I dropped my shovel and looked around. The others were busy scratching out shallow foxholes farther up the slope. . . . I had already dug a deep, comfortable hole in the soft earth, with room for another alongside. With a faint sense that I was doing something wrong, I picked up shovel and pack, moved up the slope and started another hole in the tough shale.
Two more soldiers, Loren and Johnny, arrived from headquarters. One of them looked at Parker’s first effort and asked, “Whose hole?” Parker continues:
I was sitting on the edge of my new foxhole, eating a K ration. “I dug it,” I answered. “But I don’t like the location. Sticks out of the slope too much.” Loren said, “Looks okay to me. Johnny, you dig in next to me here, I’ll take Parker’s hole.”
It was nearly dark when the lieutenant’s voice drifted down to us. “Everybody dug in?” A muted chorus answered. Yep. Okay. Si, Tenente (that was Rossi). Friggin’ A. Yes, Mother! (that was Bird Dog Patterson). The silence that followed was immediately shattered by the first German shell. The barrage was on schedule.
So we cowered in our holes, and our world was reduced to darkness, the scream of shells, ear-splitting explosions and the incessant shuddering of the ground beneath us. . . . Clearly, the Krauts didn’t want the 10th Mountain Division breaking through that pass.
At last the shelling stopped. Again, the lieutenant’s voice floated down. “Report in, guys. That was a nasty one!” One by one, the voices came out of the dark. Reynolds. Hawkinson. Rossi. Parker. Wilford. There was no answer from Loren and Johnny.
“Parker, you’re the closest—check ’em out!” I crawled out of the foxhole and groped in the dark to the bench below, knowing what I’d find. The acrid smell of cordite, burned soil and flesh hit me with a wave of nausea.
“Parker, what happened?” The lieutenant now sounded close to panic. Swallowing my horror, I croaked a reply, “They’re gone, sir. Direct hit.”
I must have fainted then, or blacked out somehow. I awoke to the muted voices of the lieutenant and Sgt. Wilford, flashlights flickering, and shadowy men working around Loren and Johnny’s foxholes. I helped to close the body bags, and carried a corner of one of them almost two miles to the nearest road.
Then Parker’s brain or his body, or both, shut down in a kind of protective catatonia. Luckily, the officers present recognized that all was not right and arranged to transport the young corporal to the rear.
Bob Woody (C Company, 85th Regiment) and Harry Poschman (D Company, 85th Regiment) shared the hell of Monte della Spe—different companies, different foxholes, same hell. Their battalion drove the Germans off the hill on March 6, then endured ten days of shelling without once being relieved. Woody dug in with an Italian-American named Marsala. “We covered as much of the hole as possible with tree limbs and a topping of sandbags and soil to ward off tree bursts. The hole had the dimensions of a shallow grave—maybe three feet wide, three feet deep, and six feet long, just enough for two to cuddle and huddle in physical and psychological warmth.”
Nights, the men could move around, maybe chase down a local chicken to relieve the monotony of canned rations. But by day, day after day, the shelling kept them in their holes. “The shelling did terrible things to the third platoon,” Woody remembered. He saw a man with his head blown off, heard wounded soldiers beg to be shot. “Sometimes you did not know who had come and who had gone, for the bodies of the injured had already been removed by the time you got out of your hole. It was just, ‘So-and-so got it.’ And that was that.”
In a letter to his brother on March 13, Woody wrote:
I nearly got mine the other night while digging a position about 30 yards in front of my present one. Someone must have heard us and dropped in a mortar shell—boom! All of a sudden I did a swan dive into the hole. Shrapnel got one guy in the ass and leg. A fragment went between my helmet and liner, ripped hell out of the liner. Wasn’t my time though.
After a couple of days on della Spe, Harry Poschman’s machine-gun squad was down to just three men. The fighting off of nighttime counterattacks, the constant shelling, the blending of days into weeks, and the promise of relief that didn’t come and didn’t come—it all pushed Harry to the brink. Pressing himself into the very bottom of his hole during a round of shelling, he thought of Willie and Joe, quintessential cartoon dogfaces drawn by Sgt. Bill Mauldin (who served with the 45th Infantry Division in Italy) every week for the Stars and Stripes. Hugging the earth, one of the unshaven sad sacks says to the other: “Lower?! I can’t git no lower, me buttons is holdin’ me up.”
That one, at least, made Harry smile. Another “Willie and Joe” rang only too true. In their hole on some blasted hill, wondering why they had been spared so far, Willie says: “I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.” Everyone on della Spe felt that way. The death and tedium wore Harry down, and he wrote bitterly, “It was obvious we were not the magnificent ski troopers who would charge the enemy on white skis and shoot him with a white rifle. We exchanged white for dirty brown, and we didn’t do much charging, for it was only prudent to crawl on your belly. . . . It was apparent none of us would leave della Spe alive.”
