by Bill Mesce
“You’re more than welcome, Lieutenant.” Angstrom saw the apprehension in Ricks’s eyes as the lieutenant watched several of the youngsters chase each other round one of the tanks. Angstrom pulled off his tanker’s football-style helmet and rubbed fretfully at his matted hair. “Yeah, I know; they’re kinda green. They all just come over a coupla weeks ago.”
“How about you?”
“Got my arse kicked at Kasserine, but this is my first time back in the show since I been out of the hospital.”
“Well, I don’t want to be the one to tell you your business —”
“Sir, the first time one of those kraut 75’s went whizzing by my head at Kasserine, I learned nothing was like they taught us at Fort Riley If you been up to the line and got some gems of wisdom to share, sir, I’m happy as hell to hear ‘em.
“You’ll probably get this all again from the skipper. Put a man on each tank’s turret .50-caliber as an AA watch. Soon as the sun goes down, nobody smokes unless they’re under cover. And except for the man on watch, keep your crews out of the tanks until we’re ready to land. If something happens to this tub, those guys’d have a hell of a time getting out.”
As Angstrom hurried off to give the necessary orders, Harry asked Ricks, “Are you just being careful or can it really get that —”
“Bad? You know Bari? Port town on the east coast of Italy. Three weeks ago, a kraut air raid hit the harbor. They put seventeen merchant ships on the bottom.”
The convoy — ten LST’s, four LCTs, escorted by two Navy destroyers — formed up in an assembly area off Cape Gallo just after sunset, and started across the Tyrrhenian at about twelve knots, which would put them in Naples late the following afternoon or early evening. The tankers gathered atop the hunch-shouldered hulls of their Shermans to watch the last bloody streaks of light drain from the evening sky.
*
A pale Harry staggered out of the LCT’s small, foul-smelling head. Ricks took him by the arm and led him to a seat on the afterdeck. The shallow draft of the vessel meant it dipped and listed with the slightest wave, and each motion threatened to send Harry back to the loo.
“You should’ve had some crackers,” the lieutenant told him. “Would’ve settled your stomach.”
The thought of anything edible made Harry clutch his stomach and moan. “Where’s Junior?”
Ricks chuckled. “He went up to see if they’d let him on the bridge. He thinks this boat trip is a bang and a half. Maybe it reminds him of his yachting days.” At Harry’s puzzlement, Ricks fluttered a wireless message he’d received at Palermo. “You wanted me to ask about him. This was forwarded from London.”
“And?”
“Daddy’s got dough. A lot of dough. One of the richest families in South Carolina. Daddy’s got a lot of political pull, too, very big in the state political machine. Daddy greased Sonny’s way to those captain’s bars and also his assignment to CIC in Washington instead of a combat tour. He ever tell you anything about his civilian police experience?”
“I think he referred to himself once as a plain old country cop.”
“Our Woody did two years with the South Carolina State Constabulary before he joined the service. That might have a nice rustic sound to it, but it’s what other states refer to as the state police. And he earned himself a pretty hot reputation in those two years. Your friend likes to play his game close. Are you going to call him out on any of this?”
“Not unless I have to. We’re here on his ticket. You like to lead with your high card. I like to save it.” Harry looked up at the star-speckled sky. “I wish I could enjoy this the way Woody is. It’s a beautiful night.”
One of the Coast Guard deckhands stopped to pick up their seabags and overheard Harry’s remark. He grunted. “Pardon me, sir, but it rained every fuckin’ night ’til tonight, and I wisht it would fuckin’ rain this fuckin’ night!”
After the grousing crewman disappeared into the aft superstructure, Harry turned to Ricks. “What do you think is his problem?”
“His problem is they don’t drop bombs when it rains,” Ricks replied.
*
Several of the tank crews were huddled under one of the shelter halves. They giggled, they joked, there was the rustle of boxed rations being opened, the clatter of canned C rations. Harry heard the hiss of a portable stove, smelled freshly brewed coffee. They invited Ricks over, queried him about life on the line.
