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

to climb out, and we put boards and tree branches on top to protect us from the rain and to absorb the shrapnel from the constant shelling.
    We stayed like that under a never-ending attack for four solid months. You couldn’t leave your dugout during daylight or they’d pick you off. Where are you going to go anyway? You’d take your chances and come out at night to relieve yourself or empty your helmet of your body waste if you couldn’t hold it in during the day and you had to go in your helmet. You ate K-rations out of a can. They couldn’t get any cooked food to you. The Germans bombed our supply ships. You played cards and you talked about what you were going to do after the war. And most of all, you prayed. I don’t care who you were or who you thought you were, you prayed. I said more Hail Marys and more Our Fathers than I could count. You promised to sin no more if only you got out of this alive. You swore to give up women and wine and cursing and anything you ever did that you could use to offer up in your prayers.
    The worst shelling was done at night by what we nicknamed the Anzio Express. It was a giant piece of artillery that the Germans kept camouflaged during the day so our airplanes couldn’t find it. It was kept on a railroad track outside of Rome. They’d bring it out and put it into position after dark, when our planes were on the ground, and fire round after round at us. Its incoming shell sounded like a boxcar on a freight train overhead in the night sky. It was so loud and scary it was demoralizing every time you heard it, and you never let yourself think too long that some poor GIs not far from you were on the receiving end of it and getting blown all to hell so there’d be no bodies left even to send home to their families. And you could be next.”
    You took your turn on point a hundred yards out on the perimeter as an outpost so the other guys could get some sleep, but there wasn’t much sleeping during those four months. I’ve found better places to be than to be out on point all night. Nighttime is always scarier than daytime. Even without the Anzio Express at night you’re getting conventional shelling all day long. It rattles your nerves, and you harden up inside to keep from rattling all over. It’s got to affect you unless you’re a complete nut. Twice the Germans advanced on our position trying to drive us off the beach, but we held on. ”
     
     
     
    The Combat Report states that the 45th “ripped to shreds” the German attempt to “erase the beachhead.” This period of repelling the German assault was followed by “the long months of holding and waiting” at Anzio and constant bombardment and loss of more than 6,000 Allied lives. In May the main force that had been at a standoff broke through the German line at Monte Cassino. By the end of that month, 150,000 weary but happy soldiers moved out of their dugouts in Anzio and linked up with the main force advancing from the south toward Rome. Meanwhile, on June 6th, the Allies landed in Normandy and opened up another front.
     
     
     
    “ We marched into Rome without a fight. Rome was what they called an open city, which meant neither side would bomb it, but there was a little bombing. Rome is the first time I ever saw a sidewalk café. We’d sit there and relax, eat our lunch, and drink a little wine. I saw my first blond Italian women in Rome parading by the cafés. I had a few adventures. It wasn’t hard to do. We were issued chocolate bars and tins of cheese and chopped eggs in a can. That’s all it took. The people had nothing so you can’t judge them on morals. Fraternizing with the local women was against regulations, but what were they going to do, send us to a combat unit?
    We fought the Germans in Italy for a while, and then we got put on landing craft for the invasion of southern France called Operation Dragoon on August 14, 1944. We had some resistance as we landed. It was more harassment than real fire