Chapter 6 -- Naples -- Shower of Frogs

And we return to The Shower of Frogs by William J Stigall, Jr.

http://www.amazon.com/Shower-Frogs-World-War-Memoir/dp/0533135354/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261548494&sr=1-1

Naples, Part One: October-November, the First Month

My first contact with the great city of Naples came somewhere near its very heart, the contact a few muffled voices in the gloomy dark sometime after midnight. The words were Italian. The voices came from faces in barely discernible bodies huddled beside dark buildings. My jeep came to a halt at a street crossing. There was silence. Then, "Americano?""Si"

The bodies came to the side of the jeep. We spoke no Italian, they little English, but enough was exchanged to learn that the few remaining Germans had left the city early in the morning. In their leaving the Germans had heaped upon their former ally a burden of senseless destruction and heartless hunger.


At that moment and for the next two months I experienced a mixture of emotions about the Neapolitans. The mixture was manyleveled, many-sided. It led to a confusion of reactions, a condition I shared with many American soldiers. On the one hand, the Italians deserved this punishment. They had cheered and strutted to a fat and pompous Mussolini. They had joined fates with Hitler. They had been our mortal enemy in North Africa and Sicily and were still fighting against us in Italy to the north of Naples. On the other hand, forgiveness seemed the larger need. In defeat, in humbled poverty, what canone do but present one's worstself7 Ifsome of the actions we were to witness in the days to come seemed like prideless beggary, if the life they lived seemed dirty and undisciplined, it was countered by a warmth of humanity, a wealth of smiles, and a vibrancy and passion for life not visible in every American.

ICBB -- The US Army 1942-1045

CHAPTER FOUR. THE UNITED STATES ARMY. 1942-1945



On March 23, 1942, the U.S. Army accepted my enlistment and I was sworn.in at a dingy recruiting office on Clark Street in Chicago and marched off to a train for Camp Grant near Rockford, Illinois. I was thirty-one, a college graduate, a drama instructor, and a single man. wore an old pair of trousers and a jacket. In a few days I was No. 16069267. From Grant I was sent to Camp Claiborne near Alexandria, Louisiana. There were four or five other camps within a short distance of Alexandria. The surrounding country was peaceful, rolling country with pine trees. We enjoyed starlit nights and sunsets.



Life at Camp Claiborne from March to October of 1942 was not pretty, or comfortable. How could you forget the parades with all the heat of summer in Louisiana uniforms? All the spit and polish and cleaning of equipment? All those inspections?



There was a bugler at Claiborne. I remember clearly our 1st Sgt. in Division Headquarters; yelling at us to drop our cocks and grab our socks. Latrines with concrete floors, S end and the line of stools at the other end. painted white and had bench type tables. There were some overhead fans. We formed lines for everything.





The Service Club for enlisted men was separated from the company area. It was a large white frame building with a day room that had tables for writing or playing cards or listening the radio. There was a pool table. Not far from the Service Club was the Post Exchange, the PX. where you could buy most of the things you needed like shaving cream, toothpaste, drinks, and 3.2 beer. The tents we lived in had wooden floors. We were moved to tents with dirt floors while wooden tar paper shacks were being built.





Early in my basic training at Camp Claiborne in Louisiana I met Edward Kroer. Neither of us know in what manner we met. I think we were both at that time in Service Company, the company in charge of food, clothing, supplies, bookkeeping, and the motor pool among things that are done to service a regiment. The 325th Regiment with its Lorraine Cross insignia was composed of several companies: Headquarters, motor pool supply (they issued rifles, backpacks and other equipment). Ed and I must have met in the chow line. He was younger than I and was also a college graduate. He came from Hammond, Indiana, south of Chicago. I lived on the South Side of Chicago. One time his mother came to visit him at Claiborne; when she went home she called my mother and they started a telephone conversation that lasted until both Ed and I were separated from the military in 1945.



When the 82nd was suddenly nominated to be airborne, Ed wanted nothing to do with gliders. While he was on furlough I enlisted him, at his request, in the parachute unit. One must understand that no one in the 82nd volunteered to be in the gliders. Men had to volunteer for the parachutes. I did and flunked the physical; they said I did not have enough teeth. Ed passed and was transferred out of the services company. He went to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training.


