The day I arrived, they put me on an IV to feed me intravenously. I had lost a considerable amount of weight. I was eighteen years old, 5 feet 11 inches, and still growing. Even when I was in full health, I weighed no more than a hundred fifty pounds, so I had not an ounce of fat to spare.
The medical authorities at the facility had their hands particularly full because of an atrocity the Germans had perpetrated in Naples. Before withdrawing north, the Germans had loaded the basement of the main post office in downtown Naples with high explosives equipped with a very long time fuse. They had been gone a week when the bomb exploded around noon on October 7, timed to create maximum damage to property and life. On October 11, another delay-fuse bomb or mine went off in the billet of the 307th Airborne Engineer Battalion, the unit to which I had originally been assigned before insisting on a transfer to the parachute infantry. This explosion leveled the building, killed eighteen engineers, and wounded fifty-six.
As wounded and dying people flooded into the evacuation hospital, the staff was ordered to clear out all the patients except for critical cases, so I was transferred to the 3d Convalescence Hospital outside of Naples. The German Army had previously had a very high-level headquarters unit in this facility, which had once been Mussolini’s fairgrounds. It was a large, imposing building, constructed of white marble, surrounded by smaller buildings set in an elegantly landscaped garden that included beautiful trees and large reflecting pools forty to sixty feet long, and two and a half to four feet deep. For the first time in a long while, I was under a solid roof.
Although there wasn’t any improvement in the rations, I started to gain some strength on the IV. In a matter of a few days, I was able to get out of bed. The hospital staff was literally fresh off the boat, having moved directly to the facility from the United States. Many of the people in my so-called ward, however, had been in combat. These included a number of Rangers, hard-fighting men who had received a lot of tough training with British commando units when they were formed in Scotland prior to the North Africa invasion in November 1942. They were all volunteers, an elite outfit, and were more experienced in combat than I was. I respected the Rangers and became quite friendly with several of them.
After a while, the hospital received a limited supply of other rations. To my joy, we now had cream of wheat for breakfast. It was worth waiting in line for an hour and a half to receive a mess kit full of cream of wheat and powdered milk. We also got a piece of white bread and a cup of coffee. If there were seconds, as soon as we finished our first helping, we got in line and waited for more. If not, we got into another line and waited to wash our mess gear. By the time this was done, it was time to get in line for the noon meal, providing you could stomach it. Everyone who was well enough went over the wall looking for food, especially for sweets, which those of us with yellow jaundice and malaria craved.
With the press of many more casualties than expected, the convalescence hospitals soon filled up with serious and critical cases, and patients like myself were soon displaced again. We went from our rooms in the permanent buildings to temporary wards set up in squad tents about two hundred yards from the center of the grounds. These wards resembled a company street, with six to eight squad tents on either side of a makeshift street running off a hard-top road. The tents held six to eight men each and were equipped with cots and blankets.
One day we got the word there was going to be an outdoor movie—Bob Hope in Road to Morocco, with Dorothy Lamour and an all-star cast. As soon as darkness set in, it was going to be shown in the plaza formed by the hospital complex, projected onto one of the white walls. The movie had just started when, without warning, a bomb exploded on the hospital grounds. The Germans’ photo-reconnaissance people had evidently discovered military activity on the exposition grounds, then deduced that the Allies, too, were using it as a major headquarters. I recall no Allied anti-aircraft fire, no return of fire at all. The raid was a complete surprise.
Everyone was in a state of panic. It was a clear night, and the white buildings showed up plainly in the moonlight, making excellent aiming points. It is almost unheard of for aircraft to strafe ground targets at night, but the Luftwaffe strafed that hospital. They came in diving, opened up with their multiple machine guns, and, as they started pulling out of their dive, released the bombs. Many of the combat veterans instinctively jumped into the pools and hugged the banks or walls, trying to get some cover. By the time I got to them, they were already thickly crowded. I went for as big a tree as I could find. I actually started to dig a hole with my bare hands—anything to get below the surface. It seemed to me that the raid lasted for an hour, but it was probably only minutes long. Official reports say that eight bombs fell on the grounds. I wasn’t counting, but to me it seemed like many more.
