UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Went out on an OP in a big two-story house in plain view of the enemy. Observation was perfect. We found one CP where there must have been at least a company of Germans. We saw a camouflaged gun there, scores of jeeps [perhaps Volkswagens], ammo carriers, command cars, large trucks, half-tracks, motorcycles, even a man on horseback. The first day we saw a train moving in the distance. Reported it and next day the Air Force bombed it. [A day or so later they’d repaired the track, someone said with American POWs, and the train was back running.] Saw the Jerry ack-ack knock down two of our B 25s and saw the men that survived float to earth. [I have a vivid memory of a crippled Flying Fortress going down over the Velletri area on this or another occasion.]

On our right I saw a camouflaged tank or self-propelled gun. In back of it was a house and road where we saw vehicles and columns of men. I fired two missions on it with the 105s. Got three rounds within four or five yards of the tank and the rest dispersed around the house and road. Caught a Kraut taking a shit and saw him run for it when the first round came in, pants around his knees.²⁰

Our last day there the English came to take over, and Jerry [the enemy] must have spotted them. He hit the houses across the road from us with what must have been at least a 170-millimeter gun, moved down the road, scored a direct hit on the house next to us, and then hit the road 75 yards from our house. We dove into a ditch next to the foundations in back, about ten men still in the house. He put one about ten yards in back of the house, and the Limeys decided to come downstairs. Next one was a direct hit on the peak of the roof, knocking off the roof and the entire upper story, damaging the first, covering us with plaster and landing rocks as big as trunks two feet from our heads. We got out of there FAST. Thus ended, quite conclusively, a good OP.

The road behind what was actually a modest villa paralleled the front and was reached by a driveway of a couple of hundred feet through a field. The British crew swung off this road and up the drive as jauntily as if crossing Piccadilly Circus, arms flailing in the fashion of the King’s Own, in plain view of any Kraut with a pair of binoculars, and of course had to have a jolly outdoor howdjado with us, much to our discomfiture. Soon after, in roared the big shells, curtains for one of our hottest windows on the show, a latter-day example of how the Redcoats lost the American Revolution.

No sooner had we climbed out of the ruins and got to the end of the drive than a German fighter plane, an FW or Me-109 following the road low on the lookout for targets, roared in on us, guns blazing, and we threw ourselves in the ditches. A wonder they hadn’t long since given this and a few other isolated landmarks a dose of preemptive shellfire, unless they assumed we’d hardly be so rash as to use them.

The next day, February 15, marked the onset of irony enough on both sides to illuminate the somber lines from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold, who never went to war but must have listened to those who had, writing of it as a “darkling plain, / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”²¹

Overriding the misgivings of his generals that such a tactic would concentrate too much of their forces in too narrow a sector, Hitler ordered Kesselring and Mackensen to drive the 14th Army’s climactic Beachhead-splitting attack down the Via Anziate like a spear of Siegfried, the lightning point of which should be his favorite Berlin-Spandau Lehr