Charles C. Patton Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

4
says he remembers when theae nurses. . .see, Street was a d ctos.
. . he remembers when the nurses came and didn't hav any
clothes. . .and the last he saw of them, they were h ddled
together in an open field with not even a pup tent, and o, it
was a small world.
Q. So then you went home?
A. Well, we went back on and tied up in the harbor at Bizerte.
Bizerte is where Rommell took off from North Africa into Sicily
and he had just been driven out of Sicily and we were tied up in
Bizerte. And there's a big lake there in Bizerte, and in order to
get into this lake to tie up, you had to go through a rather
serpentine-like channel. Bizerte had been bombed by the United
States Air Force, and a submarine had been sunk right at one of
the turns, and I remember how close it was to get by this aunken
German submarine, or maybe it was Italian. I don't know, to get
into the Lake Bizerte to tie up and wait for a convoy of empty
ships to go back, and we did get through and tie up. They didn't
allow anybody to go ashore until they got shots for bubonic
plague. Apparently, the bubonic plague was found there in North
Africa. Bizerte was full of Italian prisoners of war and the
countryside was full of all kinds of destroyed military stuff.
Tanks and trucks and what-not. And, there were two other guys
and I who decided we'd like to see the countryside, and so we
commandeered a command car. This command car is an open touring
car, and it sat up real high and had big wheels on it, and we
were all dressed up in our Navy uniforms, white caps, touring
through North Africa on this Army command car with smoking tanks
on either side of the road, with people telling you, "Just
get off the road because there are mine fields everyw
Well, we were able to get down to Tunis, and we had lun
Tunis and there wasn't much to eat as I recall. A little
some cheese, and bread. I remember the glasses on the tab
this restaurant we went into were made out of coke bo
They'd taken coke bottles and cut the top of them off an
glasses out of them. They didn't have anything else.
Well, then we decided to go up to see the old Roman t
Carthage which is right there, and we drove up the road hop
find Carthage. Of course, the people there, the natives,
French, and I remember we weren't sure we were on the right
track, and 80 we stopped some peasant man along side of the mad
to see if we were going in the right direction, and in my very
best frsnch, I asked him, "Es ceci la via a Carthage?" I
remember what he said, He said, "Ea que vous parles le
francais?" He didn't understand me a bit. But finally 1 got
over to him and he said, "Yeah, that was the road to Carthage,
and if we just went on, we'd come to Carthage", and we did come
to Carthage. We got out and we wondered around these ruin@ and
we saw the old baths and the tiled and the terraces and whajt not
and 1 remember picking up a few of these blue and white tile
putting them into my pocket. I also ran across a kid. The