From WJ Stigall's WWII memoir, A Shower of Frogs
Chapter 4: Kairouan and a Shower of Frogs
The day of July 9, 1943, was very much like every other day in Tunisia. The single exception to the deadly sameness of our life was the sense of imminent action. Nothing was more certain about the days and nights around the Kairouan arc than that they would be pretty much the same. The same olive-drab uniforms, the same uninspired chow, the same marches, the same faces rising out of the same bodies, the same sameness. If one felt lucky, he might try a fig from off the tree or grapes from merchants in the nearby village of El Elen or Skrina. The result was usually diarrhea. The smells of the day went the distance from obnoxious arrogant camels to the fragrant jasmine, from dirty dishwater to the sweet-smelling oleander.
The sameness was occasionally broken by a drive into an Arab village, passing on the way small donkeys, dirty-looking "Arabs" and once a magnificent group of wild horses racing one another madly along the dust-filled fenceless roads. 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. [With the editor's apology about the characterizations: WJ Stigall loved North Africa, including the people there. Hence his quotation marks.]
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.
