THE GELA LANDINGS COMMENCED FOR REAR ADMIRAL . . . (10, July 1943)

Admiral John Lesslie Hall Jr.

The Gela landings commenced for Rear Admiral Hall’s DIME Force at midnight of the 10th along a 5000-yard stretch of beach.  Aboard transport Barnett was Col. John W. Bowen’s 25th Regimental Combat Team and the gifted novelist Jack Belden.  When the first wave of LCVP’s struck out for Beach Blue, a long, rough ride from the line of demarcation, Belden was present.

USS Barnett on 19 February 1943

From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and edited by: S. E. Smith

BATTLE STATIONS (9, July 1943)

Battle Stations
By: Lt. John Mason Brown

11:30 P.M., July 9

USS Ancon (AGC-4) at anchor, 11 June 1943,
during preparations for the invasion of Sicily. 
US Navy photo # NH 99148

“H” hour, the hour of hours, is almost here.  It is now 11:30 P.M., and the attack is scheduled to begin at 2:45 A.M.

    When we passed Malta––unconquerable Malta––toward the middle of the afternoon, and later came to Gozo, we knew our next island was Sicily.  We are near Sicily now, still moving towards it in the darkness.  It will not be long before we reach our anchorage off Scoglitti on Sicily’s southern shore.

    Already we have had our hints of “D” day’s approach.  Throughout the afternoon the gray sky has been filled from time to time by coveys of Spitfires.  Several convoys have come within sight on the lunging waters.  Six aircraft, said to be hostile, were reported twelve miles away from us in the late twilight.  Then, just about an hour ago, fires and flares were seen ahead, and distant guns were heard.  It is toward these guns and fires that we are steering.  The enemy is there.  Even the extra slab of ice cream on the pie after tonight’s steak dinner was a pleasant way of our being told that something extra was soon to be expected of us.

USS Ancon (AGC-4) surface plotting area,
probably the Navy Operations Room adjacent to
or part of the Joint Operations Room, 3 July 1943
shortly before the invasion of Sicily.
Note plotting crew with charts on multiple tables,
sound powered phones, communications gear in cabinets at left,
speaking tubes on bulkhead at right,
and aircraft status board on bulkhead at rear.
US National Archives photo # 80-G-215068,
a US Navy photo now in the collections of the
US National Archives.

    Let the cynical laugh, but we have seen something of a miracle tonight.  All afternoon our hearts have grown the heavier with the increasing heaviness of the sea.  Things have looked bad for us––very bad––these past eight hours or so.  By some ugly mischance the first storm we have had in the Atlantic or the Mediterranean overtook us this afternoon when, having traveled so far, we were at last so near.

    By 2:30 P.M. the Mediterranean was being swept by a 30-knot wind.  As the waves rose under sullen skies, they subjected the little PC boats now with us to a terrible beating.  The destroyers were surf-bathing uncomfortably.  Even the largest transports were wobbling.  One by one, three of their barrage balloons were blown away from them, as easily as a child’s balloon slips through his fingers in the park.  By 5 o’clock the gale had increased until, as darkness came on, the waves swelled into more and more sizable mountains.  The PC boats were by then egg-shelling their way, not so much through as on the heavy seas.  The prospect of trying to send landing craft into the beaches against such odds was disturbing, to put it mildly.

    Many of us remembered the Spanish Armada’s fate.  We did not want to remember it, but we did.  Nature has undone that formidable Spanish Task Force, dashed its galleons to pieces on the rocks, and scattered them, when in full and proud array it had reached England’s shores.  We were a far larger armada.  Would we be the victim of the same misfortune?

Status board in the Joint Operations Room, USS Ancon (AGC-4),
3 July 1943. This board shows the disposition of Task Force 85
ships shortly before the invasion of Sicily.
US National Archives photo # 80-G-215080,
a US Navy photo now in the collections of the US National Archives.

    The weather reports were encouraging.  “The sea will calm before midnight,”  Lieutenant Commander John Cory had said from the beginning and kept on saying, even when the seas at hand grew rougher.

    Then suddenly, a little while ago, the miracle of which I spoke occurred.  No matter where you may be stationed, you must have felt it.  The wind died down almost as abruptly as it had started.  Look over the sides now in the faint light left by a storm-clouded quarter moon, which is nearing the horizon, and you will find the Mediterranean still choppy, still tossed by a heavy surf, but, compared to what it was only a short time back, as quiet as if God had put his hand on it.  This ought to be the best of good omens.

    Some transport planes, carrying our paratroops, were reported off to starboard shortly before I stumbled down from the bridge to find a place for this microphone on the floor of a darkened passage off the Chart Room.  Although I could not see the planes, I heard the roar of their motors, full of power, full of defiance.

