In one of my Dad's letters to his mother from the beachhead, he writes that he & his buddy Bob Cunningham were listening to the news from the Columbia Broadcasting System in NY. He also wrote: "We have the Jack Benny program on - Jack is still kidding Rochester. Deanna Durbin is singing now "Say A Prayer For The Boys Over There", she has such a beautiful voice!".
This must've given my grandmother the understandable impression that her son was sitting comfortably in some nice dry tent at Anzio, peacefully listening to some kind of cabinet radio on that Sunday night - much as their family would've done at home in Wellesley.
Well, we certainly know THAT wasn't true! So I started wondering - where in the wide wide world of sports, did all the guys on the beachhead get radios???? I couldn't imagine that the Army was handing them out. I did some research and found this article on "Foxhole Radios" by Don Adamson. It also may explain why - during my childhood - radios were one my father's many "tinkering manias" (I think we had more radio cases, vacumn tubes, dials,
and other radio parts in our cellar than Westinghouse!). 