Andy Biggio (135th Infantry Regiment): his story in the book "The Rifle."

A. BIGGIO, The Rifle: Combat Stories from America’s Last WWII Veterans, Told Through an M1 Garand, Washington, Regenery History, 2021, pp. 247-257.

Finding Andy

Veterans Ed Hess and John Hymer
U.S. Army, Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division
tell the story.

Media, Pennsylvania

In December of 1946, Ed Hess was finally settling back in at home. Like many Americans who had served in the war, he hadn’t seen his house since 1943. It was Christmastime in Media, Pennsylvania, and it was the first time in years that all the kids from the neighborhood were back together. Word spread that many of them would be gathering at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post for a Christmas party.
Ed walked into the hall of the VFW and found it packed. Holiday decorations hung from the ceiling, and a Christmas tree stood lit up in the corner. The bar was full of men drinking, laughing, and conversing. Ed grabbed a beer and walked into a corner, where he saw a man he recognized from when he was in high school talking to a group.
“Cheers,” Ed said as he approached, raising his glass to the man he remembered from his childhood.
“Yeah, cheers. Where were you in the war exactly?” the man asked.
“Italy,” Ed replied.
The small group of men began to laugh. “Ha! How’s the pope doing?” The men were all Marines and had served in the South Pacific.
“Man, I wish I could have hung out in Italy!” another Marine said. The men continued to make fun of the Italian campaign, downplaying it as if it had been some sort of vacation.
“Man, I wish I could have hung out in Italy!” another Marine said. The men continued to make fun of the Italian campaign, downplaying it as if it had been some sort of vacation. Ed, now ninety-nine years old, gazed down, reminiscing about the Marines who had embarrassed him seventy-five years before. It still bothered him that they had thought about his service as a joke. “I tried to laugh it off with them, but I couldn’t,” Ed said, still visibly upset by the interaction. “We all knew the Marines had it rough, no doubt, but Italy wasn’t a picnic. I was pretty bitter after that and didn’t get involved with veterans’ activities for a long time.”

Ed had a Rolling Rock beer in front of him. I had never had a drink with a man who was a few months away from turning one hundred years old. The rifle was on a table in front of us, almost entirely full of signatures at this point except for one or two spots. I knew that I had to make those spots count.
After hearing the stories of veterans who had served around the world, I knew I had to get serious about finding anyone who might have been on that hill in Italy on that fateful day when Andy Biggio, my great-uncle, was killed in action. After all, that was what had started this whole rifle project to begin with.
Ed had been there. I found Ed’s name in an archived newspaper article from twenty years before, when he had served as the grand marshal in his local Memorial Day parade. He was quoted as being in the same division, same regiment, and same company as Andy. I called the phone number I found listed for him, and his son answered. Ed was still alive. I drove six hours to Pennsylvania to meet with them in the same VFW where Marines had laughed him off seven decades earlier.
When I got into town, I arrived at the VFW before Ed and his son. I ordered a beer, and the locals asked what had brought me there. Just as I finished explaining the purpose of my visit, the buzzer to the door went off. On the security camera behind the bar, I saw a man with a walker entering the bar. It was Ed.
I knew this could be the closest I would ever get to knowing what had happened on September 17, 1944, the day Andy lost his life. Ed would be one of the final pieces to this puzzle and one of the last men to sign the rifle.
As he walked into the bar with his son trailing him, I extended my hand. He shook it and proceeded into a separate room away from the bar, to avoid the noise and give us privacy. I went to pay for my drink. “Your money is no good here,” the bartender insisted, sliding my twenty-dollar bill back to me.
Ed knew why I was there. He kept his head down and made himself comfortable in the room used for playing darts. Unlike the other veterans, who were prepared for a list of my questions, Ed leaned right in and started on his own.

