Peabody, Massachusetts

b. 1926

The Blanket

Stuck in Stalag 9B, Joe Ciccarello had time to think.  There wasn't much else to do other than starve—before long he could reach his hand around his thigh and touch thumb to middle finger.  Joe was angry a lot as a POW, and that wasn't like him. Not angry so much at the Germans, but at himself for the mistake that got him captured in the first place.  Over and over, he thought about what he had done.

The two sergeants, you see, weren't bad guys for sergeants.  As the 70th Division prepared to ship out of Boston in the fall of 1944, Joe took them to the Regina in the North End. Those Southern boys had real pizza for the first time and couldn't get enough of it!  Joe can still taste that pizza.  “One of the best I ever had,” he says.    

The next day, they shipped to Marseilles, France, on the USS United States. After weeks of fighting, their regiment was overrun on Hill 1538 by German forces in a deluge of artillery, mortars, and machine-gun fire. On the retreat, Joe came upon his two sergeants in a clearing.  It's funny, he can't remember their names for the life of him.

One of them had fallen face down, his legs shot off.  You could see how a burp gun had just sawed him off at the waist.  The other lay on his back, staring up. His stomach was open, guts spilled out, blood all over the grass.  Joe had never seen anything so awful.  Gunfire ripped the air.

“I just had to do something,” says Joe.  He'd seen a blanket in the woods about 50 feet back.  So he turned around and ran to get it.  He could put the blanket over the sergeant's stomach, he reasoned—he could at least do that.   “I knew them,” he says.  “I'd broken bread with those men.”

As he grabbed the blanket, he heard a shout in German and looked up into the muzzle of a rifle with a German soldier behind it.  Joe hasn't a clue why the man didn't shoot him.  He was marched to the rear and interrogated, then shipped by boxcar to Stalag 9B.