Part 8 Pompeii and Anzio

After a few days we ventured further afield and went on a trip to the ruins of Pompeii. Pompeii had been a retreat for the rich, the houses were elaborate with murals, gardens, and pools, and was sited about 12 miles from Naples at the base of Vesuvius. In 79 AD there had been a violent eruption, and the place was buried under ash, and white-hot lava, with the loss of about twenty thousand lives.

Legend had it, that the city had been destroyed because of its sinful ways, and a close look around the properties exposed, could lead one to understand the reasons for this suggestion. On street corners where relevant, the house walls had a penis carved on the walls pointing in the direction of the brothel. Inside the brothel there were several little cubicles, and above the entrance door to each cubicle, was the painting of a girl in the position in which she practiced her art.

Various shops, the Forum, Temple and museum were also on view, and the streets were straight and narrow. The grooves left by the chariot wheels could still be seen along the roadways. Our guide took us into one big house where a large painting was kept hidden behind a locked door and he told us it was for viewing by men only. The drawing was of a man who had a very large penis which was resting on one side of a pair of scales, and on the other side he was placing gold bars.

In the museum were several plaster casts taken of people whose bodies had left spaces in the ash and they were all in hunched up positions, with their arms over their faces, no doubt for protection. It must have been a horrible death.

We spent several more weeks at the fort, and then one day we were told to be ready to leave at short notice. This meant checking all our equipment, writing any letters that were due, and getting our smalls washed.

Marching orders came, and we were taken to the docks to embark on a troopship, where we found we were going to serve with the Scots Guards. I wandered around the permitted parts of the ship, and I found two lads whom I knew, both from Kelloholm, Kirkconnel. They were called Andrew McMinn, and Jimmy Boyle. I had been at school with Jimmy’s younger sister, Lizzie and Andrew’s younger brother, Jim. The McMinn family were keen bagpipe players and we could often hear them being played in my family home, particularly by the father who was in the local pipe band.

The troopship stopped a few miles from the coastline and we were told that our landing was going to be at a place called Anzio. We scrambled down the nets into the landing craft, and set off for our destination

When we got to the beach everything was silent, and in the darkness appeared to be completely deserted. We marched a few miles inland and then were told to dig ourselves in. Fortunately the ground was fairly soft and soon we had a foxhole that no fox would have been ashamed of, made by using a trenching tool with which we had been supplied. This was on 22-1-44.

We learned that this beachhead had been made to try and get the Germans to leave Monte Cassino which was an abbey on top of a mountain, further south, so that we were now behind it, and the Germans’ line.

The Germans had made the abbey into a fortress, and despite repeated bombing raids by the R.A.F. and assaults by the Allied troops, held grimly on. They were not dislodged from this position until the 18^th May 1944.

It was an American general who was in charge of the Anzio beachhead, and instead of dashing north to take Rome a few miles up the road, he decided to stay in the beachhead and build up supplies of men and arms before moving any further.

This cautious attitude may have been caused by a landing which had been made at Salerno, a few weeks previously, and it very nearly was a disaster. It was because of air force superiority that they were able to break out of the beachhead, before the Germans had pushed them back into the sea. A member of one of our bombardment teams was killed in the operation, by one of our planes dropping its bombs on our lines, instead of on the Germans, as the operations were changing so swiftly.