Once There Was a War (17 page)

When the red signal for an air attack goes out, the destroyers move in circles, belching smoke, and the small smoke carriers dart busily among the big ships, trailing ribbons of white, choking smoke which smells like sulphur. The little boats weave in and out, until they have covered the fleet with their artificial fog. The sound of coughing is deafening. At least it is until the anti-aircraft starts. And then, through the smoke, you hear the deep blow of the bombs. They don’t sound like anything else. And their explosions come through the water and strike the ship. You can feel them in your feet.

The endless lines of landing craft go ashore, carrying the supplies for men who are lying off in the bushes on the forward lines. Cases of food and tons of shells and cartridges. A hell of them lines the shore, waiting to be transported inland.

And the battle line has moved up. The beach is taken now and the invasion moves ahead. The white hospital ships move inshore to take on their cargoes.

PALERMO

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN THEATER,
October 1, 1943
—The sea off Sicily was running in long, smooth waves without whitecaps and the day was bright and the sea that Mediterranean blue that is unlike any other blue in the world. The PT boat ground its way through, making a great churned wake and taking even what little sea there was over the bow. It’s the wettest boat of all, the torpedo boat. The crew, in their rubber clothes, huddled on the deck trying to keep out of the constant spray, and on each side of the bridge the machine-gunners, at their stations, sat in their turrets behind their guns and the water glistened on their faces. The cartridge cases of the .50-caliber shells were green from contact with the sea water.

Off to the right a body was floating in the sea, rising and falling on the long waves. It was pretty swollen, and the brown lifebelt and collar made it float high in the water.

The captain was dressed in a bathing suit and he was barefooted. The First had a rubber coat on but his trousers were rolled up and his feet were bare, too. The two of them looked off across the port torpedo tube at the floating body.

“Should we go over and take a look?” the First said.

“Not in the shape it’s in,” the captain said. “Besides, we have to make our schedule.”

The first said, “I think that’s the loneliest thing in the world. A body floating at sea. I don’t know anything that looks so alone.”

The captain let go his hold on the torpedo tube and turned and held onto the rail behind the port gun turret. “Before you came on I had one that gave me the willies,” he said. He broke abruptly into his story.

“After Palermo fell,” he said, “there was a night and a part of a day before the Seventh Army got to the city. I was on patrol with five PTs and we got the flash and we were in the neighborhood anyway, so we came to take a look. You know what Palermo looks like. That great, big, strong mountain right beside the city and the crazy lights that get on it and then the city spilled down there at the base. It looks like Ulysses has just left there. You can really get the sense of Virgil from that mountain, from the whole northern coast of Sicily, for that matter. It just stinks of the classics.

“Anyway, it was fairly late in the afternoon when we came opposite the city and crept in next to the mole and sneaked through. We were fixed to run if anything shot at us, but nothing did. We went into the harbor and it was really shot to pieces. There were ships sunk all over and twisted cranes and one little Italian destroyer lying over on its side.

“The Air Force really did a job on the waterfront there. Buildings and docks and machinery and boats just blasted into junk. What a junkman’s dream that was! What made me think of it was that the water was oily from the blasted ships and there was a dead woman floating on the oily water, face down and with her hair fanned out and floating behind her. She bobbed up and down when our wake spread out in the harbor.

“At first,” the captain said, “I didn’t know what gave me a queer feeling and then it came to me. There wasn’t anybody moving about on the shore at all. You take a wrecked city, why, there’s usually someone poking around. But not here. I got the idea I’d like to go ashore. So the First I had then and I, we pulled up between two wrecked fishing boats and we got out a tommy gun apiece and we tied up and jumped ashore.

“It’s kind of hard to imagine. Palermo is a pretty big city. Except for the harbor and the waterfront, our bombers hadn’t hurt it very much. Oh, there were some wrecks, but not to amount to anything. I tell you, there wasn’t one living soul in that city. The population moved right out into the hills and the troops hadn’t come yet. There wasn’t a soul.

“You’d walk up a street where there were big houses and the doors would be open and—just not anybody. I did see a cat go streaking across the street, a pure white cat, but that’s the only living thing there was.

