Free "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt

attendant to a winter campaign in the cold vastness” of the Apennine Mountains under the guns of the German-held monastery at Monte Cassino.
     
     
     
    “ We pushed north in Italy from Naples toward Rome, and by November 1943, we got as far as the foothills where we began being shelled by Germans above us on the mountains around Monte Cassino. We were pinned down there for over two months. There was a monastery on top of Monte Cassino that the Germans used as an observation post so they could see our every move. It was an ancient monastery, and certain factions didn’t want it bombed. When they finally did bomb it, they made the whole situation worse because now the Germans could get protection from the rubble. In January 1944 we tried to assault the German line but got thrown back down the mountain. Some nights we’d go out on patrol to capture a German soldier for interrogation. Most nights we just tried to stay dry from all the rain and keep from getting hit.
    By then I was learning not to get close to too many people. You get to liking people and you see them get killed. A nineteen-year-old kid would come in as a replacement, and before his boots got a chance to dry he was dead. It’s got to affect you mentally. I was close to Diggsy and that was it. It was tough enough seeing Diggsy get shot twice.
    Then came the worst of it. They decided to send some of us back to a rest area near Naples in Casserta. It had been the Italian king’s palace. We had it easy for about ten days and then we took off in landing craft for Anzio. This was a coastal town that was north of the German line at Monte Cassino but south of Rome. The idea was to attack the German flank and give our main force a chance to break through at Monte Cassino. ”
     
     
     
    The 45th Division was pulled back from the repeatedly unsuccessful and costly Allied attacks against the monastery at Monte Cassino to open up another front on the German flank by the amphibious invasion of Anzio. In moving the 45th away from the front line at Monte Cassino, General Mark Clark wrote, “For the past seventy-two days the 45th Infantry Division has been engaged in continuous combat against strong enemy forces and under extreme combat conditions.” General Clark reflected upon the “bitter cold, wet and almost constant enemy artillery and mortar fire” to which the 45th Division—and Private Frank Sheeran—had been subjected at Monte Cassino. What the general didn’t know was that he was taking the 45th out of the frying pan of Monte Cassino and putting them right into the fire that was the hell of Anzio.
     
     
     
    “ Before a battle or a landing, you get a little nervous tension. Once the shooting starts it goes away. You don’t have time to think. You just do what you have to do. After the battle it sinks in.
    We took the Germans by surprise at the Anzio beach, taking a couple of hundred prisoners. Everything was quiet that first twenty-four hours as we moved up off the beach, but instead of advancing, the general in charge thought it was a trap. He decided to play it safe and wait for our tanks and artillery to land. This delay in advancing gave the Germans time to get their tanks and artillery into position above us and to dig in so they could pin us down and keep our tanks and artillery from landing. ”
     
     
     
    As Sir Winston Churchill put it, and despite his expressed wishes to the contrary, “But now came disaster…. The defenses of the beachhead were growing, but the opportunity for which great exertions had been made was gone.” Hitler poured in reinforcements, pinned the Allies down, and ordered that his army eliminate what he called the “abscess” of the Allied beachhead at Anzio.
     
     
     
    “ Then along came their heavy artillery and their airplanes strafing us. We had to dig deep because foxholes wouldn’t do us any good. We ended up in dugouts that went down about eight feet that we dug with our shovels. We used foot ladders