The peculiar, peak-serrated front stretching between the romantic Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas is a scene of heroism and disaster, of hope and gloom and suffering by a potpourri of troops representing the actuality of the United Nations in its fullest sense. Here are British, New Zealand, Indian, French, Japanese-American, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, American and even a handful of Italian soldiers.
The American doughboys now in the line, determined and brave as they unquestionably are, nevertheless are a weather-beaten, weary group of men who are surviving in their dreary, tedious, costly push forward merely by the skill instilled within them by that hardest school of all—battle. These men have fought with dogged courage equal to anything their ancestors demonstrated in their so-called harder days. They have fought with a canniness mindful of the forays by the first Continental pioneers against Indian tribesmen. And they have fought against odds and determined opposition certainly equal to those of any battle of World War I. There are many veterans of the last war who still reminisce by their firesides in terms of the huge catastrophes of those days—the terrors of a creeping barrage and massed infantry assaults with bayonet. Certainly such features on such a scale do not prevail along the contested central belt of Italy. But artillery these days is ingeniously more accurate than ever before, thanks to new devices and new methods of observation. And artillery supported by air is devilishly powerful.
Added to artillery now are new types of mortars; swifter, stronger tanks; self-propelled guns; rocket projectiles, such as the Nebelwerfer and the bazooka.
These American men have great quantities of almost all of these weapons, but it would be most foolish to get the idea that we have the fastest planes, the best tanks, the most powerful guns in the world—because we haven’t. On this front the Germans can match almost any weapon we are using, and it is only the grim, wary, brave capability of the doughboy, tankman or pilot which enables him to surmount obstacles erected by a nation whose peacetime profession was preparation for war.
American soldiers are going into tank battles with the knowledge that the model opposing them has armor over its Achilles heel almost as thick as the best protection their own vehicle may have; that they are outgunned both in the sense of range and muzzle velocity and that it will be their own fighting skill, acuteness and daring which will have to see them through if the odds are equaled.
Artillerymen pound away with huge concentrations of guns—batteries sometimes landing more than 100 projectiles simultaneously on the same target knowing full well that when the counterbattery work begins and those 32,000-yard Nazi 170’s start slowly feeling for them with shells traveling so fast that the whine is almost simultaneous with the burst, they have no single gun able to reach the enemy’s batteries.
Fighter pilots often go into action with outmoded aircraft, knowing that only the greatest cunning can give them victory. But none the less they take off full of confidence.
And then the infantrymen, whose job isn’t, as some theorists seem to suppose, merely to march in and occupy territory evacuated under pressure from massed armor and aerial assaults. They go crawling forward toward enemy pill-boxes, tired, cold and sometimes scared, entirely aware that the German, far from being a beaten man, remains a tough, resourceful soldier—one of the best in the world.
As if to add to these difficulties there is the question of forbidden territories—those clerical monuments with which in the words of the G.1. “Italy is just lousy.” In the bloody battle for Cassino, it is the opinion of many an officer and private that had we started the attack by shelling the famous Abbey of Mount Cassino, which dominates the chewed-up town, and wiped it off the map at once, the tide of battle might have turned during the first week of February.
“I am a Catholic,” says one lieutenant colonel, “but this thing didn’t make much sense. We lost lives rather than destroy stones. If you would just let the Catholic boys in the artillery shell away at the monasteries, I think they’d do as good a job as anyone.” Why, you may ask when all these gloomy facts are pointed out, are we able to advance at all? The answer is that something which enables these Americans despite their many disadvantages to climb forward over frozen peaks, inch across mine fields and batter their way through villages, which are shambles of fallen stone.
In the first place, these men are now experienced, hard-bitten soldiers who not only have been able to utilize to the fullest that fighting mechanical capacity with which the American nation is gifted, but also have developed the instinctive scouting and sharpshooting ability of their forebears.
Secondly, they possess a vigor. health and youthfulness in its fullest and best sense that Germany no longer is able to muster among its wayward decimated menfolk drained of blood and energy by more than four years of what was meant to be a Blitzkrieg.
Thirdly, the Americans know not only that they already have definite quantitative superiority in all the necessary tools of war, but that there are more where they came from in the bomb-free factories back home. Their quantity of weapons, their vigor, youth and fine health cared for so exactingly by medical and feeding organizations, are slowly proving the answer to what is actually a mercenary Nazi army defensively entrenched in some of the most difficult military terrain a major engagement has ever been fought over. Mud like thick soup, mountains like barren limestone teeth, and a ravaged landscape of torn-up roads, uprooted railways, blown-up bridges—difficult as they may be, these are merely tests of the engineering ingenuity of those supply geniuses on whom the success of this or any other campaign must eventually depend.
The backbone of this American Army, as it always has been, remains the infantry. They are used to the ghastly sight of death; they are used to its strange, slightly sour, fetid smell.
They know where a shell is going to burst from its sound. They know how to follow a mine tape in the darkness and cut wire on patrol.
