大象传媒

My father John Cory鈥檚 story from his memoir 鈥淎 Span of Years鈥� as left to the family, edited by Richard Cory.

We arrived back from Rome at 2.00am. There was hardly any time for sleep as reveille was at 6.00am and 鈥楧on鈥� troop was on the move. This time in stages with night stops, via Perugia, Arrezzo, Florence and Lucca to a small village called Sieve and finally to our destination Pietrasanta. We seemed to be welcomed, by plenty of noise from the Yankee artillery, we had been loaned out and had joined the American 5th. Army. The village was deserted and we soon found out why. We had only settled in for 2 hours when two enemy planes came over and dropped twelve bombs near to our billet. Shrapnel went through our window and shutter and hit the wall opposite, bringing down the plaster and everything was covered in muck and rubble.

It took some time to lay out a base, which was forward of the village. The area was supposed to be held by the 92 (US) Negro Division, only arrived from the States a short time ago. The Division was all black, including the officers.

We re-named the village 鈥楲ittle Chicago鈥�. Machine-guns and rifles would go off throughout the night, for no apparent reason. I don鈥檛 know who they were fighting, certainly not the enemy, who were tucked away in their mountains. I think they were frightened of the dark and just fired away to keep evil spirits at bay.

To avoid accidents we were ordered not to go out at night. One night our sleep was broken by near heavy shellfire and discovered that four heavy guns had been placed practically on our doorstop. They fired away for 1 陆 hours, once again for no sane reason. Even the enemy got annoyed after a while and lobbed over a few shells on the village. We got the guns shifted well away form the village in the morning.

Basically the front was a quiet one with very little activity on the part of the enemy. We only got just over 40 plots, which wasn鈥檛 many for us. The Americans had a good canteen at Viaregio, on the coast and we spent some of our off time there and walking along the beach, the water was too cold for swimming.

Doris had a friend at the telephone exchange in Leicester who had married an Italian. He was a sculptor who was responsible for the rather fine semi-relief of the Madonna and child, over the door of the catholic church in Loughborough. She stayed in England and had not heard from her husband since the start of the war.

His studio was in our village and I found it, about a mile out. It was closed but some locals told me that Orlando Donelli was not there, he had been taken to Germany for forced labour. They remembered the English Senora with the red hair. I transmitted the information to Doris, using our code.

With some relief we left 鈥楲ittle Chicago鈥� on the 19th February, going via Lucca to Carpineto, commune of Camugnano, high up in the snow capped mountains. There had been a limited assault and we saw a column of 600 prisoners passing by.

Our base here lasted 15 days, things were pretty quiet but we managed 60 good plots, for our American friends to have a go at. Going for a walk over the hills I witnessed one of our ammunition dumps going up in flames and explosions, after receiving a direct hit. A number of shells whizzed over our area but most activity was confined to the opposite ridge in front, shell and mortar fire and a few of our planes (American) carrying out dive-bombing action, quite a good show to watch from a reasonable distance.

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