The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Hoisting the heavy boats, their rifles banging against the gunwales, the men staggered toward the river on a narrow, muddy road. Enemy artillery now answered the American barrage, and the shriek of westbound volleys was exceeded by the rush of eastbound German shells and that she-wolf howling of Nebelwerfer rounds, also known as screaming meemies, moaning minnies, and howling heinies. “It could damn near make your blood turn solid,” one soldier confessed. Brown smoke foamed from mortar rounds tromping across the flats, and the maniacal cackle of machine guns carried from Sant’Angelo, including the dread MG-42, known in the Wehrmacht as “Hitler’s bandsaw.” Riflemen tossed away their cumbersome bandoliers, which soon lined the road like a trail of brass necklaces. A thousand smoke pots, ignited as a deception far south of Trocchio, drew more than five hundred German shells in two hours. U.S. artillery battalions received a frantic order to “check all shells for mustard gas as such shells had been issued by mistake” from an ammunition depot; no mustard was found or fired.

  Little else went right. An engineer guiding Company B to the oxbow missed the path to the river by several hundred yards; as the troops and boats turned around for a reverse march, their clatter attracted a German volley that cut down thirty men, including the captain who had distributed his cigars. Paddles, rifles, and human limbs rained across the road. Survivors scattered for cover, but the cleared corridors through the minefields were no longer visible: minesweeping teams initially had marked the paths with white tape, but switched to a brown cord that was less conspicuous to German observers. Confused GIs pelted through the fog, triggering shoe mines and drawing more mortar fire as sergeants tried to hush the wounded. “It’s pretty hard when you’re dying to keep quiet,” a platoon leader observed. Another befuddled guide also led Company A into a minefield. “We walked as men do in a cow pasture,” said one man, “placing each foot carefully on a pre-selected spot.”

  Corpses and abandoned M-2s blocked the swept lanes to the river. Screaming Nebelwerfer rounds reminded an officer of “a streetcar coming down sideways with its brakes on.” Exhausted men dragged the cumbersome rubber boats the last few hundred yards, tripping more mines. German flares silvered the water, and tracers sliced scarlet vectors through the fog, or bounced like flaming marbles off the Rapido. Those who managed to shoulder their vessels down the steep bank found that many had been holed and sank immediately; others capsized, dumping men and equipment into the icy river, or were swept away on the current.

  Soldiers fell without ever firing a shot. “It was like fighting an octopus in a crooked sack,” recalled Lieutenant William E. Everett, a platoon leader in Company C. Everett rebuked several men for shirking in a ditch, then realized they were dead. “I could hear paddles slapping and hitting together, and then the men yelling when their boat turned over,” another lieutenant wrote. “It curdled your blood to hear those men drown.” Sodden twill trousers and field jackets dragged the men under. “I had to let go of the young man and he drowned,” a private later said of one comrade. “Eight of us drowned and four swam to the German side.”

  By nine P.M., an hour into the attack, fewer than one hundred men had reached the west bank. Many burrowed into the marsh, using their helmets to scrape a few inches of defilade and piling the spoil in parapets around their shallow trenches. Thirty-one thousand artillery rounds had not discouraged the fuming German guns at Sant’Angelo. Glowing shell fragments blew in orange swarms across the bottoms. “Close explosions leave one vibrating like a tuning fork,” reported one soldier. At least four MG-42s stitched the oxbow crossing site with machine-gun fire. Of four footbridges to be laid across the Rapido, two were destroyed by artillery fire, and mines claimed a third. For hours engineers muscled the last span into the water, and by four A.M. on Friday the river had at last been bridged.

  Dozing men on the east bank were awakened to scramble across the rickety catwalk, squad by squad, platoon by platoon. “The Germans opened fire with every automatic weapon they had,” an officer said. “The slapping noise of the planks against the water would draw fire.” Another officer confessed to feeling “like a Judas goat, leading the sheep to slaughter.” By 6:30, as dawn leaked into the bottoms, about half of the 1st Battalion had reached the west bank. Shell fire damaged the bridge, dropping segments of the catwalk below the river surface. All radios had been ruined in the crossing; most artillery observers had been wounded or killed; and all phone lines back to the east bank were soon severed. So many litter carriers had fallen that few wounded could be evacuated across the river. “I don’t know how many dead and wounded there were,” a medic in Company A later recalled, “but there were plenty.”

