UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Medics enter what’s left of San Pietro. (Department of Defense)

softies wouldn’t shell the place as long as we thought it was occupied by civilians. Maybe they tried to sleep during the day.

My first inkling that our platoon might have been responsible for these murders was Pullman’s account thirty-five years later of firing through the tunnel of fog at the Kraut taking a crap some weeks earlier. This jogged Dowdall’s memory:

On the OP on the right we could see this house, an obvious place fer the Germans to be on account o’ the situation an’ terrain. Nobody could be sure. Nobody saw any. One of our tanks across the valley on the Pozzilli road saw this house an’ fired point-blank into it. The shell had got through the wall an’ wiped out the family.

After thirty-nine years it was left to Mullenax, upon our meeting again, to produce a version that rings true (although it’s unlikely the Germans would have located an OP except on the heights) if less literally than metaphorically, with the poignant tragedy and irony of the war in Italy:

[.swf or .mp3] Hear a selection from the unedited interview (3 MB, 4 minutes)

Our own artillery did it. I directed it. There was a German OP right behind that house. From where we was in that OP behind the rock fence on the hill, that farmhouse was settin’ at the base of the hill right across the valley on the range where the Germans had their front line, about two-thirds of the way down a kind of flat plateau, in the open.

This OP was what was giving us the trouble in holding the hill where I Company was at. We had already lost about half of I company as the result of that OP. We seen ’em all the time for two or three days. I kept callin’ it back, and they said, “Well, why don’t you call some artillery on it?” An’ I says, “I don’t wanna do that. I