"You will be held at camp until orders from the High Command come in for your formal assignment", he advised us, "You will be housed in regulation army tents, four persons to each tent, with iron bunks, wire springs, and GI blankets top and bottom."
This was as we had expected and we stood there stoically and listened to the rest of it. Mess call would be prompt at 7 each morning and the chow line would form at the open-air kitchen a short distance away. As a final note, he ordered that "No one should leave the camp for forty-eight hours, without his expressed permission. At the end of that time the senior officer would be responsible for the contingent with authority to issue passes and be responsible for the conduct of those in the group."
I had been hit with this Senior Officer role everytime since leaving the States nearly 25 days before. While waiting embarkation at Camp Patrick Henry in Newport News I was assigned to command a Negro work batallion because the camp commandant, a Colonel, said, "As a southerner you know how to handle niggers."
The prospect of a bunk in a warm tent was good news to the nine old retreads in our contingent but it was like waving a red flag at a bull to the seventeen bomber pilots who had come across with us. The nine old retreads were perfectly willing to retire to our tents and do bunk duty for the night. The seventeen bomber pilots disappeared like a bunch of quail in the brush thicket. They had either bribed the guards or sneaked through the barbed wire surrounding the camp and had spent the evening in the bistros outside the barbed-wire enclosure.
Apparently they made traditional use of their time and filled up on raw Algerian wine. They had returned about midnight, roaring drunk, and were caught by the military police as they attempted to get back through the wire. They were promptly brought before the Colonel who ordered them to house arrest and to see that they went to meals and latrines under proper guard.
In the camp was a contingent of enlisted men, former cooks, jeep drivers at various camps in the USA who had been gathered together and shipped out as infantry replacement in anticipation of heavy casualties as our army invaded the Italian mainland. These men had not been paid for several months. Though it took another round with the Colonel, I succeeded in getting them paid.
However, with that attended to, I still had the problem of my bomber pilots ... they were chafing at the bits to get out, or get court-martialed for whatever was coming to them. However, as luck would have it, a few days later an order came down, asking that all bomber crew personnel be shipped at once to England for replacement to the crews being lost over Germany.
I went to the Colonel with the telegram and again he argued that these fellows had disobeyed a legitimate military order and would be court martialed. Finally, however, after a lot of argument, he consented to let them go and agreed to squash the court martial proceedings. In just a few hours the seventeen young bomber pilots were on their way to their destiny. Some months later I encountered one of the group taking a leave in Italy, and he said that of the seventeen original replacements only eight were left. The other nine had either been killed or taken prisoner after being shot down over Berlin.
A matter of hours after the bomber personnel left camp, orders came for the nine retreads to report to Algiers and on the same evening we took the French Papado from Casablanca to Algiers where we were then shipped by truck to a land-locked valley in the Atlas Mountains know as Tizzi Ouzzou, or the Grand Kabayle. Numerous villages nestled high on the mountainsides looked on the lush lowlands mostly settled by the French.
Our billets at Tizzi Ouzzou were in a French high-school building and here we experienced our first Joint Command of British and American forces. Sicily had already fallen to the sweep of the Allied armies. Our mornings at Tizzi Ouzzou were taken up mainly in Italian lessons in preparation for what was to be the invasion of the Italian peninsula. In the afternoon we did a good bit of hiking in the mountains.
The British, we had promptly learned, were sticklers for doing things according to the rules and long-range plans. It had been decreed that no hot water was to be supplied until November 17th. That meant that after our long hikes in the mountains when we came in sweaty, cold, and tired it was cold-water baths, or no baths. Promptly as the hands on the clock and the numbers on the calendar reached November 17th we had hot water, to the relief of everyone.
Our stay at Tizzi Ouzzou was rather short. One afternoon, after returning from a visit to Tigzit, the farthest west of the ancient Roman settlement, an orderly came running through the hall calling specifically for Major Hammar, a former land economist professor at the University of Missouri, and anyone else who knew anything about food and agriculture.
A Captain Keim, who had been the 4-H Club leader in the State Extension service of the State of Pennsylvania pointed to me and said, "That guy is a farmer."
I had filled out my Form 57 emphasizing my experience as a manager of business enterprises, a farm magazine and radio station, General Agent of the Farm Credit Administration of the New Orleans district and my experience as First Sargeant of Infantry in World War I without a reference to my agricultural background.
