Box from World War II leads to a second find

The Baltimore Sun

A grandson's curiosity about a World War II green wooden box led to another discovery.

The box was a souvenir that his grandfather, Lee McCardell, the acclaimed Sunpapers war correspondent, had brought home from the war as a souvenir.

It ended up with one of his daughters, and when she was cleaning out her home, she passed it on to her nephew, Lee McCardell "Mac" Kennedy.

"Inside in his handwriting was a note that said: 'Lee McCardell. Baltimore Sun. Cassino 2/6/44,'" Kennedy said.

Kennedy, who is director of alumni relations at Boys' Latin School, showed the box to "Butch" Maisel, a military expert who teaches history at the North Baltimore private school.

"He told me it was for storing German rifle grenades. I never thought too much about what the box could tell me until I was given the attached piece from my Aunt Tilly," he said.

What she had given him was an unpublished account her father had written four days before that note during the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, McCardell's first exposure to combat.

The battle, which raged from Jan. 17 to May 19, 1944, resulted in the destruction of the historic abbey some 1,500 feet above the town of Cassino. The abbey had been founded by St. Benedict in 524.

"I appreciate life a little more now and firmly believe that 'war is hell,'" Kennedy said. "And I can only imagine the horror of what our soldiers are going through today in Iraq."

The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 112 journalists have been killed since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq -- 30 have lost their lives since the beginning of this year. It also reported that 40 media support workers have been killed during the past four years.

The committee does not have statistics of journalists killed in wars before 1981, but it does quote statistics gathered by the Freedom Forum, a foundation dedicated to a free press, and reports them on CPJ's Web site.

As incredible as it might seem, the Freedom Foundation reported that only 68 journalists were killed during World War II.

McCardell, who had left Baltimore in early 1942 to cover the troop buildup in England and the 29th Division troops stationed there, titled his unpublished piece, "How to be a War Correspondent."

"I suppose every war correspondent has to go through his first battle. I went through mine on February 2, 1944, at Cassino in Italy," he wrote.

"Because it was my first battle, anything I wrote about it was bound to be more or less personal, and I put the writing off for four days. I had been living at the front with the men who fought the battle. It was their battle, not mine. It was my job to write about it," he wrote.

"I had been trained and seasoned for this as much as many of the men who did the fighting. But as a spectator, I felt slightly indecent writing about my personal reactions. I had walked across the battlefield before all the wounded had been carried back, before the dead had been picked up," he wrote. "Who was I to write about another's Armageddon?"

McCardell, who observed the attack on Cassino from a hillside about 200 feet above the town, wrote that he didn't feel that he was in grave danger.

"It looked and sounded to me like the end of the world. I was fascinated. Toward the end, when the Germans began to lob air bursts over the face of my hill, I was scared silly," he acknowledged.

McCardell explained that he was on the hillside by accident. An officer said there was an ammunition detail going forward, so he joined the band of soldiers carrying boxes of ammunition for machine guns.

"I was the last in line and carried nothing," he wrote.

After turning the corner of a rocky ledge where a machine gun was firing directly ahead, McCardell was warned to "stay back a little. There are snipers above us."

Later that afternoon, the Army artillery came alive with a deafening ferocity.

"Now it opened up with a roll of thunder, the shells slamming and crashing into the town of Cassino which lay ahead, below us. Clouds of dust and gray smoke rose from the town, and a west wind blowing gently around the foot of Monte Cassino carried a haze across the valley like a streaming scarf."

McCardell wrote that the "famous old Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino remained silent, serene and majestic as God during the bombardment. ... I wondered if any Benedictine brothers were still up there, if any refugees from Cassino were with them. If they were, I wondered what they were doing. Praying for their souls in the town below that was being methodically blasted from under their eyes."

Moving forward, McCardell found a candle lying on the ground and picked it up.

"Candles were scarce back at camp, and I knew this one would come in handy some night," he wrote.

McCardell witnessed two ragged 13-year-old boys huddled in the entrance of a damaged shelter being interviewed by an American infantryman who spoke Italian. One boy's mother had been dead in the rubble for two days.

McCardell witnessed a U.S. tank being hit by German fire.

"Terrified but inquisitive, I crawled to the edge of the terrace on my belly and looked over," he wrote, while a single flame roared from its open turret.

"Jesus Christ have mercy on the poor guys inside -- burning up alive if any had survived the hit. We probably knew that crew if they were members of a battalion we had followed the last few days."

By nightfall, McCardell joined the litter bearers with a wounded soldier, a German prisoner and the two boys, as they made their way to the battalion aid station.

McCardell later was assigned to Gen. George S. Patton's 3rd Army and was in Bavaria when the war ended.

"I was one of the lucky ones; one of the lucky ones who could think about going home. There were others, not so lucky, who would never go back," he wrote in The Sun at war's end.

"They were the dead whose graves belonged to the sandy wastes of North Africa, the olive groves of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy and the hills of the Ardennes. Men who, in some mathematical calculations of the infinite, were killed in battle in order that we, the lucky ones, might survive."

fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com

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