Louie Marino
[6/25/22]
Date of Interview: 11/9/04; Elkhart, Indiana
Interviewer: Brock Lucchese
Transcriber: Brock Lucchese
[Interview starts at 001 on the counter]
[Interview with Louis Marino in Elkhart, Indiana on the night of 11/9/04. The interviewers were Brock Lucchese, Gino Lucchese, John Lucchese and John Lucchese Junior. Louis Marino served in WWII]
Begin Tape 1, Side A
[001]
[Beginning of interview: Entire group discussing and reviewing pictures, maps, who from Elkhart was in the war, etc.]
[022]
John Lucchese: How many combat jumps did you make?
Louie Marino: Three, Holland, Switzerland and Salerno. I met …. in Italy. Here is a picture.
John Lucchese: Good golfer.
Louie Marino: Yes. Here is a bunch of people you know…... This is Father Lucas, he worked with the regulars. That is not the regular team, most of them.
[John Lucchese and Louie Marino continue looking through pictures, discussing people they know.]
Gino Lucchese: What year is that?
Louie Marino: 1947. That is after the war. That other picture is before the war.
[064]
John Lucchese: Louie I can’t pick you out here. Where are you at?
Louie Marino: Oh, that is a picture of paratroopers. I am not in that picture.
LM: You can’t hardly see it. Those are brass knuckles with a bag around the other end of it. We carried that thing. That was our own personal weapon there.
[076]
JL: Really?
LM: Yeah. Let me see that. That is the brass knuckle there. He’s got the blade turned in his fingernail.
JL: Is this your scrapbook?
LM: No, this is the number 82nd Airborne put out a ….. of the war. All the pictures and everything in Sicily. Even WWI they got some stuff because that Sergeant York was in 82nd before it was an airborne outfit.
[More discussion on pictures…..]
JL:How much did your pack weigh when you were loaded like that?
LM: The minimum was probably about 80 pounds…. It ain’t nothin’ but a matchbox.
JL: They didn’t have to go out there alone did they?
LM: No. They were with the outfit. They were like a suicide plane cause they would break up so easy.
Gino Lucchese: How many guys could fit into a glider?
LM: I am not sure just how many they carried in those days, but I would assume maybe twelve or something about that much. Up to fourteen I think. I am not sure how many they did carry.
Gino Lucchese: I was looking at your map here. Did you figure out… did you jump into both of these places or just one of them?
LM: Oh no. He’s got two of them marked, huh?
GL: Well, they are both called Alta Villa?
LM: Yeah. Well, what that guy done. I think he took him. Let’s see. I think he took him to this place, and he should have took him to this place.
JL: That’s why you jumped here?
LM: Yeah, we jumped here. ……That’s really why he sent me this map, to explain why these guys took him to the wrong place.
JL: Yeah.
GL: What is the reason to jump in right here? Wasn’t there a supply line, and I know that reading your stuff on Monte casino, which would be like North right up here.
LM: The reason we jumped into Salerno was that we were getting pushed back into the sea. The Germans were kicking them out. The Americans over there. And the British. The British were on the other side. So we went in there to reinforce. What we were supposed to jump was 90 miles above Rome. We were in the planes ready to take off and everything and these guys sent word back. They said that the partisans, some of them ratted on the Americans and they told them about it, the operation. Then these two generals were up there already. And they had to escape. They took off in a boat.
JL: They changed their jump from Rome to here.
LM: Some of the planes had taken off already and ours was on the runway getting ready to go and they canceled that operation. …Two days later… the operation hadn’t gone well. So that brought us in to reinforce the forces that were in there. We were able to hold the counter attack. That was what we did.
JL: How long were you there, Louie? At that particular point? …Was this your second jump?
LM: No, Sicily was before this. We were in Sicily getting ready to go.
JL: This is your second jump?
LM: Yeah. What’s that there volcano in Sicily?
Group: Pompeii? Vesuvius? …
LM: No, that’s in Italy…
GL: Etna
LM: Yeah. Mt. Etna. Yeah, that’s the one…That Vesuvius was erupting while we were there.
[048]
JL: How did you keep yourself here? Do you remember?
LM: Well, we were for forty-eight hours under constant artillery fire. Just kept us pinned down.
JL: Forty-eight hours?
