Chapter 10 [Shower of Frogs (WWII memoir), William Stigall]
It was now the middle of November (1943). We were somewhere in the cold North Atlantic. We heard the high-pitched, pulsating honk of seagulls. They swooped above us crying with delight as they dived into the garbage-filled wake of our ship. Experienced seamen, as we now were, we smelled land. Rumors and guesses got all mixed up with wishes and hopes. The choices were as extravagant as the longings. Scotland, Norway, Ireland, Greenland, Iceland, England, of course, and wistfully, the States. I do not recall the moment of docking on the east coast of North Ireland. But I vividly remember the first images. They persisted and are with me still.
One visual: the lumbering, ponderous Cydesdale horses pulling small solid wagons loaded with whiskey barrels over the cobbled streets of modem Belfast. One auditory: the joyous and friendly sound of Irish voices speaking the cadences of my native tongue.
...
I had treasured the sun breaking over the lovely inland Lough Neagh and had experienced one of the
most memorable New Year's Eves of my life. After five years of silence--a silence imposed upon themselves, a silence of all the church bells of North Ireland, which, were they to ring, would announce an invasion by the Germans-the breaking of that long five-year silence by ringing all the church bells all over North Ireland at midnight December 31, 1943. The bells of Ballymena rang
joyously to bring in the year 1944--the year of the great invasion of occupied Europe.
About Me
- SP
- Bill Stigall was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1911. He became interested in the theater and graduated from the University of Illinois before becoming a director in the Chicago Park District theater prior to World War II. He and his brother Jack enlisted together following Pearl Harbor -- Jack went to Navy and the Pacific as a pharmacists mate; Bill to the 82nd Airborne (as shown in the photo) ... the North Africa, Italy, and D-Day campaigns. He was captured by the Germans and was a POW until the end of the war in Europe. After the war he moved to Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois where he taught theater and a self-develooped course on western civilization. That's also where he met my mother, who became his wife, and me. Later on they moved to Scarborough, New York where they lived until he died in 2001, shortly after celebrating his 90th birthday in Paris. Besides "Shower of Frogs" there is also a compendium of his writings called "I Couldn't Be Better" and a genealogy. The "Shower of Frogs" can be purchased from the maker of this blog via Amazon.
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