Mount Union borough

Capt. Joseph S. Giacobello and the Distinguished Service Cross

Joseph S. Giacobello was born in Mount Union on June 30, 1919. He graduated from Mount Union High School in 1938 and played basketball and football at Shippensburg State Teachers College until he was drafted into the Army on June 17, 1942. He went overseas with Company F, 2nd Battalion, 137th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, reached Normandy on July 5, 1944, and went into combat on July 11 in the hedgerows of St. Lo.

On July 13, 1944, his company was held up by enemy machine guns firing from a group of houses. Second Lt. Giacobello volunteered to lead a patrol around them and was wounded in the face and elbow. His citation says he refused medical aid until all positions were secured, and he received the Silver Star.

On September 11, 1944, the 2nd Battalion tried to cross the Moselle River near Crevechamps. The regiment's report says the first across was First Lt. Giacobello with 15 men of Company F, and that they were the only American troops across the river at that point for a day and a half and were believed to have been lost. The citation for his award counts sixteen riflemen and says they crossed on a dam. It says he leaped over a retaining wall onto the far shore and was separated from other troops for twelve hours while he infiltrated enemy positions for information. When his squad reached him, he established communications and directed supporting troops to the area, securing the bridgehead. He received a bronze oak leaf cluster in place of a second Silver Star.

On November 21, the 2nd Battalion resumed its attack toward Hellimer, France. The regiment's report says Company F led the way in the final assault, that the Germans were cleared from the town house by house, and that two enemy tanks were knocked out and another abandoned. The report does not say who knocked them out. Later accounts name him. Pennsylvania's Act 59 of 2019 says he led his company in the attack and that he and two others stopped a machine gun and knocked out a Panther tank. American War Memorials Overseas, in its record of the Hellimer memorial, which cites a historian in the village, says he jumped from a second story window onto a passing tank, pried open the hatch, dropped in grenades and climbed back inside with help from his men. The 35th Division Association's biography says he was wounded in the attack on Hellimer and received his second Purple Heart.

On December 10, 1944, Captain Giacobello's company was given the mission of seizing an enemy-held factory on the far side of the Saar River at Sarreguemines, France. His citation says that in the night he and two enlisted men crossed the river on an improvised plank bridge and killed the crew of the first machine gun position. They went on into the factory and for three hours fought a larger enemy force in the main building with grenades, pistols and finally knives, holding their ground after the enemy set the building on fire. When the rest of the company arrived, he led it against the remaining defenders. The regiment's report does not mention the plank bridge. It says the battalions finished crossing by a railroad bridge at 5:45 that morning and attacked at 7:30, and that Company F captured the factory, which it calls the Pottery Plant, after a four hour battle. The next day, it says, the 2nd Battalion cleaned out the rest of Sarreguemines and freed 995 former prisoners of war. For the December 10 action he received the Distinguished Service Cross, in Third U.S. Army General Orders No. 57 of March 13, 1945.

Act 59 lists his wartime honors as the Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts and the Combat Infantryman Badge. He came home to Mount Union, where his obituary says he owned and ran J.S. Giacobello Distributor for many years, and the Act says he helped local veterans and supported youth sports. He died on February 16, 2019, at the age of 99, and is buried in Mount Union Cemetery.

Act 59 named the Pennsylvania Route 747 bridge over the Juniata River in Mount Union Borough the Captain Joseph S. Giacobello Memorial Bridge, and a ceremony in the borough dedicated it in October 2019. The 35th Division Association placed him in its Hall of Fame, and Shippensburg University's ROTC battalion inducted him into its own in 2017. On November 11, 2022, according to American War Memorials Overseas, a memorial was inaugurated in Hellimer to him and one of his soldiers. Its English inscription remembers the men of Company F "who liberated Hellimer, November 21, 1944."

Checked against the record. We checked his awards against the citations published by the Military Times Hall of Valor and against the 137th Infantry after-action reports for September, November and December 1944, as transcribed on the 35th Division Memory site. We read the enacted text of Act 59 of 2019 and the memorial inscription as shown in the American War Memorials Overseas photograph. We did not see the original typed reports or the award orders themselves. Some points stay open. The regiment's November report confirms that Company F led the final assault at Hellimer and that tanks were knocked out, but it does not name Giacobello. The Panther tank comes only from the 2019 Act and later accounts, which differ on how it happened, so each is given as its own account. No account written in 1944 that we have seen tells it. The memorial record also calls him and one of his soldiers the village's liberators, but its inscription honors the men of Company F, and we did not find who made that recognition.

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