The 504 and the 505 initially moved to the Mount Soprano area of the beachhead to relieve units from the 36th Infantry Division. I mainly remember how heavily loaded we were. I was carrying my own weight, nearly 150 pounds—my individual weapon, a rocket launcher, several rockets, a can of MG ammunition, and my personal gear. Our heavier equipment was dropped in equipment bundles. The real problem was how to transport it once we were assembled. The recent medical evacuations had made the regiment way under-strength, yet every squad had to carry the same armament as if it had all its members. This meant a far heavier load for every one of us.
On September 16, the 504 was given the mission of taking the high ground around Altavilla. Now very heavily defended by the Germans, this area had already changed hands several times. The 505 was to set up roadblocks on Mount Soprano and the surrounding foothills to preclude any movement of German forces from that end of the beachhead. Company F’s position was not too high up on the range. We were to wait there for contact with the British, who were still working their way northward to Naples.
British lorries took us to our initial position. We didn’t meet any resistance. Our elevation offered us a ringside seat to observe the fireworks of aerial and naval warfare. A hasty airfield had been set up as one of our first objectives. The Army Air Corps, using P-38s, a twin-fuselage fighter aircraft, attempted to schedule constant air cover, but at times the scheduling was off. The Germans had very close observation over the beachhead, and the minute the P-38s hit the airstrip, their fighters and fighter-bombers came in over the mountain ranges and gave the naval flotilla a working over. This is the first time I had ever seen a direct hit on an oil tanker or an ammo freighter. They went up with a tremendous bang.
By this time, I had been in my squad for about five weeks, and I was getting to know the men. At eighteen, I was the youngest, although they thought I was twenty-one. I doubt that anyone in the squad was over twenty-three. There was J. E. Jones, whom I particularly liked, an easy-going, happy-go-lucky guy from Alabama or Georgia; George Paris, a Regular Army man; Charles Blankenship, another Southerner, a big, friendly fellow who was in the Army before Pearl Harbor and transferred to the paratroopers; our BAR man, Angus Reedy; Robert L. Smith, a married soldier we always kidded because he was so faithful to his wife; and Tommy Watro, our sniper, an original 505er from Johnson City, New York. I’m pretty sure they were all privates first class. They were all “old” men who had made the jump in Sicily, as did our sergeant, John P. Gore, who came from Indianapolis, I believe. The only other “new” man I can recall was Hubert Pack, who had been an EGB448 like myself.
I give full credit to everyone who jumped in Sicily, but we still didn’t have too many battle-wise, seasoned veterans in the 2d Battalion. Everyone from battalion commander on down was still receiving much needed on-the-job training in Italy. Our company commander, Capt. Neal McRoberts, for example, was a university graduate, but he had little battle experience. Sergeant Gore had gone straight to Parachute School after thirteen weeks of basic training, and I noticed he still was none too sure of himself.
This situation was partly due to the fact that the 1st and 3d Battalions had seen most of the heavier fighting in Sicily. In combat, everything depends on the factors of a particular action. You can’t always rigidly follow the rules. Arnone, especially, gave us the chance to learn to adapt our tactics in the heat of battle, with relatively little loss of life. But Italy served as one big training experience for the entire 505, not only for the 2d Battalion. The whole 82d Airborne Division was very fortunate to have experienced combat prior to Normandy.
The first couple days on Mount Soprano, we were in roadblock positions, mainly waiting for the Brits to move up to us. We received artillery fire, but there were no close engagements.
During this time, I began to have trouble eating. If there was one weakness in the parachute infantry units, it was feeding the troops. Unlike other kinds of troops, we never received a hot meal once we were committed. Our regiments were meant to be lean, mean, and swift. We were lean all right, but we were so overloaded that we couldn’t move as quickly as the organizers intended. We carried in everything we ate.
