Assignment to Hell (30 page)

O
N
A
UGUST
19, 1943, A
NDY
Rooney wrote a tribute to the Eighth Air Force that commemorated its bombing campaign’s first anniversary. The
Stars and Stripes
ran his piece as a special supplement; it was a good four times longer than the typical
Stars and Stripes
article. In it Rooney told a remarkable story that had occurred three weeks earlier. Staff Sergeant Tyre Weaver of River View, Alabama, a top-turret gunner, and Second Lieutenant Keith J. Koske of Milwaukee, a navigator, were on the crew of the B-17
Ruthie II
. They were part of a July 26 Flying Fortress mission over Hanover, Germany, that ran into a swarm of Focke-Wulf 190s. One explosion of cannon fire killed the pilot. Another burst a few seconds later rocked the top of
Ruthie II
.

“Weaver fell through the [top-turret] hatch and slumped to the floor at the rear of the nose compartment,” Koske told Rooney. “[Weaver’s] left arm had been blown off at the shoulder and he was a mess of blood. I tried to inject morphine but the needle was bent and I couldn’t get it in.”

They were still four full hours away from England; there was no way, Koske reckoned, that Weaver could survive that long without serious medical help. He secured the gunner’s parachute, wrapped the rip cord in Weaver’s hand, and tossed him out over Lower Saxony, praying that Weaver would survive the fall and get decent care. “[Weaver] was really a stout fellow and seemed to know it was his only chance,” Koske said.

When Rooney wrote his anniversary piece in mid-August, there had been no word on Weaver’s fate. Koske and the other surviving crew members feared the worst. Weaver, his pals told Rooney, constantly talked about tinkering with his ’33 Ford;
⁴⁸
the heap was up on blocks in his parents’ driveway in River View.

Rooney ended his piece with this homage to the bomber boys he knew so well: “The Eighth Air Force is a story of men necessarily buried under the damnably cold heap of statistics the Allies are trying to pile higher than Axis statistics. When the pile is higher the airmen can go home, and if that American kid was saved by a German doctor, maybe he can get a license to drive his ’33 Ford with his one arm.”
⁴⁹

Four months later, miraculous word arrived from Red Cross officials: Weaver had survived his ordeal and was being treated in a German prison hospital. A young German girl had seen Weaver’s parachute thud into a field; defying the Gestapo’s orders not to approach enemy fliers, she ran over to Weaver and realized he was seriously injured. She then ran to a nearby army post; two soldiers arrived and took Weaver, unconscious, to a local doctor.

After recovering, Weaver was sent to Stalag 17-B near Krems, Austria, the notorious POW camp that inspired a book, a play, and a fine 1953 movie starring William Holden and written and directed by the great Billy Wilder, an Austrian émigré.

Weaver’s good fortune continued: A year later, he was repatriated in a prisoner exchange. As Weaver returned to Alabama
Life
magazine followed, running his picture on October 23, 1944; the photo showed Weaver grinning broadly, his left uniform sleeve neatly pinned at the shoulder.

He managed to do a lot more than just drive his Ford one-handed; he learned to pilot a plane with one arm, too. Weaver got himself elected tax collector of Chambers County, in part because voters loved the unusual way he campaigned: tossing out E
LECT
W
EAVER
leaflets as his two-seater zoomed overhead. His plane buzzed so low one day that it nearly clipped the steeple of the Chambers County Court House.

While waiting at a local bank one day, Weaver spotted a pretty teller and shrewdly hopped lines to meet her; two weeks later, he and Frances were married. They raised a family of seven kids and, eventually, twenty grandkids. Today an entire wall of the United States Air Force Enlisted Heritage Hall in Montgomery is devoted to the wonderful saga of Staff Sergeant Tyre Weaver.
⁵⁰

Weaver lived long enough to see the wall dedicated in his honor. He also lived long enough to be reunited with Keith Koske, the navigator whose quick actions had saved his life. Together with Gene Ponte, another member of the
Ruthie II
crew, they would chat every July 26, the anniversary of the fateful raid.

The story of the one-armed gunner who survived a parachute fall from five miles up was featured in the 1949 Gregory Peck film
Twelve O’Clock
High
and highlighted in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not—
but the fictionalized accounts of Tyre Weaver’s story don’t do justice to the real one.
⁵¹

Weaver was one of 9,300 USAAF airmen wounded in action in the ETO and one of twenty-six thousand American airmen captured by the enemy. Nearly twenty-four thousand American fliers were killed in action in the ETO.
⁵²

“I love Mr. Weaver’s quote,” wrote his daughter-in-law Brenda, the wife of Tyre’s son Bob. It was an inscription that helped Sergeant Weaver get through his trials: “For you see, no matter what a man believes before the mission starts, after it’s over he knows he’s been in God’s hands.”
⁵³

I
t was “hellish hot” that August night, Homer Bigart recounted, as nearly seven hundred Army commandoes, their faces blackened, piled from the transport vessel into DUKW assault boats. They were bobbing on the Tyrrhenian Sea seven miles behind enemy lines, poised to launch a clandestine attack on the Fifteenth Panzer Grenadier Division’s stronghold at Brolo on the northern Sicilian coast. Looming beyond the rocky beach was the imposing specter of Monte Cipolla. In the forbidding blackness, the commandoes and the seven correspondents covering them—an esteemed list handpicked by the U.S. Seventh Army’s public relations staff that included Bigart of the
New York Herald Tribune
, Tom Treanor of the
Los Angeles Times
, Jack Belden of
Time
, and Don Whitehead of Associated Press—could barely make out the mountain’s 750-foot-high peak.

