Assignment to Hell (36 page)

The Rapido was something out of Dante’s
Inferno
. For more than a week, the two sides had been exchanging wretched artillery and machine gun fire. As they had done throughout Italy, the Germans had implanted thousands of mines. On the evening of January 20, in the chaos of the initial charge across the Rapido, a company of GIs from the 141st Infantry had stumbled into a minefield; one explosion followed another, each punctuated by chilling screams. Many bodies had been rotting for three or four days, some longer.

In the hours leading up to the truce, the Germans carried American corpses down from the hills sub rosa, lest U.S. medics deduce exactly where enemy troops were positioned. Working in concert, medics from both sides stacked the mutilated remains of some eighty bodies; virtually all belonged to the 141st.
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Many of the riverbed victims had perished in the artillery exchange that signaled the beginning of the nighttime attack. Others had succumbed the following morning when the American high command, despite appalling losses and the attack’s failure to gain any ground, ordered the assault renewed.

Hal Boyle had seen all manner of death and deprivation in North Africa and Sicily and during the push north from the beachhead at Salerno. But he’d never witnessed anything like the carnage along what GIs were now calling Purple Heart Valley. No one had. On top of the hundreds of deaths inflicted by mines and guns, scores of Allied soldiers drowned when the Germans dynamited upriver dams and levees, sending water rampaging down the Rapido and Garigliano.

The 36th Division had already been through hell in Italy, absorbing big losses on the Paestum beachhead, during the bloody crawl up the Sele Valley, and in the mountains surrounding San Pietro Infine. Its roots were in Texas as a National Guard outfit. The men proudly wore their Texas allegiance in the patches on their sleeves; a T was embedded in their unit’s insignia. But so many “T-Patchers” had been killed and wounded that the
division no longer had a dominant Texas flavor. Along the Rapido alone, more than four hundred men in just three regiments of the 36th had perished. One company sent into the hellhole lost all but 17 of 184 men.
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The Rapido crossings were, in sum, a tragic—and utterly avoidable—reprise of Great War foolishness.

Ironically, the 36th’s commander, General Fred L. Walker, was a World War I veteran who’d earned his stripes in July 1918 rebuffing a reckless German attack across the Marne River.
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It’s clear from Walker’s bitter diary entries that he knew fording a stream against an enemy entrenched on high ground would be disastrous.

The 36th’s gambit was supposed to be part of a coordinated series of assaults against enemy positions in the hills bordering the Liri Valley and its 1,300-year-old Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino. But earlier flanking thrusts by the British 46th Division and a group of Free French Algerians and Moroccans had failed to dislodge the Germans; both Allied units were forced to retreat.

Without personally eyeballing the 36th’s position, Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the Fifth Army’s commander, insisted that the river attack go off as planned. Clark and the overall British commander, Sir Harold Alexander, wanted the 15th Panzer Grenadiers occupied so they could not be sent northwest to reinforce the beachhead at Anzio, where a big—but, as it turned out, not big enough—Allied amphibious end run was scheduled to take place on January 22.
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On January 23, three days after the 36th’s assault, Boyle filed a story about the heroic actions of Staff Sergeant William C. Weber of St. Marys, Pennsylvania, a rifle platoon leader in the 142nd Regiment. Weber and another member of the 142nd, a private from Rockford, Illinois, named Harry W. Lund, dove into the frigid Rapido to save six companions who’d somehow survived the onslaught while stranded on the far side. Boyle caught up with Lund and Weber a few minutes after the dramatic rescue; they were shivering in a dugout on the “safe” side of the river.

“We figured the best way back after the situation became hopeless was over one of the [temporary] pontoon bridges not knocked out,” Private Lund told Boyle. “We found the bridge all right, but it was half sunk in the
middle of the river. I tied a rope around me and swam out and tied it to the bridge. Then we tried to pull it into position. We couldn’t because one section was under four feet of water.

“I tied a piece of communications wire around me and set out again,” Lund continued. “This time I tried to swim to the other side, but I was tired and might have drowned if the boys hadn’t hauled me back. Then Sergeant Weber said he would try it.”

