Bloody Basin

Bloody Basin: An Italian No-Man's-Land of Black Mist and Enemy Patrols

 

By Sgt. BURGESS SCOTT YANK Staff Correspondent

 

At the Front in Italy—Because so many men from both sides have died; here, Yanks of one Fifth Army unit call this sector "Bloody Basin."

 

The Basin is a shallow depression in a rocky, mountainous setting-a bowl some 200 yards across, with a few battered clumps of mountain scrub and more shell holes than a man can count.

 

The bottom and sides of the bowl have been pummeled, pounded and powdered by the 105s, 88s, mortars and howitzers until Bloody Basin looks more like a Hollywood battlefield set than like part of the Fifth Army front lines.

 

At dawn and at dusk, thin layers of mist pour into the Basin and lie in sheets over its scrub and blackened shell holes, making it seem more than ever a no-man's-land.

 

With nightfall, Yank patrols go out into the Basin to scout out every clump and recon every hole that might contain a Jerry sniper. As they step into the layers of mist, you see only helmets and feet, and then nothing. With darkness enemy patrols venture out, too, and sometimes in the misty blackness the opposing forces come close to each other.

 

Sometimes they're even within talking distance, and the men tell of weird conversations that fol­low—snatches of broken German and bits of throaty English exchanged there in the dark.

 

By day it's almost all foxhole warfare—dug-in Yanks and Jerries cracking at anything that moves opposite them. S/Sgt. James Rutledge of Rising Star, Tex., who has spent many weary days with his rifle in a hole overlooking the Basin, says: "You lie in your hole from sunup to sundown, and the only thing that breaks the monotony is taking potshots at Jerries."

 

Some unseen artillerymen recently cheated Rut­ledge out of a German.  He had a clear patch of ground across the Basin in his sights, and several times that day Jerries had carelessly wandered across the clearing. Each time he had squeezed his trigger and chalked up another score. "I had the next Jerry lined up in my sights," said Rut­ledge, "when a 105 made a direct hit on him and destroyed the evidence.”

 

One of the coolest operators in the Basin is S/Sgt Jack McMillion of Harrisburg, Colo. McMillion was making a report on the field tele­phone to his lieutenant when he observed three Germans advancing on him up the hill. With one hand he pulled the trigger of the rifle that lay across his knees, while the other hand still held the phone. The lieutenant heard the crack of McMillion's rifle over the phone. That crack dropped one of the Nazis and sent the other two running. Then McMillion completed his report to the officer.

 

A replacement in the Basin sector, Pvt. Gerald Gralinski of Milwaukee, Wis., got a close shave as an initiation. Gralinski hadn't had time to get into a regular foxhole. He'd scooped the dirt out in a hurry, and his hole was fairly shallow. He'd placed his pack across the front of the hole, laid his rifle across it and was doing a good job when a German machine gunner, got him in his sights.

 

The first burst tore Gralinski's rifle from his hands, crumpling it beyond use. Gralinski yelled to a sergeant in a nearby hole: "Hey, can you get me another rifle?" The sergeant's reply was somewhat profane.

 

Another replacement fared a little better. Pvt. Martin Krauss of Millville, N. J., a German-born Yank, found that his knowledge of German came in handy on several recon missions.  Once Krauss was sent with a couple of other replacements to wipe out a machine-gun nest.  They crept within a few yards of the gun, and then, as the other two covered him with grenades, Krauss commanded the Jerries to surrender, speaking their own language.  They came out with their hands up, and the trio of Yanks took them back to headquarters.

 

Sgt. Dan T. Barfoot of Oklahoma did the same thing, but he did it in English.  While on patrol Barfoot saw a machine-gun barrel poking through some brush and saw a Jerry helmet behind it.  Barfoot pushed his tommy gun into the brush and yelled: “Come outta there.”  “I’m coming,” answered a voice in good English, and out walked two Germans.

 

On another mission Barfoot led a patrol of 12 men through the Basin.  After they’d walked a good distance, he noticed that he had 13 men with him.  At the end of the column was a punch-drunk German soldier, dizzy from the constant shelling, who had fallen in and was marching with the Yank patrol.  Without saying anything, Barfoot continued the march back to headquarters.

 

YANK 25 Feb 1944 Down Under Edition

 

The Best of YANK (excerpt)

Yank magazine was created by enlisted men for the targeted reading audience of fellow enlisted men. Much of its content was written in military-ese and has a humor and style directed at those experiences that the enlisted man might appreciate. Therefore it probably wasn't the best publication for the general public to read.

In late 1944 the Yank editorial staff thought it had enough material that it might be nice to create a book for the general public's reading pleasure. They created "The Best of Yank" which was published in 1945 while the war was still raging.

The following is just an excerpt from the introduction of that book which shows just some of the involvement and effort and danger that the Yank correspondents experienced during World War II.

Yank editorial staff, therefore, consist entirely of enlisted men. Many of them have turned down the opportunity to get a commission because it meant leaving Yank. Some of them in civilian life were experienced writers and editors on big metropolitan dailies and slick paper magazines; Others were mere copy boys or reporters from small-town newspapers in town's like Paducah, Kentucky, and Long Beach, California. They live under military discipline and work for army pay (and not high pay, at that; most of them are corporals and buck sergeants and staff sergeants). Yank's main editorial office is in New York, where it publishes a U. S. edition for the camps in this country and prepares rotogravure, offset and letterpress pages for its overseas editions, printed weekly in London, Sydney, Honolulu, Rome, Paris, Cairo, Tehran, Calcutta, Puerto Rico and Panama. The Paris edition of YANK, incidentally, made its first appearance early in September, 1944, rolling off a rotogravure press that only a few weeks before had been printing the Paris edition of Wehrmacht, the German Army’s equivalent of YANK. The New York office also puts out weekly an Alaska edition, shipped from Seattle to Alaska and the Aleutians, and a general overseas edition for overseas bases not covered by the foreign printing operations. In addition to its regular Раcific edition, the Honolulu bureau of YANK also publishes a South Pacific edition, and a pony-sized Pacific Air Mail edition for troops on the lonely islands of Admiral Nimitz's far-Flung ocean command.

With such a worldwide territory to cover, YANK’S editorial staff naturally sees plenty of overseas duty. The editors, writers and photographers are rotated constantly from desk jobs to combat assignments, from the main office to the overseas bureaus and from one theater of operations to another. For instance, Sgt. Joe McCarthy, YANK’s managing editor, who received a Legion of Merit for helping to establish the Army weekly as a worldwide magazine, is now in France, has reported the war in Italy and was the first American GI to enter Athens when it was liberated.