After everyone was sure the raid was over, the authorities tried to restore order. Most of the combat veterans reacted more quickly than the hospital personnel, who had never been under fire before. We ran into the wards and attempted to calm the amputees and the critically wounded, who were terrified and unable to take shelter. Then those of us who were able attempted to clear the debris and find bodies or wounded people. After what seemed like hours, a number of us returned to our ward.
Everyone who hadn’t gone to the movie had been killed. The squad tents had been surrounded by fairly large trees, and I distinctly remember the absolute mulch of fallen leaves, branches, wood, cots, tents, and body parts that was all that remained of the ward. The situation was so hopeless that we didn’t even try to clear the debris. At first light, we went through the piles of rubble looking for bodies or someone who miraculously might still be alive, but we didn’t find anyone. This was the first time I saw human brains exposed to daylight.
That morning, once the streets had been cleared of rubble and swept, they started painting huge red crosses on the pavement, roofs, and walls of the buildings. I heard later, but don’t know if it’s true, that the Germans apologized for bombing the hospital.
After the raid, more tents were put up in other parts of the exposition grounds. The authorities issued shovels, and we all dug elaborate slit trenches alongside the walls so we could roll out of our cots right into a slit trench in the event of any more air raids. A number of us attempted to get discharged from the hospital and return to our units. I stayed about a week longer in the hospital, during which time the Germans visited Naples every night with such regularity that we could almost time their raids. Their main targets now were the harbor and large military installations.
When we didn’t go out on the hunt for food, my new friends and I spent our late evenings or early nighttime hours in our cots, watching these raids from our hospital vantage point overlooking the harbor. Even though we were located some distance away, the situation instilled us with fear. One day, we debated whether a person who was drunk would feel more or less frightened during an air raid than someone who was sober. We decided to conduct an experiment. We went over the wall, got several bottles of vino, and managed to get to the peak of drunkenness just at the time the raid began. By the time the second or third bomb hit the harbor, all of us were stone sober.
I was finally returned to F Company, 505, in decent health and able to eat normally. I was glad to be back. After the battle in Arnone, our bond was tight, and the more combat I saw with my friends in the unit, the closer I became to them.
About this time, some important changes in leadership took place in the 505. Colonel Gavin was promoted to brigadier general and became our assistant division commander. The new commander of the regiment was Col Herbert F. Batcheller, and our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander, became the regimental executive officer. Luckily for those of us in the 2d Battalion, his replacement was Maj Benjamin H. Vandervoort, one of the finest battalion commanders anywhere in the Army. He would remain our leader for most of the war.
Regimental activities in Naples largely consisted of patrolling the streets, maintaining law and order, doing wo
rk details, and carrying out support for the Allied military government. The civilian population of the city was starving. The going price for prostitutes was one K ration or a C ration. Later, as the rear-echelon military personnel increased, the market price doubled to two C rations. Even at this low price, parents were actually selling their daughters into prostitution in order to provide for the rest of the family.
One of our many duties was to enforce discipline along the bread lines at the military government-established ration distribution points. Without strict control over the distribution of food, the situation quickly got out of hand. Life-support facilities were virtually non-existent. Safe drinking water, sanitary sewers, electricity, gas, food supplies, transportation, medical services, refuse collection—in short, everything that makes a metropolitan area function—had been destroyed.
The black marketeers were making a lot of money, but people on the poor end of the scale had a hell of a time staying alive. At the distribution points, we had to fix bayonets and actually prod the people into lines to keep them from going into mob action as we handed out the food. Yet, after duty hours, any soldier who had the money—and most of us did—could walk a block or two, be seated in a black-market restaurant complete with linen tablecloths and candles, and be served a nice steak dinner with all the trimmings. Returning from the restaurant to our billets, we witnessed adults and children picking through garbage cans outside our mess areas.
There were nightly air raids. The Army had brought in a lot of smoke generator units. If there was any wind at all, they would move these units upwind and turn them on shortly before they expected an air raid to begin, in the hope of hiding targets from the Luftwaffe. The machines would generate gargantuan clouds of smoke that drifted down over the city and the harbor. I carried out my duties in the late afternoon after they had turned the generators on, sometimes working in smoke so thick that it looked like the whole city and surrounding area were bathed in heavy fog.
During this period, rumors about what would happen next were running wild. One day it was said we were going back to the States, the next we heard we might be sent to the Pacific. As far back as Africa, the rumor had been going around that we would eventually wind up in England. We called this type of information a “latrine rumor” because it always ended up being a lot of crap.
Nevertheless, it didn’t come as much of a surprise when they finally said we were going to move. They didn’t tell us where, they just said, “Get ready.” We had to remove our division patches and jump wings, and pull our trousers out of our jump boots to more or less disguise ourselves. The sad part was that General Clark insisted that the division leave one regiment behind for his use in Italy. So, when the 82d sailed out of Naples on November 18, 1943, we left the 504 PIR behind.
Even at that late date—a month and eighteen days after we had taken Naples—the harbor was in such a state that it was still impossible to move in close enough to embark from a pier. We had to take landing barges out to our troopship, the USS Frederick Funston.
Chapter 13
Cookstown and Belfast, Northern Ireland
Even as our ship was sailing out of Naples, we heard many competing rumors about our destination and mission. I only knew we were steaming west and conditions were a whole lot more pleasant than those I had endured on the way to Casablanca. The Funston, first of all, was specifically designed to carry troops; it was not a converted passenger liner. True, we were still crowded, but there were showers enough, and fresh water, and latrines in functioning order. We were only fed two meals a day, but the food was good, with fresh baked bread and pie or cake for supper.
We passed Thanksgiving Day of 1943 on board in the port of Oran, Algeria. The meal, complete with turkey and pumpkin pie, was one of the very best I had had since joining the service. I spotted soldiers in Oran, fully clothed in our uniforms and armed with our equipment, but sporting beards, mustaches, and long hair that were far from regulation in the U.S. Army. Later I found out they were the Free French Colonial Forces employed in Italy. They were armed with the very same .30-caliber 1903 Springfield rifles that we had meticulously cleaned of cosmoline and carried on the ship to Casablanca.
We left Oran on November 29 accompanied by a huge protective convoy that headed west through the Strait of Gibraltar. At the time, the Spanish still held Spanish Morocco, and General Franco held rule over Spain. Any ship passing through the narrow body of water at the Strait was a prime target for the German U-boats that roamed the area in wolf packs. I spent many hours lying on my bunk, picturing a German torpedo sticking its nose through the bulkhead. If this had actually happened, it would all have been over so fast that I would never have known what hit us. As something to think about, it was down several notches from the magnitude of the day-to-day worry of ground combat.
After safely passing through the Strait of Gibraltar we kept heading west. The rumors that we were going home seemed to be confirmed. I passed some time with a real nice fellow called Dominick DiTullio from the 3d Battalion, 505. I had never met him before, but it turned out he was also from Erie, a local football star at Strong Vincent High School back in the late ’thirties or very early ’forties. We had many long talks about our hometown as we sailed to we-knew-not-where in the middle of the Atlantic. My new friend was killed on June 7, D-Day+1, in Ste. Mère-Eglise. He posthumously received a Distinguished Service Cross for his action on D-Day.
