BY STEVE DAMISH
Metro Editor
Love Letters Help Him Survive Horrors of War
Foxhole gold.
That's how Amalio "Gio" Giovanniello thought of his growing hoard of letters from the French girl, Paulette Limousin.
They were pure gold to the frontline soldier who spent his days and nights slumped in holes in the ground.
 | 
A recuperating Amalio "Gio" Giovanniello rests in a Paris hotel after the Battle of the Bulge.
Amalio Giovanniello is shown in January 1945 in a photo he inscribed and sent to Paulette Limousin in Paris. "Gio" was in Belgium at the time.
PAULETTE LIMOUSIN
Photo from August 1945 in Paris.
|
The letters were Gio's connection to the world far from his foxhole, and reminded him why he was dug in here on "The Ghost Front," the sector along the Belgium border facing the Germans that had grown quiet in early December 1944.
In the three miserable months since Gio had left Paulette in Paris, he and his unit had become one with the mud and snow of the Ardennes Forest.
German artillery attacks a few weeks earlier had shattered the trees around the position Gio held at the time, filling the air with lethal splinters of metal and wood. Gio caught several fragments in his left hand, and lost feeling in his fingers.
Since those attacks, Gio's unit had moved south from the Hurtgen Forest, in the northern Ardennes, to this position. Now, he was in a section of the forest north of Malmedy, Belgium.
Hot meals were still scarce, and the random artillery round forced the troops deeper into their holes. But the forest had grown quiet ghostlike.
The respite gave Gio time to look at his foxhole gold 90 letters from Paulette that he kept in his pack, wrapped in his Army-issue poncho.
"The poncho didn't keep me dry anyway, it had so many holes in it," he said. "This was a much better use for it."
The foxholes gave him cover her letters gave him comfort.
Paulette now shared all her feelings with the American she had met just once. She wrote of her worries, her fears, her love of dress-making and her childhood.
She also wrote of a peaceful and fruitful future, and her hope to share it with someone like Gio, the soldier from Brockton, USA.
Gio wrote back with what he had toilet paper and a pencil.
He couldn't tell her much where he was, what he was doing because Army censors read all incoming and outgoing mail, blackening out any information they thought the Germans might find useful.
Paulette also sent an occasional photograph not often, because film was scarce, and she didn't like her wartime look.
But Gio did.
This girl is beautiful, and she keeps writing to me!
Gio realized that his French-speaking Cajun buddy, who had been translating Paulette's letters, was right her letters had evolved from pleasantries and small talk to tokens of love, steeped in affection.
Alone in his frozen foxhole, Gio realized:
I have to go back and see her. I love her, too. I'm sure I do. Some how, some way, I've fallen in love with this French girl.
He found his opportunity by volunteering to serve as a guard on a train full of German prisoners bound for Paris.
Gio manned a machine gun on top of one of the rail cars, ducking each time the train approached one of the low stone bridges that carried traffic over the tracks.
He spent two days in Paris, on the other side of the city from Paulette. Finally, on the third day, he had some free time and set out in search of her.
He had forgotten where her apartment building stood, but he knew it was in Gentilly, and took the Metro there.
"I had just stepped off the Metro and looked across and saw someone stepping off another train. It was her," Gio remembered. "We saw each other at the same time, froze, then ran to each other, almost knocking each other over. She hugged me so hard I couldn't breathe."
They spent the afternoon at her family's apartment, with her mother, Adele, and her older sister, Simone. The couple's only time alone was their walk from the Metro stop.
Paulette stared at Gio, just as she had months ago, when they huddled in the basement of the apartment during an air raid warning.
This time, he stared back just as intently.
They communicated with hand gestures and a few basic words, but they didn't have to speak both had the same thought when they embraced:
I'm in love and I'm going to marry this person.
Gio left that night a soldier transformed.
He was a man with a mission stay alive for Paulette.
A week later, on the morning of Dec. 16, the earth shook in the frozen Ardennes. The Germans had launched an all-out offensive 600,000 men, and thousands of tanks, trucks and artillery pieces pushed west into Belgium, creating a bulge in the allied lines that threatened to burst, letting the enemy sweep toward the strategic port of Antwerp.
No one had expected a German attack. Not on the Western Front. Not when millions of Russian soldiers bent on avenging the Nazi assault on the motherland were smashing through the Eastern Front into Germany.