Then there is Sgt. Merle Miller who after he had established the Pacific edition in Honolulu and landed in the Marshalls as a combat corespondent， returned to the U. S. to work for four months as an editor in the New York office and as a YANK correspondent in Washington. Then he went overseas again to France, where he became editor of YANK’S Paris edition. Sgt. Dave Richardson won the Legion of Merit for his front line coverage of the New Guinea campaign for YANK. Then he went to Burma and completed one of the toughest assignments undertaken by a correspondent in this war—a 500-mile march through the jungles with Merrill’s Marauders that took him behind the Јар lines for three months.

When he returned to civilization, Sgt. Richardson wrote to the office:

"Besides the regular 60-pound horseshoe-type pack which every Marauder carried (containing a blanket, poncho, kukri knife, three to five days rations, entrenching shovel, water wings for swimming rivers and an extra pair of shoes) I lugged two cameras, film, notebooks, maps, pencils and my carbine. And I brought along a typewriter. But the only chance I had to use it was during a two-day rest period after our first battle. I spent the first day repairing the damage that had been done to it by the incessant rain and by its being carried on a mule over bumpy ground. The second day I managed to bat out some picture captions. The rest of the time my stories had to languish in my notebooks because we usually walked from dawn to dusk, spending the rest of our time before dark cooking supper (no fires were allowed after dark in this Јар territory) and after dark sleeping in our ponchos and blankets on the ground, often in pools of water from the heavy rains.”

Miller and Richardson are not the only YANK men who have seen more than one side of the global war. Sgt. George Aarons and Sgt. Burgess Scott, after a tour of duty in Britain in 1942, went all the way from El Alamein to Tunis with the British Eighth Army. A few months later they established what they considered a record for long-distance jeep travel, starting from Cairo, driving to Aleppo in Syria to make a memorable picture story of the execution of two Nazi spies, and then turning around and going all the way across Africa to Algiers. There they managed to load their jeep on a transport plane and take it to Italy, where it асcompanied them on several trips to the Cassino front, landed with them at Anzio and chugged into Rome with the advance tanks of the 1st Armored Division. Scott has returned to the States for a tour of duty in YANKS main editorial office, but Aarons and the jeep are somewhere in France. Aarons says he won't be satisfied until he drives the jeep in triumph up to the front door of YANK'S Berlin bureau.

Then there is Sgt. Walter Peters, a veteran of many air missions over Europe (he was the only American correspondent on the murderous Schweinfurt raid), later cited for bravery under fire with the Infantry at St. Lo and now on his way to China to write about our Chinese allies and the men who are flying the B-29s. And Sgt. Georg Meyers, decorated for his conduct in the invasion of Attu. And Sgt. Walter Bernstein, who probably beats every YANK correspondent when it comes to globe trotting. Bernstein left the U. S. in the early spring of 1943, traveled by ship across the South Pacific to Australia and then across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf. He spent some time in Iran and then moved to Cairo and to Algiers, just in time for the invasion of Sicily, where he saw action with the 45th and 3d divisions. When Sicily fell, he returned to Cairo and traveled in Palestine and Syria. He c then went to the Italian front when it was near Naples and left it to return to Cairo again to cover the conference between Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek. In the spring of 1944, Bernstein managed to make arrangements with Yugoslav Partisan representatives in the Middle East and Italy for a personal interview with Marshal Tito, who had not yet been visited by a correspondent from an English-speaking country. The partisans took Bernstein from Italy to an island in the Adriatic andthen landed him on the Yugoslavian mainland where he walked for a week across German occupied territory and over the mountains to Tito’s headquarters.

"That walk was a nightmare," Bernstein wrote afterward. "We only had actual trouble once when we had to cross a main road at three in the morning between two German garrisons about a kilometer apart. We sent about ten men to each garrison to start a little disturbance and keep them busy and while they were doing that we double-timed across the road and into the woods on the other side. The bullets were flying around but nobody got hurt except a few Germans or Chetniks. That was the only real trouble we had, although we were near the Germans on several other occasions, but the walk itself was dreadful: over all the mountains in Yugoslavia. We would start in the morning and by three in the afternoon we would be up at the snow line and then we would go down the other side and start up again on the next mountain. We would walk sometimes all night and part of the next day and then sleep for a few hours and start again and I would lose all track of time and think that the dawn was sunset or vice versa. Anyway, I wouldn't want to do it again. I got sick when we finally arrived at headquarters, ran a fever for a few days and my eyes wouldn’t focus, but I stayed in bed a while and ate and slept and got over it."

Then Bernstein got his interview with Tito. A few days later the Anglo-American mission in Yugoslavia discovered that he had entered the country without proper permission and hustled him back to Italy on the next available plane. "It had Pullman seats, no less,” says Bernstein.

Thus far in the war, two YANK men have been killed in action. Sgt. John Bushemi was fatally wounded by Јар mortar fire during the invasion of Eniwetok in the Marshalls. Sgt. Peter Paris, the first enlisted man to cross the threshold of the New York office and report for duty when The Army Weekly was established in May, 1942, met his death on D Day in Normandy when he landed with the first wave of the 1st Division. Others have narrowly escaped with their lives. Sgt. Barret McGurn was hit by mortar fire during the second battle of Воugainville. And during the fighting at Gloucester Bay, Sgt. Dick Hanley, a staff photographer, climbed out of a foxhole 15 yards from the enemy and turned his back on the Japs to make a picture of some Marine machine gunners. "Go ahead," the Marines told him when he deliberated the wisdom of such a risk. "If they get you, we'll get them." Hanley managed to return to cover still in one piece.

Sgt. Joe McCarthy the editor of Yank magazine was once quoted as saying: if our correspondent survives, we have a story. If he doesn't, we have a casualty.

 

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STOLEN STRIPPER

The mysterious history of Sherry Britton, whose sultry contours enslaved admirals and enlisted men alike.

