Читать книгу Brave Men - Ernie Pyle - Страница 8

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We had a couple of bad moments as we went to invade Sicily. At the time they both looked disastrous for us, but they turned out to have such happy endings that it seemed as though Fate had deliberately plucked us from doom.

The cause of the first near-tragedy was the weather on the morning of the day on which we were to attack Sicily. The night before, it had turned miserable. Dawn came up gray and misty, and the sea began to kick up. Even our fairly big ships were rolling and plunging and the little flat-bottomed landing craft were tossing around like corks. As the day wore on it grew progressively worse. At noon the sea was rough even to professional sailors. In midafternoon it was breaking clean over our decks. By dusk it was mountainous. The wind howled at forty miles an hour. We could barely stand on deck, and our far-spread convoy was a wallowing, convulsive thing.

In the early afternoon the high command aboard our various ships had begun to wrinkle their brows. They were perplexed, vexed and worried. Damn it, here the Mediterranean had been like a millpond for a solid month, and now this storm had to come up out of nowhere! Conceivably it could turn our whole venture into a disaster that would cost thousands of lives and prolong the war for months. These high seas and winds could cause many serious hazards:

1.

The majority of our soldiers would hit the beach weak and indifferent from seasickness, two-thirds of their fighting power destroyed.

2.

Our slowest barges, barely creeping along against the high waves, might miss the last rendezvous and arrive too late with their precious armored equipment.

3.

High waves would make it next to impossible to launch the assault craft from the big transports. Boats would be smashed, lives lost, and the attack seriously weakened.

There was a time when it seemed that to avoid complete failure the landings would have to be postponed twenty-four hours. In that case, we would have had to turn around and cruise for an extra day, thus increasing the chance of being discovered and heavily attacked by the enemy.

I asked our commanders about it. They said, “God knows.”

Certainly they would have liked to change the plans, but by then it was impossible. We’d have to go through with it. (Later I learned that the Supreme High Command did actually consider postponement.)

Many ships in the fleet carried barrage balloons against an air attack. The quick snap of a ship’s deck when she dropped into a trough would tear the high-flying balloon loose from its cable. The freed silver bag would soar up and up until finally in the thin, high air it would burst and disappear from view. One by one we watched the balloons break loose during the afternoon. Scores of them dotted the sky above our convoy. That night, when the last light of day failed, only three balloons were left in the entire fleet.

The little subchasers and the infantry-carrying assault craft would disappear completely into the wave-troughs as we watched them. The next moment they would be carried so high they seemed to leap clear out of the water. By afternoon, many of the sailors on our vessel were sick. We sent a destroyer through the fleet to find out how all the ships were getting along. It came back with the appalling news that thirty per cent of all the soldiers were deathly seasick. An Army officer had been washed overboard from one craft but had been picked up by another about four ships behind.

During the worst of the blow we hoped and prayed that the weather would moderate by dusk. It didn’t. The officers tried to make jokes about it at suppertime. One said, “Think of hitting the beach tonight, seasick as hell, with your stomach upside down, and straight off you come face to face with an Italian with a big garlic breath!”

At ten o’clock I lay down with my clothes on. There wasn’t anything I could do and the rolling sea was beginning to take nibbles at my stomach, too. Never in my life had I been so depressed. I lay there and let the curse of a too-vivid imagination picture a violent and complete catastrophe for America’s war effort—before another sun rose. As I finally fell asleep the wind was still howling and the ship was pounding and falling through space.

The next thing I knew a booming voice over the ship’s loudspeaker was saying: “Stand by for gunfire. We may have to shoot out some searchlights.”

I jumped up, startled. The engines were stopped. There seemed to be no wind. The entire ship was motionless and quiet as a grave. I grabbed my helmet, ran out onto the deck, and stared over the rail. We were anchored, and we could see the dark shapes of the Sicilian hills not far away. The water lapped with a gentle, caressing sound against the sides of the ship. We had arrived. The storm was gone. I looked down and the surface of the Mediterranean was slick and smooth as a table top. Already assault boats were skimming past us toward the shore. Not a breath of air stirred. The miracle had happened.

