By Peter Ciferri, BucksLocalNews.com

"The shells were coming in like rain. It's the kind of thing you just cannot imagine unless you go through it."

That was the feeling Washington Crossing resident Joe Agnello had moments before he was shot in the shoulder and declared missing in action during what he called "the very worst part of the war I experienced."

Agnello and his company in the 84th Army Infantry were fresh faces in the European theatre. The men landed at Omaha Beach shortly after D-Day to add reinforcements to the U.S. troops storming through western Europe.

"We saw all the horrible stuff that had happened," Agnello remembered of his landing at Omaha. "There was still a lot of debris and equipment that the men had dropped. Tanks were still in the water and landing barges were crippled We got our first taste of how bad it could be at that point."

Traveling through France, the men were greeted with parades and the smiling faces of liberated French, but as they neared the front, in Holland and Germany, moods were still combative.

"We entered the very worse combat conditions I experienced in the war," Agnello explained.

Those conditions came when along the Siegfried Line, where Agnello says Nazi troops were entrenched and setting a trap for the U.S. soldiers.

"Nobody knew what was going on," he remembered. "The shelling was so horrific that there was a complete panic."

At some point, Agnello said he remembers being forced to the ground by a bullet. He then jumped into a foxhole where he remained until the shooting stopped.

"There was no one alive around me," he said of the chilling silence that followed the fighting. "My whole squad was wiped out, either killed or wounded."

In all, two-thirds of his 200 man company were lost or wounded and to make matters worse, Agnello was reported missing in action due to a combination of being transported to the hospital by another company and faulty witness accounts said a shell hit him directly.

The MIA reports spread through his family and company. But when his mother received a telegram reporting her missing son, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary telling her to stay calm because Joe was being taken care of. She never lost hope.

About a month later, while recovering in a hospital outside Paris, a fellow company man also receiving care ran into Agnello. He reported back the false story of Joe being shelled and helped cleared the air on his disappearance.

With the Battle of the Bulge well underway, the Army needed reinforcements, so Agnello's wounded shoulder didn't keep him out of action for very long.

"They sent you back even though you weren't completely healed," he explained. "I didn't think it [his wound] should look so raw before you go back but when you need manpower, you need manpower."

Back in action, his company was coming through the tail end of the Battle of the Bulge. He ended up at the Elb River near Hanover and was amazed at the number of Germans surrendering unconditionally.

More afraid of the Russians than they were of the Americans, Agnello says the Nazi soldiers came in force, accepting surrender over death.

"You would never know that they were fearsome soldiers," he said. "Once there is no basis for continuing to fight, you give up and you become very docile."

But the surrenders didn't come with a feeling of victory for the U.S. troops, as they knew full-well what lay ahead in the Pacific theatre and occupation duty. Agnello saw occupation duty.

After the war, Joe came home and finished his long-delayed engineering education. Graduating in 1947, he also married Palma Agnello during his time at Lafayette. Sixty-one years later, the two are still a pair.

Working a couple of jobs in engineering, Agnello moved to Lower Makefield in 1959, and 1969 he became a face in the community when he opened the Bucks County Racquet Club in Washington Crossing.

A Bronze Star and Purple Heart recipient and successful businessman, Agnello has years of stories to look back on, but those days on the Siegfried Line changed his life.