The Day of Battle (51 page)

Of the last eighteen men treated, all but five had trench foot, including one soldier who studied the swollen, translucent appendages below his ankles and wrote, “They were almost like the feet of a dead man.”

With his left flank secured, Clark could now throw a roundhouse right to capture Monte Sammucro and San Pietro. Darby’s Rangers had skirmished with grenadiers on the flanks of the mountain since mid-November, usually in claustrophobic gunfights fought at close range across the talus. The 3rd Ranger Battalion had crept to the eastern fringe of San Pietro just before dawn on November 30; heavy fire pinned them down all day until they crawled away at nightfall with more than two dozen casualties. But two Ranger patrols in early December edged close to the village without drawing fire, fueling hopes that San Pietro and Sammucro had been abandoned. “I don’t think there are any Krauts up there,” declared Captain Rufus J. Cleghorn of the 143rd Infantry.

He soon learned otherwise. Cleghorn, a former Baylor University football player from Waco, Texas, impiously known as “Rufus the Loudmouth,” led his Company A up Sammucro’s east face on the evening of December 7. For five hours they climbed through swirling fog, the minesweeping detachment commanded by a lieutenant lugging a movie camera, a copy of Clausewitz’s
On War,
and a fruitcake from home. As they neared the pinnacle, labeled Hill 1205 on Cleghorn’s map, a sudden shout carried from above:
“Die kommen nach oben!”
Too late. The Americans swarmed over the crest in a brawl of muzzle flashes and pinging ricochets. By first light, 250 Yanks held the high ground. Flinging insults and grenades, Cleghorn and his band rolled boulders down the pitch at the field-gray shadows below. Grenadiers counterattacked, then counterattacked again, each time driven back until bodies lay like bloody stones across the slope. Private duels were fought in the fog, grenadier and rifleman darting among the rocks “like a couple of lizards.” Surveying a squad of dead Germans he had just mowed down with his Browning Automatic Rifle, a soldier murmured, “This is fun. This is like what I dreamed about.”

Two miles west and two thousand feet below, the attack on San Pietro proved less merry. Four battalions of long-range artillery shattered the village at five
A.M
. Wednesday, smashing the tailor shop and the post office and the Galilee porch of St. Michael’s church with its separate doors for women and men. At 6:20
A.M
., the 2nd Battalion of the 143rd Infantry crossed a shallow streambed from the southwest, “in magnificent skirmish lines just like the training manual ordered,” reported one witness. With rebel yells and Texas whoops, the men clattered four hundred yards to the edge of the olive terraces. There the whine of Meitzel’s machine guns stopped them as abruptly as a slammed door. Tracers lashed the ranks as the men dove for cover among the ancient olives, detonating mines and drawing mortar fire that boiled in orange clusters across the battlefield.

A sister battalion, the 3rd of the 143rd Infantry, surged into the fight, shaking out on either flank only to find the orchard terraces seeded with shoe mines and enemy pillboxes emplaced every twenty-five yards. “Ammo, damn it, we need ammo,” someone yelled above the roar. Men with fingers shot off were hastily bandaged and shoved back into the fight. Enemy artillery opened from Monte Lungo, across Highway 6 to the west, where German observers had an unobstructed view of the American ranks. Still a quarter mile from San Pietro, the attack faltered and slid back in an olive-drab ebb tide. Levitating bodies lay snagged across the German barbed wire. By nightfall the attackers had retreated almost to where they had started. They tried again Thursday morning—the rebel yells a bit subdued
this time—and again Meitzel’s grenadiers threw them back. In thirty-six hours losses in the two battalions exceeded 60 percent.

