To the OTHER Seaside

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top.

~  ~  ~  ~


Things to Come

 

 

After two months in country, the 129th had seen some action in defense of England, putting their long months of training to the test. At roughly five months in, they were moved to the southwest city of Weston-super-Mare, a seaside resort town known for its vast estuary, a wide, shallow inlet on the Bristol Channel. They began to waterproof their equipment “preparing for invasion of France.” So, by this time, they knew their purpose. 

Though the diary doesn’t mention it, nor have I seen it mentioned anywhere, I can’t help but imagine that the seafront along Weston was used as a training area for amphibious assault. It is extremely shallow, to the point that at low tide, the water retreats to the horizon and one can walk a mile of beach out to the sea. At high tide, the water is only wading depth, more or less, leaving still a vast beach across which to charge.

(Turn your volume down. Loud wind noise on the video.)

Mark and I went on a small expedition to Sand Bay, just to the north of Weston, in search of a World War II-era machine gun emplacement. We struck out along Sand Bay Beach but could not see anything and, searching one last area, we headed further north in Mark's car along Sand Point Road, a pavement that got narrower and narrower the further we went. Just as Mark was looking for a place to turn around, we passed the emplacement. The road was so narrow at that point, Mark couldn’t stop or else he would be blocking traffic should any come along. So we parked at the National Trust car park at the end of the road, maybe a quarter of a mile past the bunker. The instructions to pay for parking at the remote location were unclear, so Mark suggested I walk back up the road to see the pillbox while he figured out the parking. I saw that one could enter the pillbox, but I first opted to step out into the field of fire, as it were, to take photos of the front of it. It sits among some seriously overgrown foliage and is barely visible from the front, but I did get some photos. Just as I stepped forward to return to the pillbox, I looked to my right, to the south, and about 100 yards away I saw the peak of another one! I walked to it and took a couple photos of its front and returned to the first one I had seen. They really had nothing to do with the 129th AAA Battalion, but they were neat to find and explore. 

Nestled in the weeds.

Overlapping fields of fire.

Defying the overgrowth of 80+ years.

The field of fire.

Sparse amenities...

...but a great sea view!

#   #   #

Dorset, Kent, Somerset

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~ 

 

Preparation

It is here that I make another, planned,  departure from the original route. Though the 129th arrived from Glasgow in Blandford Camp, Dorset, and then went in succession to Folkestone, Kent, then to WestonSuper Mare in Somerset, and then to Swanage, and then to Dorchester (again in Dorset), criss-crossing back and forth across the south of England for six months of training and gear prep, Mark and I have only a few days, making the criss-cross to match the order in which the 129th moved difficult, if not foolish, so we’re doing it in an efficient order, hitting Folkestone first and then working our way west, and then hitting the middle on the way back east.

The Itinerary of the 129th AAA Gun Battalion, January to June 1944 (sort of, thanks to Google Maps)

  And so today we visited Folkestone. 

 

 

It’s a breezy town right on the southeastern edge of the country, its beaches extending into the English Channel. Though the town proudly boasts a rich history around its role in World War I, there is next to nothing to be found about it in regard to World War II, even though the German Air Force bombed it several times. 

 

The breezy coast of Folkestone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the Folkestone WWI Memorials

   

Another WWI Memorial...

A plaque added to the statue memorial to "also" thank those who sacrificed in WWII

Mark helping me compose the shot of me

 

 

The shot of me with the English Channel behind me

 

 

 

 

 

#   #   #

Not There, Yet

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~




On a Train Headed South

The troops of the 129th boarded trains in Glasgow and headed south. My assumption is that they departed from Glasgow Central Station.

Based on my assumption, in order to replicate the route as closely as possible, I purchased tickets to travel southbound by rail from Glasgow Central Station, however, the realities of the British Rail labor agreements and the schedule of British bank holidays thwarted my efforts in part. Upon arrival at Glasgow Central, I was notified that, since it is a banking holiday, the first leg of my rail journey would be over asphalt in a motor coach. One hour 45 minutes later I disembarked from the bus in Carlisle, England, for an approximate quarter-mile walk dragging my suitcase and carry-on bag over flagstones no two of which beside each other were canted at the same pitch.

Carlisle town center, near the train station.

The platform and my train at Carlisle.

The motor coach ride, though departing a bit late, may have actually been quicker than the train for the fact that it didn’t have to make any stops along the way. After waiting a little more than an hour, I boarded the train service that IS operating today and continued southward, changing trains in Preston, to Birmingham New Street Station where I was picked up by my good friend Mark Walford. It is here where there is a planned departure from my attempt at an accurate replication of Dad’s route because, years ago when I mentioned to Mark my desire to someday make this journey, he told me to let him know because he hoped to accompany me for part of it. So, after one night in Sheldon, Birmingham, Mark will be my chauffeur and guide for the rest of my UK portion of this journey!

