World War II Chronicle: August 2, 1943
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Front page: the first public flight of the Waco CG-4 glider ended in tragedy. Several thousand spectators watched the glider’s wing break off of the plane and its passengers, including St. Louis mayor William Becker and Robertson Aircraft Corporation president William Robertson, plummet to their deaths at Lambert Field.
Robertson was a major in the Missouri National Guard, commanding the 110th Observation Squadron, which flew Curtiss JN-4 Jenny biplanes. Robertson Aircraft operated the contract air mail route between St. Louis and Chicago, and Charles Lindbergh was the chief pilot. Robertson’s aviation unit is the ancestor to today’s 110th Bomb Squadron, which operates the B-2 stealth bomber. In fact, the base where the B-2s are stationed, Whiteman Air Force Base, was where glider pilots trained. Sedalia Glider Base was renamed Sedalia Army Air Field in 1942 and will change its name again in 1955 in honor of 2nd Lieutenant George A. Whiteman who was killed trying to take off from Bellows Field during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Robertson funded Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis — the first aircraft to fly non-stop across the Atlantic, and was a co-founder of Lambert Field… The first two pages discuss yesterday’s massive bombing raid on the Ploesti oil fields and the Harlem race riot… George Fielding Eliot column on page eight… Sports on page 11, and Washington Nationals right-handed pitcher Ray Scarborough is off to become a Naval aviator after defeating the St. Louis Browns.
Roving Reporter by Ernie Pyle
WITH THE U.S. NAVY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN — Just before daylight on the morning we landed in Sicily I lay down for a few minutes’ nap, knowing the pre-dawn lull wouldn’t last long once the sun came up. And sure enough just as the first faint light was beginning to come, bedlam broke loose all around us for miles. The air was suddenly filled with sound and danger and tension, and the gray-lighted sky became measled with thousands of the dark puffs of ack-ack.
Enemy planes had come to dive-bomb our ships. They got a hot reception from our thousands of guns, and a still hotter one from our own planes, which had anticipated them and were waiting out beyond.
The scene that emerged from the veil of night was a moving one. Our small assault craft were all up and down the beach, unloading and dashing off again. Ships of many sizes moved toward the shore, and other moved back away from it. Still other ships, so many they were uncountable, spread out over the water as far as you could see. The biggest ones lay far off, waiting their turn to come in. They made a solid wall on the horizon behind us.
Between that wall and the shore line the sea writhed with shipping. And running out at right angles from the shore through this hodge-podge, like a bee-line highway through a forest, was a single solid line of shorebound barges, carrying tanks. They chugged along in Indian file about 50 yards apart — slowly yet with calm relentlessness that you felt it would take some power greater than any we know to divert them.
The airplane left, and then other things began to happen. Italian guns on the hills back of the beach opened up. The shells dropped at first on the beach, making yellow clouds of dust as they exploded. Then they started for the ships. They never did hit any of us, but they came so close it made your head swim. They tried one target after another, and one of the targets happened to be us.
The moment the shooting started we had got quickly under way — not to run off, but to be in motion and consequently harder to hit. They fired at us just once. The shell struck the water 50 yards behind us and threw up a geyser of spray. It made a terrific flat quacking sound as it burst, exactly like a mortar shell exploding on land.
Our ship wasn’t supposed to do much firing, but that was too much for the admiral. He ordered our guns into action. And for the next ten minutes we sounded like Edgewood Arsenal blowing up.
A few preliminary shots gave us our range, and then we started pouring shells into the town and into the gun positions in the hills. The whole vessel shook with every salvo, and scorched wadding came raining down on the deck like cinders.
We traveled at full speed, parallel to the shore and about a mile out, while shooting.
For the first time I found out how they do something like this. The destroyers and ourselves were doing the shelling, while all the other ships in close were scurrying around to make themselves hard to hit, just turning in tight circles, leaving half-moon wakes behind them. The sea actually looked funny with all those semicircular white wakes splattered over it and everything twisting around in such deliberate confusion.
We sailed at top speed for about three miles, firing several times a minute. For some reason I was as thrilled at our unusual speed as with the noise of the steel we were pouring out. If you watched closely you could follow our shells with your naked eye almost as far as the shore, and then pick up the gray smoke puffs after they hit.
At the end of our run we would turn so quickly that we would heel far over, and then start right back. The two destroyers would do the same. We would meet them about halfway. It was just like three teams of horses plowing a cornfield — back and forth, back and forth — the plows taking alternate rows.
This constant shifting would put us closest to shore on one run, and farthest away a couple runs later. At times we would be right up on the wedge of pale green water, too shallow to go any closer.
During all this action I stood on a big steel ammunition box marked “Keep Off,” surrounded by guns on three sides, with a smokestack at my back. It was as safe as any place else, it kept me out of the way, and it gave me an view of everything.
Finally the Italian fire dwindled off. Then the two destroyers went in as close to shore as they could get and resumed their methodical back and forth. Only this time they weren’t firing but belching terrific clouds of black smoke out of their stacks. The smoke wouldn’t seem to settle, and they had to make four runs before the beach was completely hidden. Then in this blinding screen our tank-carrying barges and more infantry boats made for the shore.
Before long you could see the tanks let go at the town. They only had to fire a couple of salvos before the town surrendered.
That was the end of the beach fighting in our sector of the American front. Our biggest job was over.
Evening star. (Washington, D.C.), 2 August 1943. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1943-08-02/ed-1/