Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  That first morning on Riva, as soon as the assault companies reported topping out on the ridge, engineers began hauling cable up the Capel Buso route. The going was not as easy or as smooth as it had been on the flat ground at Swift. There was the racing Dardagna to cross, and there were mines buried in an orchard partway up the route. A few Germans, caught away from their units on the sharp eastern contours of Riva, fired on the tram builders. A couple of engineers were wounded by mines. But they persevered, and by the afternoon of the 21st, they had a working tram that covered two-thirds of the vertical to Capel Buso. The fourteen-minute ride cut the total time needed to bring wounded down from the top to about two hours. Many of the fifty casualties evacuated this way probably owed their lives to the engineers.

  Meanwhile, the tram also shuttled tons of food, water, and ammunition to the 86th companies holding on tenaciously against counterattacks by the German 4th Mountain Battalion. The position hardest hit was that of Lieutenant Loose and his A Company platoon. (Asked later to explain why the regimental brains had charged a mere platoon with taking the most important objective on the ridge—the one closest to Monte Belvedere—Loose replied: “The Army made a mistake.”)

  Not only was Loose’s platoon outnumbered, it was cut off by a knife-edge ridge from the resupply at Capel Buso. The lieutenant and his men improvised brilliantly while running dangerously low on ammunition and, in the end, having only snow to melt in their mouths for sustenance. The Germans counterattacked six times over two days. The forty-man platoon fought back by anticipating the enemy’s next angle of attack, by throwing his grenades back from where they came, and with stealth raids of their own down behind the lines. On the first morning, Loose led a patrol through the fog to an elaborate German dugout with sod walls, a window and a door, and a wire clothesline strung to a nearby tree. Loose’s bazooka man fired a round through the window, killing four. Three more were captured along with a briefcase of documents, one mortar, several machine guns, and some much-needed food. The men also found a portable record player. Among the recordings were an Al Jolson LP and a recording of “Lilli Marlene,” a popular German song that was often broadcast over Nazi propaganda radio. Loose’s men took the player and the record back to their perimeter, where they played the song over and over to torment any German soldiers within hearing range.

  By the second night, Loose’s men were out of hand grenades and desperately low on ammunition. The counterattacking Germans, sensing an opportunity, crept ever closer. With no options left, Lieutenant Loose called down to his supporting field artillery and requested defensive fire practically on his own position. “Do you realize what you’re asking?” came the reply. “I do,” Loose said, “but if we don’t get artillery in tight, you’ll have nothing left to support.”

  Loose ordered his men to burrow deep in their foxholes while the gunners dialed back their coordinates to within twenty-five yards of the perimeter. At 2:00 A.M. a torrent of shells smashed into the advancing Germans, ending the threat, for the moment. Twenty-four hours later, down to six rounds of machine-gun ammo and “so hungry I couldn’t see straight,” Loose and A Platoon were finally relieved by the battalion commander himself, Col. Henry Hampton. James Loose and six of his men would each be awarded the Silver Star for “gallantry in action.”

  Counterattacks of diminishing strength continued for the next few days and nights, but for all intents and purposes, Riva Ridge was secure. Considering the risk, casualties had been miniscule: seventeen American dead and something over fifty wounded. Over a hundred German troops were taken prisoner; uncounted scores lay dead in the northside snow. No longer could the enemy direct fire onto Belvedere’s south face, and as a bonus, the Americans on the ridge could now pinpoint artillery targets on Belvedere’s back side, which greatly improved prospects for the massive night attack by the 85th and 87th Regiments that jumped off just before midnight on the 19th. The 10th’s special training had proved its worth. Along with a daring plan, some spectacular weather luck, and a defending force stunned by the audacity of the attack, the mountain troops, “Minnie’s ski troops,” had pulled off the most successful alpine assault in U.S. military history.

  But almost no one back home heard about it. As it happened, February 19 was the day three divisions of Marines landed on Iwo Jima against twenty thousand fanatic, dug-in Japanese. Iwo Jima was just a speck in the western Pacific, but it had airfields and it would be crucial to American bombing missions targeting the main islands of Japan. The famous photo of Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi justifiably dominated the nation’s front pages.

