Over the Cut
There's a spectacular view from a bend in the mountain road between the Italian hill towns of Genzano and Velletri, in the Alban Hills 20 miles southeast of Rome. The near-vertical slope drops dramatically to a flat plain a thousand feet below. Off to the southwest lies the sparkling blue Tyrrhenian Sea, 20 miles away, and at the end of an arrow-straight highway to the sea, the port of Anzio.
For five months on that now peaceful plain, in the winter and early spring of 1944, in one of the fiercest battles of World War II, a retreating Nazi army held off the American and British forces in fierce and bloody combat. On the Anzio beachhead, 4,400 American and British soldiers and 5,500 Germans died before the Americans finally broke through in late May and made their way up the rocky slopes to Velletri, Genzano and the hills commanding the route to Rome, and into Rome itself.
In 1944, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin made a memorable drawing of his scruffy but dogged GIs, Willie and Joe, perched on a rock near a shattered Nazi Tiger tank, near that same bend in the road. "My God!" says Willie, pointing toward the seacoast. "Here they wuz an' there we wuz."
Joe Garland wuz there, too.
"In Unknown Soldiers: Reliving World War II in Europe," — a gritty but graceful, loving memoir of the men with whom he served — Joseph E. Garland, Gloucester's acclaimed historian and author of more than 20 earlier books, writes in spare, focused prose about the intertwined lives of a handful of infantrymen we get to know well. In so doing, he reminds us of the strong bond that exists among soldiers, the force that makes them do brave and sometimes seemingly impossible things in the frightening face of danger — not from love of flag or country, but of one another.
"Unknown Soldiers" may be one of the finest first-person, nonfiction accounts of men at war ever written. Human-scale, dirt-and-mud real, it is about the day-to-day business of men at war, trying to stay alive.
There are no accounts here of glorious feats performed by dashing officers or larger-than-life heroes. Joe Garland and his buddies — Jack Pullman, Andy Zapiecki, Shorty Nye, Jerry Waldron, Val Mullenax, Les Gerencer, Jimmy Dowdall and the other "Ironheads" of his I&R platoon — are the heroes of this story, the Willies and Joes of Bill Mauldin's drawings: scrimy, flea-bitten, unshaven, unwashed, always tired, looking out for one another, just doing their jobs. The book took him 65 years to finish — and it was worth the wait.
Garland was an enlisted man, a private throughout the war, who left college to join the Army in 1943. After completing basic training he was sent to Italy, where he was assigned as a scout in the Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Division, just after it had fought its way, first across Sicily against a retreating but determined German army, and then north into the Apennines from an amphibious landing at Salerno.
Joe Garland's war began on that "Winter Line" in October 1943, just after his 21st birthday. The 45th division was part of the Allied Fifth Army, slowly clawing its way up the spine of Italy, attacking what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had wrongly termed "the soft underbelly of Europe," in a maneuver that was supposed to outsmart, outflank and pin down the Nazi forces and make the planned Normandy invasion a cakewalk. Instead, the Italian campaign proved to be a costly diversion, tying up and killing tens of thousands of American and British forces before the final assault on Germany in 1945.
The I&R scouts' job was to slip undetected, in teams of two or three, far forward of the front lines to man observation posts, direct artillery fire, and on occasion, capture prisoners. It was hazardous, stressful duty where a mistake could be fatal not only to the scouts but to the units they served. On the Winter Line, Garland saw death for the first time, learned what it means to be under fire from someone who is trying hard to kill you, and learned fast the survival skills needed to stay alive and still do your job.
In January 1944 the 45th Division was taken off the line to join in the amphibious landing at Anzio. Though the Germans were caught by surprise, the American commander failed to take advantage of his temporary superiority, the Germans rapidly reinforced, and the two sides settled down to a bloody and prolonged standoff, which finally ended in May when the Allies at last broke through.
After Anzio, the division landed in southern France, where Garland was wounded in a fall when his observation post in a barn loft came under fire. He was evacuated to Italy, where he recovered, and served in safer, rear-area assignments for the remainder of the war. The 157th, I&R in the forefront, went on to liberate the Dachau Concentration Camp ("what, at last, it was all about," wrote Garland), then pressed on to Nuremburg and Munich before the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
To tell his and his comrades' story, Garland assembled a seamless collage of his own personal recollections, (kept in a forbidden journal at the time); his letters home, and excerpts from more than 90 hours of recorded conversations with some 20 of the surviving veterans of the I&R platoon, only four of whom are known to be alive today.
Included as well are the memories (translated by Garland) of a French Resistance fighter who joined the unit as an irregular fighter and the heart-rending recollections of a Dachau survivor. Woven through the war narrative, too, is the charming story of his correspondence with wife-to-be Helen Bryan, a pen pal introduced by a fellow soldier.
Through Garland's and his comrades' spoken and written words you get it all — the sights, the sounds, the stench of war, and the constant, gut-twisting fear of death underlying every waking minute and haunting every dream of these ordinary soldiers who daily did extraordinary things.
Some of the men, in the words of platoon leader Jack Pullman, just "wore out," unable to take the stress any longer. Call it shell-shock, battle fatigue, or post-traumatic stress disorder, it wore down many more than would admit it, and has been a companion of warriors since ancient times.
For many, too, there was the sense of guilt that they had survived while their comrades had died. For Garland, this feeling was reinforced by the belief that his influential doctor-father's intervention had spared him from further combat.
For years after he started to write the book, he was unable to inject his own role into the narrative. It was only when he read Dr. Jonathan Shay's 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam and then talked at length with the author, a psychiatrist specializing in treating Vietnam veterans with chronic post-traumatic stress syndrome, that he realized that the same sense of survivor's guilt that blocked his writing had plagued soldiers as far back as the Trojan War. At last he was able to finish the book.
Tom Halsted of Lanesville is a regular Times columnist and a veteran of six years in the US Infantry.
Book signing
Unknown Soldiers" is being officially released tomorrow, on Veterans' Day, Tomorrow evening from 7-9, author Joseph Garland will be reading from and signing copies of the book at the Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant St., Gloucester.