It was rumored that our convoy was at one time closer to the United States than to Europe. That’s how big a loop we must have made. After a number of days, we turned north, and on December 9, the 505 found itself on the dock at Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the end of a twenty-one-day voyage. We went by train to Cookstown, where we were billeted in regiment-size encampments that had formerly housed British troops. Our living quarters consisted of long, narrow metal Quonset huts, with one completely inadequate potbelly coal- or wood-burning stove in the middle. Small wooden sawhorses raised about a foot off the concrete floor formed the leg supports for our beds. Between the sawhorses were three planks that supported mattresses filled with straw. At the very most, we had two woolen GI blankets.
There was no running water in the huts, which each housed fourteen to eighteen men. I think we had company-size latrines, located in another Quonset hut with wooden bench-type seats all in a long row, and a 20- or 30-gallon bucket beneath each hole. A trap door opened from the back of the latrine. The Irish farmers came in daily, picked up our waste, threw it in a wagon, and spread it in their fields for fertilizer. It was a convenient arrangement, but the Army warned us against eating too much of the local lettuce.
The Cookstown winter was very damp. We did experience some snow while we were there, which was a first for many of my friends from California and the South. Although they were already seasoned soldiers who had faced the terrors of combat, the memory of those troopers horsing around in the snow for a few, carefree moments always reminds me of our comparative innocence at the time. Those who survived our coming missions in Normandy and Holland would get their fill of snow in the Battle of the Bulge just one year later, where many would die in a desolate, bitter cold landscape.
We had no hard training in Northern Ireland, for there was no terrain to train on. Land was too scarce to take it away from food production and other civilian uses. We did, however, extend our usual cross-training on all individual and crew-served weapons to include the main infantry antitank weapon at the time, the 57mm antitank gun. The PIRs didn’t yet have antitank guns, but we hoped to get some in by glider after the initial drop on our next mission. If the crews for the 57mm in the gliders were killed or wounded, the PIR troopers had to be able to load and fire the guns.
While we were billeted in Cookstown, I obtained a pass to visit the regiment to which I’d been assigned for several months back in Georgia and Alabama. The 507 was stationed near Belfast, at Fort Brush. My old company, Company I, was billeted in civilian housing, if I remember correctly, but after the first half
dozen drinks with my old friends, I lost track of a lot of details.
I do remember how they all wanted to hear about the use of the parachute troops in combat operations. I got the chance to expound a little on my personal philosophy about staying alive in combat. I had a bunch of very eager listeners. This philosophy boiled down to four main points: Dig in and get below the ground surface; as a private, never volunteer; always stay alert when within enemy mortar and artillery range; and always be security conscious.
We had a very liberal pass policy in Northern Ireland, which was radically different from what we had been used to in Africa, Sicily, and Italy. Belfast was a big town, which for us meant girls, music, and booze. This latter, like everything else in the United Kingdom, was rationed, so all the bars were open for a limited number of hours each day. One of the most familiar sayings in all the American units was the warning the bar was going to close: “Time, gentlemen, time!” Another was, “The Yanks are over paid, over sexed, and over here.” A private’s pay in the paratroopers, $50 a month supplemented with $50 jump pay, made us the highest paid military organization in the world.
In Belfast, you could buy a bottle of black-market booze—scotch, bourbon, or Irish whisky—for $20, which made it the equivalent of five pounds. This made whiskey expensive even on a paratrooper’s salary. On the other hand, we thought that the price of beer and whatever food we could find in the civilian economy was quite reasonable. I was introduced to Guinness, which wasn’t too powerful. I discovered that if I drank a lot of it, I still could get drunk. To my sorrow, it gave me a bad case of diarrhea.
We enjoyed the companionship of a good many females, both civilian and military. The female component of the British Army was the ATS, or Auxiliary Territorial Services, also called Terries. After a few dates with some of them, I decided that ATS really stood for Always Thirsty and Starved. They could out-drink, out-eat, and generally out-do a man. The British also had a volunteer women’s organization, the Women’s Land Army, or the WLA. They replaced farm boys, and wore breeches with knee-length leggings. WLAs were hefty, strong, and physically tough. It was said that a man who made a pass at one of them had better be able to defend himself, whether the response was negative or positive.
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