Thomas “Tommy” Mascari, Darby Army Ranger, World War II. This image was taken near the end of the war after Macari had returned home to Indianapolis, Indiana.
When he volunteered he did not know exactly what he was volunteering for. It was September 1943 and he was on maneuvers in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, when his unit was ordered into formation to receive an address by a recruiting official. The Army, the officer briefed them, was looking for 86 soldiers. Each had to be unmarried. The mission would be dangerous. They would deploy in two weeks. That was the totality of the information given. After some twenty soldiers stepped forward, Thomas “Tommy” Mascari, a native of Indianapolis, Indiana, who had recently completed basic training, did so as well. “I figured I would be going overseas sooner or later, so I thought it might as well be sooner,” he explains of the rationale for his decision.
Only after he had undergone weeks of intense specialized training in the hills of Tennessee, boarded the escort carrier USS Croatan, steamed to Casablanca, Morocco, on the coast of North Africa, and convoyed on to Naples, Italy, did Mascari learn the nature of his duty. The twenty-one-year-old private would be among the replacement troops for Colonel William O. Darby’s 1st Ranger Battalion. That elite and now legendary command, which had been formed a little over a year earlier as a special operations ground force, had sustained heavy casualties in the punishing push north into the teeth of the fortified German lines in central Italy.
As a member of Company A, 1st Ranger Battalion, Mascari participated in the night landing at Anzio in the Italian Campaign and the subsequent battle of Cisterna in which the number of soldiers wounded, killed in action, and captured proved so devastating that Darby’s Rangers ceased to exist (the battalion would be reconstituted later as a precurser to today’s famed 75th Ranger Regiment). Mascari, with many of his teammates, was seized as a German prisoner of war.
Surviving the next six months incarcerated in a lice-infested camp in Florence, Mascari orchestrated a harrowing escape during a transfer of the prisoners to a location inside Germany, leaping with three other Rangers from the boxcar of a moving train. He eventually navigated his way through the German lines to Naples where he was reunited with Allied forces. On his return home to the States, Mascari recalls never seeing a more inspiring sight than the Statue of Liberty as his transport ship passed through New York Harbor.
Thomas Mascari now lives in Maple Valley with his daughter and son-in-law. His grandchildren graduated from Tahoma High School in the 1980s. Like many combat veterans, the 99-year-old is humble and reserved when speaking of his military service, chalking up his actions to simply doing his job and performing his duty. “When you’re an Army Ranger you’re always an Army Ranger for life,” he says proudly, “but, at the time, during the Second World War, I was just another soldier. You didn’t feel different. I was just another guy.”
Cary Collins teaches Military History of the United States at Tahoma High School in Maple Valley, Washington.