“I took off all the clothes I could so I would not get waterlogged,” Weber told Boyle. “I was out as far as I could—it was like somebody putting an icicle on your toe and running it up to your waist. But that current bothered me more than the cold water. There was also an awful undertow. I was never sure I would get over until I finally crawled out on the other side.”
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GI
S COULDN’T BE SURE OF
much that winter: Visibility was so poor and the fighting so intense along the Rapido that, for weeks, Allied and German lines got confused. Early one morning in late January a captain from San Antonio named John Henning was on the far side of the river looking for the rest of his patrol. Armed only with his service revolver, Henning suddenly happened upon a Volkswagen jeep carrying a pile of enemy soldiers and dragging a seventy-five-millimeter gun.

Henning, a North Africa veteran “not exactly unacquainted with the working of the Teutonic mind,” told Hal Boyle that he decided to try a bold bluff.

“Henning jumped into a crevice, and as the bouncy little volkswagon
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with its cargo of Nazis rolled past, he suddenly called out: ‘Halt!’”

The Germans rolled right past but hit the brakes when Henning yelled even louder. “Believing they were surrounded, they climbed off the volkswagon and gave themselves up.” Henning knew he’d be overpowered if they realized he was all alone, so he called out for help; fortunately, two GIs were nearby.

“A few minutes later,” Boyle wrote, “the crestfallen Germans were marching to a prisoners’ camp, and their 75-mm gun was earmarked for an American ordnance dump.”
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In Italy there weren’t enough moments of semitriumph like Captain Henning’s. On January 27, the day of the truce, Boyle interviewed Captain Kaplan and the team that had brought back some twenty-five bodies and four wounded men, one of whom happened to be a medic who’d been languishing for days. “When he was lifted into a litter, [the medic] grinned feebly and said: ‘Look, I have got maid service—you can’t beat this battlefield!’”

Within minutes of the truce’s expiration, “both sides opened up with heavy, rolling artillery barrages,” Boyle wrote. “This sector of the sanguinary Rapido River again became a ‘no-man’s-land.’”
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“S
ANGUINARY” WAS A FAVORITE ADJECTIVE
of both Boyle’s and Bigart’s. It means “bloody,” and there was no shortage of opportunity to use it in the Italy of 1943 and 1944. Italy was, as Ernie Pyle called it, a “tough old gut,” pockmarked with one gory field after another. The insidious German strategy that Boyle and Bigart witnessed firsthand in Sicily—blowing up roads and bridges, falling back to high ground, turning and fighting, then slipping away to blow up more roads and bridges and falling back to even higher ground—was magnified on the mainland.

In Sicily, Albert Kesselring, the crafty commander of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group C, was constrained by the geography of a small island. There were no such constraints up Italy’s boot, where deep rivers and daunting mountain ranges provided the stuff of Confederate General James Longstreet’s dreams: natural boundaries that could be fiercely defended.

Indeed, Italy’s topography lent itself to the rearguard warfare at which the Germans had become expert, much to Hitler’s dismay. Kesselring, Joe Liebling wrote after the war, was an anomaly: a Göring protégé who never became a fanatic Nazi, a onetime artillery officer who’d learned to fly at age forty-eight, and an early blitzkrieg proponent whose name later became synonymous with defensive warfare.
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The
Generalfeldmarschall
and his officers studied south-central Italy’s hills and streams and established a series of lines between Naples and Rome, collectively known as the Winter Line, to which they would retreat once Allied troops began pressing north.
The mountains beyond the Volturno River constituted Kesselring’s first row of defense. A few miles north came the Barbara Line, followed by the Reinhard and Gustav (aka Hitler) Lines running in front of Monte Cassino. Anchored in the rugged central Apennines, the Gustav Line proved nearly impenetrable.

It was all by wicked design. Kesselring wanted his lines farther south to retard the Allies. He wanted the Gustav Line to wreck them.

Historians often compare the long-drawn-out battle for Italy to World War I’s trench warfare. But Homer Bigart plumbed that analogy long before academics got ahold of it. Early in the campaign, Bigart drew parallels to Britain’s ill-advised maneuvers in Turkey in 1915. And by late winter Bigart was writing the likes of: “It is a depressing experience to return from the Anzio beachhead, where front-line misery rivals World War [I] Flanders.”
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Bigart’s pointed reporting on the Anzio-Cassino stalemate earned him the enmity of Allied censors, chronic grumbling from Mark Clark and his deputy Geoff Keyes, and a stinging rebuke from Sir Harold Alexander. Allied commanders complained that skeptical reporting from Bigart and others was hurting troop morale and undermining the war effort back home.

