UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

I got under with the wire clippers trying to free us, but the Germans were attacking, firing all around, so the officer says the hell with the jeep, and we walked back. At the CP, Colonel James comes out and wants to know who the hell are those guys up there on the horizon? And it’s the Germans diggin’ in. Dawn was just comin’ up.

Meanwhile, Danny Boone’s driving Mullenax and a crew to set up an OP in a house on the road not far from the one I’d been shelled and strafed off, when near the Overpass they run into shellfire. A fluke shrapnel hits the ignition key and disables the jeep. Mohawk and the boys hike on to the house, and Danny walks back to the CP to get a tow from Vern Dilks, who for once is ruffled.

When we got up there a coupla Sherman tanks right back of the Overpass had been hit and were burnin’ like hell and ammunition goin’ up, and a little further on some British Bren-gun carriers—it was a moonlit night—and you could see the bodies o’ these guys who’d been killed, hangin’ over the sides. We got outta there. I guess the Germans got the jeep. I was sweatin’ blood.

When the CP was pulled back, Dilks and Emmett Oman were cruising around looking for a spot to dig in when a couple of tanks began throwing in 88s. Dilks:

They was hittin’ stumps and stuff, and shrapnel flyin’ all over. I heard one come right across the windshield, and by the time I got my butt outta there and was layin’ on the ground, the second one come in, and what it didn’t do to the back o’ my left leg, like somebody hit me with a red-hot ax. Boy that medic was on the ball, shells bustin’ all around, an’ that guy standin’ there cuttin’ my pants off, dressin’ it with sulfa. Might have been Emmett got hit by the same shell but I don’t think so. We went to different hospitals in Naples, and he never come back.

Up in their house on the east–west road as the February sun rose wanly over the smoke of the developing battle, Mullenax, Nye, Trubia and the new men, among them Montford “Monty” Locklear (quiet, serious) from Ohio and a couple of even newer ones unnamed, were trying to establish an unobtrusive OP in the midst of other American and British artillery observers, a naval fire control party getting set up, a few military police, and some tanks rumbling around. To the Germans it must have resembled the Brandenburg Gate at rush hour. Pullman had just left after looking in and was worrying if he should pull them out of there. Shorty Nye wasn’t too happy either:

Our troops was just in front of us, and there was these tanks of ours on the road. The Kraut artillery had already smashed the damn house, windows all out and big holes in the walls, and on the top floor a dead woman lyin’ there. We had the OP in the back end so’s not to be seen, lookin’ through these holes where we could see Germans, one or two, or a half-track or a motorcycle go this way and that way and all over the place. There was four or five houses, and we was in the next one from the end.