The ANNOTICO Report

WWII VETERAN BREAKS SILENCE AND TELLS WAR STORY TO HIS SON

La Crosse Tribune
By Ken Brekke
Special to the Tribune
Monday, May 30, 2005

BLAIR, Wis. — Dad is 86 now, and his memory has slipped a bit.

Sometimes he needs to be reminded of things like medical appointments and
upcoming holidays, but Memorial Day means something special to him.

He has been a farmer for most of his life. But for more than three years
during World War II, he was a soldier.

Tech 4 Kermit Brekke, once of Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 363rd
Combat Regiment, 91st Infantry Division, never used to talk about the war.
But apparently enough years have passed. The memories aren't quite as
painful as they once were. Dad spent more than a year in combat in Italy
and occasionally shares a story now.

"We were supposed to land at Anzio, where they had that awful battle," he
recalled recently. "But a storm caused the plans to be switched."

The men of the 91st Infantry landed farther south and almost immediately
began to help Allied troops who were already pushing their German foes out
of Italy.

"Our first combat was just north of Rome," remembered Dad, who was 23 when
he entered the Army.

"We walked most of the way up Italy," he added. "We'd take a town, sleep a
couple of hours, then walk in the night to the next town. Time didn't mean
much. We usually didn't know what day it was."

Dad was a rifleman when he first arrived in Italy, and within a few months
became a radio operator and repairman. He usually carried only a
.45-caliber handgun, in addition to his communication gear, even though he
often was right at the front line. Sometimes, in the chaos of battle, he
and his comrades were farther advanced than they should have been.

"A lot of the time we were ahead of the infantry," he said. "They were
supposed to be ahead of us, but things didn't always work the way they were
supposed to."

He said he quickly learned not to shoot at the Germans, "because if you
shot at them they shot back. It was better to stay low and call in the
artillery."

Dad remembered a three-man patrol somewhere in the mountains of northern
Italy. "We headed out after dark. We were walking along, scouting, when I
saw three guys standing alongside the road a little ways ahead. They were
Germans, and they must have thought we were Germans, too. We could see more
Germans up ahead around a campfire. I didn't dare to say a word, but I saw
a dark hole in the mountainside to our right. I hoped it was a cave
entrance. It was, and it was empty."

Once out of sight, Dad ran a long antenna out the mouth of the cave,
contacted headquarters on his radio, and called for artillery. "They asked
where I was, and I said I didn't know, so they sent over a smoke shell,
which showed up about a mile away."

The next shell was closer and the third one was right overhead. An
artillery bombardment followed.

When the three Americans emerged from their cave the next morning, they
found 30 or 40 dead Germans and three dead Belgian horses the enemy had
been using to pull their own artillery.

Proving you can't take the farmer out of the soldier, Dad said the sight of
all those dead Germans didn't bother him, "but I didn't like to see those
horses laying there."

‘Powder River'

..The 91st Infantry Division's... contained many Wisconsin men during World
War II, including several from Trempealeau County.

Histories that deal with the combat in Italy, including some written by the
officers who commanded the men who fought their way up the peninsula, agree
the battles there were some of the toughest of the war.

The Italian campaign featured a short front, restricted by the width of the
country, and limited avenues of advance, dictated by the mountainous
terrain, according to the "Encyclopedia of World War II," by Simon and
Schuster.

"The Allies, using the bulk of their resources in Western Europe and
drawing upon their slender resources in Italy for the invasion of southern
France, never had enough troop units to establish a clear-cut superiority
over the Germans," the book said.

The Germans also showed "an unexcelled skill in waging defensive warfare by
imaginatively utilizing ground exceptionally suited for delay and
obstruction," the book continued.

Soldiers on both sides endured harsh winters, battles on rocky cliffs, cold
rains and mud. The fighting was frequently done at close quarters, with
Allied soldiers using rifles, hand grenades and even bayonets to destroy
the enemy's entrenched positions.

Some historians contend the whole Italian campaign was not necessary, and
that the Germans would have been defeated without it. However, the Simon
and Schuster book states the Allied Italian campaign "was a necessary
component of the giant ring that squeezed the life out of the Nazi state."
Without Allied troops in Italy to occupy them, several German units could
have been switched to the European front, and by marching up Italy, the
Allies were able to gain control of several airports that aided bombing
operations against Germany.

Staying alive

Not that such grand strategies occupied much thought for soldiers like my
father and the other 7,000 members of the 363rd Combat Regiment. They were
too busy just trying to stay alive. Staying alive required being lucky. Not
everyone was lucky. Dad was.

An artillery shell landed near a hole he had crawled into during a
bombardment. The blast tossed him right out of his hole, but he wasn't hurt.

A bullet passed through his backpack while he was crouching in a crater
made by an artillery shell. The bullet made a hole in his raincoat, but not
in him.