These generally sentimental and, in its best sense, simpleminded youths have attained a somewhat remote connection with their former selves. This writer has seen them slogging silently with impassive, grimy faces past slit trenches containing the awkwardly sprawling bodies of their fellows, regarding them, if at all, as if they might be stones. Not that this unfeelingness has made them automatons, but in war it is necessary to compartmentalize the mind, and softer thoughts remain very much in the innermost compartment.
In spite of the bitter cold at night and the steep terrain, topped by precipitous rock formations and coated with snow and slippery frozen mud, our infantrymen prefer to fight on these heights. Generally, such actions comprise a modern kind of American-Indian warfare, with careful probing of the enemy from behind cover until contact is established.
When the two armies meet in closeup fighting. Allied artillery generally is able to give the infantry only a modicum of support because infantry units are too closely intermixed with our own men. It then becomes a question of small arms and as many grenades as a man can pitch. Then the plodding doughboy, sweating despite the crisp wintry climate, is likely to pound the side of a friendly tank with his rifle butt and holler, “Come on over here. We’ve got some Kraut holed up. Dig them out, will you?” Or there will be a shout. “Don’t fool with that. Throw in a grenade.”
These actions will never go down in history as battles any schoolboy ever will be expected to study, but the rate of casualties here is high. and from such pushes one gets an idea of what the ordinary, unglamorous infantryman goes through in this war.
The best example of this terrible process of troops bleeding their way forward was our attempt to cross the little Rapido River. Under cover of the heaviest type of shelling and combined night and smoke screening, the infantry led the engineers to the river, where the latter put up a flimsy, railless little footbridge. Spray from the swift, swollen stream froze on the bridge.
Infantrymen staggered toward the river carrying heavy boats loaded with equipment, while other small units began crawling across the bridge, gripping its icy sides with bl
eeding fingers. A hail of enemy fire from fixed positions broke through the smoke.
The first group lost sight of the mine tapes, and the boat and its crew blew up in a cascade of frozen earth.
Thick fire of all sorts burst about the bridge to the contrapuntal accompaniment of screaming rocket projectiles. Some units penetrated to the enemy’s second line wire defenses while the Germans coolly opened up fire from their hitherto silent hidden positions. This pressure on the exposed attackers was too much. and the effort had to be given up after excessive losses.
Northward along the Tyrrhenian coast the infantrymen fighting at the Anzio-Nettuno beachhead have had better fighting weather and better terrain than those in central Italy. Here the original emphasis was laid on naval operations, supply and weather being the two big questions during the initial phase of any such battle. Clear skies afforded a much better fighter plane cover over the crowded harbors and beaches as well as improved vision or heavy bombers droning inland with their cargoes of explosives.
When the writer went into Anzio with Gen. Sir Harold R. L. Alexander the other day the usual air raid was going on under a light cloud blanket. It was rendered somewhat dramatic by the sudden plummeting to earth of a sheet of flame that was once a fighter plane, followed by the lackadaisical silver parachute of its pilot. Everyone in the harbor region was working like a beaver disregarding the invisible dogfighting above the clouds. They were unloading truck after truck of supplies from the ships, while tarpaulin-covered “ducks” were chugging in over the beaches with cases of ammunition.
Long lines of heavy guns rumbled inland past laurel groves toward the critical battlefield. Despite the marshland spreading about inshore from the beachhead, this is by far the best tank country on both Italian battlefronts and the ugly monsters crawled steadily toward the highlands in support of the infantrymen who had already fought their way inland.
These then are Italy’s two fronts. Fighting on either of them is a tough job. Before we achieve victory on either or both of them, as one general put it, “We’re bound at least to get a bloody nose.” As still another commander sees it, “We will have to put out plenty” before the battle is over.
But in this discussion, just as in the fighting, it is the infantrymen who have the last word. “If all roads lead to Rome,” the doughboys ask, “why in hell don’t the Krauts just pack up and follow them?”
APRIL 10, 1944
PRAVDA RIDICULES TIMES WAR WRITER
Hanson W. Baldwin Is Termed ‘Admiral Of Ink Pool’ Who Uses German Data
By Wireless to the New York Times.
MOSCOW, April 9—Pravda published today a sharp, satirical personal attack upon Hanson W. Baldwin, military commentator of the New York Times, labeling him “admiral of the ink pool.” Mr. Baldwin, according to Pravda, relies exclusively upon German information for news of the Soviet-German front, and thereby has put himself and his newspaper in a ridiculous position.
The author of the 1,100-word dispatch concerning Mr. Baldwin is David Zaslavsky, one of the Soviet Union’s leading writers, who recently attacked Wendell Willkie and William R. Hearst.
Mr. Zaslavsky quoted from Mr. Baldwin’s dispatches over the period since the Soviet-German war began, and concluded that Mr. Baldwin had made a number of incorrect appraisals and forecasts of the true situation on the Eastern Front.
“You can’t explain the systematic failures of Mr. Baldwin only by his lack of information or by his limitations,” Mr. Zaslavsky said. “The source of his mistakes is different, and he has disclosed it himself. On April 26, 1942, he wrote that he did not trust Soviet information and that he operated only on the basis of German information. To this he has remained inevitably true. And that’s exactly why his ‘prognoses’ are suffering defeats, together with Germany.
