Anthony Benedetto was drafted into the Army in November 1944. After training as an Infantry rifleman, he was assigned to a group of soldiers to be replacement troops to Germany. He wrote. in his autobiography, The Good Life:
The U.S. Army felt that the replacements could simply join the veterans on the field and be taught firsthand the rules of combat and the tricks of survival. It was an unrealistic assumption, since in the heat of battle there was rarely time to teach the replacements anything. Many of the replacements troops had inadequate training, no combat experience, and–unbelievably–some had never even fired a gun. It was a disastrous situation but those were desperate times, and I guess the U.S. Army felt they had no choice. The majority of the men in the campaigns of 1944-45 were, like myself, individual replacement troups.
He was assigned to the Seventh Army, 63rd Infantry Division of the 255th Regiment, G Company. The replacements troops were loaded into Army trucks and headed east across France in January and February 1945. By March, his company had entered Germany and were sent to the front line.
The only protection we had on the front line was the foxhole. Every soldier had to dig himself a hole before he could go to sleep. Sometimes it took hours to dig through the frozen ground, and by the time you were done, you’d only have a few hours of sleep before you’d have to get up again. Once our holes were dug, we had to secure the surrounding area with booby traps and set up communications lines back to the command post. We ate cole or frozen food before going to bed.
My first night on the line was a terrifying experience. I had finished digging my foxhole, but I was so exhausted I just passed out on the ground before I could even get in the hole. When I woke up, my face and my body was covered with snow. I was really disoriented, and once I realized what had happened, I started to look around. Directly behind me was a tree, and embedded in the trunk was a huge piece of shrapnel, right above where I’d been sleeping. If I’d been a few inches higher off the ground, I would have been killed the first night.
A high point of their marching through Germany was the opportunity to see Bob Hope give his USO show. With Hope were Jane Russell and Jerry Colonna and Les Brown’s band.
It was gratifying that the last official mission of the 255th Regiment wa the liberation of the concentration camp in the town of Landsberg. Many writers have recorded what it was like in the concentration camps,so I won’t even try to describe it. Just let me say that I’ll never forget the desperate faces and empty stares of the survivors. To our horror we discovered that all of the women and children had been killed before our arrival and that just the day before, half the remaining survivors had been shot.
The main thing I got out of my military experience was the realization that I am completely opposed to war. Every war is insane, no matter what they are fighting about. Fighting is the lowest form of human behavior. It’s amazing to me that with all the great teachers of literature and art, and all the contributions that have been made on this very precious planet, we still have evolved a more humane approach to the way we work out our conflicts. Although I understand why the war was fought, It was a terrifying, demoralizing experience for me. I saw things now human being should ever have to see. I know I’m speaking for others as well when I say that life can never be the same once you’ve been through combat. I don’t care what anybody says; no human being should have to go to war, especially an eighteen-year-old boy.
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