Guns At Cassino (5 page)

`Don't
take it to heart, sir. Put it down to a bit of bad luck, eh?'

Fred
Walker had once been Clark's instructor at the War College and he felt he could talk to the tall rangy Army commander in a more familiar manner than most of the other Second Corps brass. On this icy December day, however, he was wrong - badly wrong. Clark swung round on him.

‘B
ad luck, eh?
Bad
luck
is all I ever hear in my command! One goddam piece of bad luck after another, staring at Salerno, Fred. I guess that was bad luck too, eh!'

General
Walker flushed and bit his lower lip to hold back his angry retort. Pearson, watching the exchange, felt for Walker. His Thirty-Six, a Texan National Guard outfit, was a hell of a mess. Not only were Walker's senior officers hopelessly incompetent, but the Regular Army man had indulged in a couple of bad cases of nepotism, appointing two of his own sons to high staff positions. The young aide knew that there were plenty of people on Clark's own staff who breathed a sigh of relief every time the Texans went out of the line, feeling that there at least they couldn't cause trouble.

`The
36th have had a hard row to hoe, General,' Keyes, the Corps Commander intervened hastily. 'It seems that Fred's doggies always get the hind tit.'

`Maybe
- maybe,' Clark said, staring down at the map again for a moment, as if he were trying to discover something there which was being hidden from his gaze purposely.

‘I
don't understand the Krauts, gentlemen,' he said, looking up again, his craggy face creased in bewilderment. 'Intelligence says they're strapped for bodies, yet they pull off a humdinger of an attack this morning. Was that thing on Peak 555 just a local attack? Or are they testing our strength in the Liri Valley prior to pulling off a major attack at the same time when we land?'

`You
mean at Anzio, sir?' Keyes asked in alarm.

`Of
course, I damn well do!' Clark snapped. 'Where else? What if when we go in at Anzio, they come down from that goddam peak and really lam into us? We'll be weakened by two divisions taking part in the Anzio landing as it is. Boy, they'd really catch us with our skivvies down.'

He
paused and looked round the faces of the assembled brass threateningly.

`And
I'd like you to remember if they did, all your heads would roll. I don't intend to be the fall guy like Eisenhower almost was at the Kasserine Pass. You understand that, don't you?' he added, lowering his voice so that they got the full significance of his threat.

`Yes,
General,' they mumbled.

Pearson,
watching the little scene, thanked God once again that he was not a regular officer, but an 'eighty-day wonder', in the Army for the duration of the war only. How often in these past nine months had he seen senior officers, whose orders could mean life or death for thousands of men, eat crow like this, all for the sake of advancement.

`All
right, gentlemen, what are we going to do?' Clark's voice rose again.
'This
is what we're gonna do! It's bad enough with those YBSOBs on Cassino staring down our throats every time we open 'em to yell chow. But I'm not going to tolerate the Krauts holding that Peak, ready to jump us down here whenever the hell they damn well please. Geoffrey,' he addressed Keyes, 'I'm going to take out Peak 555 with your guys.'

Keyes
absorbed the information in silence. Clark, he knew, would tell him what to do as usual; the Army Commander was not in business for suggestions at this particular moment.

`I
recommend you use Fred's 36th for the job.'

`But,
General,' Walker protested. 'My boys are scheduled for the crossing of the Rapido. I need all strength available for that. If I fritter my men away - ’ he shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.

`I
know, Fred. After all I am the Army Commander,' Clark said with barely concealed sarcasm.

`May
I make a suggestion, sir?' It was Colonel Porter, the soft-spoken second corps Deputy Chief-of-Staff, who Pearson thought looked more like a Mid-Western high school principal than a professional soldier.

`What
is it, Bob?' Clark asked.

`Why
not use the 93rd Regiment attached at the moment to General Walker's division?'

`
The
black
boys
!
'
someone among the brass exclaimed in surprise.

