Phil Piergrossi This is Me

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1. 1. Article

   www.readingeagle.com/re/farrel - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/29/2002   Last Visited: 3/29/2002

   Phil Piergrossi of Hyde Park, right, is commander of the Greater Reading Post 32 of the 80th Division Veterans Association.
   ...
   When the local guys from the 80th Division Veterans Association get together to swap war stories, Phil Piergrossi, 81, Hyde Park, the commander of the association's Greater Reading Post 32, shrugs his shoulders as often as not and passes the buck to someone else.
   
   "I wouldn't know anything about that," he says. "I wasn't there."
   
   Not that Phil missed out on the war.
   
   He was one of those drafted in the summer of 1942 and assigned to the 80th or Blue Ridge Division.
   
   The division's shoulder patch depicts three mountaintops in baby blue.
   
   ...
   "We wound up on the wrong side of the river, surrounded by Germans," Phil says. "We'd fallen into a trap."
   
   While the rest of the division held the Luxembourg bridges during the Battle of the Bulge and spearheaded the headlong advance of Gen. George Patton's Third Army, Phil spent months living in freight cars in German railyards.
   ...
   "They kept us separated, but we could see they were much worse off than we were," Phil says. "Occasionally, we'd be close enough to throw cigarettes to them, but the guards didn't like it. If they caught you, they gave you a rifle butt in the back."
   
   Much of what's left of the war are numbers, some fixed in time, some still subject to change.
   
   The 15,000-man 80th Division suffered 17,087 casualties in war, including 3,500 killed.