TROUBLE IN ITALY

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



“It’ll be okay, Dino. You know Italy, and it knows you. It’s in your blood memory,” I remind myself every time I dive under a bush or duck behind a building for cover. And when I’m shaking in my boots and about to crap in my pants I tell Ma in my mind that this place ain’t like she told me. Ma tucked me in and told me stories about Italy every bedtime when I was a kid. And at the end of every story, she’d say, “Italy’s in your blood memory.” She meant it that way because she and Pa were born here, and as far as I know, all my relatives were born here. My brother and I are the only ones born in America.  

            I trained in the boiling sands of North Africa for this mission to invade Italy and crush Mussolini and Hitler’s mobs. Brooklyn gets hotter than hell in summer but this whole Mediterranean area is blistering hot like I’ve never seen. And it’s lousy with Fascists and Nazis. Brooklyn has it has its turf wars. I got caught up in some of them rumbles when I was a stupid kid, but it was nothing like this. The thing is, I don’t know the difference between Fascists and Nazis. Politics ain’t my gig. The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ebbets Field, my girl in Flatbush, those are my things—and Ma and Pa. My brother, Carmine, he ain’t too bad either—a stupid kid, yeah, but he’s got heart. We better get this damn war won before he hits eighteen, because Ma’s heart couldn’t take it if he has to go in, too. It already kills her that I’m in it.

            Me and my buddies, when we trained in North Africa, we figured we’d be working for Patton on this mission. But things have changed. We’re getting kind of used to change, because it happens a lot in this man’s army. Commanders get shifted around and armies get merged. I hear Patton is in the can or solitary confinement somewhere. He got in trouble with the top brass and they shut him down. A lot of the top brass think he’s a schmuck. He doesn’t fall in line with political correctness. But he’s the Allies’ best general. I don’t get it. In my book, he’d have to assassinate the president before I’d relieve him of command. He outsmarted his bosses and everyone else, including the enemy, and mopped up Sicily while those guys still had their thumbs up their arses. Sometimes I worry that nobody really knows what’s up and what’s down with those highbrow guys from their haughty-taughty military schools. It seems to me that common sense is in short supply at Allied headquarters, at least when it comes to Patton, and maybe lots of other stuff I don’t know about. The worst part of it is that while the top brass were dicking around trying to figure out strategy for the Sicilian campaign, slowing down operations without any need for it, the German’s used that window to fly the coop and set up strong fortifications against me and my buddies here in Salerno, Italy.

I’m with an army that’s got the Brit’s in with us, and French, and guys with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force. There’s also South African and New Zealand and maybe Polish guys, and even native Italians who signed on as co-belligerents against the Axis enemies. One good thing about this multi-national crew is all the different kinds of faces and languages. Sometimes it’s like being back in New York. How I wish!

We’re under the thumb of a British army group, commanded by what I hear is a smooth-talking British aristocrat. I haven’t met the guy and don’t expect to. I just hope he’s one smart guy and gets us out of here real quick. I don’t have my hopes up too much though, because he’s one of the higher-ups that Patton outsmarted in his push to Palermo, and that ultimately got Patton to Messina before anyone else. The difference between Patton and them is that he doesn’t let his foot off the gas. I don’t see any other way to win this war.

I’m what’s called “a foot soldier, a Private First Class, foot soldier.” Guys like me in the Infantry have the privilege of being the lowest of the low in pay and grade, and also get to do most of the dirty work. Ain’t that just the way of the world, all around? Well, I hear the Negro troops make out even worse than we do; and yeah, there you go again: The Way of the World, All Around!

I might be a low-grade, foot soldier, but I’m not stupid. I smell trouble here. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and that pedigree guarantees a nose that smells trouble. It was dark—middle of the night dark with some moonlight but not a lot of it when we stormed Salerno. The Gerries knew we were coming. They were dug in and ready for us right where we hit the beach. Star-shells streaked up and tracers crisscrossed the sky and lit it up like the Fourth of July. There was no place to hide in all that light. When we hit the shore, it was Hell with a capital H. The sand dunes were thick with Gerry’s .50-caliber machine guns. The .88s up in the hills were cracking and the beach sand where the shells hit all around us shot up in the air. We had to plow through that heavy hailstorm of bullets and sand. In front and back and right and left of me, lots of our guys were blown to bits on land mines, and other guys yelled for their mother when they got hit. There’s talk that some of our guys cut and ran. Only a punk would cut and run! But I didn’t see any of that. I only saw a lot of guys get cut down. But if desertion is a problem, it will only get worse, because the scuttlebutt is that Italy ain’t the highest priority no more, so it doesn’t get the best stuff. It goes to England where bigwigs are building up a gigantic offensive into France and a final victory in this European Theater of World War II.©

Note: the above is a work of historical fiction inspired by true events.