Adolf Hitler, the World War I German corporal turned dictator, once again had proven unpredictable.
The quiet in the Ardennes had ended and The Ghost Front came alive in a frenzy of fear, rage and confusion.
The artillery barrage came first an onslaught of thousands of rounds that leveled forests and cleared a path for the German Panzer and Tiger tanks spearheading the attack.
Every available American was pressed into the line. Many had never fired a shot in anger. Musicians rehearsing in an Army band that morning dropped their instruments, grabbed rifles and went into combat. Wounded soldiers cut casts from their limbs, found weapons and hobbled to the front.
The Battle of The Bulge lasted 45 days. During that time, letters from Paulette piled up at headquarters.
Gio managed to scribble a couple of letters, but they weren't for Paulette. They were addressed to the woman he had neglected since meeting the French girl his mother, Ersillia, back home in Brockton.
"I thought I was going to die," said Gio, "and I hadn't written to her. So, I finally did."
Gio's unit came within 100 yards of being encircled. More than 60 years later, he finds it difficult to talk about the battle.
"Let's just say, I had to fire my rifle a lot," he said.
Later, his unit moved northwest, digging in at Eupen, Belgium, during a deep freeze and enduring another German bombardment.
Gio sometimes pulled the frozen corpses of German soldiers over his foxhole for cover as he moved from foxhole to foxhole, trying to stay alive.
The fighting abated in late January, and Gio's unit pulled back from the line.
Doctors cut off his boots, revealing a pair of frostbitten, bluish-black feet. Gangrene seemed to be setting in, and doctors told Gio they would have to amputate.
Gio pleaded with them not to.
The doctors took a chance, plunging his feet in a tub of ice water. Each day, they dumped in more ice and gave him another shot of the new wonder drug, the antibiotic penicillin.
One day, a doctor came with good news: The color of Gio's feet had improved he wouldn't lose them.
Through all the fighting, the frozen foxholes, even the days spent with his feet immersed in ice water, Gio kept the bundle of letters from Paulette close by.
He always had his eyes on his foxhole gold.
Paulette kept writing to Gio, but feared he was dead. She hadn't had a word from him in more than a month.
But the worst was over for the man she now called mon amour.
When the winter skies cleared over Belgium, Allied planes smashed what was left of the German armor and finished off the remnants of the once mighty Luftwaffe.
German troops began surrendering by the tens of thousands. The end of the war was in sight.
When the Bulge ended, Gio received Paulette's letters, dozens of them tied in a bundle. They all said the same thing: "Write and tell me you're alive."
Gio wrote.
"I'm alive, Paulette! I've made it through this horrible battle. I made it through because I kept thinking of you, and reading your letters. I love you."
For the next three months, Gio and his unit followed the advancing American infantry from one battleground to the next the infamous Siegfried line protecting Germany; Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies; and the bridge at Remagen, the last intact span over the Rhine River.
Gio saw devastation everywhere. But his unit's job was done; there were no more enemy planes to shoot at.
By May, he had reached the Elbe River, deep in Germany, where the Americans linked up with the Russian army. The Russian soldiers men and women were friendly, eager to learn about the Americans. They were also eager to trade for cigarettes.
Gio didn't smoke, so he traded two cartons of Lucky Strikes to a Russian for two gold rings he thought Paulette might like.
Then, the Russian told him the rings' origin they had come from the fingers of a dead German soldier. He had cut off the German's hands, then the fingers to get to them.
Gio decided he wouldn't give those to the woman he called ma cheri.
On May 8, 1945, came news that had the Americans and Russians dancing arm-and-arm in the streets, guzzling vodka, and collapsing and crying "right on top of each other."
The Germans had surrendered.
Gio shouted, then cried, then danced with several Russian infantry women, then cried some more.
Then he sat, reached into his pack and pulled out Paulette's latest letters.
He began reading. She had gotten him through this war he would celebrate the end of it with her.
Back in Paris, Paulette heard the news on the radio. She sat down and started another letter to Gio.
She would celebrate the end of the war with him, too.
But she didn't write about endings she wrote about beginnings.
Metro Editor Steve Damish can be reached at sdamish@enterprisenews.com.
Copyright 2005 The Enterprise