The other bad moment came on the heels of the storm. As long as that ship of ours sails the high seas, I’m sure the story of the searchlights will linger on in her wardroom and forecastle like a legend. It is the story of a few minutes in which the fate of the ship hung upon the whim of the enemy. For some reason which we probably shall never know the command to obliterate us was never given.

Our ship was about three and a half miles from shore—which in the world of big guns is practically hanging in the cannon muzzle. Two or three smaller ships were in closer, but the bulk of our fleet stood far out to sea behind us. Our admiral had the reputation of always getting up close where he could have a hand in the shooting and he certainly ran true to form throughout the invasion.

We’d been stopped only a minute when big searchlights blinked on from the shore and began to search the waters. Apparently the watchers on the coast had heard some sounds at sea. The lights swept back and forth across the dark water and after a few exploratory sweeps one of them centered dead upon us and stopped. Then, as we held our breaths, the searchlights one by one brought their beams down upon our ship. They had found their mark.

All five of them, stretching out over a shore line of several miles, pinioned us in their white shafts as we sat there as naked as babies. I would have been glad to bawl like one if it would have helped, for this searchlight business meant the enemy had us on the block. Not only were we discovered, we were caught in a funnel from which there was no escaping.

We couldn’t possibly move fast enough to run out of those beams. We were within simple and easy gunning distance. We were a sitting duck. We were stuck on the end of five merciless poles of light, and we were utterly helpless.

“When that fifth searchlight stopped on us all my children became orphans,” one of the officers said later.

Another one said, “The straw that broke my back was when the anchor went down. The chain made so much noise you could have heard it in Rome.”

A third one said, “The fellow standing next to me was breathing so hard I couldn’t hear the anchor go down. Then I realized there wasn’t anybody standing next to me.”

We got all set to shoot at the lights, but then we waited. We had three alternatives—to start shooting and thus draw return fire; to up anchor and run for it; or to sit quiet like a mouse and wait in terror. We did the last. Our admiral decided there was some possibility they couldn’t see us through the slight haze although he was at a loss to explain why all five lights stopped on the ship if they couldn’t see it.

I don’t know how long the five lights were on us. It seemed like hours, it may have been five minutes. At any rate, at the end of some unbelievably long time one of them suddenly blinked out. Then one by one, erratically, the others went out too. The last one held us a long time as though playing with us. Then it too went out and we were once again in the blessed darkness. Not a shot had been fired.

Assault boats had been speeding past us all the time and a few minutes later they hit the beach. The searchlights flashed on again but from then on they were busy fanning the beach itself. From close range, it didn’t take our attacking troops long to shoot the lights out.

I’m not certain but that some of them weren’t just turned out and left off for good. We never did find out for sure why the Italian big guns didn’t let us have it. Several of us inquired around when we got to land after daylight. We never found the searchlight men themselves, but from other Italian soldiers and citizens of the town we learned that the people ashore were so damned scared by whatever was about to attack them from out there on the water that they were afraid to start anything.

I guess I’m always going to have to love the Italians who were behind those searchlights and guns that night. Thanks to them, St. Peter will have to wait a spell before he hears the searchlight yarn.

Just before daylight I lay down for a few minutes’ nap, knowing the pre-dawn lull wouldn’t last long once the sun came up. Sure enough, just as the first faint light was beginning to show, bedlam broke loose for miles around us. The air was suddenly filled with sound and danger and tension, and the gray-lighted sky became measled with countless dark puffs of ack-ack.

Enemy planes had appeared to dive-bomb our ships. They got a hot reception from our thousands of guns, and a still hotter one from our own planes, which had anticipated them and were waiting.

A scene of terrific action then emerged from the veil of night. Our small assault craft were all up and down the beach, unloading and dashing off again. Ships of many sizes moved toward the shore, and others moved back from it. Still other ships, so many they were uncountable, spread out over the water as far as the eye could see. The biggest ones lay far off, waiting their turn to come in. They made a solid wall on the horizon behind us. Between that wall and the shore line the sea writhed with shipping. Through this hodgepodge, and running out at right angles to the beach like a beeline highway through a forest, was a single solid line of shorebound barges, carrying tanks. They chugged along in Indian file, about fifty yards apart—slowly, yet with such calm relentlessness that I felt it would take a power greater than any I knew to divert them.