KWAJALEIN, MARSHAL ISLANDS - The mysterious case of the kidnapped strip-teaser held the grim attention of the sweat-soaked rock-happy residents of this Pacific atoll for 10 tense weeks. A sensational story, you say. You can bet your last native necklace it was! Because, in the first place, what was a strip-teaser doing on Kwajalein?
Well, it was this way. She was Miss Sherry Britton, a girl who used to take 'em off every night in a place called Leon & Eddie's in New York City. Miss Britton was brought to Kwajalein in a special service capacity, a sort of morale-builder first class. She made her home in the studios of WXLG, an Armed Forces radio station.
Sherry is the kind of girl who fits exactly into the hour-glass hand pattern traced in the air by any wordless wolf who needs to describe his finest mental image. Her face, with its insolent, inviting eyes and bee-stung lower lip, is the only part of her which bears description on this page.
Sherry's job as easy for her. All she had to do was let the members of the military forces look at her. That's all - just look. And that's what they did - with varying results. There were those who came, and saw, and walked away with a dreamy look in their eyes. Some broke out in a cold sweat despite the 120 degrees of temperature. Some had to be led away. Or carried.
The far-flung fame of Sherry Britton reached even to the ears of admirals and generals in the Pacific Ocean areas. It was only natural then to expect the big brass to make inspection tours of this little rock. The Air Transport Command and the Naval Air Transport Service later said they never had seen so many star-studded planes. For a while they considered the necessity of several new pages in the book of military protocol. What else could determine whose plane would land first - that of a lieutenant general in the Army or that of a vice admiral in the Navy?
All of those brains-behind-the-battles descended in droves on the WXLG studios where Sherry was living. For a few days the broadcasting boys who were the guardians of Sherry were fearful that the sight of scrambled eggs and glittering stars would sway her, just as many another lass has succumbed to metal insignia in preference to arm stripes. But Sherry remained true and appeared to be more alluring than ever to the enlisted men.
(This case of a girl turning to enlisted men instead of officers has been written carefully for preservation in War Department archives, and the Medical Corps already has prepared a physio-neuro report on the phenomenon, a report which strives to show that a beautiful body often harbors a twisted mentality.)
And then it happened. Sherry Britton was kidnapped! This curvesome young creature, who had given her all for the morale of the garrison forces, was snatched from the WXLG studios one drizzly night. It was past the regular viewing hours for Sherry, but the kidnappers gained entrance by asking to come in out of the rain. One of the boys at the studio later admitted that he should have suspected a plot from the first moment. Because very few of these coral-crazy guys, after spending from 10 to 20 months on Kwajalein, know enough to come in out of the rain. But that's the way they got in. Shortly thereafter the rain stopped, the boys left, and so did Sherry Britton!
Well, those platter-spinners at WXLG almost went nuts. On top of the fact that all of them were crazy about Sherry themselves was the added realization that they were responsible for the safety of this number one morale-uplifter. In allowing Sherry Britton to be kidnapped they had violated the trust of thousands of men.
For eighteen hours the horrible crime was kept secret. But then, after some replacements from the States had been escorted to the studios for their inaugural three-second glimpse of Sherry and had been denied entrance, the thing couldn't be held back any longer.
The news broke on the air the next afternoon and immediately threw the entire Marshall and Gilbert Island area into an uproar. It hit everybody right between the eyes with a terrific shock.
Men reacted in strange ways. Three big Seabees, who had all day been driving fence posts into the rock with sledge-hammers, wept openly and unashamedly in the mess hall. A clerk in the Army personnel office jumped through a window and began to pull up the fence posts with his bare hands. Pilots climbed into their planes and gunned them into the wild blue yonder in an effort to forget the earthly catastrophe.
The law enforcement agencies of Kwajalein were called into the case instantly. Clues were scarce, however. No ransom note was received and so it was deduced that the motive for the kidnapping of the strip-teaser was not one of financial gain.
It was thought for a few hours that Sherry would be smart enough to leave a trail of bits of clothing so that he abductors could be followed. Being accustomed to taking off her clothes, she would have no inhibitions on that score. But then it was remembered that Sherry had been very lightly clad. As a matter of fact, unclad would be a better word.
A few days later a clue developed. A Navy man drew an issue of greens and asked for a shirt with a size thirty-six chest and a size twenty-four waist. The storekeeper was alert, however, and promptly turned in an alarm because he suspected that the specification for a size thirty-six chest was a direct clue to the whereabouts of Sherry Britton. When questioned, though, this Navy man stated that he was going back to the States and wanted to look sharp on board ship in a suit of tailor-made greens. He denied all knowledge of Sherry Britton, especially as to he measurements.
All those false clues served only to increase the feeling of hopelessness which crept over the island in those dark days. It is difficult to describe the maddening surge of nausea which occurred when WXLG reported every hour, on the hour, that "there is no news at this moment in the mysterious case of the kidnapped strip-teaser."
Sure, the war was over. It had ended about three days after Sherry disappeared. Nobody seemed to know the exact date. All right, so the war was over. So what? So there were no nude blondes to cavort in a lily pond during the V-J Day celebration, no girls to kiss, no bartenders to set 'em up. The morale of the men was low.
It was that way for weeks. Even the glorious news that 200 men would be sent home for discharges after 600 replacements had arrived failed to stir the gloom.
And then, as suddenly as it had happened, the thing was all over. Sherry Britton was found. Oh, it was nothing sensational. As a matter of fact, it was very simple. And when all the facts were known, the men took it bravely and went on with their daily occupation duties, painting, building new barracks, remodeling the island open-air theaters, and so forth.
The tip-off came from a Medic who was leaving and who had seen Sherry. He left an anonymous note with the Red Cross.
What happened was this: The deed was done by one of those men who had been placed under observation in the hospital because he had gazed too long and too well at Sherry Britton, one of those Section 8's. Sherry had become an obsession with him. He had sneaked from the hospital on that fatal, rainy night and had immediately gone to the radio station for another glimpse of his heroine. When he saw his chance, he spirited her out of the place and took her back to the hospital disguised in his hospital robe. The next day he was taken to another island, an island which actually had trees, and of course he took Sherry with him in the group.
A high-ranking officer was flown to this island to bring Sherry back. But he didn't return with her. It seems that this rock-happy lad was so enamored of Sherry Britton that to deprive him of his great love would have meant his complete physical collapse, as well as mental. Death would have followed.
An official bulletin explaining this was published, broadcast and read at Kwajalein.
The bulletin said, at the end:
"Never in the history of any military installation has a pin-up picture meant so much to so many. The picture of Sherry Britton was part of the life of this island. Its value as a morale builder cannot be measured by any standards. It is a tribute to you men that you withstood the awfulness of the past weeks after being deprived of our beloved picture. Let us take comfort in the knowledge that our picture has saved the life of the deluded soul who now has it in his possession. And now that you know all the facts - carry on!"
by Cpl. PAUL FREYE - December 7, 1945 edition.

