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| Sergeant Charles E. "Commando" Kelly (center) after receiving the Medal of Honor. |
by Sergeant Charles E. "Commando" Kelly as told to Pete Martin
In September 1943, the Gulf of Salerno saw the initial important Allied landing on the Italian mainland. It was selected because it lay only thirty miles south of the big port of Naples, yet was still within protective fighter range of the newly conquered Allied bases in Sicily. Hoping to exploit Italy's surrender on 8 September, American and British forces went in the next day without preliminary bombardment. But the Germans were not surprised. Suspecting the defection of their dubious allies, Field Marshall Kesselring had waiting ashore the crack 16th Panzer Division, entrenched and alert.
Though eventually dislodged, German resistance kept the issue in doubt for almost a week. A GI's eye-view of the battle is told by one who was later awarded the Medal of Honor for his exploits those first bloody days.
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Leaving the Salerno beach fifty feet behind me, I pumped my knees up and down in a sort of dog trot, moving straight ahead. That first rush took me past a dead GI, lying peacefully, as if asleep, with his head on his pack, his rifle by his side. I pulled my eyes away and told myself, Don't let that worry you.
Then came a big drainage ditch with GIs lying down inside of it. "Come on! It ain't deep! Jump!" I jumped, only to find the water and slime up to my eyes. The bottom was oozy; my feet sank into it, and I was weighted down by ammunition. I let go of my automatic rifle, but as soon as I dropped it, I felt lonely and lost, and ducked my head under to find it. Groping around, I got my hand on it. There was a small tree handy and, using one of its branches, I pulled myself out of the muck, and so to the other side.
There is no rhyme or reason to how the mind of a soldier in battle works. There I was charging into Italy, passing dead men and coming close to drowning in a ditch, and, after cleaning my rifle as best I could, all I could think about was whether or not the photographs in my wallet had been ruined.
I took them out, tried to wipe them off on the grass, and waved them back and forth to stir up a little air to dry them.
Machine gun bullets were boring into the ground in front of me and, at intervals, when the blup-blup of their impact came too close together, I hit the dirt. Those machine guns blazed away at us and mopped up our staff sergeant. He went down with bullets in his head.
I kept right on moving forward, and the next time I looked around to check my position, I was alone. The orders I'd heard back on shipboard had gone out of my mind. All I remembered was hearing somebody say, "When you get on the beach, keep moving forward."
Hopping over a wall and following a little path, I jumped over another wall into a clump of thorn bushes. Machine gun bullets were streaking up and down the path I had just left, so I lay down in those bushes and played dead until the fire slackened. Finally I found a break through the thorns and, at the end of the break, a row of our men dug in. They were from two of our outfits, all mixed up together.
Once more, I started looking for my outfit. After a while I got tired of going along doubled up and stooping over, so I stood up and started walking. I decided I was thirsty, and stopped at a farmhouse well to get a drink. There were grapes and peaches around, and I stuffed some of them into me. I passed deserted farms and houses until they all ran together in my mind and I couldn't tell one from the other. Finally I figured I had walked about eight hours, and must be about twelve miles inland. Turning around, I saw a highway, and started to walk along it heading back in the direction from which I had come. Then, in the distance, German medium Mark IV tanks hove in sight. I dived into a ditch, squinted along my BAR—Browning automatic rifle—and began to fire as they came close, but the slugs from my gun made no impression on them. I was aiming at the tanks' slit openings, but there is so much noise and racket inside one of those things that the Heinies probably didn't hear me. They rumbled and clanked by, and I kept on walking down the highway, coming at last to a little creek, where I drank, took off my shoes and bathed my feet. My toes were stuck together from the sea water I'd waded through back at the Salerno beach. I washed my socks to get the salt out of them, and put the same socks back on, keeping my extra ones in reserve.
I put in about fifteen minutes trying to remember the things I was supposed to have had firmly fixed in my head when we landed on the beach. Finally I remembered what our detail was supposed to do. I could see the mountain Lieutenant O'Leary had told us about. He had called it Mountain Forty-two and we were supposed to take it. So I started toward it.
After climbing for a while, I came to a winery and found the first battalion of our regiment dug in there and all around it in the open fields. I wanted to ask them where my outfit was, but their trigger fingers were too itchy; they were shooting at sounds and dimly seen movements, and it wasn't any time to be dropping in unannounced to tear a social herring with them. So I dug in behind a bush and went to sleep.