  Minnie Dole heard the news about Riva, several days after the fact, by way of a confidential phone call from a staff officer in Washington. And then, with some digging, he was able to find a couple of censored newspaper stories. Censored, because the Northern Apennines fighting was far from over. It was just beginning.

  CHAPTER 10:

  Belvedere

  Time deals out many kinds of hours,” David Brower wrote in Remount Blue, a combat history of his 3d Battalion, 86th Mountain Regiment:

  There is the microscopic one that passes without the knowing of the fond couple parked on the hill. There is the short hour by which a newsman’s deadline measures its approach. Hours are from moderate to long, depending on one’s interest in a task, attenuated if you are on time and someone else is late, interminable if you’re pacing the maternity hospital lobby. But how to describe the kind of hours the soldier gets when he is waiting for the jump-off, the hours that he divides into minutes and again into seconds that he cannot squander?

  Brower’s battalion, which had been in reserve the night before, when the 1st Battalion climbed Riva, now waited in the dark at the foot of the Belvedere-Gorgolesco massif. The plan was for the 87th Regiment to attack up Belvedere’s left flank (facing north) beginning at 11:00 P.M. (Bob Parker would lead a column up the same route he had scouted two days before to the village of Corona.) At the same time, one battalion of the 85th would move straight up toward Belvedere’s summit, and a second battalion, further right, would climb to the saddle separating Belvedere from its slightly lower sister peak, Monte Gorgolesco. The 86th Regiment’s 3d Battalion—Brower’s group—would then secure Gorgolesco’s right flank.

  As General Hays had said, all of this was to be accomplished at night, without artillery preparation and without loaded rifles; he was counting once again on the element of surprise. Soldiers worried that this was foolish; hadn’t the enemy been sufficiently alerted by the previous night’s attack on Riva Ridge? Nevertheless, the orders read: No arms are to be used before daylight; the aim is to slip past the German positions if possible and gain the high ground behind them; positions that cannot be bypassed are to be eliminated with bayonets, knives, and grenades; if we don’t fire our weapons, the defenders will not know where we are or what our strength is; artillery and air support will come only after daybreak and after initial objectives have been taken.

  “Man alive,” said Dan Kennerly when Sgt. Harry Poschman read the orders. “We are to make an assault with five battalions against the strongest German positions in Italy and not a goddamn loaded gun in the entire outfit. That’s a large order, Sarge. I hope the general knows what he’s doing.”

  While Brower and his battalion waited, Poschman and his machine-gun squad shouldered their loads and started up the hill behind C Company, 85th Regiment. They had been hiding all day in haystacks and hedgerows and rubble-strewn stone buildings, and now, as word came that the Riva climbers were holding firm against sporadic counterattacks, they moved across the line of departure. “This is it, men!” Harry thought about the line his officers had used at Camp Hale to simulate drama, and how the dogfaces had snickered under their breath every time. “This is it, men!” Now the phrase was devoid of humor. And Harry thought about Vassos the Greek, who had been wrong after all.

  It was exactly 11:00 P.M. Boots crunched through freezing mud and what little snow remained on Belvedere’s south slo
pes. The moon peeked over the mountain’s flank and added to the incandescence provided by the searchlights. Together they threw enough light on the snow patches to make them glow. Trees cast multiple shadows. More than once, Harry thought he saw them move.

  Harry’s squad of eight men was in charge of one water-cooled, .30-caliber heavy machine gun. One soldier carried the gun itself while another lugged its tripod. A third carried the bezel, a solid brass ring on which the gun could spin 360 degrees and which showed compass bearings and range-finder distances. The rest of the squad struggled with packboards loaded with boxes of ammunition. Everyone carried his own rifle and pocketfuls of hand grenades. An extra soldier had been assigned to carry antifreeze for the gun’s water jacket. That’s what kept the barrel from burning out while firing twenty rounds per second. (When machine-gun squads did, inevitably, run out of antifreeze, the men would urinate into the water jacket to keep their gun operational.)

