April 4, 1944 — Fresh bread at Anzio—Yanks ignore shells to keep bakery humming
“Ask Dr. Walt” in Today’s Christian Living “What is cholesterol and why should you care?” (Part 2 of 7)
April 4, 2024“Ask Dr. Walt” in Today’s Christian Living “How do you find out if you have an abnormal cholesterol?” (Part 3 of 7)
April 5, 2024Every square yard of the Anzio beachhead in Italy can be reached by the enemy’s guns. But routine tasks go on, and Allied troops in the area even receive fresh bread. Here Pvt. Morris Goldblatt of New York City stacks some of the daily output of 13,000 loaves from mobile ovens set up in an old Italian machine shop near the frequently shelled Anzio harbor.[1]
The article, titled, “Fresh Bread at Anzio—Yanks Ignore Shells, Keep Bakery Humming” continued:[1]
They also have to laugh—do these U. S. Army bakers on the Anzio beachhead—whenever they remember being harsh and by their mothers to walk lightly in the kitchen while the bread was in the oven. Shells and bombs fall all around this bakery, composed of mobile unit such as the one pictured here, and the big square loaves always turn out perfectly.
~~~~~
Ernie Pyle wrote, in an article titled, “Shells Fall All About Charmed Bakery Outfit:”[2]
Furthermore, our beachhead has a big modern bakery, which has been working under fire for weeks, turning out luscious, crisp loaves of white bread from its portable ovens at a pace of around 27,000 pounds a day.
More than 80 soldiers work in this bakery. It is the first draftee baking outfit in our Army, and the company will be three years old in June. They’ve been overseas a year and a half, and have baked through half a dozen bitter campaigns.
They’ve had casualties right here on the beachhead, both physical and mental, from too much shelling. Their orders are to keep right on baking through an artillery barrage, but when air-raiders come over, they turn out the fires and go to the air-raid shelter.
Life seemed very normal in the bakery when I visited them. The shift leader at the time was Sergt. Frank Zigon of Pittsburgh, who showed me around. The boys were glad to have a visitor, and they gave me a pie to take home.
They said they’d had shells on this side of them and that side of them, and in front and behind. It was believable, but everything was running so smoothly that their stories of shells seemed quite academic, like some mathematical truth without reality.
But when I left the bakery, we hadn’t gone a hundred yards till an 88 smacked into the soft ground just the width of the road from our feet. If the ground hadn’t been muddy, thus absorbing the fragments, we would have got some hot steel in our jeep and probably some in our persons, as the lawyers say.
The baker boys’ story of shelling ceased to be academic right then, but I still held onto my pie.
~~~~~
[1] Memphis Press-Scimitar News Clipping.
[2] Ernie Pyle. With Fifth Army Beachhead Forces in Italy. News Clipping.
In case you haven’t read or listened to Dad’s book, you can learn more or order it here.
© Copyright WLL, INC. 2024.
