Stone Gardens: Twenty-two-year-old Boone County native among those who died at the Battle of Anzio

Second Lieutenant George W. Hendricks Jr. stepped off a landing craft onto the beaches near Nettuno, Italy, in the final days of January 1944 as part of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division’s push in Operation Shingle.

Born on November 11, 2022 to geroge Hendricks Sr, and Ethsabeth (Ettie) Balinger, the 22-year-old from Boone County, he left the University of Arkansas and his fraternity brothers behind to accept an officers commission nto the 7th Infantry Regiment--the Cottonbalers, a unit already hardened by fighting in North Africa and Sicily.

The 3rd Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott, was one of the first major American formations ashore on January 22, tasked with securing the Anzio beachhead 35 miles south of Rome. What was meant to be a swift end-run around the German Gustav Line instead became a grinding stalemate that would claim Hendricks six weeks later.

The 7th Infantry landed in the early hours of the invasion, its battalions wading through cold surf under sporadic Luftwaffe strafing.

By dawn on January 23, the regiment had pushed inland several miles, linking up with Rangers and the rest of the division to form a perimeter around Anzio and Nettuno. Initial resistance was light, but German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring reacted fast, rushing reinforcements from across Italy--panzergrenadier divisions, paratroopers, and heavy artillery. Within days the beachhead shrank under counterattacks, and the 3rd Division found itself dug into muddy fields and drainage ditches, trading fire across flat, exposed ground that offered almost no cover.

Rain turned the terrain into a quagmire; supply lines ran straight into German artillery range from the Alban Hills just a few miles away. For the men of the 7th Infantry, the days blurred into patrols, mine-clearing, and holding foxholes while 88mm shells and Nebelwerfer rockets screamed overhead.

Hendricks arrived with the division’s veteran core, already blooded from earlier campaigns. As a second lieutenant he led a platoon in one of the regiment’s rifle companies, responsible for everything from directing machine-gun positions to coordinating with attached tanks during local probes.

By late February the pressure had intensified. On February 29, Kesselring launched another major assault—Operation Fischfang’s follow-on—throwing elements of the 362nd Infantry Division and supporting armor straight at the 3rd Division’s sector on the eastern side of the beachhead. German infantry advanced through pouring rain against American barbed wire and interlocking fields of fire.

The 7th Infantry and its sister regiments in the 3rd Division held the line in brutal close-quarters fighting, repulsing the attacks over three days of hand-to-hand combat and concentrated artillery duels. By March 3 the German offensive had spent itself; the beachhead remained intact, but at a steep cost in men and ammunition.

On March 4, 1944, with the front still smoldering from the latest repulse, Second Lieutenant Hendricks was killed in action. Official records list only the date and location—Italy—without further detail, but the timing places him squarely in the aftermath of those final German lunges.

The 3rd Division’s after-action reports describe the period as one of relentless artillery harassment and small-unit clashes as both sides licked their wounds and prepared for the next round.

Hendricks became one of more than 7,000 Americans who would die in the four-month Anzio campaign, a battle that pinned down six German divisions and ultimately helped crack open the road to Rome when the Allies broke out in late May.

His body was moved to the temporary cemetery established just days after the landings, later formalized as the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno. Plot F, Row 7, Grave 17 holds his white marble marker today, overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and the same ground where the 7th Infantry had fought to hold the beachhead.

The 3rd Division would go on to break out from Anzio, link up with troops from the south, and drive into Rome on June 4, 1944—two days before D-Day in Normandy.

Hendricks never saw that victory, but his regiment’s stand in those muddy weeks of February and early March helped make it possible. For a young officer from the Arkansas hills who traded college life for a commission and a rifle platoon, the war ended on a rain-soaked plain 5,000 miles from home, one small piece of a larger fight that turned the tide in Italy.