“Hey, Major!” Angstrom called out on seeing him. The sergeant was atop the lead tank, pulling the wireless whip antenna over. “Want to give me a hand here?” Still a little queasy, Harry climbed up on the bogie wheels and pulled himself onto the rear deck of the tank. “Just hold this thing down for me,” Angstrom asked.
In the feeble moonlight Harry noticed the words stenciled in white paint across the back of the Sherman’s turret: Irma’s Boys. “Who’s Irma?”
“My wife.” Angstrom reached into the commander’s hatch and pulled out several small objects hanging from ribbons. “My kids made these for me in school. My wife sent them to me for Christmas. You can’t see it, it’s too dark, but they each put their name on the back: Donny, he’s the oldest, nine, he did the tree, and then the twins — that’s Tim, and this one’s from Stevie.” He held them up for Harry to see in the moonlight. They were wooden cutouts, one shaped like a Christmas tree, the other two like Christmas ornaments. Angstrom began to tie the ribbons to the top of the antenna. “I thought, you know, what the hell, maybe for luck. You can let that go now.”
The antenna sprang back to its upright position; the three little ornaments rattled against each other in the breeze.
“How much you want to bet some hard-ass officer makes me take ’em off?”
Harry clapped a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “He’s going to have to outrank a major.”
Angstrom brewed some coffee over a portable stove under the shelter half behind Irma’s Boys. He and Harry spent the evening exchanging stories about their families, displaying wallet photographs by the light of Angstrom’s Zippo lighter. It was enough to take Harry’s mind off the movement of the LCT and as the night wore on he grew drowsy Angstrom drew two sleeping bags from inside his tank and offered one to Harry. They stretched them out on the deck of the cargo well, and after a few last words about home both drifted off to sleep.
The swaying on the LCT that had sickened him now rocked Harry to sleep. His body so craved the rest that even the jarring peal of the LCT’s general quarters alarm was slow to rouse him.
“C’mon, Major, up!” Angstrom shook him, none too gently
“Major, are you in here?” Now Ricks’s head was poking under the shelter half, and Harry felt the lieutenant grabbing at him.
“What the hell’s —”
“General quarters!” a voice blared over the Tannoy system. “General quarters! All hands to battle stations! Destroyer radar picket has incoming bogeys, course three-jour-zero, range twenty — jive miles.”
“Out of the northwest,” Ricks told Harry “They’ll be krauts. We’ve got about five minutes.” He jammed a helmet on Harry’s head and pulled him out into the cargo well between the Shermans and the hull.
Angstrom scrambled onto his lead tank, replacing the antiaircraft gunner standing watch. “Look alive, people!” he called to the other gunners. Each pulled back the heavy bolts on their .50-caliber guns to chamber the first round, then grabbed the heavy guns by their twin grips, swinging them skyward.
“Radar picket reports friendlies on intercept course. Bogey targets range fifteen miles.”
“How’re you doing, Major?”
Harry found Kneece huddling behind him. “I wish I was somewhere else right now,” Harry replied.
“You and me both, brother,” came an unknown voice out of the dark.
“You’re the veteran,” Woody Kneece said to Ricks. “What do we do?”
Ricks shook his head; there was nothing to do.
“Friendlies report interception on bandit
formation, altitude six thousand, range ten miles.”
Bulky in his helmet and lifejacket, an LCT crewman came squeezing by, life belts draped over his arm. “Major, you got a belt? Here, just tie it on like this. Who else doesn’t have a belt? Hey, you, meathead! Ditch the cigarette! Anybody still think we’re havin’ a gorgeous fuckin’ evening?”
Through the vibrating deck plates Harry sensed a change in the pitch of the LCT’s engine, felt the craft pick up speed, crashing harder through the waves. Over the sound of the throbbing engine, GQ gongs and Klaxons went off on the other convoy vessels.
Ricks climbed up on the rear deck of Angstrom’s Sherman. “Don’t wait until you see them,” he advised. “The minute you see those destroyers putting up fire, let go!”
“Let go at what?” the nervous sergeant asked.
“Just let go. Put as much steel in their way as you can.”
“Range five miles. Bandits now at three thousand feet.”