When he returned he went into the headquarters company. When he went into Normandy, he went in a glider. That is life in the Army.



We kept in touch through the following two years until I was surrounded in Holland and became a German prisoner of war. During that trying time for my parents and brother, Mrs. Kroer was a great help to my mother as they talked frequently on the phone. Through the 1990s, we still corresponded.



There were a number of men who were pleasant company. They had been business men or truck drivers or had other occupations in civilian life. They were beyond the age of twenty-one.

37

"I Couldn't Be Better"

Hello, everyone -- Exciting news! We just found the volume that my mother and I made of Bill's various non-Frogs writings called "I Couldn't Be Better" so I'll be posting some pages from ICBB once I scan it in. The title comes from Bill's perennial greeting, which he modified somewhat upon entry to the Emergency Room in 2001 to which the admitting nurse said to the 90 year old World War II veteran, "Great. A wise guy." But they were all wonderful to him (although unsuccessful in their quest).

Anyway, here's the opening page of Chapter 6 -- Naples, Part One: October-November, the First Month

My first contact with the great city of Naples came somewhere near its very heart, the contact a few muffled voices in the gloomy dark sometime after midnight. The words were Italian. The voices came from faces in barely discernible bodies huddled beside dark buildings. My jeep came to a halt at a street crossing. There was silence. Then, "Americano?" "Si"

The bodies came to the side of the jeep. We spoke no Italian, they little English, but enough was exchanged to learn that the few remaining Germans had left the city early in the morning. In their leaving the Germans had heaped upon their former ally a burden of senseless destruction and heartless hunger.

At that moment and for the next two months I experienced a mixture of emotions about the Neapolitans. The mixture was many leveled, many-sided. It led to a confusion of reactions, a condition I shared with many American soldiers. On the one hand, the Italians deserved this punishment. They had cheered and strutted to a fat and pompous Mussolini. They had joined fates with Hitler. They had been our mortal enemy in North Africa and Sicily and were still fighting against us in Italy to the north of Naples. On the other hand, forgiveness seemed the larger need. In defeat, in humbled poverty, what can one do but present one's worst self. If some of the actions we were to witness in the days to come seemed like prideless beggary, if the life they lived seemed dirty and undisciplined, it was countered by a warmth of humanity, a wealth of smiles, and a vibrancy and passion for life not visible in every American.

My memories of those early hours and first days and weeks in

44

Chapter 5: Tunisia, Sicily, Italy

Hello, everyone: Just to reorient you, Bill has got a long way to go even though he's already experienced the frogs. Here he is crossing the Mediterranean to Italy. -- SGP

Chapter 5

Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy

I was "dug in" on a long slope of a hill; at the bottom of it was the shore of the most magnificent sea in the world. In fact, the view I had from my two-foot-deep slit trench was really the twenty-dollar-per-day Riveria view. As far as I could see from two hundred yards up the slope, there was a vista of exquisite serenity, a body of water varying in degrees of color from blue, to lavender, to turquoise, with a gentle ripple of whitecaps on the surface of the water and magical blanco clouds in the deep azure sky above. The Mediterranean Sea, sea of history, was for us, too, a sea of some historic moment. We knew that one day soon we'd either fly it or sail it. We felt reasonably sure that we'd not walk it.

The city of Bizerte in Tunisia lay a mile or two around the corner of our slope. It was late August 1943. Bizerte was a city whose streets were being cleared of rubble and whose harbor, cluttered with sunken ships, was undergoing salvaging operations. Our jeeps were being conditioned against salt corrosion. Engine blocks and some openings were sealed shut. The exhaust pipe was given an extension that ran along the edge of the windshield to a point two feet above it. For an airborne outfit, ours, the 325th Glider Infantry, spent a great deal of time walking on the land and sailing on the sea. Current preparations suggested a sea crossing with a beach landing. This was the one maneuver we had not practiced.

Nights on the forty-five-degree-angled slope beside the transparent blue Mediterranean were pretty romantic, even from a slit trench. Girls were out that season, but radios were in. Possibly under the influence of the relaxed atmosphere of that part of the world, their volume was kept low and soft. As everyone knows who remembers the war in North Africa, it had about it a romantic quality unlike any war in any portion of the European conflict.