  Belvedere’s fields and woods were not tilted nearly so steeply as Riva’s rock, but the way was long and folded, riddled with streams and ditches, with sharp ravines and bombed-out wagon roads. Here and there lay the ghostly remains of U.S. tanks—abandoned on the November attempts to capture Belvedere, attempts that were forced back by heavy and accurate German artillery. Through the night the columns advanced, haltingly, gaining altitude, listening to the odd explosion, the occasional firecracker sound of small-arms fire and wondering if this was it, if they’d been found out. It was only a matter of when. Then the night grew still again and they trudged on. Harry’s platoon followed in support of C Company, a rifle company spearheading the attack on the saddle. The machine guns could not fire on the move; their job would be defensive, to protect C Company’s perimeter once the company gained the ridge. When the line moved forward, the men sweated under their huge loads. When the line stopped, as it did all too often, the sweat froze.

  It must have been about 6:00 A.M., Harry thought, when a ripping sound broke the silence. It sounded “like somebody tearing a big piece of canvas.” The ripping sound was followed by “the flutter of a wounded bird. The wounded bird landed with a terrific flash and a big bang. Somebody screamed, and somebody called for a medic.” The assault had been discovered, the battle begun.

  The wounded bird had been a mortar round; the fluttering-wing sound was the sound it made as it fell. (Artillery cannon fire high-velocity, flat-trajectory rounds over many miles—shells that shriek or whine overhead. The portable, short-barrel mortar tube lobs shells at high angles over relatively short distances. The resulting explosions can be equally devastating.) More German mortars crashed into the earth. Harry told his boys to dig in even if they were to be stopped only a few minutes. Any depression, no matter how shallow, into which a man could flatten himself was safer than standing exposed. Harry hugged the earth as it heaved with each explosion. He wanted to become the earth. He imagined himself crawling up completely inside the protection of his helmet. A ridiculous fantasy, he knew, but it turned out to be a common one.

  The mortar barrage lasted but a short eternity. The squad ahead got up and started forward, and Harry’s squad staggered to their feet and followed. They hurried along the edge of a wood and then, beyond it, onto an open slope lit by faint daylight. Now the enemy opened up with machine guns. Harry could see neither where the bullets were coming from nor where they were landing, so he just kept going into what seemed like a wall of noise. Mortar shells landed in the trees the men had just left, shattering tree limbs and sending deadly wood splinters flying. Incoming artillery shells split the air above before exploding, their jagged fragments spinning, buzzing through the dawn like angry hornets. Spent shrapnel lost momentum and smacked the dirt with a dull thud. Dan Kennerly noticed that each piece of flying metal had a different pitch, probably because the shards were different sizes. “Some actually harmonize with others . . . musical shrapnel, a deadly melody.” When a shell exploded close by a man, even if he escaped the whirling fragments, the concussion forced blood to ooze from his ears and nose. Small-caliber stuff—from rifles and machine pistols—whizzed about with a high-pitched zing.

  Harry had his men running forward spaced a good ten yards apart, as he had been taught. From somewhere up ahead another German machine gun burst to life, and this time Harry could see the bullets striking a patch of snow and advancing right for them. But then the bullets stopped. Out of ammo? Jammed? Or maybe, Harry thought, one of our guys got the gunner. He hoped it was the last. But just in case, he signaled his men to drop into a ravine on their right. A soldier on the far side of the gully saw them and shouted across, “No! It’s mined!”

  It turned out that the 1st and 2d Squads of Harry’s platoon had tangled with the minefield, fatally, just minutes before. Kennerly had watched as two men ahead of him went down, caught in trip wires, then four more. “An aid man, I think it’s Rosey, goes to help. As he sits down beside Haak, the ground under him explodes. He sat on a mine.”