“Out there at ten o’clock!” a spotter on the bridge called out. Ricks pointed up into the night sky to their left. Harry climbed up on the Sherman next to him and followed the lieutenant’s directing finger.
The night sky was patched with luminous, fluffy clouds, limned in moonlight. Flickers of light danced across the sky, lost speed, then arced slowly earthward, dying out before reaching the black sea.
“Tracers,” Ricks explained. “They’re duking it out with our fighters.”
The far clouds lit up briefly — a bright orange flash that dwindled into a smoldering fireball tumbling toward the water. A cheer went up from the bridge crew.
“Let’s hope it was one of theirs,” Ricks said quietly.
“Maybe they’ll get them all?” Harry asked.
Ricks smiled sadly. “Some’ll get through. Some always do.”
The LCT’s engine changed pitch again; the ship seemed to veer violently first to one side, then the other.
“He’s taking evasive action.” Ricks nodded at the Tannoy speaker, expecting an announcement.
“Heads up on deck! Bandits coming in!”
Harry followed Ricks as he leapt back into the darkness of the cargo well. They rejoined Kneece against the side of the well. From beyond the gunwales Harry saw gun flashes, then tracers spraying up into the sky from the escort destroyers that had positioned themselves between the convoy and the incoming attackers. Neither the hull of the LCT nor the growl of the vessel’s engine muted the chaos from the destroyers, an atonal symphony of pumping 40-mm cannon and clattering 20-mm guns. Then the anti-aircraft guns on the LST’s joined in: The blast of individual guns was drowned in a roar of fire. Flaring orange blossoms of flak burst so densely Harry couldn’t imagine anything airborne surviving.
“Start putting it up, Sarge!” Ricks called up to Angstrom.
The four.50-calibers on the tanks began their own staccato chatter. It echoed deafeningly within the metal confines of the well.
Harry risked a glance upward. He saw nothing in the night above him other than the hail of tracer fire, could hear no engines above the din. But then, low at first, then knifing through all the other noise… a scream.
Not human. Not mechanical. Something alien. Something designed for the sole purpose of adding the element of terror to impending death.
“Stukas!” Ricks hissed it as if it were a profanity.
The approaching whistle stabbed Harry with a cold pain in his bowels and he lowered himself to the deck with the other men, hunching in, his arms going round his legs as he curled himself into a ball because the scream told him I am hunting you… I am coming for you…
The scream of the Stuka grew louder, and he could feel the movements of the LCT grow sharper, as if the man at the helm, in his evasion, was growing more desperate.
Then, another sound, a soft, almost gentle high-pitched whistle detaching itself from the howling scream of the dive-bomber.
Harry’d suffered enough bombing raids in London to know the sound of a falling bomb, yet he’d never felt a gut-wrenching fear like this. He’d borne out the London raids in some kind of shelter: a cellar, an Underground, something. But here, there was no cellar to climb down into, no place to run. The level bombers that had devastated London made it seem a random process, but the Stuka had picked his ship, had sighted him — I am coming for you…
He looked up again. If you’re coming for me, I want to know.
In the flashes of the .50-calibers he spotted the frantic face of one gunner, his expression a mixture of raw terror and rabid hate. Another gunner hammered at the jammed bolt of his weapon. Behind him, Kneece crouched, his face also turned to the sky, his mouth agape, his eyes hypnotized by the macabre beauty of the tracers floating through the dark. Then above, a ghost of an image, something barely separated from the night by the moon glowing against the ugly broken-winged silhouette descending on them, its fixed landing gear outstretched like talons.
Harry heard other bombs whistling down among the convoy ships, the crash of their explosions, the hiss of displaced sea.
But the most frightening moment, the most terrifying sound, was the small voice coming from the dark well — he never found out whose — that muttered a resigned “Uh-oh.”
The roar of the detonation was deafening, so loud that Harry was sure the 1,100-pound bomb must have landed square in the cargo well. But then the ship dipped into a heavy starboard list, away from the blast, the deck canted so sharply that Harry and the others went skidding across the deck only moments before a cascade of seawater drenched down upon them.
