Italy Part 1

Click on image to enlarge When we moved from Tlemcen, Algeria, on our way to Naples, Italy, we were bivouacked near Oran gettin gready to board a  British ship.  This "staging area" was nothing but a sea of cold mud with lots of rain.  Everything owned was wet.  This was about the most miserable spot we were ever in, but looking back it seems just  a small part of our experiences.  Above is me, the writer, and our M/Sgt Rudolph Tupala.  That chair he is sitting on we had to burn for heat the last night we were there.  With "Tup" and me, we had  S/Sgt Williamson, T/Sgt Plzak, Sgt Christiano,and S/Sgt Medcalf.  Each one of us had two Army blankets, a rain coat, "low cut" oxfords with lace up leggings (at this time there were no combat boots in the military inventory, and a shelter half (a shelter half was half of a tent designed for two soldiers for shelter).  Two of us would share our blankets, etc., and snuggled together for each other's warmth.  We took a number 10 tin can filled it half full with dirt, poured gasoline into it (which we siphoned from vehicles) and lighten it for some warming of the tent.  This burning caused a lot of smoke and our faces and clothing became almost black from was the soot.

Click on image to enlarge Here you see a troop ship tied up next to an overturned ship in Naples harbor where we docked and walked off the side of this ship; this was in the last week of December, 1943.  Our voyage on the British ship we had to use, was typical British in that we had to sleep on hammocks in the dinning room where we were served mutton and little else.  Our sleeping area was hot and you could not get away from that mutton smell.  Breakfast was ground up grain with water, no milk, no coffee, just some awful tasting stuff they called tea.  The Germans were still bombing this harbor day and night and we were lucky to get in there and on our way before we were hit.
 

Click on image to enlarge This is the first place we stayed in Italy near Naples harbor.  We ate along a high fence; see the man in a helmet (along the right near the top of this picture) looking down at a lot of people who gathered at meal time begging for food with their tin cans, etc..  They would put their cans on long poles and heist them up to us.  It was right on this wall where we ate our Christmas dinner, 1943.  The Italian people at this time were having a very hard time because there was little food anywhere.  Before the Germans left this harbor they torched the two remaining spaghetti factories in Naples. The Germans also mined the local post office with a time bomb which did not explode until almost 7 days after our troops arrived.