  The 141st Infantry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Aaron A. Wyatt, Jr., had intended to send his 3rd Battalion on the heels of the 1st, but with the bridgehead barely two hundred yards deep he canceled the order. After a night of confusion, the new day simply brought more derangement, including contradictory orders that first instructed men on the west bank to hold fast, then advised them to pull back. A few scuttled across the submerged bridge or swam to safety, grabbing at tree roots to haul themselves onto the east bank. Most dug in to await reinforcements, or raised their arms in surrender. Engineers stretched a net across the Rapido, seining for bodies adrift on the current.

  Downstream, on the division left, the attack proved no less gallant and no more successful. “When I saw my regimental commander standing with tears in his eyes as we moved up to start the crossing, I knew something was wrong,” said the commander of Company L in the 143rd Infantry.

  Two crossing sites had been selected for the 143rd, and at eight P.M. on Thursday night the point platoon at the upper site paddled across without drawing fire. Then German gunners leaped to life, riddling the boats and wrecking a footbridge in progress. Engineers scorched back to the boat dump, where the regimental commander, Colonel William H. Martin, found them cowering in foxholes. Rallied with threats and supplications, the men lugged more M-2s to the river, and by six A.M. Friday most of the 1st Battalion—the late Captain Henry Waskow’s former unit—had reached the west bank.

  Their stay was brief. Machine guns and panzers flailed the bridgehead with grazing fire, lashing the buttocks, backs, and legs of soldiers unable to hug the ground any tighter. Facing annihilation, Major David M. Frazior shortly after seven A.M. asked permission for his battalion to return to the east bank. Walker refused, but by the time his stand-fast order arrived, Frazior had abandoned the bridgehead with the remnants of his command.

  Five hundred yards downstream, at the 3rd Battalion crossing site, no retreat was necessary since not a single soldier had reached the far shore. Plagued with bumbling engineers and skittish riflemen, companies had wandered in and out of minefields for hours. “The flashes seemed to turn the fog rising from the river into a reddish glow,” one officer wrote. “The men were unable to identify even the path at their feet.” At midnight the battalion commander reported that he had five boats remaining and still was unsure where to find the river; at five A.M. he was relieved of command, and his successor soon canceled the attack.

  This bad news was scribbled on a message slip for General Keyes and entrusted to a carrier pigeon by a II Corps liaison officer near the Rapido. At 7:25 A.M., with a great flutter of wings, the bird was released and flew straight to a nearby tree, perhaps dispirited by the fog and gunplay. “I had to throw dirt at it to get it out,” the officer reported. “When it flew to another tree, I just left it there.”

  Neither Keyes nor Walker needed a pigeon to tell him that the evening had not gone well. After sitting by the field phones in his command post all night, Walker advised his diary on January 21, “The attack last night was a failure.” But now what? Crossing the river in daylight would be foolish, he believed. Time was needed to draft new orders, to position new boats, and to replace leaders who had been wounded or killed. At 8:30 A.M., Walker told the 141st and 143rd to resume the attack in just over twelve hours, at nine P.M.

  Keyes had oth
er ideas. At ten A.M. he strode into Walker’s Monte Rotondo command post. A few minutes earlier, Clark had urged Keyes by phone to “bend every effort to get tanks and tank destroyers across promptly.” Keyes concurred. Weren’t there at least some troops from the 141st Infantry still on the west bank? he asked Walker. No effort should be spared to reinforce them, preferably before noon: the rising sun would blind German defenders. A II Corps staff officer with a clipboard sketched a crude map of the Rapido, with arrows pointing from east to west. Walker argued briefly, then agreed to set H-hour for two P.M.

  “Anybody can draw lines on a map,” he wrote after the corps commander drove away. “I felt like saying that battles are not won by wishing while ignoring the facts, but this was no place to court insubordination.” Instead, Walker channeled his frustration into his diary: “The stupidity of some higher commanders seems to be profound.”