Midnight, July 9

Joint Operations Room, USS Ancon (AGC-4), 3 July 1943
shortly before the invasion of Sicily. Command personnel
are manning the stations on the raised platform at the left. The two
horizontal plots may be the air plot table (foreground) and local
plot table (background). The task force disposition status board is
on a bulkhead at the left rear. A radio transmitting keyboard is in
use in the foreground. Note the extensive use of sound powered
phones. Chalked on the vertical status board at right is the statement
"Again we have been asked to do the impossible. Let's do it as usual."
US National Archives photo # 80-G-215083, a US
Navy photo now in the collections of the US National Archives.

    Perhaps you can hear it.  The distant gunfire of which I spoke last time has greatly increased.  The fires are still burning on the beaches ahead.  If anything, they are brighter, because we have been pushing quietly into our anchorage.  They cast a glow into the sky the way a city does at night.  They are not easy to make out as yet.  One of the fires looks as if it were a bit inland.  In shape it is rectangular enough to be the outlines of a lighted airfield, which of course it is not. 

    These fires mean that our planes have been busy.  So do the inquisitive enemy searchlights which have been sweeping the sky from the beaches to the west.

    Scoglitti, our objective, must be about five miles away from us in the darkness just now.  Our convoy is reaching its destination safely and without confusion.

    If our first sight of Sicily has consisted of fires burning in the night on a land we cannot see, there is a reason for this.  According to plans, the Northwest African Air Force was scheduled to conduct an air offensive throughout the whole Mediterranean area prior to our coming.  By these heavy air attacks the Allies have sought to compel Axis air forces to withdraw from fighter range of the desired beaches in Sicily in order to maintain their own cities, industries, armies, and air bases.

Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, U.S. Army, on the navigation
bridge of USS Ancon (AGC-4), en route to the invasion of
Sicily, 7 July 1943. With him is CAPT. Timothy Wellings, USN.
US National Archives photo # 80-G-86325, a US Navy
photo now in the collections of the US National Archives.

    Before daylight this morning a heavy bombing attack is scheduled to be mad on all Sicilian airfields, and for the balance of the day a fighter group of approximately thirty-six planes is supposed to be maintained over each of Sicily’s three main airfield centers.  American fighter squadrons will be based on Malta and other near-by islands.

    Those paratroopers we heard heading inland will have been dropped with others during the night in the area of the Task Force to our west.  The guns we hear at first will not necessarily mean that the Italians and the Germans have spotted us.  Most probably they will be anti-aircraft guns, called into action by our paratroopers and our transport planes.

    

12:45 A.M., July 10

    That crunchy, bumpy noise you may have heard five minutes ago was our anchor on the way down.  It’s blacker than coal up here.  Our ships are still slipping into position.  They are gathering like conspirators.  We can’t see them, but we can feel them, the way in a dark room you know someone else has entered, is creeping past you, or is standing next to you.

Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, USN on the bridge
 of his flagship, USS Ancon (AGC-4),
during the invasion of Sicily in July 1943.
US National Archives photo # 80-G-302134,
a US Navy photo now in the collections of the
US National Archives.

    A searchlight from time to time cuts the sky above the beaches.  A few tracer bullets are being batted out, like hot baseballs, by the enemy’s shore batteries.  The sound of ack-ack can be heard inland.

    Don’t be alarmed by the submarine just off our port side.  It’s one of ours.  I hear the sight of it cost a soldier his dinner.  He had wondered out on deck to get some air and see the show in which he will soon take part.  Tonight’s second slab of ice cream and the see-sawing of the Mediterranean had not been getting along too well.  The soldier was holding his head in his hands when, to his horror, one of his eyes rolled open to discover the periscope, the conning tower, and finally the whale’s back of a submarine loom out of the tar-colored waves beside him.  “Jesus Christ! he is reported to have said, at the same time that he said good-by to the ice cream and raced below.

    Everything else is under control.

1:30 A.M., July 10

    A great wave of planes––our planes––has swept over us.  They were our transports coming out.  Although only a few of them could be seen, all of them could be felt and heard.  They mean that our 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers have been landed and are already at work.

Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, USN (left), Commander
Western Naval Task Force (Task Force 80) with his Chief of Staff
and Aide, Rear Admiral Spencer S. Lewis, USN, on board USS Ancon 
(AGC-4), flagship for the Salerno Landings in September 1943.
Note the binoculars worn by both men.
US Navy photo # NH 99213, from the collections of the
US Naval Historical Center.

    The darkness up here has grown.  It’s hard to make out the person next to you on the Admiral’s bridge, unless in passing he just happens to be silhouetted against one of those fires still burning on the beaches.