“German information is misinformation. Speaking simply, it is lies. The Germans try to deceive everybody—their adversaries, the neutrals and their own people. They are deceiving very crudely, and only those who want to be deceived.
NAVAL EXPERIENCE CITED
“The ink pool admiral—Hanson Bald-win—can say that he is also a sort of victim of German atrocities. The Germans have atrociously deceived him and put him in wrong. But he wanted it himself. The fact that he is attracted to false German sources is really a kind of political disease, so let him blame himself if he has put himself and his newspaper in a ridiculous position.”
SOME PROPHECIES ASSAILED
“All through 1941 and the greater part of 1942, Mr. Baldwin in his surveys was forecasting the defeat of the Red Army,” Mr. Zaslavsky said. “On paper he himself was defeating the Red Army, and about him you could say, in the words of an old Russian song: ‘Here, in militant zeal, Mister Hanson Baldwin defeats Russia on a map by his forefinger.’”
Mr. Zaslavsky quoted a number of Mr. Baldwin’s forecasts that he said did not turn out right, and that Mr. Zaslavsky said should have persuaded The New York Times commentator to “at once and forever give up making brash prophecies.” But, Mr. Zaslavsky added, Mr. Baldwin’s “tongue is his enemy, and he forecast with all the authority of an old seawolf that the Russians wouldn’t have any big victories” in the winter of 1942–43. The Soviet author said that prophecy was faulty navigation.
Mr. Zaslavsky concluded with the assertion that if Mr. Baldwin had commanded a naval ship “along such a course, with such skill, and with such brains, he would have smashed the ship long ago, and would have been thrown out of the Navy in dishonor.
“But an inky sea has its own laws,” Mr. Zaslavsky said. “Its admirals can for years flounder around in the pool and feel no shame at all.”
APRIL 14, 1944
Bong Downs 27th Japanese Plane and Becomes U.S. ‘Ace of Aces’
By FRANK L. KLUCKHOHN
By Wireless to the New York Times.
ALLIED HEADQUARTERS IN THE SOUTHWEST PACIFIC, April 13—Capt. Richard Ira Bong, 23-year-old farm youth of Poplar, Wis., became the leading United States combat ace yesterday when he shot down his twenty-seventh Japanese plane over Hollandia, New Guinea.
Captain Bong is now “the American ace of aces,” an announcement from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters stated. [Meanwhile, Capt. Don S. Gentile, leading American ace in the European theatre with a record of twenty-three planes shot down in combat and seven destroyed on the ground, has been put out of action for a few days as the result of a crash landing in his Mustang at his home base in England, it was disclosed Thursday.]
Quiet Captain Bong, an Army fighter pilot, exceeded Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I American record of twenty-six planes shot down, which had been equaled in the present war by Maj. Joe Foss of the Marine Corps and Maj. Gregory Boyington, also a marine, who is missing. Captain Bong yesterday shot out of the sky his twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh.
Flying the two-engined Lightning in which he has made combat air history, Captain Bong won official credit for the two additional planes, which he coolly shot down as wing men “covered” him to give his remarkable marksman-ship full play.
A JINX IS SHATTERED
Captain Bong not only broke the record but shattered a “jinx”—the twenty-six mark that had seemed an impassable limit to American pilots; particularly since Major Boyington was reported missing in January. Major Foss, who recently returned to duty in the South Pacific area after an interval in the United States, has been grounded.
Col. Neel E. Kearby, Thunderbolt ace, of San Antonio, Texas, who won the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down six Japanese planes recently, was declared missing within a week after winning America’s highest military decoration. Within a few hours, Maj. Thomas R. Lynch, another ace, was killed in New Guinea. Colonel Kearby was officially credited with twenty-one planes, Major Lynch with nineteen.
HAS TWENTY DECORATIONS
Captain Bong, with twenty decorations, including the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star with oakleaf, Distinguished Flying Cross with four oak leaves and Air Medal with
eleven oak leaves, looks less like an ace than any of them.
He looks to be just what he is, a lad off the farm rather than a killer. But in the air he is a top flier as well as a man who can shoot from any angle with cold precision whether coming out of a roll or screaming down on the enemy.
APRIL 16, 1944
The Score—By Air Chief Marshal Harris
RAF bomber commander sums up the results of persistent attacks on two priority targets—industrial cities and plants making fighters.
By Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Bomber Command, Royal Air Force
London (By Wireless).
Half of the German Air Force now faces westward toward Britain and toward the bombers of the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force; each of which can now send out a thousand bombers by day or by night in a major attack. Included in this western half of the German Air Force there are about 400 bombers whose function at the moment is to carry out sharp raids on London which have no strategic value but are meant to give the German people the illusion that England is being hit as hard as Germany. Such operations are essentially defensive—a mere reaction to pressure exerted by the other side.
There is also a comparatively small number of aircraft cooperating with the German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic—a battle which the Germans are steadily losing. But all the rest of the German Air Force in the west consists of fighters, single and twin engined. The result of this disposition, with the emphasis enormously on defensive action against the Anglo-American bombers, is that there are now four times as many fighters on the western as on the eastern front.
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 113