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Don't Wake Me; Let Me Dream

ENGLAND—When Pvt. Charles Schmelze of Pittsburgh. Pa., had finished servicing a troop carrying glider of the Ninth Air Force for the big invasion hop, he was pretty well pooped. So he climbed aboard the glider, picked himself a comfortable corner and hit the hay. The glider towed by a plane piloted by F/O E. G. Borgmeyer of St. Louis, Mo., was last seen landing in a zone of heavy fighting. Pvt. Schmelze had slept his way into history's greatest military Operation.

 

-YANK London Bureau

Highway 6

By Sgt. FRED ROSEN

YANK Staff Correspondent

 

WITH THE FIFTH ARMY IN ROME [By Cable] —Nobody will ever know for certain which were the first Allied troops to enter Rome. During the evening hours of June 4 (1944), reconnaissance units, some armor and some infantrymen crept into the city from different directions. In some cases they pulled up to spend the night in houses vacated by Jerry only a half hour before.

 

All night long there was sniper fighting throughout Rome as isolated Germans tried to join the rest of their forces fleeing north. German time bombs began booming from different sections of the city during the night. Armed Partisanos in civilian clothes, thirsting for revenge, roamed the dark streets, taking pot shots at German vehicles and rushing the buildings where Germans or Fascists were known to be hiding. The last few hours that night Yanks and Partisanos, some of them working together, captured a number of Germans trying to escape in civilian clothes.

 

The city was pitch dark. There was no electricity, no telephones, and water only here and there. The people of Rome sat up all night, peering out of shuttered windows, waiting for the Americans and spitting down curses on the Germans as they caromed through the streets on their way north. At least one of these Jerry vehicles sprayed lead at every window in sight.

 

At dawn, larger bodies of Allied troops began entering the city on every road leading up from the south. Most of them somehow came together, forming one great column moving up the Appian Way.

 

People came pouring out of the houses in a great flood. Hysterical women clasped their hands and rocked back and forth on the curbstones, moaning "Grazia, grazia."

 

We had reached Rome after a furious jeep trip in pursuit of a picked force of Yanks and Canadians whose mission was to punch through the right flank of the German positions south of Rome and to penetrate the city.  

The flying spearhead had met with unexpected success along the broad straight Highway 6, long used by the Germans as their main supply route. Jerry had retreated so fast that he had neglected his usual careful demolition; even the telephone poles were standing.

 

Beyond Valmontone, until recently the anchor of the enemy defense line, we came upon the first signs of battle—a half-dozen scorched German tanks and half-tracks, discarded helmets, little heaps of machine-gun shells, a dead German with letters and snapshots on the ground beside him.

 

The first Yanks we caught up with were tankers, asleep in the turrets or on the ground against the treads. A guard told us they were taking a six-hour break after three days of continuous fighting. Next we came to long lines of infantrymen, tired, dirty but determined. From a farmhouse 20 yards off the road, a couple of riflemen emerged with vino bottles in their hands and roses in their "buttonholes."

 

As we approached Cenecelli, a suburb of Rome, Italians lined the highway, cheering and waving. Old women in black dresses bowed and grinned

like mechanical dolls. Men on bicycles leaped off and waved their arms in wild welcome. A kid, sitting on the branch of a tree that stuck out over the road, showered down handfuls of rose petals as we went by.

 

At the foot of a long upgrade in the road, we came to a cluster of soldiers crouched in a ditch. "Take it easy, there," said a heavy-bearded soldier sprawled in the ditch on one elbow. "This is the end of the line. Jerry is just over the hill." We had caught up with the spearhead.

 

The Yanks and Canadians had been held up for an hour by a couple of German self-propelled guns and some tanks, dug in over the hill. This effective roadblock had already knocked out two American tanks.

 

We sat around the ditch. Nobody seemed to know what to do until reinforcements arrived. Two of our tanks went over the hill to try to root the Jerry out, and we could hear the high song of the fast German machine gun that the boys called the diarrhea gun. Two shells burst 20 yards from our ditch. We slammed our faces into the dirt. Five men crawled down the ditch to join us. They were the crew of one of the tanks, just knocked out by the Germans. "If we could only see where the bastards are," one gasped.

 

For at least an hour enemy fire kept us pinned down. Whenever a shell burst close to a church near our ditch, it set the bells clanging. We looked at each other and remembered it was Sunday. Suddenly we spotted a wedding procession walking down the road toward the church, eight couples, arm in arm, all dolled up in their Sunday best. The white-gowned bride giggled

prettily, as if the roar of shells were her wedding march and the ricocheting bullets were rice.

 

After another 15 minutes, the lieutenant in charge decided to move up closer to the crest of the hill. We stooped over as we walked up the ditch and carefully avoided stepping on the shoulders of the road—Jerry's favorite place for mines. As the shells whistled and crashed all around us, we turned off the road and sprinted for a half-ruined farmhouse. Some of our tanks roared past, on their way over the hill for another try at Jerry.

 

Four hours passed while we listened to the battle. Everybody grew restless as the sun got hotter and the flies and the dust increased. Without telling the lieutenant, T-4 Nellis Johnson, an Indian from Pima, Ariz., and Pvt. Neal McLean of Chicago, Ill., crawled through the grass toward the hilltop. McLean had a bazooka, plenty of shells and hand'grenades. Johnson had grenades and his favorite weapon, a Johnson automatic rifle, which he calls a "Johnny gun."

 

Nearly an hour later the two came crawling back. McLean had fired all the bazooka shells into a house where he thought the German guns were located, and had been kept skipping around by machine-gun fire that came back. Johnson was plastered. He had crept around a house to "surround the Jerries" and found a vino cellar. The lieutenant burned their ears off for going up without orders. Johnson swayed back and forth, listening meekly and mumbling: "But, sir, we got so tired sitting here!"

 

Then Jerry began to work on us in earnest. Shells exploded all over the field and the road. "Airbursts," so-called because they exploded before hitting the ground, sent a shower of jagged steel into the backs of the men below. Broken window glass tinkled on our helmets. We had to get shelter—and quick. One of the Canadians shot the lock off a cellar door, but it was no use.

The place was full of wine barrels, and we couldn't get in. A shell fragment cut into the Canadian's back; he fell like an empty sack.