Finding Andy

“I joined the 34th Division right before they attacked Monte Cassino,” Ed Hess explained. “A shell blew up a house that I and four others were in. I was buried up to my armpits in debris before being pulled out. My other squad members were killed. I survived only to end up with a bad concussion.” This event happened while he was serving with G Company of the 135th Regiment.
Shortly after this, Ed was transferred to Company B. “The same company as your uncle. They needed more bodies,” he said. “The division was marching through liberated Rome.”
It made perfect sense to me. According to Andy’s letters, he had joined the 34th Division as a replacement just before taking Rome. Once they left the city, the 135th Regiment got into some intense fighting. While going up the west coast of Italy in June and July of 1944, they often caught up with the retreating German Army. I didn’t need a history book to tell me that. It was in Andy’s letters.
“In the outskirts of a town called Rosignano, if we knew where the Jerries were, we would sneak past their pillboxes on elevated terrain, lowering dynamite concealed in a suitcase down by rope,” Ed told me. “The explosion would blow the face off the concrete pillboxes. We could see the Jerries trying to push the suitcase away, but it didn’t do them any good.”
His account of the fighting up the coast of Italy aligned with the stories from Carl DiCicco and Lawson Sakai, who were both also with the Thirty-Fourth Red Bull Division. “We had the month of August off to rest, then were ordered to a staging area outside the town of Barberino around September 12, 1944. We could see the hills in the distance that were our new objective. As we neared, it looked like someone had taken a chain saw to all the trees. The Germans had cut down everything so they would have a clear field of fire on us,” Ed remembered.
The men were caked with mud because it was the rainy season. With all the incoming mortars, they were constantly diving onto their stomachs, but they had nowhere to seek cover, not even a tree to hide behind. The hill was littered with barbed wire entanglements and camouflaged pillboxes.
“Our company commander, Captain Drury, was the first one killed on September 14,” Ed said. “He crept up with a few others to do some recon, and a sniper shot him.” The sniper fire pinned the men down for several hours. The Germans were also lobbing grenades down at the men and calling in mortars.
“We were a decent way up the hill and began to dig in,” Ed said of the fighting. “Company B had to disperse so much that they were now only communicating in platoon-size elements. We all felt it was a suicide mission. Some men considered mutiny.”
As they lay dug in on the hillside, Ed reached his breaking point. “I just started saying to myself, ‘Why should I have to die here? I have been carrying the BAR for nine months. I deserve a break. I shouldn’t have to stay on the front line until I’m dead.’” He pleaded with his platoon commander to be sent back down the hill. “There are plenty of jobs I can do in the rear, sir, I have been carrying the BAR since Cassino,” Ed said to him.
The lieutenant told Ed he would not be allowed off the front line. But for some reason, a few minutes later, another soldier came up to him and took his BAR away from him. The soldier informed Ed that the lieutenant wanted him to make his way back down the hill towards the company headquarters.
Ed walked a mile or so back down the hill. He was safe for now, and he worked in the company headquarters for several days. “After a few days, I began to hear how much of a hard time my company was having back up the hill,” he remembered. Another officer in the command post approached Ed and aggressively asked why he was in the rear and not with the others up on the hill.
Ed explained what had happened and that his lieutenant had sent him down to the rear.
“Bullshit,” the other lieutenant said. “Take the GRO men up to your company now!”
The GRO men were the grave registration officers. The men, along with some replacement troops, began to make their way up the slippery hill. It was Ed’s first time back on the front line in a few days.
“As the hill flattened out a little, that’s when I saw them. Thirty-seven of them,” Ed said as he began to cry in front of me and his son. “Thirty-seven of them,” he kept repeating, before explaining that he was speaking about the thirty-seven soldiers from his company he had found lying dead, lined up next to one another in dirty, blood-soaked uniforms, waiting to be collected.
One of them was Andy Biggio.
“The GRO men started picking them up. We carried them down the hill,” Ed said through sobs. The men were forced to carry the bodies of their fellow comrades on stretchers down the slippery, muddy hill.
He hung his head. Did he feel guilt? Still, after all this time? After all, he never would have made it to ninety-nine years of age if he hadn’t requested to come off the front line that day. “So many men got hurt or killed, and yet I never got a scratch,” Ed said as he wiped tears from his eyes.
“Well, I’m sure you have been living your life the way they would have wanted you to,” I said hesitantly. In the back of my mind, I knew some information was missing about exactly what had happened to Andy in those days Ed came off the line. I was proud and heartbroken that my nineteen-year-old uncle had stayed in his position on the hill until his death. Like Ed, he hadn’t wanted to be up there either. In his last letter to my great-grandmother, Andy expressed not wanting to “go back up the hill,” and begged for her to mail him a cross to wear around his neck.
Ed went on. “When I went up the hill, I passed John Hymer. He doesn’t live too far from here.”
“Wait? What?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, another man from our company lives an hour from here. He’s still alive,” he responded. Ed gave me the address in Bridgeton, New Jersey.
Ed continued talking, but I could no longer concentrate on what he was saying. I couldn’t believe I had found two of these guys, an hour apart from one another, after I had spent months looking across the entire country for one. Would John have more answers about my great-uncle?
At the end of my interview with Ed, I was satisfied to see him sign the rifle. He had been living with survivor’s guilt for an eternity. He had come home from the war, worked for forty years, gotten married, retired from two jobs, and had two kids. He had taken care of his disabled son until his death just two years before. Ed could have come home, drank at bars, and pounded his chest pretending to be someone he wasn’t, but he remained quiet, humble, and honorable.