  Neither Keyes nor Walker was privy to the secret, but Fifth Army’s attack had already fulfilled part of Clark’s ambition. An Ultra intercept two nights earlier disclosed that Field Marshal Kesselring had ordered the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division near Rome—half of his reserve force—to reinforce Tenth Army on the Garigliano; another decrypt soon revealed that the other half, the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, had also been ordered south, leaving the Anzio beaches virtually undefended. However ineffectual, the British X Corps attack had spooked the Germans. Kesselring believed that Tenth Army was hanging “by a slender thread.”

  This intelligence, available to Clark and Alexander but not to their subordinates, had little impact on the Rapido battle. Pressing the attack would further distract the enemy from SHINGLE, Clark believed. And if Walker could punch through at Sant’Angelo, unleashing his armored horde up the Liri Valley, so much the better.

  Off they went, trudging like men sent to the scaffold. A soldier stumping down a sunken road toward the Rapido observed, “There was a dead man every ten yards, just like they were in formation.” Close to the river, the formation thickened. Another soldier, carrying a rubber boat, later wrote, “It didn’t seem what we were walking on was dirt and rocks. We soon found out it was dead GIs.”

  On the division left, the 143rd Infantry crossed more adroitly on Friday afternoon than it had on Thursday evening. Confusion delayed the attack for two hours, but at four P.M., beneath a vast, choking smoke bank, the 3rd Battalion began to paddle west. By 6:30 all rifle companies had found the far shore, and Colonel Martin ordered his 2nd Battalion to follow in train late that night. A quarter mile upstream, the 1st Battalion also crossed at dusk, although the laconic battalion commander, Major Frazior, radioed, “I had a couple of fingers shot off.” Three battalions crowded a bridgehead only five hundred yards deep and six hundred yards wide. “When twilight turned to darkness,” one soldier later wrote, “I was thinking this is my last old day on earth.”

  On the division right, delay begat delay in the 141st Infantry. Not least, engineers neglected to bring an air compressor to inflate fifty rubber boats, and Colonel Wyatt, the regimental commander, postponed the attack until nine P.M. without telling Walker. By two A.M. on Saturday, a pair of footbridges had been laid, and six rifle companies from two battalions soon crossed. They found no survivors from the previous night’s combat. Engineers wondered whether the Germans had left the catwalks intact “to draw more of our troops over.” Some soldiers balked at crossing the river, or deliberately tumbled into the water. Others displayed uncommon valor. Company E of the 2nd Battalion—the unit roster boasted mostly Spanish surnames, Trevino and Gonzalez, Rivera and Hernandez—advanced with bayonets fixed through sleeting fire from three sides. “Fire wholeheartedly, men, fire wholeheartedly!” cried their commander, Captain John L. Chapin, before a bullet killed him. Corraled by minefields and barbed wire, the 141st held twenty-five acres of bottomland that grew bloodier by the hour. “Well, I guess this is it,” a major told a fellow officer. “May I shake hands?” Moments later a shard from a panzer shell tore open his chest. He dragged himself to safety across a submerged bridge, and medics saved him. “It was the only time,” one witness said, “I ever saw a man’s heart flopping around in his chest.”

  Artillery and Nebelwerfer drumfire methodically searched both bridgeheads, while machine guns opened on every sound, human and inhuman. GIs inched forward, feeling for trip wires and listening to German gun crews reload. “Get out of your holes, you yellow bellies!” an angry voice cried above the din, but to stand or even to kneel was to die. A sergeant in the 143rd Infantry described “one kid being hit by a machine gun—the bullets hitting him pushed his body along like a tin can.” Another sergeant wounded in the same battalion later wrote, “I could hear my bones cracking every time I moved. My right leg was so mangled I couldn’t get my boot off, on account of it was pointed to the rear.” German surgeons would remove the boot for him, along with both legs.

