Rozell, Matthew - The Things Our Fathers Saw 04 - Up the Bloody Boot: The War in Italy by Rozell Matthew

Author:Rozell, Matthew [Rozell, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-24T23:00:00+00:00

Overseas

[They sent me overseas] in the first part of ’44. I know [in] the 346th and 347th Battalions, we had all the guns and equipment on one train. It came straight through to Newport News, [Virginia]; it never stopped. There, a couple of days later, they brought all the troops in and they had to check all the equipment on the boat. Then in 21 days the whole division landed in Oran. [We went over in a convoy]; it was a lot of ships. The captain would let us go up in the lookout, and as far as you could see to the front, right, left, and rear, there were ships. I think they went down to the West Indies, and across to Africa, up along the coast of Africa, through the Strait of Gibraltar, to Oran. What we were supposed to do there was train for landing operations, and of course the rumor was that we were going to land in southern France. We were there a month or so. Oran had been taken, between the British and Americans.

One little incident happened there. Our army had to capture Oran from the French. I know when the guys were unloading our guns they dropped one, so it bounced. The colonel was looking overboard and yelled about it. Well, they dropped the next one so it bounced a little bit more, and I remember the colonel grabbed a carbine and shot four or five times over their heads; that ended the dropping.

From there, the Navy took us across the Mediterranean to Italy. We thought we were going to southern France, but in the middle of the Mediterranean, they opened the orders, and we were to go to Italy. Another little incident I remember was the captain of the boat said the officers could eat in the officers’ mess—I was a captain. He said when we did, we needed ties. Our Colonel Lynn said to him, ‘Just where in the hell do you think we got ties? Everything we have is on our backs.’

I remember climbing down that big rope ladder—it was a hundred feet wide—down to the landing craft. This was near Naples; the British army had taken Naples. So we got in the landing craft and I always thought the guy was afraid of getting mud on his boat, because he let us out in about four feet of water. When we got to shore we were all pretty wet.

Nothing really happened until we got north of Rome; the [Allies] had taken Rome [on June 4]. I remember north of Rome we got news that the landing on June 6 from England to northern France had started.

Then we were really on the Italian Campaign. The war in Italy was mainly artillery and sniper fire; there was a lot of artillery. The British had the line, and it takes a little while to prepare for battle—you’ve got to get a lot of ammunition up and that stuff, you know. The British Eighth Army had a lot of different nationalities; there were Canadians, Gurkhas, Sikhs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.