Despite its tongue-in-cheek title, “Artful Dodger” Bill Cantrall learned the hard way that driving an ambulance serving the frontlines during WWII was far different from driving a taxi. Try navigating the roads of your local city in the dark, or curvy mountainous roads in the fog or in the dark, or both, double clutching and laboriously shifting gears, or in the driving rain without windshield wipers, with someone walking ahead, lighting the route you’re taking with the end of his smoldering cigarette. And, try doing this with seriously wounded people in the back of your van, at the same time, worried that the necessary slowness of your pace and the inevitable jarring they will face as you navigate under very difficult circumstances might result in the death of your passengers before you can get them the medical help they so desperately require. If you can imagine doing this, and maintaining some semblance of your sense of humor, while also sometimes coming under enemy fire, you might get some inkling of an idea about what life was like for Bill Cantrall driving for the AFS (American Field Service) as a civilian volunteer during WWII.
His fascinating memoir, Just Like A Taxi’s first chapter, “FUBAR! Thoroughly Bad Show,” opens with a scene of Bill in Italy, being asked-nay, ordered-by a British Indian Army officer to go on a “special assignment.” He was told to drive by himself up a road until he comes to “a farmhouse with two Sherman tanks.” Supposedly, there would be nobody there, and “they’ll bring the wounded to you.” Little did Cantrall know at the time that by driving to where the officer ordered him to go, he would be placing himself “on the 35-yard line for the biggest attack of the Italian Campaign.” With the Allied forces shooting from one direction and the Germans from the other, he didn’t have much choice but to ride out the battle, from the relative safety of underneath the ambulance.
While driving an ambulance for the AFS, Bill had many unique experiences and he learned a lot about not only the culture and language of Italy, but the cultures and languages of many countries, all of which had servicemen there. Bill not only transported wounded for the United States, but for seven different armies that were in Italy at the time. New Zealand, India, England, and Poland were among the countries who ambulances of the AFS served. I know that later on in his life, Bill became a Professor of Linguistics, and I don’t doubt that he was probably influenced in his career choice by his being around so many people from other countries, as well as his eidetic memory and ability to pick up languages relatively quickly.
There are several harrowing moments that Bill recounts in Just Like A Taxi, like when he is narrowly missed by German bullets on more than one occasion, or when he had to contend with extreme cold, pouring rain, driving in darkness, and dealing with monstrous potholes created by mortar fire. But, for me, the best parts of the memoir, the ones that shine the most, are those when he spends time getting to know the people from the various cultures and lands who have congregated in Italy. Also, Bill’s love of Florence, art, literature, and Dante (not necessarily in that order-oh, and wine, women, and song, too), his sense of humor, and his ability to think outside the box and figure out ways to get things done that he wanted done made this memoir come alive for me, and almost feel that I was there with him.
What am I talking about when I say “get things done”? For example, before he got accepted by the AFS and embarked on a ship to Italy, he attended the University of Illinois, and as he writes:
Having combed the student catalog for loopholes, I enter the University of Illinois that fall as a chemical engineer, a pre-med student, and an English major, as needed, in order to skip boring first-year classes. Young ladies in department offices seem pleased to sign for their absent chairmen, whom I have (carefully) just missed. To speed things up, I have students on the Boardwalk sign as my freshman advisor (G. Washington) and approve a no-charge overload for the dean (A. Lincoln). Amazingly, I can earn a year’s free credit the first week passing proficiency exams. Also, the textbooks cost nothing if returned in five days.
Another example I enjoyed reading about and found quite humorous (though I doubt if Bill did at the time) he relates in chapter 11, “Way of the Warrior: Tenth Indian Infantry Brigade” and in chapter 12, “Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies.” Bill got along well with the Indians and loved playing volleyball with them (yes, volleyball in the middle of a war), but he didn’t much care for their food, vegetarian fare, with a hot sauce that didn’t agree with his digestion. His solution to get some meat into his diet? Drive to Florence and trade a bottle of Gordon’s Gin for a large tin of Spam, large enough to last for several weeks, even sharing it with his friends. Sometimes his ingenuity made the difference between merely getting by and making life more tolerable. As he writes: “This may be stretching the term a bit, but without ‘scrounging’ useful bits of this and that without leaving one’s name behind, the AFS could not have achieved what we did. That probably goes for the whole army.”
Just Like A Taxi by Bill Cantrall is one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read about how it was like to serve America during WWII. It’s actually one of the best memoirs, of any type, I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who loves to read memoirs, was in WWII himself or had relatives in it, and to anyone who would like to know what it was like to be an ambulance driver for the AFS during WWII. Get it today!
Just Like A Taxi Marks An Awesome Debut
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