USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Wenham > Wenham in World War II : war service of Wenham men and women and civilian services of Wenham people > Part 20
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For the rest of December, the Battalion patrolled in the hills west of Burauen, eliminating what few Japs remained.
SICILIAN INVASION
Her engines stopped and the USS Chase with some four thousand men aboard, gradually lost her forward speed. At last she dropped her anchor in the Mediterranean, seven miles off Gela on the south coast of Sicily. This was D-Day-July 10, 1943, but it was still pitch dark except for the occasional flash of a naval gun and the fires burning on the distant shore. At 3:30 we had breakfast and just as dawn was breaking I went over the side.
The Higgins boat scraped the sand and we all jumped arm-pit deep into the surf and waded ashore. I had been ordered to wait on the beach until I received further instructions. Consequently, I climbed the highest sand dune I could find and watched what went
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on. In spite of everything that happened to me in the ensuing two years-and quite a good deal did-the invasion of Sicily remains one of the unforgettable high lights of the war. Perhaps it was be- cause this was a new experience for me, perhaps it was because I realized that I was seeing the actual unfolding of the greatest am- phibious operation in the military history of the world up to that time. Or it might have been because I saw a loaded 21-ton truck strike a land mine and simply disintegrate and then watched truck drivers who had also seen it, criss-cross the beach as though nothing of any importance whatever had taken place.
The Mediterranean was sapphire blue and the sun was shining on a thousand ships, spread out as far as the eye could see. There were Liberties, Transports, LST's, LCI's, landing barges, Navy pa- trol boats, destroyers, everything imaginable. The big boats rode at anchor while the others shuttled back and forth putting supplies and men ashore-everything except tanks and artillery. Those came later and just in time.
In an endless stream, the men and materiel came across the beach. Bombing didn't stop it, shelling didn't stop it, nothing even slowed it up. The dead were buried in a little temporary cemetery behind the sand dunes, the wounded were evacuated to the Liberty ships in the bay and the invasion went steadily on.
The Rangers had landed soon after midnight and had captured the town of Gela. The First Division swarmed ashore in the pre- dawn twilight and with comparatively few casualties had taken their first objectives. The 45th Division was on our right flank and the 3rd had hit the beaches near Licata, several miles to the west of us.
The First Division consolidated their positions and continued on, to take Mt. Olivio airfield, if they could. The Division Staff was bivouacked in an olive grove behind a ridge. Generals Terry Allen and Teddy Roosevelt seemed very well satisfied with the situation. But as the afternoon wore on, things seemed to worsen. The shell-
ing of the area was more frequent and more accurate.
Enemy
bombers made life very uncomfortable-not to say uncertain. Dur- ing the evening it was rumored that the 1st Division had had to re- treat to their original positions under unfavorable circumstances. With that unpleasant news, we settled down to what must be a most unusual thing in Sicily in July, a very chilly night.
Sunday, the 11th, will long be remembered by every soldier in the First Division Sector. The Germans mounted a tank attack on the plains north of Gela and the situation became very grave indeed.
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At the same time, the Italians drove a wedge between us and the 45th Division on our right, actually reaching the beach. We were shelled with such intensity and precision from the enemy positions in the hills that we suspected the Germans had taken over. Generals Allen and Roosevelt looked worried and General (then Colonel) "Wild Bill" Donovan, Chief of O.S.S., who had come ashore as an observer, looked as though he had discovered plenty to observe. I spent most of the day in a slit trench in the lee of a cement irriga- tion ditch, wishing devoutly that I was elsewhere.
Fortunately for us, about this time the heavy cruisers Boise and Savannah steamed into position, took the enemy gun emplacements in the hills under fire and put them out of business. Even more im- portant, was the timely arrival of some tanks and artillery which moved immediately to the battle raging north of Gela and turned the tide in our favor. The Germans were driven back, a counter attack by the 1st and 45th Divisions eliminated the wedge of Italians to the east and the beachhead was secure.