It would have been nice to fill my canteen with water before I started again, but my canteen had picked up a bullet hole somewhere along the way. I hadn't known about that bullet before, although it must have given quite a jerk when it ripped through. I tried to rub the sleep from my eyes and walk down the highway. Both sides had infiltrated into and behind each other, so that you had to be on the alert each minute and watch every moving thing on each side of you.
German bullets were zipping around like high-velocity bees, but I finally found my outfit dug in, in scattered, shallow holes. They greeted me with, "Where the hell have you been?"
When I reported to Lieutenant O'Leary, he said, "I was sure they'd got you."
Every once in a while a shell landed near us, but they didn't do any real damage.
After a time we started down the road, and ran into a little Italian boy, who said, "Germans. Germans. Germans." My pal, La Bue, spoke to him in Italian, but the kid was frightened and didn't make much sense.
While La Bue was bickering with him, Lieutenant O'Leary shouted, "Here come some Heinie scout cars! Get off the road!"
We dived for cover and the scout cars opened fire. Bullets and fragments of shells bounced from our rifles, and two of us were hit. All of a sudden, one of our boys got his bazooka on his shoulder and let go with a tremendous, crashing "Boom!" and immediately afterward one of our men jumped up on a wall beside the road, leaped like a frog to the top of one of those panzer wagons and dropped his hand grenade into it. That particular scout car stopped then and there. The others speeded up, trying to get past us, when a company of our anti-tankers we hadn't seen up to that time went into action with its 57-mm cannon. It was chancy stuff, for if that 57-mm had missed its target, it would have gotten us. But as it was, everything worked out nice and clean and efficient. The bazooka kept on booming, and, quicker than it seemed possible, that whole small reconnaissance detachment was knocked out.
The place was a shambles. Scout cars were going up in flames. Tires were burning with a rubbery stink, and bodies were burning too. One German leaped out and started to run. When we went after him, he put his revolver to his head and killed himself. We had thought that only the Japs did that, and for a moment I was surprised and shocked.
Then a deep-rooted GI habit asserted itself. A moment before, hell had been popping on that stretch of road. Now, two seconds later, all we thought of was souvenirs. Milky Holland found a German Luger. Looking back at it, I can remember no feeling about the German dead except curiosity. We were impersonal about them; to us they were just bundles of rags.
About two hours afterward, things were so quiet that some of us sneaked off into the nearby town, but we weren't relaxed and casual, and we took our rifles and sidearms with us. The townspeople were out waving at us and offering us water, wine and fruit. La Bue, a kid named Survilo and I had a yen to see the inside of an Italian jail. A woman had told us it was where they kept the Fascist sympathizers. The leading Fascist citizen of the town was in there, mad as blazes and yelling his head off behind the bars. La Bue listened to him for a while, then got mad himself and tried to reach through the bars and tickle him with the end of a bayonet. The Fascist really sounded off then.
When we came out, we saw some pretty Italian girls. La Bue made a date with one of them—the procedure following the same line as if we had been back in Pittsburgh's North Side. He asked her if she could get a couple of friends for us. Smiling, she said she could, and, feeling that we had accomplished something important, we went back to our bivouac.
But, just as they sometimes do in the North Side of Pittsburgh, our plans laid an egg. Platoon Sergeant Zerk Robertson pointed to a town named Altavilla, five or six miles away, and said, "See that town over there? That's where I'm going, and I want some volunteers to go with me. I'm taking the second platoon and some sixty-millimeter mortars." La Bue looked at me, and I looked at him, and we thought of our dates, but there wasn't anything we could do about it, and presently we were walking out along the highway.
When we came close to Altavilla, along came an Italian, and three of our Italian-speaking boys—Gatto, La Bue and Survilo—talked to him. The Italian didn't seem to know where the Germans were or whether they were in the town or not, but we took what he had to tell us with a cupful of salt. The day before we had made our invasion, Italy had surrendered. We had got the news on the ship, but we had been told not to believe it, for our officers didn't want us to feel relaxed and spoil the fighting edge we had worked up.
The Altavillans were all out shaking hands with us and telling us they came from St. Louis or Brooklyn or other towns and cities all over the United States. They kept saying, "I speaka Engleesh," and bringing out bottles of wine and glasses. But we didn't have much time for that; we were busy trying to find places to set up our weapons.
