UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

The Overpass—underpass to hell (Department of Defense)

Though Hitler’s vaunted Lehr Regiment broke and ran for their lives, wave after wave of Germans of stronger stuff charged down the Via Anziate and on either side behind a crawling shield of small arms and shellfire, tanks firing point-blank at whatever moved. Overrunning E Company, they snuck around the British and the 179th on Second Battalion’s flanks, nearly cutting them off and forcing them to pull back.

Tanks attacking G Company on the bluff above the Caves were knocked out by our artillery, which at one point was reluctantly called down on one of the beleaguered platoons and cut the attackers to pieces, but they just kept coming, crawling through draws under terrible fire and leaping into foxholes for hand-to-hand battle with each Amerikaner as if it were a personal vendetta, finally forcing what was left of the platoon to withdraw.

In the afternoon Panzers eradicated a squad of men and a platoon leader. At nightfall three enemy companies resumed the attack against E Company through the ditches on either side of the Anziate. The left platoon was wiped out; a handful of men on the right of the highway still held on.

Hastily dug in the swampy ground and taking refuge in the tunnels left by the British in the east–west highway embankment at the Overpass, Third Battalion took a more prolonged shelling, bombing and strafing from everything the Germans had. Men were exploded; noses bled from the concussion; some of the wounded lay where they got it for two days before they could be reached. Medics and litter parties, drivers, Wire Section men from Regimental Headquarters repairing recurrently broken phone lines, all worked under constant fire.

Answering with 432 guns and 500 air sorties, we were locked together with our enemies inside a continuous, ground-shaking concussion of flying fragments of steel, buildings, vehicles, mud, bullets and bodies.

Returning from driving an officer up to the Second Battalion CP beyond the Overpass, Bill Caird ran over some barbed wire that wrapped around the drive shaft.