    The small boats should be in the water by now.  One of ours has returned with Captain Mitchell, from some errand in the night.  From transport after transport these small crafts are being lowered.  They must be filled with anxious men; the small boat men who are the point and glory of this Force.

    Shortly before I came down, another wave of probably fifty of our transport planes has roared above us, heading out from Sicily, their mission completed, their paratroopers landed in the blackness of an unknown land.

    Before the thunder of their motors could be heard, a lull appeared to have settled on the shores ahead.  Then came the first faint drone of the approach, and some tracer bullets rose skyward, no doubt to greet them.

2:40 A.M., July 10

    We are within five minutes of what should have been the time for “H” hour.  But “H” hour has been delayed until 3:45 at the request of the Commander of Transports, Blame the choppy seas for this, and difficulties they have caused in getting the small boats out.  So take time off to get your second wind.

Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, USN (right), who commanded
American naval forces during the invasions of Morocco,
Sicily, and Salerno, on the deck of his flagship, 
USS Ancon (AGC-4), with war correspondent Quentin Reynolds. 
US Navy photo now in the collections of the
US National Archives.

    Don’t think that things have not been happening above, in spite of this delay.  Do you remember those enemy searchlights which I have mentioned several times?  Well, they have given us some uneasy moments.  There’s a hell of a lot of difference between our searchlights when they are looking for the enemy, and enemy searchlights when they are looking for us.

    As far as I can make out, there have been three of these searchlights sweeping from the shore.  When we were stealing in, and even after we reached our anchorage, they swept only the sky.  They kept raking it back and forth, back and forth, sticking up like nervous white fingers in the darkness.  They were after our planes then, and didn’t seem to know we were here.

    Even when they followed the transport planes out, these searchlights swung far above us––which was precisely what we kept hoping they would do.  One of these beacons, however, carried its search toward the horizon until its lowered light hovered  over our ships to port.  Then it blinked and went out, apparently not having spotted anything of interest. 

    This made us breathe the easier.

    But only for a while.  Because in a few minutes those searchlights were in motion again.  The same one that had blinked before, woke up in alarm.  When it came on, it was aiming straight above it at the sky, which was still all right with us.  Then it began circling its light out to sea, lower and lower each time, until it started skimming the waves.  In its sweep it landed on one of our ships lying at an angle.  It paused there for an awful time before starting its move again.  Then it swung slowly past the other vessels ahead, seeming to halt for the same awful time on each one of them, icing them with light or showing them up as silhouettes, as neat and black as you will ever find on any Ship Identification cards.

The staff of Vice Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt USN, aboard his flagship 
USS Ancon (AGC-4), in the Mediterranean in 1943 and 1944. 
Jim Moses' father C.W. Moses, USN was staff gunnery officer on
VADM. Hewitt's staff.

    The beacon finally reached us.  Our turn came just the way it used to in school.  Waiting for it wasn’t pleasant.  The light cut closer and closer until it was full upon us, blinding us when we looked straight at it.  It wasn’t hard, then, to make out the faces on the Admiral’s Bridge.  It would have been hard not to make them out.  The faces of the men up there looked the way an actor’s face does without makeup under a spotlight.  You know that sallow look?  Even the ship’s gray was lighter than the sun at midday had ever made it.

    I thought they had found us.  I couldn’t see how they had missed us.

    “Can they see us?” I asked Captain Wellings, our Gunnery Officer.

    “No.  We can see them all right,” he smiled, but I don’t think they can see us on a night like this.  Anyway we are out of their range of vision.”

    This was good news.  It still is.

USS Ancon (AGC-4) at anchor, 11 September, 1943, in
Salerno Bay, Italy. Note unidentified Italian submarine alongside.

    With such targets as these three enemy beacons screaming for attention, our gunners must be going crazy.  But so far they have managed to hold on to their itchy fingers and keep the secret of our being here––if it still is a secret.

    Those guns, those deep-throated , distant guns you may hear, don’t belong to us.  They are British and come from the east coast.  From the sound of them the show must be on there.  And on in a big way.

3:15 A.M., July 10

    The searchlights are still at it.  When I got back to the bridge, it looked for a moment as if a gunner on a near-by ship had blown one of them out.  Since we are said to be outside their seeing range, the moment this gunner let go wasn’t an entirely happy one.  His wanting to fire was human enough.  There was the beacon ahead, begging for attention.  And there was the gunner eager to oblige.  It would have been as simple as that if, by releasing his tracers, he had not given away the secret of our being here. 

    As these tracer bullets arched through the sky, some words––almost as hot––shot out on the bridge.

    For a few minutes the light went out.  Then another of the three beacons came on, sweeping the ships in earnest.  It was followed by the third.  Before long the first light blazed out, now on again, now off again, like a lightning bug.  The gunner had missed his mark.  He has been answered by tracer bullets coming out from the shore.

