Backlands

by Michael McGarrity

  Matt nodded again, but he didn’t expect to survive. The Germans and Italians had at least a two-to-one advantage, and all the officers and noncoms in Company K had forecast heavy resistance.

  Closer to shore, they passed swamped and capsized landing craft, half-submerged trucks and howitzers, and blown-up landing craft surround by bodies floating in the water. The navy coxswain slowed the boat and lowered the bow ramp, and at the urging of the lieutenant, the men plowed into the chest-high water, weapons held above their heads, mortar and artillery shells exploding all around them. Matt reached the beach untouched and made it to cover under sporadic small-arms fire to Lieutenant Daugherty’s position at a sheltered dune.

  “Where’s Kesling?” Daugherty asked, scanning the surf. Two dozen men huddled around him with not another corporal or three-striper in sight.

  “I don’t know,” Matt replied, following Daugherty’s gaze. There were bodies of men sprawled in the lapping surf. Officers ran around ordering men to dig foxholes. Medics tended to the wounded and dying. Down the beach, a small group of Italian soldiers marched with their hands up toward an engineer company offloading equipment. A mile out to sea, smoke billowed from a burning merchant ship. Behind him, machine gun fire from higher ground tore into a soldier trying to drag a buddy to cover. Matt flinched at the sight.

  “Where’s Kesling?” Daugherty demanded again, looking undone.

  “I don’t know, sir; he was right beside me.”

  “The squad is yours until he shows,” Daugherty said. “Take ten men up that draw and clear any enemy resistance you encounter. I’ll go left and we’ll meet at the top. Got that?”

  Matt nodded, gathered his men, and moved out. That was the last he saw of Lieutenant Daugherty and a dozen other men from Third Platoon. Halfway up the draw Matt looked back in time to see enemy artillery rounds blow them to shreds as soon as they broke cover.

  Above the beach, Matt and his squad got close enough to clear a machine gun nest of Italian soldiers with hand grenades without taking casualties. Thinking they probably weren’t facing German soldiers, Matt had the squad hunker down and started talking Italian to enemy troops lodged behind a fortified, dug-in position twenty-five yards ahead.

  In between the mortar bursts and automatic weapons fire the Italians poured at the squad, Matt cupped his hands and told them they were doomed if they didn’t surrender immediately.

  “You will all be killed,” he warned in Italian. “I will radio your position to our destroyers and they will blow you up with their heavy guns.”

  The firing didn’t stop.

  “What are you saying to them, Pops?” a young soldier named Barry Peters asked.

  Matt translated.

  “The radio got blown up with the lieutenant and those other boys,” Barry noted.

  “I know that,” Matt hissed. He cupped his hands again, waited for a lull in the shooting, and shouted in Italian, “Save yourselves. Retreat with honor or you will all be slaughtered.”

  Firing from the Italians slackened.

  “Do not hesitate, brave Italian soldiers,” Matt yelled as loud as he could. “You have fought for far too long. Leave your position now before I give your coordinates to our navy. Live to return with pride to your wives and mothers. You have two minutes to decide.”

  The firing ceased. Up ahead, Matt could hear snatches of Italian, but he couldn’t make out what was being said. On either side of him, skirmishes and firefights raged along a ragged front, with some platoons stalled and others pushing slowly inland.

  When the whispering stopped, it got quiet. He waited three minutes before wiggling out of the machine gun nest and slowly crawling toward the enemy position. Either his ruse had worked or he was about to become dead. He didn’t start breathing again until he reached the abandoned fortification, cleared the area, and called the squad forward.

  Barry grinned as he plopped down next to Matt. “Jeez, that was something, you sounding like a real Italian and all. I’m stickin’ with you, Pops.”

  “It was just dumb luck,” Matt replied. “We’ll hold here until the CO or some other officer arrives,” he added after the last man tumbled safely into the trench.

