The Day of Battle (69 page)

Dawn, that harsh betrayer of predicaments, revealed this one. The Rangers occupied a triangular field half a mile across, bounded by the Conca road on the east, the Ponte Rotta road on the north, and a boggy skein of irrigation ditches to the west. Several hundred yards beyond the intersecting roads lay a rail embankment and the Cisterna train station. A ramshackle farmstead known as the Calcaprini house provided a command post for Dobson, who estimated that at least seven German machine guns now ranged his position from tree lines to the north and west.

Hardly had the Rangers begun to dig in than from the south came the creak of tank tracks. Certain that 4th Battalion had broken through with an armored spearhead, the men cheered lustily, until the underbrush parted to reveal the iron cross insignia of a Mk IV panzer.

“Then it opened up on us,” Corporal Ben W. Mosier recalled. “After the first volley, you felt naked.” Several self-propelled guns also clanked into view. Rangers swarmed forward. Shooting at vision slits, they leaped onto the hulls to lift the hatches and spray the crews with their tommy guns. Dobson shot a tank commander with his .45 pistol and flipped a white-phosphorus grenade into the turret. Milky smoke boiled from the vents; as he leaped from the tank, a bazooka round detonated against the bogie wheels, wounding him badly in the left hip.

From Highway 7 and the hills above Cisterna, German reinforcements boiled into the fight beneath an overcast sky that kept Allied warplanes at bay. Step by step the Rangers retreated until nine companies had squeezed into an exposed swatch three hundred yards across, just below the Ponte Rotta road; three others went to ground southeast of the main force. Wounded soldiers jammed a stone building near the Calcaprini house that had been converted to an aid station. As a German soldier crept toward the window with a grenade, medic Micky T. Romine shot him in the face with a .45. “I have shot that man a thousand times in my dreams,” he later confessed. Panzer machine guns stitched the ditches and marsh brakes. “You could run about twenty yards and then hit the ground,” Sergeant Thomas B. Fergen recalled. “If you waited longer, they got you.” A Ranger severely wounded in the face asked Fergen to shoot him. “We’re finished,” he said,
“and I don’t want them to get me.” Fergen shook his head. “Don’t be crazy,” he murmured.

Rangers held in reserve gave half their ammunition to comrades in the line, but by late morning precious little remained. German snipers fired from trees, houses, holes, and farm silos, each terrifying
pop!
punctuating the larger din. “The tracers were flying close enough to stop them with your hand,” a Ranger said. A platoon leader shot in the chest sprayed blood with every breath; so many leaders had fallen that their inexperienced subordinates struggled to adjust artillery fires.

Shortly after noon someone cried, “Them bastards is giving up!” Three hundred yards to the south, a dozen captured Rangers from the 3rd Battalion walked with their hands high toward the Calcaprini house, trailed by a German paratrooper squad and a pair of armored personnel carriers. As the group approached, Rangers on the flanks opened fire, killing two guards. Other Germans bayoneted two American captives in the back. “Surrender,” a voice called in accented English, “or we shall shoot the prisoners.” More Rangers tossed aside their rifles and with hands raised joined the captives. When the ragged procession closed to within 150 yards of the command post, a Ranger “fired a shot into our column and killed one of our men,” Captain Charles M. Shunstrom later recounted. “This one shot started everybody else firing, and the result was that two or three of our own men were killed in the column plus one or two German guards.” The Germans scattered as grenadiers and armor crews “started to spray our column of prisoners with automatic fire.” More Rangers surrendered, Shunstrom reported, and “even an attempt to stop them by shooting them failed.”

Darby for several hours had labored under the sweet illusion that despite 4th Battalion’s travails the infiltrators were “apparently okay,” as he told Truscott’s headquarters by phone. Shortly before five
A.M
., he added, “Things are going well.” But by first light he was worried. At 6:15 he reported that the Ranger force “is having a hell of a time. There isn’t any contact with my 1st and 3rd battalions.” A reconnaissance troop barreling up the Conca road in jeeps hit “a solid sheet of machine gun fire and hand grenades”; of forty-three men, only one escaped capture or death.