OFLAG 64
It is hard to believe that the sight of a barbed wire enclosed prison camp could look good to anyone, but to the small remnant of the 179th Task Force, it seemed like an oasis in the desert. We had been shuttled back from the front in ammunition trucks and in coal tenders on locomotives. Guarded by escaping German submarine crew men, we had suffered the abuse and tempers of all the Germans with whom we had come in contact. We had been paraded before a German Youth School to satisfy the ego of some lowly "Ober Leut- nant" and been pushed around every railroad station and wayside. It would have been bearable had we been fed and had cigarettes but the Krauts evidently thought that we were camels or the like. To add to that, one of our greatest worries was our own planes, which I'm afraid, bothered us more than the Germans.
The great gates of Stalag XII in Limburg, Germany, just across the Rhine, were swung open and we plodded wearily through under the stares of the guards and were brought to a halt outside the head- quarters building. Waiting for us was a detail of trained officers and men who immediately went to work on us. Names, ranks, etc. were taken again by two officers who stopped and looked over each man carefully. It was here I first realized what the word "arrogant"
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meant, that I had heard applied so often to these men in the States, as I tried to stare down the cold eyes of a German captain. I saw him check my name on his paper and he passed down the line, and then I was taken over by one of the men of the detail and given my "umpteenth" search. These boys really knew their business. I was left as clean as a plucked hen of everything that could be of per- sonal value to them. They missed pictures, etc. in my wallet and a small compass, designed especially for just this sort of thing.
We were soon herded to various tents, buildings and enclosures, ยท according, evidently, to rank, and had begun to look forward to a chance to wash, a cigarette or even some food. I and nine others were to wait awhile for all this, for Lt. Jenkins (C.O., 179th Inf.) and I were taken with eight enlisted men to a central building where we were given a spoon and a Red Cross box. We were then marched out through the gates again to the town of Limburg and a dreary looking castle which commanded a bluff overlooking the country- side.
Here we were introduced to the famed Intelligence Section of the German Wehrmacht, who, with smiles and perfect English, escorted us individually down the dark narrow stairs and corridors to a row of small cells with contrastingly large thick doors complete with small covered peep-holes, all the while spouting the dark history of their "perfectly wonderful old castle" and cautioning us not to worry as our stay with them would be "most pleasant."
Two days later, after refusing to fill out their "hotel register" which they jokingly handed out as we entered, the guard unlocked the great door and escorted me up inside the great stone building to a room where I was to be given interrogation by a German non-com. Very pleasant formalities were flung back and forth and I was in- vited to take a chair and offered a cigarette. The Kraut methodical- ly lit a pipe and chattered amiably about nothing at all while I en- joyed his rationed cigarette. He started his job in a pleasant chatty manner but gradually brought himself around to the things he and his like were curious about. When he received the (I hope) silence I was supposed to maintain, he swung to a little different tack. He began to tell me all he knew about me and my unit, its "travels," equipment and my bosses. He backed up a lot of it with manuals complete with photographs of equipment, etc. After all this, a few pointed implications were made and I was abruptly sent back to my little cell, evidently to think it all over. I mixed up a new concoc- tion of powdered milk and jam I had been experimenting with from
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my Red Cross box. I also ran a rather alarmed eye over what re- mained. I'd have to slow down.
Several days later, after I had seen and heard a Frenchman and two Russians given a beating in the corridor, the Sergeant and I were together again. This time I got no cigarette or chatty build- up. It was all business. There were three things his bosses wanted to know. A reserved grin at him really brought action. He raged in true Nazi style for twenty minutes. I learned that American culture consisted of "nigger music," refrigerators and chewing gum and that our worst enemies and future conquerors were the South Americans. The Sergeant had spent several years working there in a Diplomatic Corps. When he mentioned that his son was a prisoner of the Russians and it brought a real grin, he called the guard in a rage and informed me my fate was in my own hands. He couldn't help me. (As if he would !) The next few days I sweated, I guess, but after finding a way to swap grins (no talking allowed) with the others at our morning toilet, I felt better.
Days went by and finally we were given a dogtag and a card to send to the Red Cross making us full-fledged "Kriegsgefangene." We were marched away to the rail yards and loaded twenty-five or thirty in a cage in one end of a box-car to begin our long journey across Germany to Poland, the real prison camp.
The trip is a story in itself but we finally arrived at "Oflag 64," Shubin, Poland and were searched again and assigned to barracks.
