UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

The Brits rammed a narrow salient up the Anziate beyond the “Factory” (or Aprilia, actually a model farm settlement created by the Fascists) but were stopped beyond at the Campoleone rail junction by an impenetrable enemy defense. The Sherwood Foresters Battalion on our right was reduced to eight officers and 150 men.¹⁰

The worst of it was that what looked like good tank country proved the opposite. Our First Armored, trying to swing around to their left in support, bogged down in the fields, mushy and crossed by numerous draws, or “wadis,” as the Eighth Army chaps remembered them ruefully from the North African campaign, sometimes holding water and fraught with tangles of brush. Thus, as the Germans were the first to realize, command of the hard ground of the highway and the assembly points of the Factory and the rail station of Carroceto on the west side opposite where the track paralleled the highway was vital to both sides.

Meanwhile, to their right, my Croft buddy George Furber, in B Company of the Fourth Rangers since we parted that day in Mussy’s Racetrack, had a view from the inside. Evidently nobody had tipped them off that they were up against the Hermann Goering Division. They walked right in and got knocked right out.¹¹

On the first of February, the day after the ghastly failure of the Rangers’ attempt at a breakout, the 157th relieved the 36th Engineer Combat Regiment, which fought as infantry when they weren’t building or destroying something under fire, truly the worst of both worlds; they were dug in from the extreme left of the Beachhead on the coast along the

The Factory at Anzio (Department of Defense)