UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Beech and the British FO decided we couldn’t defend anything, and it was more important that we get out and be the eyes and ears on what’s happening. We pulled back some distance using dry drainage ditches for cover, and about an hour later, when the sun was up, were running down a gully—a main gully which the Germans were smart enough to shell. As we started up a side gully I was leaning back against the bank when a shell hit down at the intersection of the two. I said to myself, “Gee, that one missed me!”—when suddenly I got this pain in my shin. I’d been hit.

I could move, so we continued on, but it was stiffening up, and I’m limpin’ along, and we get back to another house where there’s an anti-tank gun peeking around the corner. We must have had an observation team there, but we were trying to find a new location that would have been a good one. And as we looked back a shell came in and removed the whole corner of the house and the anti-tank gun.

Eventually we got back to the Medics, who put me on a British hospital ship, and since I was one of the early wounded, it didn’t leave for four or five days. We had tea morning, noon and night and four o’clock and a fifth time, and for years I wasn’t able to drink the stuff. Back at Naples the wound was so small they didn’t operate. No scar. Don’t even remember which leg.

That house with the anti-tank gun behind it . . . Dave O’Keefe had taken a couple of the young replacements to set up an OP in a small farmhouse in the same area north of the Overpass.

There was an anti-tank gun and squad there. Through this window on the east we saw Germans and tanks over toward the Factory, and I says, “Naw, we can’t do anything here, let’s go back into the other room away from the window.” It was one o’ my premonitions. There was a masonry partition there. No sooner had we left than there’s a blast. We went back and the window was gone. One o’ those tanks put a round through. That night we pulled the hell outta there. I kept the ole North Star over my shoulder, and we come up to the concertina barbwire the British had laid. “Halt!” We told ’em who we were and got through the wire and back to the CP.

Dawn was just breaking on the morning of the sixteenth as our infantry finished changing holes with the Tommies and tried to figure out where they were, where the Germans were, and how to lay in their fields of fire, when suddenly the whistles of incoming shells, the more distant rumbling and roaring, the end-of-the-world explosions and resounding thuds, the geysers of earth and stone, the screaming death . . . and the universe imploded on them.

For an hour they hugged Mother under the worst barrage and bombing yet experienced by the Regiment. Then, as abruptly it lifted, and down out of the smoke clanked the enormous, roaring, clattering, squeaking Panzers with the Grenadiers trotting in their wake. Three were rolling right over E Company’s left-flank platoon when a tank destroyer knocked out two and the third withdrew. The TD’s machine gunner broke up the infantry assault until he ran out of ammo and they had to haul back.