UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

diminutive Moletta River to the sector held by the British First Division. Our First Battalion took the coast and coast road, then there was a broad stretch of woods considered to be more or less impenetrable and scarcely defended at all, with our Third Battalion on the right next to the Second North Staffordshire Regiment. Our Second was back in reserve.¹²

Facing us was the German Fourth Parachute Division—one tough bunch of Squareheads, the Engineers warned us as they pulled out for the rear with relief.

That may have been the night Colonel Church sent Jack and Dom Trubia out to take a prisoner for interrogation or, failing that, to capture some mutton for his table from a small flock of sheep that a farmer was herding suspiciously close to our lines as if to signal the Tedeschi just where we were. Or, failing that, maybe grab the farmer himself.

They found sheep but neither shepherd nor paratrooper, so Dom, who was raised on an upstate New York farm and knew about such things, took over:

I grabbed one sheep for the Colonel and one for the Platoon. I don’t think he was too happy with him, a poor old broken-down ewe, but I couldn’t catch a lamb. I dropped one off there with his Chinese cook and cut its throat, and got the other back to the Platoon, the only fresh meat we had on Anzio. I made a cut on the inside knee and took a tire pump and blew him up and separated the hide from the carcass just as easy as anything. Then we boiled him in a five-gallon can we got from the kitchen, the only way we could cook him.

Thus fortified, I wrote home that “life worms its mouldy and rather hectic way through the spiritless stratum of war as usual. The other day we raided a flock of sheep and had some quite good lamb chops to go with our K rations. Our dog Boots has been gnawing on the bones.”

We’d inspected a Messerschmitt 109 knocked down in a nearby field. The bloody remains of the pilot were splattered around the cockpit. I enclosed in the letter a clean piece of fabric I cut from the fuselage.

The smashing repulse of our twin attempts at a breakout was followed by the inevitable lull when you just knew that no good was brewing over there. But where, and when? The word came down from Division that G2, the 45th’s intelligence section, had to have a prisoner for interrogation, and the arm was put on the I&R.

So on the night of the second of February Lieutenant Pullman rounded up all of us he could find, and we headed out to First Battalion CP, checked in, and from there to B Company CP at the edge of the woods. From here we prepared to move out through our lines as a combat patrol and find and attack an enemy outpost that was known to be off in the dark somewhere—the first time the Platoon had ever been told to start a fight. To make it quicker and quieter, it was decided to limit the action to Mickey Smith, Griff, Jim Dowdall, me and maybe another. Jerry Waldron wanted to go but had to stay behind lest a stray flash of light in his eyeglasses give us away. It was three days before I had the chance to record in my little black notebook what happened: