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.