UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

The I&R shifted to the staging area and the secret was out. We’d be boarding a cavernous LST for a cruise up the coast, bypassing Monte Cassino, and disembarking on the Beachhead. “May my first landing be as near a dry run as possible!” was as close to praying as I could achieve.

Three nights later we embarked in the LSTs for a sleepless voyage of eighty-five miles. Any illusions as to what lay ahead had vanished. Approaching the plateau spread out below its parapet of hills already swarming with enemy, we felt all over again the same rising anxiety that gripped us that direful day back in November as we trucked through the rain and mud toward the looming mountains from which we just knew they were looking down our throats.

On the morning of January 29, 1944, with the rest of the 157th, the Platoon hustled off the boats at the small port of Nettuno, a couple of miles east of Anzio, and beat it as fast as we could from the logistic bustle of the harbor, which was loaded with sitting ducks, because the Luftwaffe was always somewhere there over the horizon. The Regiment hiked and rode rapidly north on the short road to the Padiglione Woods, where we dug in for the night on the southern edge of the only substantial cover on the Beachhead.

Of Anzio we knew nothing except that once again the Germans were up there looking down on us. Twenty-three hundred years before our arrival, Antium, as it was then known, lost out in its wars with Rome and was absorbed in the early empire. Inevitably it was adopted as a favorite resort for emperors and rich Romans, achieving a certain distinction as the birthplace of both Caligula and Nero, alongside whom Benito looked benign. I suppose if you shed your toga and stuck to the Tyrrhenian beaches, the sea breeze blew away the malaria mosquitoes.

“Definitely we’re in the Pontine Marshes,” I wrote in my journal. “Miles and miles of absolutely flat, drained land—one of Il Duce’s better ideas—and bare except for occasional areas that are very thickly scrubbed. Most foxholes take water in the bottom.”

Foxholes were wells because much of the plain behind Anzio and Nettuno was barely above sea level, fed by underground springs and from the hills. Periodic attempts had been made to drain the Pomptine (so-called originally) Marshes since the Emperor Appius Claudius built the Via Appia through them from Rome to the south in 312 B.C., but success awaited Mussolini’s dictatorial drive that reclaimed fifty thousand acres for cultivation by 1932 by means of a canal system to which he deigned to give his name. The draining materially reduced but failed to dry up the standing water that bred the malaria-bearing Anopheles mosquito—hence the preventative Atabrine pills we popped daily during our sojourn on what might more aptly have been called the Pontine Beachhead.

At dusk and again near midnight came 110 Luftwaffe bombers. And we dug, man, did we dig! Not for five days could I find a break to write home with something the censor would pass.

I will tell you something about the beauty of a night air raid. The Luftwaffe, of course, is rarely to be seen, but they come over in small force occasionally. We have a tremendous amount of A-A [anti-aircraft] protection, and it is a fascinating sight to