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Excerpt from Chapter 5:
Cerignola, Italy
In 1492 Christopher Columbus became the first Italian-born man to set foot in the New World. Over the 450 years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Italians came to America in his wake. From 1943 to 1945, a million and more Americans, many from Italian-American families, others whose parents or grandparents or ancestors had been born elsewhere in Europe or in Asia or Africa, came to Italy. They were mainly young men, overwhelmingly in the armed services of the United States. They came not to settle and start a new life, not to conquer, but to undertake an air offensive against Germany and its satellites, to drive the German occupiers from Italy, to liberate the country and allow it to choose its own government.
They came to the mainland right after the Italians had overthrown Benito Mussolini, but evidence of his two-decade rule was all about them. Italy was in ruins. Mussolini was no Hitler or Stalin, but he was nevertheless a disaster for North Africa and a catastrophe for Italy. He had turned a country of skilled artisans and expert farmers, full of so much life and spirit and art and fine food and wine as to be an object of envy to much of the rest of the world, into a country virtually without young men, a country that made almost nothing, a country on the verge of widespread starvation. He had gathered up nearly all the young men and forced them into his army, which he hoped against all reason would make Italy into a major power. By 1943 it was a country of old men, women, and children, almost all of them hungry, ill-clad, suffering medically and in nearly every other way. The American servicemen had grown up believing that Italy was poor, a place to escape from, but they had no idea until they arrived that Mussolini had made the country destitute.
What Mussolini had not done, the Germans did. In their retreat north after the Allied invasion of the mainland in September 1943, the Germans had taken with them damn near everything -- virtually all food, wine, vehicles of every type whether horse-drawn or machine-powered or pushcart, artworks, whatever they could carry.
* * *
One afternoon in September 1944, George McGovern and his shipmates arrived in Naples harbor. From the deck they could see dozens of little boys lined up on the wharf, holding out their hands and yelling in broken English, "Babe Ruth," or "Hershey Bars," or "gum." Just as the Americans began to reach into their pockets, the ship's loudspeaker came alive and the captain said, "Now look, nobody throw anything to these children. These kids are starving and a couple of days ago an American ship came in here and the soldiers started throwing candy bars and the kids jumped into the water to get some and several of them drowned. We don't want to repeat that. We came to help these people, not to drown their kids. Don't throw anything. I mean anything." McGovern recalled them as "spindly-legged kids with pale faces," and he admitted, "This was my first exposure to people on the edge of starvation." Outside Naples that night, in an AAF base, he could hear "mothers scrounging around in the garbage cans looking for scraps of food that they could take home to their kids."
The American soldiers had come out of the Depression. Many of them had been deprived. But none of them had ever known anything like this. To the Italians, they were incredibly rich. Their uniforms were far better than those of the Italian army and much superior to those of the German army. They had what seemed to be unbelievable quantities of food, gasoline, weapons, trucks, jeeps, airplanes, tents, medical supplies, cameras, money, movies and projectors, and more.
The newly arrived Americans were discovering the vast difference between their country and others, even their closest ally, Great Britain. Lt. Roland Pepin, assigned as navigator to the same 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group as McGovern had been, also came to Italy by ship, but Pepin's "rusty old tub" had deposited his crew in Tunis, where they transferred to a British luxury liner for the journey across the Mediterranean to Naples. That sounded nice, and it was -- for the officers, not for the enlisted men. Pepin found that "the British have an entirely different approach than us to the separation of officers and enlisted men." As an officer, he was in a stateroom with one other man "with all the luxury usually granted first-class passengers." The enlisted men were in the bowels of the ship packed like sardines, sleeping in hammocks. Sanitary facilities for the enlisted "were a disgrace, causing a stench that was inhumane."
