Father & Sons

Late in February a U.S. battalion in Italy made a gallant and determined stand against the Germans from a cave on the rocky road that runs north from Anzio. Cut off from supplies and fighting for a week without replacements, the battalion, in the words of New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Homer Bigart, "withstood the cruelest pressure any American unit has been called upon to face in this war."

Correspondent Bigart singled out for special mention the work of 25-year-old Corporal George Sylvester Viereck Jr., who stood in the mouth of the cave blasting away with his Garand rifle at oncoming Nazis while an artillery barrage thundered down on them from the rear. Said Corporal Viereck: "We had a feeling of animal joy as that stuff came down on the surrounding Germans."

Slight and blond, young Viereck was a onetime student at Harvard Law School, a graduate magna cum laude of Harvard College. There he had helped found and edit a new liberal monthly magazine, the Harvard Guardian.

Immediately on reading the dispatch from Anzio, Corporal Viereck's mother sat down in her Manhattan apartment to write her son a letter of congratulations.

Last week the letter came back. Across it was stamped the word "DECEASED." That was the way she got the news.

Next day, in a barren cell under the Washington courtroom where he is on trial for sedition, Naziphile George Sylvester Viereck Sr., already serving a one-to-five-year prison term as an unregistered agent of the Reich, listened stolidly as his wife broke the news to him. The Vierecks' other son, Sergeant Peter Viereck, author of a critical book on the origins of National Socialism, is now in North Africa.

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