UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

charge the draw and eliminate an American recon patrol? Maybe because of whatever stayed Griff’s hand in this sector when, as he recalled, “concealed on one side of a hill in the brush, we picked up what we thought was an enemy OP, a soldier sitting there with field glasses. I thought about taking a shot at him or calling some artillery but decided he wasn’t a worthwhile target.”

Nowhere was safe, from the front lines back to the shining Tyrrhenian. From their bleachers up in the hills our enemies observed us like fleas on a map at their leisure and every day accumulated more artillery coordinates of our significant installations, daily updated by the Luftwaffe whose recon planes, circling high above like lone hawks, attracted our futile ack-ack fire.

Nothing was beyond their reach, from mortars to the “Anzio Express,” the giant railroad gun outside Rome that hurled 280-millimeter, 11-inch-diameter, 550-pound shells from a 70-foot barrel up to thirty or so miles sighing high over our heads to explode with titanic devastation in the rear areas and among the ships unloading in the harbor, or without a hint of warning on top of us at the front.¹⁶

As its daylight bombing diminished somewhat with our increased air cover and antiaircraft fire from the ground, the Luftwaffe took to the night all the more, as on the ninth of February, when I observed to my notebook that “things have been pretty hot around the CP. We’re close to the lines, and something like eight TDs [armored tank destroyers], two tanks and six artillery pieces have moved right in next to us. At five the other morning several Jerries came over and dropped ‘butterfly’ bombs over us, and they’ve sent a few shells in occasionally. Consequently we have all dug in, and my shelter seems to be the best of all. It gives protection against about everything except a direct hit.”

The anti-personnel butterfly bomb was another work of the Devil of the Night, a bathtub- sized canister parachuted from a Junkers Ju-88 or Heinkel He-111 bomber toward the target by the fierce white light of a parachuted flare that seemed to strip us naked to the enemy looking down. A timed charge blew open the sides at the optimum altitude for scattering scores of offspring like a flight of deadly butterflies that exploded with a storm of fragments. Pullman parked his boots outside his hole one night, and they were riddled.

The menace of a Heinkel approaching with a load of butterfly bombs before our ackack had got wind of it haunts the memory of the howling crescendo EEERRRROOOWWWWOOOOWWWEEERRROOOOWWWW of the slightly out-of-synch engines up there in the darkness that in the recalling sends the same shivers as ever up my neck.

One of der Führer’s more quixotic scientists conjured up the “Goliath,” a miniature unmanned tank about two feet high that was supposed to lumber along toward our lines with two hundred pounds of explosive, guided remotely by a couple of thousand feet of trailing wire, to be detonated at its destination. Drawback: the Doodlebug, as the dogfaces derided it, could be stopped by rifle fire.¹⁷

I penciled for home a cross-sectional sketch of the major hole I excavated with Waldron’s skeptical assistance: “Jerry and I have dug into the side of a hill and pitched a