Panther Soup: Travels Through Europe in War and Peace - Hardcover

Gimlette, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307265420 ISBN 13: 9780307265425

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

In 2004, John Gimlette set off across Europe, following in the footsteps of one of the greatest armies ever assembled: the United States forces of 1944–45. His guide (emotionally if not geographically) was Putnam Flint, an eighty-six-year-old Bostonian who had landed in Marseille in the midst of World War II with his tank destroyer battalion, nicknamed The Panthers. With Flint’s help, Gimlette traveled back through the war to try to grasp the physical, social, and psychological realities of the smashed and sodden continent that Europe had become. Panther Soup is the heartfelt, keenly observed—and often unexpectedly humorous—chronicle of that journey: a brilliant hybrid of travelogue and personalized military history.

From Marseille, north to Dijon and Alsace, Paris and Lorraine, across the Rhine into Germany, and eventually south through the Alps into Austria, Gimlette provides a vivid impression of the route as it is today, from spectacular landscapes to cities that have risen from cinders. He reveals the ways in which the war is both memorialized and buried, and meshes his account with recollections from Flint and other survivors they meet along the way: former enemies and refugees, heroines and résistants, children of the blitzkrieg.

Here is an uncommonly evocative mixture of past and present, a meeting of cultures, and a deeply personal assessment of one of the most tumultuous moments in world history.

About this title

About the Author:

