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A stitch in time can lead to combat duty
By Carl Heintze
It is a little known (until now) part of the history of World War II that I once came close to committing treason. Well, at the least, I aided and abetted the enemy.
Now more than 50 years later it is safe to confess it. I think the statute of limitations has expired, and besides most of those involved are either dead or too feeble to take their revenge.
My brush with aiding the enemy came about because of the difficulty I had in getting into the armed services. Some of my grandchildren may find it hard to believe, but there was a time when men and women wanted to get in, not out of the armed forces.
I was among them, eager to join up, take my rifle or whatever and march off to war. Alas for me, the armed services even in those dark days (around 1942) had standards. They took one look at me and declared that my eyes (20/400, although corrected by glasses) and my weight (a perennial problem, there was always too much of it), rendered me unfit for duty, whether it be Army, Navy or Marines. I never tried the Coast Guard or the Merchant Marine, but I suppose they would have rejected me, too.
So I was cast onto the trash heap of military service. I was classified 4-F, a state in those days somewhat akin to being a leper in the time of Christ. This did not, of course, prevent me from joining the war effort. I went to work in a shipyard, not building Victory ships, but building vessels (seagoing tugs and mine layers) that presumably helped us become victorious somehow.
I lived in this state of suspension for about six months. Then suddenly, the Army discovered it had miscalculated potential losses. It reclassified me into a category known as 1-AL, fit for limited service.
The Army didn't say how limited. They just bundled me off to the Presidio of Monterey. There I became a tailor in the Presidio's reception center.
Just how the Army decided I was a tailor I have no idea. I had been majoring in college in political science and I suppose that was as good a qualification as any. I didn't know one end of a needle from another, I had no other qualifications whatsoever, but that really didn't matter.
The Army set me to work measuring men for their new uniforms. Each day as potential soldiers came through the door, I whipped my measuring tape around their chests, along their arms and about their necks. As I did I called out my measurements, most of them inaccurate and two "writers" scribbled them down on the draftees' clothing forms.
The draftees then took the forms with them as they passed through the clothing warehouse and were issued boots, pants, shirts, leggings (soldiers still wore leggings in those days) and so on. At the end of the line they were attired in a whole collection of clothes that didn't fit.
Thereafter, the new soldiers were shipped off to other camps where presumably someone straightened things out and got them finally to look like Uncle Sam's finest by ignoring whatever I had put on their clothing forms.
I know it was a terrible thing to do and I'm sorry, but at the time I felt trapped. No one seemed to care whether their uniforms fit or not, least of all me. All I wanted was to get out of the clothing business and into the war.
It took the Army awhile to figure this out. (It always takes the Army awhile to figure things out, but eventually it does.) Came 1944. The invasion of Europe had begun. Casualties again were heavier than anticipated, particularly in the infantry.
The Army took me out of limited service just as if it had never existed and reclassified me as fit for any kind of duty. I suppose they might have balked at my being a paratrooper or a fighter or bomber pilot--those occupations took skill. Being an infantryman, however, didn't require much except being warm and being there.
Whole companies of men like me were reclassified out of limited service and out of the 12 service commands in the United States and were suddenly found to be ideal as foot soldiers. (Many weren't, but it took the Army awhile to find that out, too.)
In like fashion the Army also suddenly discovered that thousands of men they had earlier sent off to college as part of the Army Specialized Training Program should be infantry. They quickly reclassified them out of college into infantry regiments and sent them overseas.
The ASTP men and the former limited-service men met sometimes as infantry replacements and sometimes as the rank and file of new divisions. And a lot of them were wounded and a lot of them died.
I didn't die, but I did get where I wanted to be, in combat. I've always thought the Army believed it to be a kind of sentence for all those misfitted soldiers I'd sent off into God knows where. What they didn't know was that I was happy as a clam.
But it also taught me a lesson. I've never tried to fit anyone with clothes since, and I buy all my clothes ready-made. No more tailoring for me, thanks.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
