Fred and the others were taken behind German lines and put to work loading supplies and spare parts onto trucks.  During the task Fred accidentally dropped a heavy gear used on tank tracks on his foot, breaking it.  When it was time for the Germans to move out, the prisoners were loaded onto a tank.  Fred was put inside because of his broken foot.  Later they were transferred to a truck.

Night fell as the German convoy made its way up a grade, away from the American lines.  Fred and his buddies looked at one another and suddenly bolted from the truck into a gully.  The Germans fired a few shots, but didn’t bother to go after them.  They had escaped!  But how were they to make it back to American lines?  In the military, the highest ranking man in any group is to take charge.  Sergeant Robert Lowery was the ranking escapee, but the others all had different ideas about which direction they should take.  Private First-Class Patterson, the second ranking soldier, lit into the others.

“Sergeant Lowery is in charge.  He and I will make the decisions and the rest of you will obey orders, or else!”  That settled the matter and everyone followed Sergeant Lowery.  Because of his broken foot, Fred fell behind.  The next day Sergeant Lowery got himself stuck in a briar patch.  No one assisted him until Fred caught up and helped pull him out.  Finally, they made it back to American lines and Fred was allowed to rest in a hospital while his broken foot mended.

Somewhere around this time came the infamous slapping incident.  General Patton was visiting a field hospital in Sicily when he came across a battle fatigued soldier.  Patton’s definition of battle fatigue was curt and to the point—cowardice.  In a fit of rage he called the soldier a coward and slapped him.  The press got wind of the incident and trumpeted it in the headlines.  Patton was ordered by General Eisenhower to apologize to the soldier and relieved of his command.  This directly affected the coming Italian campaign.  Instead of George Patton, the invasion force for Italy was placed under the command of the less able General Mark Clark.

It must be conceded the Patton was no “soldier’s general.”  His armies always took heavy casualties.  But he got the job done faster than any other American general and thus in the long run lessened casualties.  Perhaps the best measure of a general’s effectiveness comes from those who must oppose him.  The German generals least preferred going up against George Patton.

In late August, the 179^th Regimental Combat Team was transferred from the 7^th Army to the 5^th under General Mark Clark.  Fred had sufficiently healed from his broken foot to be returned to duty.  On September 7, the 179^th boarded British LST’s for the invasion of Italy.  The voyage to the Salerno beachhead was highly uncomfortable.  It was stiflingly hot in the holds, as the men were crammed together like sardines and had only their C rations for food.  The galleys of the LST’s were not equipped to feed so large a contingent of men.

The men were cheered when the announcement came on the eighth of September that Italy had surrendered.  Now they wouldn’t have to fight Italians defending their homeland.  But the news was tempered by the realization that the Germans were still there—and they could be counted on to fight.

Early on the morning of September 10, the second day of the invasion, the179^th RCT hit the beaches at Salerno.  Without Patton, the attack bogged down on the beaches and the Germans began massing for counter-attacks aimed at driving the invaders into the sea.  Something had to be done quickly.  It fell to the 179^th to move inland to block the expected counter attacks.

On the night of the 10^th Colonel Hutchins ordered his men forward, east on Highway 18, under the cover of darkness.  Fred’s 3^rd Battalion was placed at the head of the column.  Stealth was vital.  The men were forbidden to talk or to smoke.  Silently they force-marched twenty-two miles into the interior to Persano, where they had to be dug into a defensive position by daybreak.

Dawn was breaking as they reached Persano and the Germans struck the 179^th with all their might.  Third Battalion was hit from the northwest by tanks and infantry.  Colonel Hutchins called for tank support, but none was available.  Fred found himself in a full-on fray with the famed Hermann Goering Division, eager to avenge their humiliation in Sicily.  At one point 200 Germans tanks bore down on Fred’s position.  With no tanks at their disposal, the 3^rd Battalion fought them off with grenade launchers, bazookas, and with artillery help from the 160^th artillery battalion.

By evening their ammunition was nearly spent.  Water and K-rations had run out.  With the coming of nightfall, the ground fighting stopped, but for the exhausted men of the 179^th there could be no sleep.  They were continually under bombardment from German planes and artillery.  They knew that they were surrounded.  No reinforcements of men, munitions, or provisions were forthcoming.  A feeling of helplessness came over Fred and the others.  This was no Hollywood movie where viewers knew ahead of time that there would be a happy ending.  This was reality.  Fred and the others grimly waited for the dawn ground attack they knew would finish them.