Once, while his whole company was walking along a road, Dad noticed small
clumps of dirt were bouncing all over. It took a few seconds for the men to
realize they were being strafed by a German plane that was approaching
soundlessly from the rear. Dad wasn't hit, and, incredibly, he can't
remember anyone else being hit either.

A balky radio had defied several attempts to repair it, but my father had
gotten it to work, at least temporarily. He had tried it in several places
in the building where the commanding officer had set up a makeshift
headquarters, and found reception was best in a window right above a
stairwell two or three rooms away from where the officer was checking his
maps. Dad went to get the officer, who wanted to call headquarters, and
they both headed back to the radio.

An artillery shell struck the roof right above the room they had just left.
"It blew the roof all to hell," Dad recalled. "If we had been in that room
just a few seconds longer, we both would have been killed." The blast
knocked what had been the malfunctioning radio out of the window, and it
bounced down the stairs. The radio had a huge dent in its case, but worked
fine from then on.

The 363rd had just moved its camp when a German plane dropped a series of
bombs on the ridge the soldiers had vacated moments earlier.

Getting enough sleep was a problem for soldiers during the Italian
campaign, but Dad spied an empty barn that looked inviting. He walked in
and was looking around for a soft spot that might become a bed. "Then, the
first thing you know, the whole barn fell down on me." The building had
been hit by an artillery shell. Dad was surrounded by fallen timbers and
shattered boards, but nothing hit him. Reasoning that an exploded building
would no longer be a target, he plopped down and went to sleep in the
rubble.

Dad jumped from a landing craft into water he expected would only be a foot
or two deep. Instead, it was about 10 feet deep, and he had a 40-pound
radio strapped to his back. Dad went to the bottom, and probably would have
stayed there, except a friend noticed he was in trouble, went down to get
him and helped him to shallow water.

Sightseeing

There wasn't much time for sightseeing, but Dad did visit Venice while on a
brief leave, and saw the Leaning Tower of Pisa through his binoculars. The
division had been ordered not to damage the landmark, and enemy soldiers
were taking advantage of this shelter to grab a hot meal. But they were a
little too far from the tower, and Dad watched as his friends in the
artillery dropped a few well-placed shells on the unfortunate Germans
standing in a chow line.

A celebrity also visited Dad's unit one day.

"We had an Italian first sergeant, and he called me over to meet somebody."
It turned out the 363rd was fighting near what was the hometown of Primo
Carnera, former heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

"I remember his hands," Dad said. "They were four times as big as mine."
Carnera, who stood 6-foot-7 and weighed 270 pounds when he won his
championship in 1933, was nicknamed "the ambling Alp" and remains the
biggest of all heavyweight champions.

Surrender

The Allies had fought their way close to Italy's border with Austria when
Dad's unit learned the German commanders in Italy had surrendered. The
Powder River men had been pursuing the fast-retreating Germans up the Po
River Valley, finding all kinds of discarded military equipment along the
way. There was a feeling of relief, but no party, when news of the May 2,
1945, surrender came. "We kind of expected it," he recalled. Complete
capitulation by the Nazis came in France a week later.

Dad's lucky streak continued after the surrender, although it didn't look
that way at first. Within a few weeks of the end of the war in Italy, the
363rd was aboard troop transports that eventually were supposed to head for
Japan.

The soldiers had been aboard the ship for about two weeks, catching up on
their sleep and wondering what waited for them on the Pacific Front, when
word came that atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan. Soon it was learned
that enemy also had been defeated, and Dad's ship headed for America. It
turned out they were lucky after all, because they were soon to be
discharged. Had the unit stayed in Italy it would have been part of the
occupation forces and discharges would have delayed.

Dad was mustered out at Fort Snelling, Minn., and headed for home. A bride
he hadn't seen in more than 18 months was waiting for him in Blair.

Mom and Dad took a trip to Europe about 35 years after the war ended. They
visited several countries, including Italy, and at one point their tour
passed a battlefield where Dad had seen action.

He skipped that stop.

"I didn't want to see that place again," he said....

The 363rd Combat Regiment  Suffered about 500 casualties in the campaign in
Italy between July 1944 and May 1945. Another 1,600 men were wounded in
action.

Helped smash the Gothic Line, considered the Nazis' strongest defensive
position in the Mediterranean. The line featured pillboxes ringed with mine
fields and wire, but the Allies punched through it in 10 days.

Received little publicity during World War II, as most of the attention was
focused on Allied advances in France. The campaign in Italy did make
headlines on June 5, 1944, when Allied soldiers entered Rome. But that news
was quickly overshadowed the next day, when the invasion of Normandy was
launched.

Ken Brekke, the author of this story about his father's service in World
War II, spent 30 years at the Tribune as a writer and editor before
retiring in 1998. He also served in the Army in 1969 and 1970.

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