Please Note: This blog post is an account of World War II, including mild language, violence, illness, death, and other themes that may not be suitable for younger readers. While these stories are an integral part of history, some of the following content may be slightly graphic in nature.
The following is an excerpt from “Never Forgotten: Stories by Scott County, Minnesota, WWII Veterans” by Tom Melchior, in collaboration with the Scott County Historical Society.
Earl Dols volunteered for the Army and served in the 34th Red Bull Division, 1st Battalion, 168th Infantry and 175th Field Artillery Combat Team, except for the time he was detached from them and served with the British 1st Division. Before joining the Army, Earl had finished the program for mechanics at Dunwoody College of Technology and was assigned to maintain military vehicles. Earl was shipped from Fort Snelling to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, for basic training. He was then moved to Fort Dix, New Jersey and prepared to go over seas.
Portrait of Earl Dols.
On the third of March, 1942, we got all of our equipment checked over. It takes a long time to take care of 125 vehicles. I changed all the lubricating oil. Then on the 28th or 29th of April, we left the states on the USS Mexico that had been converted to a troop ship. They said that it used to be a banana boat. The Normandy was there, but that caught fire. The Normandy was a big French boat that held lots and lots of troops. They were pouring so much water on it and the thing capsized right in the harbor. A couple of buddies of mine and I went down to the Brooklyn Yards and we could see the thing there laying on its side. We didn’t know at the time that it was scheduled to move us. The USS Mexico was a small ship compared to an ocean liner like that.
We left on the 28th or 29th of April. We got to Belfast, Ireland, on the 11th of May. We had some training there, but then we were detached from the 34th and attached to the British 1st Division. We would sit around a table with gas masks. Put your gas mask on and breathe through there for one hour, but they didn’t use gas then. From there we went to Enniskillen, Ireland, for basic training. We were eating “1-and-14s” or “14s-and-1s.” A ration box would last one man fourteen days, or fourteen men one day. That was the British chow, hair ox-tail soup and such. As far as buying anything off of camp, you couldn’t. It was all fish and chips, fish and chips.
Then we were detached to the British and the old 34th stayed back on the British Isles. Afterwards they shipped the 34th and the 175th Artillery up to Scotland. We left Ireland for Scotland on a barge that was used in the Dunkirk invasion. While we were in Scotland, some of the equipment came. There they had better seaports. The USS Mexico was the only ship that came in at Belfast because the harbor was so shallow there that they couldn’t get a big liner in there.
We went to Inverurie in the northern part of Scotland for a couple months. We were training for amphibious landings. LSTs [tank landing ships] would come in there off the Atlantic coast. Because a lot of rivers flowed out into the ocean, the LSTs could back in there. About two nights a week we’d have a practice load with the trucks, mostly all 6-by-6s, Dodge command cars, weapons carriers, and Willis Jeeps and that kind of stuff. It was all loaded after dark, and it got so dark you could hardly see a hand in front of your face. About one o’clock the sun would start coming up again.
The guys got so good they could load a whole LST backing them in there so that when they had to get the hell off the enemy coastline, it didn’t take any time at all to drop the gate and off they went. They could load one of those LSTs in 30 minutes. It was so crowded in there you couldn’t hardly walk in between the vehicles and everything else.
We didn’t know what was going on. We took a couple of trucks and loaded them up with parts because we were going to be detached from our division and attached to the British 1st Division. We had gotten new vehicles and the British were using ours because the old 2-by-4 Chevy station wagons were all wore out and beat up, so we got all new ones. That took a while for the United States to make that stuff.
Dols and company working on a military Jeep.
After training in loading and unloading LSTs, they shipped us down to Glasgow, Scotland, for a month. They got us ready to load up on what had been the ocean liner Awatia, but that was changed into a troop ship. It was docked in Liverpool, England. The 175th Field Artillery was separated from our division, from the 34th, attached with the British 1st Division. They were a bunch of bastards. They shoved us in more or less for experimental use. We were trained on a British 25-pounder gun. That was equivalent to an 87-millimeter gun. We left the old 75-millimeter from World War I here because that was no match for the German armor. It was like taking a pea shooter. It was useless. We knew that.