`Yes,'
Walker said emphatically. 'They've been up here four weeks now. They've got to go into action some time. We're strapped for men and even if they are relatively inexperienced, they outnumber those Teds up there three to one at least.'

Clark
hesitated. He was not a politically-minded man like Eisenhower or the limey Montgomery. But he did know enough of the situation in the USA to realize that America's first Negro combat regiment was a political issue, especially as the War Department had made so much publicity about them, plastering the front pages of papers all over the States with pictures of coloured master and staff sergeants in the supply services, sacrificing their rank to become PFCs in a combat outfit.

`What
do you think, Fred?' he asked at last.

Walker
hesitated.

Well,
General, they're as ready as they're ever gonna be. But I don't know.' He bit his lip. 'Hell, you know me - I command a Texan division and those buckos of mine don't like black boys. They don't even like white guys - if they don't come from Texas!'

There
was a burst of laughter from the rest of the brass, hastily suppressed when they saw the look on Clark's face. `What about you, Geoffrey?'

Keyes
was a much smarter man than Walker. At that moment, Pearson could see the Corps Commander's mind racing, trying to outguess the big Commanding General. Did Clark want the Negroes to carry out the attack or not? That was the problem. And in the end Keyes solved it in the manner that Pearson had come to expect from those senior officers who were going to survive the course. He compromised.

‘
Well, sir,' he said, 'Bob here and Fred say that the 93rd are trained and, after all they are volunteers, even their white officers. So their spirit should make up for their other defects. In addition they outnumber the Krauts, as Fred has pointed out. So I say, let them have a crack at taking out the Peak.' He shrugged. 'And if they don't pull it off, at least they'll have worn the Krauts down and we can still send in Fred's Texans.'

`Good,'
Clark picked up his cap with its outsize lieutenant-general's stars and nodded to Pearson to follow him, 'then that's that. The black boys will do it.'

With
Clark in the lead, the brass streamed out into the winter morning. The white helmeted MPs of his escort snapped to attention and the correspondents and cameramen surged forward, shouting questions and levelling their cameras to get a shot of Clark. As usual, the Fifth Army's Commanding General was more than approachable. Pearson grinned, as he turned his face so that the cameramen could photograph his left side - his best - and answered the correspondents' yelled demands for information with his conceit wrapped round him like a halo.

`Just
say, gentlemen,' he bellowed above the racket, 'that General Mark Clark's Fifth Army has got the situation well in hand. And off the cuff - so don't quote me on this, gentlemen - you can expect to hear that Peak 555 is back in the possession of General Mark Clark's Fifth Army within the next seven days. Okay, Pearson, let's get the hell out of here. It's colder than a well-digger's ass.'

The
brass snapped to attention and the jeep shot away, followed by the outrider escort of MPs on their gleaming motor cycles.

The
staff of the US Second Corps relaxed. Their hands came down from the gleaming lacquered helmets, with the silver and gold insignia. Someone broke wind. A colonel spat into the mud of the farmyard. Slowly they began to drift back into the farmhouse HQ.

‘
Waal,' the big Colonel who had spat, said to his neighbour in a thick Alabaman voice, heavy with whisky and a lifetime of prejudice, 'it sure looks as if those niggers are gonna get their asses well and truly licked, don't it?' He hawked and spat again.

Five

On the same morning that General Mark Clark visited the Second Corps, the Vulture gave the assembled officers of his Battle Group Wotan a little lecture.

Standing
in front of the new command post which he had set up between two prominent hillocks that Schulze had already nicknamed Twin Tits, he rasped:

`Gentlemen,
this is where we are going to stand. I have no further orders from Smiling Albert' - he allowed himself a cold little smile at the nickname - 'than these - stand and fight!'

He
flung out his hand in an expansive gesture and the assembled SS officers stared around at the barren mountain top, covered in the debris of war, which seemed such an offence to the noble dignity of the snow-capped peak towering above them.

