Worldtravel

Part V: On the edges of combat

By Scott Beveridge

My father arrived in Le Havre, France, during the second week of February 1945 with shattered nerves.

James R. Beveridge was just 22 years old and assigned to perform office work for the U.S. Army’s 38th Infantry Regiment’s Quartermaster Corps. His unit would later set up tents to feed soldiers, as well as starving German refuges, sometimes serving baked beans for breakfast from clean galvanized steel garbage cans.

As he marched across a U.S. secured Normandy, more than 1,200 Allied bombers were raiding central Berlin, worried that he would soon be called to into combat.

“If the troops were trapped, you had to put down the typewriter and grab a gun and fight,” he said.

“If they overrun that front line, then everyone is fighting, no matter who you are.”

Dad said he witnessed bombers en route to Germany so thick overhead that he could barely see the sky. He cheered the planes on, hoping they would bring a quick end to the war.

On April 4, 1945, his unit was dispatched to Dinslaken, a small industrial city in the Ruhr area of western Germany, a distance of two miles from the front line.

Meanwhile, American troops were marching through Germany, greeted by Germans waiving white flags of surrender.

The nights were frightening, pitch black with all the window blinds pulled shut in the houses and buildings. The frequent bombing raids had also taken out the electricity in many areas.

“You could see the shells like fireworks in the next city,” he said.

In a last-ditch effort to protect the Ruhr pocket, Nazi troops were sending “buzz bombs” across the sky toward England, dad said. “They sounded like motorboats.”

Many of the bombs malfunctioned and fell to the ground, hitting the wrong targets.

But, with a month, the war with Germany was over.

“The surrender traveled by word of mouth,” dad said. “Everybody cheered. They wanted to go home.”

Yet, President Truman, warned American the war was only half won because of the heavy fighting in the South Pacific.

Looking back, dad said he sometimes suffered a guilty conscience because he survived the war physically unharmed, knowing that was not the case for his friends and relatives. He often overlooked the value his unit posed to the war, brushing some of it off as woman’s work.

The Quartermaster Corps was under the command of Major Guy I. Rowe, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism in France during World War I. The Corps’ main mission in dad’s war involved feeding, clothing, and equipping the troops.

Its members also were trained to fill specialized roles in every theater.

By the end of the war, the corps had handled 70,000 different supply items and prepared and served nearly 24 million meals.

It also had been assigned the grim task of burying nearly a quarter-million soldiers in temporary graves. Meanwhile, 4,900 corps soldiers were killed in battle.

Dad would find himself sorting mail in England, refueling vehicles and clearing out houses in bombed out areas of Holland and Germany to double as temporary barracks for the U.S. troops.

“If the platoon sergeant said he wanted that house to stay in, we threw out all of the furniture, put the furniture in the yard to make room for cots,” he said. “We destroyed it. The American people didn’t (care).”

He never fully understood how the army determined where to place its soldiers

“I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now,” he said. “I was lucky. That’s the only word for it.”

After Germany fell to the Allies, dad relaxed in the South of France where he was able to swim daily in the Mediterranean Sea.

The vacation wouldn’t last long because his orders soon called for him to board The Ainsworth on July 15, 1945. The merchant ship was about to join a massive convoy of military vessels to assist in the war half-way around the globe with Japan.

P6 parking lot at Newark (NJ) airport, originally uploaded by Julia Manzerova.

Pennsylvania rifle deer season starts tomorrow. Here’s hoping none of us end up with a set of whitetail antlers on our vehicles’ hoods. I’ve hit seven over the three decades I have been driving in this neck of the woods, and don’t want to add another trophy to my car fenders.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
I thought New York City’s weather on Sunday was just perfect for a few hours of street photography on Chinatown’s Mulberry Street, but ended up spending an interesting time at Columbus Park (Mulberry and Bayard). This is the only park in Chinatown, and is built on what was in the 19th century the most dangerous slum area of immigrant New York.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Now, it’s the venue of choice for hundreds of Chinese residents, a few of whom I saw were practicing tai chi, while others (mostly women) were playing mahjong and card games, and groups of men were engaged in numerous games of xiangqi. Many more occupy the benches, socializing with their neighbors or with strangers, listening to the songs of birds in their cages.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
At the corner of Mulberry & Bayard, there was a large band of traditional musicians accompanying a handful of elderly Chinese opera singers, surrounded by an appreciative audience. I had come prepared…and brought my audio recorder to capture its unmistakable sounds. The musicians used a panoply of Chinese traditional musical instruments, such as the yangqin, a sort of dulcimer with a near-squared soundboard, and played with two bamboo sticks, as well as the jinghu, a small two string fiddle, a circular bodied plucked lute called the yueqin and the recognizable gu and ban, a drum and clapper.