The attacking airplanes left, but then Italian guns opened up on the hills back of the beach. At first the shells dropped on the beach, making yellow clouds of dust as they exploded. Then they started for the ships. They never did hit any of us, but they came so close it made our heads swim. They tried one target after another, and one of the targets happened to be our ship.

The moment the shooting began we got quickly under way—not to run off, but to be in motion and consequently harder to hit. One shell struck the water fifty yards behind us and threw up a geyser of spray. It made a terrific flat quacking sound as it burst, exactly like a mortar shell exploding on land. Our ship wasn’t supposed to do much firing, but that was too much for the admiral. He ordered our guns into action. And for the next ten minutes we sounded like Edgewood Arsenal blowing up.

A few preliminary shots gave us our range, and then we started pouring shells into the town and into the gun positions in the hills. The whole vessel shook with every salvo, and scorched wadding came raining down on the deck.

While shooting, we traveled at full speed—parallel to the shore and about a mile out. For the first time I found out how such a thing is done. Two destroyers and ourselves were doing the shelling, while all the other ships in close to land were scurrying around to make themselves hard to hit, turning in tight circles, leaving half-moon wakes behind them. The sea looked actually funny with all those semicircular white wakes splattered over it and everything twisting around in such deliberate confusion.

We sailed at top speed for about three miles, firing several times a minute. For some reason I was as thrilled with our unusual speed as with the noise of the steel we were pouring out. By watching closely I could follow our shells almost as far as the shore, and then see the gray smoke puffs after they hit.

At the end of each run we turned so quickly that the ship heeled far over. Then we would start right back. The two destroyers did the same, and we would meet them about halfway. It was just like three teams of horses plowing a cornfield—back and forth, back and forth—the plows taking alternate rows. The constant shifting put us closest to shore on one run, and farthest away a couple of runs later. At times we were right up on the edge of pale-green water, too shallow to go any closer.

During all this action I stood on a big steel ammunition box marked “Keep Off,” guns on three sides of me and a smokestack at my back. It was as safe as any place else, it kept me out of the way, and it gave me a fine view of everything.

Finally the Italian fire dwindled off. Then the two destroyers went in as close to shore as they could get and resumed their methodical runs back and forth. Only this time they weren’t firing. They were belching terrific clouds of black smoke out of their stacks. The smoke wouldn’t seem to settle, and they had to make four runs before the beach was completely hidden. Then under this covering screen our tank-carrying barges and more infantry boats made for the shore.

Before long we could see the tanks let go at the town. They had to fire only a couple of salvos before the town surrendered. That was the end of the beach fighting in our sector of the American front. Our biggest job was over.

In invasion parlance, the day a force strikes a new country is called D-day, and the time it hits the beach is H-hour. In the Third Infantry Division for which I was a very biased rooter, H-hour had been set for 2:45 a.m., July 10.

That was when the first mass assault on the beach was to begin. Actually the paratroopers and Rangers were there several hours before. The other two large American forces, which traveled from North Africa in separate units, hit the beaches far down to our right about the same time we did. We could tell when they landed by the shooting during the first hour or so of the assault.

Out on our ship it seemed to me that all hell was breaking loose ashore, but later when I looked back on it, actually knowing what had happened, it didn’t seem so very dramatic. Most of our special section of coast was fairly easy to take, and our naval guns didn’t send any fireworks ashore until after daylight. The assault troops did all the preliminary work with rifles, grenades and machine guns. From our ship we could hear the bop, bop, bop of the machine guns, first short bursts, then long ones.

I don’t know whether I heard any Italian ones or not. In Tunisia we could always tell the German machine guns because they fired so much faster than ours, but that night all the shooting seemed to be of one tempo, one quality. Now and then we could see a red tracer bullet arcing through the darkness. I remember one that must have ricocheted from a rock, for suddenly it turned and went straight up a long way into the sky. Once in a while there was the quick flash of a hand grenade. There wasn’t even any aerial combat during the night and only a few flares shot up from the beach.

In actuality, our portion of the assault was far less spectacular than the practice landings I’d seen our troops make back in Algeria.

A more dramatic show was in the sector to our right, some twelve or fifteen miles down the beach. There the First Infantry Division was having stiff opposition and its naval escort stood off miles from shore and threw steel at the enemy artillery in the hills. On beyond, the Forty-fifth had rough seas and bad beaches.

