Word: cisterna
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Dates: during 1944-1944
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Last week Mrs. Mills heard startling news about frail Jimmy: in Italy, 21-year-old Private James H. Mills of the infantry had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry during his first encounter with the enemy. Last May, near Cisterna de Littoria, he had knocked out two Nazi machine-gun nests singlehanded by killing four Germans (with five shots) and capturing seven more. Then he had repeatedly set himself up as a decoy target while his platoon surrounded an enemy strong point and captured 22 prisoners without suffering a casualty...
Concentrated Hell. Bloody was the struggle for Cisterna, where General von Mackensen, commanding the German Fourteenth Army, had turned the railway embankment into a fortification. There some U.S. Rangers, members of two battalions wiped out in the frustrated attack of Jan. 30, were still rotting on the ground...
Last week the Americans had 1,000 field pieces pouring concentrated hell on Cisterna. Even so they had to repulse seven German tank thrusts before they moved in through a jungle of booby traps and mines and a mass of shattered and scorched tanks, half-tracks, trucks and self-propelled guns...
...plan called for an attack from the beach. Our outfit, led by the first unit, was to shove north three miles and cut the highway west of Cisterna. On the extreme right flank another outfit was to cut No. 7 east of town. Still another was to barrelhouse straight up the middle and take the town itself...
Shells from the Hills. With dawn, the enemy found his eyes and his shells rocketed down from the hills beyond Cisterna. Enlisted men in the Command Post picked up trench shovels and bit deeper into their foxholes. Ahead we heard the screaming of the Nebelwerfer, followed by a rapid series of crunchings as shells landed close together...