* * *
McGovern, Pepin, and the hundreds of other AAF reinforcements and replacements boarded trucks for the drive across Italy, almost straight east to the airfield some five miles outside Cerignola, about twenty miles southwest of Foggia. Cerignola was reputed to have been a center for Mussolini's Fascist party and had become a place of refuge for Italians fleeing the frequent Allied bombing of Foggia. Before the war it had been a town of 25,000 but by 1944 it contained about twice that, none of them young men. The name Cerignola meant land of cereals, and it was thus the origin of the word "Cheerios." It grew hard wheat, the best in Italy and possibly the best in the world for making pasta. The Romans stored the wheat in the ground, silos in reverse. They covered the holes with wood that kept the water out when it rained. There are still 600 such storage places in and around Cerignola today, all with Roman numbers on them. According to local people, this is the only place in the world where hard grain was preserved in this way. Mussolini, however, had sapped Cerignola's resources for his army and in 1944 one could not tell that it once had been a major agriculture center for the Romans. Although it was generally flat and fertile, with plenty of rain, by 1944 almost nothing was cultivated there. The olive trees were neglected. The people were even worse off.
An AAF medical officer wrote a description: "The town was a reservoir of malaria, venereal disease and dysentery with flies and mosquitoes to insure spread. The streets were filled with pot-bellied bambinos openly defecating in emulation of their elders because there was no sewer system or toilets. They ate food when they could get it on the black market obtained from fly-infested fruit stands and vermin-filled butcher shops where rotten meat was the rule. There were no medicines, the death rate among children was appalling, the splenic index was 40 per cent and malaria was a children's disease -- all the adults had it long since. Avitaminosis, tuberculosis, and frank starvation were everywhere. The only music to be heard was the sound of a passing funeral, and that band had a full-time job."
Cerignola was an ancient city. On June 29, 1863, its modern cathedral had its first stone placed as the American Civil War was being fought, even as Robert E. Lee's army was marching into Pennsylvania for what would be the battle of Gettysburg. The cathedral's dome stood out. Pilots could see it from ten miles away. "Many times I was reassured that I was on course when that dome loomed up ahead of us," McGovern recalled. It is still there in the twenty-first century, upgraded and active.
Nearby were the ancient ruins of Cannae, site of one of the most famous battles ever fought. In 216 B.C. Hannibal of Carthage set up his base at Cerignola, because of the grain stored there. Eleven miles away, at Cannae, Hannibal's force encircled Roman troops that outnumbered his army by two to one and, in a single afternoon, destroyed them. Most of the Americans had never seen a building as much as a hundred years old nor a battlefield that went back as far as the mid-eighteenth century, much less two millennia. One AAF pilot of the 456th Bomb Group, Lt. Robert S. Capps, was so intrigued by Cannae that he visited the site and later wrote a biography of Hannibal.
When the Germans retreated and the British Eighth Army swept past, the people of Cerignola hoped they were out of the war. They were not. In January 1944, when the AAF arrived to transform the area around Cerignola into a major airfield, an incredible storm of activity began. Massive numbers of ground support vehicles and huge amounts of matériel arrived. There were more than 2,000 young men at the base from the 455th and the 456th Bomb Groups. Army olive-drab tent cities sprang up among the olive groves, along with massive amounts of ground support equipment, fuel, bombs, ammunition, food, medicines, and other supplies, which continued to arrive daily. The people of Cerignola began to learn about the way Americans made war. They had never seen anything to match it.
Lt. Colonel Horace W. Lanford, twenty-five years old, was the first commander of the 741st Bomb Squadron. He arrived in Cerignola early in 1944. At that time the town was only sixty miles south of the front lines. The airfield, bombed by the Fifteenth Air Force in 1943 and then abandoned by the Germans, was in poor condition. The group had sixty-four B-24s; Lanford had flown in with them. There were no hard stands (parking ramps), so the group had to line up the bombers either wingtip to wingtip or nose to tail on what little runway there was. Still, the pilots managed to take off and land. On their early missions, to help morale on the stalemated beachhead at Anzio on the western coast of Italy, the Cerignola-based bombers formed up with other groups. The B-24s and B-17s flew directly over the beachhead to let the American infantry see their awesome power. Lanford remembered it as "an exciting, unforgettable sight." The bombers stretched "as far as you could see in front and as far as you could see in back."
To provide adequate space and runways for the B-24s and B-17s, the Americans brought in bulldozers. They leveled what had once been wheat fields. Engineers laid down steel matting for the 4,800- foot runway, and made taxiways and hard stands. They did not bother to make hangars -- all maintenance, repairs, and other work on the bombers was done in the open, from the first and until the end of the war.
