He Alone Silenced 3 German Machine Guns in 60 Seconds

On the morning of 12 May 1944, near Mount Damiano, Italy, a U.S. infantry company was pinned on an exposed slope by overlapping German machine-gun fire. Movement stopped. Casualties mounted. Advancing further meant crossing ground already measured by enemy gunners.

This documentary reconstructs what happened next through official U.S. Army records and Medal of Honor citations. At the center of the account is Staff Sergeant Charles William Shea of Company F, 350th Infantry Regiment, 88th Infantry Division—a 22-year-old infantryman whose actions unfolded in less than a minute but changed the outcome on that slope.

Rather than dramatize the event, this film follows the sequence as it appears in primary sources: how the machine-gun positions were laid, why the company was immobilized, and how Shea moved under fire to neutralize three emplacements in succession. The focus is not spectacle, but decision-making under pressure, terrain, timing, and the mechanics of small-unit combat in the Italian Campaign.

This story is part of the lesser-known ground fighting in Italy, where progress was measured in yards and single positions could decide whether an entire company lived or bled in place. It also examines how such actions were recorded, verified, and later recognized—often far from the battlefield where they occurred.

No reenactment. No fiction. Just a factual reconstruction of one documented moment from World War II, and how it fit into the larger reality of infantry warfare in 1944.