On To "The Boot"

I guess the infantry had gone in ahead of time, they'd attacked and they'd advanced a little bit inland, and we got into Reggio di Calabria and there wasn't much opposition so they decided to go along the coast road, they sent us along the coast road from Palermo along up towards Locri, which is on the foot of the peninsula there, and we didn't run into very much opposition at all, we ran into thousands and thousands and thousands of Italian soldiers who were giving themselves up. You got the surprise of your life, about fifteen miles out of Locri, we see these guys coming out full marching order, swords, bayonets, flags, bands, a whole division, coming down the road to us. And the General's in front leading the parade, with all his medals and sashes and God knows what, and we just sort of waved them on, "Keep going boys, we can't, we can't do anything for ya." So we got through Locri and it's about ten o'clock in the morning and the first time I had really got fired upon, we were going along this coast road, and the ocean's here, and the mountains are here and there's a road, that's it. There's nothing else, you either went in to the sea, or you could go up the mountain. We were going along this road, it was about ten o'clock in the morning, and this squadron of Kittyhawks came over and they strafed the living Jesus out of us, and we're throwing down recognition signals, pointing to the rondelles on the top of our vehicles, it didn't make any difference to these guys. For about ten minutes they come down strafed us, fly out to sea and come back and strafed us again and we lost two carriers, two armoured cars, I think, three got, two guys killed and about five guys wounded. Our own troops. And boy are we cursing these guys, so we, we finally get organized again, there's no place to go, you know, here's the sea or the mountain, we couldn't go anyplace. We just dove under our carriers and trucks and just prayed to God that, you know, nothing would happen to us. So we get organized again, I'll be damned if we hadn't gone more than ten minutes up the road again, there's another squadron of planes coming over, and we figure, "Oh boy, we've had it." They're Germans, Messerschmitt 109's, they waggle their wings at us and they can't be anymore than a hundred feet up, they waggle their wings at us and keep going. We were so far ahead of the rest of the army, that they thought, that we were their reconnaissance troops going back. They, you know, but that was the first time we really got a, I really experienced action and it was our own troops.

Interviewer: So you were obviously much further forward than anybody in either air force would have thought.

Would have thought, that's right, we, the advance went so fast, that unbelievable. Like I say, we landed about four o'clock in the morning and here it is ten, and we're so far up the coast that, unbelievable.