35

Shower of Frogs -- the frogs

Excerpt from page 29 --

As we were driving back from Kairouan one afternoon, a dark cloud came over the camp and it rained water and hundreds of tadpoles, which squirmed around on the hood and floor of my jeep. We thought it very odd, being pelted by small living forms from the sky, each about half the size of the head of a pencil. By then we were so used to the strange sights of Tunisia that only later, when my honesty was questioned, when it was thought that there was upon me "the spell of Arabia" or that I had a Moses complex, only then did I search for the scientific explanation for this "plague" of frogs. Water, in being blown up from the ponds, also sucked the infinitely small tadpole. Fierce winds, common in Tunisia, blew both water and tadpoles some distance and eventually dropped the living matter with the rain.

Moving on

I was in Japan last week (more on that later) so I'll just catch up with the Shower of Frogs by moving on to the next chapter -- Chapter 4 -- when the frogs actually appear.

Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs

On June 15, I drove my jeep into a wobby C-47 and was flown a thousand miles over the Atlas Mountains. The flight lasted about five hours. When not asleep, I watched the green-and-brown mountains, some with small white patches of snow. We flew over the golden cultivated fields of Algeria. From the small window in the plane I could make out grove upon grove of what I later learned was a part of the main crop of Tunisia-the olive. We landed near a great walled city of white adobe houses with blue shutters.

I backed the jeep out of the plane, and we d rove some ten miles and set up a bivouac area within an olive grove near the small Arab village of EI EIen. We pitched tents under the wind-twisted olive trees, which, for all their short leaves, afforded some shade from the murderous sun. The large olive orchard was surrounded on four sides by a wicked cactus fence ten feet high. On three sides we cut an opening large enough for vehicles to pass through. This protected us from wandering camels and nomadic Bedouins. It also locked us behind a fiercely forbidding wall.

A few days after arrival, I drove into the large walled city with a huge mosque towering high above the wall and over all other buildings. Approaching the city, we whiffed the strong smell of sulphur coming from the graveyard near the edge of the city. Later we understood that this was a holy city and that many bodies, alive and dead, were brought here for burial, some above ground. The bodies were covered with sulphur. The city itself, with the walls, was, I now realize and did to some extent then, straight out of the Middle Ages. It is called Kairouan, a word derived from the Bedouin word caravan. The streets were unpaved and are still almost entirely unpaved. The whiteness of the houses, the whiteness of every single house, was, in the brilliant sun, a stunning

24

Marnia-Oujda, North Africa

Besides this "trip", my father went at least four more times to North Africa later in his life -- not being all that adventurous (or perhaps it was my mother who wasn't), he didn't ever return to Algeria, but he and my mother went at least twice of Morocco, once to Libya (before Quadafi), and at least once to Egypt. Each of those trips has its own story -- my aged aunt who had polio as a child riding a donkey through the souk; dinner under the stars on the desert outside of Cairo and visits to the Temple of Dendur before it departed for New York; our plane being forced down by a sand storm between Libya and Egype. But none of those stories matches those of The Shower of Frogs.

A Shower of Frogs --- Chapter 3

3
Marnia-Oujda

Whoever selected our campsite at Marnia in Algeria was well acquainted with Hell. He undoubtedly had been there and was determined to share his hateful experience with others. Gustave Dore, were he among us, would have been reinspired to illustrate Dante's Inferno.
Our campsite has been described as fla desolate, sterile, rocky, dusty, heat-scarred valley." Camp Marnia was an Arab goat pasture--a small valley that all day gathered in the sun's rays and kept out the cool breezes. For centuries, goats/ sheep, and camels, eating close to the land, had nibbled away all the green foliage and reduced the treeless land to sand, rocks, and scrubby grass. By now only goats found it habitable. Goats and my outfit, the 325th Glider Infantry. At Marnia, Algeria, and later in Kairouan, Tunisia/ there was established from absolute zero a bustling army camp.

