Once There Was A War by John Steinbeck

There were sets like those in a Hollywood studio in the old silent days, wooden fronts and tall and short build­ings with open windows and little streets between, and there the men learned how to crouch on a corner and how to slink under the cover of walls. They learned with practice grenades how to blast out a machine gun set up in a building. It was strange to see them rehearsing, as though for a play. It went on for weeks.

And when they had become used to the method and when they reacted almost instinctively, they were taken finally to the Mediterranean beaches, the long, white beaches, which are not very unlike the beaches at Salerno. The water is incredibly blue there and the beaches are white. And the water is very salty. You float like a cork on it. On the beaches they practiced with real landing barges. The teams put out to sea and then turned and made runs for the shore and the iron ramps clattered down and the men rushed ashore and crept and wriggled their way up to the line of the shore where the grapevines began, for there are vineyards in Italy, too.

When they had practiced a little while, machine guns with live ammunition fired over their heads, but not very far over their heads, to give them a real interest in keep­ing low.

Now in larger groups they rushed in from the sea and charged up into the vines and crept up through the vine­yards and moved inland. An amazing number of men can disappear into a vineyard so that you can’t see them at all.

The dark Algerian grapes were ripe and as they crawled the men picked the grapes and ate them and the incidence of GI dysentery skyrocketed, but there is no way of keep­ing a dusty, thirsty man from eating ripe grapes, partic­ularly if they are hanging right over his head, when he lies under the vines.

Over and over again they captured this little sector and climbed up and captured the heights. They had to learn to do it in the daytime because when they would really do it it would be in the dark of the early morning. But when the training for each day was finished, the men went back to the beaches and took off their clothes and played in the water. The water was warm and delightful and the salt stung their eyes. Their bodies grew browner day by day until they were only a little lighter than the Arabs.

At night they were very tired and there is not much to do in Africa after dark anyway. No love is lost for the Arabs. They are the dirtiest people in the world and among the smelliest. The whole countryside smells of urine, four thousand years of urine. That is the characteristic smell of North Africa. The men were not allowed to go into the native cities because there was a great deal of disease and besides there are too many little religious rules and prejudices that an unsuspecting dogface can run afoul of. And there wasn’t much to buy and what there was cost too much. The prices have skyrocketed on the coming of the troops.

The men slept in their pup tents and drew their mosquito nets over them and scratched and cursed all night until, after a time, they were too tired to scratch and curse and they fell asleep the moment they hit the blankets. Their minds and their bodies became machine-like. They did not talk about the war. They talked only of home and of clean beds with white sheets and they talked of ice water and ice cream and places that did not smell of urine. Most of them let their minds dwell on snow banks and the sharp winds of Middle Western winter. But the red dust blew over them and crusted their skins and after a while they could not wash it all off any more. The war had narrowed down to their own small group of men and their own job. It would be a lie to suggest that they like being there. They wish they were somewhere else.

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, October 1, 1943—Week after week the practice of the invasion continued, gathering impetus as the day grew nearer. Landing operations and penetrations, stealthy approaches and quick charges. The whole thing gradually took on increased speed as the day approached.

The roads back of the coast were crowded with staff cars dashing about. The highways were lined with trucks full of the incredible variety of war material for the invasion of Italy. There are thousands of items necessary to a modern army and, because of the complexity of supply, a modern army is a sluggish thing. Plans, once made, are not easily changed, for every move of combat troops is paralleled by hundreds of moves behind the lines, the moves of food and ammunition, trucks that must get there on time. If the whole big, sluggish animal does not move with perfect cooperation, it is very likely that it will not move at all. Modern warfare is very like an automobile assembly line. If one bolt in the whole machine is out of place or not available, the line must stop and wait for it. Improvisation is not very possible.

And all over in the practice zones in North Africa the practice went on to make sure that every bolt would be in its place. The men went on field rations to get used to them. Canteens must always be full, but full of the evil-tasting, disinfected water which gets your mouth wet but gives you very little other pleasure.

While the men went through their final training on the beaches the implements of war were collecting for their use. In huge harbors, whose names must not be mentioned, transports and landing craft of all kinds were accumulat­ing. They crept up to the piers and opened the doors in their noses and took on their bellyfuls of tanks and loaded tracks and then slipped out and sat at anchor and waited for the “D” day at the “H” hour, which very few in the whole Army knew.

On the freighters cranes slung full-loaded tracks and laden two-and-a-half-ton “ducks,” which are perhaps America’s real secret weapon of this war. The “ducks,” big tracks which lumber down the beaches and enter the water and become boats, or the boats which, coming loaded to the beach, climb out, and drive as tracks along the dusty roads.

In the harbors the accumulations of waiting ships col­lected, tank-landing craft and troop-landing craft of all kinds. The barges, which ran up on the beaches and disgorge their loads and back off and go for more. And on the piers Arab workers passed the hundreds of thou­sands of cases of canned rations to the lighters and the lighters moved out and filled the ships with food for the soldiers. The fleets accumulated until they choked the harbor.

Now the enemy knew what was going on. They had to know. The operation was too great for them not to know. They sent their planes over the harbor to try to bomb the gathering fleets and they were driven off and destroyed by the protecting Beaufighters and P-38s. They did not succeed in doing damage, for finally the enemy had lost control of the skies and the fleets could load at least in peace.

But at night they tried to get through and the flak rose up at them, like all the Fourth of Julys in history, the ships and the shore batteries put up a wall of fire against the invading planes so that some of them unloaded their bombs in the open countryside and some of them exploded with their own bombs and some went crashing into the sea. But they had lost control.

Now “D” day was coming close and at headquarters the officers collected and held conference after conference and there was a growing tautness in the whole organiza­tion. Staff officers dashed in to their briefs and rushed back to their units to brief those under them. It would have been easy to know how close the time had come by the tempo, and then suddenly it was all done and a curious quiet settled on the whole invasion force.

Somewhere an order passed and in the night the ships began to move out to the places of rendezvous. And in the night the columns of men climbed into trucks and the trucks came down the piers to the ships, and the men, like ants, crawled on the ships and sat down on their equipment. And the troopships slipped out to the ren­dezvous to wait for the moment to leave.

It was no start with bugles and flags or cheering men. The radios crackled their coded orders. Messages went from radio rooms to the bridges of the ships. The word was passed to the engine rooms and the great convoys put out to sea.