Night Bombardment at Anzio

The Anzio beachhead was roughly seven miles deep at its best and never got deeper. From the landing on January 22, 1944, until the breakout in late May, every man in it lived inside the range of German guns on the hills that ringed the plain. There was no rear area.

The worst came at night. Two 280 mm railway guns the troops called Anzio Annie and the Anzio Express fired from railway tunnels in the hills, each shell arriving with a sound like a freight train. Luftwaffe bombers came in behind flares. Men slept in holes dug down to the water table, and the water came in.

The beachhead held for four months at a cost of more than 40,000 Allied casualties. Rome fell on June 4.

Two men in a slit trench, one with his hands clamped over his helmet, the other watching the horizon burn. Everything above the trench line is light — flares hanging under their parachutes, the arcs of tracer, a whole town on fire — and everything below it is mud and standing water catching the glow. The nearer figure has his eyes shut. The farther one has not, and that is the painting.