The 456th Bomb Group had confiscated an old farm building to use as headquarters. There were two brick buildings used as air crew briefing rooms and navigators' and bombardiers' study rooms.
The 455th Bomb Group had its headquarters on the other side of the runway. It had been part of a nobleman's estate but was sadly neglected. Group headquarters was located in a farm animal stable, which was also used for briefing the crews for the combat missions. The building, made of stone with no windows, had sunk into the ground. The men had to clean out manure that had been accumulating for years, and fight off the fleas as they were working. The briefing room was later also used as a movie theater.
Lanford, commanding the 741st, won the right to a barn in a coin flip with the commander of the 743rd. It had two big bays and an aviary on top. Next to it was a small storage building, which went to the 743rd. For the 741st, Lanford made an officers club in one of the bays and an airmen's club out of the other, "after clearing out tons of junk." In the aviary, Lanford knocked off the bird perches and sealed the holes and cleaned up the interior, painted it, and built a ladder to climb up to it. The aviary thus became the quarters for Lanford and five other officers.
At first, the enlisted men in the 741st slept in the big plywood boxes that lined the bomb bays in which baggage was placed in the B-24s for the flight over to Italy. "You can't imagine those living conditions," Lanford said. The only tent was used as a mess tent. The men had to stand in line to have their mess kit filled, and when it rained, as it often did, they had to run for cover. Lanford hired local labor to put up a mess hall made of stone. In the process, he learned that one of the residents was reporting on what went on at the airfield to the Germans. One night during construction, the German propaganda broadcaster nicknamed Axis Sally by the Americans -- who liked to listen to her program because she played American music -- said, "We see you down there, 741st Squadron, building your mess hall. You'll never get to use it, we'll bomb it before it's complete." The Germans never did bomb it. (The base was defended by a British antiaircraft gun crew, as Cerignola was in the British Eighth Army area.)
Axis Sally seemed to know everything. Radio operator Sgt. Robert Hammer was in the 742nd Squadron. Once in the spring of 1944 his squadron, nicknamed the "Checkerboards" because of their tail insignia, was on a mission when two ME 109s went after a straggler that had lost an engine. The pilot of the bomber ordered the crew to lower the landing gear as a sign of surrender. The ME 109s came in close to escort the B-24 to a landing field, one off each wing. The pilot told the crew to open fire. They knocked both fighters down and the pilot returned to base safely. That night, Axis Sally declared that the Checkerboard B-24s would thereafter be the top priority of the German fighters. The squadron changed its insignia several times, but the Germans kept after it. Hammer said that the Germans had "fantastic intelligence reports. Berlin radio would tell us where we were going even before we got off the ground."
* * *
In early 1944, Lt. Robert Capps arrived to join the 744th Squadron. "We were deposited on bare, damp ground in olive groves. We were instructed to pitch tents on the hard, moist ground like Boy Scouts. The olive groves became muddy quagmires from rain mixed with human activity." The men anchored the pyramidal tents by ropes attached to the olive trees. There was one tent for the three or four officers and another for the six enlisted men, side by side. They slept on fold-up cots with either two wool blankets or a sleeping bag for cover. The men made mattresses by packing straw into cloth mattress covers, but the straw had insects in it, which led to bites.
If a man touched the inside of the tent while it was raining, the tent leaked. It was cold -- it snowed more than once in the winter
of 1944-1945 -- so the inhabitants applied a bit of Yankee ingenuity by rigging a stove from a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, cut in half. The fuel was gasoline, fed into the stove through a makeshift plumbing device from another, full drum outside. It was a drip-by-drip method. The men cut a little door at the bottom of the stove for ventilation. If the stove got too hot it burned too high and soot would build up in the smokestack and ignite, sending hot sparks out the chimney, then down onto the tent. The holes caused other leaks.