A few minutes earlier the raid’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lyle A. Bernard of the Third Division’s Second Battalion, had pinpointed Monte Cipolla on a map. “Take this objective,” the thirty-three-year-old native of Highland Falls, New York, pleaded to the men gathered around him on the
ship’s deck, “and we’ll be in Messina in a week.”
¹
They’d attack Brolo and Monte Cipolla in four waves of riflemen and artillerymen, spaced fifteen minutes apart, Bernard explained. Two companies led by Bernard would seize the summit, a mortar unit would be stationed midmountain, and the remainder would seek to control the valley. The ship wasn’t alone: Second Battalion’s transport was flanked by the light cruiser
Philadelphia
and six destroyers.

Forty tortuous miles east of Brolo, Messina was the island’s last outpost; the toe of Italy protruded two and a half miles across the strait. Days before, the Germans had begun ferrying thousands of troops to the safety of the mainland, a massive retreat that went on for another week, inexplicably unmolested by the Allies.

Bernard may not have known at that point that the enemy was in the process of evacuating Sicily. But he knew all too well that his ultimate boss, Lieutenant General George Patton, the U.S. Seventh Army’s commander, was obsessed with beating British commander Bernard Montgomery and Monty’s British Eighth Army to Messina. Patton wasn’t the only American determined to outrace the Brits to Sicily’s northeastern edge. A BBC report given wide airing in Sicily that week suggested that Patton’s boys had the easier go of it against mainly Italian troops in the western part of the island, while Monty’s men had a tougher slog against Hitler’s finest along the eastern coast. There was more than a smidgeon of truth to the charge, but it nevertheless got doughboys riled up.

Even the impassive Omar Bradley, Patton’s deputy commander, was angling to outdo the Brits. “I confess that while no strategic purpose would be served by it,” Bradley recalled in his memoirs, “I was equally anxious to beat Monty to Messina, if it were possible without recklessness or undue casualties.”
²

The problem, of course, was that “recklessness” and “George Patton” went hand in hand; moreover, Patton rarely gave “undue casualties” a second thought if they stood between him and a headline. And that early August morning, with seven top combat reporters poised to herald his latest bid for military genius, Patton saw his name in a lot of headlines.

Ironically, it was corps commander Bradley and Third Division head
Lucian Truscott who came up with the notion of tapping the small naval force docked at recently captured Palermo. Their scheme was to launch amphibious assaults to leapfrog German defenses, cutting off the enemy’s means of escape along coastal road 113.
³

With Patton bleating in their ears, Bradley and Truscott rolled out their first amphibious end run along Sicily’s northern coast on the evening of August 7, 1943. Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s commandoes surprised the Germans by landing near Sant’Agata and San Fratello, some ten miles into enemy territory. Undetected, they sleuthed toward the Rosmarino River. That same night, in a choreographed move, Truscott’s inland troops opened an offensive against Germans holding the hills between the Third Division’s position and San Fratello.

The pincer movement confused the enemy—but only temporarily. Truscott and Bradley ended up disappointed with the mission’s results. The Third Division regulars struggled to gain ground against armored troops. Bernard’s battalion, meanwhile, got caught in the vise of a counterattack; it was trapped at the riverbank for the better part of two days before being relieved by another unit of Truscott’s infantry.

Dog tired, their ranks depleted, the Second Battalion men were ordered by Patton just hours later to perform another amphibious miracle at Brolo.
⁴
Truscott, chastened by the Sant’Agata experience, was wary of ordering another seaborne incursion unless he was convinced his inland troops could crack the German line around Cape Orlando and quickly link up with Bernard. The Brolo raid had been scheduled to jump off on August 9 but Truscott pleaded for and got a twenty-four-hour reprieve, although it rankled Patton. Bradley and Truscott wanted a similar delay on August 10 to get the Seventh and 15th Infantry Regiments closer to Brolo. But this time Patton refused, irking Bradley, who felt that Patton was undermining his prerogatives as corps commander.

Patton chewed out Truscott several times by phone, then blistered him, as depicted in
Patton
, in person at Truscott’s command post near Terranova, invoking Frederick the Great’s maxim: “
L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!
”

George Patton was good at preaching audacious courage when the lives
of other men were on the line. But even Patton had twinges of guilt. He wrote in his journal that night: “I may have been bull-headed.”
⁵

B
ULLHEADED INDEED
. “T
WO AMPHIBIOUS OPERATIONS
in three days is a nasty business, requiring more guts than are given the average man,” Bigart observed. Not a reporter given to sentimental outburst, Bigart was so inspired by the commandoes’ grit that his account of the August 7 raid imagined a postwar victory parade.

“There was one platoon in particular whose men should be remembered when they move down Fifth Avenue beneath the victory arch. They were the men of Lieutenant Jesse Ugalde, a twenty-one-year-old art student from Greeley, Col. Ugalde’s platoon was the only one to reach the objective in the Agata mission. Cut off, they held the edge of San Fratello for thirty hours without food or water, harassing the enemy retreat and killing or capturing a score of Germans.”

With barely a day’s rest, Bernard, Ugalde, and their men now were greasing their faces for another nighttime attack. “They walked with the heavy tread of men half drugged by want of sleep,” Bigart wrote.

The holds of the attack ships were brimming with tanks, half-tracks, and special amphibious trucks. DUKWs were marvels of American ingenuity, wheeled “duck boats” that could motor through waves, then drive onto a beach and into the fields beyond. To compensate for the men lost in the earlier raid, Bernard had been given a unit of Army Rangers. Bernard congregated his men at midnight, two and a half hours before H hour. Combat had wearied him, Bigart thought; Bernard looked much older than his early thirties.