LM: Yeah. And then we found… they were trying to move out, and get out of there, because we pushed them back. But, they had control of the road. But we had the control of the high road, there at Alta Villa. And they had this road blocked off, though. What they did they loaded up and took off and went… We got on a RCI. Which was a beautiful sloop, real nice boat from Salerno we come out of there. And, it was a beautiful sunny day. And, right here at Amalfi. That’s where it was almost straight up. We had to walk up and by the time we got up there it was dark after we got off the boat ride we took to there. And, when we woke up in the morning, we were in a grape arbor. Beautiful, great big beautiful grapes right above our heads. And the poor old farmer, I talked to him a little bit in Italian. And he says you guys ruined me, he says you guys are like locusts… [Laughter]
JL: Locusts [Laughter]
LM: Oh boy.
JL: You found some fresh fruit…
LM: He had them girls out there real early out there. And had this great big vat. And they squishing them with their feet standing around n’ gettin’ the juice out of them grapes. That was something…
GL: What time of the year was that? Was that in the fall?
LM: Yeah, that was, uh…probably the last week in September when we were in the grape arbor. Then we had to walk on to Naples from there. That’s when I could see Mount Vesuvius and I couldn’t figure out what that big fire was. And here that fire from Mt. Vesuvius was huge, smoking up.
JL: Did you guys fight all the way this way?
LM: Well, we didn’t run into any resistance any more until we got to about Naples. And then, we… and that damn guy gave me a big roll of wire. And it was a mountain, well, a pretty good sized hill. Just before we got there and he said, “Louie, you gotta carry this roll of wire over for us. Over the mountain, over the hill.” And no, he didn’t give me any help or anything. And I had to carry that darn thing by myself. And …. I could hear small arms fire up ahead. But, that was the only resistance we got and then when I got over the hill with that roll of wire and it was almost daybreak and I asked that guy, I said, “What do you want me to do with this wire?” And he said, “Oh, it’s ok, just leave it lay there.” After I brought it up there.
JL: Oh man!
LM: So I left it there. And it was really weird though, because here I am walking, going into Naples, I don’t know where the rest of the outfit is, except this one guy was in the jeep. And here I am going down to Naples, no civilians, no people, no nothing. You know, in a town the size of Naples.
JL: Oh boy!
LM: And, uh, that uh, they finally, some more troops showed up, but there for a little while, it was just like a ghost town, you know. Not a soul. And we. But the Germans did, they set the darn coal, right there in the port, they set it on fire. And all these big piles of coal were burning, that the Germans had touched off. And you could. People below me are coming down there with wheel barrows trying to get the coal. Oh.
[203]
JL: Well, where was your worst battle at?
LM: Oh, I suppose it was in Holland.
JL: Was that your first jump?
LM: First jump? No, that was my last.
JL: Your last, yeah?
LM: Yeah, I was. There was Pellegrino here. And this guy we called Pop Pryhowski because he was 31 years old and he was an old man to the rest of us. You know, all of us were in our teens and just early 20’s. And uh, oh. There’s the Mussolini Canal there at Angio when we went in by boat. We invaded it. When we came around from Naples and came in there by boat. And I got a picture I had here. I think I had another one. Yeah. These are the boats we used to go across the Wahl River at Remagen. They had the bridge. They had .88 cannons that they swung around and every time they tried to get somebody on the bridge, well, they would blow them away with these .88 cannons. They were accurate too with those damn things. And those are canvas boats. And when we went across the Wahl River, which is part of the Danube. It was just like that river is [pointing out the window to the St. Joe river], the ground on the other side was as flat as the river is, but going across the river they had these machine gunners and you could see the bullets hitting the water like raindrops. Boy, they were hitting all around us.
JL: Were those issued by the government, those canvas boats?
LM: No. The British built them somewhere and brought them to us.
JL: Nice and light, but not very much protection.
LM: Oh, yeah, you didn’t have much protection as all. But the Engineers. The 307 Engineers, which were attached to it, had to do the rowing and take us over there and drop off, then come back and get another load. We went single file, for oh, it was about 300 yards, before we could get any protection at all from the fire, from these guys shooting. And uh, we uh, … made the best protection we could by going single file. And most of us got over there, I don’t know how. But we lost some guys in the boat. And we finally got to the other side so we could get some fire power onto them.
[244]
GL: What was the battle over?