“You know those little painted carts the Sicilians have, with scenes painted on them? Well, there were some of those lying on their sides and the donkeys that pulled them were lying there dead, too.

“The First and I walked up into the town. Every once in a while I’d get the idea of going into one of the houses and just seeing what they were like, but I couldn’t. It was quiet and there wasn’t a breath of wind and the doors were open and I just couldn’t make myself go into one of those houses.

“We’d walked quite a good distance up into the town, farther than we thought, when it began to get dark. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight. Well, when we saw the dark coming, I think we both got panicky without any reason. We started to walk back to the waterfront and we kept going faster and faster and then we finally broke into a run.

“There was something about that town that didn’t want us there after dark. The open doors were black already and the deep shadows were falling. We dog-trotted through the narrow streets and then I got to thinking—there’s nobody here, but now if I see anybody it’s going to scare me. It gets dark awfully quick there. It was pitch black in the narrow streets, but you could see light above the houses.

“It got so we were really running and when we broke out on the dock and climbed over the wrecks, we were panting. The First said to me, ‘A guy might have got lost in there and not got back all night.’ But he knew we had been scared, and I knew it too.”

A hard dash of spray came over the bow of the PT and splashed him in the face.

“That gave me the willies,” the captain said. “I think that scared me more than I’ve been scared for a long time. I got to thinking about it and once or twice I had a dream about it. Come to think of it, the whole thing was like a dream anyway, from that dead woman right on through. But if I ever wanted to say how it was to be alone and panicky, I think I’d think of that right away.”

SOUVENIR

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER,
October 12, 1943
—It is said, and with some truth, that while the Germans fight for world domination and the English for the defense of England, the Americans fight for souvenirs. This may not be the final end for our dogfaces, but it helps. It is estimated that two divisions of American troops could carry away the Great Pyramid, chip by chip, in twenty-four hours. This writer has seen pup tents piled nearly to the ridge rope with nearly valueless mementos of places the soldiers occupied. Dark back rooms of houses in Algeria and Palermo and Messina, and by now probably Salerno, are roaring with the industry of making bits of colored cloth and celluloid into gadgets to sell the soldiers.

A soldier has been seen struggling down a street in Palermo carrying a fifty-pound statuette of an angel in plaster of Paris. It was painted blue and pink and had written on its base in gold paint, “Balcome too Palermo.” How he ever expected to get it home no one will ever know. If the homes of America ever receive the souvenirs that are being collected by our troops there will be no room for living. The post office at an African station recently stopped a sentimental present a soldier was sending his wife. It was a prized possession and he had bought it from a Goum for 1000 francs. It was a quart jar of fingers pickled in brandy.

It is reported that the pre-Roman Greek temples at Salerno have suffered more from chipping by American soldiers in two weeks than they did during the preceding three thousand years, and whereas they have suffered the destructive rage of invaders for centuries they are not expected to survive the admiring souvenir-hunting of our troops, who only want to send a small chip home to the little woman.

True souvenir-hunting has its rules. It does not apply to the fighter group who transported a grand piano, piece by piece, over a thousand miles. Nor to the bomber swing band who rescued a crushed bull fiddle and mended it with airplane fix-it until it was four inches thick. They wanted to use these things. Souvenir hunting, if properly done, only takes notice of things that can’t possibly be used for anything at all and are too big or too fragile ever to get home.

Probably the greatest souvenir hunter of this whole war is a private first class who must be nameless but is generally called Bugs.

Bugs, when the battle for Gela in Sicily had abated, was poking about among the ruins, when he came upon a mirror—but such a mirror as to amaze him. It had survived bombing and shellfire in some miraculous manner, a matter which created wonder in Bugs. The mirror was six feet two in height and four feet wide, and it was in a frame of carved and painted wood which represented hundreds of small cupids wrestling and writhing about a length of blue ribbon, which accidentally managed to cover every cupid from indecency. The whole thing must have weighed about seventy-five pounds, and it was so beautiful that it broke Bug’s heart. He just couldn’t leave it behind.