But with the dawn came silence.  Where were the Germans?  Didn’t they realize how close they were to winning?  Incredibly, they had withdrawn.

The German withdrawal re-opened the supply lines and soon the weary 179^th was re-provisioned with food, water, and ammunition.  They were then relieved by the 36^th Infantry Division, which included the most decorated American soldier of World War Two, Audie Murphy.  He later went on to a career in movies, where he played a succession of hero roles.  The weary soldiers of the 179th marched back toward the beach at Salerno.  “The Battle of Persano” had cost them 38 dead, 363 wounded, and 121 missing.

Forty-three years later, Fred’s younger brother Jim traveled to the Persano battlefield.  While silently surveying the scene, he noticed two older men doing the same.  That evening he saw them again at his hotel.  Upon greeting them, he discovered that they had been members of the Hermann Goering Division that had fought against the “Crazy Okies” of the 179^th on that fateful day.  Jim sat down on the porch at the hotel to converse with Kurt Kroner and Wolfgang Bergin.  It brought a smile to their faces when Jim related to them how Fred had considered the German soldier to have been the best trained and disciplined soldier in the world.  They then proceeded to give their version of the battle.  Sicily was tough, but Persano had been a nightmare.

“We were ordered to wipe out the Americans trapped in Persano.  We killed every one of them at least seven times, but they wouldn’t stay dead.  They kept getting back up and killing us.  It was horrible.  We kept killing them until there were not many of us left.  We were so few that we had to withdraw.  We had been soundly defeated by an army we had trapped.  It was impossible, but that’s the way it happened.  Those men we fought were devils.  We were the best fighting machine in the world until we met those Americans they called ‘Crazy Okies.’  It was a case of the cat being eaten by the mouse.”  If you are feeling the same emotions I am as I write these words, you are simultaneously crying and bursting with pride at being an American.

Back in Salerno, the 179^th marched past an appreciative General Mark Clark.  The 179^th had blocked and decimated the best unit in the German army.  Largely because of their efforts, the beachhead at Salerno had been temporarily saved.

But if Fred thought it was time for a hot meal, a hot shower and some R&R (rest and recreation), he was sorely mistaken.  The 179th was positioned between the 10^th and 6^th Corps as part of the defensive perimeter around the beachhead.  More German attacks were expected.

Late in the morning of September 12 the attack came, an all-out effort to annihilate the American Army on the beaches at Salerno.  “The Battle of Shrapnel Corner” went on fiercely the rest of the day.  Straight at the 179^th the Germans launched another attack of 200 tanks, with a battalion of supporting infantry.  The 179^th hit back with all they had.

Fred’s foxhole buddy panicked.  “I’ve got to get out of here!” he cried.

“Don’t stand up or they’ll kill you!” Fred yelled.

There is no delicate way to put what happened next.  Despite Fred’s warning, the soldier sprang up to flee and was instantly cut down, with his body parts splattering all over Fred.  There was no time to mourn or to clean up.  Just shoot.  And so Fred fired away all day.

In the 2^nd Battalion’s sector, the Germans tried a dirty trick.  A group of soldiers approached under a white flag of surrender.  At 150 yards they suddenly dropped their white flag and began shooting.  The Americans mowed them down, killing about forty of their number.

By dusk the German attack was spent.  They retired from the field, leaving behind tremendous losses.  In the 179^th sector alone, they had lost twenty-two tanks.

But the horrific grind of the battle had taken its toll on Fred.  As the day drew to a close, his mind and body shut down.  He had become a battle fatigue casualty.  Fred had been captured and had escaped—broken foot and all.  He had been in four major engagements.  Two of the men who escaped from the Germans with Fred, John Gort and Robert Lowery, said that Fred had been a good soldier.  In a fight he gave his all.  At that point he had a ticket home, with no one calling him a coward.

But Fred elected to stay, wanting to continue helping with the war effort in any way he could.  And so he was flown across the Mediterranean to a hospital near Oran, Algeria.  There he rested in the hospital until he was recovered sufficiently to be sent to the repo-depo, a place for soldiers who could no longer fight to be reclaimed for useful, non-combat assignments.

Part three, How Fred met my Father, next week