But the irony is that the correspondents covering the war in Italy didn’t come close to reporting its ugly truths. With men still fighting and dying, journalists such as Bigart, Boyle, and CBS’ Eric Sevareid censored themselves. Had they accurately described the perils faced by Allied troops, there would have been a public outcry to stop the “senseless slaughter,” Sevareid said after the war.
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Boyle’s coverage of Italy was less barbed than Bigart’s; as always, it focused more on the grunts in the field than the dubious decision making of their bosses. But it was so human and powerful that it helped win Boyle a Pulitzer Prize.

Much of Italy’s fighting evoked not just Great War despair, but also the cannibalism of Cold Harbor. Members of the 36th along the Rapido weren’t the only Allied troops sent to almost certain death, much like U. S. Grant’s men late in the Civil War. The GIs who dug in along the Volturno and places farther north “were living in almost inconceivable misery,” Ernie Pyle wrote.
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Stars and Stripes
cartoonist Bill Mauldin spent weeks trying to sleep in Italy’s ubiquitous muck, but concluded that lying on rocks was more comfortable. “Rocks are better than mud because you can curl yourself around the big rocks, even if you wake up with sore bruises where the little rocks dug into you. When you wake up in the mud your cigarettes are all wet and you have an ache in your joints and a rattle in your chest.”
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T
HE
I
TALIAN CAMPAIGN GAVE A
lot of people aches in their joints. It’s where Winston Churchill’s great Mediterranean gamble finally fell apart. It’s where Franklin Roosevelt should have listened to George Marshall and drawn the line with Churchill and the Brits. But FDR exercised the kind of commander-in-chief restraint that most commentators laud: He left the ultimate decision on the wisdom of invading the Italian mainland to his field commander, Eisenhower. In mid-July 1943, one week into what appeared to be a relatively “easy” invasion of Sicily, Ike green-lighted Operation Avalanche, and put his top deputy, Mark Clark, in charge of Italian invasion planning. Clark assumed command of what he would soon insist on calling—over the snickers of correspondents—“Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army.”

At that moment, the Churchill-Eisenhower logic seemed compelling: A quick Allied thrust would decimate the Italian army, keep German
Panzer
units back on their heels and away from northern France, and give the Allied bombing command better airfields from which to attack Nazi fortifications and oil fields along the Adriatic and points north.

Yet what Allied planners failed to grasp is that in both North Africa and Sicily, the Wehrmacht essentially fought with one hand tied behind its back. In the earlier Mediterranean campaigns, the German army had been hamstrung by long supply lines and Hitler’s indifference to the area’s geostrategic significance.

All that changed in September 1943 once Montgomery’s Brits and Canadians came ashore at Reggio di Calabria on Italy’s toe and a polyglot force led by Clark and the Americans landed two hundred miles north at Salerno. Italy, after all, was part of Hitler’s
Festung Europa
, which of late
had developed its first fissures. Germany’s Eastern Front had begun to collapse; the Germans had just suffered an epic defeat in the tank battle at Kursk. Hitler didn’t want another humiliation on the Reich’s southern perimeter. To buck up Kesselring, Hitler sent sixteen fresh divisions to Italy, insisting that the mountainous country be fanatically defended.

The Nazis were also zealous in punishing the traitorous Italians. Six hundred thousand Italian soldiers were marched at gunpoint into slave labor. Tens of thousands of other
soldati
were executed, along with incalculable numbers of Italian civilians. As Allied troops grew nearer, scores of museums and precious Roman artifacts were ransacked or firebombed.

Hitler also abruptly ended Mussolini’s “lenient” policies toward Jews. That fall, some twelve thousand Italian Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. But the Italian people, led by valiant priests and nuns, effectively “hid” 80 percent of the country’s Jewish population from the Gestapo. Had the clergy been discovered concealing Jews, they would have been murdered; many were anyway.

Kesselring had a clear objective and strategy: sucker punch the Allies up the peninsula, wage a war of attrition, and wait for an opportune moment to expose and eviscerate the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth Armies.
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