The sea has been smooth during the whole thing. Any storm would have made it more difficult, but the sea has been kind to us. It is as slick as silk and littered for many miles with little twinkling C-ration cans floating in the sea and glittering under the sun. The water is oily, too, and there are bits of wreckage floating everywhere and all the garbage of this huge fleet, the crates and cans and bottles and debris that men have the ability to scatter about.
Near shore the cruisers and battleships continue to fire, but now their guns are elevated and they fire over the mountains at targets unseen from the sea.
The command ship lies protected in the middle of the invasion fleet. She is a floating radio station. From her all the orders have gone out and to her all the news has come in. And the staffs are brutally tired. This has not been the usual thing. The command ship has been bombed at constantly. Her crew has been alerted every half-hour in the twenty-four. The bugle is blown and then the boatswain’s pipe over the loudspeaker and then the crackling horn that means battle stations. Then tired staff officers have taken off their helmets and their lifebelts and made for the deck for their assigned stations, while the anti-aircraft roared over their heads and the bombs came down and burst the water into the air.
Not many German planes have got through the air cover, but some have and nearly every one was after the command ship. They have straddled her with bombs. There have been near misses that jerked her in the water and it is a wonder her plates aren’t sprung.
And this has been going on for four days. No one has had any sleep. What has made it even worse, the Jerry planes have been talking to each other on their radios and not bothering to code their messages. They have been looking for this particular ship and aiming for her. They know that if they get this ship they may get the controlling brains of the whole operation.
There are very tired colonels and generals on board, waiting for the order to go ashore and establish headquarters. They will feel much better when they are ashore. It is not nice to be aboard the target of the whole fleet. But the command ship has not been hit. Other ships about her have been blasted, but not the command. The feeling aboard has been that the luck is getting pretty thin and that the next one must get her.
Meanwhile, the litter spreads out to sea on little currents. There will be C-ration cans come ashore for a thousand miles. The litter will coat the shores of Italy.
What has made the command ship’s life even more lively is that the Germans have a new bomb. At least, that is the rumor. This bomb is released and then controlled from the plane. It is directed by radio, and if it seems about to miss it can be turned by its master. At least that is what is said. And surely these bombs do not seem to act like other ones. They come down more slowly, and they glow as they come, with something like a phosphorescence that you can even see in the daytime.
When the red signal for an air attack goes out, the destroyers move in circles, belching smoke, and the small smoke carriers dart busily among the big ships, trailing ribbons of white, choking smoke which smells like sulphur. The little boats weave in and out, until they have covered the fleet with their artificial fog. The sound of coughing is deafening. At least it is until the anti-aircraft starts. And then, through the smoke, you hear the deep blow of the bombs. They don’t sound like anything else. And their explosions come through the water and strike the ship. You can feel them in your feet.
The endless lines of landing craft go ashore, carrying the supplies for men who are lying off in the bushes on the forward lines. Cases of food and tons of shells and cartridges. A hell of them lines the shore, waiting to be transported inland.
And the battle line has moved up. The beach is taken now and the invasion moves ahead. The white hospital ships move inshore to take on their cargoes.
PALERMO
SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN THEATER, October 1, 1943—The sea off Sicily was running in long, smooth waves without whitecaps and the day was bright and the sea that Mediterranean blue that is unlike any other blue in the world. The PT boat ground its way through, making a great churned wake and taking even what little sea there was over the bow. It’s the wettest boat of all, the torpedo boat. The crew, in their rubber clothes, huddled on the deck trying to keep out of the constant spray, and on each side of the bridge the machine-gunners, at their stations, sat in their turrets behind their guns and the water glistened on their faces. The cartridge cases of the .50-caliber shells were green from contact with the sea water.
Off to the right a body was floating in the sea, rising and falling on the long waves. It was pretty swollen, and the brown lifebelt and collar made it float high in the water.
The captain was dressed in a bathing suit and he was barefooted. The First had a rubber coat on but his trousers were rolled up and his feet were bare, too. The two of them looked off across the port torpedo tube at the floating body.
“Should we go over and take a look?” the First said.
“Not in the shape it’s in,” the captain said. “Besides, we have to make our schedule.”
The first said, “I think that’s the loneliest thing in the world. A body floating at sea. I don’t know anything that looks so alone.”
The captain let go his hold on the torpedo tube and turned and held onto the rail behind the port gun turret. “Before you came on I had one that gave me the willies,” he said. He broke abruptly into his story.
“After Palermo fell,” he said, “there was a night and a part of a day before the Seventh Army got to the city. I was on patrol with five PTs and we got the flash and we were in the neighborhood anyway, so we came to take a look. You know what Palermo looks like. That great, big, strong mountain right beside the city and the crazy lights that get on it and then the city spilled down there at the base. It looks like Ulysses has just left there. You can really get the sense of Virgil from that mountain, from the whole northern coast of Sicily, for that matter. It just stinks of the classics.
“Anyway, it was fairly late in the afternoon when we came opposite the city and crept in next to the mole and sneaked through. We were fixed to run if anything shot at us, but nothing did. We went into the harbor and it was really shot to pieces. There were ships sunk all over and twisted cranes and one little Italian destroyer lying over on its side.
“The Air Force really did a job on the waterfront there. Buildings and docks and machinery and boats just blasted into junk. What a junkman’s dream that was! What made me think of it was that the water was oily from the blasted ships and there was a dead woman floating on the oily water, face down and with her hair fanned out and floating behind her. She bobbed up and down when our wake spread out in the harbor.
“At first,” the captain said, “I didn’t know what gave me a queer feeling and then it came to me. There wasn’t anybody moving about on the shore at all. You take a wrecked city, why, there’s usually someone poking around. But not here. I got the idea I’d like to go ashore. So the First I had then and I, we pulled up between two wrecked fishing boats and we got out a tommy gun apiece and we tied up and jumped ashore.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine. Palermo is a pretty big city. Except for the harbor and the waterfront, our bombers hadn’t hurt it very much. Oh, there were some wrecks, but not to amount to anything. I tell you, there wasn’t one living soul in that city. The population moved right out into the hills and the troops hadn’t come yet. There wasn’t a soul.
“You’d walk up a street where there were big houses and the doors would be open and—just not anybody. I did see a cat go streaking across the street, a pure white cat, but that’s the only living thing there was.