LM: The bridge. We was trying to take that bridge. I don’t know whether you saw that movie, “A Bridge Too Far”? It was about the jump in Holland. The thing was it was just like it is now. These guys would set these road mines, they were trying to get to those guys in Arnhem, the British troops jumped in Arnhem and we were trying to reach them. And these tanks, every time they get started these British tanks they’d get to Arnhem well, they’d run across these pillow mines and blow up. And, that would halt things from going on further and finally we had to break it off at Remagen. Just on the other side of Remagen. We never reached the British troops that jumped at Arnhem.
LM: [Pointing to picture] This is the Battle of the Bulge, Normandy. That was a mess, too.
JL: Were you there?
LM: Yeah
JL: That was where?
LM: That was in Belgium.
[262]
JL: How many countries did you fight in …?
LM: Germany, Holland, France, Italy at this point. And when I first got to North Africa there was just a little, kind of, rear action around….northern Africa.
JL: When you said World War, you were in several wars.
LM: That deal there…it’s not like there going now. It’s bigger scale. These convoys trying to go from A to B. And, Baghdad, you know they’ll blow up these convoys every day, I think. Killing people, over there. And then convoys. That was a similar way the Germans did the troops trying to get to Arnhem.
[281]
JL: Louis, in big jumps like this, how many guys, how many percentage would make it as far as broken legs?
LM: Really don’t know. But there was a lot of casualties, not a whole lot. But, there was always casualties, that way. See, what they try to do was get you out of that plane in six seconds, the whole stick. They call the whole bunch of you a stick. You tap the guy on the…you check his equipment and at night you can’t really see anything. The thing people don’t realize is when it got dark, there was no lights. You couldn’t build a fire. You couldn’t turn a switch on. You didn’t have any lights, everything was dark. And in Africa, when we were in Africa it was in the dessert, we had to go thirty-five miles just to get a drink of water. We got one canteen of water a day. And that was to shave, take a bath, whatever. You got one canteen of water a day. That was it.
GL: You had to get a stick out within six seconds? How many guys were in a stick?
LM: There would be anywhere from 14-16 guys. When you left that plane, well, you dropped about 175 feet before your shoot opened. There was a little piece of string, about that long that that had a pilot chute, a little pilot chute onto the main chute. And when the pilots reached that there, it pulled the main chute out. Then that string would break and they let the shoot out. If you didn’t put that little piece of string on there, your shoot wouldn’t open. They wanted you to get out of that plane as soon as you can. When you hit the ground you’d have all of your fighting force together and be able to reach your objective, whatever. Trying to get to that bridge in Remagen you know to hold that before they’d blew it up.
JL: Were all your jumps at night?
LM: No….That one in Holland was a daytime jump. Beautiful, Sunday. People coming from church. There was this one church; there was a bar right next to it. People sitting at the bar, you see them looking out…There was a damn sniper up in that church, somewhere. We never did stay there long enough. We had our objective to get to and you can’t mess around with a sniper. You just don’t know exactly where they are at. You hear that sound of that bullet, then you hear the rifle.
Brock Lucchese: Did it ever hurt when your parachute opened? Did it hurt when your parachute opened?
LM: Well it’s probably what you’d…if you went out wrong, you’d get big blisters on your shoulders. Like strawberries like you get playing basketball. Sometimes you get that big blister there if you go head first, it flips you out. You try to go out with your feet headed towards the front of the plane. Try to twist to go out that way. They slowed the plane down, lift the tale up so you wouldn’t get tangled up in the tale…
(Looking at medals and citations: Bronze Star, Combat Infantryman, Wings, Ruptured Duck, )
Begin Tape 2, Side A
[John Lucchese Junior (JLL) enters during pause]
[001]
LM: Yeah, I remember 10/17 very well. There was a team of artillery observers. He had about five or six guys with him, and uh, he was giving artillery coordinates that rate of fire. And I thought, boy, let’s get the hell out of here. Because the Germans, don’t take em long to zero to in, you know, from all over…they all got killed, every one of them guys. That captain….I never will forget that. Because, when we came back and we moved out of there, it’s like someone came in there with a bull-dozer. They cleared all these shells…
JLJ: How could they determine that fact where the ordinates were coming from?
LM: Them Germans had equipment, I don’t know, they had equipment that they could see the… on the way the artillery was coming in. Listen,…the guy that was giving us instructions on where to fire rounds and he was looking out where he thought the shells…[he was on the radio and he was looking out towards where the shells] should have been. And he says, I didn’t see where that shell laid. I never saw it. And I say, hey, you better look behind you. The shell landed about a hundred yards behind him. And here all the time he was looking forward. And this guy’s supposed to be a lieutenant and supposed to be up on all…shell…That’s how bad things got…He was from a different division, altogether. I didn’t really know who he was. He was from a different division on down, another outfit.
