America in WWII - (Page 10) some girl he didn’t know kissing him in his hospital bed. It didn’t take him long to figure out she was mistaking him for me, and wouldn’t you know it he decided to take advantage of the situation and continued to let her think he was me! On October 14, 1942, our battalion moved to Camp Maxey, Texas, for six more months of training. Then on April 29, 1943, Company A concluded training and shipped out on the USS Monticello; our destination was Oran [in Algeria], North Africa. (The remainder of the battalion, Companies B and H&S [headquarters and service], remained stateside until the invasion of Southern France.) The Monticello was an old Italian luxury liner with mahogany staircases. We were on the second level and just above us on the top level was a bunch of nurses that were being shipped overseas. Of course that level was off limits to us, but the smell of perfume drifted down to where we were and just about drove us all crazy. Our ship was alone when we started out, but the next morning we were joined up with a convoy of hundreds of ships…. A I WAS THERE Upon landing at Oran, we were attached to Patton’s army and I couldn’t believe our first order was to wear neck ties in all that heat. That night the war became real for us as the Germans bombed the harbor. It looked like a giant bonfire with all the tracers going up. One of our men, J.B. Johnson, was hit by shrapnel in a most sensitive area of the body and earned himself the nickname “Shrapnel Johnson” which stuck with him throughout the duration of the war…. On October 13, 1943, we boarded LSTs [Landing Ships, Tank, flat-bottomed vehicle transports designed to land on beaches] in the Port of Bizerte and departed North Africa. Three days later we landed at the Port of Bagnoli near Naples, Italy. Conditions were difficult, as the narrow, winding Italian roads were hard to traverse with our long truck and trailer combinations. Sometimes we had to use bulldozers to push our trailers around the curves. The cold rain and mud made matters even worse, not to mention harassment from the enemy flying overhead. German bombing and strafing caused us to spend a lot of time under our Mack trucks rather than in them. Our first bridge in Italy was constructed on October 17, 1943, across the Volturno River. This was the first heavy ponton bridge constructed in the ETO [European Theater of Operations], and 2,334 vehicles along with 1,770 foot soldiers used the bridge in a 24-hour period. The Volturno fluctuated constantly due to heavy rains and it was a struggle to keep the bridge from washing away. Civilians were allowed to cross our bridge, and one day an old Italian farmer’s donkey and wagon stopped in the middle of our bridge and the donkey refused to move. We tried everything to get that donkey to move and finally ended up having to push donkey and wagon off into the river, much to the protest of the old man. We hated to do it, but we had to keep the bridge open for traffic. On another occasion an old Italian man fell off the bridge into the swift cur- 10 AMERICA IN WWII OCTOBER 2007
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