UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

A week before the Hill 895 action, the 36th Division, now reorganized after its horrible clobbering at Salerno, had moved up on our left and relieved the veteran Third Division, our constant companions through hell and fire, only to be plunged into one of the Italian campaign’s bitterest, the battle for the town of San Pietro, a key stronghold of the Bernhardt Line. For ten days the Germans beat back everything we could throw at them while the dauntless John Huston directed and narrated probably the starkest combat film of the war. Finally budged a week before Christmas, the enemy withdrew in their usual orderly fashion from bloody San Pietro and Hills 460, 470 and 640 in our sector to wellfortified fallback positions and prepared to celebrate the birth of our mutual Guide to Humanitarian Behavior.

The Third’s assistant commander, General William W. Eagles, replaced our General Middleton, ill and worn out, who had come out of retirement to shape up the Thunderbirds back in the States. It was now my turn, with my new boots and my combat suit, to emerge from semi-retirement.

Pullman led a recon patrol, my first experience of such derring-do, to check out whether the Viticuso Valley, beyond the OP on the left, had been vacated by the enemy on the seventeenth. Mullenax was along, and perhaps Hank Mills. The circumstances are long forgotten except our cautious foray beyond our lines and down into no-man’s-land where we approached with rising trepidation a small stone farmhouse that stood by itself in this sweep of the valley. The ridges rising a few hundred yards to the northeast may or may not have been enemy-occupied. To the south was Hill 1010 and our OP from which our artillery had been directed that mucky day when Jack, through the tunnel in the fog, caught the lone German taking a crap out in front of this very house.

Jack and I approached gingerly with our guns at the ready, the others covering us. The area around the lonesome farm cottage had been hit with shellfire all right. We snuck up and listened. No sound but the breeze and sporadic chatter of gunfire off in the hills. We kicked open the door.

There in a shrapnel-torn room sprawled the family on their beds, father and mother and four or five children and babes, greenish and bloated in death, covered with gray palls of plaster dust from the explosion of the shell that had torn through the wall by the ceiling. The hole faced our lines. Nothing we could do. It had all been done. We got the hell out.

We had seen how the country people, like Zapiecki’s old paesan who had nowhere else to go and was forever looking for his cow in this same valley, tried to convince themselves that this was not their war. They had nowhere else to go, whether they lived in the cities, in the towns, in the hamlets up in the hills, or on the isolated farms. Especially in the mountains the paesans scratched out a subsistence with a few remote vineyards and olive groves, and lived, as they had since Caesar’s time, in poverty and in the grip of a lifelong acceptance of the inevitable.

However they got it, and from whom, it’s clearer now than then that this family must have stuck to their land and their home as the war rolled over them simply because they had nowhere to go. Their neighbors were in the same fix, and Viticuso was being flattened. Maybe they and the Germans figured that if they laid low except at night and in the fog we