We loaded up on the British ship Metrapole on the 15th of October, 1942, and sailed around on the Atlantic Ocean for 24 days. We looked up at the sun and it would be in the south, half an hour later in the east. We were zig zaggin’ all the time so the Krauts wouldn’t take a bee line on us. There were a lot of subs, U-boats, out on the Atlantic Ocean.
This guy Moody was from A Battery was a battery mechanic. I had been with the outfit nearly a whole year and I knew a lot of those guys, not personally, but I knew of them because of their jobs and my job. We were attached to the British outfit, 1st Division. A Limey soldier, as we called them, was cleaning his Tommy gun. Accidentally, it went off and five slugs cut across Sergeant Moody. We buried Moody at sea, put him down the plank into the water. He had a pet female dog he named Lady. The guys from A Battery kept the dog all during the war. When the war was over, some of the guys from the battery in Minneapolis brought the dog back and gave it to this guy’s mother.
Where did you land in North Africa?
The rest of the division came in as far as Oran, North Africa. The British and our 175th Field Artillery went in – they told us about a day or two before – through the Straits of Gibraltar. We didn’t know what the hell was waiting for us. We figured they would have sunk all of us. We went through there at night. I can remember looking to the left off the deck of the ship and I could see lights. I don’t know if it was Portugal or Spain, but we went through there with no opposition whatsoever. None.
I couldn’t figure that out. I think the Germans were so busy up in North Africa. It was [Winston] Churchill’s idea to spread this thing out so the Germans couldn’t concentrate on one little area.
We landed at Algiers and we had a little opposition there. We all got off the big ships on a rope ladder on LSPs [Landing Personnel Boats]. It was on a Sunday morning. They dumped some of us off here and some of us there and they said, “Stay put.”
We sat on the shoreline, three or four of us together. It was 10 o’clock, November 8th, 1942. Actually it wasn’t supposed to be done that way. It was a big, gigantic operation with lots and lots of mistakes. About four o’clock in the afternoon, they had runners who told us to go to certain areas. We marched into Algiers. It was pretty well settled then. There was a little dispute between the Free French and us. It took us awhile to get our equipment unloaded.
Then we were going to convoy across from Algiers toward Tunisia, a 400-mile trip that was pretty much desert, some roads. The wind would come up and we’d have dust storms that affected our equipment. We couldn’t oil anything. The dust would get in there and nothin’ would work.
We convoyed across North Africa and went up to Medjez el Bab. The 5th Armor was in there. It was wet and rainy and they got their tanks stuck. Every once in awhile you could hear a shell come in and “bomph” there would be big black smoke there. The Germans were adjusting on our positions. We were all green. We didn’t even know what it was. Some of the brass knew, I suppose, but we didn’t know.
There was little bit of a shack that some slept in, but I slept outside in a shelter-half with two blankets. It rained that night and I woke up the next morning and my hand – I had a wristwatch, just a cheap watch-- and my wrist was laying in water. So much for the watch.
Nothing happened ’till that night. We were waiting for orders to get out of there. We knew it was hot territory. We had a little candle burning in that shack. About 11 o’clock at night this guy from the 5th Armored came in. He had abandoned his tank. It was stuck in the mud. The Germans were about a half mile or three quarters of a mile out of town. He took his 45-pistol and dug a foxhole with it. He said that some of the German infantry was right around him. He waited for his chance and he got the hell out of there. He got into this town and saw this candle burning in this rackety old building and he rapped on the door and said, “You guys better get the hell out of here. The Krauts are down the road here about a half mile.” We waited for orders to move.
At last the order came down to move. We got out of there, but A Battery lost three guns and they were taken prisoner. “Old Soapy” Jones, he got his truck and gun out of there, but we lost four British 25-pounders.
It was a funny start to the war. There was a pocket of Germans here and 20 miles away there was another pocket of Germans. The next morning, we come into this little town of Gafsa, and the Germans used their Stuka bombers. They were slow airplanes that maybe moved 120 knots an hour. They dive right straight down and drop their bombs and they’re off. There must have been quite a few of them because that morning about 10 o’clock they were hauling all the dead out of town and they had them all loaded up on two-wheeled carts to take them out to the cemetery. They were all civilians.