Major Hammar and I were immediately called before the assignment board consisting of a British General and an American Colonel and were told to report to General Eisenhower's headquarters in Algiers the next morning. We were soon packed bag and baggage in a weapons carrier and rushed to Algiers ready to report to General Eisenhower. We were received by his Civil Affairs officer who briefed us on the situation and reported back to General Eisenhower.
Two weeks before our departure for Sicily from Tizzi Ouzzou an American Lieutenant Colonel, who had served a short time in Military Government in Sicily, claimed that provisioning the island would be no problem since Agricultural Department statistics showed Sicily exporting about 40,000 tons of wheat annually. We did not at the time have access to the statistical data but we were suspicious that something was wrong somewhere. Now here we were, less than two weeks later, in Sicily because of a food crisis.
What had happened was just another example of the danger of taking statistics at first glance and assuming that they mean what they appear to mean.
The Pentagon planners, setting up the supply needs for the Sicilian invasion, had looked at the Sicily agricultural statistics all right -- but they had only read the production and export figures. Sicily is the chief producing area in Italy for durum and hard wheat varieties and annually exported considerable amounts of this wheat to North Italy to blend with soft wheat in making pasta. On the other side of the ledger Sicily normally imported 40,000 tons of soft wheat from North Italy or Africa to round out her food supply. Seventy percent of the diet of the Sicilian population at that time consisted of various forms and concoctions of bread grain ... the balance being fruits, vegetables, olive oil, and very little meat.
Because of the invasion, much of the 1943 hard wheat crop had not been exported to North Italy; and none of the soft wheat from North Italy had come to Sicily. To further complicate the situation, the current grain crop in Sicily was not coming in and Dr. Hammar and I faced the problem of how to induce the farmers market.
Our first stop was Trapani, the provincial capital of the province of the same name, on the west coast of Sicily. The town had been badly battered by the naval bombardment and was just beginning to move about a little. A rather sharp and gung-ho Britisher was in charge of the small military government team. There was much activity of cleaning up the mess of the battle and getting some sort of local government organized and going. Everything had to be closed down tight. Gasoline stocks, transport, food supplies, and fuel resources had been seized and put under guard. The chief activity that morning was issuing or denying anxious Sicilians a chit for a ration of gasoline, wheat, or fuel. Everything was moving, if it moved at all, through military channels. There was concern in griping about the collection of the wheat crop but things had not reached crisis proportions evident in Palermo.
Over the years Italy had developed a nationwide system of Farmer Cooperative Marketing associations which received and marketed the farmer's grain, olive oil and horse beans. These cooperatives ("Consorcois Agarios") had been enveloped into the fascist system and performed certain state services such as payment of subsidies to wheat farmers. When miliary government officers landed in an area they were given a guide book for procedures mainly requiring the closing or destruction of all Fascist institutions and the trial or firing of all officials of these institutions. Colonel Charles Polette, Military Governor of Sicily, had followed the book and closed all of these institutions and fired or jailed their managers. This meant that the only agencies which could receive and pay a farmer for his products were closed. Since there was no subsidy to be paid, farmers were at a loss of what to do with their wheat. Under the system these Consorcios and their sub-offices in almost every commune in Italy offered the only way a farmer could market his wheat legally.
When this situation became so evident, Major Hammar and I discussed the situation and what to do about it. We had no adminstrative authority; only staff functions, which were largely the making of reports and the expression of opinions. But the situation was most serious, so with some danger of getting into trouble higher-up, we quietly suggested to the local Military Government that teams be formed in each province to find some way to open up the consorcios and get them back into business with the promise that we would try to legalize the procedure and get an increase in the price of grain to offset the lack of subsidy which normally came from the government. Most of the local Military Government officials took the hint and opened up the Consorcio Agarios with the clerical personnel putting some farmer, a so-called non-Fascist official, in nominal charge of the operation.
Another false assumption which bugged us all over Italy and Germany was that everybody concerned with a Fascist institution was a member of the party or a follower of Fascism. When it was pointed out that it would be almost impossible for everyone to be Party member we were told by some of the most ardent CID men that these people were followers and followers in this instance are worse than an outright Party member.
