The end of the tortuous trail was not yet in sight, but the beginning of the end was. Men of the 3rd Infantry Division, doubly heartened by the victorious conclusion of the push on Rome and the successful amphibious invasion of France’s Normandy coast, began to see where that trail had been leading all this time.[1]

Sometimes it had seemed there was no pattern to its crazy wanderings. There was no end—not even a remembered beginning, lost in too many endless days and sleepless nights—just the awful, eternal middle. Shells, mountain peaks, destroyed villages, and mud were the only milestones to mark the journey.

Men of the 3rd [Infantry Division], and its brother divisions in the Mediterranean Theater, for a long time bore most of the United State’s ground effort in the European war. Sometimes they took staggering casualties. They froze, sweated, and cursed, by turn. They fought, died, and wept without tears for dead comrades. They looked for hope when often there seemed nothing for which to hope. About the only thing left to them was faith, which was equally divided—faith in God and faith in the fighting qualities of the men on either flank.

The men who lived like rats in the ruins of Cassino and dodged death day and night were hard put to it to see the grand scale of a strategical map. The soldiers who smashed across the Rapido River, to get smashed right back, could not with a casual wave of the hand say, “Well, we took a bit of a reverse today.” The men who carefully kept even the tops of their helmets from showing over the parapets of Anzio foxholes were in no position to predict the end of the was by “Oh, say, Christmas.”

But the beginning of the end suddenly materialized. The tentative start, gradually evolved into full-scale warfare, now fitted neatly into a single picture which could be viewed from one perspective. That France, and eventually Germany, had been the unltimate objectives, everyone had known. It was the method of getting to those objectives that had sometime been obscured for the fighting soldiers.

When, with the invasion convoy in mid-journey, it was announced that the destination was Southern France, the pattern was now complete. Africa, Sicily, Italy, Anzio … it had taken the 3rd Infantry a long time to get there.[1]

[1] Taggart, 200.

In case you haven’t read or listened to Dad’s book, you can learn more or order it here.

© Copyright WLL, INC. 2024.