The
photos in this post are from government sources and are for educational
purposes only. Much of the research and
photos comes from Tools of War: An
Illustrated History of the Peninsular Base Section, Army Service Forces,
Mediterranean Theater of Operations From Salerno Landing, 11 September 1943 to
V-J Day, 2 September 1945, U.S. Army Military History Institute. My first non-NARA (National Archives)
operational documents were found in Peninsular
Base Section – Italy, Declassified 19 December, 2009, WWII Operational
Documents, Combined Arms Research Library Digital. Why it took almost 65 years to de-classify is
beyond me. The stories of General Francis
Oxx who commanded PBS in Leghorn and my father who served in the Transportation
Corps are just two among many hundreds of thousands of GIs who supported combat
forces in North Africa and Italy. 
Other
than the picturesque vistas of Mediterranean sunsets and the snow-capped Atlas
Mountains and their valleys of orange groves and olive trees, PBS was a material
world of combat rations, food, ammunition, and gasoline, and the land and ocean
convoys that delivered them. It was also
the story of hospitals, German POWs, and services provided by the Engineers and
Signal Corps. Maybe that’s the reason
for theirs being a lost world; it was an unglamorous world of heavy lifting and
bombed out harbors like Leghorn. That’s
where General Oxx and my father lived and worked. Until recently I knew little about it and I
gave up on finding WWII topographical maps of Leghorn. I also knew that the layout of PBS’s command
might prove it to be the operational headquarters for all the Services of
Supply 1944-1945.
The
final incarnation of the entire supply function for the Mediterranean Theater
of Operations that had been headquartered in Oran, North Africa came to rest in
Leghorn on the Arno River Delta. The Mediterranean Base Section was replaced by
the Peninsular Base Section. As the
documents indicate, the theater headquarters (big shots) were housed in a Bldg.
“E”: (Via Ventotto Ottobre) and called Headquarters Command: Provost Marshal,
Judge Advocate, Finance, Chaplain, Army Exchange, I&E Section, Public
Relations. I figured this was a symbolic
watchdog for PBS’s operations because there were only a handful of hand ranking
officers. On the other hand, Penbase
Headquarters (Via Mameli) was a self-sustaining headquarters company I was
looking for: Bldg. “A”: G-2, GS Div, G-4, GS Div, POL, Radio, Base Purchasing
Agency; Bldg. “B”: Command Group, GS Div, G-3, GS Div, Billeting Officer; Bldg.
“C”: Chemical, Medical, Ordnance, Adjutant General; Bldg. “D”: Signal,
Engineers, Transportation (TC), Inspector General.
As
I read the documents, references to the location of the buildings puzzled
me. It would be nice to actually locate
them on a map, but I don’t speak Italian.
“Via” which means “way” kept popping up.
Maybe it was possible. How I
found the buildings (PBS’s headquarters) which exist today
is the subject of my next post in this personal story of WWII.
