World War 2 In Review No. 6

By Merriam Press

Merriam Press World War 2 In Review Series

2023 eBook Edition

Coverage of a variety of subjects covering various aspects of World War II:

(1) Communist Guerrilla Warfare Against the Japanese: Base Area Utilization and Expansion

(2) “There Are Only Dead Men on the Bridge…”: Medal of Honor Recipient Lt. Comdr. Bruce McCandless

(3) General Alexander M. Patch: From the South Pacific to the Brenner Pass

(4) Fight Talk: General Cable Corporation in World War II

(5) 6th SS Mountain Division

(6) U.S. Submarine Losses in World War II

(7) U.S. Navy Submarine Badge

(8) Crossing the Rhine: The 5th Division at Oppenheim

(9) The ‘88’ with 20/20 Vision

(10) Allied Offensive Mining Campaign: Interrogation of Captain Kyuzo Tamura, IJN and Commander Binzo Sugita, IJN

(11) Anti-tank Artillery of the Red Army in Action

(12) Attack on a Fortified City: Brest Litovsk, Byelorussia, 1941

(13) One Man’s War: “Commando” Kelly

(14) Nachtjagdgeschwader 2

474 B&W and color photos and illustrations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387076055

Book preview

On the Cover

One Man's War: Commando Kelly

by Sergeant Charles E. Commando Kelly as told to Pete Martin

In September 1943, the Gulf of Salerno saw the initial important Allied landing on the Italian mainland. It was selected because it lay only thirty miles south of the big port of Naples, yet was still within protective fighter range of the newly conquered Allied bases in Sicily. Hoping to exploit Italy's surrender on 8 September, American and British forces went in the next day without preliminary bombardment. But the Germans were not surprised. Suspecting the defection of their dubious allies, Field Marshall Kesselring had waiting ashore the crack 16th Panzer Division, entrenched and alert.

Though eventually dislodged, German resistance kept the issue in doubt for almost a week. A GI's eye-view of the battle is told by one who was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits those first bloody days.

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Leaving the Salerno beach fifty feet behind me, I pumped my knees up and down in a sort of dog trot, moving straight ahead. That first rush took me past a dead GI, lying peacefully, as if asleep, with his head on his pack, his rifle by his side. I pulled my eyes away and told myself, Don't let that worry you.

Then came a big drainage ditch with GIs lying down inside of it. Come on! It ain't deep! Jump! I jumped, only to find the water and slime up to my eyes. The bottom was oozy; my feet sank into it, and I was weighted down by ammunition. I let go of my automatic rifle, but as soon as I dropped it, I felt lonely and lost, and ducked my head under to find it. Groping around, I got my hand on it. There was a small tree handy and, using one of its branches, I pulled myself out of the muck, and so to the other side.

There is no rhyme or reason to how the mind of a soldier in battle works. There I was charging into Italy, passing dead men and coming close to drowning in a ditch, and, after cleaning my rifle as best I could, all I could think about was whether or not the photographs in my wallet had been ruined.

I took them out, tried to wipe them off on the grass, and waved them back and forth to stir up a little air to dry them.

Machine gun bullets were boring into the ground in front of me and, at intervals, when the blup-blup of their impact came too close together, I hit the dirt. Those machine guns blazed away at us and mopped up our staff sergeant. He went down with bullets in his head.

I kept right on moving forward, and the next time I looked around to check my position, I was alone. The orders I'd heard back on shipboard had gone out of my mind. All I remembered was hearing somebody say, When you get on the beach, keep moving forward.

Hopping over a wall and following a little path, I jumped over another wall into a clump of thorn bushes. Machine gun bullets were streaking up and down the path I had just left, so I lay down in those bushes and played dead until the fire slackened. Finally I found a break through the thorns and, at the end of the break, a row of our men dug in. They were from two of our outfits, all mixed up together.

Once more, I started looking for my outfit. After a while I got tired of going along doubled up and stooping over, so I stood up and started walking. I decided I was thirsty, and stopped at a farmhouse well to get a drink. There were grapes and peaches around, and I stuffed some of them into me. I passed deserted farms and houses until they all ran together in my mind and I couldn't tell one from the other. Finally I figured I had walked about eight hours, and must be about twelve miles inland. Turning around, I saw a highway, and started to walk along it heading back in the direction from which I had come. Then, in the distance, German medium Mark IV tanks hove in sight. I dived into a ditch, squinted along my BAR—Browning automatic rifle—and began to fire as they came close, but the slugs from my gun made no impression on them. I was aiming at the tanks' slit openings, but there is so much noise and racket inside one of those things that the Heinies probably didn't hear me. They rumbled and clanked by, and I kept on walking down the highway, coming at last to a little creek, where I drank, took off my shoes and bathed my feet. My toes were stuck together from the sea water I'd waded through back at the Salerno beach. I washed my socks to get the salt out of them, and put the same socks back on, keeping my extra ones in reserve.