  The enemy defenses had been breached, a little bit at least. He sent one man back to the machine gun nest to direct the foot traffic of soldiers now pouring up the draw, and had the rest of the squad take up covering positions facing inland. When Captain Marshall arrived and learned what had happened, he shook his head in amazement and promoted Matt to buck sergeant on the spot. He assembled what was left of the company plus a few stragglers and led them forward.

  They met pockets of heavy resistance from German troops that controlled fields of fire from wooded thickets. The company suffered several casualties, and Matt lost a squad member to a mortar round. That night, the regiment regrouped and Matt’s squad was folded into First Platoon and placed on sentry duty at a forward position.

  The men dug foxholes, ate cold K rations, and smoked cigarettes. Enemy mortars exploded around them all night long. Nobody slept. In the morning, the regiment moved out, only to get strafed by the Luftwaffe, which scattered whole companies into olive groves for cover while the German planes destroyed trucks on the roadway, bombed tanks, and blew up jeeps.

  Over the next several days, they engaged a stubborn element of the elite Hermann Göring Division from dawn to dusk, secured an airfield, and liberated two small villages to the wild cheering of the townspeople. Ordered to stand down for the night, the men commandeered churches and public buildings for billets and secured perimeters with sentries.

  Much to the dismay of an ancient priest and his equally decrepit housekeeper, Matt and his squad took up quarters in a church rectory. Early in the morning, word came down from division that they would move out at ten hundred hours. After a K ration breakfast and a cup of coffee, Matt used the precious extra time to shave, wash his feet, and put on a pair of clean socks.

  He stepped outside the rectory just as a jeep with two soldiers pulled to a stop in front of the church.

  The driver jumped out and hurried to him. “Are you with Company K, Second Battalion?”

  “Yep,” Matt replied.

  “I’m Don Robinson with the 45th Division News. I’m looking for the guy who talked a bunch of Italian soldiers into surrendering on the beachhead.”

  “They didn’t surrender; they retreated,” Matt corrected.

  “You were there?” Robinson gestured to his buddy in the jeep.

  “I was.”

  “We want to do a story about what happened for the newspaper. That guy helped get a couple hundred GIs safely off the beach and out of harm’s way. You know where I can find him?”

  Matt nodded.

  Robinson yanked a notepad from his shirt pocket as his buddy, a short, skinny sergeant with big ears, came up, gave Matt a careful once-over, and said, “What’s your name, Corporal?”

  “It’s sergeant, and the name’s Matt Kerney.”

  The skinny sergeant broke into a grin. “I’ll be damned. Matt Kerney from the Tularosa? I’m Bill Mauldin.”

  Matt’s jaw dropped as he took a closer look. “By God, it is you, Billy.”

  “Sure as shooting,” Bill Mauldin replied, thumping Matt on the back. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Yes, it has,” Matt said, grinning.

  “Okay, it’s real sweet that you two guys know each other from back home,” Robinson said impatiently. “But enough of the lovey-dovey stuff. Where can we find this Italian-speaking dogface?”

  “You’re looking at him,” Matt replied with a laugh.

  “Seriously?” Robinson asked.

  “Seriously,” Matt confirmed.

  Robinson licked his pencil point and said he wanted all the details, and Matt told him what had happened. Robinson asked a few more questions before hurrying off to interview
the squad members who were lounging in the graveyard next to the rectory. That gave Matt a chance to catch up with Billy, who told him he had joined the National Guard in Arizona in 1940 and had been cartooning for the 45th Division News ever since, trying to turn it into a full-time job.

  Billy asked about Anna Lynn just as Lieutenant Church drove up in a jeep and called Matt over. Billy tagged along.

  “You’re wanted at regiment,” Church said.

  “What for, L.T.?”

  “Seems the colonel is awarding you the Bronze Star,” Church answered, looking none too happy. “Why anyone would get decorated for scaring away the enemy by speaking Italian is beyond me.”

  “Maybe my Italian is so bad, they couldn’t stand listening to it anymore,” Matt replied, straight-faced.

  Church’s dour expression didn’t change.

  “Now, that’s even a better story,” Bill Mauldin hooted, turning on his heel to locate Robinson and scurrying away.

  “Who was that?” Church asked sternly.