 

An Italian stuck his head out of the farmhouse and told us there were caves in the fields to our left. One by one we rose and walked at a stoop across the fields. The first man didn't run, so neither did the second. Not a man broke into a run. We all crossed safely. The caves were enormous. They were green with fungus, dark and smelly, but they seemed like heaven. There was six feet of rock between us and the shells.

 

At last the main body of our tanks arrived. In a half hour the job was done; the roadblock was smashed and the advance could continue.

We had been held up five hours.

 

Then a long column of doughboys plodded up the hill. It looked as if the whole damn Army had arrived. The doughboys had marched at

least 12 miles in the hot sun, but they just unslung their rifles as they approached the hill crest, bent over a bit and kept going.

 

The dome of St. Peter's showed up on the horizon through the mist and smoke. We were nearing the center of Rome, but there still seemed to be German snipers and machine gunners in every other cellar window. It took vicious street fighting before Jerry was driven back.

 

We stared at the enormous fountains, the huge statues and the gray stone buildings—relics of ancient Rome. There were many priests on the streets. The surprisingly well-dressed crowds were getting wilder every minute. Everyone wanted to shake our hands. Some said "Welcome" and others just yelled "Viva" and waved handkerchiefs and flags around and around their

heads. A brown-frocked Franciscan monk stood on the corner and blessed each Allied vehicle as it rolled by. A woman held up her bambino so that he would see and remember the great day when the Americanos marched in to liberate Mother Rome. Screaming swarms of kids clung to our jeep and tossed bunches of flowers all over her until she looked like a broken-down

hag made up to look like Hedy Lamarr. A well dressed gentleman jumped on the radiator and hung on precariously for a block while he got off his chest in broken English the wish that America and Italia be closa friends forever. Two

girls, eyes flashing, climbed on the fenders, drew their hands across their throats and shrieked "Morte Tedeschi! (Death to the Germans!)"

 

Around a long bend we sighted the ancient Colosseum, and under one of its huge arches of crumbling gray stone something that it had never seen before in all its years—a jeep with four exhausted Yanks sprawled out sound asleep.

An average of two or three times every block somebody would pump our hands up and down, wild with excitement, and ask whether we knew

his cousin so-and-so who lived in Newark or Chicago or Brooklyn. Six Yanks in the jeep ahead made it a rule always to say yes; then the Italians would drop off, ecstatic.

 

We were moving more and more slowly until we came to the great square known as the Piazza Venizza where Mussolini used to make

his famous balcony speeches. Here the crowd was so thick that the column stopped completely.

 

A group of Yanks and Canadians who had fought in the spearhead force worked their way through the crowd and up through the side door of Mussolini's palace, through its great gaudy corridors with their gilt ceilings, to the office where the great man used to sit.

 

Mussolini's huge desk was located at one end of the long room, so that visitors who had to walk all the way across would feel properly humble by the time they came to the big cheese himself. Sgt. Sam Finn of St. Louis, Mo., sat in the chair, put his feet up on the desk, clasped

his hands behind his head and said: "Not bad, not bad at all." All around us bustled palace guards and police in musical-comedy uniforms, with yard-wide cocked hats like the kind Napoleon used to wear. We stepped out of the office onto the balcony, and a great roar went up from the crowd in the square below. We were on Mussolini's own balcony, undoubtedly the first

Yank uniforms ever seen there.

 

"Viva Americanos!" yelled thousands of people as they waved their handkerchiefs up at us—the same sight Mussolini must have seen as he

looked down. It was then that Sgt. John Vita of Port Chester, N. Y., pulled the historic stunt that will be talked about for the duration and six. He stuck out his chin, threw out his chest and did a terrific take-off of Mussolini, speaking in Italian. The crowds loved it. They nearly went mad with

joy when Vita made the exact kind of slap with his left palm against his right bicep as he shot his arm up in the Fascist salute.

 

That sort of thing went on all day. The fiesta spirit was broken only by occasional shots as mobs went after the stores and homes of Fascists.

Once in a while we saw trucks and busses jammed with armed Partisanos, who fired into the air as they combed the side street and alleys.

 

It was a great day and one that no American soldier who was there will ever forget. By late afternoon the Yanks who had come in first and then scattered over the city were swinging into line and joining the steady columns of doughboys pouring through Rome all day from south to north. The doughboys were so tired they made little attempt to straighten up and parade.

 

These infantrymen were tired as only men can be who haven't slept two nights in five days. There were beards on their faces, and their eyes were sunken and red as they plodded silently forward. They held their rifles any old way over their shoulders, and many had tied pieces of burlap and odd rags around their helmets in place of lost camouflage nets.

 

These were the dirty, tough, goddam wonderful infantrymen who had fought their way up the long bloody mountain path from Salerno; the men who had lived in underground holes at Anzio for months, sweating out the deadly German shellings; the men who always seemed to have to fight straight uphill into the muzzles of German guns; the men who had won Rome.

 

They had won Rome, but they did not have time to stop in it now. Their job was killing Germans, and since the Germans were running north, that was where they were heading.

 

In one long brown column a couple of doughboys were chanting a jingle that expresses, better than anything else, the spirit of the Fifth Army. It goes this way:

 

From Sicily to Rome,

Then Berlin and home....

 

 

 

Song of the Islands

Song of the Islands

GUADALCANAL — When Guadalcanal’s "Radio City" conducted a band-popularity contest recently, the GIs who operate the new station got the surprise of their lives. Harry James and
Benny Goodman trailed Roy Acuff's Tennessee hillbilly band, which received 400 of the 1,000 votes cast by soldiers, sailors and marines of the 'Canal,' on smaller South Sea islands and on patrol ships offshore.

But James is still going to get top billing from the Jacksons who run the broadcasting plant in a three-room shed in a muddy coconut grove. These GI operators, who hail from big cities (Chicago, Salt Lake City, Duluth and Cincinnati) claim the vote was a fluke.

They blame T-5 Hyman Averback of Los Angeles, who conducts the station's "Section 8 Program/' a session of recorded music and Averback chatter. Far from being a friend of hillbilly chants, Averback is such an ardent hot-music man that he lets his prejudices creep into his running commentary on the platters. "I've got some hillbilly records here," he'll remark, "but who likes hillbilly? Let's have a Harry James."

That got them riled up," the other operators of the station say, "and resulted in concerted pressure when we took the poll." Just in case this is the wrong explanation, though, the station is going to give more air time to that good old mountain music.

