Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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.

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