The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2)

by Rick Atkinson

repeatedly run over by military vehicles before someone finally noticed and a medic buried the remains. Graves registration men arrived with their leather gloves to police the battlefield, folding the hands of dead GIs across their chests before lifting them into white burial sacks. As the soldier-poet Keith Douglas wrote, “About them clung that impenetrable silence…by which I think the dead compel our reverence.” Those who had fought for the past ten days supposedly “slept where their bedding fell from the truck.” San Pietro had cost Fred Walker’s 36th Division twelve hundred battle casualties, and two thousand nonbattle losses; the 143rd Infantry Regiment alone lost 80 percent of its strength. Engineers, tankers, Rangers, paratroopers, and the Italians who also fought for the village had hundreds more killed, missing, sick, and injured. At an evacuation hospital near Mignano, patients lay listening to the shriek of artillery, calling out the guns by millimeter. A chaplain played “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” on his Victrola. Margaret Bourke-White spied “a small grim pile of amputated legs” covered with canvas outside a surgical tent. When one dying