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PFC Norman Steele - (Operator, Truck, 1/4 ton, General Purpose)
Of all the men and officers I knew during my WWII army service, I can still remember the names of many and the faces of quite a few. But there are only a handful with whom I was sufficiently close to remember the details of the adventures we shared. One of these is PFC Norman Steele, my jeep driver. I’m sure his skills and courage saved my life on more than one occasion.
In February 1944, I was a replacement 2nd Lieutenant assigned to the 7th Infantry Regiment on the Anzio Beachhead in Italy. My job was platoon leader of the I & R Platoon (Intelligence and Reconnaissance). I would be assuming command from Sgt. Claude Bond (pseudonym), a regular Army 1st sergeant who had held the job since my predecessor, platoon leader Lt. John Banks, had been KIA while leading a patrol across the Volturno River.
At my first meeting with Sgt. Bond, at night in one of the shell battered stone houses of the regimental forward CP near Conca, he described the platoon organization, personnel and equipment. He told me the platoon was assigned four jeeps, but these were kept back at Service Company to avoid attracting artillery fire on the forward Command Post. He told me that his own jeep driver was PFC Steele and he recommended that I use PFC Perrault, neither of whom I yet knew. There were two other drivers, one of whom later deserted in the Vosges Mountains of France and the other, a battle fatigue victim, who accidentally shot and killed himself in Germany. Although I had very limited Army experience at that point, I sized up Sgt. Bond quickly and was determined to start things off on the right foot. I told him there would be no personal jeep drivers in my platoon. If PFC Steele had been driving him, then Steele was obviously the platoon leader’s driver' and since I was now the platoon leader, Steele would be my driver. It turned out to be one of the best moves I ever made!
I met Steele for the first time a few nights later when it was his turn to bring up the nighttime rations, ammo and water in his jeep and trailer. I never saw him in daylight until about three months later when we broke out of the Beachhead and it became possible to use the roads again which heretofore were subject to pinpoint artillery fire during daylight hours.
Steele was rather short and a little stocky. I don’t remember ever seeing him without his helmet and the steel pot became part of his face in my memory. He was a skillful yet careful driver, totally focused on the job at hand. His night vision and sense of direction were uncanny. We traveled countless miles on unpaved roads, many of which had surely been mined by the retreating enemy. He had either x-ray vision or a lot of luck, because we never triggered one. You only do that once.
Our relationship was not formal, but neither was it one of familiarity. He called me “Lootenant,†never “sir,†and I called him Steele. We never talked about home or friends or made small talk. He was my driver for about a year and a half and I don’t even know where he was from. Our conversation was limited to the business at hand. He held up his end and I held up mine. We respected each other for that and we saw no need to discuss it. He seemed to resist any intrusion into the enlisted man/officer relationship and maybe I did too. That’s the way we had both been trained and army training translates into action without conscious thought.
I remember our jeep being caught in the open in broad daylight by a German tank during the Anzio Breakout. The tank was so well concealed that we couldn’t see it, but the burst of its first shell on the unpaved road 20 yards in front of us was terrifying. As our jeep skidded to a stop on my order, Steele and I bailed out and took cover in the shallow drainage ditches on opposite sides of the road. Several more 88 mm shells came screaming in and then the fire stopped. Again, on my signal, we made a dash back to the jeep and Steele got us out of there safely with wheels spinning.
On another occasion, in France, we were reconnoitering a dirt road one night, that ran around the enemy’s flank. We found the road ended at a farm about two or three miles ahead. On the way in, we noticed that the trees bordering the road had been heavily notched so that they could be dropped across the road with very little additional effort. On the way back out, one of the trees was down and lay across the road blocking our escape. While I covered the woods with our 50 caliber machine gun, Steele pulled a length of chain out of his tool compartment, chained the tree trunk to the front bumper of the jeep and pulled it far enough off the road to get by. Was it an ambush foiled by the threat of the machine gun? Or did the wind blow the weakened tree down? We will never know.
On a similar recon, this time also after dark, we saw no one going in. But coming back out, there was a huge American truck blocking the narrow dirt road. Steele stopped the jeep and we walked ahead, four of us, and found that another unit was moving in behind us and their truck had struck a mine. The right front wheel, fender and hood had been blown away. The road was mined and we had somehow missed the mine or mines on the way in. Where there is one mine, there are usually more nearby. Yet, Steele volunteered to drive the jeep around the truck on the narrow shoulder of the dirt road while the rest of us took cover behind the truck. Brave man!
We had many other close calls when we were spotted by the enemy and became the target of accurate tank or artillery fire. Steele’s nerve and driving skills were largely responsible for our escape in each case.
And he had other attributes. I have described in another anecdote how Steele solved the problem of broken glass in the windshield of our jeep while we were briefly off the line near Naples. Under cover of darkness, he swapped windshields with a U. S. Navy jeep, parked unattended in the city. Next morning, I saw him in the motor pool painting out the words U. S. Navy on the metal portion under the glass. And I have described the night we crossed the Rhine River and a flat trajectory 88mm enemy shell from across the river hit and destroyed the amphibious tank which was following closely behind us. With the amphibs destroyed, we were ordered to lead 4 conventual Shermans north to Worms in total darkness, where a pontoon bridge was near completion. We crossed the river and led them south to Sandhofen where armored support was badly needed.
And how he drove the lead jeep on our June 4, 1944 nighttime patrol into Rome, our mission to see if the Krauts had pulled out as rumored. Rome is an enormous city with dark winding streets and we expected to be ambushed at every corner. I was lost, but after accomplishing our mission, Steele found the way back in complete darkness without difficulty. Steele’s courage and driving skills played a large role in my survival.
In one of the many French villages we freed in Southern France, civilians lined the road cheering us. Young women climbed aboard to hug and kiss us. Older women offered us bottles of wine. And the old men stood at attention in the rear and saluted, wearing their old WWI uniforms and medals. One pretty young lady approached our jeep on the driver's side and gave Steele a big hug and kiss. She then leaned forward across his lap to give me a kiss in the front passenger seat. But before we made contact, she suddenly withdrew and backed away into the crowd. "What was that all about?" I asked Steele? He gave me a silly grin and said, "I squeezed her titty!"
And yet, the Army caste system, kept us from becoming good friends. In fact, when we were on Occupation Duty in Germany after the War and people were being rotated back to the States by a point system, I never even knew Steele was leaving until a new driver suddenly appeared and Steele was already gone. I never saw him again. In recent years, I have tried unsuccessfully to locate him through the Internet It’s said that you can’t go back, and maybe it’s better that way. But one of my strongest recollections of life as a 2nd Lt., Infantry is the terrible loneliness.
Russ Cloer
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