From our tiny second-floor apartment, the orange sun slipping past the horizon cast a harvest glow onto the rows of crops fanning out from the farmhouse. Sitting for Francesca’s simple farm dinner had settled an ache into my joints, and the satisfying meat and potatoes further tamped down the energy left from the day’s piedi explorations. I leaned with both arms against the window frame to appreciate the setting sun, then pushed back and made for the door. Pulled by the glow to have one last view of the slumbering farm, I slipped on my shoes and stepped carefully down the stairs. As I walked out of the yard to the edge of the field, I pictured my father having a similar nighttime stroll on one of his early days at Anzio. Picking his way through the foxholes, Erick could venture to the edge of the camp enclosure and look toward the front. Scanning the pockmarked landscape, he could see a portion of the canal that his comrades were guarding. The frontage totaled fifty-two kilometers, just over thirty-two miles. The Force guarded one-fourth of it, about eight miles, that stretched from what they called Bridge 5 to the sea. The full-strength Third Regiment lorded over the first five miles of it inland from the sea, while the half-strength First Regiment, just three companies, stretched out over the remaining three miles to the shards of Bridge 5.

Erick likely reconnoitered the canal frontage in preparation for the raiding campaigns. Traversing the front, he would see meager defensive coverage: one man stationed about every twelve yards. A dangerously thin line. “An accurate estimate of this opposing strength, on intelligence gained from prisoner interrogation, placed 1,250 enemy fronting the fssf,” Burhans wrote. “Further, a minimum of two regiments were held in Cori and Ninfa, reserve pockets in the mountains within easy striking distance of the Force sector.” My father’s unit at that time held just over 1,100 combat troops, including his Second Regiment in reserve, so a rough tally with reserves could mean the Force was outmanned at least two-to-one.

It wasn’t just a problem on the canal. Overall, the Allies were vastly outnumbered, but most of the troop concentration was along the area’s two main roads, the Anzio-Albano road, which was defended by British troops, and the Nettuno-Cisterna road, defended by the masses of the Third Division. Fortunately, the German sector facing the Force was “removed from the main enemy axis of movement and communication,” wrote Burhans. Erick and his mates had not fought this kind of battle before. “Anzio meant a complete reversal of the former Italian situation,” Burhans explained. “The Force went on the defensive, and was down to sea level on the Pontine Marshes, the flattest piece of ground in Italy.” The dredged waterway provided defensive benefits and offensive challenges. It was “a prime tank trap,” Burhans recalled. Flat bottomland rose from each side of the canal into earthen berms that provided the only high ground to hide behind. At its widest points, the canal ditch was sixty yards wide. Numerous small canals, drainage ditches, and irrigation channels connected to the main line. Since most of the bridges had been mined or destroyed, attacks or raids were done via improvised transportation. Soldiers built temporary bridges or ferried across in small boats tethered by a cable. Once you forded the swampy waterway and clambered up the muddy bank, you would have to attack across the open farmland that stretched away from the canal. In the last of the day’s light, I scanned the undulating outline of the Lepini Hills beyond the fields. Clusters of lights revealed the villages. Erick, too, could have looked into the distance and understood that the Germans once again held the high ground for observation. Perched in the hills that paralleled the canal and the church towers and taller buildings in larger towns behind their front, the Germans could observe all activity along the canal. The frontline Forcemen dug foxholes and set up machine-gun emplacements into the leeward side of the canal berms, slightly less observable than the horizontal land behind them. But there was scant cover to prevent them from being sitting ducks along that made-up river. Chafing at this exposed situation, they itched to take over the high ground, and Force leadership pursued ways to go on the offensive. Right away, General Frederick sought permission for the Force to take Mount Arrestino, a pivotal high spot in the Lepini Hills above Highway 7. The campaign’s cautious leader, Major General John P. Lucas, nixed the idea. So it would be another fight where the numbers were not in the Force’s favor, and again they’d be battling unfriendly terrain. Comparing the frontline need to his unit’s depleted numbers, Erick would see a chilling shortage.

But a steely defense from Frederick’s fighters was to be paired with deadly offensive maneuvers. Coiled behind those lines, biding their time day after day until the sun went down, waited the battlefront’s leveling factor. The Force’s extensive night training was to be put to use in near-constant raiding into the canal’s no-man’s-land under the cover of darkness. The Second was to be the sharpened tip on the spearhead’s relentless offensive. I walked farther down the narrow gravel lane toward those distant shadowy mounds, which were to be the next day’s adventure. Aiming for a full-dark experience, I kept my back to the farm buildings and unfocused my eyes into the gloom. What if the canal was right there in front of me, water churning and gurgling down from those hills and headed for the sea? What if just beyond a shallow rise, the inky river, and the far shore’s twin-mounded bank, gun barrels were aimed squarely at me, their operators scanning the dark horizon for any signs of movement? I froze on the road. I wanted to drop to the ground and skitter over to the shallow ditch. To conjure up the scene one night in peacetime, surrounded by calm, triggered a chilling, frightful image. To live with that feeling nightly, and then to strike forth into that darkness and walk headlong toward those aimed weapons . . . I could not conceive of it. Dad pulled from a reserve of bravery and determination that, if he passed it down to me, I could not detect in myself. Perhaps he didn’t realize that he carried it, and maybe it only surfaced in the presence of such unavoidable obstacles. Perhaps the same would be true for me, in the unlikely instance that such a situation would arise. I could no more know that than know the heart and mind of my long-dead father. All the roads toward him, the source of his courage, his experiences, were shadowed, gravelly lanes leading to blackness. The sole light was my hope that, standing on the land where he stood, contemplating his path, I could catch a glimmer of his spirit, moving purposefully behind the enemy lines of my desolate thoughts, my barricaded memory.

The stars came out over the Italian farm and took me there. A North Dakota evening as warm as my mother’s embrace, the air finally still and fireflies winking beyond the window, drew us onto the farmyard’s lawn. I could hear the ringing clink of dishes as my sisters washed and stacked the dinner plates, and the open window sent their chatter into the quiet darkness. Dad stood by us, the youngest of his brood, his weight on his left hip, casting an angular shadow onto the lawn. We walked farther from the house, the girls’ voices receded with the light, and then we sank down onto the lawn to end the day in my favorite summer way, gazing up at the stars. On a clear and moonless night like that, your thoughts navigated star to star, marveling at the brightness of a scattered few amid the vast quilt of dimmer pinpricks, uncountable, unfathomable. Lying back, completely at rest except for our searching eyes, we inched ever closer to sleep, which was very likely the goal of this quiet excursion. But it was also a time for the feeling of being together, not needing language, sharing the twinkling image above, the warmth of the ground below, the itchy grass on our bare legs, the heaviness of our bodies at rest. “There is the North Star,” Dad would say. “Follow it up to the Big Dipper. See how it is pointed upright? The cup won’t spill out. No rain coming.”