This was the first time I’d ever seen big-gun tracer shells used at night and it was fascinating. From where we sat it was like watching a tennis game played with red balls, except that all the balls went in one direction. A golden flash would appear way off in the darkness. Out of the flash would come a tiny red dot. That was the big shell. Almost instantly, it covered the first quarter of the total distance. Then uncannily it would drop to a much slower speed, as though it had put on a brake. There didn’t seem to be any tapering down between the high and low speeds. The shell went from high to low instantly, and instead of starting to arc downward as it hit the slower speed, it amazingly kept on in an almost flat trajectory as though it were on wheels being propelled along a level road. Finally, after a flight so long it seemed unbelievable that the thing could still be in the air, it would disappear in a little flash as it hit something on the shore. Long afterward the sound of the heavy explosion came rolling across the water.

When daylight came we looked from the boat deck across the water at the city of Licata. We could see the American flag flying from the top of a sort of fort on a hill directly behind the city. Although the city itself had not yet surrendered, some Rangers had climbed up there and hoisted the flag.

Our Navy can’t be given too much credit for putting the troops ashore the way they did. You can’t realize how nearly impossible it is to arrive in the dead of night at exactly the right spot with a convoy, feel your way in through the darkness, pick out the designated pinpoint on an utterly strange shore line, and then put a ship safely ashore right there. In our sector every ship hit every beach just right. They tell me it was the first time in history that such a thing had ever been accomplished. The finest tribute to the Navy’s marksmanship came from one soldier who later told Major General Lucian Truscott, Third Division commander:

“Sir, I took my little black dog with me in my arms and I sure was scared standing in that assault boat. Finally we hit the beach and as we piled out into the water we were worse scared than ever. Then we waded ashore and looked around and there right ahead of me was a white house just where you said it would be and after that I wasn’t scared.”

Since I was a correspondent duly accredited to the Navy, I had intended to concentrate on the sea-borne aspect of the invasion and had not planned to go ashore at all for several days. After the way things went, however, I couldn’t resist the chance to see what it was like on land. I hopped an assault barge and went ashore there on the south coast about six hours after our first assault troops had landed.

They had found nobody at all. The thing apparently was a complete surprise. Our troops had been trained to such a point that instead of being pleased with no opposition they were thoroughly annoyed.

I stopped to chat with the crew of a big howitzer which had just been dug in and camouflaged. The gun crew was digging foxholes. The ground was hard and it was very tough digging. Our soldiers were mad at the Italians. “We didn’t even get to fire a shot,” one of them said in real disgust.

Another one said, “They’re gangplank soldiers”—whatever that means.

I talked with one Ranger who had been through Dieppe, El Guettar and other tough battles, and he said Sicily was by far the easiest of all. He added that it left him jumpy and nervous to get trained to razor edge and then have the job fizzle out. The poor guy, he was sore about it!

That Ranger was Sergeant Murel White, a friendly blond fellow of medium size, from Middlesboro, Kentucky. He had been overseas a year and a half. Back home he had a wife and a five-year-old daughter. He used to run his uncle’s bar in Middlesboro and he said when the war was over he was going to drink the bar dry, and then just settle down behind it for the rest of his life.

Sergeant White and his commanding officer were in the first wave to hit the shore. A machine-gun pillbox was shooting at them and they made up hill for it, about a quarter mile away. They used hand grenades. “Three of them got away,” White said, “but the other three went to Heaven.”

Our sector, on the western end of the invasion, covered the territory each side of the city of Licata—about fourteen miles of beach front. When I landed the beach was already thoroughly organized, and it was really an incredible scene—incredible in that we’d done so much in just a few hours. It looked actually as though we’d been working there for months. Shortly after dawn, our shore troops and Navy gunboats had knocked out the last of the enemy artillery on the hillsides. From then on that first day was just a normal one of unloading ships on the beach, as fast as possible. The only interruptions were a half dozen or so lightninglike dive bombings.

Each separate invading fleet operated entirely independently from the others. Ours carried infantry and had hundreds of ships; the bulk of it was made up of scores of new-type landing craft carrying men, trucks, tanks, supplies of all kinds.