 

#   #   #

 

Over There

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~

Destination Great Britain!

 

While on a wider map the city looks landlocked, Glasgow sits on the River Clyde, which flows out into the Firth of Clyde and then on out into the Irish sea. The 129th steamed into the harbor amid active shipbuilding activity and, it would seem, marched right on to waiting trains, again destination unknown, but at least now they had a general idea.

I walked around City Centre a bit this afternoon, trying to stave off sleep because I failed in my method of staying awake 24 hours BEFORE my flight so I could sleep on the long flight and wake up in early morning local time to stave off jet lag. But I didn’t, so I didn’t.

 

Google Maps says this is Glasgow Harbor, but I fear someone opened a pub around there and just calls it “The Harbor,” as it’s nowhere near what appears to be the former shipyards downriver to the west where one would presume troop ships could find easy berth. (below)

 

If "The Harbor" IS where they disembarked from their troop ship, it was definitely an easy, short march to the trains. I walked what could be a likely route from the harbor to the dominating structure at the center of the Centre, Central Station, and it was a mere six minutes.

#   #   #

New Year's Eve 1943

#   #   #

Anticipation and Uncertainty

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~ 

“Destination Unknown"

Christmas, 1943, must have been very difficult for the young men of the 129th. Most had just been home to see family only weeks before and, four days on a train later, all were now stewing over the memories under a cloud of anticipation and uncertainty. And New Year's, 1944, didn't promise better. When a unit went on alert, they knew they would be on a ship within hours.

©HistoryNet.com

 

As the most reliable and efficient means of transit overseas at the time, the Army and the Navy operated 358 troop ships — both purpose-built for the military and commissioned or captured in prior military events — to bring the insanely large numbers of personnel to the combat theaters.

Secrecy was imperative. The soldier who wrote this diary not only broke the rules but risked intense scrutiny were he to have been captured by the enemy. And so it was that, as they boarded the troop ships, they had no idea where they would step off.

 

The CRISTOBAL, one of 358 vessels commissioned by the US Army and Navy to serve as troop ships delivering personnel to the war. (Troopships of World War II, Roland W. Charles, The Army Transportation Association, ©1947)

#   #   #

 

Shipping Out

 

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~

From Training to Train-ing

Their furloughs over, the men of the 129th returned to Fort Bliss and boarded trains for their designated Port of Embarkation, Camp Shanks, New York. From the HistoryNet.com article, "Camp Shanks: Last Stop, U.S.A:"

IN THE DARKEST HOURS of many nights from April 1943 to May 1945, people living on the outskirts of Orangeburg, New York, awoke to the heavy footfalls of soldiers on their final march on American soil. Division by division—from the 6th Armored to the 101st Airborne—nearly 1.3 million uniformed men and women filed from the Camp Shanks staging area to railcars and ferries that would transport them 30 miles south to ocean liners waiting at the mouth of the Hudson River.

For many of the soldiers who passed through in 1943 and '44, Camp Shanks was the last glimpse of the United States they would ever see.

Shaping Up

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~

 

Training


Anti-Aircraft Artillery training, judging by the dates of the diarist’s journal, lasted five months. There was intensive combat training plus training on the set-up, maintenance, firing, and transport of the guns, field operations, and aircraft identification, not to mention camping in the New Mexico Desert for seven weeks.

Dad once told me they had flash cards with silhouettes of all of the known aircraft in the theater of operations — friendly as well as enemy — and that they had to correctly identify each one within seconds because they had to know which planes NOT to shoot at! I got the war from Dad in small sips. Also in that period, Dad received a certificate of completion of Basic Electricity, U.S. Army (Antiaircraft Artillery) Course from the National Schools, Los Angeles, California, on 13 August 1943! 

  

 

Next Up: The War

Training finished, they were given their furloughs. From what I have been able to find out online, furloughs were anywhere from one week to 30 days. Some accounts I found indicated that soldiers had to find their own way home or to wherever they wished to spend their time and make their way back to camp. This diary shows a gap just shy of two months from course completion to the next step. I don’t know if Dad traveled all the way to Chicago Heights and back and, if he did, if he was out-of-pocket or how long he was able to stay. But he was back at Fort Bliss by 20 December 1943.


#   #   #

Soldiering Sojourn

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~

 

Dad the Grad

Dad was graduated from high school — the only one among his mother’s seven children to do so — in June of 1942. At that time, war had already been raging in Europe for nearly two years. By the end of that year, “their war” was our war and every young, able-bodied man was either enlisting in the military or awaiting notice from the draft board. His older brother, Frank, had gone before him, enlisted or drafted, I know not which. Guido, too. Dad had spent the summers of his youth caddying at a local golf course — the birth of his love for the game — and likely did the same the summer after graduation. It's this kind of dot-connecting I never thought to do with Dad while he was alive.