`In
essence, gentlemen, we have an area of four square kilometres to defend and some fourteen hundred men to do it with? Now, I don't need to tell you that that is not a very large number of bodies. So what are we going to do?'

He
paused, tugged at the end of his monstrous nose which had turned salmon pink in the biting cold.

`We
must make this peak so costly to the Amis down there in the valley that they will give up in the end. Every man in this battle group who dies - and there will be plenty, you can be sure of that - must take six Amis with him. But as you can fully appreciate, we cannot do this if we do not make the most of the natural defences of this place.'

He
pointed his riding crop at a couple of the lanky Tyroleans idly scratching at the frozen rock a few metres away.

`Not
like that, of course. Ground, as you all know from your studies at Bad Toelz and since, is the raw material of the soldier, just as his weapons are his tools. A foolish inexperienced soldier does little with that raw material; an experienced solider shapes it exactly to his purpose. What then is the purpose of this peak which we now hold? At the moment it is simply an observation point. But is also an automatic target of attack by the enemy who not only wants to knock out this observation point, but also wants to use it for his own observation purposes. Thus, in modern warfare, the advance of an attacking army is from one piece of high ground to the next.'

Major
von Dodenburg let his eyes wander over the sterile earth of the mountain top, pitted with shell holes and littered with jagged pieces of rusting shrapnel like the scabs of some ugly skin disease. His gaze passed over the slope, covered with belts of ammunition, abandoned weapons, grenades which had not exploded, rags of uniform, paper - plenty of paper – and here and there, crumpled bodies, on to the Liri Valley below. In spite of the haze, and to the left a man-made smoke screen, he could see the Allied lines quite clearly: silent, with no visible movement, but somehow sinister in their very silence. `I have discovered in my years in the military,' the Vulture was saying, 'that the Army fits in well with a certain form of laziness. Army life is divided very equally between moments of hardship, fatigue, danger - and periods of inactivity. We had the former yesterday. Today - and every new day that dawns before the Amis attack - you gentlemen and your men are in for the latter.'

`What
do you mean, sir?' Schwarz asked, always eager for an opportunity to inspire the cynical veterans of the Wotan with National Socialist purpose and enthusiasm.

`I
mean, my dear Schwarz, that the men are going to dig, dig and dig yet more until they reach hell, as far as I am concerned.' The Vulture's voice rose harshly. 'Gentlemen we are going to turn Peak 555 into a fort that will never be taken. It will become a running sore for the Allies' His hard blue eyes swept round their eager faces, glowing in the cold air. ‘For if we don't stop the enemy here, gentlemen, Cassino over there will go, and with it the whole Winter Line. And if the Winter Line goes, we have lost Italy. The war will arrive then on the Reich's own doorstep and I don't have to tell you what that would mean to our hard-pressed homeland.
Meine
Herren
, that is all!'

Schwarz,
his black eyes gleaming fanatically, flung his arm up, as the rest snapped to attention.

`That
will never happen, sir,' he barked eagerly. `
Sieg
Heil!
'

`
Sieg
Heil!
' the cry rose and reverberated around the mountain top, harsh, brutal and arrogant, flung out like a challenge to fate itself.

One
hour later, the Wotan men began to transform Peak 555 into a fort. The ground was iron-hard, but a grenade buried in its surface soon softened it up so that the digging could commence. By the end of the first day, when the pale yellow ball of the winter snow started to slide behind the snow-covered peak, they had created a series of shallow holes all along the perimeter of the plateau below it. These were covered with sacking and rags which they had waterproofed with a mixture of rifle oil, paint, petrol and candle-wax. When the Americans still did not counter-attack on the following day, the hard work of digging commenced once more, the men burying into the Italian earth like moles. That evening their narrow one-man foxholes, each shaped like a coffin, were deep enough and they set about making them, comfortable. As a sweating Schulze joked to von Dodenburg: