UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

[.swf or .mp3] Listen to the complete chapter, pages 127–167 read by Joseph E. Garland, interspersed with buddies' voices (1 hour and 40 minutes).

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The Regiment encamped for three weeks on the verge of the Campanian plain, resting after saving the Salerno Beachhead from Vietinghoff’s Panzers and replenishing itself with casualty replacements, of which I was one.

After forty days of it, the Thunderbirds turned over the fighting to the 34th Division, which with the Third butted across the valley of the Volturno, first against the impromptu Barbara Line’s roadblocks, strongpoints and blown bridges, then bang into the Bernhardt Line the Germans had been digging and blasting into the rocky crests of the Apennines that rose like brooding thunderheads before the slogging doggies.

The bountiful bottom land around Piedimonte d’Alife, however, was as salubrious a respite for the touring Americans of ’43 as it must have been for the Samnite conquerors of the fifth century B.C. Abruptly plucked from nowhere and dropped into a platoon of faggedout veterans as their third youngest at barely twenty-one, I remember but dimly those days of restless pause for them and easy transition for me.

A signora who’d picked up some English in Canada swapped Andy Zapiecki a couple of chickens for a G.I. shirt or two and a change of underwear and had just cooked these galline for his crew, “and Joe, that’s where you come in. I was shavin’, and Jack introduced you.”

It was not to the madcap corporal that Jack consigned me, however, but to the custody of the schoolmasterish Sergeant Griffith and my fellow Ivy Leaguer Jerry Waldron— Dartmouth and Harvard, old rivals tenting together at last, so far from home. “The men seem a smart bunch,” Harvard logged two days later. “They’re somewhat reserved in their relations with me. I suspect they’re waiting to see really what kind of a joker I am when it comes time to hit a ditch.”