  Matt shrugged. “I don’t know his name, Lieutenant, some reporter from the division’s newspaper.”

  Church groaned and put the jeep in gear. “You’re due at regimental HQ in fifteen minutes. Bring your squad.”

  Matt saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  ***

  After a hastily called regimental formation, where Matt and a dozen other soldiers were decorated by the colonel, Company K formed up and moved out, pushing deeper inland. A day of light resistance turned into heavy fighting the following morning when a paratroop drop to seize and hold key objectives got so screwed up that troops were scattered miles behind enemy lines. Entrenched enemy positions that should have been overrun and in friendly hands by the time ground forces arrived were offering heavy resistance. By nightfall, the regiment had retreated, with many casualties.

  When the division finally broke through, Matt and his squad wound their way slowly through bare, brown, coastal mountains where the enemy continued to have the high ground. He lost another squad member on a company assault of a ridgetop bunker. In the same action Lieutenant Church went down with a serious wound that put him out of action. Roscoe Beal, the first sergeant, took over the platoon. By the end of the week he’d won a battlefield commission.

  Matt was damn glad to have Beal helming the platoon. He was cautious when necessary and decisive when it counted, worked hard to keep morale up, and went easy on the terrified new replacements sent up from the rear.

  Matt, on the other hand, didn’t have a reservoir of goodwill for anybody except the men in his squad. Combat dulled his sensibilities, although he tried not to let his men see it. He no longer paid much attention to the villages, which were dingy and dull to begin with, or the smiling Sicilian people, who cursed the Fascists as the company marched by. The rows of olive groves and the few hillside houses weren’t scenery, only places where the enemy could hide. And the rugged mountains, denuded of trees, held the hidden dangers of booby traps and antipersonnel mines.

  He had no enthusiasm for war, yet it was all he thought about: enemy minefields, machine gun nests, sniper positions, camouflaged panzer tanks, heavy artillery pieces zeroed in on his position. Everything out there was designed for the sole purpose of killing him and every other member of his squad. He thought death was inevitable and he didn’t like the idea of having no future.

  Night patrols were the worst. Every sound, even the single chirp or flutter of a disturbed bird, signaled potential death and destruction. The only benefit of the darkness was that his men couldn’t see his hands shaking.

  He often thought of Tom Kesling, the young sergeant who threw up at his feet in the landing craft, as sick as a dog and trying hard to lead in spite of it. Word had come down that his body had washed up on the shore, drowned, not shot. Would his parents ever learn how brave their young Tom had been in the face of death on a hostile, embattled shore?

  Matt lost track of the days of the week. He couldn’t even remember how long he’d been in Sicily. All that mattered were the hours, minutes, and seconds he spent waiting to move out, waiting for the mortar barrages to begin, waiting for the artillery shelling to commence and for the next order to advance.

  His uniform was crusted with sweat, and he stank. He dreamt of a hot shower and clean clothes. He thought about food a lot, especially ice cream. For some reason he really hungered for ice cream.

  One evening as he boiled water for coffee, too tired to think, Roscoe Beal came by to tell him the Italian dictator, Mussolini, Il Duce, had been thrown out of office and arrested.

  “That’s good news, I guess.”

  “G-2 is saying the Italian Army is abandoning their positions in droves and surrendering in growing numbers.”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice.”

  Beal handed Matt a folded paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.”

  It was the 45th Division News and on the front page was Don Robinson’s story of how Matt had cleared an enemy beachhead position by urging the Italians in their native tongue to retreat, and got the Bronze Star for doing it. Next to it was a Bill Mauldin cartoon of a smug-looking buck sergeant with a medal pinned to his chest explaining to an admiring dogface: “I got it for scaring the enemy away by speaking Eye-talin to them.”

  Matt laughed.

  “I’d save that if I were you,” Roscoe said with a smile. “I kept a copy for myself.”

  Matt folded the paper and put it inside his shirt. “Thanks, Roscoe.”

  “Get some sleep,” Beal advised as he left.