    At 3:10 there was a big explosion on the beach ahead.  For a fearful moment it blew the darkness away as if it were smoke, putting fire in its place.

    Since I made my last report, the huge British guns have continued booming to the east.  The sky has become fairly active.  Some red and white tracers have been chasing one another inland, following a high, arched course.  Three enemy parachute flares dropped from a plane or planes coming in from west of Scoglitti, have been hung off our starboard bow.

    The orchestra is warming up.  The stage is set.  The curtain is scheduled to go up in a few minutes now.

4:15 A.M., July 10

    The Fourth of July was never like this!  These are the biggest fireworks I’ve ever seen.  Our guns have really been speaking up, and it looks like they are much more than just big talkers.  The sky is as bright as a summer parasol with the sunlight streaming through it.

    The darkness is fighting a losing battle.  Light is everywhere.  Never for long.  Always changing.  Always in the swiftest motion.  Then the night seeps back, only to be driven away again.  Overhead it’s all dots and dashes that you can see, quivering as they race to rise and fall; dots and dashes, and streamers of heat, and rockets overtaking rockets.

    Lights and noise.  The noises are as different as the lights.  There’s the frog like glump of flak as it thuds through the water after a brief splash.  There’s the staccato stitching of the 20- and 40-millimeters.  There’s a sigh, a whine, and a whistle coming from something––I don’t know what.

    There are big guns, little guns, medium-sized guns––all of them fluent, and all of them demanding to be heard from, whether they are on the ships around us, in the Task Force ahead, with the enemy on shore, or the British to the east.  The big guns bellow in a full, damp, dull tone.  They sound the way a goldfish bowl might sound if––water and all––it exploded in your tummy.

    Under this flaming cover the small landing boats have been pushing into shore.  Bright as the sky is, the sea is still so dark that I have been able to see the Viking outlines of only a few of our new boats.  But once in a while, in the din, the sputter of their motors has been heard.

    Our big guns appear to have got two of those prying searchlights.  They have been snuffed out for quite a while.  It was a cruiser, I think, that scored a bull’s-eye on one of them.  The beacon scarcely had time to wink.  Then it was done for.

4:45 A.M., July 10

    Those planes are enemy planes.  Although there don’t seem to be many of them, there are enough.  So far as I can make out, they came toward us in the uppermost darkness, under which all the lights are sandwiched.  During the last half hour they have been hurtling back and forth, heard but not seen, and not leaving us unseen.

    They headed for our beaches, dropping flares over them.  Then they turned wheel for us, particularly for our cruisers, still dropping flares.  The flares have been both to port and starboard.  One of them has hung right over our Force like an old-fashioned light over a dining room table.

    They are strange things, these German flares; disturbing but completely undisturbed.  All the other lights are twitchy, nervous, explosive, darting.  But these flares have a fearsome serenity.  The parachutes supporting them do more than rest on the air.  They doze there, as calm and unmoving as if they were beyond the law of gravity.

    The other lights are momentary.  These appear to be eternal.  The others kindle the air around them with sparks, and then dash on or out.  These just hang like fixtures.  They are bright enough to cast shadows on the bridge, which up until now has been dark, except for that stab by the beacon.

    They burn singly, these flares.  Without warning a street lamp comes on, far up in the sky, blinding enough to be burning a whole city’s current, and the sea below lights up the way Broadway used to look.  This street lamp stays on for what seems an eternity, almost without moving.  When it at last goes off and you begin to breathe again, another street lamp––the twin of its parent––bursts into light some yards below the first.  If anything it is brighter than its predecessor, because it is nearer.  Then the same thing happens again and again, and this necklace of lights gradually extends itself, showing its stones one by one, until the final pendant dangles just above you.

    The Germans can’t be accused of leaving us in the dark.  But so far they have only shed light.  We have done our bit, too.  Our tracers are arching on these flares from all sides.  And a big fire is burning on a hill to starboard.

5:15 A.M., July 10

    Good news.  Word has just been received that initial landings have been accomplished on all of our beaches, and that, in general, slight opposition has been met with from the ground forces of the enemy.

    This means that the little boats from all our transports have pushed in, wave by wave, to their designated landing places and that our troops have established themselves on shore.  For the details we shall have to wait.  What matters is that the Sicilian invasion is by now a fact.

    The sky is still noon-bright up here in splotches.  There have been more flares.  More enemy planes, too.  One of these has falconed down towards the Spelvin, its motors angry, as if to dive-bomb us.  It was a rumble, a roar, a rumble again––and a bad moment.  As a matter of fact, being anchored here in the light––waiting––has given us a lot of bad moments; though, thank God, so far only to think about.