John Gimlette has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and the Wanderlust Travel Writing Award, and he writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and Condé Nast Traveller. When not traveling, he practices law in London, where he lives with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1This is how the world looked in the beginning, or perhaps how it will look in the end. The air crackles with heat, and the sky is the colour of salt. It’s an inert, waterless place, a series of eruptions blasted from the elements. My eyes sting with sea-smoke and ash. As I pick through the fissures and craters, I feel as if I’m scrambling through a petrified storm, great clouds of violet and magenta abruptly turned into rock. Nothing grows up here but sprigs of sea aster and sisal and fountains of dust. Way below, a volcanic sea cracks and sucks like blue glass burning. It is the ancient Mediterranean, in an adolescent mood. This is the island of Pomègues, at the brittle end of the Frioul archipelago. From the cliffs, I can make out the knobbly, desiccated mountains of the Côte d’Azur, and, amongst them, the city of Marseille. Through all the smoke and vapours, it looks like Gomorrah, which is how most Frenchmen think of it. Forget it, said my friends in Paris, it’s just a filthy port, full of whores. Frioul has seldom seen hope welling up in the hearts of Frenchmen. Perhaps it’s because – from a distance – the islands glow like bones, and turn the sea around them into liquid midnight. Or perhaps it’s for all the hopes and promises that have foundered there. For centuries, it was a place of exile for criminals, revolutionaries, the mad and the diseased. Remarkably, I discover that the last hospital was only abandoned in the 1950s. Ossification has taken over so quickly that it now looks Pompeian. Rattoneau Island is covered in such ruins. Next-door Pomègues doesn’t even have that. The Marseillais still punish – or honour – their islands with isolation. I have Pomègues almost to myself. I clamber across the island and see no one except a group of Arab women swimming in a cove, and a very fat man. The women are fully clothed and hardly seem to notice the water around them. The fat man too seems very conscious of his clothes and walks as if he’s wearing ermine and velvet. The oddest thing about it is that he’s completely naked. Even the most sparing of places, it seems, can ease the harshness of reality.After an hour, the island rises into a promontory and I’m attacked by les gabians. These foul, preternatural seabirds are the only creatures malicious enough to live up here, on this great, lifeless buttress. I begin to climb, under the snip and click of beaks and talons. The gabians have sown the aster with bones and shells, like a mortuary in the sky. Their vile pterodactyl chicks rasp at me from the ledges, and I can hear the bony scissors again, snipping at my ears. Then I’m at the top, alone on an empty battlefield. It’s like a landscape inside out, a great belly of eviscerated earth and rock. All around is the wreckage of an Armageddon, a vast fungal fortress system of shattered domes and concrete mushrooms, pillboxes, foxholes, giant gun emplacements, crumbling redans, rangefinders, embrasures and trenches ten feet deep. I find tiny, cement cells in the earth, like weird earth-borne fruits that have ripened and burst and turned to stone. Nothing has been spared the cataclysm. It’s now a world of components and pieces; lumps of roadblock, bedsprings, a glittering carpet of glass, and fuel cans scattered like chaff. Obstinate chimneys nose their way up through the rubble and, in the cement, I see a date scratched with a stick: 1944. So, this bone-dry war village – die Batterie von Pomègues – flourished only momentarily before the bombs began to fall. It has flourished little since. These days the only colours erupting in the rubble are poppy reds and gassy clumps of lavatera. Few people come out here any more, to this rock so violently shunned. Vive la Sodom, say the graffiti. Perhaps the aura of anxiety has never really lifted away. It’s not hard to envisage the desperate battle that everyone knew would come, a short brutal flurry of rock, heat and dust. Amongst the sea-shells are bolts sheared, twisted steel, sleepers broken like matches, and armoured doors bent double in the blast. It’s strange to think that these were liberating explosions – death to end tyranny, American bombs. And, of course, after the bombs came the ships, 880 of them on that first day of the Allied landings in southern France. ‘The Other D-Day’ had begun, exactly ten weeks after that to the north. Had I been standing up here two months later – in October 1944 – I’d have seen them, still pouring down the Côte d’Azur; troopships, Liberty Ships, tugs, Blue Ribands, tankers, colliers and tramps. It must have seemed as though the whole of America was out there, ready to roll into Europe . . . Chapter 2 On 29 October 1944, it was the Le Jeune, steaming past. She had the look of a liner, a German liner, which is what she’d been until her capture. She was now a shadow of her former self, aged by blackout and wartime drab. On the quarterdeck was a tiny figure dressed in webbing and olive. It was Putnam Flint. He’d remember this day with a degree of perplexity. It had been a curious voyage: the Straits of Gibraltar like a pair of gates; the tideless sea; Spain, looking empty; the water as blue as ink, and the storms that boiled up from nowhere and ripped off the davits. Then, at last, he’d got his first glimpse of France, these burnt crumbs scattered over the ocean. Life had taken an uneven course up until now. After his Buick adventures, Flint had briefly tussled with education. It was a hopeless struggle, which by 1938 had ended in expulsion. After that, he took a job in a glass factory, an experience that left him with nothing but a smattering of Polish. When war came in 1941, it had about it a hint of adventure. Flint was now faced with ancestral choices: whether to take to his heels like grandfather Horace, or to seek his salvation in khaki. With the future so thrillingly opaque, he opted for the army.America was no wiser than Flint as to where the path led from here. Little thought had ever been given to the possibility of all-out war. In 1938, the Regular Army was about the size of a large town. Its big guns were mostly French, or antiques bolted to trucks. Her soldiers, meanwhile, looked as if they’d marched out of another era, with their gas capes and outsize bayonets. ‘We were isolationist,’ said Flint. ‘Asleep at the switch.’ It was only with the Blitzkrieg that Washington woke up to the future. Rearmament began and – for the first time – the myriad units of the National Guard were gathered under federal control. But it was still an army that frightened no one. The British called the Americans ‘our Italians’, and – to the Germans – they were merely the ‘ice-cream men’. Even the US veterans of this era have doubts about their own ferocity. To them, they were simply the ‘Brown Shoe Army’, a reminder that standardisation was still six years away, and the other side of a global conflict.Leadership too was disconcertingly crusty. Often it was simply a matter of good schooling and admirable polo. Officers were still forbidden from carrying umbrellas because the Duke of Wellington had considered them offensive (except in the presence of ladies). Negroes, on the other hand, were excluded from all forms of military action, other than the wearily menial. It was thought they didn’t have the moral fibre for the infantry, or sufficient co-ordination for the tanks. It says much for the America of that time that a German prisoner could eat in a Louisiana restaurant, whilst his Negro guards had to wait outside.The process of shaping young Americans into soldiers was hardly edifying. Flint spent much of the next two years in the Deep South, being hauled from camp to camp. It was a sort of de-education, a numbing of initiative. Men had to perform Herculean feats of polishing and endless drill. There was jargon too, a soldierly babble of sad sacks (shirkers), fart sacks (sleeping bags), pinks, peters and bang up (trousers, penises and sex). Worse, every day was governed by chickenshit, which was the law of pointlessness. Whenever the army stopped to think, chickenshit kicked in. It required blankets to be folded in a particular way, and ties to be worn, even in combat. Chickenshit became a replacement for thought and even learning. Enlisted men were taught nothing about the dangers they’d face in the months to come: mines, trench foot, German weapons or enemy aircraft. It’s a tribute to the remarkable adaptability of Americans that any of them survived at all – or that they persevered, rallied and ultimately triumphed. Only two miracles happened in the chickenshit years. The first was that Flint married the granddaughter of a Native American. In their wedding photographs, Dorothy-Ann Smith is a woman of fierce beauty and Texan poise. As her ancestry wasn’t fully appreciated in the Austin of 1943, people happily assumed she was aristocratic and probably French. Flint enjoyed the secrecy, and Dottie was always more lover than wife. Every morning and for the rest of her life, she’d begin the day by slipping naked into the garden, and plunging into the pool. The other miracle was of a military nature. Somehow, amongst all the chickenshit and polish, the army had spotted cunning, and Flint was raised from the ranks. Even better, he was plucked from the infantry and resettled in armour, or the next-best thing. It was the 824th Tank Destroyers, a hotchpotch of gunners, tankers, volunteers, plunder, fallout and rejects. ‘We were a bastard outfit,’ says Flint proudly. Not that he cared. With the prospect of wheels, the war had begun to look promising. That summer, he grew a moustache, a flourish that’s survived to this day. The Tank Destroyers were the product of some feverish thinking. Ever since 1862 and Antietam – the bloodiest day in American his...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307265420
• ISBN 13: 9780307265425
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416