Harry wasn’t sure if he’d lost consciousness or was simply so dazed that the next moments passed without registering. He found himself suddenly aware that the firing had died out across the fleet, and the voice on the Tannoy was ordering the tankers to cease sending tracers up into an empty sky.
“You OK, Major?” Kneece helped him to his feet. The same seaman who had distributed the life belts squeezed by, stopping periodically to flash a lantern at the hull and deck, sheltering the light with hand and body. The seaman turned to the bridge and cupped a hand to his mouth: “This looks like it all came in over the top! She’s still tight!”
Harry looked round for Ricks, and found him on one of the tank turrets helping the gunner with the jammed .30-caliber clear his weapon. Ricks clambered down to the deck. “Jesus, Major, you’re soaked to the bone. Let’s get you dried off before you catch your death of cold. That they don’t give Purple Hearts for.”
*
The placid, sapphire-blue bay set against the semicircle of white beach had once offered one of the most beautiful vistas in the Mediterranean. Buildings centuries old jostled with the new on a parade of bright stucco down the verdant inland hills to the bay, held back from the water by a tree-lined boulevard populated with touring cars and horse-drawn cabs.
There had been no pitched battle when Naples fell, but with Teutonic efficiency, the withdrawing Germans had seen to it that the Allies would be deprived of the city’s militarily prized assets. At the rail yards and at every siding, whatever rolling stock that had not been removed had been torched, the warehouses and service buildings alongside razed, the tracks blown up. The port had suffered even more grievously: demolition teams had been unleashed on dockside storehouses and cranes; merchant ships had been scuttled at the docks and throughout the bay to block Allied deep-draft cargo vessels.
These obstacles the Americans had addressed with characteristic ingenuity. Bridging equipment had been used to extend the harbor’s piers, running them hundreds of yards into the bay, even across the exposed decks of the ships the Germans had scuttled, their hulks serving as pilings, out to where the Liberty ships could safely moor. Nor had the Germans anticipated the tonnage of men and materiel that could be delivered directly onto the beach by LST’s and their smaller brethren. These devisings would suffice until the never-resting engineer units rehabilitated the city’s vitals.
Yet all this hivelike activity only degraded the city: Naples h
ad the unattractive bustle of a factory town — the bay choked with drab naval vessels; the piers and beach aswarm with engineers and cargo handlers; stores piled on the beach; the unending, unstopping parade of deuce-and-a-halfs and other vehicles trundling down the shorefront promenade carrying men and munitions to the battlefront some fifty miles north.
Harry’s LCT threaded its way past the ships riding at anchor in the bay and through the maze of scuttled merchantmen under the pall of a leaden sky. An unbroken blanket of dark clouds sent down a steady rain that sucked the color from even the once gemlike bay. The only break in the monochrome scheme was the crimson glow cast against the clouds by Vesuvius, a furnace-like radiation enhancing the factory-like grimness.
Harry sat with Ricks and Woody Kneece atop the turret of Irma’s Boys, each shrouded in a rain slicker Ricks had produced from his seabags, along with musettes for each of them containing extra rations. The lieutenant had one other item of equipment to add to their kits. He reached inside his rain gear and came up with two packets of prophylactics. He handed one to Kneece.
“Am I going to really need this?” the captain asked. “Doesn’t look like there’s much fun left in this town.”
Ricks tore open his own packet and rolled the pouch down over the muzzle of his Ml. “Keeps the rain out.” He then slowly began to peel the bandage from his injured eye.
“Should you be doing that?” Harry asked.
“This may not be the time,” Ricks answered, “but it is the place.”
The LCT skipper tooted his vessel’s air horn in salute to another landing craft passing by, heading away from shore. The LCIL — Landing Craft Infantry, Large — was another expanded version of a Higgins boat. A tarpaulin had been stretched across the top of the LCILs cargo well against the rain. Between the gap of gunwale and tarp, Harry saw an interior lit by Coleman lanterns. The deck of the cargo well was a solid carpet of men on stretchers, their myriad bandages bright in the lantern light. The LCIL was heading for a hospital ship anchored far out in the bay.