had picked out. We chose alternative number two and it worked out for us. We found the birdhouse at point B and kept the new directions, and all succeeding directions, to prove that we really had completed the compass course.

That first night we built a campfire, roasted some potatoes and corn in the hot ashes, opened one can of peaches, which we all shared, drank some foul-tasting “purified” water, climbed into our sleeping bags, admired the stars for a few minutes, and then fell asleep. For breakfast, we had coffee and scrambled eggs, and then proceeded to destination C and Birdhouse Number Two. The third day brought us to a beach. At the far end was a tunnel through a high cliff. Should we try the shortcut by swimming through the water tunnel, or should we take the long way, backwards along the cliff, up a goat trail to the top and then down the other side? We voted to swim.

When we reached the other end of the tunnel and counted noses we were missing one nose. It belonged to a colleague named Art, who had been an assistant attorney general of Utah in civilian life. Warren Wells and I swam back to see what had happened. We found Art, floundering around, trying to walk through the tunnel. With water eight feet deep, this was not possible. Why walk? He didn’t know how to swim. Warren and I each grabbed one arm and towed Art through. Our colleagues on the other side pulled Art up on the rocks, pounded him on the back to get rid of any Pacific Ocean water in his lungs, and we set off for the next birdhouse.

With the end of the war, President Truman abolished the O.S.S. But “Wild Bill” Donovan was not going to let his organization go into the pages of history unheralded and unsung. He set up a special unit in Washington, DC, to engage in what we called “officially, unofficial, secret publicity.” Anyone with the slightest background in writing or editing was assigned to this unit. That included me. But this time I could live at home.

We were supposed to go through O.S.S. files and, if we came across a record of high adventure and derring-do, we were to “leak” the information to reporters from newspapers, magazines, and radio. As I pawed through the files assigned to me, I was astounded at the low success rate. O.S.S. agents dropped into France were picked up by the Gestapo, or were found and turned over to the Germans by collaborators, or broke legs on landing, or saw their parachuted supplies drifting away in sudden gusts of wind, or failed to make contact with the Maquis. Still, a few trains were wrecked, a few tunnels blown up, a few convoys disrupted.

The reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff were marvels of puffery. Two, in particular, stand out in memory. The first claimed that, thanks to the work of O.S.S. members working with their local Greek contacts, “all German shipping had been driven from the Aegean Sea.” It turned out that while the statement was literally true, German ships were still getting through. Although it was too dangerous to go into the open sea, they were able to hug the coast and hide behind islands.

The second report that caught my attention then, and is still bright 55 years later, related to a “Jump School” near Kunming, China. The report said that “so great was the gallantry of our Chinese Allies, that not one student refused to jump.” This looked fishy to me and I bided my time until a couple of master sergeants, who had been instructors in that school, came to town. They were real “Willie and Joe” types immortalized by Bill Mauldin. I showed them the report and asked if it was true. Willie scratched his head. Joe scratched his crotch, and then Willie said,

“We dunno how they felt about jumping. They came jabbering down the line and Joe and me, we don’t speak Chinese, so we don’t know what they were saying. I stood on one side of the door and Joe stood on the other side of the door and we just flang ‘em out.”

One morning in the middle of October 1945, I was reading files when I heard, “Congratulations, Blachly.”

I asked, “What for?”

“You’ve just been promoted to private first class.”

This great honor lasted for about two weeks when word came through that men with three or more children were to be demobilized immediately. This meant I had to go back to Fort Meade to go through the paper-work. When this was complete and I was a civilian again, I was about to leave when the sergeant in charge said, “Blachly, don’t you want to enlist in the Reserves to protect your rating?”

With nothing to lose and with a bit of bragging, I replied, “Next time, if there is a next time, I’ll go in as colonel or better.” In all the years since then I have not had to make good on my boast and still remain, thank God, a Pfc. (retired).

Frederick J.O. Blachly (CC ‘80) was an associate editor of the Reader’s Digest and later a writer and public affairs adviser for the departments of Commerce and State, and in the Executive Office of the President. He says “I made my living as a writer and my life as a musician.” He played in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and was first cellist of the Washington Camerata.

Return to COSMOS 2000 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page