UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

1. Thirty-five years later, while visiting Vernon Dilks at his home in Sarasota, Florida, I recalled the accident of his old buddy Mills. “Yeah, he got mad as hell at me, but I couldn’t stop laffin’, he looked like such a idiot [uncontrollable laughter]. The guy kicked the boilin’ water [laughter], and it went all over him [laughter], and he got up an’ took his pants off [laughter], an’ danced around like a stupid drunken idiot [laughter]. Helluva thing to laff at [laughter]. I just couldn’t stop [laughter], an’ he got so mad at me for laffin’ [uncontrollable laughter].”

2. Incident recalled by Andy Zapiecki.

3. Diary of Major General John P. Lucas, January 9, 1944. As excerpted in Blumenson, “General Lucas at Anzio,” in Command Decisions, 333.

4. Diary of Major General John P. Lucas, January 10, 1944. As excerpted in Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, 355.

5. Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 400. Diary, January 20 [1944].

6. Morison, Sicily—Salerno—Anzio, 346.

7. Colgan, World War II Fighter-Bomber Pilot, 65.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 67–68.

10.Morison, Sicily—Salerno—Anzio, 346.

11. George Furber:

They let our Third Battalion go into Cisterna, and then as we came up they had us almost surrounded by machine guns. But we jes’ laid down for the rest of the night so we could see in the daytime what was goin’ on.

When daytime come, Colonel Murray was right beside me, and we were talkin’ on the radio with Third Battalion. They were completely surrounded, and the Germans were advancing on ’em. So Colonel Murray said we’ll spread out and make an attack in a big sweep. The minute we started they pinned us down. So smarty me, I told him we oughta have a bayonet attack. Good idea!

I was firin’ my M1 with the bayonet on, and they hit it first, knocked the butt against my cheek, and then as my arm was up in the air the bullet went in around the bone and came out and knocked my knuckle off and picked me up a hundred an’ eighty degrees and threw me directly back. Leon Domaszewicz got hit in the thigh and couldn’t walk and tole me that Red Gillig [another of my fellow Croft trainees] just a short way from us got it right between the eyes. A bunch got it on that sweep. The Germans were only two or three hundred yards away.

After the medic got through with me I went into the irrigation ditch off the Mussolini Canal, maybe two or three feet deep, where we could pull the boys in, and laid out there and helped with the wounded and those I could do anything with, givin’ ’em morphine and a drink o’ water. When it got dark the wounded who could walk went back to Ranger headquarters. That’s the only time I saw Colonel Darby actually crying. Major Miller was killed, and he knew it was a wipeout. The Third Battalion was gone, and here the Fourth’s gone, and the First’s about all that’s left.

Back in the hospital in Naples I was operated on and in a half-cast until March, and when they took it off it was real gooey and started to stink. The orderly had to leave, and the nurse wanted to, and the doctor too. It hadn’t smelled, but it would itch and I’d scratch the bottom with a coat hanger. But I had this tremendous scar and asked the doc, “What the hell is this? When I came in I didn’t have but two lil holes.” He said, “If it had been shrapnel we wouldn’t have done a thing, but with bullets you hafta clean it.” I’m soakin’ it and there’s lil black threads, and he says, “That’s good. Pull ’em out. They’re nerves.”

For years it felt dead, but the nerves have all grown back. You can bullshit the VA and say goddammit my arm hurts and I can’t use it. But as far as lifting, there’s no disability, and I’ve always been lefthanded. Never had any compensation. It looks worse than it is.

12. We never could get the unit nomenclature of the Brits straight, even after Pullman explained that a regiment enlisted in the traditional fashion from one county was split up for the Second War amongst several brigades in order to retain pride of identity while preventing the sort of wholesale wipeout that had divested so many areas in the UK of the cream of their young men in the First War.

13. It didn’t occur to me until one day sixty years later while taking a reflective shower that when his Kameraden found Fritz shot dead and without his gun they might logically have assumed he was killed while unarmed. And I’d hiked away from that grisly scene with his bloody Schmeisser, and his blood on my hands for which I was not responsible but that no shower can wash away. Poor Fritz. He died for das Vaterland fighting the Yanks from across the sea and the Brits from across the Channel while he and his associates devastated the land of the despised Italians who’d betrayed his beloved Führer. Irony without end.

14. Smith et al., History of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 55.

15. Churchill, The Second World War, 488.

16. Hibbert, Anzio: The Bid for Rome, 129. Originally the “Leopold” and also known on the Beachhead as “Anzio Annie,” this monster could be fired and then backed along the railroad to concealment in a mountain tunnel. Only twenty-six years earlier Annie’s progenitor shelled Paris. The only one to survive World War II, this biggest of all guns was shipped to the U.S. and is on display at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland.

17. Ibid., 88–89.

18. Ibid., 89.

19. Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 414. Diary, February 12 [1944].

20. Writing home: “I observed for our 105s and probably damaged a tank and took care of a number of personnel.” Waldron wrote my father about the same time that “our Platoon has more or less gone back to its main work of observation, and Joe immediately distinguished himself by knocking out a tank at three miles, putting one HE [high-explosive shell] on the front end and one on the rear—fini de movement around tank.”

21. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (written in 1867), lines 35–37. From Lieder et al., British Poetry and Prose, 1181.

22. Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 415–16. Diary, February 16 [1944].

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 415–16. Diary, February 17 [1944].

25. In his amiable satire The English Gentleman (39–40), Douglas Sutherland writes in his chapter “The Gentleman at War” of “those two very gentlemanly gentlemen at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and his second-in-command, Lord Uxbridge.

“‘By God, I’ve lost my leg!’, remarked Lord Uxbridge.

“‘So you have, by God,’ remarked his chief as they continued to ride into battle.”

26. Christopher Hibbert, the Oxford-educated historian and author of Anzio: The Bid for Rome, was a captain in the London Irish Rifles in Italy.

27. Bishop, Glasgow and Fisher, The Fighting Forty-Fifth, 81.

28. Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 416.

29. Bishop, Glasgow and Fisher, The Fighting Forty-Fifth, 81. Division equipment losses for February included four Piper Cubs, 21 tanks and 17 tank destroyers as well as “88 trucks, 16 trailers, 34 anti-tank guns, 159 machine guns, 61 mortars, 101 [BARs], 364 rifles, 109 carbines, 219 pistols, 12 Tommy guns, 674 bayonets, 398 trench knives, 228 binoculars and 122 wrist watches.”

30. As one of the ten, I so regretted that gratuitous yellow, which upon reflection, unlike General Patton, I found foreign to the spectrum of fear in war, that I expunged it a couple of years later while transcribing the journal.