Then Captain Laughlin called me over and said that there were a lot of five-gallon cans of water and cases of ammunition stacked around, and he wanted me to pick them up and carry them into the mayor's house—a big, solidly built, very beautiful building. But first of all, he wanted me to be sure that the house was free of Germans. We checked every room on the first floor, leaving a man in each room. Then I went up the stairs, and found a girl ducked down under some blankets on a bed. I pulled the blankets back and motioned for her to get out. She slipped into a dress and a pair of slippers, meantime yelling her head off as if convinced nothing good could come of meeting me. Still yelling, she went downstairs to join her family.
Men began hauling ammunition in through the door and setting up machine guns in the courtyard and in the windows. Before it grew dark, we had changed that building into a fortress-arsenal. When guards were placed, I drew the outside steps for my post.
The town was on the slope of a hill at the bottom of which was a road that led to the sea and the beach some ten miles away. The mayor's house fronted on the town square, and both were in the uphill half of the town, near its outskirts and overlooking the road. Off in the distance a half mile away across a valley was another hill. During the battle, the Germans came down this hill and also down the slopes of the hill on which the town was located.
Next morning just as I went inside to eat, machine guns on a nearby hill let us have it. They had a beautiful field of fire and knocked out one of our machine guns in the courtyard. Slugs ripped into the gun crew and, ricocheting from the gun, went screaming away. The gun itself was sticky with blood and had small nicks in it where the bullets had bitten into its metal. The men who had manned it lay around dead.
A lieutenant had borrowed my rifle the day before. I had picked two or three since then, but now I didn't have a gun. I felt naked without it, and going upstairs to look for one, I found a BAR lying there. I also found a pair of field glasses and, kneeling at a window, I could see men walking on Hill 315. The fire directed at us was coming from that hill, so I knew the men on it must still be Germans. I loaded my gun, waited a second to make sure my aim was true, and fired. When I picked up the field glasses again and took a look, three of the men who had been moving before were lying still. A fourth, who had fallen into a foxhole, was still moving one foot, so I upped with the BAR and let it chatter once more. When I peered through the glasses, that foot slowly straightened out and lay flat on the ground.
It seemed as if the noise and shooting and the business of people getting wounded had been going on for days, when we realized suddenly that we were as empty as drums. Once we let ourselves think about it, we were as hungry as curly wolves, and we went through the piled-up cases of food, looking for cocoa and biscuits. We got out our canteen cups, made cocoa in them and dunked the biscuits in the sweet, chocolaty stuff, but I couldn't give my mind over to it.
A GI plunked himself down at a window next to mine, and we spotted Jerry machine guns in the distance. I had luck then. Every time I'd duck down to load my BAR, the Jerry machine gun went into action. When I popped up ready to squirt lead, Jerry was busy loading. The machine gun next to me, however, was jinxed. Its gunner got it through the shoulder, and the mournful cry of "Medico! Medico!" started. There was a whole chorus of people crying for medicos in the other rooms.
Somebody brought in two German prisoners. We stripped them and checked everything they had. One of them had a bag with papers in it which showed he had been in the Army nine years. One of our boys spoke German and did a translation job. The Heinie told us he had been married just before he joined up and had seen his wife only twice in nine years. For the first time since I had been in the war, I felt sorry for a German. That was a brutal way to treat any man, even a German. He told us he and the other Germans with him had been brought down to Italy for a rest, but they had decided by this time that somebody had lied to them about that. The other German turned out to be a doctor, and he started to help us with our wounded. That Kraut doc knew his trade. In no time at all, he was fixing up two of our wounded to everyone our own medico was repairing.
I had shot my BAR so steadily that when I put the next magazine load of cartridges in it, it wouldn't work anymore. I laid it against a bed, went into another room to get another BAR, and when I got back, the bed was on fire. That first gun was so hot that it touched the bed off like tinder. I worked the new BAR until the steel of the barrel turned reddish-purple with heat and it became warped. I couldn't find another BAR, so I went upstairs, found a Tommy gun with a full magazine, went to the window and gunned for some more Germans.
