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It was a pleasant Italian morning, with pale sunlight shimmering through a thin mist. Poppies bloomed in the wheat, crickets chirped in the weeds and skylarks sang overhead.
Lieut. Francis Xavier Buckley, a carrot-thatched engineer from Philadelphia, was tooling his jeep northward from Terracina along the coastal road, accompanied by a private. When they came to a wrecked bridge near Borgo Grappa, they got out and started to walk, escorted by a flock of politely curious Italians on bicycles. At 7:31 Buckley met a force moving south from the Anzio beachhead Captain Benjamin Harrison Souza of Honolulu...