THE GHOST OF JOHN F. KENNEDY COMFORTS A GERMAN EX-PAT

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



Emil’s voice cuts through the layers of my slumber like a buzz saw. It isn’t so much grating as it is insistent—overpowering! “Admiral Dönitz has called off the U-boat operations, Katrina. And the Führer isn’t fighting him on it. I will no longer be assigned to long days and nights away from you out to sea. We can be married now.” It is the same dream—too many nights the same dream! It punches me in the stomach! I jerk awake, gasping for air. “The middle of the night again,” I moan. “Emil, please let me be! Please, please go away!” But, it is useless. Nothing has changed in all these twenty years. I know from experience that I won’t be able to get back to sleep. Frustrated, I kick the quilt to the foot of the mattress and rise to my feet. “Coffee!” my weary brain insists. I paddle to the kitchen.

            It has been a long weekend in Washington DC, perhaps the longest in its history—in the history of my adopted country as a whole, actually. This capital city of the United States is closed. Across the country, businesses and schools are closed; nearly everything is closed, except for high-alert security operations and transportation systems. The grief-stricken people of the nation are parked in front of their television sets to watch the unfolding events surrounding the assassination of President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It happened shortly after noon central time on Friday, November 22, 1963—only the day before yesterday! It seems like forever. A jolt to my consciousness in an unwelcome voice reminds me that the president is now Lyndon Baines Johnson. I don’t like the idea one tiny bit.

I am one of a large community of ex-pat Germans in DC. Following the death of both of my parents, and as I had no other ties to Germany, I immigrated to the USA. That was fourteen years ago. I was fortunate to land a position right away with a German Language Institute and Cultural Center here. Mr. Kennedy, at the time Senator Kennedy, engaged the institute in helping him with his campaign for president, specifically in appearing at gatherings of ex-pat Germans. I served as the adjunct to him in that endeavor. I was taken aback when first he engaged me in conversation about the Second World War. It is usually a topic that is avoided in interchanges between Germans and Americans. I understood immediately that he wanted all barriers between himself and me erased, a desire on his part I was to see over time extended to all people everywhere.

The date of our first meeting, a lunch meeting, was Friday, January 15, 1960, only two weeks after he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I remember it so well because it coincided with a fateful date earlier in my life. It was on that exact date in 1944 that my then fiancé, Emil came up missing. He was a crew member of the German U-boat 377 whose last radio report occurred on January 15, 1944. The submarine had departed Brest, France on December 15, 1943. U-boat 377, with Emil onboard, sailed into the mid-Atlantic, its return anticipated in early February. When it failed to arrive, it was reported, ‘lost to an unknown cause.’ Before the submarine set out on its mission, Emil had informed me while on a short leave over the Christmas holiday of Admiral Karl Dönitz’s discontinuation of Germany’s U-boat program in the Western Atlantic because of a lack of success and heavy losses. Apparently, however, Germany was not so willing to give up its U-boat program. It actually continued well into the final weeks of the war.

In my nervousness, and by way of an apology, I suppose, I blurted out this history to the senator. His handsome face broke into a reassuring smile, and he said, “My service in the war was also spent on the water, although on the Pacific fighting the Japanese.”  

“The famous PT 109 incident,” I replied.

“Yes. That happened in August of 1943.”

“I knew next to nothing of Hitler and his Nazis, or of the war,” I replied shamefacedly.

“You weren’t a member of a Hitler Youth group?”

“My father was a farmer. We lived in an extremely remote region of Southwest Germany. We lived our lives much as our ancestors had done for generations, isolated from the country’s political turmoil. We were aware of the war, but were able to keep apart from it almost entirely. And then I met Emil.”

“And he was in it body and soul?!”

“He was a Nazi, a fanatical Nazi. For a long time, I didn’t realize how dangerous he was.”

“And by the time you did recognize it, it was too late—you were in love with him, I take it.”

I broke eye contact with the senator then and looked at my folded hands in my lap. “Emil took it upon himself to indoctrinate me. It was a point of honor with him. He saw the war from the perspective of a sailor and he spared me no details about his ‘kills,’ as he called them—hundreds, thousands of American merchant ships and Allied submarines blown to bit. I didn’t keep a tally because the horror of the slaughter of all those young men on both sides was sickening to me. After a while, I couldn’t stand the sight of Emil. I vowed that if I survived the war, I would leave Germany.”

“Have you ever gone back?”

“Someday, when both Germany and I have mended a bit more.
“And Emil?”

