U.S. ARMY

Joe Grimaldi

Fighting on the front lines continuously for more than five months, Joe Grimaldi saw so many images of war that they blurred into one description: hell. “That’s a long time,” Grimaldi said of the intense combat he experienced with the 78th Infantry Division. “We were hammered every day without letup — someone’s trying to kill you. It gets to the point where you want to get hit to get out of there. So many things going on. So many battles. So many injuries. So many people getting killed. It was just a living hell, the whole thing.”

He recalls German bodies being used as signposts and accepting such sights as the “gruesome reality” of war. “You just could not make much of an issue about people dead all over the place,” he said. “If you did, you’d be a basket case. You had to take it philosophically and not think about it.” 

Grimaldi operated a radio as the 78th Division made its way across Germany from the Siegfried Line: the Hurtgen Forrest, Schmidt, the Schwammenauel Dam, Roer River, the Cologne Plains and finally the Rhine River, without relief.

“And now, today March 7, the day we reach the Rhine, the 78th Division is to be in corps reserve for a well deserved rest,” Grimaldi wrote in a recent remembrance for Flash, a quarterly journal of the 78th Division started during World War I. “Like everyone else, I went into a deep sleep, but not for long! “Around 1 a.m., my boss, Steve Samboy, woke me up to announce that our forces had done the impossible: captured a bridge over the Rhine, intact. So much for our well deserved rest.”

Grimaldi and the rest of the 78th Division joined the battle at the Remagen Bridge. Approaching the bridge, traffic was heavy and slow. The artillery from both sides in the battle was heavy, too. “As fearful as one was, one had to feel sorry for the MPs posted there as traffic directors,” Grimaldi wrote. “They obviously would not (and did not) last long.”

He described crossing the bridge as being “excruciatingly slow with no place to duck and shells exploding every few seconds.” “In spite of what seemed like the horrors of hell, one’s mind absorbs and retains innocuous scenes like noticing the six-inch round shell hole penetrating the center of a steel I beam in the bridge’s superstructure,” recalled Grimaldi.

After crossing the bridge, Grimaldi watched the first of many aerial attacks on the bridge: three Stukas dive bombing the bridge and “almost to a man — rifles, machine guns, weapons by the hundreds plus anti-aircraft on the west side opened up to fill the sky with debris.” The allies had captured the bridge, but had no place to go, hemmed in by enemy anti-aircraft and infantry troops.

In pitch darkness, 1,000 U.S. soldiers marched single file, hand to shoulder along a narrow beach to Honnef. “How lucky we were that the enemy had no time to plant mines,” said Grimaldi.

Grimaldi lost radio contact with regiment command. He suggested to his colonel that he scale a steep bank to see whether the additional height would put the radio back in range. “He agreed, and when I reached the top, I was shocked to see several pin points of light nearby, which I assumed to be cigarettes,” Grimaldi said. “I warned the colonel accordingly, and since the whole battalion was so vulnerable — it would have been slaughter had we been discovered — we continued the stealthy march without radio contact.”

Grimaldi set up radio operations in a brick factory in Honnef. The building endured several direct hits, including a 100mm shell that did not explode on impact but penetrated the brick building and landed on the concrete floor a few yards from Grimaldi’s radio station. “We went on about our business, ignoring the dud during the time we occupied the building,” he said. “We had more critical things to think about — hunger.”

Their search for food took them down a main street leading from Drachenfels, a high peak sporting a castle housing German “artillery observers who had a clear view and would blast anything that moved,” he said. Despite the danger, Grimaldi and his combat buddies could not resist the trek after they discovered a warehouse loaded with glass jars of pears, grapes, strawberries and more. “Our hunger was stronger than our fear of going down that street,” he said.

Grimaldi received a Bronze Star for meritorious service against the enemy during the period of Dec. 9, 1944, to March 20, 1945, in Germany. The citation says that he distinguished himself by unwavering devotion to duty as his battalion advanced from the Siegfried Line to the Rhine River.

“He frequently remained in exposed positions to insure better radio contact with front-line companies,” according to the citation. “On one occasion, in Schmidt, Grimaldi operated his radio from the top floor of a building for 48 hours while the town was under constant shellfire.”

Grimaldi recalls that every time he radioed information it was a cue for the enemy to shell him. He said he would radio a message then “run like hell” to the basement until the shelling stopped. Then he would run back to the attic and send more radio signals.

Grimaldi grew up in Boston and was working at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard when he was drafted in 1943. After being discharged in February 1946, he returned to Boston and went to work for Greyhound Bus as a mechanic, a job he says he never really liked.

So, three years later, still eligible for the GI Bill, Grimaldi was easily convinced by his wife’s suggestion that he go to college, and he enrolled in Northeastern University. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering and began a 27-year career with Exxon.

He and his wife, Mary, built a house in Surry in 1981 and retired there in 1982. They raised three children and have four grandchildren.

— James Straub