On the way down to the trucks, Jerry Scotti told Dick about the action at the ledge. The Germans had tried over and over again to advance straight up the hill, and many had been cut down. When they unlimbered the mortars, they did a lot of damage, with the Americans losing twenty men in the entire action.
“It would have been worse,” Scotti said, “if the Rangers and regular troops hadn’t cleaned up the Pass itself so quickly. They sent a bunch up here, and they took the Germans from behind. It was all over in half an hour then.”
That night Dick Donnelly slept the sleep of the good and the just—for eleven hours, along with the rest of his men. And the next day they moved back to the parachute troops base.
“Well, that’s that,” Tony Avella said, as they sat under the shade of a tree. “Best action so far. I guess everybody’s happy but Vince Salamone, who sat this one out in the guardhouse.”
“Yeah, the home-run king is fit to be tied,” Max said. “But I bet he’ll be a good boy from now on. He doesn’t want to miss another little tussle like this. Wonder what we’ll get next?”
Although the men themselves quickly dropped the subject of the Wadizam Pass battle, concentrating their thoughts on the future, it was not so lightly passed over in headquarters in a city behind the lines where a three-star general went over reports of that action with others of his staff.
“That Wadizam Pass action was brilliant,” he said. “General Ackerly planned and executed it without a flaw. And I thought it would take us another two weeks to get past that bottleneck.”
“Yes, and he had some good men under him,” said one of his aides. “That paratroop company really pulled the Germans away with their feint. That’s why the Rangers cleaned up everything so quickly. When the frontal attack came, there was almost nothing left to do.”
“Captain Marker should get a promotion for that,” the three-star general commented. “But what I like best is that suicide squad they sent out to the dam never really expecting to see them again. And they all came back! I’m glad Captain Marker gave us such a complete report on that action. I have an idea we’re going to be able to use a crowd like that for some special tasks when we get to Italy.”