He said "the mission of this Regiment was to capture that pillbox so when the amphibious forces landed they could ride right through that junction." Well anyway, my company captured this pillbox. I’d like to say it was through a brave act and all that but it wasn’t anything like that at all. I was coming down the road with my prisoners trying to contact the 1st Infantry Division and I saw the objective, the pillbox. At the time we had a battleship off shore that was firing 16-inch shells. But unfortunately the pillbox was in a low spot and they couldn’t hit it with the shells. The shells were landing about 100 yards to the outside.

I had a very good interpreter, a great young interpreter, a man named Calanreno. His family had been from Sicily. He could speak Italian better than they could (laugh). I then told one of the Italian prisoners to go down to the outpost and said: "you tell those people, if they don’t come out with their hands up in 10 minutes, that we are going to bring all that fire down from the guns out there and just blow them to hell." And by golly the whole dam bunch of them walked out with their hands up (laugh). So we immediately went down and occupied the pillbox. We took about 40 prisoners. It wasn’t an hour later when the 16^th Infantry of the 1^st Division arrived and I told them that we took the objective.

I then met up with the battalion commander who said, "since you’ve already been up on that ridge, I’ll let you lead the attack." By that time it was getting a little dark. I had about 50 men. So the 1^st Battalion commander of the 16^th Infantry put me and my men up front and the commander said that I was to lead the attack. I said to him "how am I going to find my way up that ridge?" It was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. He said that’s no problem and he said, "here’s a German communication wire and I’m sure it leads right up to where the German’s are (laugh)." So he just put it in my hand and said "just follow this" and laughed. I took the thing and we started out. But this is was very steep ridge. Well anyway, the Germans were up in this high position and we were climbing up on this ridge, and the rest of the battalion of the 16^th Infantry was behind us. Soon the Germans heard us and opened up with machine guns. The machine gun fire missed us and went right in the middle of the 1^st Battalion of the 16^th Infantry and they had a lot of casualties, including the battalion commander. He was seriously wounded and was barely alive.

In the meantime we crawled right on up and started to assault their defenses. They were in trenches that were two to three feet wide and about six feet deep. They were cut into solid rock. They were dam good defenses as far as organization was concerned. But there weren’t many Germans in the trenches. We were successful in driving them out. I would say there were about 25-30 Germans in the trenches. We drove them back and occupied their positions. Then we were up on the ridgeline. It started to become daylight and German tanks, Mark V’s and VI’s were coming down the road. We didn’t have anybody that could stop them but I did have the forward field artillery observer of the 16^th Regiment Division. They were about 50 yards in front of us and it looked like we were about to get overrun. We called for artillery fire and we got good artillery fire. They hit the lead tank right in front of us; they hit the turret. It didn’t knock the tank out but it jammed the turret and the tank caught on fire. The poor Germans inside the tank couldn’t get out. You could hear them screaming for half a mile inside the tank. The shells then started going off that were in the turret of the tank and that kind of discouraged the other tanks from attacking. There were about four or five tanks. The tanks were from the Hermann Goring Division.

As they were coming up on the ridge the 1^st Division had a tank destroyer company; the tank destroyers were half- tracks with 105’s mounted on them. They had a lot of fire power. They pulled up on the ridge and fired about 2 rounds. The Tiger tank then swung it’s turret around and then it almost looked like they were dolls that when up in the air when a shell from the Tiger tank hit the tank destroyers. They knocked three of them out as fast as they could drive up on the ridge. They blew them to pieces before they could get a round off.

My orders at the time were just to hold the position or die (laugh). The lieutenant next to me then said "do you think we are going to get out of this thing alive?" I said, "of course we are" and I then I said, "they are not going to come up in here at daylight and when it gets dark we’ll crawl out of here." But I really thought the tanks were going to come right up on our position and if they did we didn’t have the means to stop them. Thankfully, the artillery was able to stop the tank attack. The artillery fire was close; we weren’t more than 50 yards from the tanks but we were in 6-foot rock trenches so we were relatively safe. The Germans then fired on us with large mortars.

The only way they could hit us was to drop one right in the trench and they did do that. I almost died of pure fear because it hit the trench and it bounced around. And you could see it bouncing around and I thought "wow I’m have bought the farm!" I thought in the next bounce that thing is going off… but it didn’t. It finally came to a rest and never went off. The tanks withdrew and we lead another attack. We then attacked another town and took it and then they put the company in reserve.