In a combat situation, this meant we were never more than one or two meals ahead. We never sat down or had regular meal hours; we ate on the go, as food was needed. In Italy, I think I jumped with a day of K rations and two or three days of D rations, which were used strictly for emergencies. D rations consisted of a single semi-sweet chocolate bar, heavily wrapped in waterproof paper. K rations came in waxed, waterproof boxes that each contained one meal.
Usually after we made contact with the sea-borne forces or the main body, they would issue C rations, which were much better, but bulkier, than K rations. Each meal had two cans—one containing hash, stew, or beans, and the other biscuits. Otherwise, we tried to make out by scrounging, so I have had my fill of boiled chicken-in-a-helmet. But early on in Italy, when we were in isolated, mountainous terrain far from any villages, with no one or nothing to pilfer, living off the land was not an option.
Moreover, the rations just weren’t getting down to us. We often went without eating for part of the day, and would sometimes go a full day or more without eating at all. When we did have C rations, they normally weren’t too bad if we could get them near a fire and heat them up to get the grease mixed in, or pour it off, but this was rarely possible on the front lines. They weren’t all that appetizing cold, and the grease was hell on the system. The trouble I began to have stomaching them now would lead to real problems later on.
The British made contact at our roadblock. We were relieved of duty about five days later, and marched down to the beachhead. We loaded onto trucks and moved northeast to Rocca d’Aspide, in a mountainous area south of Naples. Our main activity there was to go out on combat patrols. I remember being out in advance of the main body on one of these, a long, hard patrol over rugged terrain.
We stuck more or less to the roads and the trails, but whenever we did move into a settled area, the natives were all out, cheering us and greeting us as liberators. Every third or fourth person could speak some broken English, and would tell us they had relatives living in the United States. More often than not it was in Brooklyn. This astonished me, because only a few days earlier these same people had been our enemies, yet here they were, obviously proud to have family members in the States. There were even American flags flying from some of the houses. I always wondered if their relatives sent them.
I particularly remember a funny incident when we entered one of these villages full of cheering people. It was a hot afternoon, and a priest stepped out of the crowd and handed me a glass of water. Without thinking, I downed it in one large gulp. Suddenly, I had a sputtering hot throat and mouth, and my stomach was on fire. I had just been introduced to grappa—a colorless liqueur of pure distilled spirits. After that, no matter how hot the day, I usually took a tentative first sip of any drink that people in the crowd handed out to me.
We had a lot of Americans of Italian descent in Company F who could speak Italian, so we were able to communicate pretty well with the natives. One of our Italian speakers was Richard Tedeschi, called “Teddy,” a dark, wiry guy from the Bronx, who was so small I don’t know how he made the weight requirement to get into the troopers. Teddy and others told us many things that made us realize why the villagers were cheering our arrival. There were lots of stories of German atrocities, which had especially occurred in the last few days. The villagers said, for example, that when the Germans were moving, they sometimes tossed grenades from their truck out into the crowds on the roads just for the hell of it, causing casualties among the civilians.
Moving northward, the 505 reached Castellamare and the Sarno plain by the evening of September 29. Our own group never made contact with the Germans, but our patrols were extremely fatiguing because of the mountainous terrain. I marched in the rain through a number of nights, but the dates and locations all run together.
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p; I do remember September 29 because of a terrible accident that happened on the road. At that point we were being transported by British lorries. Company F, or at least my platoon, had been lucky enough not to encounter much resistance along the way. We had been strafed once or twice, but we hadn’t sustained any casualties. When we loaded up, we folded down what seats there were, then stacked our weapons in the right front corner of the lorry bed to make more room to lie down in the back. We all were exhausted and grateful to get some rest.
We were moving along with most of us asleep when suddenly the lorry stopped. The order came to de-truck fast. We all sat up and instantly reached for our weapons. Reedy reached over to grab his BAR. Like all of us, he was scurrying to get out of the truck, and he pulled the BAR towards him, muzzle first. In a split second, the weapon went off, firing three rounds rapid fire. Reedy fell over right on top of me. I was just getting up, and the muzzle of the BAR was a matter of inches from my head.
