Descending from the Clouds

by Wurst, Spencer F. ; Wurst, Gayle;

  In June 1943, the 82d Airborne Division moved east to Kairouan, French Tunisia, and the EGBs followed shortly thereafter. As our convoy proceeded east, we had to go through the Atlas Mountains. I distinctly remember their beauty—they were large mountain ranges, with roads winding up and over them. Unfortunately, I was distracted from higher things along the way.

  Here we were, speeding down the road on a two-and-a-half-ton truck with a ton-and-a half trailer coupled to it, and I had a bad case of diarrhea. The convoy stopped only once every two hours for a break. But when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. I actually crawled out of the truck, got down on the tongue of the trailer, and responded to the call of nature, holding onto the tailgate with one hand and my pants with the other, at a speed of 40 miles an hour. And I wasn’t the only one. It was interesting, to say the least.

  Chapter 9

  Permanent Assignment: Company F, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment; the Move to Sicily

  Kairouan was close to the bivouac areas of the 82d Airborne Division. I had been an infantryman for three years, and fully expected to be assigned to a parachute infantry company. But because I had attended the Fifth Army Mines and Demolition School, I found myself assigned to Company B of the 82d Airborne Division’s 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion.

  I did not like this at all. I felt I was much better qualified as an infantryman, so I made it my business to find the most senior officer in the area and request a transfer to the parachute infantry. For once I got some action. Without much delay, I was transferred and assigned to Company F of the 505 PIR. By this time, however, the 505 had already been committed to combat in Sicily.

  One thing is sure—the 505 had no time to go stale. The regiment celebrated its first birthday in North Africa on July 6, 1943, with a steer roast, beer, and a rousing pep talk from Col. James Gavin, and was already in combat three days later in Sicily. By this time, fifteen generals had visited the division, from Eisenhower on down. I would join the 505 along with the other EGB448s after the fighting finished and the regiment came back to Kairouan. The EGB448s would not see Sicily until early September 1943, when the 505 returned there after leaving North Africa. But because we had been assigned as replacements in July, our members later received the Combat Infantry Badge and the Bronze Star Medal for meritorious service in Sicily, even though we hadn’t jumped with the regiment.

  While I was waiting in Kairouan, my life was less than glorious. You could smell the town for a good two, three, even five miles away, depending on the wind. The inhabitants believed that the dead must be buried in extremely shallow graves, and vented the caskets up to the surface. The air was polluted with the smell of rotting corpses. Add to this the stench from very primitive sanitation facilities. In the 100 degree weather, the odor was horrific.

  The olive grove where the 505 was bivouacked afforded the only shade for miles and miles around. Each platoon or squad was assigned a certain number of trees to live under. The flies and other insects were horrible, and our mosquito nets were totally inefficient when we attempted to hang them over our blanket rolls from the branches of the olive trees.

  Water, always in short supply in North Africa, was rationed. We were allowed one full helmet each day. First we bathed with it, then we shaved with it, and then we started to wash our clothes. By the time we got down to our socks, it wasn’t much more than a helmet full of mud. The British Army ran a shower point about ten miles away, so we often loaded on the trucks and drove through the desert to enjoy a very limited time under the showerhead. By the time we retraced the ten dusty miles back to the bivouac area, we were just about as bad as when we started.

  The high rate of dysentery, diarrhea, and digestive-tract problems was not exactly helped by our diet of canned food. It was here that Spam first became famous—or infamous. It was used in huge quantities, some days for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I spent time in the hospital because of dysentery and a high fever. Of course, there was no running water, and the latrines were nothing but pits. There was an unsuccessful attempt to keep a washbasin of water handy so we could wash our hands after using the latrines.

  Many troopers also picked up malaria. The rate got so high that they put us on anti-malaria medication, a bitter pill called Atabrine. An officer would stand at the end of the chow line, throw the pill down our throats, and make sure we swallowed it. Even then, some of the fellows managed to hold the pill in their mouths and spit it out later. The garbage cans were full of Atabrine, and their contents soon turned a sickening greenish yellow as the pills dissolved in the slops and trash.

