UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

Sometime before dawn I woke up on a cot in a slit trench. Screams, moans, and curses came from a German paratroop sergeant at the other end of the darkened tent who died before sunrise. A nurse was sitting there with me and told me that for hours I’d been repeating in a loud voice, “Sherman said war was hell.” Nightly detonations of our ack-ack overhead terrified me. I shook and sweated and imagined that shells meant to destroy German bombers would fall back on our tent, rip through the canvas and inflict new wounds on me.

I had thirty-six pieces of shrapnel all up and down my back, in my chest, buttocks, gut, right leg and left elbow, something like 120 stitches. They took a fairly large piece close to the backbone out from the front, and decided to leave another in my chest, the one that sets off the metal detector at the airport every time I fly.

The following day the Queen’s Infantry of the British 56th suffered seventy-six casualties from butterfly bombs as they tried to fight through to relieve our Second Battalion and had to withdraw. The British First Division relieved our Third Battalion, which in six days had 324 casualties, about 50 percent. Three officers and sixty-eight men remained out of 165 in I Company.

On February 22 the remains of Second Battalion relieved by the Tommies fought through to join the remains in the Caves.

An artillery driver reported that along the Via Anziate “we saw a German bulldozer digging a trench for the German dead. There were several piles of bodies, with about 150 or

Captain Felix Sparks (Department of Defense)