Story that appeared in the Summer 2007 Issue of
New Horizons Magazine in New York City

 

“I was brought up, beat up and dragged up in the same neighborhood,” Village at 46th & Ten resident John McNulty says of his Greenwich Village childhood. Born in 1922, McNulty’s Village was a bit different than it is today. It was working class and Irish and tough; beer was a nickel, apartments $27 a month, wages $11 a week.

“Everyone says everything was cheaper then. They were not cheaper. You made less then than you do today. We were poor,” he said.

Upon graduating public school—he had to leave Catholic school when tuition went up $10 a month—he got a job working the shipyards in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. World War II had been raging for a couple of years and it wasn’t long before he was drafted into the Army.

After a few months training in Texas and some tests, the Army made him a combat medical aid man – a medic. Soon he shipped to England, where the young man who thought of himself as a poor Irish American saw how poor people really could be.

“Growing up we at least had a toilet in the hall, but in England, if you were in the pub and had to take a leak you went outside on a wall or in a trough.”

After a bit more training, he found himself shipping into France, onto Omaha Beach, into the battle. It was a few days after D-Day, so the beach was secure, but the destruction immense.

The bodies of the dead had been cleaned up, but blown up tanks and buildings and roads littered the landscape.

Soon his unit was making contact with the enemy. With the nonchalance of a seasoned combat veteran who’s pretty much seen it all, John says the damages of battle didn’t affect him too much. “I come from a rough neighborhood so it didn’t bother me. I’d seen dead bodies before I was ever in the Army. Where I grew up I saw people torn up in my neighborhood.”

But the tough guy does remember when war became a real to him.

“The first reality of war is when you came upon your first dead GI,” he said. He hated the death, and he hated the flies. He recalls coming across a dead soldier, “A sniper had hit him in the head and his brain is out and it was nothing but flies.”

Though he was trained in basic first aid, McNulty said medical treatment wasn’t what being a medical aid man was about.

“I was mainly in transportation,” he says. “I’d dump a wounded man, throw him on a stretcher, carry him back to the aid station, drop him off, run out and pick up another wounded man and get him back to the aid station. Get the men back to the aid station as soon as possible.”

Though his job did call for a sobering sort of triage, he says. “The thing that I learned pretty soon is called the death rattle. Ever hear it?”

McNulty described it as a rattle in a person’s breathing that says no matter what kind of care the person gets, no matter what anyone does, death is coming, and coming soon. When a medic heard it, it was cause for cold calculation: waste time transporting a man who was surely going to die or go back and pick someone who might have a chance.

There was really no decision but to act dispassionately. Once he heard the rattle, he said, “I’d go after the next guy.”

Like most GIs, McNulty has his share of wild war stories. One of his favorites is of a soldier he saw coming around a bend in the road where an enemy machine gun was set up, and it opened fire.

“One bullet ricocheted off the ground and he was hit right here and it lodged right in here,” McNulty said, running his finger from the bridge of his nose up his forehead. “So I witnessed a man who was shot between the eyes and lived. A big lump right here, and he was conscious.”

He said as a medic, combat for him was different compared to other GIs, namely because he wasn’t allowed to carry a weapon. “I only fired a rifle in basic training. I remember going back to an aid station and I had a knife I used to cut the clothing and cut the boots off the wounded guys and an officer said, ‘ditch it.’ I couldn’t have a knife.”

Even though he didn’t have a weapon, McNulty said the Germans were still aiming at him. Medics were supposed to wear white armbands to signify to the enemy that they weren’t combatants so they wouldn’t fire at them, but John saw it differently, believing the armbands “were targets.”

“I wouldn’t wear them,” he said.

He still recalls much of the killing he witnessed. He remembers how they usually took control of a German pillbox by using a tank to blow a hole in the wall and GIs following with satchel charges that would be dropped in the vent. “It would blow the place apart,” he said, destroying everything inside.

That was the preferred method, but in war, the preferred method isn’t always the optimal one.

“At times, it was very, very crude,” he said. “We would have the pillbox surrounded and the Germans inside would not surrender. The tank would come along like a bulldozer and just bury them alive. We had the German-speaking GI. We told them to come out. And they wouldn’t come out. And we had to move on.”

After a few months of battle, John had a role in a major turning point of the war.

“One of the biggest highlights of my enlistment was my division took part in the liberation of Paris,” he says. But it wasn’t the big party of parading soldiers and French women rushing to kiss GIs that popular pictures made it out to be, at least not for John. “One day. In one side out the other. We slept the night in the park.”

And then it was right back into battle, chasing the Germans. His division found them dug in on the Siegrfried Line. It was on the second belt of the Siegrfried Line where John was hit. He was digging in when something exploded nearby. “I don’t know where the shrapnel came from. It just came in and hit me,” he said. He was hit in the head and the back and evacuated to Paris. After a couple of months recovering, he spent the rest of the war in limited service as a clerk.