6 A.M., July 10

    It’s dawning up here now.  Sicily’s coast line has begun to take shape.  It is still indistinct; still part of the vanishing night.  Far inland, to starboard, the kind of mountain Mount Etna might be, if only it were within seeing range, is slowly working its way into the dawn.  The pink-blue daylight is creeping down to the beaches.  You might expect to hear birds.  Instead the sky rattles with anti-aircraft fire and the hurried booming of the big guns on our cruisers and destroyers, and that near-by British monitor.  The shore line also rumbles every now and then with battle sounds like a kettledrum.

    The Admiral’s Bridge was dark the last time I felt my way up to where Lieutenant Burton was standing.  But only for a minute.  At 5:20, directly ahead of us, a great blob of light bleached and reddened the sky, tearing the night into shreds.  It was followed by a blast more sullen and deafening than any we have so far heard.  What we saw scattered across the sky was a ship from the Task Force to the west of us.

    We had scarcely been able to say, “Look! They got one!”  when the German planes which had done the getting could be seen flocking towards us.  Again there were not many.  Again there were enough.  Say, six; flying low, leaving a trail of big splashes behind them in the water where their bombs had fallen.  One of them slanted down across our bow, barely missing the cruiser off our port side.

    While these planes have swung back and forth, we have been watching the sky for more than them.  We have been waiting, waiting, for those promised British Spitfires to come to us from Malta and give us cover.  

    They must have been a little late.  They were due over us at 5.  They would have been welcome then.  They were no less welcome only a few minutes ago, when they were sighted off our stern.  They are equally welcome now, when, like birds of deliverance, they have flown across us, high, high up in perfect formation, sweeping the copper-colored sky.

    As a matter of fact I’m afraid they were too warmly welcomed by some of our gunners, who knew just enough about aircraft identification to be sure that anything with wings must be a target.  Fortunately the Spitfires were out of range.  No less fortunately they are with us.  We can all feel the more comfortable now.

6:30 A.M., July 10

    You can see Scoglitti now to port.  It’s a group of drab White House’s clustered around a church tower.  The beaches on either side of it could be any beaches seen in the freshness of an early morning, if it were not for the little boats nudging into them and the swarming dots visible through binoculars on the sands.  The fields and slight hills backing these beaches could be any peaceful hills and fields, if it were not for the smoke rising here and there from fires burning on them.  Even so, they look almost as tranquil as if they were the Contour Maps, increased in scale and come to life.

    The sea and the sky are different.  They are full of war.  The ships in our Task Force are all around us.  They look refreshed by the morning sun, and are unhurt.  Our gunners continue to pivot, covering whatever passes in the sky.

    It’s quieter up here, though one of our destroyers has been blazing away at a shore battery that has been firing on her from one of the hills. 

    The unloading shuttle service has started.

7:15 A.M., July 10

    We are weighing anchor now to move closer in to shore.

    The Spitfires have been patrolling once more.  They have come back again and again, in spite of their warm welcome.

    Everyone topside has been nibbling on or at “K” rations and feels the better for coffee, with its illusion of breakfast.

    Most of the shore batteries are silenced by now, due to the spectacular accuracy of Naval gunnery.  One by one they have been snuffed out like candles.

    Some jeeps have been lowered into the landing boats panting alongside of us.  And the LCT’s are now going in, rolling quite a bit and crowded with boys in khaki, only a few of whom look seasick and are holding their heads.  These LCT’s have been escorted and given fire cover by our destroyers.  The Army is leaving us in large numbers.  As it does so, one of our cruisers is thundering away at an inland target, and a big fire is burning on the beach to port.

8 A.M., July 10

    For the moment, all’s quiet.  We have just dropped anchor.  And after shaking hands with the Admiral, General Middleton of the 45th Division has gone ashore.  In the same boat with him went Clark Lee, the INS correspondent.  Fires are still smoking off the beaches, and guns rumbling intermittently.

    The chief news is that there seems to have been no serious opposition.  A message from shore says, “Considerable artillery and prisoners taken.”

LET US PROJECT THE NAVY’S SUCCESSFUL ADVANCE TO . . .

Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk

Let us project the Navy’s successful advance to the point where all forces have arrived at their assigned beaches . . . Off Scoglitti, aboard Kirk’s flagship, Ancon,

Ancon in 1945

one is keenly aware of the presence of Lieutenant John Mason Brown, celebrated newspaperman turned naval officer.  In 1942, at the age of forty-two, Brown resigned his post as drama critic of the New York World-Telegram and applied for a commission.  Urbane, erudite and witty, he was known to the flagship for his unique broadcasts to all hands––informal accounts of what was happening on the Sicilian and, later, Normandy beachheads.

