Word: anzio
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world. Although he hated war ("It is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous, and less and less photogenic"), Capa was seldom far from the front lines. Armed with three cameras and a flask of Scotch, he jumped with U.S paratroopers into Nazi-held Germany. At Anzio he landed with the assault troops; on D-day he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave of the 1st Division. "For a war correspondent to miss an invasion," Capa said jauntily, "is like refusing a date with Lana Turner after completing a five-year stretch in Sing Sing...
Sicily to Munich. Between the war dance and the Broadway parade, the Thunderbirds followed a long and bloody trail of soldiering around the world. In World War II the 45th was a crack assault division. In eight campaigns, from Sicily to Munich, it made four landings (Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, the French Riviera), spent 511 days in action, suffered 20,993 casualties (second only to the 3rd Division). The Nazi army learned to respect and fear the men of the fast-stepping "Falcon" Division,* who overran 1,000 square miles of Sicily in one three-week action...
...World War II began, he joined the South African Air Force, but soon "lost his temper" and was put under arrest. He escaped by pole-vaulting the prison stockade, hopped a train to Durban and enlisted in the artillery under a fake name. Demobilized in 1945, a veteran of Anzio and Cassino, he set about the more serious business of fighting crocodiles...
Wounded by a Piano. In Italy he soon won a reputation for restless energy, drive and impetuosity. When patrols went out, he sat up and waited for their return, so that he could interrogate the patrol commander himself. At a critical moment on the Anzio beachhead he ordered every man available-sappers, cooks, clerks-into the firing line. "He acted like a red-hot poker," says one of his officers. "He always impressed you as a man who was inevitably heading for a tremendous crackup," says another...
...holiday. It was Ferragosto Day (Aug. 15), Italy's best loved and most ancient annual holiday,* and from the teeming Eternal City (pop. 1,600,000) a million Romans decamped to their seaside villas and to public picnic grounds in the Abruzzi Mountains or at war-famed Anzio Beach. Shops, offices, banks, even Vatican City's Sistine Chapel, were closed up tight, though St. Peter's, as always, stayed open. Garbage went uncollected. milk undelivered, newspapers unpublished and tourists unsolicited by the prostitutes in Villa Borghese park. At his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo. Pope Pius...