Notes about May, 1945

I'm going to begin my analysis of the month of May with a continuation of the quotation at the end of the month of April:

...After crossing the river the attack continued to the north. Bn assembled (1-2 May) in vicinity of Treviso and was attached to 85th INF Div as the Armor force of the various task forces continuing the attack to the north and northeast across the Po Valley and into the foothills of the Alps.  On 2 May all enemy troops in Italy and Austria surrendered.  The following days were spent moving north through German occupied rear areas, to secure the Austrian border.  Bn was attached to 91st Inf Div and moved to Manzano vicinity Trieste, where the territorial dispute between Marshall Tito and the Allied High Command was the major issue.  Bn was part of the Armored reserve under II crops.  Bn was relieved from 91st Inf Div and became Corps troops (11 June).  Balance of month spent in preparation for return to the states.

As the document points out, at the beginning of May the 757th was still marching full-steam ahead.  Vernon moved with the Battalion to connect to the 85th Infantry Div, and on May 2nd they started beating a path toward Austria.  Vernon doesn't make record of it, but the next couple of days were witness to some extreme fighting conditions as the 85th met very confused enemies.  Most simply surrendered, but a select few did misguidedly put forth valiant fights, and those poor individuals often met with very tragic outcomes as the Allies slaughtered their way to Austria.

On May 2, Vernon writes: "A german [sic] general was captured and he surrendered all the troops in Italy."  Another account of this exact event reads:

A noon on May 2nd a parlementaire from the enemy forces - a tall, handsome German speaking the best Cambridge English - approached our forward troops with a white banner, and asked permission to pass beyond our lines to inform other German troops in the vicinity that hostilities in Italy were to cease at two o'clock that afternoon.  The Commanding Officer of the 337th Infantry had heard nothing of this, and the emissary was detained while inquiries were made of higher headquarters.  And the advance continued...

And advance they did.  The men heard sporadically about rumors that the war in Germany was over, and could not help but be curious about whether or not this captured general was telling the truth.  For the next few days Vernon's journal indicates that although they had not faced the enemy, the men were still convinced the fighting was to continue.  It wasn't until the evening of May 7 that Vernon writes "[the] radio reports that all of Germany has surrenedered to Eisenhower... Final victory will be announced tomorrow on the 8th at 3 p.m. Boys are happy but not too excited until we hear the final announcement over the Radio from Churchill and Truman."

The next day Vernon must have heard that report, because the next week's worth of entries all read "S. Candido."  There is a wonderful picture of the town of San Candido in Vernon's collection:

The inscription on the back of the post card reads "Note the snow on the mountains. I crossed this bridge many times a day."

It's fair to assume that the next week or so was pretty relaxing.  He writes about going to church and speculates about the future of the 757th - "the 757th may go back to the States and be used for training purposes and held in reserves for the Pacific. Rumors are also that the 757th may never see action again. I hope!"  On the 14th he took what almost sounds like a vacation to Cortina.  He has several professional pictures of the area around Cortina in his possession:

Cortina Col Rosa

Funivia Cortina - Faloria Tofane

Lago Ghedina

Stazione Funivia

Cortina Faloria

The vacation came to an end when the men were called back into combat near the border town of Trieste, Italy.  They traveled through the Alps and Southeast to the outskirts of Trieste.  They passed through the town of Udine along the way on the 21st of May.  On the 22nd they set up camp about 23 miles outside of Trieste near Sambasso, Italy (which is currently known as Sempas, Slovenia).

There they waited until the end of the month to see how the "trouble with Tito" resolved itself.  This story is an interested footnote to World War II history.  Trieste was originally Yugoslav territory.  However the population spoke a mixture of Austrian, Italian, and Yugoslavian.  After the first world war Italian forces occupied Trieste and claimed it for the Italian empire.  There it became a hotbed of Yugoslavian anti-Italian sentiment, until the Germans occupied it in 1943 and crushed all insurrections.

After the war, Tito assumed that this territory would be returned to the Yugoslavians, and after the announced surrender of German forces on May 2, moved his troops into the city.  The wikipedia entry for Trieste reads:

The Yugoslavs held full control of the city until June 12, a period known in the Italian historiography as the "forty days of Trieste"[7] During this period, hundreds of locals were arrested by the Yugoslav authorities, and some of them disappeared.[8] These included former Fascists and Nazi collaborators, but also Italian nationalists, and any other real or potential opponents of Yugoslav Communism. Some were interned in Yugoslav concentration camps (mostly in Borovnica, Slovenia), while others were allegedly murdered and thrown into the potholes ("foibe") on the Kras plateau.[9]

Having just claimed victory in Europe, the Allies were eager to relocate troops to the Pacific theater and finish the war there.  They weren't especially excited to deal with tin-pot dictators looking to capitalize off of the fall of European fascism.  Unfortunately for Tito and his men, the Allies eventually did grow tired of his charade, and the forty day reunification of Trieste with Yugoslavia came to a close.