U.S. ARMY NURSES EVACUATE THE WOUNDED

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



Summaries of today’s fighting will go out to newsrooms all across the free world. A gaggle of foreign correspondents follow the battles around like phantoms, uniformed, wolfing down the awful C-rations, chugging the sickening, chemical-tainted water from their canteens, running or crawling on their bellies among the sheets of bullets and overhead bombs, all for the sake of finding a story to send back home. They will report only what will pass the censors, things like the amount of ground gained, the heroic act of an anonymous GI, or excerpts from an official report by General So and So. Tomorrow, families will gather around their radio sets, their ears perked for any nuance in the stories that might give them some clue as to the status of their Johnny or Billy. And they will scan their newspaper hoping for the same revelation, to no avail. Their kid’s name won’t pop out among the sentences of yet another story about the current raging battle in Salerno, Italy. Instead, a telegram handed over by a man at the front door will inform unlucky parents of the missing or dead.

            I know full well that the folks back home have to stay on top of what is going on, not only because they are worried sick about their son or daughter, but because otherwise they just might give in and let the Nazis and Japs win. It’s a sure bet that there are very few mothers and fathers who have slept soundly through the night since World War II began—my parents included, of course. My mother still hasn’t forgiven me completely for joining the US Army as a nurse, and she is even less inclined to let me off the hook since I was deployed overseas. My dad doesn’t believe in sending any female into harm’s way for any reason, no matter how pressing. I literally want to throw up at the idea of my name, or God forbid, a photo of me doing my job of evacuating the wounded from a battlefield and having it show up in our local newspaper. I can’t stand the thought of how that would terrify my mother. So when I see one of those journalists, I turn my head away and pray he will focus his attention elsewhere.

            I sailed abroad in late May, only four months ago now, but it has been another lifetime. I was one of a large contingent of medical personnel, nurses and doctors and aides, onboard an enormous ship, which was a luxury cruise liner in its peacetime identity. It was converted to a troopship ever engaged in transporting troops and other personnel to fields of operation across the Atlantic. The ship and others like it on return trips to New York Harbor are directly connected to my job. They carry the walking-wounded and others back home, among them Prisoners of War who are subject to internment in various camps across America.

            Even though we medical personnel were assigned to specified quarters on the ship, still there were occasions when rubbing elbows with the troops came up. The ship was packed stem to stern with them, short, tall, rail-thin, and brawny, sprawled out in hallways, on decks, stretched out on bunks, all of them uniformed and helmeted and attached like glue to their guns and field packs. A chalked number unique to each one marked on their helmets and linked to a manifest in their commanding officer’s possession gave them a strange individuality. I was careful not to look at any of their faces. I figured there was a chance I would see too many of them again under different circumstances. It was likely that I would carry some of them out of a battlefield on a stretcher; that I would stitch-up for some of them bullet-shattered arms and legs, or stuff their guts back through gaping holes in their bellies. Some of them I might not be able to save at all.

            Today, September 17, 1943 was my first assignment on a field of battle in Salerno, Italy, and a weird coincidence happened. A young lieutenant among a group of soldiers lifting a wounded comrade on a stretcher to my outstretched hands where I stood at the open door of the evacuation plane called out my name and touched my hand. “Evelyn!” the lieutenant shouted. “It’s me, Benny.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Benny for sure, my neighborhood friend, one of a group of us who had been playmates since we were kids. How many warm afternoons did we play kick the can, hide and seek, and tag, or build snowmen and igloos during our cold Midwest winters? One year Benny got a telescope for Christmas, and one by one he let us look through it—he gave us our first real view at the stars, the same stars we had oohed and aahed over when on hot summer nights we had stretched out on blankets in our back yards. Sleeping under the stars was a happy childhood adventure. Dear God, please keep Benny safe as he beds down under those same stars tonight, somewhere out there on that battle-churned war-site in this hostile, Godforsaken, foreign land.©



Image: Air evacuation from Italy to North Africa

Recommended Reading:          https://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/MedSvcsinMedtrnMnrThrtrs/chapter3.htm

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

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

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.       

©IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH

 By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



At the precise hour that Beatrice prepared for bed at their home in the United States, George perched on a rock that was tucked among an outcropping of ancient boulders high above the coastline of some godforsaken, derelict area of Mussolini’s Sicily. If there was ever a lost civilization or the Dark Ages revisited, this was it. It was understandable why it was Italy's Achilles Heel.

It was the time of day when everyday if circumstances allowed it that he stopped to conjure his wife in his mind’s eye, the twilight hour—just before dark, when figures stood out starkly against their landscape for one last curtain call—just before they smoldered and vanished, sucked into their distinct placements on the planet. It was no easy task being the wife of a dedicated military man—it was a lonely and difficult and thankless life sentence for her, and he knew it. He pulled his helmet from his head, held it in his lap, and ran his hands across his damp pate. July in Sicily in that year of our Lord of 1943 was an anteroom of Hades, and U.S. Army Lieutenant General George Smith Patton, Jr. hated everything about it: the squalid, filthy peasants; the ruined towns; the tight hairpin roads; the impassible mountains; the dust; the bugs.

His pistols in their holsters were heavy and hot against his hips. He yearned for the end of the day when he would unbuckle the belt and lay the guns on the little table next to his bed in the schoolhouse he had procured for his Seventh Army headquarters. He slipped the Colt .45 revolver out of its holster on his right hip. Its ivory grip was smooth in his palm, but its silver plating was in need of buffing. The .357 Magnum on his left hip could also use some attention. He knew his fellow officers ridiculed his flashy, swashbuckling image. But he didn’t care what they thought about it. He believed it inspired his troops. And besides, he liked standing out from the crowd.  

Placing the revolver back in its holster, George sank back on his elbows. It was reliably quiet at this hour. Even the enemy needed this daily respite from the fighting, this time to gobble down their rations, to drop their grungy trousers and take a leak or crap, to spread the cheeks of their crusty a-holes to the air. He allowed himself only a moment of reprieve and then sat back up, his spine straight and taut as a statue, his senses alert for enemy movement. He studied the beach far below. It was jam-packed with hundreds of Allied ships that from his distant perch looked like the collection of his boyhood toys. The armada stretched in both directions as far as the eye could see. It brought to his mind the many years of battles between the Roman and the Carthaginian fleets, and the decisive conquest that finally gave Rome control of the Mediterranean, one or two centuries before the birth of Christ. In a former life, he very well might have been a Roman sailor on one of those ships, or more likely, a commander.

The thing he missed most about his home was his library, its shelves stuffed full of his books, most of them on military history. What would Julius Caesar or Napoleon do now if they were in George’s boots? The difference was that they were supreme commanders. Their hands were not tied by superiors less experienced, and yes, less capable than themselves. On the other hand, George had a clear-cut advantage those commanders in earlier times lacked. He had a mobile, mechanized army, a fast-moving armored tank and half-track army that laid waste of anything in its path. George knew that if fate favored him, he would earn the reputation as the World War II military commander the Nazis most feared. But he was also the “bad boy” of his Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s crew, and because of that dichotomy, he was often a breath away from glory or from dishonor. He hoped his legacy would be honor. He hoped his would be an honorable death. He also knew that death stalked him like a bloodhound.

“It is rather interesting how you get used to death. I have had to go to inspect the troops in which case you run a very good chance—or I should say a reasonable chance—of being bombed or shot at from the air, and shelled or shot at from the ground. I had the same experience every day in which for the first half-hour the palms of my hands sweat and I feel depressed. Then, if one hits near you, it seems to break the spell and you don't notice them anymore. Going back in the evening over the same ground and at a time when the shelling and bombing are usually heavier, you become so used to it you never think about it,”[1] George stated in a letter to a friend written during the course of the war.

George pulled to his feet and headed back to headquarters, only a few paces away. The shelling was about to begin anew on this oppressive summer evening of 1943, somewhere in half-dead Sicily. This is a good place for vampires, he thought to himself as he stomped his thigh-high boots on the hard-packed ground to shed them of their stubborn layer of dust. 