Did you encounter any fighting in Tunisia?
Oh, ya, we were there from November 8th for a couple of months. We used the British 25-pounder. From that time until the first part of January 1943, and then we got the American-made 105 guns. Then we were all back to the Red Bull outfit. They were kind of testing us out to see if we could do a lot. Nobody seemed to know what was going on except the big brass.
It was hot in the summer of ’43. It was all sand. We were in a town they called Matur and from there we convoyed back up to Oran. That’s where the rest of our division was. We were getting ready to make the landing in Italy.
On the move.
When did you land in Italy?
We came in and landed about the 9th of October at Salerno. The 45th or 36th Division went in there and they couldn’t hold, so the old 151st that I had been with at first was turned over to the 175th that was used at Salerno, because a German anti-tank outfit came right up and started firing on our gun positions. They said that if it hadn’t been for the 151st, we couldn’t have held Salerno. The Germans backed off, so we went up towards Naples, Italy.
We pulled in at Concerta, a town about ten, twenty miles out of Naples. That night Mt. Vesuvius blew up. We could see the stuff going up in the air. From there it went pretty slow. We went up toward the Gustav Line at Cassino. We didn’t move there for months, couldn’t get through.
The Gustav Line was a series of German military fortifications in Italy. The main line of fortification ran across Italy through the Apennine Mountains to the mouth of the Sangro River on the Adriatic Sea in the east. The center of the line, where it crossed the main route north to Rome (Highway 6) was anchored around the mountains behind the town of Cassino including Monte Cassino, which had an old abbey sitting atop it that gave the Germans clear observation of any attackers.
They figured the Germans were using the Abbey for a lookout because it’s sitting way up high. They said they weren’t using it, but one of our L5s or J3s observation airplanes said they could see an antenna sticking out, so then they knew the Germans were using that. They warned them and they just kept using it. We were losing too many guys, but you couldn’t get them out of foxholes. They had litter bearers taking them out and some of the bodies laid there for two or three weeks in the cold. You wouldn’t believe it, but that’s the way it was.
What made the battle of Monte Cassino such a difficult battle?
The Germans were dug into the mountains. They had been preparing that line for a long time. That was their Winter Line defense.
That was in the Liri Valley and Highway 6 come through there going up to Rome. We were trying to get through there to take Rome, but we couldn’t get through. About 10 o’clock in the morning, B-25s from the 13th Air Force came over and they dropped everything they had. We had 500 artillery pieces firing at the same time. I would have swore to God that if they shook it any more, the bottom of Italy would have fell off the bottom of Europe. They said it didn’t do any good. All that rubble gave the Germans protection.
We decided we would try a different way of getting there. We went up to Anzio. We loaded some of the equipment on LSTs. They took about four men out of each section of ten men because there wasn’t room. We broke through about the fourth or sixth of June about a day or two after the invasion of Europe.
You said there were so many guys on the beach at Anzio that the Germans were shooting artillery at you.
Yes, the beach was only about five, six miles wide and 18 miles long. Every night LSTs would go in there and dump some ammo and equipment, but it took a long time to get enough stuff to make a push. You can’t make a push and run out of ammunition. You couldn’t dig in because the water would come in on the beach. After two or three feet you’d strike water, so you couldn’t protect any of our provisions.
Anzio was a bastard. There wasn’t anyplace that you could go to have any protection because the Germans could reach us. The ocean was behind us. Germany was here in the mountains to the left; Germany was here in the mountains in front; and Germany was here in the mountains to the right. They clipped us from three sides.
Earl Dols at Anzio.
How did you get through?
It took awhile until we got enough equipment. As we brought the stuff in, the Germans would send in a barrage of artillery over and blow it all up. They figured they would run us right out into the Mediterranean. We got enough equipment and we pushed on through. It was either the 4th or 6th of June that we took Rome. About the same time the invasion at Normandy took place.