There was no assurance that we would ever get away from that house. Any of us. We seemed a hell of a small island in an ocean of Germans. Yet I don't think any of us thought much about it. Not then, anyhow. Later, toward nightfall, we thought about it plenty, but right at that moment, all we thought of was keeping on sticking hot lead out of the windows like the bristles of a porcupine, so any Germans who tried to close their hands around us would jerk back as if they'd been burned. But if we had thought of it and if anyone had popped in on us then and had offered to make book on us coming out of that place alive, he would have had to offer big odds to get any bets from us.
I had burned out one Browning automatic rifle and used up all the ammo I could find for a Tommy gun. Now I picked up a bazooka and crawled among our dead men in the upper floor, looking for bazooka shells. Those shells weighed about four pounds each. I brought down six of them, and put one in the gun, but it wouldn't go off. I worked on that bazooka for a while, then poked it out of the window and pulled the trigger. The men in the house thought an 88-mm shell had hit the place. All the pressure came out of the back end of that tin pipe, along with a lot of red flame, and the house trembled and shook. I had shot it about four times when my eye lit on a box of dynamite on the floor. I asked Sergeant Robertson, my platoon leader, if we couldn't get some use out of it, but it was no soap; we had no caps or fuses. Lying beside the dynamite was an incendiary. I threw that at the roof of a near-by building the Germans were holding. It exploded there and the house started to burn.
With all the equipment and ammo we had brought inside with us, the place was like an Army ordnance showroom. I picked up a 60-mm mortar shell and pulled out the pin, or safety lock, that controlled the propulsion charge and the cap which sets off this charge. There was still another pin, or secondary safety lock, inside of it, which I didn't know how to get out. I tapped it on the window ledge, and the second pin dropped out, making it a live shell or, the way I planned to use it, a live bomb. For if I tossed it from the window and it happened to land on its nose, the weight of its fall would give it the twelve pounds of percussion needed to set it off.
As I looked out the window, a handful of Germans came up a small ravine in the rear of the house, I whirled that shell around and let it drop among them. I did the same thing with another shell. As each of them landed, there was a cracking roar, and when I looked out again, five of the Germans were dead.
I went around looking for more guns, and found my third BAR in the hands of a dead man on the third floor. His ammunition was lying in the belt beside him, but he didn't have much of it left. So I picked up machine gun cartridges of the same caliber, and put them into the BAR magazines. Then I took it down to the front room and started to squeeze its trigger. Another man, three or four feet away, had an M1 rifle. Every once in a while he got excited and stood up to shoot. But he tried it once too often. Peering from my window, I could see a stream of tracers coming from off in the distance, and one of those white-hot chunks of phosphorus went through his shoulder, hit the wall behind him and began to burn there. He slumped down to the floor, blood poured from his shoulder, and the inevitable cry of "Medico! Medico!" went up.
I worked that BAR until it began to smoke as if somebody were cooking it. Snipers were touching up the men down in the kitchen, and someone sent for me to go down and help. When I got there, some dizzy GIs were cooking spaghetti, just as if they were chefs in a ravioli joint back home and food was all they had to think about. They had spread tablecloths, had laid out knives and forks, had sliced bread, watermelon and honeydews, and had put out grapes and tomatoes. I don't mind people doing screwy things; it helps to let off steam sometimes when things are so tight that otherwise you'd go off your rocker, but to see them readying that meal made me mad. I got off a few overheated cracks, but my remarks didn't bother them. They just said, "Ah, quit blowing your top, Kelly," and went on stirring the spaghetti and smacking their lips over the goat cheese and the sauce. So I thought, The hell with it. Maybe they've got a good idea there.
I've had people ask me since what a man thinks of at a time like that. The way the questions are put I can see the answer is supposed to be "His thoughts go winging homeward," or "He wonders if his soul is ready to meet its maker." The truth is, once a man is in action he thinks very little about home or the hereafter. His mind is a gimlet boring into those things around him and before him, and most of his thoughts are focused on finishing the job at hand.
A GI has to work out his own philosophy of fighting. He gets it into his head very early that, no matter how much the enemy shoots at him, he isn't going to be hit. If he gets any other idea and lets his mind work overtime on it, he'll end up with the thing they call "exhaustion." I know if I ever let myself go into battle thinking, This is one battle I'm not going to come out of, I'd be no good as a soldier and I probably wouldn't come out of it. One GI I knew who had the right mental point of view was a kid named Portugee Mendes. He went through all his battles with a fever of 102. We could see he was sick, but he wouldn't quit and go to the aid station unless we carried him there.