The floor was mud. To make it livable, the men would build a concrete floor, assisted by hired Italian labor. First they put down crushed rock, then topped it with a layer of concrete. Bill Rounds, who shared a tent with McGovern and Sam Adams, wrote in his diary, "We sleep in tents, no lights or running water." Soon there were lights -- a single bulb hanging in the center -- and by December 4, 1944, Rounds could write in his diary, "Our tent is now in good shape -- good stove -- clothes rack and front door."
McGovern, Rounds, and Adams's tent was located near two of the more elaborate tents that were occupied by veterans who were close to the end of the thirty-five missions required to go home. McGovern met one of the pilots for the first time when he and Rounds went for a joy ride in a "liberated" jeep. Rounds was driving, at high speed. He flew down the "street" between the tents, turned a corner on two wheels, caught one of the ropes from the veterans' tent, and the ensuing rip tore the tent in half. The stove, uniforms on hangers, shelves of books, magazines, and photographs, all flew into the olive grove. Climbing out of the jeep, McGovern saw an aging pilot "with heavy circles under his eyes who had to be at least twenty-five" walking over to the vehicle. His name, McGovern found out later, was Capt. Howard Surbeck. His voice quaking with rage, Surbeck said, "You two sons-of-bitches will never make it through combat. I should kill you right now." Rounds and McGovern spent the rest of the day putting up a new tent for him. "So," McGovern recalled with a laugh, "that's the way I broke into the 741st Squadron area."
Rounds was nonetheless unstoppable in his practical jokes. One night shortly after the incident with the jeep he rolled a fifty-five-gallon drum of fuel oil into the middle of the squadron area, set it on fire, and shouted, "Enemy raid!" There were cries of panic and anguish all around, except from Rounds, who was laughing.
Adams was different, a capable, highly conscientious technician. He wanted only to do his part in winning the war, then get back to Milwaukee as quickly as possible to begin his studies to become a minister. He and McGovern talked, almost always it seemed, about everything. Adams spent what idle hours he had writing long letters home, cleaning his equipment, reading, or simply lying on his cot, thinking. McGovern also did a lot of reading and writing letters to Eleanor. After he began flying in combat, he always put in a number, which seemed innocent enough to the censors, but each one was the number of missions he had flown. Eleanor knew that thirty-five was the magic number -- when George had completed thirty-five missions he could come home.
Those who arrived in the summer or fall of 1944 were assigned to tents already in place. This had its good points, but one notable drawback as well. Frequently, the tent had belonged to a crew that had been shot down. When pilot Lt. Donald Kay of the 465th Bomb Group arrived in Cerignola, he heard those who were already there call out, "You'll be sorry!" He and his crew took over the tents that had been those of a Lieutenant Greenwood and his crew, who had been shot down two days before Kay's arrival.
* * *
The food may have been the envy of the people of Cerignola, but it was never close to the standards the Yanks were accustomed to eating. Powdered eggs were the breakfast staple, served in various forms, often scrambled. But no matter what was done with the eggs, most of them ended up in the garbage can. There were pancakes, made from flour and the powdered eggs. They looked like and had the consistency of a Frisbee. The Army-issued "tropical butter" was treated to prevent spoilage under any imaginable circumstance, so it was too hard to melt, no matter what was tried. The bread was fresh, baked on the site by the cooks, but it was coarse and suitable only for French toast -- again made with powdered eggs. Sometimes there was oatmeal, but it was on the rubbery side and Lieutenant Pepin of the 741st was convinced "that what wasn't consumed was used to repair the planes, as it was gooey and sticky enough to be useful."
At noon and in the evening, there was canned food -- stewed prunes, hash heated in garbage cans, and meat, which was mostly Spam, called "mystery meat." Like nearly every serviceman in the armed forces of the United States, the AAF men at Cerignola came to hate the sight of Spam. This was true even at the very top. After the war, General Eisenhower met the president of the Hormel company and thanked him for the Spam, then added, with a grin, "But did you have to send us so much of it?" One writer in the 455th -- calling himself "Anon" -- commented: "For breakfast the cooks will fry it. At dinner it is baked. For supper they have it paddy caked. Next morning it's with flapjacks. Where the hell do they get it all, they must order it by kegs!...SPAM in stew. SPAM in pies, and SPAM in boiling grease!"
