DEADLOCKED AT ANZIO

11/11/2011 – Of the many heart-rending sagas from World War II, few are so affecting – even nearly seven decades on – as that of Operation Shingle, the invasion of the Italian ports of Anzio and Nettuno.

Concord Village’s Robert S. Appel saw action in that successful challenge to Nazi Power. Appel was a raw replacement fresh out of training camp with guts enough to walk ill-prepared into a maelstrom. Also part of that success was Truman Olson, Appel’s sergeant, who, firing his .30-caliber machine gun from his waist, drove off a German assault.

Olson single-handedly saved his company from annihilation according to Appel, and posthumously was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“For an hour and a half after receiving his second and fatal wound, (Olson) continued to fire his machine gun, killing at least 20 of the enemy, wounding many more and forcing the assaulting Germans to withdraw,” reads the citation for the medal.

Appel, 90, has written three books on World War II.

Appel remembered that Olson “had a very boyish face, but he was a rugged individual, and he loved that gun.

“I can’t say that I was in love with the gun at all, but he was,” Appel said. “You could sense a certain thrill in his firing of the gun. Coming from the farmlands of Wisconsin, the pleasure of shooting was a daily way of life.”

The Anzio operation began with deceptive felicity. At 2 a.m., Jan. 22, 1944, a combined British/American invasion force waded ashore unopposed, achieving complete surprise and utterly outflanking the Gustav Line.

“That was the easiest invasion we ever had: no shots of any kind,” recalled Appel. “All we did was land at two o’clock in the morning, walking in there and going down the road.”

The only conspicuous hazards were “rose bushes or bramble bushes of some kind with a lot of thorns, on either side of the road,” Appel remembered.

But this was not a walk in the country and the enemy soon made an appearance.

“The Germans were having some kind of a party that night in Nettuno. And two of them were coming back from the party in their little jeep,” he said. “The password for the day was ‘Strawberry Blonde’ and when the head man in our company yelled out ‘Strawberry,’ of course there was no word ‘Blonde’ coming back, and that was the end of those two guys.

“I had to jump into the rose bushes with a machine gun and I thought I would never get out. My face was all scratched up and bleeding. It was just unreal,” Appel continued.

30,000 German Troops

Rather than exploit the surprise and storm inland into the surrounding hills, as his superior officers thought he was doing, General John Lucas, commander of the invasion operation, decided to solidify his beachhead and await the build-up of a force adequate to withstand the inevitable German counterattack. That decision is controversial to this day, but there is no question that German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was very quick in reacting to the opportunity it presented.

By the next day, 30,000 German troops were on the scene; by the time the Allies had landed a viable invasion force of 70,000 men, there were 95,000 Wehrmacht troops facing them.

Delighted by these events, Adolph Hitler decided to make Anzio a showcase for Germany’s ability to smash a large-scale Allied invasion, such as the one he knew was imminent on the coast of France. Along with the two railway guns, he dispatched elite armored and paratroop divisions from France and the Balkans with orders to throw the American and British invaders back into the sea.

Winston Churchill, the original mastermind of Operation Shingle, emphatically was not delighted by the progress of events, or with General Lucas.

“I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale,” Churchill fumed.

The issue was not uncontested, however. On Jan. 30, Allied troops launched attacks, as originally planned. A key objective was the town of Cisterna di Littoria, about seven miles northwest of Anzio, toward Rome. Company B, 7th Infantry Regiment – Olson’s and Appel’s outfit – would be responsible for cutting the road into the town.

Unfortunately, 36 battalions of German troops were being assembled near Cisterna to mount a large counterattack against the Anzio beachhead. They ambushed the Americans. Two Ranger battalions spearheading the assault on the town encountered heavy armored units as well as infantry and were reduced to six men from their original strength of 767. Some hundreds of other Rangers were captured by the Germans and ironically got their trip to Rome as prisoners, paraded past the Coliseum and filmed for propaganda purposes.

A Dawn Attack

Back on the road to Cisterna, Olson manned his machine gun and Appel, assisted. Both were dug in along a ridge with other members of B Company.

Appel wrote later that he briefly took over the machine gun as Olson stepped away, possibly to get a dressing on a wound he is believed to have taken to his arm, but never mentioned. Olson took the gun back at about 3 a.m.; the Germans attacked at dawn.

About 200 Germans, supported by mortar fire, descended on Company B’s position, according to Appel. With Olson firing the gun single handedly, Appel, with no weapon other than a malfunctioning .45-caliber pistol, took cover in a fox hole. Very quickly, as is not uncommon with replacement troops, he had a serious wound – struck in the head by shrapnel from a mortar round. He could not know it at the time, but his career as a combat soldier was over.

Reciting to himself the words of the 91st Psalm (He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty), Appel staggered back toward a medical station on Anzio beach. With an overwhelming thirst from his loss of blood, Appel scrounged water along his way. Approaching two medics attending a man on a litter, he discovered it was Olson, still alive but badly – probably fatally – wounded.

“True to his soldier spirit, he gave me his canteen and said ‘Take this since I have the medics with me until we reach the ambulances, but you’ll be walking, so take it and good luck,’” Appel wrote in his book of war reminiscences, “The Outside Boys.”

Olson died that day from enemy fire.

Army surgeons removed shrapnel from Appel’s head and he was evacuated home because the right side of his face was (and is) partially paralyzed. He served out the war as a hospital orderly in Springfield, Mo. But he never forgot Truman Olson.

“I got my son to look up all the Olsons in Cambridge, Wis.,” Appel said. “He came up with about 20 and I wrote letters to them and got an answer from his brother (Earl). He said he had not heard how his brother died, or anything about it, except he got the citation sent posthumously to his father. I gave him closure on his brother. Now, today, I’ve got a family up there in Wisconsin that looks to me all the time. They’ve got scrapbooks on me.”

Bob Appel was well aware of his debt to Truman Olson.