  Despite their appalling state, these garbage cans provided nourishment for the local population. From the time we arrived in North Africa in May 1943 until we left, children would come into camp for food whenever we were anywhere near an Arab settlement. Sometimes they would sneak in, and sometimes we let them in ourselves. They would head for the garbage cans, take the garbage out, and eat it on the spot, or put it in cans to take home for their families. Witnessing this gave us much more appreciation for our American way of life.

  On August 20, the 505 was airlifted back to North Africa from Sicily, where it had made the first American regimental combat jump of World War II. Although I was unaware of it then, a major event in the Sicily operation concerning our sister regiment, the 504 PIR, had thrown the entire future of airborne warfare into question. The 504, minus its 3d Battalion, which had jumped with the 505 on D-day, had flown into friendly territory near Gela as reinforcements. Their arrival shortly followed a Luftwaffe attack on the U.S. naval invasion fleet situated just off the coast, which had received a pounding by thirty Ju 88 bombers. The last of the German fighters had barely left the area before our C-47s full of troopers appeared in the sky.

  To come in over the beaches, the Air Corps had to fly over the naval convoy. The Navy had received strict orders that there be no firing. Maybe the word did not get all the way down, or the anti-aircraft gunners on the ships got nervous. Either way, they opened fire on the low-flying troop transport planes. Ship after ship, and even gunners on shore, joined in the attack. By the time the massacre was over, twenty-three of the 144 C-47s in the armada had been shot down. Within minutes, 318 American paratroopers and many C-47 crew members lost their lives.

  When the 505 returned from Sicily, I was assigned to the 1st Squad of the 3d Platoon of Company F, 2d Battalion. None of us knew anything about the 82d Airborne’s baptism by fire; I was only very relieved to be assigned to a permanent unit and finally find a home after three long months as a “casual.” Nevertheless, even after assignment, the EGB448s were still kept segregated as a group. We were not allowed to move our belongings to the area designated to our new unit, and the so-called “older” members looked down their noses at us. Even a few days of “seeing the elephant” in Sicily made the “old” men of Company F feel superior to the “new” men.

  At one point, there was a regimental parade. The EGB448s were integrated into the 505 as part of the ceremony, undergoing the formal passage from replacement status. Never again did the 505 treat new men as badly as they had treated us. Subsequent replacements were quickly integrated into squads and platoons through training, and also on a personal level as friends and fellow troopers. Later, many of the men in the company who had made the Sicily mission would tell me that the first real combat for Company F was in Italy at Arnone on the Volturno River.

  Meanwhile, I had to put up with second-class status. Being an NCO did not help my situation. In fact, our company commander, along with some of the other officers who had been in the 505 for a while, took a dim view of receiving NCOs as replacements. They would have preferred to promote soldiers to the NCO spots who had been with the company all along, although they also received officer replacements, and the officers, unlike the NCOs, were assigned to their normal leadership positions. I was a sergeant acting as a private, a simple rifleman under the authority of my squad leader. Further, our captain was constantly on the lookout for any violation of procedure
s or orders. Company commanders were allowed to make and break NCOs, and every legal means was used to reduce the EGB NCOs in rank.

  Shortly after I was assigned to the 505 in August, Bob Hope and Frances Langford came to our bivouac area with the U.S.O. group. The 505 decided to have a show for them, too, and the new EGB448 replacements, myself included, were selected to make a demonstration jump. It was a late-evening jump, made in the desert just beyond the stage area. After the jump, we all had to gather up our chutes and do everything else on the double in order to make the show. I did manage to make it on time—there was no way I was going to miss Frances Langford in the flesh, singing “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey.” I remember reading much later that at one point in her North Africa tour, this same song caused Frances Langford a lot of embarrassment. She sang it in an Army hospital without realizing it was the amputee ward and some of the men she was singing to had just lost both their arms.

