When I was in high school in the '90s, I did three years of Navy JROTC - partly because it got me out of having to take gym, and partly because I was considering going into the military after high school. (I wound up graduating a few months after 9/11, and decided not to.) JROTC cadets hold ranks as if they were actually in the military - you start as an E-1, up to E-7, after which you join the officer corps, and can make it as high as O-5 by your senior year if you’re chosen as the student company commander (we had one O-6 in the entire school district, who was the student batallion commander). I never made it higher than E-6 myself.
Anyway, as part of the process towards advancing to E-3, you had to complete “seaman correspondence”, which was an older version of the self-guided course actual sailors had to complete to earn the same rank. I believe the version we used was written either during or just after the Vietnam war. I found myself recalling a story earlier today that I’m pretty sure I read in that course, and I’m wondering if it sounds familiar to anyone else out there.
The point of the lesson was how to survive if stuck behind enemy lines, and this section of it emphasized that, if you found yourself in a civilian area, it was important to act like a local. It supplied an anecdote from a soldier who’d served in World War II and had somehow got stuck either in Germany itself or in occupied France, and found his way to an urban area, and needed to urinate. He asked someone where the nearest bathroom was, and they pointed him to an open-air urinal that was just mounted on the wall of a building or something similar to that. Ultimately, his being too embarrassed to expose himself in public tipped someone off that he didn’t belong there and lead to him being captured.
Does this anecdote sound familiar to anyone, in particular Navy veterans of a certain age? I’m trying to find a source for it online and so far I’ve come up empty.
It seems like having an American accent (or not being able to speak French/German at all) would have been a bigger giveaway.
When I was last there the lines for public toilets in Paris were often very long. I never saw an American-style, multiple-stalls-with-men-on-one-side-ladies-on-the-other restroom. They were nice self-cleaning single-person toilets, but not many of them. Even the bathrooms in the airport were single person. So I guess using open air urinals to combat public urination in other areas makes sense.
Definitely has “did not happen” written all over it.
That doesn’t mean it hasn’t been retold as fact though. I can imagine this starting out as a joke about uptight Americans being shocked by a pissoir, but ended as ancedote that allegedly happened.
I thought perhaps it could be that to indicate two, Americans would hold up their pointer finger and the middle finger, like Churchill’s V for Victory sign. Germans would hold up the thumb and the pointer finger. So you could give yourself away by saying I have to go number 2. (Isn’t that a plot point in Inglourious Basterds?)
Seems like being unable to piss in public would be a big problem for a soldier regardless of whether he’s behind enemy lines. What did he do in combat situations or on long marches?
Churchill’s V for Victory has the palm of the hand towards the signer and the back of the hand towards the audience. Americans signal 2 (and Peace, brother!) with the palm facing the audience.
As to the OP’s contention:
I went through USAF survival school in the early '80s. Much of which curriculum was informed by Viet Nam era experience with survival, evasion, and if unsuccessful at that, with POW captivity.
Rule #1 was never get near civilization. As the saying went, “Only people capture people”. If you never encounter a human, you’re safe from capture. There’s essentially zero expectation anyone could “pass” as a local anywhere. To be sure, passing might have been a bit more possible during WW-II in Europe for more white American (or Commonwealth) soldiers than it has been in wars elsewhere before or since.
But I rather doubt that USN training materials from the Viet Nam era would be talking about wandering around European cities or towns trying to blend in. Not even as a cautionary tale about why not to try.
“A story that haunted Burton up to his death (recounted in some of his obituaries) was that he came close to being discovered one night when he lifted his robe to urinate rather than squatting as an Arab would. It was said that he was seen by an Arab and, in order to avoid exposure, killed him. Burton denied this, pointing out that killing the boy would almost certainly have led to his being discovered as an impostor. Burton became so tired of denying this accusation that he took to baiting his accusers, although he was said to enjoy the notoriety and even once laughingly claimed to have done it”
I recall a book I had in history class back in highschool. They had a bit about how some British or Canadian bomber crews had uniforms that could be altered to look more like civilian clothes if they had to bail out over Europe. I recall a picture of a pair of boots, in which the foot portions looked like regular shoes, and you were supposed to cut off the upper parts after you’d landed and evaded any initial pursuit.
Googling around, it seems like these were the boots:
I thought it was 3 fingers, where Americans would hold the pinkie against the thumb, leaving the other three fingers for the number, while Europeans would hold the first finger against the thumb and the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers would show the number. It’s been quite a while since I saw that scene.
There is the true story of the WWII German spy Carl Meir who landed in England, and was immediately caught because of his lack of knowledge of British pub opening times.
Other spies were caught by cycling on the wrong side of the road.
So, a foreign agent, or an escaped prisoner not knowing about pissoirs is plausible.
It’s true there are plenty of examples like this (e.g. the fake XX spy Agent Garbo sending the Germans back stories of plying English dock workers with wine not beer for information)
But that’s not why I think it never happened. There would be so many other reasons a naive airman would get caught before encountering a pissoir, and there is absolutely no member of any branch of any armed forces during WW2 who wouldn’t be happy peeing wherever they want.
I don’t doubt that the OP is misremembering, and getting some details wrong. They openly say as much.
I suspect it isn’t a case of being too shy to use a pissoir. It’s a case of needing to use a pissoir, but not recognizing the one that’s right in front of him.
I’m skeptical as it still relies on speaking perfect accentless French but not knowing what a pissoir was. Also the person he was asking not just assuming he needed to do something you couldn’t do in a pissoir (I’m assuming even the French do not get into the specifics of why they need the toilet when asking for directions )
I mean, considering the era, the soldier could very well have been the child of immigrants and able to speak French/German well enough to sound like a native.
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