‘Stand and Fight’
August 25th, 2009 | Historical The Middle East | Posted by Andrew Scutro
Navy
ABOARD THE CRUISER ANZIO OFF SOMALIA — We set out from Bahrain on Aug. 16, embarked on this, the flagship for counterpiracy Task Force 151. With extra staff and special personnel, just about every rack is taken, to the point where the junior officers are living in forward ops berthing, former lair of the boatswain’s mates. Two female hospital corpsmen from an embarked surgical team got the medical department racks. This ship does not have the female berthing modification, so there are no enlisted women in ship’s company.
The task force staff is combined with British Royal Navy officers and sailors. There’s also a Somali interpreter from the Midwest and a Coast Guard team from Galveston, Texas.
Military Times photographer Sheila Vemmer has been posting just a fraction of her photos here and here.
The ship is named for one of the most brutal battles of World War II and communications over the ship’s 1MC are often closed with the ship’s motto: Stand and Fight.
Terms like ”hero” and “warrior” and others too long to list here are thrown around with alarming disregard today. But the passageways of this ship are watched over by Medal of Honor recipients from the early 1944 showdown at Anzio. Their efforts, as the allies stood and fought ashore in Italy, were shockingly brave. If you need a reminder about that war, or the Americans who were thrown into it, look up the history of the battle and the MoH citations of men like Pfc. Alton W. Knappenberger, Capt. William W. Galt and 2nd Lt. Ernest H. Dervishian. There are 19 more names, several of them among the 7,000 allies killed in a few months there in 1944.
Comments
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Bob Says:
August 25th, 2009 at 5:30 amEveryone that serves in the Armed Forces is watched over by those that have fought and died. Everyone that served in the past leaves a part of themselves to watch over those that come after them.