Evening star., 1943-11-21
Invasion Plans Involved

fire on any planes which came into view
in any possibly threatening position.
Fortunately, the great majority of such
gunfire, when directed at our own planes
by mistake, was at planes flying at great
altitude and far beyond the range of the
light weapons in use. Again fortunately,
hostile planes had to come down to low
er attitudes in order to drop their bombs
with any degree Of precision and the
curtain Of antlaircraft projectiles, even
when directed at our own planes, served
as a severe deterrent to sneak bombers
which tried to dart in during the con-
fusion.
This condition Of nervous trigger fin-
ger (veterans call it trigger happy'D
Is quite usual with gun crews who have
not been through air attacks, but also,
as Is usual, the crews learned quickly
and almost instinctively when an ac-
tual attack was developing and when
our own fighters only We're present.
Hostile plane attacks can develop dur
ing the passage of a few seconds time,
and it is too much to expect that
friendly planes will never be fired upon
even by veteran gun crews.
The pilots of friendly planes, some
times from necessity and sometimes
from other reasons, do not always obey
the rules. Primarily the pilots of
friendly planes are responsible that
they do not come dangerously close to
our own anri-aircraft batteries and, be-
ing themselves thoroughly imbued with
the spirit OF preservation, they
usually keep we'll out of range of otlr
light and medium fax. When the
heavier fax opens up on them by mis-
take they appear to regard such ac-
tions with the utmost disdam and SIM
ply continue about their business, prob
ably quietly cursing the general stu
pidity of all antiaircraft gun crews
Occasionally a flight of Spitfres or
P-40s will deign to execute few roles
to show up their silhouettes from everv
possible angle, as much as saying, you
damned fools, don't you recognize a
Spitf1re or P40 when you see one?"
This question of plane Identification
is never completely solved and through
out the Sicilian campaign there were
sporadic cases of friendly planes being
fired at. although after the first day
Of the campaign these occasions were
very rare and, in most cases, entirely
justified by the circumstances.
The situation of uncertainty as to the
identity of friend or foe in the air
quickly led to the use by the gun crews
of the expression Friendly Spitfires"
and Enemy Spitfires' This came
about as result of the fact that enemy
planes frequently came over during day.
light at high attitudes or in cloud cover
and dropped bombs at random. The
Spitfires chasing these bombers were
frequently climbing for ATTITUDE in
plain sight or streaking along disregard
ing cloud cover.
Many Enemy Planes Bagged.
AS result, the antiaircraft gun con-
troll officers warned the gun crews to
hold fire as planes overhead are
friendly" Immediately after this a
pattern of bombs would be seen to
drop, probably hundreds of yards away.
The gun crews laconically designated
these as enemy Spitfires." The ex-
preston is still in current, if infrequent,
use.
During this first dawn attack I occa-
sionally had few free seconds from
maneuvering my ship to glance at the
sky and the surrounding horizon. Such
glances were usually rewarded by the
sight of one or more smoking or burn
ing planes spiraling down or plummet-
ing into the sea. After landing either
in the water or on the beach, these
planes invariably burst into violent
flames and burned with a great deal of
black smoke for from several minutes
to an hour or more.
Quite naturally few of our fighter
planes were shot down by Axis fighters,
but the great majority of the falling
and burning planes were enemy and it
gave us sailors an abiding sense of Sc
curity to realize that our air force had
firmly within its grasp the mastery of
the air and that any air attacks
which we might suffer would be sporadic
in nature, of short duration, and carried
out in the face Of such fighter opposi-
tion that any appreciable bombing accu-
racy was out of the question.
The Axis apparently came to the
same conclusion. There were no more
daylight bombing raids in force through
out the remainder of the Sicilian CAM
paign.
When we arrived at Palermo on july
20, after few days at North African
port where we refueled, refilled our
magazines and stocked other supplies it
became Immediately evident that we
were in the front lines for fair. The
harbor was cluttered with sunken
Italian men-of-war, transports, floating
drydocks and lighters. Salvage units
were working like beavers to clear on
dock space, dynamite wrecks in the
harbor and generally to render the port