“He haunts me still. Not a day goes by that I don’t carry the burden of my convoluted feelings for him. The weight is heavier because he lost his life.”

“I lost my big brother, Joe in the war. By rights, it should be he who is running for president. I suppose in some ways I’m doing it for him, although at times he was a royal pain in the neck to me.” The senator chuckled and then was silent for a couple of minutes, lost in his memories of his brother. “We must never forget that we are still in a state of war. We are in the Cold War, and have been since the end of World War II. In a way, it is just as insidious, maybe more so, because our enemies are so much more difficult to see. I think of it as our long twilight struggle. When I am president I intend to lead the way into the light.”

It was all I could do to keep tears from pooling in my eyes. Finally he said, “We both have our war scars. What do you say we leave it at that? Miss Berger, welcome to the righteous side of the fight.” He raised his glass and reached it out to me. I clinked my glass against his, and he added, “And now for the business of getting me elected president. What do you have planned for me?”

I have lost this morning to my memories. I think about going to Mass, but my watch tells me it is already too late in the morning to do so. I click on the TV. The president’s motorcade scrolls across the screen as it has done for the umpteenth time during the weekend, since that awful Friday, November 22^nd morning. That gorgeous head of the president, so vulnerable in the open-top limousine, slumps forward. His wife in her Chanel suit and pillbox hat draws him to her. The president is shot, and we learned soon thereafter, that he is dead!

The live television cameras switch to the latest events in the continuing coverage of the president’s assassination. Cameras are in the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters this Sunday morning. Before our eyes, among a crowd of reporters and other onlookers, in handcuffs, young Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK’s alleged assassin, is surrounded by police guards. A big man in a fedora and dark suit steps forward from the crowd, raises a handgun, and shoots Oswald. Pandemonium breaks out and then the shooter is wrestled to the floor. Unconscious, Oswald is hustled to an ambulance and rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, the same medical facility in which the president was pronounced dead two days ago.

Wave after wave of shock, grief, outrage, doom sweep over me! Hadn’t I left this kind of thing behind in Germany so long ago? What terrifying impacts will the loss of this president in whom the American people placed such high hopes have on the country? I am heartbroken for his wife and their little children. Was there a photograph of Jackie, Caroline, and little John-John in his wallet when he fell? I think about his mother and father and his many brothers and sisters, and his extended family, resilient and unstoppable people almost to a one, but this will give them serious pause, undoubtedly.

I perch in rigid disbelief on the edge of my sofa. “…Miss Berger, welcome to the righteous side of the fight,” JFK said to me at our first meeting, one short sentence that took me in the fold and defined so simply my role as an American, and as a German, when I return to my homeland, someday.©

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

Image: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Books by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and soft cover at Amazon.com.

ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS OF THE GHETTO OF ROME

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



My eldest son, Sabato, he is like a goat since he took his first steps—climbing whatever has been before him. In the beginning, he scaled the furniture in our little home. As he grew older, he scooted a chair to a window, slinked up and through it, and made his way outside. My wife, she could not control him. Whenever she turned her back, he scurried away to climb something. Most of the time, it was the wall in which the window is located that gives onto a tall tree beyond arm’s reach of it. The limbs of the tree provide him the means of disappearing among the rooftops of our cramped neighborhood. He is one of an ancient breed of climbers among our people, myself included when I was young, spawned by the stifling four walls that enclose us in this Ghetto of Rome, which has been our people’s prison during much of the time between the middle of the sixteenth century and now.

Jews have been counted among the population of Rome since a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, the Christian’s Jewish savior, and the ironies of our history here are ceaseless. First we were in favor, and then out of favor—in and out, in and out, our fortunes have varied over two millennia according to the mood and the politics of the separate ruling powers of the times. It is the same throughout this hemisphere of the world, where there are also Jewish ghettos—many of them—but the Ghetto of Rome holds the dubious distinction of being the oldest. Like its history, its boundaries are irregular, comprising about two thousand Jewish people at its inception in 1555, the whole of them shut behind a gated trapezoidal urban enclosure measuring a cramped, four blocks in size. At its longest border, edged up against the Tiber River, the quarter was then and is to this day perpetually damp and murky, our narrow streets, homes, and businesses infested with vermin inhabitants of waterways and their nearby areas. The river also guarantees that the ghetto is subject to incessant flooding. Diseases wrought by the forced overcrowding and unsanitary circumstances are rampant. Crushing poverty is our lot as well, because gainful employment among the larger society is denied to us. To state that our close and substandard living conditions are inhuman, is merely a restatement of our situation during most of our history.