Once in a while, anybody gets scared, but if you don't think about it, it doesn't last. One of the things that helps drive away fear is actually seeing the enemy. It's patrol work and fear of the unknown that gets on your nerves. Then, too, having a buddy killed snaps men out of the jitters. We had a fellow in our company named Lynn, with Alabam for a nickname, and we put a nervous replacement in to bunk with him. They liked each other, and when Alabam was killed, the green kid insisted upon being sent out on patrol. All we would have had to say to him was, "There's a flock of Germans out there," and he would have gone after them single-handed.
In the kitchen I found a box of champagne, broke the neck off a bottle and wet my whistle. Then I took the straw off a big basket, got out three or four eggs, broke them into an empty C ration can and drank them raw. Still tasting those eggs, I went over to the window through which those snipers' bullets had been coming. Nobody had been paying much attention to the snipers; they had been having their own way and had grown careless about concealment. I saw one of them in a tree, and drew a bead on him. His rifle dropped from the tree first; then, after a few seconds, he toppled down limply to the ground himself.
While I was squatting there, one of the men from upstairs came down with about fifty BAR magazines, lay beside me and began feeding me ammo. On a distant hill, tanks were firing at us point-blank. I took a look at them through a pair of field glasses, and saw a Heinie on top of a turret, shooting at us with a 20-mm cannon. I fired about twenty magazine loads at him. After the first fifteen magazine loads, my gun was red, but I fired five more for good measure before putting it aside. Looking through the field glasses once more, I could see that the turret was down and one of the tanks was gone.
Giving that BAR a rest, I went over for some more champagne. It was the first champagne I'd ever had. To me, it tasted like soda pop, and after drinking it I felt full of gas bubbles. Back at the window again, I spotted a Heinie coming through a little gully. The BAR had cooled by that time, but when I pulled the trigger, it wouldn't go off. I pulled it again, but it still wouldn't fire. When I threw a bullet into the firing chamber, there wasn't enough pressure to set it off, so I had to let that German come ahead. He was coming from where our troops were supposed to be, and it dawned on us that the Germans had separated Company K from Companies I and L, and built a circle around them.
Those in command of our house fortress were trying to get permission for us to withdraw. We were running low on ammo and we had almost given up hope of relief. Our only communication with the world outside the mayor's house was our radio, and the Germans had jammed that. They had gotten hold of one of our radios, tuned to the same frequency we were using, and all we could hear over our set were Germans talking. Finally we found a little hand-set phone radio, got that going, phoned our battalion.
It was decided that we would make our break after dark. In the meantime, we were to stay there and fight. Before the light dimmed, we gathered up our scarce supply of ammunition and started decoy firing on one side of the house while a lieutenant sneaked out the other side to see if he could find a way out. When he came back, he told us, "It's okay. When we go out of here, we'll go six men at a time."
There were about thirty of us left alive. The lieutenant broke us down into groups of six men each, and at intervals those groups drifted away. The ones that remained kept on firing to cover the retreat. I offered to stay as part of the rear guard, and Bill Swayze, a six-foot-five GI from Trenton, New Jersey, said, "I'm going to stay, too." Bill was a fast talker; he always had a laugh on his puss—he had grinned all through the battle—and was good company.
I crawled out of the house with Swayze, Lieutenant Ball and a GI from K Company. We took with us the wounded who could travel. The ones who were hit too badly to move we left there. Johnny Marra and Tom Spencer went with us, although both of them were hurt. We heard Germans coming into the house behind us. Then I heard guns going off upstairs. Our guns. The wounded had saved a few rounds for a last fight. The Germans yelled "Surrender!" but the firing didn't stop short; it gradually flickered out.
We hugged walls in the dark streets, and German machine guns in the houses along the way barked at us snappishly now and then. When that happened, we hit the ground and lay flat with our faces buried in decayed garbage.
After one of our stumbling breaks, we hit a dead-end passage. The alley we were passing through was barred by an iron gate and when we tried to open it, it gave a loud creak. That was all the Jerry machine gunners needed to make them search us out in the darkness. We waited until their fire sputtered less angrily, jumped on top of a cement wall, then on a table on the other side and went down some cement steps. There we stuck our heads around the edge of the terrace, looked things over and made a run for it.