The prison routine sounds very simple on paper but to us it was as complicated a life as any we had ever experienced. There is an old adage which says, "Familiarity breeds contempt" and so it goes. Constant association with hungry, tired, worried and war-sick men soon drove men into their various channels of character, good and bad, and the various make-ups in them came to light.
The camp had been converted from a boys' reformatory school, a little more room added, and a lot of wire and sentry towers. When we arrived we had been given two very small German trench blank- ets, assigned a tiered bunk, a locker, and a place at mess. Also a position at "Appel," the counting formation. Gradually we new men fitted into the pattern of things. There was ersatz coffee at about 8 A.M. and "Appel" sounded at 8.15 A.M. At twelve, we moved, in shifts, to a large hall in one of the buildings for the noon meal. We were divided into messes of eight men who sat at the same bench every day. On the table was one loaf of heavy German bread, a bowl of cabbage soup and a jug of "ersatz." It was my job to
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divide the soup. Every noon it was two-thirds of a cup of soup and a three-quarter inch slab of bread.
At three o'clock another "Appel" sounded on the plow share, which hung as a bell near the gate. At five we entered the mess hall again for supper. This meal consisted of a large bowl of boiled potatoes and more "ersatz." When it was all divided each man had three or four potatoes, depending on their size. We had to save a piece of bread from the noon meal if we wanted to supplement the potatoes. At nine o'clock all lights were out and everyone was in bed. No one was allowed outside the barracks after dark, the exact time being set from time to time.
These "Appel" formations and mess formations were, of course, our high spots in the day. The long intervals between created the chasms into which men's minds could wander. Food was the basic topic of conversation during these long hours of inactivity. Some men even went as far as to create yearly post-war menus for them- selves, complete with fantastic recipes which could only be concocted by the minds of hungry men. Women often contend that the chief topic of conversation of men is women, but here I can truthfully say, they took a definite back seat to a roast stuffed turkey.
Each barracks, a one-story wooden building with a cement floor, housed about 60 men and was heated by two porcelain charcoal-burn- ing stoves. The amount of charcoal was determined by the number of men, the temperament of the Germans and the accuracy of the Russian aircraft. One could only feel the heat if one leaned against the stove, and several men, sleeping in strategic positions, constantly had large dark brown "cooked places" on their backs. Others, un- able to get near the stove, either stayed in bed or shivered. Every- one developed painful cases of chilblains and the most serious cases were transferred to barracks with wooden floors.
The camp had been previously occupied by British prisoners who had left a library of sorts which, when supplemented by the dribble of books we received, gave us assorted reading matter. Everyone learned to play contract bridge and cribbage, but these occupations could only be utilized by the more rugged individuals as the lighting and the cold made participation nearly unbearable over any period of time.
As some of the prisoners were professors or teachers, schools on various subjects were organized, but again the cold raised havoc with the daily attendance record. There were several actors in the
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group who organized and put on plays which supplemented the con- versation for a few days.
Naturally there was the problem of association with the German guards. Our own rules prohibited any association with them at all, but several of them who became known to us as the "ferret" and the "weasel," etc. were constantly trying to strike up conversations for their own information. A system was worked out among the pri- soners to discourage all their various attempts at "snooping."
It seemed strange to us that lumber, ice hockey, football, baseball and ping pong equipment got through on besieged rail lines while Red Cross food parcels, personal tobacco and clothing parcels were delayed endlessly. Without these welcome Red Cross parcels, our lot would have been far worse.
DACHAU
Dachau is a name that will live in infamy forever. It was here that Hitler built the first of his unspeakable concentration camps. It served as a model for Buchenwald, Belsen and all the rest and it had everything-crematory ovens, gas chambers built to look like shower baths, savage dogs whose purpose it was to disembowel a "spread eagled" prisoner who had the bad judgment to defy his Nazi oppressors.
Dachau was captured on April 29, 1945 and I entered the town and inspected the camp the next day. There are no adjectives in the English language to describe what I saw there.