-Sgt, BARRETT McGURN
YANK Staff Correspondent

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment
SOMEWHERE IN ITALY—There's a tiny village of about 20 houses here, where every person in town thinks he's the luckiest man alive.

Some drunken German soldiers had wandered into the village, broken into the houses, filled themselves with vino and used the wine barrels for target practice, laughing loudly when the old wine gushed onto the ground.

Finally the American artillery started shelling nearby, and the Nazi drunks began to stagger out of the place—all except one, who decided to see how his “tommy” gun worked.

He lined up all the Italians he could find and was all set to start shooting when some shells hit the top of the building across the street and the falling rubble killed several people, including him.

The townspeople buried their own dead but they left the German where he fell. For a week the body lay there, stinking in the sun, and nobody would bury it. Instead, every time the Italians passed the body, they spit.

When the American soldiers entered the town, they buried the German. The Italians still haven't forgiven them for doing that.

-YANK Field Correspondent

GIs Take Over Rome

By Sgt. JAMES P. O'NEILL

YANK Staff Correspondent WITH THE 1 ST ARMORED DIVISION IN ROME

[By Cable]—Eight days ago I was in Teheran, Iran; a few hours ago I was in
Naples; now I was in Rome. I entered the city under sniper and machine-gun fire, with the point
tanks of the 1st Armored Division, accompanied
by riflemen.


Behind a big Sherman, the third tank to enter
Rome, our jeep bounced at 1930 hours into this mad town filled with happy, hysterical people, sniper fire, pretty girls, mine explosions and free wine. How I happened to get here is a strange tale.
In Naples we were talking over my plane ride
from Iran, the major and I, when a corporal from
the censor's office came in and said our troops
had entered Rome that afternoon. The major, who is my commanding officer, apologized for
interrupting my story. "I'd better get up there and find a press to print YANK on," he said. "I'd
better get up there and find a story," I said.


By 1400 hours the major and I, with Cpl. Sal
Canizzo as our driver, were speeding toward
Rome up Highway 7, the famous Appian Way.
The major had decided to take Highway 7 because Sal said that, on the map, it seemed the straightest and easiest road to the Eternal City.


The highway was in excellent condition, and we 'moved quickly toward the front, slowing
down only in towns like Formia, Terracina and
Cisterna. There we had to pick our way through
rubble-strewn streets. But if the streets were
bad. the towns themselves were terrible. They were towns no longer—just lopsided masonry,
dazed peasants, mangled trees and burned tanks.
In every town there was the smell of death. You could tell the nearness to war by that smell.


Until we hit Velletri, there was little traffic except an occasional small convoy, and we had the highway to ourselves. But when we were about five miles out of Velletri, the road became clogged with traffic—on one lane only, the northbound lane that led to Rome. We zoomed up the outside lane, dodging back into the convoy whenever we spotted an MP.

We passed endless rows of crowded ammo
trucks, gas trucks, ambulances, weapons carriers
loaded down with equipment and six-by-sixes
filled with infantrymen. The road was all dust,
dirt and confusion. Whenever we stopped and asked the way to Rome, the MP would shake his
head in a puzzled way and point hesitatingly
toward the forward end of the dusty column going north on the Appian Way. There was no sign of the enemy; no gunfire of any kind; no planes-ours or theirs—in the sky; no foxholes or
tanks. On this sunny afternoon the hustling,
bustling column, noisy with yells and friendly curses, reminded me of the impatient crowds
bound for dinner after a Saturday football game.


We sped through Albano, where the final push
for Rome had started. No sooner had we passed
through the quiet town than the whole scene changed. You'didn't have to know much about war to sense that you were nearing the front.


You could tell by the dust, rising from the road
like a giant smoke screen and blotting out the warm caressing sun; you could tell by absence of vigilant MPs, who up to now had kept shooing our jeep back into the noisy column. 


And the column itself had changed.  It now consisted of tanks—mostly heavies and mediums—and trucks mounted with heavy weapons. Straddled out in two single lines, 15 paces apart on both sides of the road, were infantrymen.   Their faces were dirty and partly covered by
handkerchiefs that helped keep the dust out of
their mouths. As they walked up the road, they
kept their guns on their hips. Neither the riflemen nor the tank crews talked much; they just moved silently up the road.

The column's pace had slowed down to a crawl when the sounds of shellfire suddenly came from up ahead. The men on the road dove for the safety of the embankment, and the tank crews ducked into their turrets. Sal nudged our jeep over to the embankment, and the three of us got out and lay down with the men on the side of
the road. The shelling was over in five minutes, although it seemed like ages; then the column started to move again.


We got into the jeep, and the major looked at
his map. For a moment he was silent. Then,
taking off his helmet, he scratched his head. "It
looks as if that kid from the censor was wrong.
We might end up selling these blasted things to
the Germans," he said, pointing to the bundle of YANKS we had brought along for promotion work in Rome. "Are you two willing to go on?"
Sal, an Italian boy with a terrible yen to get to
Rome, yelled "Hell, yes!" I waved my head indecisively. The major took that for an affirmative
answer. Our jeep moved on.


Soon the tanks stopped again, and now our
jeep was parked protectively behind the third
leading tank. There was more fire. It was not the same kind of fire we had heard before; this had
a whap instead of a whoosh.


A rifleman came over to our jeep; he was a short squat kid with a dark dirty face, and when he tried to smile you could see he was
tired. "Hey, YANK," he said, pointing to the sticker on our jeep, "you're pretty far up to be getting autographs." Then he spotted the bundle of magazines. "Can I have one, sir?" he asked the major. "Sure thing," the major said.


I reached down and handed the rifleman 10 copies. He pulled a knife out of his hip pocket. "Wanna German souvenir, bud?" he asked. He
threw the knife into the jeep and started across
the road. He gave the rest of the magazines to "a
bunch of his buddies, and one of them yelled across: "This sure is first-class distribution."

Just then there was another dose of whaps, and one of the infantrymen behind us must have noticed my shaking hands. "Don't worry," he said. "That's just a couple of snipers over in that farmhouse. We're gonna go up and get the bastards in a minute."


The Appian Way had now widened out into a four-lane highway with a trolley line running down the middle. Through the dust you could see the city of Rome. Down the street, ignoring the sniper fire, came citizens of Rome, some of them carrying wine in jugs and bottles. One man came running down the road alone; he wore no coat and was crying. The short dark rifleman
talked with him in Italian for a moment, then
turned to us and said: "This guy's wife was
blown up by a mine. He wants a doctor. You
better tell one of the medics."


