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Memorial Day, 2002

Monday, May 27, 2002

By Bruce Keidan, Post-Gazette Senior Editor

This is the story of Mario Joseph Gabrielli, a citizen soldier, told mostly in his own words.

	Mario Gabrielli in Winchester, England, 1944.

Called "Gabe" by some and "Gary" by others, he was the son of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Avella, a small coal town in Washington County. He was a star athlete in high school, winning a football scholarship to Waynesburg College. Six months after matriculating there, he received a letter. "Greetings," it began.

A friend of the family drove him to Burgettstown to catch the train to Pittsburgh. It was Feb. 12, 1943. He was 18.

From Pittsburgh, he took a train to Camp Shenango, a replacement depot in Lawrence County, for induction, inoculations, uniform issue and his GI haircut. He drew KP duty his first night there.

The newly minted soldiers were sent next to Camp Croft, S.C. For 13 weeks, he underwent basic training there.

The next stop was Camp Patrick Henry, Va. "It was literally a swamp. It rained every day.

"When I got home after the war, I found out how closely they were censoring our mail. I remember one letter that arrived home started out saying, 'Hello, Mom and Dad. Goodbye for now.' The whole body of the letter had been removed."

They left the United States from South Hampton, Va., crossing the Atlantic aboard the British ship Empress of London. They had no idea where they were going. When they docked, it was in Casablanca, Morocco.

"Africa, for crying out loud. This didn't look good to me. The first night we had liberty, I walked with three of my buddies to a small pub at the edge of camp where we had our first taste of cognac. We figured we were going to end up in France one way or the other, and we wanted to be prepared."

Invading Sicily

Sometimes they wondered which side was the enemy. "From Casablanca, we were transported [in May 1943 to the Tunisian city of] Bizerte -- in cattle cars! We had no seats, no restrooms, and the cars measured 40 feet by 8 feet. The trip took two or three days." Once again, no one told them where they were bound.

He was assigned to Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 60th Regiment, 9th Infantry Division. That August, the 9th invaded Sicily. The Allied beachhead was already established when an amphibious landing craft deposited him on the beach at Palermo.

"I was becoming a toughened combat soldier. I'd been baptized with shellings. I was ready to go on with it, to face whatever came next."

What came next was an amazing coincidence.

"During a break [in] our march through Sicily, the German artillery had us zeroed in and started pounding us. As we scattered for cover, two of us dove to what looked like a low spot in the terrain. We had not met as yet, and after the shelling stopped, we introduced ourselves to each other. As we were just jawing ... to calm ourselves, our talk, of course, turned to home.

"When we had it all sorted out, we realized that we had played football against each other in high school. He was from Trinity High School in Washington, Pa. His school was rated Class AA. My hometown school, Avella, had a rating of Class B. It was so sweet to remind him that we had beaten them, 5-0. I still remembered the score. I had kicked a 53-yard field goal, and I had tackled a ball carrier in their end zone for a safety. That's why the strange score. I was carried off the field that night on the shoulders of my teammates. What a feeling! Bill Craig, my ground-cover companion, remembered the game, too. We talked about every aspect of that game ..."

Craig, two years older than Gabrielli, still lives in Washington, Pa. After the war, he made it a point to look up his old football rival, and the two remained friends for life.

The incident boosted Gabrielli's morale, in part because it served as a reminder. "My football scholarship would still be in effect when I came back from the war. That promise was made to me by President [Paul R.] Stewart as I left Waynesburg. ... My ambitions were to play pro football. That's all I ever wanted to do."

Meanwhile, there was a war to fight. "The real battle in Sicily at that time wasn't between the U.S. and the Germans. [It] was between Gen. [George S.] Patton and Gen. [later Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery. Patton was marching to Messina on the left flank, and Montgomery's troops were forging ahead on the right flank. Smack in between them both was my outfit. ... We were part of Patton's army, but his left flank outraced us to Messina, and my outfit withdrew to [the nearby town of] Cefalu."

They spent August through October 1943 swimming in the Mediterranean and training for night missions. The unit was being prepared to take part in the invasion of Anzio. But the orders never came.

From Sicily, they shipped out to Liverpool, England. "It was here at Winchester Barracks that I found myself standing in the breakfast line with my buddy George Albert [a 6-foot-2, 210-pound tackle on the Waynesburg College football team]."

Spotting the two strapping young athletes together, a first sergeant named Bodnoff called out to them. "You and you," he snapped. "We need two volunteers for the [regimental] boxing team."

"That started my boxing career in the U.S. Army."

Albert eventually became the 9th Infantry's heavyweight champion. Gabrielli not only boxed but also trained the division's boxing team, which took on all comers in the European sector and beat them.

Then the boxing team disbanded. "It seemed that it came out of nowhere and closed the same way. It was seven to 10 days before D-Day, June 6, 1944. Some of the boxers went out of town for an exhibition. Some of us went to a staging area to go to battle."

Gabrielli was among the second group. He was selected to carry a portable anti-tank weapon called a bazooka that looked like a section of stove pipe.

Nearly 50 years later, Gabrielli thought he remembered hitting the beach on June 8. Military historians say the 9th Infantry arrived in Normandy on June 10. His unit's assignment was to distribute ammunition to the troops on the Army's advancing perimeter "as soon as possible and as close to the troops."

"As soon as we started to move [inland], we saw bodies of paratroopers hanging from their parachutes in the trees."

Crashed gliders and smashed bodies, American and German, were everywhere.

They marched until late afternoon, then made camp for the night. Gabrielli pulled guard duty. The knowledge that two GIs had been killed in the same area the night before, their throats cut as they slept, helped him stay wide awake.