  Other than the Bob Hope show, not much happened while we were waiting in Kairouan. We thought we would never get out of there. The 505ers who had seen better things in Sicily—not only fighting, but plentiful wine, good food, and women—were feeling pretty fed up with training exercises and Spam. Then, on September 5, the 505 was ordered to return to Sicily, where we bivouacked at three different airfields. My battalion, the 2d, was based at Comiso; Regimental Headquarters and the 3d Battalion were at Castelvetrano; and the 1st Battalion was at Barizzo, along with Company B of the 307th Engineers. We had no idea what our mission would be.3

  While we were waiting for the next operation, we continued to train and did a lot of detail work. By this time, the enemy had been cleared off the island, but we were still subject to air raids, and we all had slit trenches dug as protection against the air raids and other enemy activity. One day, while I was on a work detail at the airfield, a little Sicilian boy came by with a couple bottles of wine. Alcohol was strictly forbidden in the bivouac area, although none of us was above sneaking in a little whenever we could manage it. We all chipped in to buy a bottle, and stowed it for future use. That evening, after chow, the squad passed the bottle around as we were shooting the breeze. The long and the short of it is that the empty bottle ended up in my slit trench.

  The next morning, when we left for training, one of the squad members, a fellow named Zunda, stayed behind because he was running a fever. Our company commander walked through the bivouac area, spotted the wine bottle in the slit trench, and immediately asked Zunda, who was the only person around, who the trench belonged to. Zunda answered truthfully, and thus gave the captain the golden opportunity I believe he had been seeking for some time.

  When I got in from training, the captain called me to the company CP. It was a matter of “sit down, Sergeant, stand up, Private.” I felt that the reduction was unfair. Although I had violated the order, I had not drunk an entire bottle of wine: it had simply ended up in my trench. But the only protest I made was that I would only accept the bust if it read “reduced without prejudice.” And so it was in the early days of September 1943 that I was once again back to the grade of private, albeit “reduced without prejudice.”

  Ever since we had arrived in Sicily, a lot of guessing had been going on about where the 505 would go for our next operation. Unbeknownst to us, the Italian government was teetering on the edge of collapse. Italy and Germany were still allies and the German Army heavily occupied the Italian peninsula. After a number of secret meetings among General Eisenhower’s representatives, Italian political leaders appointed by the king, and the Italian Army high commander, it was agreed that Italy would surrender. But the Allies wanted more—they wanted the Italians to turn against the Germans and help us in the war.

  As part of this negotiation, it was decided that the 82d Airborne would deploy to the mainland. The plan was to drop one or two regiments of troopers around the airfields at Rome, and depend on the Italian Army for logistical support (communication, transportation, trucks, fuel, food, and water) until the beachhead forces landed. Even under the best of conditions, it would have been a pretty tricky operation.

  Very luckily for the 505, the plan was canceled. Even as it was, we had a very close call. The pathfinders of the 504 PIR took off, as scheduled, on September 8. They were actually in the air when they got the word to postpone. The mission was definitively called off on September 9, the very day the 505 was scheduled to make the jump. As it turned out, the Italians had backed down. Their excuse was that the Germans had reinforced the area around Rome with mechanized and armored troops, which made the German position much stronger than it had been when the Italians had agreed to the operation. And so the saying goes, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

  The enlisted men were never told anything about this operation, called “Giant II,” although officers had already been briefed on it. I remember marching along on a training exercise when the guesses and rumors were flying about. “Where do you think we’ll go?” and “What are we gonna do?” was all you heard. Off the top of my head, I said, “I’ll bet those dumb bastards are going to send us up to the airfields at Rome.” I got a very quick double take from my platoon leader, which I didn’t understand at the time. It was not until much later that I realized I had hit it right on the head. As it turned out, Rome was not taken until early June 1944, ten months later.

