Children of Naples In World War II, The

Army,  Feb 2007  by Connaughton, Joseph

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It was May of 1944 and World War II. I was one of a handful of U.S. Army Air Forces replacements among a boatload of battle-bound U.S. paratroopers. Our convoy had left two weeks earlier, and it had been a very tense crossing. We were anxious to see land again after the zigzag course, the blacked out nights, the life jacket drills and the submarine encounters. It was an excitement I wanted to leave behind. Later, when we slipped into the Bay of Naples that morning, I looked out of the porthole. That was when I realized a new kind of excitement was about to begin.

The porthole showed bombed-out buildings and piers amid cigarshaped barrage balloons, tethered and floating lazily overhead. Those foreboding gray shapes seemed like storm clouds gathering-a forewarning of dangers yet to come. As we pulled up to a partially bombed-out pier, I heard the anchor clang and plummet into the water. It was time to grab my B-4 bag and duffel bag and head for the gangplank.

After we reached the bottom of the gangplank, a ruddyfaced sergeant in loose-fitting khakis ordered us to line up in a column of four abreast. He screamed: "Right face!" Then he gazed at the assembly from left to right. "Welcome, guys, to beautiful Napoli. You know what they say-see Naples and die. Well, you might just do that. Before you do though, I want you to pull out your dog tags from around your neck and look at them. If your blood type is O negative, I want you to drop out of ranks and congregate around those big GI trucks over there. And just leave your bags here. We'll take care of them."

I knew I had type O negative blood, and as a universal donor I had some inkling of what was about to come. We loaded onto the trucks and were soon riding through the narrow streets and over the rough roads.

While bouncing along on the wooden sideboard, I looked in horror at the littered streets. There were ragged children in groups scouring the gutters and rummaging through garbage, apparently looking for food. I closed my eyes and figured we were riding through the slums of Naples.

Thirty minutes later, my thoughts were interrupted by an abrupt stop in front of an Allied field hospital. My earlier suspicions were confirmed as we jumped down and lined up in front of the nurse stations. It didn't take long for the medics to draw the blood. I didn't mind the inconvenience and felt proud when the nurses told us they would fly the blood immediately to the troops at Anzio. The troops had experienced heavy casualties, and this was an emergency shipment for battlefield transfusions.

We waited around as more trucks brought in additional troops. A sergeant herded our earlier group back onto a truck and mentioned food as our next objective. Those were sweet words to my ears. It was about 2 P.M. and I was famished. In 15 minutes the "kidney masher" stopped in front of a partially bombed-out building labeled Infantry Mess No. 1. We lined up at the door and I wondered how different it would be from a stateside officers' mess. I soon found out. The cooks issued us GI mess kits and gruffly told us, "Go through the door and down the cafeteria-style line. Take whatever we put on it and be damn glad of it, too."

We sat at one of the bench tables by some GIs. They looked dirty, mean and in no mood for company, but there was no place else. I noticed they had piled their food about twice as high as ours. When my Air Corps buddies and I sat down, I said, "Hi, fellows, we're replacements for the 319th Bomb Group stationed on Sardinia. Ever """·* heard of them?"

One GI replied, "Yeah, man, your guys are really killers. Back at the Anzio beachhead, when the Germans moved in on us, your group dropped those air burst bombs on that German regiment. It almost wiped out the whole lot of them. Where do y'all get them kind of bombs?"

I said, "I'd never heard of them," and thought, this is a switch. I'd always thought of soldiers, not airmen, as trained killers. As they got up from the table, I noticed the GIs had eaten only a small portion of their food. I said to my buddy, "What's with these guys? Doesn't combat make them hungry?" He just shrugged.

The GIs rose and took their mess kits with them. We picked up ours and followed them to the door. They turned to the left, but our sergeant guide directed us to the right where he demonstrated how to empty our leftovers into a garbage drum and wash and rinse our kits in the drums of hot soapy water and rinse water. We followed suit and turned in our mess kits as instructed.

But my curiosity got the best of me. I retraced my steps and looked for the GIs. I found them in a nearby alley in front of a crowd of squabbling Italian kids. I couldn't believe my eyes. These kids fought for a place in a line in front of the GIs. Two or three other soldiers grabbed the big kids and moved them to the end of the line. The others soon settled down and the line took on a rough order. I noticed each child had a broken plate, bowl or just a small box in his little hands. While the two soldiers kept order, the other GIs went down the line and scraped off their remaining food into the children's makeshift plates; the children then quietly sat down and voraciously consumed their share. Tears welled in my eyes as I struggled to control my emotions. The sight of those tough GIs sharing most of their food with the children was almost too much for me. I said to one, "Soldier, how'd you know the kids were out here?"