[027]
GL: You were talking about one situation where their own people shot down twenty seven of our airplanes.
LM: Twenty-seven of our airplanes. They were amazing. Navy personnel. You didn’t see that very often. You can read it in the history books, somewhere…
(Discussion about AWACS and Air Force)…
LM: You have to go through hell to get killed. That’s about what it amounts to. So stay out of the service if you can (lecturing to Brock). Don’t volunteer for anything.
[050]
GL: Louis, do you know how many guys are still around from your old group?
LM: Well, our outfit has a convention every year. The 82nd Airborne. They put out a magazine every month. And this last year they were at Lake Tahoe. And, they asked 82n World War II veterans to stand up, and I think they had 3,000 people there at that convention, and when they asked the WWII veterans to stand up, only seven guys stood up. There were only 47 there at that convention from WWII. So, they’re getting pretty thin. There’s not too many left. Yup, the number is getting pretty small. But, that guy, the picture, Fred Baldino, he’s still kicking and hanging in there.
JL: Where’s he live?
LM: Not Pasadena, the next town… It’s terrible. I can’t think of the name of it. But it’s right in the Los Angeles area.
JL: Ever call him?
LM: He calls me all of the time.
JL: Yeah.
LM: Yeah, I don’t call him but he calls me. And there’s another guy but he just died a couple years ago. And he was a sergeant. And we used to give him all the shit details. He is the guy who had me carry the wire across the …That was really weird. We were out in this one house, in Italy, and we were sitting at the table. The whole kitchen, oh, was about like this. And they had a draw curtain about right here. He took this girl in this room, and he screwed her in this room, and he left us still sitting at the table. That’s how bad this guy was.
JL: Animal. Animal.
LM: …He didn’t even get to keep his stripes.
JL: Really?
LM: Yeah. I thought to myself, at that time, I thought, oh, you are not one of what he is doing. That’s for the dogs. I didn’t like that at all.
JLL: Yeah. That is. That’s just like a dog.
LM: But it was terrible. Them people were hungry you know. They didn’t have nothing to eat. That’s how they, you know, that’s how they fed their family.
JL: Prostituting?
LM: Well, yeah.
JL: Yeah.
LM: Yeah. Terrible. That’s why I say, war is terrible. It’s horror all around.
GL: I was telling Johnny about the one story you told earlier about Pop, he played minor ball.
LM: Oh yeah!
GL: What was his real name?
LM: Pryhowski
GL: Pryhowski
LM: Yeah, Pop Pryhowski. He was a good athlete, but you know, he was an old man to us, 31 years old.
GL: Was he a pitcher or a fielder or?
LM: No, I think he was a short stop. And he was really good. And we used to play, you know. Once in a while we’d get enough off to really, when it wasn’t related to combat, we’d have time, you know, to mess around and play ball.
JLJ: Louie, you were a good ball player back then.
LM: But this guy was a good baseball player. He’d do tricks with a baseball. He’d toss it around, you know. Unbelievable. You know, he was quick.
[093]
GL: Where were you when you were under attack from the Germans?
LM: Oh, at that time?
GL: Where you had, he had, panicked and?
LM: Oh, we were in a fox hole. The both of us. And we were at Salerno.
GL: Okay.
LM: This is at Salerno. And we had moved from one position, to this other position, and these holes were already dug. And Pop was already there when I got there. So I got in there with him, and we no sooner got in there and the German’s counterattacked. And he, right away, he panicked. He just, froze, you know. And I tried to get the gun out there, but he didn’t do anything. Finally, I said, ……that he was a good ballplayer. And I said, “Get a hand grenade!” And I knew he could throw that damn thing a mile!
GL: How far away were the Germans?
LM: Oh, well the German’s were shooting at us. It was probably from the water. But, it was terraced. They could stand up, look over and drop the … bomb. These people, over the centuries, had terraced these … off and they could … so they could plant, oh, vegetables and stuff, you know, they would do. And, when they’d go so many yards about ….. and they would terrace it off and you could go down and …try to cut this out in the mountains. Maybe thousands of years of roads.
GL: So you were in the lower position?
