The War Continues
Text and images by Matthew Diggs

An American Naval convoy comes under heavy fire during the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The tracer bullets and explosions fill the night sky with flashes of light. The roar of German torpedo planes are rivaled only by the sound of anti-aircraft weapons firing incessantly into the heavens.

Wesley Lanois Williams was the first loader for a twin mount 40-mm anti-aircraft gun atop the USS Atherton DE-169. His duty is to shove rounds of shells into the gun, and clear away the empty hulls after being fired.
“The gun was blasting right in my face, it could jar the top of your head off,” Williams recalls as if he could still feel each devastating blow. He talked about how the gun turrets were positioned on the top deck of the ship and totally unshielded to attacks.

“The German planes would come through strafing while firing their machine guns. Knocked water all over me with those bullets, and there I am standing up on my gun in the wide open, but I can't get down. I would have to stand there and poke shells down in that gun,” Williams said, shaking his head. “I was lucky. Somehow they always missed.”

Williams, 88, now lives in a small cream-colored trailer in the backwoods of Decaturville, Tenn. A narrow concrete road leads to his home where two dogs faithfully guard his dwelling. Williams invited me into his home and as I climbed the uneven stairs a cat hurriedly ran away at the sight of a stranger. “Have a seat,” he insisted right as we sank into the worn, flower-printed couch.

“So you want to hear about my days in the Navy?” he asks expectantly. “Why don't I just tell the whole doggone story?” He adjusts his tinted glasses without waiting for a response.

“I was drafted into the Navy on May 6, 1943, and went through eight weeks of boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland. They ran the fool out of me. Run me for ten miles every day through the woods and fields and everything else.” Williams spoke slowly as if carefully considering each word. His voice was deep and raspy, the result of a lifetime of smoking.

“I had to go through 16 weeks of Destroyer Escort training,” he said. “'Escort duty meant that we kept watch for submarines or anything that can harm the convoy.”

After training Williams then got to be aboard the newly commissioned ship, the USS Atherton DE-169. “We made 16 round trips from Boston and New York Harbor to sicily and North Africa,” he stated proudly.

“I had to stand a four-hour watch during the day, and then a four hour watch at night at my gun post. Just as soon as I would come off from watch I had to start chipping paint and repainting,” Williams shares, recollecting the event with great annoyance. “It seemed like forever before I was able to lay down.”

Williams reached into his left breast pocket for his pack of cigarettes. Plucking one from the box, he smiled. “One time our ship tied up to the dock in Palmero, Sicily. There were a whole bunch of people standing on the dock and all they wanted were some American cigarettes,” Williams said with amusement as he cradled his own cigarette between two fingers. “I'd take out a pack of cigarettes and pitch them over to them one at a time. You ought to have seen them fight over that cigarette, I mean really fight. You could see some good fights if you just pitched over a cigarette.” Williams laughs and lights his cigarette, taking a long drag.

As Williams continued his countenance began to fall, remembering what he discovered beyond the dock of Palmero. He talked about walking the streets with his shipmates, and seeing the aftermath of planes dropping bombs and big battle wagons throwing shells from 25 miles out. The buildings were gutted and the people of Palmero were terrified.

“There wasn't nothing left of them. Anything standing had a hole so big that you could run a freight train through it.”

Williams became quieter. “I saw people laying out all over the place with a leg gone, or an arm gone and they had no place to go. Everything there was destroyed.” After pausing a moment, he added, “I'd like to go back now and see what it looks like.” He periodically flicked his cigarette at the ashtray while talking.

“I remember coming back with a convoy down the Straits of Gibraltar and a German sub was sinking ships on both sides of us,” Williams said as he looked into the distance and motioned to his left and to his right as if he actually saw the ships submersing into the water.

“One old boy on the ship, a good friend of mine named Stegall, would be sitting up in the gun and that little feller would just go all to pieces,” Williams remembered. “We would be up on the gun and he would get to crying. I would have to talk to him, and calm him down.He'd say to me, 'Big Willie, do you think we'll make it?' I'd say, 'Yeah, we'll make it, there ain't nothing to worry about. We've made it so far.'”

Unfortunately some members of the crew were not so easily comforted. “I saw a petty officer just walking backwards and forwards on the weather deck, the same path every time. I was watching him there one night while standing at my gun,” Williams calls to mind as he puffs on his cigarette.

“One time he came to the fantail and he didn't stop. Right on over he went. I called, 'Man overboard!' He just walked right on over the fantail where the propellers were turning. There wasn't anything left of him because it chopped him right up. He just lost it somehow, and he had been in the Navy a long time.”
Williams said that when the war was over the Pacific they returned to the United States at the docks of Charleston, South Carolina. “I done had my sea bag all packed and was up on the weather deck where the gang plank was. I shouldered that old sea bag and down that gang plank I went. I rode that ship 275,000 miles.”

Once he reached the dock, he sat his sea bag down, and said to the boys up on the deck, “Boys I can tell you one thing, there is somebody riding that ship besides the crew. Just look at how many close calls it's had and never got a scratch. Never was touched. All the other ships looked like a tree that had been trimmed up and shot all to pieces.” Over 60 years have passed since his last battle, but Williams remembered the war in perfect clarity: “Nothing phased me back then. I didn't have fear of anything. Now it's different.”

Williams sat on the edge of the couch, his black leather shoes digging into the dingy carpet. “It sure is coming home to me now,” Williams said, wringing his hands. “Every time I go to sleep I have some of the most dog gone nightmares you've ever seen. I'll get to dreaming that I am in the middle of something from my Navy days.” Williams says as his voice grows in intensity.

“I can't hide, and I can't get out of the way. The shells are not killing me and they are shooting the fire out of me, but their bullets ain't penetrating.”

Williams buries his wrinkled face in his hands, his arms extending like long pieces of tan leather. “Man, I wake up sometimes just a-sweating, and oh Lord, it's getting worse all thetime. It's every night. It used to not ever bother me. Every time I turn on the TV to a warmovie I get it off of there quick. Just tears me all to pieces.”

As I heard these words I realized that the war was not truly over. As long as veterans of the war live on, so do the horrors of the war they survived.

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