No assault on San Pietro was likely to succeed until German gunners were knocked from Monte Lungo. U.S. troops held the southern knob, but to seize the rest of the mile-long hogback the 1st Italian Motorized Group was chosen by General Keyes for Italy’s first battle on the side of the Allied angels. With
ROMA O MORTE
chalked on their rail cars, sixteen hundred soldiers in Alpine uniforms and feathered caps arrived in Mignano. Uphill they marched in heavy mist, two chattering battalions abreast, shouting threats and vowing to punish their erstwhile Axis allies for deserting them in Africa and Russia. For a few glorious minutes the attack went well. Then machine-gun cross fire hit the Italians—“like corn cut by a scythe,” in one account—and enraged grenadiers fell on the confused ranks with fists and clubs. Those who escaped downhill were said to be the fastest runners. Only massed U.S. artillery fire checked the German counterattack and prevented the Italians from being driven back to the Volturno. Losses at first were feared to exceed nine hundred, but stragglers reappeared and the final tally was pared to less than three hundred. “My troops,” the Italian commander wrote Keyes, “are not in a condition to be able to accomplish the missions which you have assigned them.”

Monte Lungo remained in German hands, and so too San Pietro. Only on Sammucro’s icy parapets had the attack succeeded, and there Captain Cleghorn, with reinforcements from the 1st Battalion, held firm despite frenzied enemy efforts to dislodge him. Sardinian mule skinners plodded up the mountain from Ceppagna each night, following trails marked with white tape or toilet paper. They brought rations and phone wire, grenades and dry socks, sulfa and Sterno and a daily water ration of five gallons per squad.
“Brrrr,”
the skinners told their little mules—the Italian equivalent of “Giddy-up”—urging the animals down the trail before daybreak, which was not difficult since the December nights were endless. Cooks and clerks wearing packboards also hauled up supplies, along with mail and a few improbable early Christmas gifts from home: one soldier shivering in a burrow was chagrined to receive a necktie. Seeing a small cairn of dead soldiers lying trailside near the crest, an officer wrote, “Splendid, husky young men. They seemed just barely dead.”

A hundred yards or so down the back slope, grenadiers shivered in their own burrows, close enough that a GI could “feel the presence of the enemy through the pores of [his] skin,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White. Once known as Huns or Jerries, now they were called Krauts or Teds—from the Italian
tedeschi
—or Blonds or Heinies or Graybacks. By any name, dead
ones lay scattered about, green and grotesque, and every few hours another counterattack added more to the landscape. Sometimes the Germans’ grenade volleys grew so intense, a U.S. soldier reported, that “we were holding our rifles so we could bat them off the way you bunt a baseball.” American artillery swept the slopes with white phosphorus, silhouetting the attackers and spattering Krauts, Teds, and Blonds with incandescent flakes. A speck the size of a pinhead would burn clean through a man’s leg unless plucked out with forceps or smothered with a mud poultice. Day and night, artillery reverberated against the low clouds, and the rumble echoed across the crags like querulous nagging. Men slept behind stone sangars with tracers whispering six inches overhead. “The fellow who stays out of sight the most is the one who lives the longest,” an officer advised. Few needed to be told twice. “I may be prejudiced,” a soldier told his buddy, “but I don’t like this place.”

Cleghorn’s Company A had been reinforced by Company B, commanded by another Texan, a twenty-five-year-old captain named Henry T. Waskow. Raised in the cotton country south of Temple, one of eight children in a family of German Baptists strapped enough to sew their clothes from flour sacking, Waskow was fair, blue-eyed, short, and sober—“a sweet little oddball,” in the estimate of a school chum. “He was never young,” another classmate recalled, “not in a crazy high school–kid way.” A teenage lay minister, Waskow took second prize in a statewide oratory contest, won the class presidency at Belton High School, and graduated with the highest grade-point average in twenty years. At Trinity College he joined the Texas Guard, in part for the dollar earned at each drill session, rising through the ranks on merit and zeal. At Salerno, Company B had fought with Darby at Chiunzi Pass.

“I guess I have always appeared as pretty much a queer cuss to all of you,” Waskow had written in a “just-in-case” letter to his family as he shipped overseas. “If I seemed strange at times, it was because I had weighty responsibilities that preyed on my mind and wouldn’t let me slack up to be human like I so wanted to be.”