            The very night of his Bar Mitzvah five years ago, not only did Sabato become a man, but he also transformed into a cat-burglar. I do not suggest that he indulges in breaking and entering. Certainly not! Soon after the authorities shut us inside the ghetto behind locked gates, as they do each evening, donned head to toe in black, Sabato creeps across the rooftops of adjoining habitats of our neighbors, drops to his feet outside the boundary wall, and slinks into the wider city. Darkness comes early at this time of year and the curfew hour begins soon afterwards. The darkness is intensified by the mandatory blackout—all windows and doors are shrouded in black cloth or by other means. Keeping to the shadows, and being careful to avoid the armed patrols that like cockroaches infest every corner, Sabato scours the sinister streets and alleyways for whatever he can find. That first evening upon his return, his black eyes shining triumphantly, he said to me, “Papa, look what I found for you! Now you will have many nights of good light as you study the Torah.” And from behind his back he produced four tall and thick, white candles, only slightly used. “I found them in the dust bin behind the Cathedral,” he informed me. The Cathedral has become one of his regular foraging sites. There he gleans an assortment of treasures, including medals of the saints, candelabras, and other religious articles. We trade them on the black market through a friendly Roman Catholic who acts as our trusted agent, which contributes greatly to the livelihood of our family. One of Sabato’s happiest finds was for his sister, Ada. The day of her Bat Mitzvah looming before her, she was mortified that she lacked a nice pair of shoes for the small ceremony we planned for her. God Himself, with the help of Sabato, provided. As Sabato stole down a pitch black street a few nights before, a pair of barely-used girl’s sandals beckoned to him on a doorstep of a house. He snatched them up and stuffed them in his rucksack. Later that evening, like the prince kneeling before Cinderella and placing the glass slipper on her foot, Sabato lowered to his knees and slipped the sandals on his sister’s feet. They were just the right size!      

Since Nazi Germany seized Rome two days after the Italian surrender to the Allies on 8 September, 1943, discrimination against us has been at a fever pitch yet again. Many of my close friends and associates have escaped the persecution by pulling up stakes and moving south in search of protection among places now occupied by the Allies. I am skeptical of such a drastic measure. After all, several non-Jewish Romans pooled their resources and helped us to meet the Nazi demand that we Jews hand over 50 kilograms (110 lbs.) of gold to them, a sum that we were promised would insure the freedom of 200 family heads marked for deportation to a concentration camp. It shows to me and many of my neighbors that the Nazis are only after loot, and as long as we can fork over commodities, we will be safe. Sabato sees it differently. He begs me to leave, but I cannot find my way to ripping my sickly wife and our other six children, the youngest of whom is still a babe in arms, from the only home they have ever known. I recognize that restless look in Sabato’s eyes—he is ready to go, to climb through the window, to scale the tree, and to escape across the rooftops and over the walls of this ancient ghetto once and for all, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I fear that if he leaves, we will lose him forevermore.

Even as I come to the end of this writing in my journal, the German security and police forces have sealed off the ghetto and announced that our final removal will soon be underway. “Papa!” my son exclaims. “Please, Papa come with me. I can get all of us to safety. We will go south and find protection among the Allies.” But it is too late. My wife and baby daughter would never survive such a journey. I feel certain that a concentration camp is our better option.

“I must go, Papa. I must join the co-belligerent forces and fight the Nazis.” His rucksack filled with his scant possessions strapped to his back, Sabato takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks. And then he bundles his mother in his arms in a goodbye embrace. One after the other, he kisses his brothers and sisters, and then he turns from us and disappears through the window. I run to it and through misty eyes watch my son scale the tree and step foot onto our rooftop.© 

Note: On October 16, 1943, the German Gestapo raided the Ghetto of Rome. At its outset, 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children, mainly of Jewish persuasion, were rounded up. Among that number, 224 non-Jews were released. It is recorded that two days later, 1,035 Jews were loaded onto Holocaust trains and shipped off to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Only fifteen men and one woman survived the bloodbaths of the deportation and internment in the camp. If the narrator of my story of historical fiction had actually existed, it would have been a miracle if he and his family had been among the survivors. Sabato, on the other hand, because I sent him south to the Allied encampments, very well might have escaped. I like to think that he would have made it to one of the British Isles or the United States soon after the end of the Second World War.



Image: LIFE IN THE GHETTO OF ROME - 1880 Watercolor by Ettore Roesler Franz

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.       

©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