Bridgeton, New Jersey

The next morning, I drove straight to the Hymer residence in New Jersey. John and his wife knew I was coming and were delighted. “It’s so great to have someone interested in all of this after all this time has passed,” his wife said, letting me in the door. The two had been married for seventy-one years. John was now ninety-six years old. He shook my hand as I entered their small home.
“This rifle led me here,” I explained, placing the plastic case on the living room floor. When I opened it, showing all the names, the couple was in awe. I pointed to the last available spot. “You, my friend, are going to sign right there,” I told John.
“What did you say your uncle’s name was?” John asked loudly. He was now hard of hearing.
I wrote down B-I-G-G-I-O on a piece of paper and showed him. He nodded, remembering the name but not the face of the boy who had been with the company for only a few months before being killed. John picked up where Ed had left off, telling me the story of the advance up that hill outside of Barberino in mid-September.
“I remember Barberino before we left the staging area,” he began. “Some of the guys who were of Italian descent in the company were given civilian clothes. Our commander ordered them to walk into town and see what they could find out.”
The soldiers who could speak Italian—mostly from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston—returned with some intelligence to report. “They were able to find out where the Jerries were,” John said, “and the last time they were around.”
In the second week of September, B Company patrolled through a village just before ascending its first hill. “One of the officers stepped on a mine, wounding him seriously,” John told me. Aggravated that the locals hadn’t warned the soldiers about the mines, one soldier released a farmer’s sheep from their pen, herding them in the direction of the minefield.
“I remember the sheep stepping on the mines, exploding one after another,” John told me. “It cleared most of the mines for us.” As John walked through the rows of dead and dying sheep, some of them were still thrashing around violently with no legs. “It was a disturbing sight, but I continued to rush forward. There was scattered artillery enemy fire coming in.”
Immersed in a macabre scene before they even reached their objective, Hill 650, the company advanced its way through the rest of the village. The Americans set up a command post at the base of the hill. There were already several goat paths leading up the terrain. “We began heading up,” John said, “and as Ed told you, it really did seem like suicide.”
The vegetation disappeared as they climbed the hillside. They were occasionally shot at but didn’t know from where. “A few scouts would sneak up, then come back to inform us of pillboxes, trenches, and barbed wire ahead,” John said of the climb. “We tried to stay off the paths, but we had no other option. You could see ropes hanging off the sides of the hill that the Germans had been using. Finally, we were pinned down by accurate sniper fire.”
As the sun set, B Company began to advance under darkness before digging in. It was their first night on the hill. When the sun came up the next morning, it unveiled an intimidating sight. “Rows of barbed wire prevented access up the hill,” John recalled. “Beyond the barbed wire were trenches and dugouts.”
John was ordered to crawl up and start clipping the barbed wire with bolt cutters. He and another soldier crawled on their knees and elbows to the first strand of concertina wire. As they began to cut it, they looked up and saw two Germans standing over them, watching. John froze, but the Germans didn’t shoot. They just walked away.
The other American soldiers who were watching began to whistle and waved them back. “They knew we were spotted,” John explained. As soon as John got back to the foxhole, a mortar barrage began to rain down on B Company, continuing for several minutes. Most of the men were caught out of their foxholes. “We lay on our bellies and just prayed,” John said of the shelling. “It was a barrage like no other!”
Several men were wounded. The Americans were in desperate need of counter-artillery fire, but they were not getting it. As the men backed their way down the hill, it became clear why they couldn’t get friendly artillery fire returned. The radioman lay face down. Shrapnel had entered his lower body and penetrated the radio. When the medics rolled him over, they saw that it was Andy Biggio.
As John continued to paint the picture for me, I could only hope that Andy had died fast. The only people who might have heard his last words were the members of his platoon who surrounded him after the smoke cleared. But even they wouldn’t survive the coming days.
In his last letter home, on September 12, 1944, Andy told his family that he had just volunteered to carry the radio. Andy had a bad feeling then, and he asked his mother to send him a gold cross to wear around his neck. He admitted to being scared and not wanting to go up those hills outside Barberino, but he did it anyway.
Andy was the only man killed in the barrage that day. While others hugged the ground or ran for their lives, he remained standing, attempting to keep his eyes on the enemy positions to relay messages over the radio. That’s when a mortar shell landed behind him, killing him.
Andy died on September 17.
Company B made several more attempts to summit the hill and eventually penetrated the Gothic Line, but the victory came with a cost. “We took on so many casualties in the coming weeks up there, some guys just walked off—deserted!” John exclaimed. “Other men were refusing orders. It got ugly. The company had to send us replacements, but they weren’t infantrymen; they were AA gunners and Gurkhas from India.”
The AA gunners were men who often stayed in the rear and kept watch for enemy planes. They were not used to being on the front lines. “When the fighting became close quarters, I asked one of the AA gunner replacements in the foxhole behind me to keep watch while I cleaned the mud out of my rifle,” John said, remembering the chaos on the front lines. “He didn’t, and the Germans counterattacked. Suddenly someone was pulling me out of my foxhole. It was a German lifting me up by the back of my neck!”
A machine gunner in a foxhole fifty yards behind John fired a burst, killing the German. “I swear to God, if he hadn’t shot that German, I wouldn’t be here. They were either going to capture me or kill me,” John remarked. “It was a lucky shot, too, for a machine gun.” After the counterattack was repulsed, John cursed the replacement AA gunner.
The men were soon ordered to advance. B Company began to hook right around the hill again to avoid more barbed wire and mines. “The Germans had a U-shaped trench that wrapped around the hill. We tried to outflank it,” John said.
While attempting to go around the enemy defensive position, John came across a series of foxholes. “I saw a man in a foxhole. I said, ‘Hey buddy, are you with the Ninety-First Division?’ I knew they were somewhere on the right side of us.”
The man turned his head. He was wearing a German helmet.
“Americana! Americana!’ the Jerry started to yell,” John told me, remembering his dangerous mistake. “I raised my rifle and shot him in the foxhole. My platoon sergeant, Sergeant Hart, jumped into the next foxhole and began stabbing the other German.”
B Company had just infiltrated the German lines by accident, but it was a blessing in disguise. As soon as the Americans poured into the enemy trench, the soldiers began to hold their hands up and yell, “We Yugoslavs! We Yugoslavs!” Fifty-six Germans surrendered to John and his platoon. Although some of the enemy soldiers could have been Yugoslavian, the Americans had been fighting the German Fourth Paratrooper Division. “They could have been Yugoslavian, but it didn’t matter,” John remarked. “None of us would know the difference anyway.”
One of the Germans led John to a barn on the other side of the hill, where the men kept their blankets and food. The man reached under a blanket and handed John a heart-shaped watch. John refused to take the prisoner’s souvenir. “I felt bad,” he said of the experience. “He was a soldier just like me, and probably didn’t want to be there either. I let him keep his personal belongings.”
John and the German, who had been trying to kill each other just minutes before, shared a moment at the top of the hill. “Next thing you know, another American came into the barn and ripped the watch out of his hands and kept it for himself,” John told me. The German kept his head down and was forced out of the barn at gunpoint. “I felt bad for him, but there was nothing I could say.”
The prisoners were marched down the hill to battalion headquarters. Americans collected the enemy machine guns that were strewn about. The Americans had suffered serious casualties, but they had accomplished their objective. “We went up that hill with 180 men,” John said, shaking his head, fighting back emotions. “We had 25 men left by October.”
The Gothic Line was finally penetrated. Hitler’s stronghold in Italy collapsed, but it took as many Americans down with it as it could. Private First Class Andy Biggio was one of them.
These were the last pieces of the puzzle I needed. I buckled the rifle in its case for the last time. John was the last interview on my journey. My mission was complete. I thanked him and his wife. They were sad to see me go.
“I hope I helped you understand a little more about how it was,” John said.
Trying to hold it together, all I could say was, “You did, John. You did.”