I put in about fifteen minutes trying to remember the things I was supposed to have had firmly fixed in my head when we landed on the beach. Finally I remembered what our detail was supposed to do. I could see the mountain Lieutenant O'Leary had told us about. He had called it Mountain Forty-two and we were supposed to take it. So I started toward it.

After climbing for a while, I came to a winery and found the first battalion of our regiment dug in there and all around it in the open fields. I wanted to ask them where my outfit was, but their trigger fingers were too itchy; they were shooting at sounds and dimly seen movements, and it wasn't any time to be dropping in unannounced to tear a social herring with them. So I dug in behind a bush and went to sleep.

It would have been nice to fill my canteen with water before I started again, but my canteen had picked up a bullet hole somewhere along the way. I hadn't known about that bullet before, although it must have given quite a jerk when it ripped through. I tried to rub the sleep from my eyes and walk down the highway. Both sides had infiltrated into and behind each other, so that you had to be on the alert each minute and watch every moving thing on each side of you.

German bullets were zipping around like high-velocity bees, but I finally found my outfit dug in, in scattered, shallow holes. They greeted me with, Where the hell have you been?

When I reported to Lieutenant O'Leary, he said, I was sure they'd got you.

Every once in a while a shell landed near us, but they didn't do any real damage.

After a time we started down the road, and ran into a little Italian boy, who said, Germans. Germans. Germans. My pal, La Bue, spoke to him in Italian, but the kid was frightened and didn't make much sense.

While La Bue was bickering with him, Lieutenant O'Leary shouted, Here come some Heinie scout cars! Get off the road!

We dived for cover and the scout cars opened fire. Bullets and fragments of shells bounced from our rifles, and two of us were hit. All of a sudden, one of our boys got his bazooka on his shoulder and let go with a tremendous, crashing Boom! and immediately afterward one of our men jumped up on a wall beside the road, leaped like a frog to the top of one of those panzer wagons and dropped his hand grenade into it. That particular scout car stopped then and there. The others speeded up, trying to get past us, when a company of our anti-tankers we hadn't seen up to that time went into action with its 57-mm cannon. It was chancy stuff, for if that 57-mm had missed its target, it would have gotten us. But as it was, everything worked out nice and clean and efficient. The bazooka kept on booming, and, quicker than it seemed possible, that whole small reconnaissance detachment was knocked out.

The place was a shambles. Scout cars were going up in flames. Tires were burning with a rubbery stink, and bodies were burning too. One German leaped out and started to run. When we went after him, he put his revolver to his head and killed himself. We had thought that only the Japs did that, and for a moment I was surprised and shocked.

Then a deep-rooted GI habit asserted itself. A moment before, hell had been popping on that stretch of road. Now, two seconds later, all we thought of was souvenirs. Milky Holland found a German Luger. Looking back at it, I can remember no feeling about the German dead except curiosity. We were impersonal about them; to us they were just bundles of rags.

About two hours afterward, things were so quiet that some of us sneaked off into the nearby town, but we weren't relaxed and casual, and we took our rifles and sidearms with us. The townspeople were out waving at us and offering us water, wine and fruit. La Bue, a kid named Survilo and I had a yen to see the inside of an Italian jail. A woman had told us it was where they kept the Fascist sympathizers. The leading Fascist citizen of the town was in there, mad as blazes and yelling his head off behind the bars. La Bue listened to him for a while, then got mad himself and tried to reach through the bars and tickle him with the end of a bayonet. The Fascist really sounded off then.

When we came out, we saw some pretty Italian girls. La Bue made a date with one of them—the procedure following the same line as if we had been back in Pittsburgh's North Side. He asked her if she could get a couple of friends for us. Smiling, she said she could, and, feeling that we had accomplished something important, we went back to our bivouac.

But, just as they sometimes do in the North Side of Pittsburgh, our plans laid an egg. Platoon Sergeant Zerk Robertson pointed to a town named Altavilla, five or six miles away, and said, See that town over there? That's where I'm going, and I want some volunteers to go with me. I'm taking the second platoon and some sixty-millimeter mortars. La Bue looked at me, and I looked at him, and we thought of our dates, but there wasn't anything we could do about it, and presently we were walking out along the highway.