News from Truscott’s regiments was relentlessly grim. On Darby’s flanks, the 7th Infantry and 15th Infantry were each to have infiltrated a battalion followed by tanks. The 1st Battalion of the 15th Infantry was pinned down immediately and by nightfall on January 30 had covered barely a mile. The 1st Battalion of the 7th Infantry fared even worse, struggling with barbed wire, steep ditches, German flares, and casualties that by
sunset pared the unit from 800 men to 150. Sergeant Truman O. Olson, a machine gunner in B Company, fired more than three thousand rounds before being mortally wounded; he was among four 3rd Division soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for valor at Cisterna, three of them posthumously.

At seven
A.M
., the first radio dispatch from Major Dobson—with word of Miller’s death—told Darby that his entire command was at risk. An hour later, the news was even more dire, but the radio failed and not until early afternoon could signalers again raise the embattled Rangers at the Calcaprini house. A weepy 1st Battalion captain sounded so overwrought that Darby asked to speak to Sergeant Major Robert E. Ehalt, one of his original Rangers.

“Some of the fellows are giving up, Colonel.” Ehalt spoke slowly, his voice steady. “We are awfully sorry. They can’t help it, because we’re running out of ammunition. But I ain’t surrendering.”

An eavesdropping stenographer at Conca jotted down Darby’s frantic reply. “Shoot if they come any closer,” he said. “Issue some orders but don’t let the boys give up…. Who’s walking in with their hands up? Don’t letthem do it! Get the officers to shoot…. Get the old men together and lam for it…. We’re coming through…. Hang on to this radio until the last minute. How many men are still with you? Stick together.”

Muffled gunfire crackled through the speaker. “They are coming into the building now,” Ehalt said. “So long, Colonel. Maybe when it’s all over I’ll see you again.”

“Use your head and do what is best,” Darby said. “You’re there and I’m here, unfortunately, and I can’t help you. But whatever happens, God bless you…. God bless all of you.”

Darby’s voice thickened. “Ehalt, I leave everything in your hands,” he said. “Tell the men I am with them to the end.”

A moment later he phoned Truscott. “My old sergeant major stayed with the last ten men. It apparently was too much for them.” Then, asking his staff to leave the room, Darby laid his head on his arms and sobbed. Sergeant Carlo Contrera, who had served as Darby’s driver since North Africa, later observed, “He couldn’t stand the thought of what was happening to them.”

Truscott had stood watch on the second floor of his Conca monastery from two
A.M
. until first light on Sunday. To the north, German tracers flailed a landscape washed in cold flare light, and artillery flashes limned the horizon. “Situation is confused,” noted the 3rd Division log. At dawn a fleet of Sherman tanks and tank destroyers lumbered up the Conca road.
“Smoke, dust, the tiny darting figures of men, a great cacophony,” wrote another officer, watching through the upstairs casement.

Confusion and cacophony persisted all day. Teller mines halted the tanks just two hundred yards past the 4th Rangers at Isola Bella; eventually the German roadblock gave way, but an even stronger blocking position at Femina Morta—place of the dead woman—again thwarted the American drive. Darby’s account of his conversation with Ehalt struck Truscott like a physical blow. “Whole show is folded,” the division log recorded. “General very disturbed.”

Litter bearers staggered back across the polders, “packing meat.” Exhausted soldiers chewed malt and dextrose tablets, their eyelids “heavy as silver dollars,” the mortarman Hans Juergensen wrote. Audie Murphy, now a sergeant and recently returned to the 3rd Division after a bout of malaria, described “jeeps drawing trailerloads of corpses…. Arms and legs bobble grotesquely over the sides of the vehicles.” A German shell knocked Murphy senseless; upon regaining consciousness, he found the soldier next to him dead. “Living now becomes a matter of destiny, or pure luck,” he wrote. “The medics are bloody as butchers…. I see one medic fall dead on a man whose wounds he was dressing. A scrap of metal severed his backbone.”

For a renewed push on Monday, January 31, half a dozen generals crowded the Conca monastery, including Clark and Lucas. Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers, visiting from Algiers, brought a bottle of Gilbey’s gin for Truscott’s throat, now “considerably worse” from too many cigarettes and too little sleep. Low clouds precluded air support, again, and the high command’s hopes rested with Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey, whose 2nd Battalion of the 15th Infantry was to veer west of Isola Bella before driving north into Cisterna. Toffey had endured his own close calls at Anzio, escaping with a shredded field jacket and minor wounds when a mine demolished his jeep. “Generally decrepit but still in there punching okay,” he wrote Helen on January 29. His men had deftly seized three bridges over the Mussolini Canal and destroyed four others. “Tired but sleepless; never loses aplomb or sense of humor,” Will Lang jotted in his notebook after following Toffey across the beachhead. “Not a man to let a weapon sit around without using it.”

