UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

think there’s some kids in there too.” So I didn’t ask for it. I Company got kicked offa there about twice. About the third day I says it’s us or them, and I called for the artillery, and that’s what happened, and the 105s plastered it. But I don’t think they got one damn German. I think they’d all pulled out. I was with you on that patrol, and I was the one that had called that in. It was jest a matter of we were going to wipe their OP out or they was gonna wipe us out.

It sure turned my stomach when I looked at those children and that man and wife. That was on my mind for years. I drank a quart o’ whisky for about ten years and nobody ever knew I was drunk. It stuck in my mind, that family I called the artillery on, and I still to this day think that maybe they was working with the Germans, but I dunno. But to kill innocent children bothered me to beat the devil. The Germans was either holding them hostage or they were cooperating with ’em. We didn’t have much choice. We had to wipe that thing out.¹²

Terrible as it was, for whatever reason I made no record of the ghastly tableau. But I couldn’t expunge it from my mind’s eye through more than half of a century that would see the eradication of millions of other innocents. Without doubt this family that clung to its home and patch of land, in the eye of a holocaust it had nothing to do with, was murdered by us.

Tens of thousands of their countrymen suffered the same fate simply by being in the way of the grappling armies let loose on this ancient and beautiful land by the vanity and weakness of the posturing dictator who sold his soul and his nation’s to the Huns from the north.

Poor ole Mohawk. Was he the one who took aim and called down the fire? Even if he didn’t and as time went by assumed the burden for us all, he suffered as much as if he had.

Jack Pullman never volunteered his men for anything, and that went double for patrols. “The weather was nasty, and things were stable. If we could have one OP let’s try to stay out of patrols as much as possible. I felt that anything we did was really not going to do much for anybody.”

Our Platoon Sergeant was right. But on the eighteenth of December, Division intelligence wanted to know if the Germans in their withdrawal of the previous day had pulled out of their stronghold of Viticuso, and Colonel Church passed the assignment on to us. Jack picked Dom Trubia and me, and off the three of us hiked, our fate strangely in the hands of a local Italian kid, “a little wispy thing in dark black shepherd’s clothes and slouching hat.” I sorted it out in my journal the next day:

We were to go through our lines to about two miles behind the theoretical German lines. The Guinea was to slip into the town and report back to us. We were at H Company’s mortar positions. If there were Jerries, hunky-dory, we’d go back. If there weren’t we’d have to go into town and investigate further, following him along a trail which would undoubtedly be mined and trip-wired [for booby traps].

We waited all day for him to return and then went back to the CP to find that he’d been back all afternoon and reported no Germans. He’d gone to his mother’s house three miles out of town, and she’d told him that the Tedeschi left four days before. So he probably sidetracked us intentionally, since he