Chapter 5: Tunisia, Sicily, 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 Riviera 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.

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. This was not all due to Rommel and the British Eighth Army. Nor was the romantic aura due to the movie Casablanca and the song "As Time Goes By." They helped. They contributed, as did the German
song "Lili Marlene," which had long since been won over by the British and was now being played over Allied radio. A portion of the romantic nature of this area of military operations was the country
of Tunisia. The veiled women, the ancient cities, the camels and small donkeys, and the semi-desert nature of the landscape compounded an atmosphere of strangeness. The days were blistering
hot, but the night air in late August was exhilarating, and the stars, as always in Tunisia, seemed within our grasp. They sparkled in the cushion-soft sky like glowing sapphires.