  ***

  The collapse of the Italian Army made for easier going, except for the pockets of fanatical Fascist units and battle-hardened German troops encountered along the way to Palermo. Overwhelming Allied forces quickly destroyed them. A day before Lieutenant General George Patton entered the city, Matt and his squad were far to the east, on point for the regiment and approaching the front line two miles distant. In an open field, they came upon a large herd of cavalry horses and pack mules left behind by the retreating Italians. Some of the ponies were saddled.

  The sight of the ponies lifted Matt’s spirits. He turned to his boys and said with a grin, “How many of you know how to ride?”

  Three hands went up.

  “What are you waiting for?” Matt said. He removed his helmet and handed his M-1 to Barry Peters, who’d just made corporal. “Cover us, just in case.”

  He walked into the herd, gently touching each horse as he made his way to a saddled chestnut gelding with four stocking feet. It nodded in greeting as Matt approached. He talked to the pony as he adjusted the stirrups and eased into the saddle. The familiar feel of the animal under him made the war go far away, as if he’d entered a time warp.

  He started the chestnut at a trot, then urged him to a fast lope and finally a full gallop, flying back and forth across the pasture. The three men on horseback chased after him, whooping with glee. For a moment Matt was back on the Tularosa at the 7-Bar-K. He wheeled the pony toward Barry Peters, who had decided to give horseback riding a try. He was bareback on a pony, trotting it around in circles, holding on to its mane, bouncing wildly up and down. He got bucked off when the pony skidded to a sudden stop, and landed in soft grass. The squad laughed as he bounded to his feet, grinning sheepishly.

  Matt charged the chestnut straight at the men, and they scattered before him. He drew rein and sat in the saddle, grinning like a kid who’d been given his first pony.

  He looked down at Barry, shook his head, and said, “From what I saw, its best you stay afoot.”

  Barry’s sunburned face turned a darker red. “Wilco.”

  “I’m going to reconnoiter the next hill.”

  “Think you should?” Barry asked.

  Matt nodded and pointed at the three soldiers on horseback. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, send the
posse.”

  He spurred the chestnut up the hill, jumped him over a low rock wall, and followed a winding mountain stream before crossing to a meadow. He drew rein to take in the view of the regiment trudging along the road below, just shy of where he’d left his squad.

  He galloped back to find Roscoe Beal and Captain Marshall waiting for him with a chewed-out, glum Barry Peters standing nearby.

  “I should have your stripes for this,” Marshall snapped as Matt slid out of the saddle.

  “Take them, Captain,” Matt replied. At that moment, he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Marshall scowled.

  Roscoe Beal said with measured caution, “It seems to me, Captain, that Sergeant Kerney has captured a fine herd of animals we could put to good use packing our equipment through these hills.”

  Marshall huffed, gave Matt a sour look, and said, “You’ve got a point, Roscoe. Okay, Kerney, get your men started jury-rigging packs for some of these animals. I’ll put another squad on point.”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt said.

  When Marshall walked away, Roscoe whispered under his breath, “Don’t expect another Bronze Star for this, Kerney.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Matt replied in feigned disappointment.

  ***

  Ordered to take the coastal town of Santo Stefano, the Forty-Fifth came up against German forces waging a slow, deliberate retreat to Messina across the rugged terrain. The Germans were fighting to gain time to cross to Italy before the Allies overran them and forced their surrender.

  Captain Marshall got regimental permission to assemble a special mounted unit using some of the captured Italian Army horses and mules to pack ammunition, weapons, and supplies across the rough mountainous terrain, and he put Matt in charge of it. As a result, the regiment outflanked and destroyed a number of hastily thrown-up German defensive positions. It allowed the regiment to reach the outskirts of Santo Stefano ahead of schedule, while the rest of the division mopped up from behind.

  The small town climbed a steep seaside cliff, vulnerable and exposed by land. The main road from Palermo to Messina ran through it. Captain Marshall blocked the road west of the village and deployed two platoons on either side to stop any straggling German troops from escaping. He gave permission for Matt and his men to rest the animals.