Note: The above essay is a work of fiction based on well-known characterizations of Patton. The setting in which Greene places him depicts the area in which he first landed in Sicily during Operation Husky, but his interlude at the rock and all that transpired there are products of her imagination. The excerpt from the letter Patton wrote to a friend on the theme of death is authentic. It was Greene’s inspiration for her essay.



Image: Lieutenant General George Smith Patton, Jr. – North, Africa, 1942/43



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

---

[1]Letter to Frederick Ayers (5 May 1943), published in The Patton Papers 1940-1945 (1996) edited by Martin Blumenson, p. 243

Long-buried Secrets are Unearthed in Rhys Bowen's Fascinating Novel

The Tuscan Child by Rhys Bowen provided me with hours of pleasurable reading during a time I desperately needed to slow my pace and turn down the volume of the world around me. I am a sucker for World War II stories, and this one hit the mark for me on all counts: a clever plot, likeable characters, and engaging setting. Kudos to author Rhys Bowen. -Review by author Linda Lee Greene. 

 A father’s love letter sends a young woman on a journey in search of long-buried secrets.

Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda

Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/LLGreeneAuthor

Blog: http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her on LinkedIn and Google+

A Review of James Ernest Shaw's book titled 'An Italian Journey'

Rather than rock stars and movie stars, the objects of my adoration are public broadcasting’s Rick Steves and Joseph Rosendo and others of their ilk, people who chronicle their worldwide travels for listeners and viewers. Such public information shows are godsends to people like me who, due to restrictions on their health, are unable to travel to far-off places. One of the charms of these short travel documentaries is that they make of their hosts ‘temporary locals,’ to borrow a phrase from Steves, by having them hobnob with local people and indulge in cultural activities distinct not only to the major destinations, but also to cozy villages and other hidden-away corners of the world. This philosophy of becoming a ‘temporary local’ is the chief appeal of author James Ernest Shaw’s delightful book entitled An Italian Journey. Adding to its appeal is that it is a book of non-fiction that reads like an intriguing novel.

I didn’t make it to Italy before I developed a chronic illness that up to this point in my life limits me to domestic travels. Immersing myself for a time in Tuscany was one of my fondest dreams…and now I have realized that dream, although vicariously, through James Ernest Shaw and his adventures journaled in his brilliant An Italian Journey. Like a gladiator on two wheels, for seven glorious weeks in Tuscany he bicycled sizzling as well as foggy mountainous hairpins and held his ground against speeding trucks and leisurely foot-peddlers. He climbed trees older than the modern world and picked olives, built stone walls, sat at table and ate pasta and drank wine, talked politics and religion and farming with real people of the area, and through the experience was transformed. And I think he found the key to why Italy and Italians are special among all the people of the world.

Shaw had inspired me to find my own way to Italy, somehow, and more importantly, to begin anew a journey I began and abandoned many decades ago, and that is to become a Roman Catholic. Thank you, James Ernest Shaw. –Author and artist Linda Lee Greene 

 

Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

          Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com
            Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor
          Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor
          Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor
            Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com
          Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

    

Review of Pamela Allegretto's 'Bridge of Sighs and Dreams'

Downsizing from a large four-bedroom home and moving to a small two-bedroom condominium in recent months has made it impossible for me to read at my usual speedy pace. But when my tortured back and squealing feet refused me during my “downsizing” project, I was able to spend much of my time-outs reading a few books, among them a marvelous World War II epic titled Bridge of Sighs and Dreams by author and artist Pamela Allegretto. The book was a perfect diversion, and has earned an honored place in my library of “World War II Books.”

Like Kristen Hannah’s acclaimed World War II novel The Nightingale, Allegretto’s novel explores the seldom-seen topic of the effects of war on women, the former on two sisters in German-occupied France, the latter on two sisters-in-law in war-torn Italy. If you haven’t read both of these fabulous books, you are missing out on big-time reading pleasures.

An artist whose fine art is collected worldwide, Allegretto’s every stroke of the keyboard that gave life to Bridge of Sighs and Dreams is rendered as masterfully as the brushstrokes that shape her popular canvasses.

https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Sighs-Dreams-Pamela-Allegretto-ebook/dp/B015JRFQE8

Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+