I was racking my brains all evening trying to remember the title of the movie that featured Beijing opera characters, and which won the Cannes Palme d’Or. It’s Farewell My Concubine, the 1993 Chinese film directed by Chen Kaige, and adapted from the novel by Lilian Lee.

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Tobi.com has launched their Augmented Reality Dressing Room, the FIRST virtual fitting room that actually delivers an adequate fitting room experience.

Tobi.com’s Augmented Reality Dressing Room is completely integrated into their online store. After watching a quick tutorial, customers print a ‘marker’ which they hold up to their webcam in order to activate the application’s sensors. Watch the video below to see how it works!

It is dark and it will get darker… buy candles and a new dress, maybe it will help a little.

A new book from Lines & Shapes.
Chemical gdns.
Gelitin.

1. What’s your relation to poetry? How do you interact with it?

Poetry is my vocation. There’s nothing I enjoy more than finding the right words, or finding a series of “wrong” words and making them right.
———-

2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several at the same time?

Usually, I work on one poem at a time. But I’ve been writing a long poem for a few months,

What good would the holidays be without such kids as Kenzie and the kooky and creative things she pulls out of her head?

What good would the holidays be without such kids as Kenzie and the kooky and creative things she pulls out of her head?

Denver Art Museum and Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Museums exert a magnetic pull on me. Whenever I travel –whether to a significant city with world-class museums or a small town with a tiny museum filled with local teasures and memorabilia — I visit as many as I can. We are members of several local museums, including the Denver Art Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and I visit but not often enough. In the last 10 days, I went to the DAM when I had time in downtown Denver between scheduled events and then to Nature & Science with friends visiting for Thanksgiving. I spent most of the time in both museums seeing special exhibits, and I recommend both. FWIW,  I went to the art museum on an uncrowded Wednesday afternoon, and four of us visited Nature & Science on the busy Friday of Thanksgiving weekend.

Charles M. Russell at the Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is showing the first major retrospective of the works of Charles Marion Russell, who depicted a Wild West that had already been considerable “tamed” by the time he documented it between the mid-1880s until his death in 1926. More than 60 important artworks of this self-taught artist are shown, including oil paintings, bronze sculpture and mixed media, plus a selection ofletters and personal objects that portray the artist in his own words and images. Russell was a Western artists but not a “cowboy painter.” He actually painted more Native Americas than gringo cowpokes. The entrance to the exhibit, where no photography is permitted, is shown below.

I joined a docent tour, and although many works came from Tulsa’s renowned Gilcrease Museum which I have visited. Still, I learned a lot about the artist whom I had often lumped into a pair, “Remington and Russell.” Iin truth, these two renowned Western artists overlapped only slightly and corresponded during that time. The Russell exhibit, which hangs through January 10, is included in the museum admission: adult admission, $10 for Colorado residents, $13 for others. Click here to see all admission prices.

Genghis Khan at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science
                  
Genghis Khan, his sons, his grandsons and their Mongol hordes galloped into the Denver Museum of Nature & Science with a multi-faceted exhibit that enlightens us about this 13th century warrior and ruler. The Mongol Empire was the most extensive the world has ever known. “The Two Faces of Genghis Khan: Warrior and Statesman” explains his humble beginnings from which he rose to become both a feared warrior and a revered statesman and leader.

The exhibit includes horsemanship, military and governing strategies and tactics, nomadic culture, domestic life and craftsmanship. Lots of interactivity, numerous video presentations, informative maps and docent demonstrations help bring the time and place of this distant ruler with the frightful reputation to life. The entrance to the exhibit, where no photography is permitted either, is shown below.

Genghis Khan will be at the museum through February 7. Many of the 200 objects have never been seen outside of Asia or Russia. The Denver area has about 2,500 Mongolian residents and the Mongolian Cultural Center for the Arts. Tickets, which include general admission to the museum, are $20 for adults. Click here for all other admission prices.