Wayne disagrees with some of the accounts written below about the “Friendly Fire” that occurred on Jul 11, 1943. He is now 84, but has a memory like
an elephant. His fellow shipmates told the same story as how Wayne remembered it. Wayne and his Andy shipmates told of how the Army Air Force contacted
the Navy to get permission to fly over their war zone while they were in a radio silence total blackout mode. The sky was pitch dark. The Navy at
first declined telling them it was too dangerous. After several pleas from the Air Force, the Navy relented by giving them a certain time to fly over.
Somehow the planes got lost and flew beyond them. They returned from another direction and at a later time. Assuming they were the Germans that they
were expecting to attack, the Navy open fired on the Allied planes. The Navy kept this from the men and they only found out what happened when they
picked up a bunch of the airmen who were in the skirmish six months later.
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This is an account from the internet of what happened at Gela.
Lesser-Known Facts of World War II
FRIENDLY FIRE (Sicily)
On July 11, 1943, on the American held airfield at Farrell, three miles east of Gela in Sicily, preparations were under way for the reception of
reinforcements from Colonel Reuben H. Tucker's 504th Parachute Regiment. As the C-47 transports approached the bridgehead and headed for the drop
zone, an American machine-gun down below fired a stream of tracers upward at the C-47s. A second machine-gun opened up followed by another and still
another. Directly into this storm of 'friendly fire' flew the C-47s. As plane after plane was hit, the paratroopers jumped only to be shot in mid-air
or just before they landed. The trigger-happy machine-gunners, thinking they were German paratroops, kept up their deadly fire while General George
Patton and General Matthew Ridgeway, the 82nd Airborne commander, awaiting to greet the paratroopers, could only look on with shocked disbelief as
the tragedy unfolded before their eyes. Altogether, twenty three of the original 144 troop carrying planes were shot down and thirty-seven others
badly damaged. Ninety-seven men were killed and around 400 were wounded in this, the greatest tragedy to befall the US invasion forces. A total of
2,440 US soldiers died in the battle for Sicily and are now buried in the American Cemetery on the Gulf of Salerno. The battle for Sicily (Operation
Husky) involved a total of 467,000 men. The Allied forces lost 5,532 men killed and 2,869 missing. German dead amounted to 4,325 and the Italian dead,
4,278.
Another account of the incident at Gela;
"On July 11, 1943, the remaining Battalions of the 504th PIR were dropped in the vicinity of Gela with heavy losses from both the German and Allied
(friendly fire) antiaircraft fire. Despite the heavy losses the division was moved up to the front by motor and reinforced by the 39th Infantry
Division on July 12, 1943. The crossings of Fiume delle Canno were secured on July 18, 1943 and the division pushed along the coastal highway,
seizing the Marsala-Trapani area of Sicily's western coast by July."
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