As the Easter service was conducted, the enemy threw in a few artillery concentrations, which gave those assembled a sharp reminder that they were still on Anzio.

Throughout Holy Week, chaplains recorded a dramatic increase in confessions, conversions, and ceremonial baptisms. All had been baptized by fire, and now some were christened by water.

As warmer weather approached, Phil knew that defeating the Germans and the Allied generals’ salvation at Anzio rested on the Infantrymen like him at the front. They were the valorous men who knew that “this pestilential plot, this woe, this kettle of grief,” as author Rick Atkinson would later describe it, could not go on forever.

They were spurred on by snowballing rumors that a breakout was coming any day.

Even though the Anzio Beachhead had been a dreary and dismal death trap for almost three months, Phil and his men had a sense that if they could break out of the hell that was Anzio, then the rest of Italy was ripe for the taking.[1]

~~~~~

Bombing Brings New Suffering to Hospital[2]

Debris is cleared away after an attack on an American hospital on the Anzio Beachhead. Nazi bombs killed two patients and injured 56 others.

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Protected from everything except a direct hit, wounded Allied soldiers rest in their foxhole beds at an Anzio beachhead hospital. Engineers dug out the bed space, covered the pits with a tent and build sandbagged bunkers of dirt. Recently when 20 German shells combed the hospital area, all such patients escaped additional injury.[3]

~~~~~

German fire bombs turned an American hospital area on the Anzio beachhead into a bloody shambles last night, climaxing a might and day of savage patrol fighting and artillery exchanges on the three major Italian fronts.

The Nazi bombers were apparently attempting to blast Allied military installations and shipping.

Three big incendiaries landed on a cluster of hospital tents jammed with wounded troops and medical corps personnel. Two men were killed instantly and 56 others badly hurt, including a number of captured Germans.

United Press War Correspondent Robert Vermillion, who witnessed the attack, said there was no immediate indication that the Nazi planes struck deliberately at the hospital area.

(A German radio commentator heard by the United press in New York reported that the Fifth Army was shifting troops and equipment to the Anzio beachhead in great numbers and predicted a major Allied attack there.)

(Picture Caption) The Allied field hospital tents are plainly marked but a bomb crater in the foreground reveals that it is not immune.[4]

~~~~~

[1] Larimore. At First Light. Page 109.

[2] Signal Corps Radiotelephoto by Acme. The Commercial Appeal. Tuesday Morning, April 4, 1944. News Clipping.

[3] Associate Press Photo. The Commercial Appeal. Friday Morning, April 7, 1944. News Clipping.

[4] German Bombs Play No Favorites on Anzio Beachhead. Memphis, Tenn., Tuesday Morning, April 25, 1944. Pictures and caption. News clipping.

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