I VOLUNTEERED
Thel knew that his family wanted the story of what he did in the army. He told these stories about Italy and then stopped. He said that he couldn’t answer any more questions, and he will not talk about it.
(This following was told once, 50 years later. It was never repeated.)
“The front line was moving in Italy and there was so much damage to the country. April,1944, They asked for volunteers, for special training.
I thought the war was winding down. I miscalculated; I thought that if I took time up with training---the war would be over. It wasn’t the first mistake that I ever made.
I regretted it from the first day. I was over eight others, a Buck Sgt, a Corporal and six men. It was scouting behind enemy lines and ‘dirty fighting’, hand to hand. I wish that I hadn’t learned that kind of fighting.
We had the special training and then---
We got on a British troop carrier that was loading at Florence, we were the only Americans. We thought that it was full of troops.
The crew was teased that their ship was so old that it wouldn’t float.
We were never told anything, none of us knew where we were going.
Our sleeping quarters were bunks five deep. They were evenly spaced to the ceiling, there were no matresses, their bottoms were canvas. There was just barely room to get in and sleep, like all troop ships, that I ever saw.
They served more fish than the Americans. That British ship served baked beans and fish for breakfast. It tasted pretty good after the third day.
Every day at 10 and 2, they served tea with cream and sugar. We lined up and they put tea in our canteens: filled it up, if you wanted it. They had Arrowroot Cookies, another handful if you wanted them. I liked them, most G I’s didn’t want more.
(I still buy them, when I can find them.)
We went back through the Straits of Gibraltar and then north, up the coast.
D DAY,JUNE 6, 1944, off the coast of France
We didn’t know what day it was, or where we were. Our ship stopped in sight of the coast, we pulled in ahead of nearly all the others, we got real close. Big Navy ships quickly lined up behind us and started shelling the
beach and the small cliffs. All the shelling went over us, it was loud and scary. Some of them could have fell short, on us.
We tried to count the Allied ships. There were 100’s of ships that moved in, behind and beside us, as far as we could see. It was a mostly clear sunshine day, but the water was rough. I had picked up a pair of field glasses in Italy and could see the first landings on the shore.
Rope ladders were hung over the side of our ship and the British soldiers swarmed down the rope ladder, into landing craft. The amphibious jeeps held 12 or 15 people, and there were small boats, and big ones. There were underwater obstacles, and many of the boats and their men, never made it to shore. There was no turning back. There were more boats and men, they just kept coming, jamming the beach. I watched the men as they tried to ‘hit the beach’ running and fall down and start shooting. And then to try to get off that beach and get behind something. So many didn’t make it.
It was real plain, I could see every movement. I watched it all.
Replacement troops kept going ashore. Men from each ship went straight from that ship to the nearest shore. In four or five days, most all of the ships had unloaded, and moved back where we couldn’t see them. Our ship never moved. There was lots of artillery from behind us, going over our heads. So much noise but we were never shot at. The German aircraft was already gone, before we got there. The fighters and strafing planes too, they were all friendly, to us.
Our ship had three decks. We were only allowed to go from our sleeping quarters to a deck in the open, on our floor, in the daytime. And we could go to the mess, to eat. At night there was a strict black-out. We all had to stay inside at night, so that a soldier wouldn’t forget and make a light, smoking. As a Staff Sgt, I could go out any time the hatch was open.
My group were required to ‘stand ready’ to go ashore at any time. Except when we took a bath---and they timed us then.
Even when we slept, it was with our clothes on. We were always ready to grab our equipment and climb down the rope ladder.
(This was not mentioned until 50 years later, never in more detail.)
Waves of dive bombers, all concentrated on the beach. There were quite a few trees on the shore, at first. After four days the fighting had moved so far that I couldn’t tell as much about it. At night I could see the muzzle blasts of the enemy and the blasts from mortars or bombers. I could tell where the main fighting was. As near as we could tell, all the British Soldiers had left the ship that we were on. Just us nine Americans and the crew of the ship—that was all on board. We had no radio and they never told us anything.
In Italy we could listen to ‘Axis Sally,’ on a German station, her news was pretty accurate. She told some truth, in with her propaganda. She played the latest American songs. She played ‘Roll out the Barrel’ the first time I ever heard it.
She called soldiers names, she told the name of their wives and their boy friends. In Italy, Germans dropped leaflets to try to lower our moral. I say one leaflet that had a picture of a soldier’s wife and her name. A POW was in her bedroom. His POW coveralls were hanging on the bed post.
That soldier was in my outfit, in Italy.
We set there 28 days. We were never told anything.
That night I woke up and felt the ship moving. After eating our baked beans and fish, we got to go out on our deck. We could not see the shore or any other ships. There was an airplane circling our ship, it could spot submarines. All the daylight hours since we left Gibraltar, we had been under submarine ‘watch’. There was always someone on the highest point of the ship, looking out for a submarine.
I have always been thankful that I wasn’t called to go behind the lines and use that special ‘dirty’ fighting, that I had received training for.
We sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar again and I saw a dead body floating. There was danger of enemy submarines, we didn’t stop.
We unloaded at Florence, Italy. There were more men than we thought, that were left on that British ship. I guarded prisoners that we put on a ship north of Florence. We set with them 4 or 5 days, and we could see Naples. It was hot summer, the weather in Italy is about like it is here in Texas. They put us on flat ‘40X 8’ railroad cars that could carry ‘40 soldiers or 8 horses’.
We were hot, and we stripped down to our shorts. I had a safety pin to close the front of mine. If any of us had gotten so sunburned that we couldn’t do our duty, we would have been court marshaled.
The trains in Italy had little old narrow gage tracks. We were traveling along, I had my legs swinging off over the edge. I heard a yell from up ahead. I jerked my legs up, just in time, as we went through a narrow tressel.
We went back to our outfit, it had fought on further north. Rome had been declared an ‘open city’ and there was no damage in it like there was in Naples.