    

Image: Allied troops reach Salerno, Italy


Books by Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and soft cover at Amazon.com and by request at other booksellers.       

©A STEP AT A TIME…COMING OF AGE IN WORLD WAR II

By Linda Lee Greene, Author and Artist



Born in 1920, farmboy Bob Gaffin’s formative years had been Great Depression years. At the age of sixteen, he had conned his way into the Civilian Conversation Corps (CCC), passing himself off as the required age of eighteen to get in. The extra few CCC bucks every month had contributed mightily to his family’s coffers: they had helped to pay for his brother Bussy’s medical bills, repaired farm equipment, and purchased lumber for the larger house his father had been building, a necessary project to accommodate the ten members of his family. Living in the deep country of Southern Ohio, USA with their large garden, orchard, as well as forest and farm animals as sources of food, the Gaffins had kept their bellies full at least, and as such had fared better than most city folks who had relied on soup kitchens and the Salvation Army for sustenance during those bleak economic times. Still, Bob had suffered in his heart over the awful poverty so many of his family’s neighbors and friends, and even some relatives, had borne with such dignity.

Bob’s two CCC stints had widened his world far outside of the 586 square miles of his Adams County, Ohio home. He had been sure that the natural wonders and colorful ethnic cultures of the Northeastern United States in which he had been immersed had acquainted him with all the remaining planet had had to offer. But then, Confederate country had loomed on his horizon and he had breathed in the DNA of the Civil War battlefields on which he had imagined his grandfather might have fought. Many more new things had been revealed to him there—not just the ways and means of war he had learned in military boot camps, but also how white people had lived so very differently than had black people, and how a flag other than Old Glory had so often whipped in the hot and humid subtropical air of that Rebel lair.

Who would have thought that Bob would have sailed the Atlantic Ocean in an enormous ship stuffed shoulder to shoulder and knees to knees with his fellow G. I.s and come to ground in North Africa just two months before his twenty-second birthday? How had it been that in a combined British-American invasion in World War II’s “Operation Torch,” Bob had entered his baptism of fire among the American troops at Casablanca in French Morocco? As explained by Winston S. Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, the invasion had not been the “…beginning of the end,” but the “end of the beginning.” And so it had been for Bob, whose innocence had been shattered by the explosions and gunshots of that confrontation; as he and his Allied counterparts had rolled forward into a long and dirty war with their German and Italian enemies, and as during the muddy winter lull in the fighting, he had observed in that place overt slavery still practiced, Jews bullied and persecuted with impunity, and in their flight from the Nazis, terrified and desperate and tattered European refugees bulging the streets and sleeping on floors of public buildings.

It hadn’t stopped with North Africa. It couldn’t have ended there. In Southern Sicily a few weeks later, which was a barren and arid geographical extension of North Africa, the wheels and serpentine tracks of Bob’s half-track pulverized the bodies of dead Germans and Italians lying in the way of vehicular progress, each humped carcass pitching the half-track up and down like a bucking horse. Tears flooded Bob’s eyes, and the contents of his stomach gorged his throat. But then he saw the hollow eyes and bloated stomachs and protruding bones of the children, gorgeous, innocent, raven-haired Sicilian children lining the roadways of that stingy Fascist state, their little filthy hands reaching out, their noses running in anxious beseeching: “Acqua! (Water) Pane! (Bread)”

Never had he seen such destitution. As he and his compatriots of the 2^nd Armored Division captured and assembled thousands of Italian Prisoners of war (POWs) nose to shoulder, Bob thought about the soup lines he had seen back home in Cincinnati and Louisville. Returning to that part of the world was far, far in the future. Wiping the world clean of these Nazi bastards would be a long and difficult job, but Bob was up for it. Every step of his journey to that hour had prepared him for it.   

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com. Her novel of historical fiction titled GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS features a far-reaching look at Bob Gaffin’s childhood and young life.



Image: Bob Gaffin in casual military attire