Reedy was dead before he landed on me. The others pulled him off, and we opened his shirt. I will never forget the sight of the three little round, blue .30-caliber holes in his chest. When he pulled his BAR towards him muzzle first, the safety must have been off and the trigger probably caught on the bolt handle of an M1 rifle stacked up with the BAR. We very sorrowfully laid his body along the side of the road and marched forward on our mission. There was nothing else we could do.
The next event I can recall occurred during combat patrol in the mountainous terrain around Castellamare. We had marched all day and were high in the mountains when the 3d Platoon was ordered to go down to reconnoiter and clear the area so the company could advance the next morning. It was pitch dark, raining heavily, and there was no time for orientation. Our lieutenant was the patrol leader. He was a great big 6 foot 2 inch, heavy, tough individual. But although he looked the part, he was actually one of the weakest platoon leaders I ever observed in the war.
It soon developed that there were two ways to get killed that night: get shot by the enemy or drop off a mountain ledge. After a number of close calls, we were told to employ flashlights. When it came down to it, our platoon leader must have decided that he would just as soon get killed by Germans as lead his men off a cliff.
Coming down the mountain, I sometimes looked off into the far distance. It was impossible to put things in perspective, but at one point I observed what looked like a huge fire. I thought to myself, “Well, we’re not the only dumb so-and-sos; the Germans don’t have very good light discipline either!” This fire turned out to be my first view of the volcano on Mount Vesuvius.
We finally hit a road, moved down it for a ways in combat formation, and eventually came to a cluster of houses sometime after midnight. The patrol leader decided to investigate one of them, a villa surrounded by a tall wall with an entrance gate. We took the proper precautions, going into all-around firing positions, and he had one of our Italian-speaking soldiers rattle the gate and call out in Italian. To our surprise, the owner answered, came out and opened the gate, welcomed us into the house, and offered to fix us a big spaghetti dinner. Our lieutenant consented, and around 2:00 A.M. I had my first Italian-made spaghetti dinner. Our hosts apologized for the meal, saying it was poor because of wartime shortages. It was one of the worst spaghetti dinners I ever ate, but I was so hungry it tasted damn good.
I don’t know what the lieutenant’s orders said about the duration of the patrol or how we should report, but he decided to spend the rest of the night there. I’m sure none of us gave him a very bad argument. Our platoon leader was the only officer in the platoon at the time, and our platoon sergeant, whom many of us had noticed was never around when the firing got hot, was not the man to protest.
The next morning, at the crack of dawn, our outpost security spotted a jeep coming down the road and stopped it. Lo and behold it was Colonel Gavin, who immediately asked to speak to our platoon leader. I’m sure that Gavin was quite unhappy with what he found. He ordered us to keep patrolling until we made contact with the enemy. Our lieutenant wasn’t with us for very long after that.
We continued the patrol until we got to a town that seemed to be a suburb of Naples. I later realized this was probably Torre del Annuziata. We held up there until the rest of the company and battalion caught up with us. This must have been September 30. That night, the 3d Battalion of the 505 was attached to the British 23d Mechanized Brigade. They entered Naples on October 1, following a British reconnaissance unit. The 1st and the 2d Battalions followed shortly behind.
Thanks to the 3d Battalion, the 505 can make a claim to liberating the first major city in Europe. The 3d Battalion guarded General Clark when he made his “Triumphal Entry” into Naples accompanied by General Ridgway. They were the first American troops to enter the city. Their commander, Maj. “Cannonball” Krause, was a real showman with a mind to getting his name in the history books. He raised the American flag in Naples, and would later raise this same flag again when the 505 liberated the first town in France, Ste. Mère-Eglise in Normandy.
