Sgt. J.D. Salinger
“He was brave under fire and a loyal and dependable partner,” Keenan [John, NYPD Chief of Detectives, in a sympathy letter written to Matt Salinger after his father’s death] observes. “On many occasions in the course of an assignment, although pinned down by artillery, machine gun or small arms fire, he did what had to be done.” But for Keenan, what was most telling about Salinger was his refusal to let the brutality of the war harden him. “Did he tell you,” Keenan asks Matt Salinger midway into his letter, “how he saved a group of wounded German soldiers from being executed by understandably fired-up GI’s?”
[...]
Salinger had insight into what a Nazi victory would mean as a result of living in Austria
less than a year before Germany annexed it, and during the war he got a
firsthand view of Nazi death camps that never left him. In her memoir, Dream Catcher,
Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, remembers him once telling her, “You
never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely,
no matter how long you live.”
Salinger’s horror at what he and the Fourth Infantry Division had
seen was enough for him to briefly check himself into an Army hospital
in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945. “I’ve been in an almost constant state
of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane,”
Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had become friends
earlier in the war when Hemingway was a correspondent for Collier’s.
