April 1st - With heavy guns drumming in the background and white-capped waves rushing in from the Tyrrhenian sea, Pvt. Leo Daniel Fagan, 25, today became the first beachhead Yank to be baptisted in the sea since the allied landing more than two months ago.

Fagan, a former dynamite truck driver from Picher, Okla., was not the first member of the American forces to be baptisted, however, Capt. William L. Youcil of Tonkawa, Okla., and Pvt. William A. Pope of Lawrenceburg, KY., recently asked Chaplain Franklin E. Rector of Enid, Okla., to baptise them. he led them to a water filled shell crated five feet deep and 40 feet wide and there performed the rite.

A few Italian workers on the beach and a group of ack-ack-gunners on over-hanging cliffs watched in silence as Fagan, now an ammunition bearer with a chaplain, Lt. Col. William E. King, 43, former pastor of the Maywood Baptist church in Kansas city, Mo.

"It just goes to show that no matter where you are in Uncle Sam's army, you can be baptised," said Fagan who returned from the front lines last night. he had made arrangements for the service with the chaplain just before going up into the line for a seven-day stretch.

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