By the time the 1st and 2d battalions closed in on Naples, the city had been secured. Company F found no resistance; we were greeted as liberators. It was the first time I saw a large city that had been subjected to heavy raids by Allied bombers. The devastation was incredible. The infrastructure was badly damaged. There was no running water, no sewers, very little food, and the streets were choked with debris.
What impressed me most of all was the complete, absolute, 100 percent destruction of the harbor, which the Allies had been planning to use for logistical support. The Germans understood this, so they subjected it to a thorough and very efficient job of destruction. They blew the huge cranes used for loading and unloading, and then dropped them into the water to block the passages. They sunk all the older ships and boats in the most strategic locations, and then they blew the piers themselves. It would require the Allies many months of engineering work to clear the harbor.
Chapter 11
Baptism by Fire: The Battle of Arnone
I remember the next step in the Italian campaign differently from some of my fellow troopers, who recall laying over in Naples for a while. Fatigue, lack of food, and what I later discovered were symptoms of jaundice and malaria were beginning to affect me. It seems to me that the 2d Battalion moved right into the city and out again on foot, heading north in pursuit of the German Army. The 1st Battalion followed on October 5, and participated in the following battle. The 3d Battalion stayed in Naples to cover for the regiment.
Our battalion moved out of Naples around ten o’clock on October 4. We marched in tactical formation through what must have been the largest cemetery in the city. There were thousands of above-ground vaults and mausoleums. Many had had their sides or fronts blown off, and the bombs had blown open hundreds of graves and coffins, exposing the remains. That city of the mangled, desecrated dead seemed to stretch out forever. It must have taken us an hour to march through it. It is one of my starkest and most gruesome memories of the war.
I also remember marching in “route step,” five yards or five paces between men, along a road on higher ground, probably not too far outside Villa Liturno. Company F was the advance guard with the 2d Platoon as point, screened ahead by a British light-armored reconnaissance unit. The road, like many others in the region, was lined with ditches that provided some natural cover, and holes similar to foxholes that the Germans or forced labor had dug as extra air-raid protection.
We passed through units of the 36th Infantry Division, and then encountered German interdiction fire. It came in steadily, two to three rounds every fifteen minutes or so. As darkness fell, the order was passed to observe strict light and noise discipline. We couldn’t talk or light a match; we had to remain absolutely silent.
Sometime after dark, we noticed lights not too far up ahead. We were quite confused until we discovered it was the British reconnaissance unit, which had stopped for the night. The Brits were busy brewing their tea over one-gallon can
s, filled with dirt or sand and gasoline. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Here we were, on the road, under strict light and noise discipline, forbidden even to have a smoke; and there sat the Limeys, sipping their tea and nicely cooking their dinners over a huge fire.
As I later discovered, the 2d Battalion’s objective was to take five bridges that crossed canals south of Arnone and then take the town itself. If possible, we were also to seize intact the bridge over the Volturno River. I could only guess that our orders were to keep moving until we made contact, because that is what we did.
I was getting awfully tired, everyone was tired, but my own fatigue had worsened because I had not been getting nearly enough to eat. For about four days, ever since Castellamare, the only things I had been able to keep down were hard biscuits and the cocoa I prepared from my C ration packet. It was hot, wet and sweet was all I knew.
I trudged along, head down, only occasionally checking the distance to the man in front of me. Any shred of romance that my eighteen-year old brain might still have attached to combat had disappeared. My mind was a complete blank, wiped out by exhaustion. I had done everything humanly possible to get myself into this damn situation—trained hard for years, jumped out of airplanes, accepted demotions, transferred to the parachute infantry—yet now that I was finally about to face real combat, I hardly had any energy.
At one moment, I must have fallen asleep on my feet even as we marched. The next thing I knew, I looked up and discovered I was all alone. In the flick of an eye, the point men had evidently seen something and given the signal—I didn’t hear any command—to go into the ditches that lined the road. So there I was, standing in the open, with not one soul around me. I dived into a ditch and vowed to remain more alert.
Descending from the Clouds Page 9