This of course overlooked the very human instinct in all countries of every person to survive. Even the most primitive economy must have somebody to manage it.
As we drove on to each province and many villages on our survey, we found that most of the Military Government teams were strongly in favor of force, military raids, to gather in the grain and to "scare the peasants into bringing in their harvests." They had achieved some success in several provinces raiding the large Latifundia, but the small peasants on two or three acres often tucked away high in the mountains or on the fringes of the Latifundia were a real problem. These fellows had been hiding their crops from the invaders and government for centuries. They were not about to change colors because of "being liberated by the British and American armies."
In Calcansetti province we learned that a raid was to be staged on some farmers in a mountain village on the night of our arrival there. We took part in the raid as observers. A little after sundown, two jeeps with six or seven soldiers in each, with an American Captain and a British Major, took off for a group of villages and individual homes perched on the side of a mountain several miles away. The jeeps were parked at the hard surfaced road at the foot of the mountain and the party walked up a winding donkey trail to one of the dwellings and demanded entry. Then began a rather fantastic procedure.
When the wheat was demanded, there were loud protests from the peasant and his family. He denied having any except small amounts he had kept for his family over the winter.
This claim was not believed, and immediately a search for the wheat was ordered; a search of each room, of the out-buildings, under the floor, and in the fence corners. Finally, a sizeable amount of grain was found in the earthen jars in a sort of a cellar, more in sacks hidden away in bushes and corners. After about one hour at this one place, something like five quintals, about 1000 pounds of wheat, were seized and toted down to the jeeps and the waiting weapons carrier truck on the roadside.
We left the party at this point but when the results of raids on other houses in the area were added up it amounted to less than a ton of wheat. This seemed quite a small haul and rather dubious use of the combined military power of two great nations conducting a world war. I was convinced that there had to be some better way of doing the job, but just how was another question.
Major Hammar and I spent New Years Day 1944 in Calcansetti. The Military Government team took the day off. Italians traditionally visit and have family gatherings on that day. We did very little more than try to keep warm. An entry in my notebook reflects some of the feelings we had on New Years 1994:
"This is New Years and I suppose one should think lofty thoughts and jot down ideals and resolutions but all I can think of now is that I'm cold and lonesome for the family. It is raining, turning to sleet outside. I slept on an iron cot springs last night with no mattress, no blankets and newspaper on the iron springs to break the chill which even then came up through my trench coat and sweater which I wore all night. These Sicilians are quite a lot. They literally swamp streets each evening, walk and talk. The youngsters: first, want to be a priest; second, a painter; third, a tenor; and last probably a gangster of the Mafia."
With our food survey rounded up on January 2nd, we headed for Enna high in the mountains: a beautiful town at the foot of Mount Aetna, which on that day was capped with snow glistening in the bright sun. After our round of seeking out the food situation we got over to the British Military Government villa around midnight where we were to sleep in considerable comfort. We were casually advised by the British Major that he had ordered the execution of two Sicilians at dawn, carrying out sentence of death leveled by the Italian court, before the invasions. This was to take place in the best Sicilian tradition with a firing squad, the prisoners blindfolded and standing against the wall. We were invited to attend the execution. I noted in my book that we refused the invitation but "slept soundly that night."
During the next seven days we visited all of the provincial capitals of Sicily, Ragusa, Catania, Syracuse, Messina, and literally dozens of villages and small towns. The story around the circuit was about the same: little or no wheat coming in, black market raging, and farmers in rebellion against the prices they were paid in the official market.
As we approached Messina on one of our last stops before Palermo, we rounded a mud puddle on a curve in the road and there lying at the edge of the road, where cold muddy water was splashing on them, were huddled six young children apparently waiting or hoping to be picked up or else too ill to move. Those pale pinched faces haunt me to this day.
Vehicles were crowded front and rear and roaring hellbent for whatever destination each was supposed to reach. We paused only briefly but drove on like the rest. We stooped at the first church we saw in Messina and told the priest of the children back up the road and expressed the fear that the were going to die if not taken out of the chilly rain that night.
The priest listened, then shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yes, I know, but there are so many that we must try to care for here now that I can't see much that we can do."
I shudder now, thirty years later, at my own comment, "Well, life is cheap in Sicily." What else could be said?
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