Private Armand Lorenzi and his fellow soldiers were advancing through a snowy German forest when enemy machine guns opened fire. It was Lorenzi’s first time in combat. He started scraping a shallow foxhole until he heard German mortars and artillery exploding and rockets screaming in. Then he started digging desperately. “You learn fast,” he recalled. The Germans fired Nebelwerfers, rockets that made a high-pitched scream as they roared to target, earning them the name “Screaming Mimis.” One rocket exploded in the trees. “That’s what scares the life out of you.”
It was during the last months of the war, February 1945, and Lorenzi had just joined Company C of the 302nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 94th Infantry Division in Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.’s Third Army. Lorenzi and his fellow soldiers were trying to wrestle Germany’s Campholz Woods from the stubborn enemy.
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