The 34th "Red Bull" Division captures the Futa Pass¹

September 21, 1944, 12:00 AM

Coming from Barberino del Mugello, the American 34th "Red Bull" Division, commanded by Gen. Bolte, joined forces with the 6th South African Division, which was stalled near Vernio due to strong enemy resistance. On September 21, they reached Hill 810, which dominates the area. After fierce battles against the 334th German Division "Phalange Aphricaine," commanded by Gen. Bohle, the Americans would reach the Montepiano Pass on September 24, located between Vernio and Castiglione dei Pepoli, along the Prato-Bologna Apennine route.

The 34th Division's action toward Montepiano aimed to outflank the fortified German defenses at the Futa Pass and then swiftly advance toward Bologna. Another key objective was to keep a portion of the enemy troops occupied so they couldn't reinforce the main attack sector of the 5th Army at the Giogo Pass. Since September 12, the 34th Infantry Division "Red Bull" had also been engaged in a strong diversionary maneuver at the Futa Pass, alongside part of Gen. Livesay's 91st Division. They suffered significant losses due to the robust German defenses, as they needed to convince the enemy that the main Allied effort was taking place there.

The Futa Pass would be reached and liberated by the 362nd Infantry Regiment of the 34th Division only in the afternoon of September 22, after overcoming the weak resistance of some rear guard patrols. By then, the bulk of the German troops had already withdrawn further north to establish a new defensive line.

1. Excerpt taken from bologna.online: https://www.bibliotecasalaborsa.it/bolognaonline/events/la_34a_divisione_americana_red_bull_raggiunge_il_valico_di_montepiano