LM: We were in the high position. And they were in the lower position. It wasn’t our fault. We ducked down, and then come up. We ducked down, and then shoot, you know. When we’d stop, you know, like I was telling you about. When my one arm would get 8 rounds off, it would last for 3 days. Well, that’s, in between those positions, was when I got Pop’s to finally get a hand grenade and toss it. And I think we, I know we, must not have killed anybody. Because after I left, we went down there to look, and there wasn’t any bodies there. But, this is the thing….I don’t think I mentioned there was a well. And every once in a while we would get our canteens and go there and get some water, out of this well that was done there. And that was the time because this was in between the area where they were firing at us or we were firing at them. And that’s where the well was. And, oh, this one day I went down to fill up canteens and I looked down there and there was these goats. Why were these dead goats down there? Why would they kill a goat and put it down there? And that damn dead goat was down there and we was drinking this water.
[129]
JL: Trying to poison the well?
LM: Well, we always put tablets in our. They give us these tablets to put in our canteens.
But, I got yellow jaundice, and I think that might have been one of the reasons I got that yellow jaundice.
JLJ: Was it at that same area?
LM: Well, it was after we moved out of there. When we got to Naples. There was a. They put me on night patrol right there at the ocean, well, not ocean, but the, you know, the court that goes into Naples. And I was on was duty out there, and I got sick. And I was pooping light and peeing red. And I think it might have been from that water we drank from that damn well, you know. But we put tablets in our canteens to neutralize things. Infection we might.
JLJ: Do you think you guys were pretty well supplied during the war?
LM: Oh, yeah. Hell, us guys got the best of everything.
JLJ: Did you?
LM: Yeah! No, I mean best of what they had. For that time. They had a five-in-one ration that they give us. It was really outstanding. It had bacon, you know, you could fry the bacon. It was real good bacon. And, uh, oh, what else did they have in there?
JLJ: How did they refrigerate all that?
LM: Well, this wasn’t. This was all cured. No, this was all …….But we never got into those better rations until after we ……
JLJ: I was surprised to hear that you said that you had tablets for your water. That kind of surprised me.
LM: Well, yeah. There was two tablets they give you. (Chloroform?) I think they’re called to purify the water. And they also gave you salt tablets because the temperature was in the 90’s. And, uh, our uniforms, we’d sweat so bad, that our uniforms would turn white.
JLJ: From all the salt in your?
LM: From all the salt. Yeah. Our uniforms would turn white and hell, that made us worse targets for the Germans to see that. And, uh, about that time though, that we had that going on, that was ah. Oh, let’s see, what am I trying to say? Uh. Well, about that time we (?), we had to bury the dead. And that was a nasty job.
JLJ: Yeah.
LM: We had a German (?) and a….
[166]
JL: You had to bury your own dead?
LM: Well, and the German’s too, it stunk so bad. There is nothing that stinks any worse than dead flesh.
JL: Yeah.
LM: It is unbelievable to smell it. It’s really a smell you really can’t stand.
JL: Oh.
LM: Anyway. It is unbelievable. You gotta take a. Well, what you do is, you just dig a hole and you take their dog tags off, put it in their helmet, put their helmet over their head, and cover them up with dirt. And try to mark the grave with a stick of some sort, so the GIA will come down later and, uh. But, in that kind of temperature, your body decomposes. You can see the maggots crawling right through the skin. You know, they just eat the skin off. Oh, I don’t like it. That’s unbelievable. You gotta. You can’t believe how bad that looks.
JLJ: Yeah.
LM: It don’t take long for the maggots to eat the whole body out completely.
JL: They say at (Caserta?), there’s a beautiful cemetery there, they have all different nationalities that fought the Germans going up that mountain. Americans, Germans, the different nationalities. ………from Rome to our place.
JL: Oh yeah. Gino was by there...
JL: Now that book was written by an Englishman and I didn’t like the way he wrote.
[187]
JLJ: … or what, in England?
LM: In hot weather, it don’t take long for a body to decompose. You reach a 90 degree temperature, boom; you are a skeleton right now. Almost unbelievable.
JL: (Caserta?) was a big, big bombing. And they had a …about bomb. And the Germans were using it for their focal point, bombing everything around there. And this went on for a long time until they finally had to do it. But then they were done. And to do that, it was really a battle.
GL: At Monte Casino.
JL: Is it? When you turn off of the main highway from Rome, to go to our place, you pass that.
GL: …. at Monte Casino.
JL: Yeah.
GL: And that’s right where you were (Venefro?).
JL: Yeah……
[203]