Every ship in our fleet, except the gunboats, was flat-bottomed and capable of landing on the beach. The ships lay like a blanket over the water, extending as far out in the Mediterranean as the eye could see. The beach wasn’t big enough to handle them all at once, so they’d come in at signals from the command ship, unload, and steam back out to the convoy for a second load.

Small craft, carrying about two hundred soldiers, could unload in a few minutes, but the bigger ones with tanks and trucks and heavy guns took much longer. It was not a specially good beach for our purposes, for it sloped off too gradually, making the boats ground fifty yards or more from shore. Most of the men had to jump into waist-deep water and wade in. The water was cold, but a high wind dried them out in less than half an hour, all but their shoes which kept squishing inside for the rest of the day. As far as I know, not a man was lost by drowning in our sector of the operation.

The beach itself had been immediately organized into a great metropolitanlike dock extending for miles. Hundreds of soldiers wearing black and yellow arm bands with the letters SP-Shore Patrol—directed traffic off the incoming boats. Big white banners about five feet square, with colored symbols on them, were used to designate the spots where they should land. On the shore, painted wooden markers were immediately set up directing various units to appointed rendezvous areas. There were almost no traffic jams or road blocking. Engineers had hit the beach right behind the assault troops. They laid down hundreds of yards of burlap and placed chicken wire on top of it, making a firm roadbed up and down the beach.

Our organization on shore took form so quickly it left me gasping. By midafternoon the countryside extending far inland was packed with troops and vehicles of every description. On one hillside there were enough tanks to fight a big battle. Jeeps were dashing everywhere. Phone wires were laid on the ground and command posts set up in orchards and old buildings. Medical units worked under trees or in abandoned stone sheds.

The fields were stacked with thousands of boxes of ammunition. Field kitchens were being set up and before long hot food would replace the K rations the soldiers had carried on with throughout that first day.

The Americans worked grimly and with great speed. I saw a few officers who appeared rather excited, but mostly it was a calm, determined, efficient horde of men who descended on that strange land. The amazed Sicilians just stood and stared in wonder at the swift precision of it all.

The enemy defenses throughout our special sector were almost childish. They didn’t bother to mess up their harbor or to blow out the two river bridges which would have cut our forces in half. They had only a few mines on the beaches and practically no barbed wire. We’d come prepared to fight our way through a solid wall of mines, machine guns, artillery, barbed wire and liquid fire, and we even expected to hit some fiendish new devices. Yet there was almost nothing to it. It was like stepping into the ring to meet Joe Louis and finding Caspar Milquetoast waiting there.

The Italians didn’t even leave many booby traps for us. I almost stepped into one walking through a field, but obviously it had been dropped rather than planted. Down at the docks we found whole boxes of them. They hadn’t even been opened.

The road blocks outside town were laughable. They consisted merely of light wooden frameworks, about the size of a kitchen table, with barbed wire wrapped around them. These sections were laid across the road and all we had to do was pick them up and lay them aside. They wouldn’t have stopped a cow, let alone a tank.

Since the invading soldiers of our section didn’t have much battle to talk about, they looked around to see what this new country had to offer, and the most commented-upon discovery among the soldiers that first day was something totally unexpected. It wasn’t signorinas, or vino, or Mount Etna. It was the fact that they found fields of ripe tomatoes! And did they eat them! I heard at least two dozen men speak of it during the day, as though they’d located gold. Others said they came upon some watermelons too, but I couldn’t find any.

I hitched a ride into the city of Licata with Major Charles Monnier, of Dixon, Illinois, Sergeant Earl Glass, of Colfax, Illinois, and Sergeant Jaspare Taormina of 94 Starr Street, Brooklyn—engineers all.

Taormina did the driving and the other two held tommy guns at the ready, looking for snipers. Taormina himself was so busy looking for snipers that he ran right into a shell hole in the middle of the street and almost upset our jeep. He was of Sicilian descent. Indeed, his father had been born in a town just twenty miles west of Licata and for all the sergeant knew his grandmother was still living there. He could speak good Italian, so he did the talking to the local people on the streets. They told him they were sick of being browbeaten and starved by the Germans, who had lots of wheat locked in granaries in Licata. The natives hoped we would unlock the buildings and give them some of it.