 

Drafted

Judging by his induction date (red circles in accompanying image) indicated on his discharge document, Dad’s draft notice came probably in the last week of January or the first week of February, as inductees usually had approximately two weeks to report to their nearest induction center.

The Army did its business quite differently from the way it’s done today. Draftees stayed the first several months in regional camps relatively close to their home cities, receiving the very basic of training to prepare them for life in the military before they were assigned to units and then shipped to that unit’s training camp where they received the serious training for the missions with which they would be entrusted in the combat in which they were to be tested.

(Full disclosure: Though I had been under the impression that the unit documented here — Battery A — was Dad's, you will note that his discharge papers show he was actually in Headquarters Battery. While he was not in Battery A depicted in the diary, and his unit’s experiences might have been slightly different (I really dropped the ball on research in this department!), the places and events definitely were in his experience; as part of the 129th AAA Bn, they went everywhere together. As to the diary, Dad had given me a document consisting of several photocopied pages stapled together. I transcribed the document into a word processing app as it appeared on the page. Some years later, when I began to look for the towns on Google Maps, I realized the diarist had likely guessed at the spelling of some of them as he wrote his journal entry after the fact, or had written down a place name rather than the name of the town they were in, so I had to make educated guesses as to where some of these places were, and then edited the document likewise.)

Fort Bliss

The diarist wasn’t much for words, so his telling of their time in most places is cursory at best. Throughout this journal I will make every attempt to fill in details with information I have found in support of his words.

Fort Bliss is a US Army base headquartered in El Paso, Texas, but commands a training center which sprawls over 965,000 acres across large swaths of Texas and New Mexico, the largest military installation in the US. In operation since the mid-19th Century, it has been the training ground for hundreds of thousands of soldiers for every conflict in which the United States has been involved. Classroom instruction on the weapons of war — specifically, in Dad's case, weapons designed to knock planes out of the sky — took place on the main base, but field training and practice firing the guns took place 50 miles northeast of the main base, out in the desert at Camp Orogrande.

Great color can be found in Bob Gallagher’s World War II story, linked in the "Reading List" in the side bar. Gallagher, a few years older than Dad and from just a few miles north of him on the south side of Chicago, shares an experience that, though in an entirely different unit than Dad's, runs practically parallel to Dad’s (even bivouacked in the same town in Luxembourg for a while!), and tells in wonderful, if not harrowing, detail of the first weeks after induction, the long train ride — in Gallagher’s case, west to California — and anti-aircraft artillery training in the desert, as well as on to the rest of his time in the war. Read his story to find the grittier details of the type of journey Dad and his fellows endured on their way to war. 

#   #   #

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

~  ~  ~  ~

Introduction

My father, James V. Gasbarro, was a soldier in the US Army from February 1943 until November 1945. He served as a member of Headquarters Battery, 129th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion (Mobile), in the European Theater of Operations and, though usually well behind the lines, saw action in England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. After the war he returned to his hometown, married, and raised a family.

Dad began attending his military unit’s annual reunions probably some time during the 1980s. I honestly don’t remember. He attended them religiously through at least the mid 1990s, a couple years after Mom passed. As advanced age began taking his comrades’ mobility and lives, the reunions ceased.

One evening I engaged him in talk about his time in the war, but, as his usual, he didn’t really want to talk about the war, but rather about the memories he preferred to share, the funny moments that happened, even in light of terrifying events that occurred around him. Then he shared a story from one of the reunions: “One of the guys there,” I use quotation marks, but only as I remember the conversation, “he got up in front of everyone and said, ‘I have a confession to make. I did something all those years ago that they told us never to do. I kept a diary of every place we went and the things we did. I’m old, now. I suppose if the government finds out and wants to put me away, they won’t have me for very long.’ And then he handed a copy to everyone who was there.” I wish I had asked Dad the man’s name, but that is lost to time.

Dad gave me his copy, typed out by his old Army buddy as transcribed from his handwritten notes, and told me it was mine to keep. It fastened in my mind for the first time — though Dad had probably told me a dozen times before — that his unit was the 129th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion (Mobile). And it instilled within me a desire to someday retrace his footsteps across western Europe. I had hoped to bring Dad with me on such a journey, however, “time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves” and, now that I am able to make the trip, Dad is long gone.

Now, in the 100th year since Dad's birth, I'm about to embark on this dream journey and I intend to share the journal here with any who wishes to read it. The first several entries from the original diary tell of the unit’s stateside activities, and will come in successive days as my departure approaches, to coincide my landing in Europe with the telling of theirs.

 

 #  #  #