  Mines had not been much of a factor on Riva. The terrain was mostly too steep and rocky. And luck had played a part: The 10th men later learned that hard snow crusts had, in places, allowed them to walk right over the top of several minefields. But Belvedere was a different story; the terrain was gentler, the soil easier to dig. The Germans had had months to prepare their defensive strongholds, and they had mined all logical approaches to the ridge. Huge antitank mines had been buried in the farm roads. But it was the antipersonnel mines—the trip wires and “bouncing bettys” and Schuh mines—that could so suddenly and terrifyingly disable an otherwise strong push. These mines sometimes killed soldiers outright, but they had a crueler and more practical purpose—to wound, and thus to cause the enemy to lose two or more combatants, the actual casualty plus the men who came to his aid. The Schuh mine was so named because it contained only enough explosive to mangle the foot of a soldier unlucky enough to step on it. Engineers were trained to detect and disarm mines, and the 10th’s engineers performed this ticklish operation countless times in Italy. But not on Belvedere that first night, in the dark, when speed and surprise were paramount.

  Harry’s squad avoided this particular carnage and moved on up the rib toward the ridge. Nearing the top, through smoke and dust and the deafening noise, Harry could see lots of men running around. He felt “blown out mentally and physically” after seven hours of climbing, and the scene before him looked like nothing so much as chaos. “Most of us could not put the pieces together.” A rifle squad, ten men, lay dead in a shallow depression, mowed down by German machine-gun fire. “Even the trees were cut down about eighteen inches above the ground” as if by a ragged chainsaw.

  Harry’s platoon sergeant ran up and told him where to set up his gun. Harry couldn’t believe his eyes; the man had a bullet hole in the front of his helmet. “He ran along with me saying, ‘The damn thing went in at a slight angle, skidded around the inside of my helmet, and dropped down the back of my neck.’ The bullet burned his neck. He was mad.”

  Now that they’d reached the Belvedere-Gorgolesco ridge, the machine guns would be critical in holding it against the inevitable counterattacks. Harry and his men dug furiously, one hole for the gun, others for themselves. The digging was strangely comforting. They had trained to do this. But the setting, the lethal chaos, was entirely foreign. “This is a meat grinder,” Harry thought to himself. “And I’m in it.” Off to one side a lifeless face stared up at him as he worked.

  Theirs seemed to be the only gun out of three in the platoon to have survived the minefield. The company commander, Capt. Richard Johnson, hustled by and told Harry to “fire at anything you can find.” Harry hunted for targets with his binoculars. “Across the meadow ahead to a low ridge I searched again and again. Finally, I found him—a German machine-gun nest firing directly at us. The rounds were wild, buzzing like bees. I told Churney to fire. He lifted up on the trigger. Nothing happened. He worked the bolt fast and triggered again. Still no fire.

  “I heard Johnson yell, ‘Get th
at gun going!’ I ran to the gun and told the crew to scatter, jerked out the bolt, and gave it a fast inspection.” The bolt appeared to be okay. Harry reinserted it and tried again to fire. Nothing. He took a new bolt out of his pocket and jammed it into the gun. Still nothing. “I was numb with despair.” Then a light came on: It must be the ammo. “I cleared the belt from the gun and flung it away, fed a fresh one and fired. The tracers ran true like a red-hot wire straight to the target. Eley and Demitroff laid down on the legs of the tripod while I fired the entire belt.”

  Within minutes, or seconds, Harry couldn’t tell, the order came to get up and move again; 1st Battalion would charge to the right, from the saddle up to the summit of Gorgolesco. “Now we had to move fast, with the heavy loads, not because we wanted to, but to keep up with the hard pace set by the company commander. I had the boys pick up the gun by the legs and run with it about two hundred yards. There we stopped briefly, broke it down into lighter components, and continued on in the attack. It was a good move, as the artillery commenced hammering the spot we just vacated.”

  On they ran into a meadow and through a maze of berry bushes that grabbed at their clothes and tore their exposed skin. Thorns ripped Harry’s face from forehead to chin. On the far side of the meadow, a new order came down: Unbuckle your chinstraps. A near miss—just the concussion from an artillery blast—could tear your head off. Great, Harry thought. “Now it’s impossible to run without losing your tin hat. What a dilemma.”