UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

mildness of the January weather down on the Campanian plain restored the old American bounce, with some help from Hollywood.

Joe E. Brown, the comedian with the bullfrog grin, turned up on a makeshift stage with a piano and a mike and worked his pitcher’s pantomime before a few thousand doubled-over Thunderbirds squatting on a slope that formed a natural amphitheater. A couple of days later Humphrey Bogart tried a few jokes, but “not too hot,” I reported home. “They should send over only comedians. We’re making coffee now, eating bread and apple butter, and as soon as I finish this I’m going over to eat an egg (oh, rarest of things!), which can be had, four for a bar of soap.”

Back in the fields of Piedimonte we played soccer and cribbage and loafed and heard the distant gunfire, but we knew nothing beyond surmise, and I wrote home a few hours before the resumption of our destiny:

It’s a beautiful day, quite mild, and I’m in the best of health except for a tenacious cough which seems to be due to the charcoal fires in our tents and the cold nights. Literally every other native is a barber, and I rarely have to shave myself. Costs 10 liras, or cents. Sometimes it’s risky business if there is any excitement going on, as they are very demonstrative and will like as not slit your throat while showing what they would do to a German. A good part of our time is spent trying to avoid work, another in trying to loaf when it can’t be avoided, and finally in regretting that we worked as hard as we did.

On one side of our area is a flock of goats and sheep. The paesans drive them over the hills by going brrrr or ahhhh or zzzz. By our kitchen we have a small town, and at every meal about fifteen dozen kids collect around with tin cans and fight for our garbage. There are even a couple of very old women out there. Most of the kids are very ragged, thin and dirty. Some even have red networks all over their legs, due to cold or disease. I hear they get enough to eat just the same, though it probably wouldn’t come close to feeding American kids.

Their mules are not like ours, much smaller and therefore unable to carry the load. The Italians treat them cruelly when they’re working, beating and kicking them, even hitting them in the mouth. But they take pretty good care of them when they’re resting. Like the women, the mules carry terrific loads. Oxen are used to draw very heavy loads, and in the field to plow. They drive the mules and oxen like the goats, by going brrr or ahhh at them. As Ernie Pyle says, it sounds as though they were freezing to death.

Hitler’s resolve to make a stand in the mountains north of the Volturno had been evident by late October. Encouraged by a small Eighth Army end run at Termini on the east coast a few weeks earlier, General Alexander directed the Fifth Army on November 8 to prepare a similar waterborne hop on December 20 to the seaside resort of Anzio, to be called “Shingle,” the quaintly British word for a stony beach. But when Mark Clark found there weren’t enough landing craft for even this one-division operation, it was scratched just two