UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

The History of the 157th Infantry Regiment dismissed such an invitation to disaster with these words: “Between lay a 1,000-yard gap but it was heavily wooded and the few men defending it furnished adequate protection against a breakthrough.” Bull. Adequate because there was no breakthrough. The woods were some way behind us. A very hairy night.¹⁴

By the next day, the fourth of February, the Sixth Corps had nearly 100,000 men bottled up on the Beachhead by an estimated 110,000 Germans with armor and artillery building day and night. Churchill rumbled with Olympian discontent, “I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.”¹⁵ General Lucas, by now the universal scapegoat, was on the verge of despair.

Maybe it was too quiet in our sector. The next night our nervous S2 intelligence officer told Pullman to check out the paratroopers on the other side of the Moletta River bed. Sergeant Mickey Smith, the cool, slow-talkin’, slow-grinnin’ sorta Gary Cooper of the Platoon, was given the job, with Mullenax and me and maybe a fourth. I journaled:

The patrol was a recon, but we were supposed to get a prisoner if we could. Ha! We went up a draw parallel to and in front of the lines, reached the end of it, a clearing, heard Germans and vehicles moving along the dry river bed about 300 yards ahead and parallel to the gully. Smitty looked around, heard lots of Jerries, and we headed back. Undoubtedly they saw him and would have fired if we’d all gone across the clearing. Going back we followed a trail through the middle of the gully. Mohawk missed stepping on a carefully laid mine by about six inches, so we had a pretty good report to turn in.

Carefully laid all right. Right on his heels, I spied the mine just in time to miss tramping on it myself. We got off the trail fast. How we avoided them going up, their Gott must have been mit uns that night. If Mickey was so sure they’d spotted him, why didn’t they

The immense “Anzio Express” railroad gun (U.S. Air Forces)