Written By: Birl Brown
The broad banging bottoms of a batch of LST’s
Had tip-toed on the wave-tops and slapped the open seas,
To put their long-tongued gates ashore, and yearningly to beg
To taste an ample sample of the sands of Sicily.
Like a flatiron fights the riffles on a wrinkled trouser leg,
They sought to smooth the sea,
To Gela and Licata – leaving Monty Syracuse;
But the Second Armored shall… the Gulf of Gela use,
Where oddly both Hippocrates and Aeschylus had been,
With lots of rocks and lemons trees and beaches to extol,
And eighteen-mile deep flatlands before the hills begin.
While we were still debarking – at the Bridge’s fire control,
A Naval Ensign raised his arm and pointed at the sky –
Where 31 Junkers bombers – with open bomb bays lie.
With flight formation still intact they then began to spill
Their Nazi humor onto us, to sink our ships and kill
Whoever had no place to run, and had no means to fend
Other than the naval guns and these were, in the end,
Manned by merchant mariners, young and under trained.
The ships were shaken violently, the sea was unrestrained,
They hit the Robert Rowan and split her hull awry –
The floating halves sent spiraling – stuff into the sky,
It looked like miles-high paper or black smoke seemingly.
The men were throwing helmets down, and diving to the sea.
Our MP’s lost their motorbikes, the 18th went alee
How all the men got out of there – is mystery yet to me.
When all at last had landed and secured themselves a site,
The dusk began to settle in – ourselves, we dug in tight.
The LST still lingered there, to watch the sky for more,
With many gunners green as grass, and knowledgeless of war.
The Airborne tried aloft to find their target dropping zone
And a silhouette of planes in flight, was not to many known.
The double pom-pom Bofurs, and those on shipside spoke;
Tons of tracers ripped the planes, in fuselage and wings,
Some turned back with dead aboard; some were fiery things.
We knew it to be “friendly fire” – that we could not curtail:
Such instances occur in war… if communications fail.