    Here, Brown, who continually sought out combat assignments, reviews the approach and bombardment of Kirk’s CENT force.

From: The United States Navy in World War II
Compiled and edited by: S. E. Smith

UNDERWAY (10-11, July 1943)

 Underway
By: Admiral H. Kent Hewitt

Admiral H. Kent Hewitt c. 1945

By 1630, when Gozo had been sighted from the Monrovia, the wind was blowing from the west with a force of about 6/7 . . . It would make the coast on which we were to land, which had a NW-SE trend, a lee shore.  We could not, of course, anticipate the sort of surf we might have encountered on the Moroccan coast in TORCH, but the chop might cause considerable difficulty.  Subsequently, it was learned that General Eisenhower and Admiral Cunningham, on Malta, were so concerned with the weather as to have been on the point of postponing the operation.  

Eisenhower as General of the Army, 1945

Luckily, they held on.  At the time, my principal worry was that the landing craft might be so slowed  as to delay unduly their arrival at their destination.  This was a contingency which was effectively taken care of by Admiral Conolly, who dashed about in the Biscayne, shepherding his convoys, and having them cut corners, with the result that they were exactly on time in spite of the adverse conditions.  When I observed the rolling of some of the British LCI(L)s, as they rounded Gozo, I could not but wonder how effective some of the troops were at first going to be.  But perhaps they were all the more willing to get ashore.  The Eastern Task Force, fortunately, would have a lee for its landing.

Portrait of  commissioned by the Ministry of

Information of Admiral Andrew Cunningham, 1st Viscount 

Cunningham of Hyndhope about 1943

    My mind was greatly relieved by the prediction of my efficient aerographer, Lieutenant Commander R. C. Steere (whose forecast of surf conditions off Morocco in TORCH had been so accurate), that the wind would probably subside greatly by 2200.  This prediction again proved to be correct.  As darkness fell, the shipping around Gozo made quite an inspiring sight.  Ahead were our landing craft, inshore of us was British KMF-18, slightly behind schedule, and numerous British landing craft.  Astern was Admiral Kirk’s  second section, which was then detached to proceed to the CENT assault area.  Also coming in from the westward were the cruisers of the Covering Group, proceeding to take stations with their assigned assault groups.

Rear Admiral Richard L. Conolly, pictured here on the right,
alongside British Major General J. L. I. Hawkesworth 
aboard USS Biscayne, 6 September 1943.

    . . . Much had already been accomplished by the strategic bombing command in attacking enemy airfields and in softening the beach defenses.  To avoid premature disclosure of the point of attack, and consequent concentration of the defense, it had been necessary to follow initially a very general bombing program, with only casual attention to vital objectives, until the last day or so prior to the landing.  This was a situation quite different from small island attacks in the Pacific where, with the enemy cut off by sea, the defenses could be bombed and shelled for days on end prior to an actual landing. 

Biscayne as an amphibious force flagship off Anzio
on 21 January 1944 or 22 January 1944 during Operation Shingle.
A PT boat is alongside her.

    As we neared the coast, evidence of our air attacks was clearly visible in the A. A. fire, the flares, and the conflagrations noted at various points along the beach.  The British beacon submarines were picked up on schedule, the transports arrived in their areas, and the work of getting out boats and disembarking the troops was commenced.  Some of our own vessels were illuminated and silhouetted to us by searchlights played from the beach, but they did not seem to have been sighted by the enemy . . . 

INVASION PRELUDE (10, July 1943)

 Invasion Prelude
By: Ernie Pyle

Ernie Pyle at Anzio, Italy, 1944

The sailors went into . . . Action just as soldiers go into the first battle––outwardly calm but inside frightened and sick with worry.  It’s the lull in the last couple of days before starting that hits so hard.  In the preparation period fate seems far away, and once in action a man is too busy to  be afraid.  It’s just those last couple of days when there is time to think too much.

    One of the nights before we sailed I sat in the darkness on the forward deck helping half a dozen sailors eat a can of stolen pineapple.  Some of the men in the group were hardened and mature.  Others were almost children.  Then all talked seriously and their gravity was touching.  The older ones tried to rationalize how the law of averages made it unlikely that our ship out of all the hundreds involved would be hit.  They spoke of the inferiority of the Italian fleet and argued pro and con over whether Germany had some hidden Luftwaffe up her sleeve that she might whisk out to destroy us.  Younger ones spoke but little.  They talked to me of their plans and hopes for going to college or getting married after the war, always winding up with the phrase “If I get through this fracas alive.”