105,000 personnel from the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Canada, India, Free French Forces and New Zealand fought in the Battle of Monte Casino. American, British, and Canadian forces had 43,000 combat casualties (7,000 killed, 36, 000 wounded or missing) in the Battle of Anzio.
There was no fighting in Rome, right?
Yes, it was called an open city. We marched through Rome. We went past the Coliseum. We stayed on the outside of Rome for about a day and a half because the Germans had blown the bridge across the Tiber River and we couldn’t get across. We had the Bailey Bridge. The engineers would piece a bunch of this bridge together and push some of it across and add to it and push that across till they got over that span. It wasn’t like the pontoon bridges that had balloons underneath them These were all steel. They could handle some pretty big loads such as tanks, but not too many. They had to space them out. From there it was tough going up through those mountains.
Where did you go next?
To Città Vecchia where the Krauts had a big gun. They said the barrel was over 30 feet long. They used to fire that sucker at a little town by the name of Nett, hoping they’d hit some LSTs and stuff out in the water. You could hear that sucker come over – woop, woop, woop, woop, and a booster shot was behind it and that would give it another boost into the harbor at Natuna. Our L-5s, Ariel Observation Post, would go and try to locate where that gun was, but they never could find it. It was on a railroad gun. They’d fire the gun a few different times and pull it back into a railroad house.
How far did you go? Where did you finish?
We got as far as Livorno Luiano up in the Apennines Mountains about 45 miles north of Florence. We stayed there from the middle of October until spring. That’s when the invasion of Sicily took place. They didn’t need us anymore. They gave us a rest. We had enough. I saw Mussolini hanging upside down in a garage station at Milan. The partisans had killed him.
What were “screaming meemies”?
When they [the bombs] would drop they had like a small siren built right into them. It was to terrify the enemy. We had those dropped on us up at Anzio. They dropped everything on us. There was no place there where they couldn’t reach.
There were a lot of horses and cows and what have you on the beach. We had burros. There was one of them there, and ten or twelve of us would go up to get our mess, our chow. We’d go to Frank, the mess sergeant, and I always got a couple cubes of sugar. That old burro would come to meet me every morning and I’d feed these cubes of sugar to ’em. Never a morning would he miss. He’d be there. One morning he didn’t show up, so I went to look around a bit. A shell hit him and he was gone.
Can you talk about the Volturno River?
We crossed that about three different times. It was like a snake. You’d cross it here and go up a ways and here that thing was again. In the fall of the year when it rained, it was a couple miles wide. Our company commander, Captain De Wells, got killed there. He was a West Point guy. He wasn’t afraid of nothin’. Oh, that guy had guts.
There were so many mines planted. In one place we were in a rest area at the Volturno. The river bed was mined. The water had settled and you could see these pins sticking up from the river bed. The rain and the water from the higher land would come into this lower area and wash like a culvert. Our infantry would try to come up through these washouts. They [the Germans] had these “bouncing Betties” and you tripped the wires and they cut across your groin and killed ya.
It seems as though every place you went the Germans had machine guns.
I dream about them. Up to about a few months ago I could hear the German burp guns. Burrrrrrrrp, burrrrrrrrp, they were real fast. You could hear them at night at Anzio beach head.
Did you have any protection for your ears from the shelling?
None whatsoever. We didn’t have any. I never saw any. They [guys in the artillery] all had trouble hearing. We were coming around a bend and the 155, the Long Tom, was firing up this way. The muzzle blast from that 155 hit and I couldn’t hear anything for about three days.
What would you say was the worst fighting that you encountered?
Anzio. The Germans were north of us, east of us, and west of us. They had three sides. Shells were coming in all the time. It got so one day was like another. It was seven days a week. Sundays and Saturdays, that didn’t mean nothin’.
Earl Dols was awarded the following decorations and citations: Good Conduct Medal, Bronze Service Arrowhead, European-African-Middle Eastern Theatre Medal, American Defense Service Medal, and six Overseas Service bars: Algeria-French Morocco, Tunisia, Naples-Foggia, Rome-Arno, Northern Apennines, and Po Valley.
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