On the right side of the road three or four
dogfaces were talking to the wine-carrying civilians. One of them took a big slug out of a bottle.
Suddenly there was a shot, and the GI fell over
in the road. The civilians scattered, and the other soldiers bent over their buddy. One of the crew of
the lead tank yelled to the crouching rifleman: "Is he hurt bad?" And the little dark kid yelled
back: "No. he ain't hurt. He's dead."


A second lieutenant and a squad of riflemen started up the embankment on the left toward
the farmhouse from which the shots had come.
The lead tank began to move again. We decided to stay with the tanks, hoping they would
finally make town. We felt uneasy on the road and nudged close to the third tank. The three tanks
in front of us were the only ones moving; the rest of the column had stopped.


We made it this time. No sooner had we passed
between two long rows of apartment houses, at the point where the Appian Way ends and the city of Rome begins, than the three tanks and our jeep were engulfed by screaming, hysterical Romans. Some were laughing, some were crying and all of them wanted to touch us. One old
lady kissed our jeep as if it were her lost son.
A dark-haired girl placed a rose in Sal's ear.
Somebody threw a bunch of flowers into the jeep and someone else put two bottles of wine alongside the flowers.

The three tanks had met the same fate. Romans swarmed over them like ants. The tanks couldn't move without killing somebody. I jumped out of the jeep and headed for the first tank to get the names of the GIs in it for my story, but it was impossible. Twice I was halfway up when the yelling crowd pushed me off.


Then I spotted an officer in the center of the road, trying to clear a path for the tanks.  I went over and talked with him. "How does it feel to be one of the first tanks in Rome?" I asked. He was a tall thin-faced captain. "We're not staying here long," he said. "We're supposed to move up that road toward the Tiber but these crazy people won't let us.  They don't know it but they're holding up the war."


The officer gave me the names of the men in the lead tank: Lt. Henry Schoberth of Versailles, Ky.; Sgt. John Brown Jr. of Canton, Ohio; T-5
Ernest Barnett of La Grande, Oreg.; Pvt. Tiberio
Di Julio of Orange, N. J., and Pvt. Antonio Cano of Los Angeles, Calif.
From somewhere came the whoosh of a selfpropelled gun. The captain headed for his tank, and the tanks began to move to the side of the road for protection. Somehow nobody got hurt, and this time the Italians cleared a path. Then the tanks disappeared down the dark street.


When I reached the jeep, I found that the major had picked up an ex-colonel of the Italian
Army. "We're going to his house for dinner," the major said. It was a confusing ride. We would start up one street and meet a bunch of people at
the corner. They would either swarm all over our much-abused jeep or scream something about
Tedeschi. This, Sal informed us, meant that there were still snipers up the street.


After backtracking over half the city of Rome, we finally arrived at the ex-colonels home.  He
lived in a modern apartment house. We parked
the jeep in his garage, locked the door and, after fighting our way through the mob that had
formed in front of the entrance, arrived at our
host's apartment. There we were introduced to
his wife, his mother and two of his friends, a middle-aged couple. We had a dinner of ham sliced thinner than a Walgreen special, peas, salad and white wine. We knew food was scarce in
Rome and went easy with the ex-colonel's larder.

Through Canizzo's New Jersey-style Italian, we learned that, besides being very happy, these
people were interested in two things. The ex-colonel wanted to know how the Allies were going to treat the members of the Italian Army. The other gentleman, a banker, wanted to know what the AMG would do with the lira. We could answer neither question.


After thanking them for the dinner, we took off with a volunteer guide for the Ambasciatori, one of Rome's swankiest hotels. Our guide found
it easily, and we went inside. There were no
lights, since the Germans had knocked the powerhouse out of commission. At the desk we found a tall thin man in charge. He spoke good English and did not seem at all ruffled by our presence. "Aren't you surprised to see us?" we asked. "No,"
he said, "we were expecting you, but not quite so
fast." "Are there any Americans here?" we asked. "Not yet," the man said, laughing quietly. "There were German officers in this hotel an hour and a half ago."


A bellboy took us to our rooms. Sal and I shared one with twin beds. He was asleep in five minutes, but I couldn't doze off. There was a lot of sniper fire, and with every whap I could picture some Kraut working his way toward our room. Soon the roar of tanks came up from the streets below. I went out on the balcony and
breathed a sigh of relief when I saw they were ours. For a minute or two I watched and then I went back to bed. Soon the comforting roar of
the tanks made me drowsy. I remember saying: "This all must be a dream." Then I went to sleep.


Early next morning I went down to the bar and met Charlie Castellotti, a famous bartender in the Paris of the hectic 1920s. Three German officers drank at Charlie's bar only a few
hours before the arrival of our jeep. "They were sad," Charlie said. "They have felt for a long while that you were going to take Rome."


There was a pretty girl sitting at the other end of the bar with a beautiful dark cocker spaniel at her feet. I went over and petted the spaniel.
He didn't seem to like my touch. "His name is
Blacky," the girl said. "He was given to me by a
German lieutenant last night."


It was a warm lazy day. There were still crowds in the streets. GIs whizzed through town with flowers in their helmets, bottles of wine in
their hands and girls hanging on their jeeps.


On one of the main streets a water main had burst. Four happy dogfaces were pushing each other into the stream. A large crowd gathered and watched the horseplay, cheering whenever a soldier was thrown into the drink.


But not all the Roman scene was hysterical
that day. Through one main street, in long serious lines, marched the infantry on its way to the
Tiber and the forward positions. On another street tanks, trucks, guns and ammo rolled toward the front.

On still another street a band of civilians, armed with machine guns and wearing red bands on their sleeves, stormed a radio station. They brought out the proprietor and beat him to the ground, using their guns as clubs. Then they carried him off. yelling "Fascisti."


The pace was too fast to last. Pvt. Charles
Camp of Dunbar. Pa., a rifleman who had fought
from the beginning of the push to the very outskirts of the town, put it this way: "Come the MPs and the 'Off Limits' signs, and this town will slow down."

