The Battle of San Pietro

Posted on July 11, 2003 in Book of Days Fact-Dropping History

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: It was as if….

….it never happened. Not as far as the history books were concerned.

My father was an ammunition carrier in the Third Army during the Italian campaign of World War II. Tonight, when I stopped by Barnes and Noble, I paused in the military history section to learn what I could about the Battle of San Pietro. I thumbed the spines of maybe 200 books. There were “complete histories” of the war, many volumes about the Normandy Invasion, the fall of Berlin, Guadalcanal, Midway, Kursk, Stalingrad, North Africa, and a couple of almanacs that claimed to list the events of the war day by day. Most of the covers were done in black and red. I guess they sell when the topic is the Second World War, though I marked a couple printed in sepia, pale blue, and white.

Seeing no history of the Italian campaign, I checked the indexes of the general histories and the almanacs. Not one of them mentioned San Pietro.

John Huston did a film which motion picture historians mark as one of the finest of its kind. A few Texas websites talk about it in passing because elements of the Texas National Guard participated in that campaign. But little is written about it.

My father never talked about his war experiences. After he died, my uncle told me about San Pietro and a single fact that explains the silence of the man and the silence of the history books. My father, the ammunition carrier, was one of three survivors in a battalion sent to charge a hill at San Pietro.

Three.

3.

3

Of San Pietro, it seems, little is written because almost no one lived to tell about it.

---

Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.

Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: “Throw away the lights, the definitions/and say of what you see in the dark.” (after Wallace Stevens)