UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

see great threads of tracers crisscrossing or paralleling each other up into the sky, moving back and forth slowly as they follow the planes. The din is terrific, and now and then a flare goes up or comes down, giving the countryside for miles around a ghostly complexion. The terrific flashes and “crump” of the bombs make the whole thing fascinating though terrible.

But in my journal:

They came in, a plane at a time. The sky was filled with red streaks of tracers and ack-ack, really terrifying. We saw what appeared to be planes that had been hit heading for the harbor. Later they told us they were magnetic glider bombs released by enemy planes which are attracted by the ships. At least three ships were hit. How helpless I felt in my foxhole, seeing the whole thing come off before my eyes!

No magnetic glider bomb, this was Hitler’s latest secret weapon, the Henschel Hs 293, a pioneering guided missile with wings, first deployed at Salerno. Rocket-driven and weighing 2,870 pounds including a 725-pound warhead, this infernal flying machine was launched from an aircraft and steered by radio for up to ten miles to the target at a speed of 375 miles an hour. Vern Dilks saw one that landed and didn’t explode and said it looked like a toy airplane.

We must have mistaken the rocket blast for a hit and a fire. One of the ships that got it in Anzio harbor that night was the British cruiser Spartan, anchored close inshore, which capsized and was a total loss. Then the Liberty Ship Samuel Huntington, loaded with ammunition and gasoline; they fought the fires until the skipper ordered abandon ship, and in a few hours the Huntington blew up and sank—probably what I took to be the third hit.

Dilks heard that the ammo ship had been blessed by an Italian priest, presumably in Naples, a day or two before sailing. Could the Krauts have been tipped off about its cargo via their spy system? The Luftwaffe needed no spies on the night of the twenty-fourth when it attacked three brightly lit hospital ships in the harbor, sinking the St. David with some lives lost. [This portion of the page contains copyrighted material and is available in the print edition, but is not available online.]⁶

Those in the air thanked the heavens they weren’t down there with no place to hide, while we who were immobilized targets on land or sea wished ourselves anywhere else, but certainly not up there when two days after the initial landing thirty German planes jumped eight P-40s from the 79th Fighter Group based in Naples. Flight Commander Bill Colgan recalled being suddenly in the midst of combatants

[This portion of the page contains copyrighted material and is available in the print edition, but is not available online.]