Now, after almost a week on Sammucro, the entire 1st Battalion was hardly bigger than a company, and Waskow’s company no bigger than a platoon. Ammo stocks had dwindled again; the men threw grenade-sized rocks to keep the Germans dancing. At nightfall on Tuesday, December 14, the battalion crept forward beneath a bright moon and angled northwest along the massif toward Hill 730, a scabrous knoll almost directly behind San Pietro. The trail skirted a ravine with shadows so dense they seemed to swallow the moonbeams. “Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?” Waskow asked his company runner, Private Riley
Tidwell. The captain had a sudden craving for toast. “When we get back to the States,” Waskow added, “I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.”

Those were among his last mortal thoughts. German sentries had spotted the column moving across the scree slope. Machine guns cackled, mortars crumped, and Henry Waskow pitched over without a sound, mortally wounded by a shell fragment that tore open his chest. He had never been young, and he would never be old.

Wearing his trademark knit cap and tatty field jacket, Ernie Pyle had arrived in Ceppagna, at the base of the Sammucro trail, earlier on Tuesday. Pyle’s columns now appeared in two hundred daily newspapers, making him a national celebrity; Al Jolson joked that to soldiers he had become “Mr. God.” But in this disfigured village, only two miles from San Pietro, Pyle could find near anonymity as just another unwashed Yank a long way from home. In a dilapidated cowshed near the olive orchard that served as a mule livery, he set his typewriter on a packing case and then poked about the battalion base camp. Engineers were corduroying the muddy paths to the gun batteries, filling ruts with logs, stones, and brush. Occasionally, a serenade—a barrage of every gun in the corps, fired at the same time at the same target—screamed over the hills toward San Pietro.

Late at night the pack mules returned from Sammucro with bodies trussed facedown across their wooden saddles, each corpse slithering “on the mule’s back as if it were full of some inert liquid,” as one corporal wrote. Sardinian muleteers feared the dead and trailed behind the trains.

Pyle stood outside the cowshed and watched as the first body was unlashed. “They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall beside the road.”

Four other mules arrived. “This one is Captain Waskow,” a man said. Pyle watched and said nothing. “You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don’t ask silly questions,” he subsequently explained. A few days later, after returning to Fifth Army headquarters in Caserta, where he played gin rummy and drank to excess, Pyle would recall how the bodies lay uncovered in the shadows and how several of Waskow’s men edged over to the dead captain to voice regret—“I sure am sorry, sir”—or to curse—“God damn it to hell anyway!” Riley Tidwell appeared and the company runner held his commander’s hand, studying Waskow’s waxy face.

Pyle had written his most famous dispatch, perhaps the finest expository passage of World War II. But still he felt small in the presence of dead men. “I’ve lost the touch,” he told a friend. “This stuff stinks.”

Mark Clark had proposed using tanks to capture San Pietro as early as December 9. He had pressed Eisenhower and Alexander in the fall to send the 1st Armored Division—Old Ironsides—to Italy, and he felt chagrined that the mountainous terrain afforded so few chances to unleash it. Fred Walker, the 36th Division commander, doubted that the gullies and six-foot olive terraces ringing San Pietro would accommodate tanks, a skepticism reinforced in an early foray when the lead Sherman threw a track and blocked the trail.

Walker planned to try again at midday, Wednesday, December 15. This time the attack would be filmed by a pair of Signal Corps cameramen perched on Monte Rotondo, part of a movie crew working for Captain John Huston. Assigned by the War Department to document “the triumphal entry of the American forces into Rome,” Huston, who two years earlier had directed Humphrey Bogart in
The Maltese Falcon,
instead found himself trying to concoct a celluloid epic from the Army’s frustrated assault on an anonymous village in southern Italy. At least his cinematography would be unimpeded by trees: after weeks of shelling, Rotondo reportedly “looked as if a large mower had been used on the side of the hill.”