At Cerignola, the alternative to Spam was canned Vienna sausages. After a month of eating them, one of the men tacked a proposal on the squadron ready-room door, offering to stop bombing Vienna if its people would stop sending their sausages.
Lieutenant Shostack had flown 2,500 cases of K rations in his B-24 to Cerignola, and had discovered that nobody wanted it. So he put the cases into his tent and whenever he could he would take ten boxes of them into town, go to what passed for a restaurant, "and trade them for an Italian spaghetti dinner." The spaghetti sauce had no meat in it "but the Italians had great tomato sauce and a bottle of cheap wine to go with the meal."
Whenever weather prevented a mission, which happened often, some of the men would try to break the monotony at the base by going into town. The AAF sent in a truck every half hour or so, which would then wait at an intersection so guys going back had a ride. There was a Red Cross club across the street from the cathedral, with a movie theater for the Americans, a pool table, books, and cards.
The men had ample money. They were paid in Allied military currency, which at one penny to the lira was the legal tender for occupied Italy. The exchange rate was more than favorable. Skilled Italian laborers, those who helped put in the concrete floors or worked on the runway or elsewhere, were paid 75 lira a day. Unskilled laborers received 50 lira a day. A haircut in town was 7 lira. A shave cost the same. To the initial surprise of the Yanks, there were barbers all along the streets, usually small boys with straight razors. Lt. Donald Currier noted that "as poor as the people were, many of the Italian old men went to the barber for their shave every day. It was a male ritual." For a hot bath -- unavailable at the base -- the men went to a public bath in Cerignola. They brought their own soap and towel. The cost was 25 lira.
Another surprise to the Yanks: the residents of Cerignola wore, mostly, only black clothes. The poverty of the people precluded bright, colorful clothes. Many of them were starving, or nearly so. "We watched the women standing in long lines with their pieces of cloth," Currier wrote, "waiting for their small allotment of flour." The flour came from the American supplies. Hard to imagine -- flour coming from the States to the Romans' land of cereal, where Hannibal had had his supply base. Currier also noted that on the roofs of ancient houses there were bundles of twigs and small branches. "This was the fuel they cooked with." The AAF men would bring their laundry into town, where for a few lira the local women would wash it and hang it out to dry, then fold it.
Lieutenant Pepin went into Cerignola frequently. There he had met a teenage girl named Maria, "cute and dark-eyed." He overcame his inability to speak Italian by using his high school French. Maria also had learned some French in school. He recalled that "the customary way of the Italians required the meeting of the family as a prerequisite to any form of social contact." Maria lived with her grandmother, mother, and two aunts. All the men of the family had died in the war. "The women accepted me, but I doubt if they ever trusted me. Maria and I were never alone for more than a few moments. A fleeting kiss now and then was permissible, but nothing else."
For Pepin, the friendship of the family and his visiting in their home "became very important to me. It offset the inhumane rigors of war and added gentleness to my life." He wrote his own mother about Maria. She sent him packages of women's clothing. Maria and her family "were overjoyed and honored me with great meals." But, Pepin added regretfully, "I won no free time with Maria."
Sgarro Ruggiero, a thirty-year-old who had been in and gotten out of the Italian army, worked at the airfield. One day he brought an American pilot to his home for a lunch made by his mother. She served pasta, with no meat, no cheese, no tomato sauce. Still the pasta was homemade and the wheat was homegrown, and the American ate it with gusto. Ruggiero's mother said, "If there were meat, it would be better. It would be ragu." The next day, an American truck pulled up outside her home. The driver unloaded 100 tins of meat -- chicken breast, beef, bacon, and the inevitable Spam. Ruggiero said the Americans "brought richness to us."
Sgt. Joseph Maloney, twenty years old, was a tail gunner on his B-24, in the 415th Squadron, 98th Bomb Group, based near Cerignola. A child of the Depression, Joe knew hard times. He found a nine-year-old Italian boy named Gino who would come every week to clean his tent, and he paid far above the going rate for it just to help out the boy's family. Gino's mother did his laundry in return for a cake of soap. Gino also supplied him with fresh eggs on occasion, for which Joe paid him two packs of American cigarettes. ...