As part of an advance party I left Casablanca and drove a jeep northward along the Atlantic coast to Rabat. Even from a distance we made out, against the blue sky, the peculiar thirteenth-century minaret, its tall, slender silhouette sharp and graceful in the gleaming morning sun. At Rabat a great sultan had once preached a holy war against Saint Louis. But Louis IX soon died of dysentery at Carthage, a ruined city in distant Tunisia. At Rabat we turned right and drove thirty-six miles to Meknes, where once 60,000 Christians were worked as slaves. Thirty miles farther east we circled Fez, religious/ scholastic/ and literary center of Muslim Africa. Here troglodyte women-femmes d' occasion (women at a bargain)-lived in caves outside the city walls and bellowed for masculine trade. We drove on to Taza. After driving over gently rolling country, we came to the Rif Mountains. Near Oujda/ an embroidery center/ we approached the southern slopes of the Atlas Mountains.

16

Chapter 2: North Africa

Ok, moving ahead. Bill arrives in ...

2
North Africa

"Hey, Bill, land!" shouted Jim Hurley.
"God, at last," I said.
"Let's go up."

It was the thirteenth day, and the morning was bright with sunshine.
The heavy pounding of the engines slacked off, and our
speed was cut to a few knots. Word passed quickly through the
ship, and men swarmed all over the decks. Land was visible on the
port side. Danny Moore, who worked in Supply, ran for his field
glasses. Hurley and I climbed upon a hatch, watching other men
work their way up higher and higher on anything available and
unguarded. No one knew where we were, but all could see what it
was like.

What we saw was a long yellow streak of sandy shore with
mountains rising behind it. Through Danny's binoculars we picked
out white houses with roofs of red, orange, blue, yellow, and cream.
Jim Hurley and I jumped down and found a place at the starboard
rail from which we could see a French word on a half-sunken
cruiser.

I said to Jim, "I guess that's what the French lessons were for.
What's the name?"

"I can't read it," he said, "but look." He was pointing to three or
four U.s. and foreign battleships that lay in our path. We steered
around them, steamed into the harbor, and touched land, the
engines stopped, and we dropped anchor. It was May 10, three days
before the war in North Africa ended a thousand miles east in
Tunisia. Our port was Casablanca.

There was no mistaking the excitement on board. The sight of
land was infectious; it sprung us out of lethargy and boredom; it
released a flood of conversation. It stirred rumors; it quickened

9

Bill Stigall at Lincoln College

And here's something about Bill and Phyllis Stigall by a relative stranger.

A Tribute to Bill and Phyllis Stigall:Exemplary Faculty of Lincoln College at Mid-Twentieth Century by Leigh Henson (December 5, 2006)

http://www.geocities.com/findinglincolnillinois/stigalls.html

Belated Introduction?

Dear readers -- I thought I had done this already but I don't see it on-line so I'll do it again. Probably not an unusual problem for blog novices.

This is an informal, and perhaps infrequent, blog about my father's book referenced in the previous post: A Shower of Frogs, a World War II Memoir by my father, William J Stigall, Jr. It is a somewhat cynical view of the war by an older enlistee who hated war and disliked the Army but hated the Nazi's more. The previous post gives the context of the title: driving through North Africa as part of the 82nd airborne. My dad served there, as well as in Italy before being captured by the Germans during the D-day offenses.

The book is available from Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.com/Shower-Frogs-World-War-Memoir/dp/0533135354/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249962936&sr=8-1

I plan to post some paragraphs from each chapter, sequentially, as well as some unpublished work which is more "evocative". I hope you find this insightful.

Regards -- SP

Shower of Frogs -- what's up with the frogs?

A SHOWER OF FROGS: A WORLD WAR II MEMOIR
William Jaspar Stigall, Jr. © 2001 Vantage Press, New York 269 p.

As we were driving back from Kairouan one afternoon, a dark cloud came over the camp and it rained water and hundreds of tadpoles, which squirmed around on the hood and floor of my jeep. We thought it very odd, being pelted by small living forms from the sky, each about half the size of the head of a pencil. By then we were so used to the strange sights of Tunisia that only later, when my honesty was questioned, when it was thought that there was upon me "the spell of Arabia" or that I had a Moses complex, only then did I search for the scientific explanation for this "plague" of frogs. Water, in being blown up from the ponds, also sucked the infinitely small tadpole. Fierce winds, common in Tunisia, blew both water and tadpoles some distance and eventually dropped the living matter with the rain. – page 29