  A private sobbed as wounded comrades were dragged on shelter halves up the mud-slick east bank. Ambulances hauled them to a dressing station in a dank ravine behind Trocchio. Crowded tents “smelled like a slaughterhouse,” wrote the reporter Frank Gervasi. Outside a small cave in the hillside, a crudely printed sign read: PIECES. Inside, stacked burlap bags held the limbs of dismembered boys. On average, soldiers wounded on the Rapido received “definitive treatment” nine hours and forty-one minutes after they were hit, a medical study later found: nearly six hours to reach an aid station, followed by another three hours to a clearing station, and another hour to an evacuation hospital. The dead were easier: they were buried fully clothed without further examination.

  Certainly the doctors were busy enough with the living. Only five physicians manned the clearing station of the 111th Medical Battalion. They treated more than three hundred battle casualties on Friday, often struggling to mend the unmendable, and they would handle nearly as many on Saturday. A wounded sergeant undergoing surgery with only local anesthesia later reported, “The doctor stopped in the middle of the operation to smoke a cigarette and he gave me one too.” Another sergeant from the same company told a medic, “Patch up these holes and give me a gun. I’m going to kill every son of a bitch in Germany.”

  Three hundred German artillery rounds danced across Monte Rotondo before dawn on Saturday, causing casualties and disorder in the 36th Division command post. Dire reports from the river made the morning worse: heavy losses, no troops yet on the bluff at Sant’Angelo, ammo shortages, bridges wrecked. “Nearly six battalions across but no bridges,” Keyes wrote in his diary. “Something wrong.” The corps commander had ordered two Bailey bridges built despite the Americans’ shallow purchase on the west bank, but the effort—a six-hour task even under perfect conditions—had been undone by confusion among engineering units, rutted roads that kept trucks from reaching the Rapido, and incessant shooting. “Talking or coughing drew fire,” an engineer with the 143rd Infantry reported. On Saturday morning a visiting general found the bridge builders “dug in and no work being done.”

  Smoke hardly helped. To screen the crossings, hundreds of smoke pots and mortar rounds had been laid along the Rapido. Some zealous mortarmen pumped out twenty-one shells per minute, a rate of fire so intense that many tubes burned out. By Saturday morning, visibility was only fifty yards, blinding the observation posts on Trocchio and concealing German snipers who lurked near the river. American artillerymen were forced to orient their fire by sound, a method rarely effective on a cacophonous battlefield. Chemical officers in both the 36th Division and II Corps complained about German smoke without realizing that the dirty banks were their own.

  As the morning wore on, “a pathetic inertia seemed to take hold of American commanders,” wrote Martin Blumenson, author of the official Army history of the Rapido operation. Exhaustion, guilt, regret, despondency—all gnawed at them. A II Corps major who had fought in Algeria and Tunisia reported, “The situation as I saw it needed no further explanation to me because I had seen the same indications at St. Cloud and at Kasserine Pass.” Keyes remain
ed pugnacious, if not prudent, and at ten A.M. on Saturday he ordered Walker to prepare his reserve regiment, the 142nd Infantry, to reinforce those six battalions on the west bank. Surely the Germans were “groggy” and could be overpowered by fresh troops, he told Walker.

  But Clark in a phone call cautioned against throwing good money after bad. To Keyes’s vexation, the 142nd also reported that it needed almost fifteen hours to get ready and could not attack until early Sunday. When further dispatches from the river suggested that the 141st Infantry had been “practically wiped out,” Keyes rescinded his order. “You are not going to do it anyway,” he told Walker. “You might as well call it off. It can’t succeed as long as you feel that way about it.” In his diary Keyes wrote, “Our failure due to 1) lack of means 2) poor division.”

  The finger-pointing began. Clark “seemed inclined to find fault with our decision to force the Rapido,” Keyes wrote. The record, the corps commander added, would show that for months he had “pointed out [the] fallacy in going up the valley unless heights on either side were attacked! And each time I was overruled by [Fifth] Army.” For his part, Walker was furious at Keyes’s suggestion that he was disloyal and disobedient. “I have done everything possible to comply with his orders,” he wrote. During a brief visit to the 760th Tank Battalion, parked a quarter mile from the river, Walker told a tank crewman: “I knew from the beginning that this would never work. Too many damned Germans over there.”