Licata is a city of about thirty-five thousand souls. A small river runs through the town, which has a wide main street and a nice small harbor. The buildings are of local stone, dull gray and very old—but substantial. The city hadn’t been bombed. The only damage came from a few shells we had thrown into it from the ships just after daylight. The corners were knocked off a few buildings and some good-sized holes were gouged in the streets, but on the whole, Licata had got off pretty nicely.

The local people said the reason their army put up such a poor show in our sector was that the soldiers didn’t want to fight. It was obvious they didn’t, but at that stage of the game we had little contact with other American forces and we thought the Italians might have lain down there in order to fight harder somewhere else.

Before the sun was two hours high our troops had built prisoner-of-war camps, out of barbed wire, on the rolling hillsides, and all day long groups of soldiers and civilians were marched up the roads and into the camps. At the first camp I came to, about two hundred Italian soldiers and the same number of civilians were sitting around on the ground inside the wire. There were only two Germans, both officers. They sat apart in one corner, disdainful of the Italians. One had his pants off and his legs were covered with Mercurochrome where he had been scratched. Some civilians had even brought their goats into the cages with them.

After being investigated, the harmless captives were turned loose. The Italian prisoners seemed anything but downhearted. They munched on biscuits, talked cheerfully to anyone who would listen to them, and asked their American guards for matches. As usual, the area immediately became full of stories about prisoners who’d lived twenty years in Brooklyn and who came up grinning, asking how things were in dear old Flatbush. They seemed relieved and friendly, like people who had just been liberated rather than conquered.

Civilians on the roads and in the towns smiled and waved. Kids saluted. Many gave their version of the V sign by holding up both arms. Over and over they told us they didn’t want to fight. Our soldiers weren’t very responsive to the Sicilians’ greetings. They were too busy getting equipment ashore, rounding up the real enemies and establishing a foothold, to indulge in any hand-waving monkey business. After all we were still at war and these people, though absurd and pathetic, were enemies and caused us the misery of coming a long way to whip them.

On the whole the natives seemed a pretty third-rate lot. They were poorly dressed and looked as if they always had been. Few of their faces had much expression, and they kept getting in the way of traffic, just like the Arabs. By nightfall most of our invading soldiers summed up their impressions of their newly acquired soil and its inhabitants by saying, “Hell, this is just as bad as Africa.”

When we got our first look at Sicily we were all disappointed. I for one had always romanticized it in my mind as a lush, green, picturesque island. I guess I must have been thinking of the Isle of Capri. Instead, the south coast of Sicily seemed to us a drab, light-brown country, and there weren’t many trees. The fields of grain had been harvested and they were dry and naked and dusty. The villages were pale gray and indistinguishable at a distance from the rest of the country. Water was extremely scarce. On the hillsides a half mile or so back of the beach grass fires—started by the shells of our gunboats—burned smokily.

It was cooler than North Africa; in fact, the weather would have been delightful had it not been for the violent wind that rose in the afternoon and blew so fiercely we could hardly talk in the open. That wind, whipping our barges about in the shallow water, delayed us more than the Italian soldiers did.

At the end of that first day of our invasion of Sicily we Americans looked about us with awe and unbelief and not a little alarm. It had all been so easy that we had the jumpy, insecure feeling of something dreadfully wrong somewhere. We had expected a terrific slaughter on the beaches and there was none. Instead of thousands of casualties along the fourteen-mile front of our special sector, the total was astonishingly small.

By sunset the Army had taken everything we had hoped to get during the first five days. Even by midafternoon the country for miles inland was so saturated with American troops and vehicles it looked like Tunisia after months of our habitation, instead of a hostile land just attacked that morning. And the Navy’s job of bringing the vast invading force to Sicily was three days ahead of its schedule of unloading ships.

Convoys had started back to Africa for new loads before the first day was over. Our own invading fleet had escaped without losses other than normal, mechanical breakdowns. It was wonderful and yet it was also illogical. Even if the Italians did want to quit, why did the Germans let them? What had happened? What did the enemy have up its sleeve? Nobody was under any illusion that the battle of Sicily was over. Strong counterattacks were probably inevitable. Also, German dive bombings had begun at the rate of two per hour, but everyone felt that whatever happened we had a head start that was all in our favor.