On a siding by a main highway accessible to any one, were prob- ably fifty freight cars, many of the roofless gondola type, filled with corpses, hundreds of them. There were old men, young men and boys, even a few women. All were clothed in filthy rags and ema- ciated beyond the telling. Some had been cruelly beaten as well. One I saw had a fractured skull and a boy of fifteen was covered with blood from a deep gash in his neck. These pitiful creatures had been alive when they had entrained at Buchenwald three weeks before. Their suffering must have been excruciating before death finally released them, for it was cold and raw and we had flurries of snow on May first.
Inside the prison compound, there were 32,000 miserable, starving vermin-infested caricatures of human beings-Russians, Poles, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, men of every race, creed and color. And everywhere there was death. You literally stepped over bodies of
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men who had fallen dead of starvation and disease. No one had time to bother about them-the needs of the living were so desperate and there were so few hands as yet to meet them. In rooms on either side of the crematory, bodies were piled every which way-eight hun- dred of them-as one of my officers so aptly described it, "like fish in a barrel."
Within a second enclosure I visited what passed for a hospital. Three thousand dead and dying were jammed into buildings de- signed to accommodate seven hundred at most. The hideous cruelty of this place was beyond description. The living were in bed with the dead. There was every kind of disease-typhus, typhoid fever, tuberculosis-God knows what. Every inmate had dysentery and nobody had strength enough to get out of bed to do anything about it. They all had the discharging sores that come from prolonged starvation and avitaminosis.
The smell in this place of putrefaction and decay was not the com- mon one of death and rotting bodies that we knew so well, it was a rancid stench that made you retch and want to vomit and it seemed to cling to you for hours afterward.
There were no attendants and there were no antiseptics and no surgical dressings. Many of the patients were victims of fiendish medical experiments. There were two hundred and fifty women who had been subjected to every imaginable bestiality. These poor aban- doned souls had been waiting to carry out the grisly SS slogan which at one time or another had been whispered into the ear of every pri- soner, "Here you come in by the gate and go out by the chimney." And for so many of them, help had come too late.
If there has been anything worse since the dawn of civilization than what went on in these places, I have never heard of it. Genghis Khan was an angel of compassion compared with the swine who did these ghastly things to their fellow men.
Dachau was only one of many such camps. They were all of a piece and the horrible sadistic cruelty of one was matched in every hideous detail in all the others. In the years to come, let us not forget.
PERSONAL RECORDS OF CIVILIANS IN WAR AREAS
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THE AIR TRANSPORT COMMAND
All domestic airlines were placed under the jurisdiction of the War Department in March, 1942, and became contract carriers under the Air Transport Command. The pilots and personnel re- tained their civilian status but were under the direction of the army and subject to army orders and regulations.
The experienced pilots of the ATC were the first to map out many army routes and the success of the army in using these air- routes was largely the result of the pioneer work of these pilots.
GEORGE P. BROWN became a member of the Air Transport Command and went overseas in April of 1942. He remained in this service until January of 1945.
While with the Air Transport Command, he served in the capacity of Superintendent of Ground Operations for Northeast Airlines, Inc., North Atlantic Division.
Brown also served as Station Manager at Meeks' Field in Ice- land for one year. He served at Bluie West in Greenland, and at Goose Bay, Labrador for two years, also spent some time in Scot- land. While stationed at these various bases, Brown also served as pilot for the Air Transport Command Air Sea Search and Rescue in the Arctic.
George Brown was the recipient of a letter of Commendation from General Harold George, Commanding General of ATC, commending pilots and ground crews of Contract Carrier Number 1, for flying five million miles over the Atlantic without a serious accident or passenger or crew fatality during the war.
FRANCIS BURRAGE CHALIFOUX flew for the contract divi- sion of the Air Transport Command from January 1943 through May 1946. During this period as Captain of ATC aircraft, he accumulated 3,500 hours of Transatlantic flying on routes from the United States to Labrador, Iceland, Scotland, England, Bermuda, the Azores, Casablanca and Algiers in Africa. After the end of hostilities he flew to Norway, Denmark, France and Germany.
