Soldier Humor on the Front
Bill Downs on Soldier Humor
The American soldier who landed in Britain in 1942
made the world chuckle when he remarked to his new Irish girlfriend "Pucker
up, Babe, I'm coming in on the beam."
The same American doughboy, when he landed on the continent, brought more than liberation to Western Europe. He brought a laugh
and a gag with him—and God knows the people of Europe need laughter and gaiety.
An incident on a London bus is a good example of
the American soldier's high spirits in a foreign land. This particular soldier
was completing 48 hours leave and was returning to his billet after
drinking a good deal of beer. He felt so good he started singing—sitting alone
and singing all the verses he remembered of "Dixie." The British, being modest, retiring people, were a little shocked, and some looked disapprovingly on the
doughboy's good spirits. The lady ticket collector asked him to sing a little
more softly—but this didn't faze him. He grinned and kept singing at the top of
his voice. When he'd finished the last stanza he looked around at the
passengers and said, "Now I'll stop singing—thanks for listening."
That's more or less how the American soldier gets
along with the people of foreign countries. He's independent and sometimes his
jokes are beyond the understanding of people who don't know Americans. But
generally people like him.
Here's a story that's now told pretty much all
over Belgium. A GI got on a train and went into a compartment and sat down
opposite a very elderly lady. He was chewing gum vigorously. The old lady, who
spoke some English, would look at him every once in awhile, but neither said a
word. Finally she leaned over to the gum-chewing soldier and said, "Thank you
very much for talking to me like this—but I'm deaf and can't understand a word
you say."
I can't tell you much about the GI front line humor—not
over the radio. It's rough and vulgar and sometimes filthy. Analyzed coldly,
away from the front, a lot of GI front line humor really isn't funny. But in the
strain and violence, misery, bloodshed and death of the front line, men laugh at
anything that comes along.
Even the most unprintable words that a soldier
uses somehow seem inadequate. They hate the frustration—the plain, simple
discomfort of war are reflected in his
words.
But most GIs keep their sense of humor under the
most trying circumstances. And they laugh mostly at themselves. I think it's
because, underneath, it seems ridiculous to them that they should wear uniforms
and be engaged in the business of killing. Underneath, they are still civilians.
One of the most popular statements of the ordinary doughboy is, "Boy! It's
good to be in a democratic army where a man can do as the sergeant tells him!"
But the front isn't funny. The miserable situations go into comic relief only after the danger is passed—only after the
wounded have been cleared and the dead buried.
Then the GI remembers with relief the comic
aspects of his narrow escape. For example, PFC Nathan Gorochowski from New York
takes great delight in telling you he was smoking a (blanking) cigarette when a (blanking) fragment from an 88 millimeter shell knocked it out of his (blanking) mouth—then he'll tell you it was a (blanking) Lucky Strike cigarette, too.
Sergeant
Robert Weister, from Pittsburgh, will
laugh when he tells how he was in the second story of a front line house—the best (blanking) observation point he'd ever seen—and he was calling down mortar fire
directly on the German positions. However, after a while he found two (blanking) Germans on the other side of the (blanking) house, who were using the same
position to direct 88 fire on our positions. Weister captured the Germans.
Those things are funny now—but they certainly were
not at the time.
It's often been said that the Germans never
understood the American sense of humor. But it's accurate to say that the GI
can't understand why the Germans have none. But the other day it took an
American to make a group of very scared, cold Germans to chuckle—and at
themselves, too.
Eighteen Germans surrendered in a body to a
company of the
30th Infantry Division north of
Saint Vith. The
Germans, it was discovered, had been ordered to
fight to the last man and the
last bullet. When the sergeant that marched the Germans back to the prisoner of
war cages turned them over, saying "I guess those guys couldn't make up their
minds who was the last man and who had the last bullet," one of the prisoners
who spoke English translated the remark and to his comrades and they all
grinned—except two who, being Nazis, couldn't see anything funny about it.
