(5 of 5)
Near the crest we saw a wounded lieutenant, with two worried medics. He had been hit in the stomach. "How are you?" one of us said.
"Goddam, I ought to know better," the lieutenant said. "I heard those rockets railroading down on me and I didn't get flat enough. Piece of something hit me in the stomach." He tried to grin.
Soldiers were slow in reaching the top of that hill. They had not slept all night. They had marched a long way into battle. They had had the toughest fight of the Sicily campaign. A sergeant, his face a mass of weariness, came up the hill at the head of G company. The colonel quickly called him: "Get here quickly. Go over there to the left, contact H and F company and look out for the left flank." The sergeant went over the brow of the hill. Only four or five soldiers were close behind him. Somewhere below, the rest of the column was struggling upward with painful slowness.
Just after noon, the rocket guns started up again. This time they were not shelling our rear. They were not shelling our tanks. They were shelling us. That noise, that approaching roar, drowned out even the power to think. On the hill up which our soldiers were struggling, the rocket shells started fires. Soon, to the normal noise of the battlefield, was added the crackle and hiss of flames.
But the men came through. Trucks rushed ammunition to tanks which had no ammunition. White House Hill was taken. The assault there broke the back of the German resistance. All except a few stragglers pulled out.
That evening, with the ist battalion and the tanks, we drove into Barrafranca.