After the first man went, the second one waited a few seconds before making his run. Every time one of us made a break, somebody fired at us. Finally we threw our helmets away. They were making clinking noises against walls and tree branches, and as we ran, they wobbled around on our heads and down over our eyes. By this time we were out of the town and among bushes. A German jumped to his feet before us, but his rifle caught on a bush, and before be could fire it, Lieutenant Ball grabbed it and jabbed him under the chin with it. Then, as the German was falling the lieutenant came down on the back of his neck with the rifle stock. We kept on going, but it was a scary business, for every step we took, we could hear Germans talking and yelling at one another.
We began to run, flopping down occasionally to rest. Then our group split up. The man with me was from Company K. I didn't know his name and it didn't occur to me to ask him what it was. But I did ask him if he knew his way back to where we wanted to go, and he said, "Hell, no!"
We walked up and down a series of little hills until we came to a shack backed by a pigpen. We weren't feeling too pert, so we dropped into the pigpen to get our breath, then started on again.
Presently we found our communication wires. It was like finding a street you know after wandering around lost in a big city, and the scaredness came out of us. Miles farther along, we heard somebody yell the word, "Hollywood!" Luckily, I remembered the answer to that challenge, and called back, "Theater!" Sixteen of our men had been waiting with their rifles on us, ready to let us have it, if we'd given the wrong countersign. Lieutenant Ball walked out in front of them, and behind him were some of the other men who had been in the mayor's house along with us. When we separated and broke up after getting out of Altavilla, the lieutenant's party had picked up other escapees, and in the darkness they had got ahead of us.
The lieutenant said to me now, "I figured you two were Americans. Americans are the only ones dumb enough to walk down the middle of the road instead of off to one side where nobody can see them."
He divided us—ten men on each side of the road. He led the way, and every few minutes he'd stop us and crawl on ahead of us to see what was what. Next we came across a German tank down beside the road. We didn't know whether it had been knocked out or not, and we cased it carefully before approaching it. But when we got closer we found six dead Germans lying around it.
Lieutenant Ball heard a suspicious sound and had his knife out, ready to shove into the guy who had made the noise, if his uniform turned out to be the wrong kind. But the sound was made by one of our own paratroopers. Finally the lieutenant gave us the word, "This is our own line." From that point on, we didn't walk; we ran.
Sergeant Charles E. "Commando" Kelly
Charles E. Kelly (September 23, 1920 – January 11, 1985) was a United States Army soldier and a recipient of the United States military's highest decoration for valor—the Medal of Honor—for his actions in World War II. Kelly was the first enlisted man to be decorated with the Medal of Honor for action on the European continent.
Prior to his military service, the youthful Charles Kelly had made his living with a street gang in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and frequently got in trouble with the law. Kelly joined the Army in Pittsburgh in May 1942, and by September 13, 1943, was serving as a corporal in Company L, 143rd Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division. After voluntarily participating in several patrols on that day, near Altavilla, Italy, he helped to defend an ammunition storehouse against attack by German forces. He held his position behind the storehouse all night, then took up a position inside the building. When withdrawal became necessary, he voluntarily stayed behind and held the German soldiers at bay until everyone had been evacuated from the storehouse, at which time he withdrew and was able to rejoin his unit. For these actions, he was awarded the Medal of Honor five months later, on February 18, 1944.
