Line
The 363rd Infantry and the Campaign History Left Behind
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In the summer of 1944, a young draftee named Anthony Raia climbed into the Italian mountains to join a company of strangers. He arrived to find them freshly mauled, their ranks thinned and their nerves raw.
The regiment he joined, the 363rd Infantry, would carry more than its share of the fighting that followed. The nation had fixed its gaze on Normandy, and the long campaign up the Italian peninsula ground on unremarked, brutal and unglamorous and seemingly without end. Waiting for these men was the most formidable defensive barrier the Germans had built in the country, held by some of the most fierce soldiers the Reich had. The regiment was told to break it. In some of the most punishing combat American infantry saw anywhere in the war, they did, and paid brutally for every yard.
Men like Raia left behind little more than the flat residue of military record-keeping. Out of that sparse and stubborn material, Right of the Line recovers a campaign whose worth was disputed even as it was fought, and whose brutality spared no one who climbed into those mountains. It gives back to a forgotten regiment, and to one soldier who survived it, the recognition history withheld from them.