  While Giant II was being planned, a halt was put to all medical evacuations from the unit. As soon as the operation was canceled, men who were seriously ill, people with malaria like Zunda, for example, reported to sick call. Our doctor and battalion surgeon, Lieutenant Stein, loaded up orders for men to be sent to the hospital. They were long overdue for hospitalization, but their absence soon was sorely felt when the regiment was committed to its second combat mission. The 505 had picked up many EGBs, but it was still under-strength on the jump at Salerno, Italy.

  Chapter 10

  First Combat Jump: Salerno, Italy

  Italy capitulated on September 8, 1943, and the Germans took control of many Italian military units, making prisoners of their former allies. Meanwhile, many missions for the 82d Airborne were planned and abandoned, including the one at Rome and another that called for a landing north of Naples at the outlet of the Volturno River. The objective area was too far north for the Allied air forces to provide air cover for the Navy; because of the great distance from their airfields to operation areas, they would have run out of fuel.

  The plan that finally went into effect aimed to establish a beachhead about fifty miles south of Naples in the Bay of Salerno, where a small projection of the mountainous peninsula stuck out to form a wide, sheltered bay. The Allies were going to try something different at Salerno. There would be no preliminary naval bombardment, an effort to keep the mission secret and thereby catch the Germans by surprise. The Fifth Army, commanded by Lt Gen Mark Clark, was the American headquarters controlling the Salerno invasion force. The beachhead was coordinated with the British Eighth Army, which had already crossed the Strait of Messina at the toe of Italy and was working its way up from the toe toward Naples.

  The Fifth Army landed at Salerno on September 9. The landing area was quite large, but around five miles inland the bay was surrounded by very high hills and mountain ranges. The terrain vastly favored defense over offense—and on September 9, the Germans were waiting. Far from being surprised, they had figured out the most likely spots for a beachhead, and had moved reinforcements down to Naples and points south. Their observation of the landing beaches from the mountains and high hills inland was perfect: it was like looking down onto a stage at the theater. They had the right kind of units to counterattack the beachhead, and they had amassed a whole lot of artillery.

  Salerno turned out to be as close as the Allies ever came to losing a beachhead in all the battles of World War II. On D+4 and D+5 the situation became so critical that plans were made to evacuate. General Clark moved to commit his available reserve, and decided to use the 82d Airborne. On September 13, MajGen Matthew Ridg
way received his orders: the 504 and the 505 were to drop just behind friendly lines as quick reinforcements to help secure the beachhead. The independent 509 Parachute Infantry Battalion was to drop behind the lines near Avellino, twenty miles north of Salerno, to harass the enemy and prevent the flow of German reinforcements to the beachhead. Ridgway’s first thought was to avoid a recurrence of the tragic airborne incident at Sicily. He insisted that all ground and naval forces be ordered to hold their fire the night of the 13th. Clark sent staff officers to all the anti-aircraft battalions to ensure these orders were carried out, and strict orders were given to the naval force as well.

  Just nine hours after receiving the order, Ridgway had the 504 in the air, using loading plans that had previously been made for other jump locations. Ninety planes dropped 1,300 paratroopers on the beachhead within thirteen hours of General Clark’s order. This included the entire regiment except for the 3d Battalion, which came in by sea with the division’s artillery battalions and the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. Salerno was the first time pathfinders were used, and they were employed to good advantage. By the time the 504 came in, the pathfinders had marked the drop zone with a large “T” made of flaming oil drums.

  The 509 and the 505 jumped into Italy on September 14. It was my first combat jump. It was a bright, moonlit night. Everyone was high-strung and nervous. We flew over water from the airfields of Sicily, guided along the Italian coast by new Eureka radar sets. In most cases, the Air Corps dropped us on the DZ, right on the beaches themselves. The first thing I saw going out of the plane was the blazing drums below. We landed and assembled in good order, then moved to the southeast portion of the beachhead. It was the easiest of any of the combat jumps I would make throughout the war.