Bugs probably fought the toughest war in all Sicily, for he carried the mirror on his back the whole way. When the shellfire was bad, he turned his mirror face down and covered it with dirt. On advances he left it and always came back in the night and got it again, although it entailed marching twice as far as the rest of his outfit.

Finally Bugs arranged a kind of sling, so that while advancing he had the appearance of a charging billboard. He gradually came to devote a good part of his life to the care, transportation, and protection of the biggest souvenir in the whole Seventh Army. When he finally marched into Palermo he did so in triumph, for his mirror was un-chipped and its frame was only a little chewed up from handling.

Now, for the first time, Bugs was billeted in a house, one of those tall houses with iron balconies and narrow stairs. Bugs tried in vain to get the mirror around a corner of the narrow stairway and finally he got a rope and, tying one end of it to the balcony, he went back to the street and tied the other end of it to his mirror. Then he went back and hauled it up to the second floor, where he was billeted. There he surveyed the room and decided where to hang his mirror. He drove a nail in the wall, hung the mirror, and stepped back to admire it. And he had just stepped clear when the nail pulled out and the whole thing crashed and broke into a million pieces.

Bugs regarded the mess sadly, but then the great philosophy of the “blowed in the glass” souvenir-hunter took possession of him. He said, “Oh, well, maybe it wouldn’t have looked good in our flat, anyways.”

WELCOME

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER,
October 14, 1943
—The Italian people may greet conquering American and British troops with different methods in different parts of the country, but they act always with enthusiasm that amounts to violence. One of their methods makes soldiers a little self-conscious until they get used to it. Great crowds of people stand on the sidewalks as the troops march by and simply applaud by clapping their hands as though they applauded a show. This makes the troops walk very stiffly, smiling self-consciously, half soldiers and half actors.

But this hand-clapping is the most restrained thing that they do. The soldiers get more embarrassed when they are overwhelmed by Italian men who rush up to them, overpower them with embraces, and plant great wet kisses on their cheeks, crying a little as they do it. A soldier hates to push them away, but he is not used to being kissed by men, and all he can do is to blush and try to get away as quick as possible.

A third method of showing enthusiasm at being conquered is to throw any fruit or vegetable which happens to be in season at the occupying troops. In Sicily the grapes were ripe and many a soldier got a swipe across the face with a heavy bunch of grapes tossed with the best will in the world.

The juice ran down inside their shirts, and after a march of a few blocks troops would be pretty well drenched in grape juice, which, incidentally, draws flies badly, and there is nothing to do about it. You can’t drown such enthusiasm by making them not throw grapes.

One of the most ridiculous and most dangerous occupations, however, was the investment and capture of the island of Ischia. There the people, casting about for some vegetable or floral tribute, found that the most prominent and showy flower of the season was the pink amaryllis. This is not a pleasant flower at the best, but in the hands of an enthusiastic Italian crowd it can almost be a lethal weapon.

A reasonable-sized bunch of amaryllis, with big, thick stems, may weigh four pounds. In a short drive through the streets of the city of Ischia, some of the troops were nearly beaten to death with flowers, while one naval officer was knocked clear out of a car by a well-aimed bouquet of these terrible flowers. His friends proposed him for a Purple Heart, and wrote a report on his bravery in action. “Under a deadly hail of amaryllis,” the report said, “Lieutenant Commander So-and-So fought his way through the street, although badly wounded by this new and secret weapon.” A man could easily be killed by an opponent armed with amaryllis.

The pressures on the Italians must have been enormous. They seem to go to pieces emotionally when the war is really and truly over for them. Groups of them simply stand and cry—men, women, and children. They want desperately to do something for the troops and they haven’t much to work with. Bottles of wine, flowers, any kind of little gift. They rush to the churches and pray, and then, being afraid to miss something, they rush back to watch more troops. The Italian soldiers in Italy respond instantly to an order to deliver their arms. They pile their rifles up in the streets so quickly that you have the idea they are greatly relieved to get the damned things out of their hands once for all.