When we came close to Altavilla, along came an Italian, and three of our Italian-speaking boys—Gatto, La Bue and Survilo—talked to him. The Italian didn't seem to know where the Germans were or whether they were in the town or not, but we took what he had to tell us with a cupful of salt. The day before we had made our invasion, Italy had surrendered. We had got the news on the ship, but we had been told not to believe it, for our officers didn't want us to feel relaxed and spoil the fighting edge we had worked up.

The Altavillans were all out shaking hands with us and telling us they came from St. Louis or Brooklyn or other towns and cities all over the United States. They kept saying, I speaka Engleesh, and bringing out bottles of wine and glasses. But we didn't have much time for that; we were busy trying to find places to set up our weapons.

Then Captain Laughlin called me over and said that there were a lot of five-gallon cans of water and cases of ammunition stacked around, and he wanted me to pick them up and carry them into the mayor's house—a big, solidly built, very beautiful building. But first of all, he wanted me to be sure that the house was free of Germans. We checked every room on the first floor, leaving a man in each room. Then I went up the stairs, and found a girl ducked down under some blankets on a bed. I pulled the blankets back and motioned for her to get out. She slipped into a dress and a pair of slippers, meantime yelling her head off as if convinced nothing good could come of meeting me. Still yelling, she went downstairs to join her family.

Men began hauling ammunition in through the door and setting up machine guns in the courtyard and in the windows. Before it grew dark, we had changed that building into a fortress-arsenal. When guards were placed, I drew the outside steps for my post.

The town was on the slope of a hill at the bottom of which was a road that led to the sea and the beach some ten miles away. The mayor's house fronted on the town square, and both were in the uphill half of the town, near its outskirts and overlooking the road. Off in the distance a half mile away across a valley was another hill. During the battle, the Germans came down this hill and also down the slopes of the hill on which the town was located.

Next morning just as I went inside to eat, machine guns on a nearby hill let us have it. They had a beautiful field of fire and knocked out one of our machine guns in the courtyard. Slugs ripped into the gun crew and, ricocheting from the gun, went screaming away. The gun itself was sticky with blood and had small nicks in it where the bullets had bitten into its metal. The men who had manned it lay around dead.

A lieutenant had borrowed my rifle the day before. I had picked two or three since then, but now I didn't have a gun. I felt naked without it, and going upstairs to look for one, I found a BAR lying there. I also found a pair of field glasses and, kneeling at a window, I could see men walking on Hill 315. The fire directed at us was coming from that hill, so I knew the men on it must still be Germans. I loaded my gun, waited a second to make sure my aim was true, and fired. When I picked up the field glasses again and took a look, three of the men who had been moving before were lying still. A fourth, who had fallen into a foxhole, was still moving one foot, so I upped with the BAR and let it chatter once more. When I peered through the glasses, that foot slowly straightened out and lay flat on the ground.

It seemed as if the noise and shooting and the business of people getting wounded had been going on for days, when we realized suddenly that we were as empty as drums. Once we let ourselves think about it, we were as hungry as curly wolves, and we went through the piled-up cases of food, looking for cocoa and biscuits. We got out our canteen cups, made cocoa in them and dunked the biscuits in the sweet, chocolaty stuff, but I couldn't give my mind over to it.

A GI plunked himself down at a window next to mine, and we spotted Jerry machine guns in the distance. I had luck then. Every time I'd duck down to load my BAR, the Jerry machine gun went into action. When I popped up ready to squirt lead, Jerry was busy loading. The machine gun next to me, however, was jinxed. Its gunner got it through the shoulder, and the mournful cry of Medico! Medico! started. There was a whole chorus of people crying for medicos in the other rooms.

Somebody brought in two German prisoners. We stripped them and checked everything they had. One of them had a bag with papers in it which showed he had been in the Army nine years. One of our boys spoke German and did a translation job. The Heinie told us he had been married just before he joined up and had seen his wife only twice in nine years. For the first time since I had been in the war, I felt sorry for a German. That was a brutal way to treat any man, even a German. He told us he and the other Germans with him had been brought down to Italy for a rest, but they had decided by this time that somebody had lied to them about that. The other German turned out to be a doctor, and he started to help us with our wounded. That Kraut doc knew his trade. In no time at all, he was fixing up two of our wounded to every one our own medico was repairing.

I had shot my BAR so steadily that when I put the next magazine load of cartridges in it, it wouldn't work anymore. I laid it against a bed, went into another room to get another BAR, and when I got back, the bed was on fire. That first gun was so hot that it touched the bed off like tinder. I worked the new BAR until the steel of