Medal of Honor Citation
Kelly's official Medal of Honor citation reads:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty. On 13 September 1943, near Altavilla, Italy, Cpl. Kelly voluntarily joined a patrol which located and neutralized enemy machine gun positions. After this hazardous duty he volunteered to establish contact with a battalion of U.S. infantry which was believed to be located on Hill 315, a mile distant. He traveled over a route commanded by enemy observation and under sniper, mortar, and artillery fire; and later he returned with the correct information that the enemy occupied Hill 315 in organized positions. Immediately thereafter Cpl. Kelly, again a volunteer patrol member, assisted materially in the destruction of 2 enemy machinegun nests under conditions requiring great skill and courage. Having effectively fired his weapon until all the ammunition was exhausted, he secured permission to obtain more at an ammunition dump. Arriving at the dump, which was located near a storehouse on the extreme flank of his regiment's position, Cpl. Kelly found that the Germans were attacking ferociously at this point. He obtained his ammunition and was given the mission of protecting the rear of the storehouse. He held his position throughout the night. The following morning the enemy attack was resumed. Cpl. Kelly took a position at an open window of the storehouse. One machine gunner had been killed at this position and several other soldiers wounded. Cpl. Kelly delivered continuous aimed and effective fire upon the enemy with his automatic rifle until the weapon locked from overheating. Finding another automatic rifle, he again directed effective fire upon the enemy until this weapon also locked. At this critical point, with the enemy threatening to overrun the position, Cpl. Kelly picked up 60mm. mortar shells, pulled the safety pins, and used the shells as grenades, killing at least 5 of the enemy. When it became imperative that the house be evacuated, Cpl. Kelly, despite his sergeant's injunctions, volunteered to hold the position until the remainder of the detachment could withdraw. As the detachment moved out, Cpl. Kelly was observed deliberately loading and firing a rocket launcher from the window. He was successful in covering the withdrawal of the unit, and later in joining his own organization. Cpl. Kelly's fighting determination and intrepidity in battle exemplify the highest traditions of the U.S. Armed Forces.
After receiving the Medal, Kelly toured the country with a group of other infantrymen as part of the Army Ground Forces' "Here's Your Infantry," demonstrating various battle techniques and selling war bonds. When the tour ended, Kelly was assigned to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Kelly received an honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, and the rank of technical sergeant.
Post-war Life
Kelly was less successful in his personal life. He opened a service station on the North Side of Pittsburgh in 1946, but was forced to sell it in 1947 after a downturn in business and a robbery. His wife Mae was diagnosed with uterine cancer that same year, and died in 1951. The cost of the radiation treatments for Mae eventually resulted in Kelly losing his home in foreclosure.
In 1952, while travelling across the country campaigning for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kelly was reintroduced to Betty Gaskin, a young woman he had met while stationed at Fort Knox. The two were married six weeks later, and moved to Louisville, Kentucky. In a 1957 interview with Mike Wallace, Kelly defended Samuel David Hawkins, a Korean War captive who declined repatriation until that year and was called a turncoat.
Kelly spent most of his life holding down a series of short lived jobs. This, coupled with poor health, led to financial difficulties and problems with alcohol. Kelly left his second wife and children in 1961; they were divorced in 1962. In late 1984 Kelly was admitted to Veterans Hospital in Pittsburgh, suffering from kidney and liver failure. He died January 11, 1985, at age 64. He was buried at Highwood Cemetery in his hometown of Pittsburgh.
Even though he had a problem with alcohol, his story and legacy have helped many people achieve recovery. Two local Pittsburgh Alcoholics Anonymous meetings "Camp Kelly" and "Oakdale Beginners Group" have meetings four days a week for anyone who has a desire to stop drinking.
Other Honors
In 1987, the Oakdale Army Support Element in Oakdale, Pennsylvania was redesignated the Charles E. Kelly Support Facility.
Further Reading
Kelly, Charles E.; Martin, Pete (1944). One Man's War. New York: A.A. Knopf.
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| Sergeant Charles E. "Commando" Kelly. |
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| Two GIs with Thompson submachine guns defend a farmhouse from an enemy attack. |
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| Kelly's balcony. |
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| General Mark Clark decorates Charles "Commando" Kelly with the Medal of Honor for killing forty Germans at Salerno. He was also decorated with the British Military Medal. |
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| “Commando” Charles E. Kelly receives the Medal of Honor from Lieutenant General Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army in Italy. |
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| Medal of Honor recipients 2nd Lt Ernest Childers (left) and T/Sgt Charles E "Commando" Kelly (right), were honored for their heroism during the Italian campaign at a War Department press conference, Washington, DC, April 24, 1944. |
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| Kelly arrives home at the airport, with his mom and brothers, 24 April 1944. |
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| Kelly and May Boish are married by Probate Judge Claude D. Gullattte with Sgt. John O'Ricco, Best Man, and Marie Waldrop, Maid of Honor, 12 March 1945. |
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| Major General Fred L. Walker congratulates Kelly and his bride, May, after their wedding. Walker was Kelly's Commanding General in Italy. |
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| Kelly signing autographs during a visit to a Pittsburgh war plant. |
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| American soldiers rest in a courtyard during the drive towards Rome. |
