In WWII Rites, Public Pageantry and Private Pilgrimages : Anniversary: A half-century later, ceremony in Italy opens a year of bittersweet memorials to the war.

Rifleman Clyde E. Easter, U.S. Army, waded into Anzio in the fearful pre-dawn 50 years ago this morning. He left on a stretcher, twice.

Now Easter is back, and others like him, to remember places and pain that defined his own life--and the history of a continent.

Antonio Combi, who has always lived near the beaches of Anzio and neighboring Nettuno, is glad to see the old American soldiers return. He owes them a lot. And he buried many of their friends.

“Americans are still liberators here,” said Giuseppe Tarisciotti, the Socialist mayor of this seaside resort 37 miles south of Rome. “But people are beginning to forget, so we are using the anniversary to remind the younger ones of their town’s history.”

Once, Anzio was famous only as the birthplace of the Roman emperors Nero and Caligula. Then, on Jan. 22, 1944, the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and the British 1st Division--VI Corps--landed in Nettuno and Anzio, one of two amphibious invasions that year that turned the tide of World War II in Europe.

Ceremonies at British and American military cemeteries here today open a year of bittersweet memorials across Europe marking decisive 1944 on its golden anniversary. Before the year is out, Europeans and their governments in every Allied country will pause to remember. President Clinton comes to the Nettuno-Anzio battleground in June and then flies to D-Day memorials on the Normandy coast of northern France.

In a poignant counterpoint to official pageantry, individual veterans like Clyde Easter will undertake private pilgrimages this year to salute fallen comrades and to hone personal memories.

Indeed, for millions of Americans, there will never be a Europe quite like the caldron Europe of 1944. The year began with German armies as masters of a fortress continent. By the time it ended, Rome, Paris and Brussels had been liberated by Allied armies and 1,000-plane raids by American and British bombers were common. Rebuffing a desperate German counterattack in Belgium at the Battle of the Bulge, American forces drove east, while Russian allies thrust west toward Berlin.

Fifty years ago. And only yesterday . . .

Rifleman Easter was a country boy from Cana, Va., not quite 19, when he invaded Anzio with the 7th Regiment of the 3rd. He remembers the tremendous naval barrage and the landing in darkness on a rainy, disagreeable night in an alien and backward place: deserted cobblestone streets, empty buildings, raw fear.

Fighting later across the flat, deadly countryside, Easter would encounter centuries-old farmhouses and people living in great poverty amid oxen, bicycles and trucks powered by burning wood; he would see destruction and desolation.

Twice wounded, Easter was carried out of Anzio, thinking himself lucky to be alive. But he first returned in 1985 to examine with the perspective of four decades the ground where he had fought and fallen.

Walking one day through the countryside, Easter came upon a farmhouse he had last seen not long before he was wounded. “A lady of about 75 came to the door looking quizzical, so I pointed to myself and said, Soldato Americano, and she put her arms around me and hugged me up,” he remembers.

Nettuno and Anzio were evacuated but undefended 50 years ago this morning: Occupying Germans had driven townsfolk away and forbidden them to return under pain of death, but the landing surprised the Nazis.

On invasion night, Antonio Combi and other displaced townsfolk roused from straw-covered shelters and caves to watch artillery fire light up the sky. They were frightened. But mostly they were hungry. “We were eating grass, weeds,” recalls the sprightly, blue-eyed Combi. He is 75 now and lives in retirement a grenade’s throw from the Nettuno cemetery where 7,862 Americans are buried, including 21 sets of brothers, side by side.

That first day on the ground half a century ago was deceptive; the serious dying would not come until later in three German counterattacks against beachhead defenders with their backs to the sea for four killing months.

“We had expected opposition, but at first everything was quiet until we got inland three or four miles,” remembers Easter, who says he can still pinpoint places where buildings were destroyed and later rebuilt. “So much has changed. The town of Cisterna is beautiful now, but it was all rubble then. Still, every now and then I see something, a place, a building, that says to me, ‘Anzio ’44.’ ”

Adele Combi, who would marry Antonio in April, 1944, with German shells punctuating their vows, remembers what the arrival of Americans meant. “When we saw the soldiers, people yelled, ‘Gli Americani! Maybe they’ll give us something to eat,’ ” she said. “They did, but many people ate so much so fast they got sick.”

