Excerpt from ATTACKS
By Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

Toward 1500, Technical Sergeant Dobelmann reported that he thought he saw mountain troops to the southwest on the opposite bank. He said an Italian, coming from the hill west of Fae, had been captured by a soldier standing behind a house near the railway. I grabbed the glass and convinced myself that everything was in order. No Italians would get past Fae.

But we waited in vain for the agreed return of prisoners to the east bank of the Piave. I had expected to make maximum use of their passage of the river by crossing my people at the same time.

Finally, toward 1530, we saw a dense mass of captured Italians a mile and a half south of us in the broad bed of the Piave. Most of them were already on the east bank heading toward Dogna. I was getting angry because we had lost our chance of shifting to the other bank, when the Italian artillery around Longarone opened on this mass of prisoners. Apparently, the artillery thought they were German. The fire forced the prisoners to return to the west bank near Fae. This incident did not change our situation; as before, the enemy kept us pinned down with artillery and machine-gun fire.

Shortly before dark, a great number of Italian prisoners appeared near an old levee damming the westernmost arm of the Piave in the vicinity of Hill 431, a mile north of Fae and began to cross the Piave. What I hoped for all day happened. I moved the bulk of my detachment to the weir. We no longer worried about the hostile fire which was still being directed at our old positions and on the west edge of Dogna.

On the main branch of the Piave, hundreds of prisoners protected
us from further hostile fire. The shifting of the detachment took little time. The prisoners showed us the best means of crossing the wild river with its many arms, some of which were very swift and chest-deep in places. A single man, even a good swimmer, reached the far shore only with difficulty; the strong current simply carried him away. The Italians grabbed each other's wrists and walked obliquely into the river, facing upstream with the body more or less bent forward, according to the strength of the current. We imitated them and were soon across. However, once there we set out for Fae. The ice-cold bath in the Piave helped us maintain a rapid pace.