Finally, on August 9, we pushed off, and looking out over the harbor, we saw Winston Churchill, riding around in a speedboat, smoking his cigar, and flashing his now famous V for victory sign.[1]

The LCT was so crowded that I slept on the top deck under a truck. We had hot coffee and cold C rations for four days, then our company commander raised hell about the meal situation. The cooks would ask the sailors how they wanted their eggs each morning, and they had pies every night for supper. It wasn’t fair that the navy was eating three squares a day while we were having nothing but cold C rations.

In order for us to get hot meals, the cooking accommodations were such that only one meal at a time could be cooked. It was therefore decided that the C rations would be heated, and everyone would have only two meals a day. The navy boys cried like big babies because they were only going to get two meals a day and no more pies.

A sergeant, who was the driver for the truck I had been sleeping under, got very disgusted with the whole ordeal. He reminded the navy boys that once we hit the beach, we would be eating nothing but cold C rations while they would be back to their three hot meals a day. They ended up feeling very bad about their behavior and got us some gallon cans of fruit cocktail.

The boys played cards most of the time, and we had all kinds of inspections.[1]

~~~~~

… it was the quarter-million men seconded to Operation DRAGOON, who under Plan 4-44 had begun slipping inconspicuously from the port (of Naples) on August 9 for the invasion of southern France.

Day by day more convoys left Naples, joined by ships from Malta and Palermo, Brindisi and Taranto, Bizerte and Oran, until nearly nine hundred vessels plied ten arterial routes across the Mediterranean, converging within striking distance of Provence along the west coast of Corsica.

Making up the great fleet were attack transports and Liberty ships, LSTs and LCTs, twenty-one cruisers and eighty-seven destroyers, those smoke-stained veterans of Normandy.

Now troops sat beneath tarpaulins on the transport decks, sewing shoulder flashes to uniform sleeves or thumbing through A Pocket Guide to France. The last tanks, trucks, and rubber terrain models were bullied into the holds. From the docks, cranes hoisted ten L-4 Piper Grasshoppers onto LST-906, which had been overlaid with a flight deck to serve as a makeshift aircraft carrier for artillery spotter planes. “Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! blared from loudspeakers on U.S.S. Henrico, while 3^rd Division soldiers tuned a small radio to Axis Sally, a propaganda doxy in Berlin, who boasted she was well acquainted with Allied designs on southern France. Unimpressed, the troops never glanced up from their poker game.[2]

~~~~~

The 30th Infantry convoy sailed from Pozzuoli and near-by ports of the Neapolitan area of Italy.[3]

~~~~~

On the 9th of August 1944 we started to load onto the ships that would take us to southern France. As news commentators said, we were the best equipped, best trained and the most-experienced troops ever to make an invasion. Our morale was never higher. If old Hitler knew what was coming after him and his henchmen he would have given up before we got there.

We [the 3rd Infantry Division] also had the 36th and the 45th divisions joining us and they were extremely well experienced in combat. We all knew so much about war that there was nothing that could stop us.

I couldn’t explain it but you could just feel the confidence in the air as the ships pulled away from the piers. Of course each man had his own little bag of fear but he wouldn’t let this keep him from doing his job of being a skilled soldier.

Anyone that didn’t have some small bit of fear was as good as dead because a little fear kept people alive.[4]

~~~~~

[1] Hartstern, 34.

[2] Atkinson, The Last Day of Battle, 190.

[3] Prohme, 206.

[4] Staff Sergeant Charles O. Beardslee. Dogface Soldiers Memoirs. The Hell Hole at Anzio.

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