USS Biscayne (AVP-11) on 29 January 1942

    As we sat there on the hard deck––squatting like Indians in a circle around our pineapple can––it all struck me as somehow pathetic.  Even the dizziest of us knew that before long many of us stood an excellent chance of being in this world no more.  I don’t believe one of us was afraid of the physical part of dying.  That isn’t the way it is.  The emotion is rather one of almost desperate reluctance to give up the future.  I suppose that’s splitting hairs and that it really all comes under the heading of fear.  Yet somehow there is a difference.

    These gravely-yearned-for futures of men going into battle include so many things––things such as seeing the “old lady” again, of going to college, of staying in the Navy for a career, of holding  on your knee just once your own kid whom you’ve never seen, of again becoming champion salesman of your territory, of driving a coal truck around the streets of Kansas City once more and, yes, even of just sitting in the sun once more on the south side of a house in New Mexico.  When we huddled around together on the dark decks, it was these little hopes and ambitions that made up the sum total of our worry at leaving, rather than any visualization of physical agony to come.

Biscayne as an amphibious force flagship 
off Anzio on 21 January 1944 or 22 January 1944
during Operation Shingle. A PT boat is alongside her.

    Our deck and the shelf-like deck above us were dotted with small knots of men talking.  I deliberately listened around for a while.  Each group was talking in some way about their chances of survival.  A dozen times I overheard this same remark: “Well, I don’t worry about it because I look at it this way.  If your number’s up, then it’s up, and if it isn’t then you’ll come through no matter what.”

    Every single person who expressed himself that way was a liar and knew it, but, hell, a guy has to say something.  I heard oldsters offering to make bets at even money that we wouldn’t get hit at all––two to one we wouldn’t get hit seriously.  Those were the offers but I don’t think any bets actually were made.  Somehow it seemed sacrilegious to bet on our own lives.

    Once I heard somebody in the darkness start cussing and give this answer to some sailor critic who was proclaiming how he’d run things: “Well, I figure that captain up there in the cabin has got a little more in his noggin than you have or he wouldn’t be captain, so I’ll put my money on him.”

    And another sailor voice chimed in with “Hell, yes that captain has slept through more watches than you and I have spent time in the Navy.” 

    And so it went on one of the last nights of safety.  I never heard anybody say anything patriotic, the way the storybooks have people talking.  There was philosophizing but it was simple and undramatic.  I’m sure no man would have stayed ashore if he’d been given the chance.  There was something bigger in him than the awful dread that would have made him want to stay safe on land.  With me that something probably was an irresistible egoism in seeing myself part of an historic naval movement.  With others I think it was just the application of plain, unspoken, even unrecognized, patriotism.

    For the best part of the week our ship had been lying far out in the harbor, tied to a buoy.  Several times a day “General Quarters” would sound and the crews would dash to battle stations, but always it was only an enemy photo plane, or perhaps even one of our own planes.  Then we moved in to a pier.  That very night the raiders came and our ship got her baptism of fire––she lost her virginity, as the sailors put it.  I had got out of bed at 3 A.M. as usual to stumble sleepily up to the radio shack to go over the news reports which the wireless had picked up.  There were several radio operators on watch and we were sitting around drinking coffee while we worked.  Then all of a sudden around four o’clock General Quarters sounded.  It was still pitch-dark.  The whole ship came to life with a scurry and rattling, sailors dashing to stations before you’d have thought they could get their shoes on.

    Shooting had already started around the harbor, so we knew this time it was real.  I kept on working, and the radio operators did too, or rather we tried to work.  So many people were going in and out of the radio shack that we were in darkness half the time, since the lights automatically went off when the door opened.

    Then the biggest guns on our ship let loose.  They made such a horrifying noise that every time they went off we thought we’d been hit by a bomb.  Dust and debris came drifting down from the overhead to smear up everything.  Nearby bombs shook us up, too.

    One by one the electric light bulbs  were shattered by the blasts.  The thick steel bulkheads of the cabin shook and rattled as though they were tin.  The entire vessel shivered under each blast.  The harbor was lousy with ships and every one was shooting.  The raiders were dropping flares from all over the sky and the searchlights on the warships were fanning the heavens.  Shrapnel rained down on the decks, making a terrific clatter.

    The fight went on for an hour and a half.  When it was over and everything was added up we found four planes had been shot down.  Our casualties aboard were negligible––three men had been wounded––and the ship had suffered no damage except small holes from near-misses.  Best of all, we were credited with shooting down one of the planes.