“Toffey is rolling,” a staff officer noted in the monastery at midday. Yet even with every weapon in the battalion blazing, the enemy entrenchment was too formidable. Toffey covered 2,500 yards, closing almost to the Calcaprini house before a German fusillade drove his troops to ground. On Toffey’s left, riflemen from the 1st Battalion of the 7th Infantry crossed the rail tracks two miles northwest of Cisterna, a feat that
would not be repeated for another four months; but by early Tuesday the battalion “barely existed as a fighting force,” one captain reported. The enemy line buckled a bit, yielding a mile along a five-mile front, and more than two hundred German prisoners were seized around Femina Morta. Then the line stiffened. “All afternoon we throw ourselves against the enemy,” Audie Murphy wrote. “If the suffering of men could do the job, the German lines would be split wide open. But not one real dent do we make.”

The division was spent, and Truscott knew it. The final mile to Cisterna proved a mile too far. Some companies mustered fewer than two dozen men. Wary of a German counterattack, Truscott ordered his men to dig in and hold tight. He would give Toffey a Silver Star for “fearless leadership” in a lost cause.

As for the Rangers, the sanguinary weekend spilled into Monday. A mortar barrage hit the command post, killing Darby’s intelligence officer and five enlisted men. Late in the day, his eyes red, haggard beyond his thirty-two years, Darby drove to the bivouac near the Mussolini Canal where hundreds of bedrolls and barracks bags stood piled on canvas ground cloths, neatly stenciled with the names and serial numbers of men who would never return to collect them.

Captured Rangers shuffled five abreast around Rome’s Colosseum for the benefit of German photographers. Italian Fascists jeered and spat from their balconies as the column snaked off to temporary prison pens, including the grease pits in a Roman streetcar barn. A few escaped, but most would spend the duration in German camps like Stalag IIB, sharing huts with men captured a year earlier at Kasserine Pass. In mid-March, a thick stack of postcards would be mailed to wives and parents across America: “I am a prisoner in German captivity, but in perfect health.”

The February 1 morning report for the 1st Ranger Battalion listed page after page of Rangers whose status was changed from “duty” to “MIA”: Brown and Hendrickson, Hooks and Keough, Padilla and Perry and Hurtado and Buddenhagen. Of 767 men who had trekked up the Pantano Ditch with the 1st and 3rd Battalions, only 8 escaped the calamity at Cisterna. An estimated 250 to 300 were dead, and the others, including Sergeant Major Ehalt, had been captured. Moreover, the 4th Battalion suffered 50 percent casualties. Anglo-American losses on January 30 approached 1,500, more than double the D-day casualties at Salerno. German dead, wounded, and missing for the weekend exceeded 1,000. “The enemy has suffered heavily, but our own losses have been high,” the Fourteenth Army log noted on January 31.

The hunt for scapegoats began promptly. Clark told his diary that he was “distressed” to discover that the lightly armed Rangers had been used to spearhead the 3rd Division attack at Cisterna, “a definite error in judgment.” Clark blamed Truscott and contemplated relieving him until Lucas pointed out that as corps commander he had approved the plan, even though he was surprised to discover that Darby’s infiltration tactic consisted of simply slogging up a ditch. The calamity remained secret for six weeks, when German newsreels of the captive Rangers and tales from the beachhead inspired febrile newspaper allusions to the Alamo and the Little Big Horn. An inquiry ordered by Clark made little headway—most witnesses were either dead or in German cages—and a VI Corps staff officer suggested that the massacre had been “contributed to by so many factors that it can be ascribed only to chance.”

Today eclipsed yesterday, as it always did on the battlefield, and the high command turned to more pressing concerns. The beachhead on the VI Corps right had expanded roughly three miles in three days, while the British and the 1st Armored Division on the left had pushed a salient toward Campoleone four miles deep and two miles wide. Kesselring’s counterpunch, postponed yet again because of the spoiling attack at Cisterna, had now been rescheduled for February 4, a fact gleaned by Clark a day in advance thanks to Ultra. In a radio message from Caserta, the army commander advised Lucas that orders to capture Cisterna were “rescinded…. You should now consolidate your beachhead and make suitable dispositions to meet an attack.”