"I participated in various rescue missions, to downed Army pilots in remote parts of the arctic. I flew many survey trips for the
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Army, over unmapped territory, and North Atlantic reconnaissance in lead of mass bomber movements. I was on the first run flown by the Army from Presque Isle, Maine to Newfoundland and Labrador in January 1942 and also made the first run from Northern Quebec to Baffin Land and remote outposts, and dropped mail at isolated out- posts north of the Arctic Circle on both coasts of Greenland."
In May of 1944 he was awarded the Air Medal for conducting a combination rescue-survey trip around the north magnetic pole, land- ing on the ice-cap and removing sick personnel, and leaving emerg- ency supplies in secret arctic observation posts. He made over 250 Transatlantic crossings in all carrying critical supplies to Europe and bringing home returning G-I's after hostilities were over.
Air Medal
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Personal Records of Civilians in War Areas
CIVILIAN AIR PATROL
Civilian Air Patrol, the volunteer auxiliary of the Army Air Forces, was formed originally December 1, 1941 under OCD (Office of Civilian Defense) "out of the desire of the civilian air- men and women of the country to be utilized with their equipment for the common defense." Later, in April 1943, it became a full- fledged auxiliary to the Army Air Forces.
Its Coastal Patrol covered thousands of square miles of coastal waters along the vital shipping routes, and eventually along the en- tire Atlantic and Gulf coasts from the Canadian border to Tampico, Mexico. At first only observers to summon Army and Navy air- craft by radio, it later used bombs and depth charges on submarines directly. Still later they developed air courier services to carry dis- patches or urgent shipments ; towed aerial gunnery targets ; inspected camouflage installations, etc.
GORDON CHICKERING PRINCE started flying in 1916 on a Burgess-Dunn hydro-aeroplane at Marblehead. He was among the first one hundred to volunteer in March 1917 in the Aviation Branch of the U. S. Army Signal Corps. He served as a test pilot and in- structor at 8th Aviation Instruction Center, Foggia, Italy and at 3rd Aviation Instruction Center, Issoudun, France. After World War I, he remained a member on active flying status in the Officers' Reserve Corps until 1927. He was one of the founders of the 101st Observation Squadron, Massachusetts National Guard, now perman- ently located at the Logan Airport, East Boston, Mass. He writes :
"As I was unable, due to arthritis, to pass my military physical examination at the beginning of World War II, I was appointed Massachusetts Wing Commander of the Civil Air Patrol for this state in December 1941. I served in that capacity until July when I was assigned to active anti-submarine patrol duty with the 2nd Coastal Patrol Base at Rehoboth, Del. . I flew about thirty thousand miles of anti-submarine patrol before these bases were dis- continued in September 1943 when the Army and Navy had suffi- cient planes of their own and so took over this work. In July 1943, on my 'day off,' my own plane was lost. It fell into the sea, but being summer, its crew was saved."
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Gordon Prince holds Certificate No. 754 of the Aero Club of America.
World War II Victory Medal
CADET PROGRAM, CIVILIAN AIR PATROL
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Commencing October 1, 1942 the non-active units of the CAP, at the request of General Arnold, commenced the training of High School students for placement in the armed forces.
The Cadets were trained in military courtesy, discipline and drill and had courses in navigation, meteorology, Morse code, first aid, radio and crash procedure. The boys from Wenham who took ad- vantage of this training were:
Robert Stanwood Jones, age 18, attached to the Salem Unit from September 1944 to December 1945.
William Hart LeRette, age 16, attached to the Lynn Unit from September 1944 to September 1946.
Gardiner Ames Morgan, age 16, attached to the Lynn Unit from November 12, 1944 to April 15, 1945.
U. S. COAST GUARD TEMPORARY RESERVE
The Temporary Reserve of the U. S. Coast Guard was formed to provide trained personnel to help perform the many duties relat- ing to port security and coast patrol which the Navy assigned to the Coast Guard. The men most familiar with the ports, harbors and the coast were the fishermen and yachtsmen of the country. They put in many hours of voluntary work manning small boats on in- shore and harbor patrols, standing guard duty at various Coast Guard, Navy and Army depots and patrolling the beaches of the long coast line of the U. S.
Members of the U. S. Coast Guard Temporary Reserve from Wen- ham were L. Sigfred Linderoth, Charles Reed, Harry Shackelford and John Sturges.
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