    This particular raid was only one of scores of thousands that have been conducted in this war.  Standing alone it wouldn’t even be worth describing.  I’m mentioning it to show you what a taste of the genuine thing can do for a bunch of young Americans.  As I have remarked, our kids on the ship had never before been in action.  The majority of them were strictly wartime sailors, still half civilian in character.  They’d never been shot at and had never shot one of their own guns except in practice.  Because of this they had been very sober, a little unsure and more than a little worried about the invasion ordeal that lay so near ahead of them.  And then, all within an hour and a half, they became veterans.  Their zeal went up like one of those skyrocketing graph-lines when business is good.  Boys who had been all butterfingers were loading shells like machinery after fifteen minutes, when it became real.  Boys who previously had gone through their routine lifelessly had yelled with bitter seriousness, “Dammit, can’t you pass those shells faster?”

    The gunnery officer, making his official report to the captain, did it in these gleefully robust words: “Sir, we got the son of a bitch.”

    One of my friends aboard ship was Norman Somburg, aerographer third class, of 1448 Northwest 62nd Street, Miami.  We had been talking together the day before and he told me how he’d studied journalism for two years at the University of Georgia, and how he wanted  to get into it after the war.  I noticed he always added, “If I live through it.”

    Just at dawn, as the raid ended, he came running up to me full of steam and yelled, “Did you see that plane go down smoking!  Boy, if I could get off the train at Miami right now with the folks and my girl there to meet me I couldn’t be any happier than I was when I saw we’d got that guy.”

    It was worth a month’s pay to be on that ship after the raid.  All day long the sailors went gabble, gabble, gabble, each telling the other how he did it, what he saw, what he thought.  After that shooting, a great part of their reluctance to start for the unknown vanished, their guns had become their pals, the enemy became real and the war came alive for them, and they didn’t fear it so much any more.  That crew of sailors had just gone through what hundreds of thousands of other soldiers and sailors already had experienced––the conversion from peaceful people into fighters.  There’s nothing especially remarkable about it but it was a moving experience to see it happen.

    When I first went aboard I was struck with the odd bleakness of the bulkheads.  All paint had been chipped off.  I thought it was a new and very unbecoming type of interior decoration.  Shortly, however, I realized that this strange effect was merely part of the Navy procedure of stripping for action.  Inside our ship there were many other precautions.  All excess rags and blankets had been taken ashore or stowed away and locked up.  The bunk mattresses were set on edge against the bulkheads to act as absorbent cushions against torpedo or shell fragments.

    The Navy’s traditional white hats were to be left below for the duration of the action.  The entire crew had to be fully dressed in shoes, shirts, and pants––no working in shorts or undershirts because of the danger of burns.  No white clothing was allowed to show on deck.  Steel helmets, painted battleship gray, were worn during engagements. Men who stood night watches were awakened forty-five minutes early, instead of the usual few minutes, and ordered to be on deck half an hour before going on watch.  It takes that long for the eyes to become accustomed to the darkness.

    Before we sailed, all souvenir firearms were turned in and the ammunition thrown overboard.  There was one locked room full of German and Italian rifles and revolvers which the sailors had got from front-line soldiers.  Failure to throw away ammunition was a court-martial offense.  The officers didn’t want stray bullets whizzing around in case of fire.

    Food supplies were taken from their regular hampers and stored all about the ship so that our entire supply couldn’t be destroyed by one hit.  All movie film was taken ashore.  No flashlights, not even hooded ones, were allowed on deck.  Door opening on deck had switches just the reverse of refrigerators––when the doors were opened the lights inside went out.  All linoleum had been removed from the decks, all curtains taken down.

    Because of weight limitations on the plane which had brought me to the ship, I had left my Army gas mask behind.  Before departure, the Navy issued me a Navy mask, along with all the sailors.  I was also presented with one of those bright yellow Mae West life preservers like the ones aviators wear.

    Throughout the invasion period the entire crew was on one of two statuses––either General Quarters or Condition Two.  “General Quarters” is the Navy term for full alert and means that everybody is on full duty until the crisis ends.  It may be twenty minutes or it may be forty-eight hours.  Condition Two is half alert, four hours on, four hours off, but the off hours are spent right at the battle station.  It merely gives the men a little chance to relax.

Mildred Gillars (Midge)
(Bureau of Prisons ID photo)

 

    A mimeographed set of instructions and warnings was distributed about the ship before sailing.  It ended as follows: “This operation will be a completely offensive one.  The ship will be at General Quarters or Condition Two throughout the operation.  It may extend over a long period of time.  Opportunities for rest will not come very often.  You can be sure that you will have something to talk about when this is over.  This ship must do her stuff.”

    The night before we sailed the crew listened as usual to the German propaganda radio program which featured Midge, the American girl turned Nazi, who was trying to scare them, disillusion them and depress them.  As usual they laughed with amusement and scorn at her childishly treasonable talk.

    In a vague and indirect way, I suppose, the privilege of listening to your enemy trying to undermine you––the very night before you go out to face him––expresses what we are fighting for.