Two days after the landing, the Americans began digging a temporary cemetery. Antonio Combi was one of the lucky ones hired to help. He remembers: bodies and bodies stacked in trucks; stray artillery rounds that killed the American engineer sergeant overseeing the cemetery construction, and an Italian American noncom named Nicola who spoke perfect Neapolitan and said to him one day, “Tony, somebody with a fiancee that pretty should have decent shoes”--and scrounged him a pair.

Combi remembers how, during breaks from the digging, Americans at the cemetery taught Italians to play a strange game. It took: last year, Nettuno’s professional baseball team won the Italian national championship for the 14th time.

The Anzio invasion was intended to outflank Germans stubbornly defending the Gustav Line between Naples and Rome. Operation Shingle (as in beach, not roof) stalled: VI Corps failed to break out of the beachhead and was nearly swamped by the counterattacks. The operation has been controversial among military historians ever since.

But survivors like Easter and the Combi family lived more in life-and-death minutiae than grand strategy.

Easter remembers the night patrols: “They’d send eight of us out and say, ‘Bring back a German prisoner.’ Practically every night, one or two of us would get wounded. One night I got shot in the hand. After a month in the hospital, when I rejoined my outfit, I didn’t know anybody: They were all transferred, wounded or dead.”

Attacking the inland town of Cisterna in May, Easter was wounded again, this time by shrapnel in the face. By the time he got out of the hospital, Rome was free. When the war ended, Easter went home, moved to Nashville, Tenn., and worked in restaurants and real estate before retiring.

In Nettuno and Anzio--90% destroyed--life resumed, dirt poor, once the front moved north. Combi dug in the cemetery by day and by night sewed leather leggings for soldiers.

Slowly at first, then with rapid acceleration, development came to Anzio and Nettuno. A Colgate-Palmolive factory triggered local prosperity, which was reinforced in the boom ‘60s by more light industries and the growth of tourism.

Today, Anzio, population 37,000, is hard for veterans such as Easter to recognize. The city quadruples in size at the height of summer. Its eight miles or so of beaches are good for swimming, but swatches of the bay are off-limits to the town’s small fleet of fishing trawlers: The seabed is littered with sunken ships from the Allied landing.

“Today the problems of Anzio are those of Italy,” Mayor Tarisciotti said after meeting 30 residents with problems one morning this week. “They were worried about jobs and housing--the things that trouble all Italians.”

These days, the young people of Nettuno and Anzio don’t know or care much about World War II, their elders complain. Instead, they play video games and loud music, dress outlandishly and drive too fast. Fifty years later, Anzio lives in a different universe from the rural adversity to which Antonio Combi was born and into which Clyde Easter stumbled as a teen-age infantryman.

Combi, who became a supervisor and stayed 13 years at the cemetery, eventually joined the mushrooming Italian middle class and is now comfortably retired.

Yet he never learned to drive; the family’s first car was daughter Ana Maria’s. Conceived in war and now 49, she still remembers the historic day when the Combis got wheels: On July 10, 1970, they became proud owners of a tiny Fiat 500, the symbol of the average Italian family’s breakthrough to prosperity. And how time moves. Gravedigger Antonio’s son-in-law is an air-traffic controller. His grandson is a pilot.

Bravely, Easter has rented a car for his return to Anzio. The traffic chaos of modern Italy is as close as he ever wants to come again to combat, Easter says.

This morning, Antonio Combi will go to the 77-acre cemetery in Nettuno he helped build--”every plant passed through my hands”--to watch with almost proprietary pride as Prime Minister Carlo Azeglio Ciampi renews Italy’s thanks to young Americans who never went home.

For Easter, who now lives in Fancy Gap, Va., not far from where he was born, the cemetery is not easy. He’s been there before. “I have friends there. In ‘85, I got out of the car and broke all up. I’m reluctant to go back,” Easter says.

He’ll go back nonetheless. Easter will march into that cemetery with a blue-and-white-check 3rd Division insignia on his lapel this morning because a soldier does what a soldier does. Especially 50 years later.