At 7 o'clock on the morning of June 15, Pfc. Gabrielli boarded a Jeep with a first lieutenant named Beddard and Sgt. Jenerick, the officer's driver, and they set out to look for a site to set up an ammunition dump. They were close to the battlefront, and it didn't take long before artillery shells began landing around them. The shelling lasted for 45 minutes.

They abandoned the Jeep and took cover until the barrage ended. Gabrielli was eating a can of C-ration hash when the Jeep came rolling up to him, with Beddard and the driver both in it. "Let's go, Gabe," the officer said.

Down the road, Beddard heard shots fired in a field beyond a nearby hedgerow. The lieutenant instructed his driver to stop. Beddard dismounted, ordering Gabrielli to follow and cover him as they darted from one hedgerow to another.

"Soon we [ran] into a platoon of 13 men coming from where we heard some shooting earlier. Leading the platoon was Sgt. Schultz. He was bleeding heavily. The next soldier was also bleeding. All 13 men had a bullet in him or through him, but none [of the wounds was] critical."

After tending to the wounded, Beddard ordered Gabrielli to mount up again. Sgt. Schultz asked where they were heading, and the lieutenant explained they were continuing inland to set up an ammunition dump.

It wasn't as simple as that, Sgt. Schultz told them. They were, as they spoke, in no man's land, behind enemy lines. There were German snipers in the trees on the horizon and a machine-gun emplacement dug in and waiting for them.

"We had passed our own front line. The Germans must have been watching us all this time. We went back to where the Jeep and driver were waiting for us.

"I was riding up high on top of the boxes of ammunition when all hell broke loose. Machine gun and rifle bullets went flying past my head. We managed to get behind a hedgerow, where we saw men huddled in groups of twos, threes and fours."

Gabrielli dived out of the Jeep before it came to a stop, somersaulting as he landed and crawling to a small knoll behind which he took cover. Two hours went by with no enemy fire. Beddard told Gabrielli to stay put and went to retrieve his driver and the ammunition.

"It was very, very quiet and still. I watched the daisies swaying back and forth in the soft breeze. I remember birds chirping. And I started thinking about home."

Lt. Beddard and Sgt. Jenerick returned, interrupting Gabrielli's reveries. "We took one crate of 88 mortar shells from the truck. A screeching overhead pierced my eardrums. Artillery!"

It was, indeed, heavy artillery -- 88 mm shells fired from big guns at long range. There were, Gabrielli would later recall, "three shells fired sequentially."

The first landed behind him. He heard someone scream, "Hit the dirt!"

The next landed in front of him. "I felt the ground rumble under my feet. I heard screams, calls for 'Medic!'

"I didn't see or hear the third shell. It hit right on top of me. I felt myself flying through the air. I remember hitting the ground.

"I felt no pain. I opened my eyes. ... I was under a tree. My glasses were still on my nose, and I was thinking about a Humphrey Bogart movie I had seen recently. In a death scene, the hero's vision kept fading in and out of focus. It was like that for me. I thought, 'This is it. I am dying.' I said aloud, 'God, don't let me die.'

"It took me some time to realize that my glasses were skewed on my nose and when I tried to focus, I kept seeing out of the side of my glasses that was away from my line of sight. The other side of my glasses was centered over my eye, so I could see clearly [through that eye]."

He cried out for a medic. "He seemed to be there in a flash. I could not tell how much time elapsed. He made a splint from my rifle for my left leg. My right leg was gone ... blown off."

Another coincidence. The medic who raced to his aid was the same corpsman who'd been assigned to patch the division's boxing team. Gabrielli knew him well.

"I kept asking him, 'Mike, will I lose my leg?' He never looked at me. He just looked straight ahead, saying nothing.

"It was June 15, 1944. My life was changed forever."

Evacuated to England

Miraculously, all three of the Jeep's occupants survived, although all were wounded. Gabrielli was transported to a field emergency tent, where doctors splinted his broken left leg and amputated all but a 12-inch stump of what remained of the right one. Gabrielli did not regain full consciousness until he awoke in a field hospital bed on June 22 -- between two wounded Germans. His efforts to climb out of bed and attack both of them were heartfelt but unavailing.

He was evacuated to a hospital in England, where he remained in a full body cast until shortly before Christmas and where he developed malaria.

When he was well enough, they placed him aboard a slow boat to South Carolina. From there he was flown to Battle Creek, Mich., to recuperate and begin rehabilitation.

When he finally returned to Avella, he arrived with a wheelchair, a wooden leg and his "good" leg in a brace. He could walk a short distance with the aid of crutches.

"The shock and grief was on all the faces of my family and friends who came to pay a visit. But I was proud. I wore my uniform when they came. I was still Mario Gabrielli of Avella, Pa., and I was proud to have had a chance to do my part for a better world, for my country ... for my family ... for my town ... for my friends."

He never went back to college. He worked for the county for a while. He met and married a woman named Lillian Elonzae. They reared two daughters, Marsha and Nancy. He became the town postmaster and, for 20 years, he "coached nearly every young boy in the town of Avella in some sport or another."

For almost half a century after he returned from Normandy, he wouldn't talk about what happened there. "I wanted to forget all about the Army, the war and the injury. It became harder and harder to express how I felt during the war years."

But he decided to break his self-imposed silence in 1991. He told the story to his sister, Fran Monroe of Coronado, Calif., who made it into a 24-page manuscript about his war experiences.

"My story is just one among thousands of war veterans who return home to resume life again. It is not that heroic, it's not that dramatic. It is just a life -- mine. And it is good."

On Aug. 8, 1992, a massive heart attack accomplished what German artillery fire couldn't, and Pfc. Mario Joseph Gabrielli, citizen soldier, died.