UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Food and water were so low that a single K ration was serving three men. With priority for the wounded of both sides in the Caves, the G.I.s were boiling and drinking water from a small stream that ran red with the blood of dead Germans lying in the draw.

As darkness approached, F Company was hit by machine-pistol fire and grenades outside the Caves. Up on the overlooking bluff, G and H Companies laid heavy fire on the attackers, and our 158th Field Artillery was called upon for a thirty-minute barrage on friend and foe alike. The attack withered, leaving the area strewn with dead and wounded Germans . . . and how many G.I.s? That night a supply route was finally forced through, and our drivers and carrying parties got up with water, rations and ammo and back with about a hundred wounded.

Three of the carriers were probably those new boys in the Platoon, Mountain, Sumey and Fleischer, who joined just before the landing. No one recalls their first names, only Bill Caird, who with George Mountain, a kid of about eighteen, took off from the rest area outside Naples, got drunk, and roared back singing “Lili Marlene”; Topkick Bill Sevey racked their asses for waking everybody up. A relief party to the Caves was being made up that afternoon, and Lieutenant Pullman got the word to supply three volunteers.

Naturally I’m not going to pick three of my old hands but three of my new ones. I barely remember Mountain, a little small kid. I’ve always felt bad about that. Did I just say “You, you and you, they need some help up there,” and deliver three bodies to somebody, knowing full well the situation, and the very little chance of them getting in and out? But looking back, I’d do it again the way I did.

Killed? Captured? We never again laid eyes on Mountain, Sumey and Fleischer—just Mountain, Sumey and Fleischer to us.

The next day, February 19, the fourth of the 14th Army’s counterattack, Mark Clark and his Fifth Army officers conceded among themselves that the Second Battle of Cassino— the attempt to break the Winter Line by driving the Germans out of the ruins of the bombed monastery, upon which the strategy of Shingle was predicated—had failed. Three times that day the enemy attacked the Anzio Beachhead across the plain and down the Via Anziate to the concertina barbed wire and the remaining men of I Company behind it, and three times they were cut down. Their dead and wounded and ours, including most of I Company’s officers, lay everywhere in the fields and on the road and over the wire.

There was one more try to come. Working by twos and threes down the draws and ditches on the twentieth, the German infantry built up a line closer and closer to the barbed-wire barrier, when out of the blue they were hit with a mass barrage of seventy-five British 25-pounder guns and decimated to a few moaning wounded. Their furious retaliation was five hours of shelling on I Company’s position.

It was the final German attack on the Overpass and the day of my training buddy Gareth Dunleavy’s exit from the war. After landing at Anzio with the rest of us, his 45th Cavalry Reconnaissance Troop manned various relief and reserve positions, and at least