YANK 7 July 1944

Picnic at Sansapor

Picnic at Sansapor

By Sgt. Charles Pearson

YANK Staff Correspondent

Sansapor, Netherlands New Guinea [By Cable]

If there had been some ice cream around, the invasion of Cape Sansapor would have been a picnic. It was a surprise landing. In­stead of warships plastering the beach to clear the way for the invasion craft, the LCVPs chugged in unescorted, hoping there would be no one ashore besides the usual hermit crabs.

The infantrymen poured out on the beach and nothing happened. Noone shot at them and no one ran away from them. There just wasn't anyone there. Wave after wave came in and disappeared in the jungle. LCIs and troops proceeded up the beach. It was Sunday morning with the sun shin­ing and no shot fired. A soldier wiped the sweat off his face and said: “Well, why don't we choose up sides?”

Two and a half miles offshore was Amsterdam Island and two miles farther out, Middleburg Island. A company in buffaloes went to Amster­dam and a platoon occupied Middleburg. There were no Japs on either island.

Back on the beach, GIs speculated on the where­abouts of the next landing, gambled with guilders and discussed women. A photographer walked by.

Up on the left flank, a machine gun opened fire suddenly, followed by a few bursts of rifles and tommy guns. There was no answering Jap fire at all. "Someone saw a rabbit," a soldier said by way of explanation.

Two young natives came up the beach and were chased into the water by a small barking puppy. Some ducks and trucks were using the beach for a highway. Five photographers stroIled past.

A small force moving up the right flank to the river passed through a native village, and 10 minutes later all the natives were smoking American cigarettes.

Back at the landing point a whole platoon of photographers went by. There wasn’t much of a battle but it was getting a lot of attention. Cats and bulldozers were building roads and clearing the ground. Ack-ack guns were in posi­tion. A small fellow went past with a large white sign lettered in blue: To Latrine. The beachhead was civilized now.

Next morning a force left Sansapor beach in LCMs and headed up the coast to a small settle­ment, evidently used by the Japs as a barge-relay station. The landing was made a mile and a half to the left of the village. Like the first landing, there were no shots fired. Part of the infantry started for the jungle trail and the rest headed up the beach.

There's a peculiar thing about infantrymen. Whenever they march in, there's always some madman at the head of the column with a seven-foot stride, and everyone in the second half of the column puffs and sweats. It was like that here. As the force approached the village it slowed down and advanced cautiously. The precaution was unnecessary since a rooster, a hen and a pig in the village offered no resistance. The rooster was killed, the hen was captured, and the pig escaped.

We found the village clean and in good order. The Japs who had been living there had scrubbed out the place before leaving. They left practically nothing of value or interest behind. The huts were set in around coconut palms and some banana, breadfruit, kapok and lemon trees. Flowers, red hibiscus and frangipani were everywhere, and it was the kind of place some bum who had never been there would describe as a tropical paradise. The heat was stifling.

There had been no air attacks thus far, and there was little likelihood that the Japs, who had been in the place and taken a powder, would return. All in all it was a cheap victory. No one was sorry about that.

This was not the first action for the troops who took Cape Sansapor. They had fought in earlier New Guinea battles where the going was really tough. The surprise landing probably was more of a surprise to these infantrymen than to any­one else.

The operation will never be made into a movie starring Dorothy Lamour. It undoubtedly will not make everyone forget about a second front. But it does bring us 200 miles closer to the Philippines and the Japanese jackpot. At the moment that's the general idea behind all our movements in this theater.

It's Hotter'n Hell at Andimeshk

It’s Hotter’n Hell at Andimeshk

By Sgt. Burtt Evans

YANK Staff Correspondent

Desert District, Iran—A GI died at Andimeshk post here and went to hell. "Where were you last stationed?"

asked the Devil.

"Andimeshk," replied the GI.

“Oh," said the Devil sympathetically. “In that case you'd better rush over to the supply sergeant and draw your woolen underwear and winter overcoat."

They don't publish the temperature at Andi­meshk, but estimates of the summer heat range from 130 to 180 degrees, with most of the soldier vote favoring the higher figure. Worst thing is that it's almost that hot at night, making it hard to sleep. An old-time GI resident of this desert hot box will pour a canteen of water onto his mattress, then lie down in it and try to get to sleep before the water evaporates.

KPs fhave four meals a day to deal with at Andimeshk — the usual three, plus cold fruit juices and snacks at 0930. This breaks up the work day, which runs from 0530 to 1300 for most of the men; it's murder to work in the afternoon.

Metal subjected to this red-hot sun has caused many a flesh burn. Your dog tags will sear your chest in the short walk from barracks to mess hall. Yet the men here do heavy work, packing supplies for Russia. Most of them, like T/Sgt. Jo­seph E. Dionne, S/Sgt. Milton Kaplan, T-4 Peter Farkas, T-4 Edward A. Marusa, Cpl. Edward G. Rice and Pfc. Carl C. Miller, are spending their second summer here.

The occasional breeze hits you like a blast from a steel furnace, and the heat plays strange tricks. Some types of soap just melt away, vaseline turns to liquid and shaving-cream crumbles.

Andimeshk is practically in the suburbs of Dizful, "the City of the Blind," hottest inhabited spot on earth. Dizful is one Believe-It-or-Not place that lives up to its billing.

To avoid the heat, the people of this ancient city long ago went underground. All the mysteri­ous functions of a Persian city are performed in a labyrinth of caves many feet below the earth's surface. The wealthier the people are, the deeper they can afford to dig, and there is a saying in Dizful that "the robes of the rich rest on Noah's waters." Many of the inhabitants never come up into the daylight. More than half are at least partially blind—some because of disease, some because of their long stay below the earth.

Other Army posts in the Persian desert are almost as hot as Andimeshk. As one GI put it: “To my mind, when it gets over l50 degrees it doesn't make much difference.”

And nature kicks up other annoyances form these camps. Ahwaz has almost daily duststorms and the American soldiers who unload supply ships at the important port of Khorramshahr often labor through sandstorms that blot out the sun. At Bandur Shapur it's the humidity and stench that get you.

The summer heat is even too much for the flies. When the troops first hit this waste area "the natives greeted them with these heartening words: “InJuly the flies die; in August Johnny dies." But thanks to sun helmets, salt tablets and numerous heat-stroke centers, the medics have kept heat casualties at a minimum.

Andimeshk must be unique in one respect. It is probably the only place in the world where the American soldier is denied his one inaliena­ble privilege—the right to sweat it out.

At Andimeshk perspiration dries as it leaves the pores—you can't sweat,

YANK 25 Aug 1944