But Harry persevered, out of concern for his men and a stubborn anger. One day he got a phone call from battalion headquarters. The voice said he had won a raffle. The prize was a trip to Rome. “Who are they kidding? I have three sick guys up here and you tell me I am going to Rome? . . . The voice continued, ‘Put someone in charge of your squad and get your tail down here.’ I went. I crawled, I ran, I felt like a deserter, ashamed. When I arrived at HQ, I asked what day it was. Someone said, ‘March 13.’ It was my birthday.”
CHAPTER 11:
R&R
The last thing Bob Parker remembered was helping load the bodies of his comrades onto a jeep. After that, his mind went blank.
Concerned members of his 87th Headquarters Company could find nothing physically wrong with him. But mentally, he wasn’t there, so they took him back to a farmhouse beyond the reach of German artillery and kept a close watch. His mates had to wake him up in the mornings, get him dressed, and get him down to meals. He remained cooperative and semifunctional but locked in a kind of walking catatonia. Parker’s company commander could have sent him to the big military hospital in Livorno, where most cases of battle shock were treated. Parker himself is grateful he didn’t.
“One day in the sun, on the terrace, I woke up. Five days with no memory. I guess that’s the body’s and the mind’s way of protecting itself. Wiped out my conscious mind. . . . I’m really glad they kept me with the company, with the guys I knew. Some of the men sent to Livorno, cut off from people who knew them and meant the most to them—some of those men ended up permanently disoriented.”
While Parker recovered, the rest of the 10th was relieved, in shifts, from the front lines. The salient had been enlarged, the German defenders pushed back another four miles. The hills ahead were smaller than the hills already won. From the top of Monte della Spe one could now see the vast plain of the Po. The valley remained at least fifteen miles distant, but the goal of forcing the Germans from their mountain strongholds and breaking through to the flat, fertile country beyond was at last in sight. Over a thousand Germans had been taken prisoner in the 10th’s “limited offensive,” and German Field Marshal Kesselring’s strategic reserve, the 29th Panzer Division, had been badly mauled. But Allied headquarters in Caserta was not ready to push the offensive farther. Not yet. The massive Spring Push remained on schedule for mid-April.
In truth, the mountain troops were ready for some R&R—rest and recuperation. David Brower craved time to “sit back and feel muscles that you thought were relaxed loosen a little and slip back where they were before it all started. And then you can write letters again.”
John Jennings took up his journal again on March 28, after a fighting break of more than a month. Early on, he had blithely described his writing as “scribbling,” “a brief account of this GI cook’s tour.” Now, he needed
desperately to make sense of what he’d seen. “So much has happened that I could never begin to write the small part even that I remember,” he wrote in careful longhand at the rest center in Montecatini. “It is impossible to describe the utter fatigue of those first three days and nights of continuous driving and fighting . . . how thoroughly the Krauts dug their positions and how absolutely dead the dead are.” And a little later, “One almost envied the dead and wounded all about, for now they were out of it, and away from the constant overburdening ache of complete weariness.”
Harry Poschman, despite his guilt at leaving his buddies on della Spe, headed south toward Rome on his raffle week. (Somehow his name had been drawn out of a hat. Only a couple of soldiers from each battalion, maybe two out of a thousand, had won the prize.) On the way through the rest and supply town of Montecatini, he got a shower and new shoes. A supply sergeant pointed to a small mountain of shoes and told Harry to take his pick. Harry asked where he got all those combat boots. “I shouldn’t have [asked]. Some were stained and torn. Most were in bad shape. I picked a couple that fit and later discovered they were different sizes. It was okay. I wasn’t going to a ball.”
And Rome in 1945 was no great shakes either. The Eternal City appeared decidedly mortal, hungry, and ragged. Black-market restaurants served the only food available—other than at Army mess halls—and that was expensive and often rancid. Harry and a friend bought a bottle of Chianti and some black-market cheese and picnicked on the marble steps below the monument to Vittorio Emmanuel.
Later, they walked to Saint Peter’s. Pope Pius XII was speaking from his balcony. “I couldn’t understand a word he said, but a nice Italian lady interpreted for me. Her little boy looked sad and hungry.” The woman said her husband had left for the war five years before and she hadn’t heard a word from him since. She asked Harry to come home with her, quick to insist that her parents and her other children were there, and she only wanted food. So Harry took her by an Army mess hall and “bought an armload of meals-togo and sent them home happy.” He wondered “how the American people would get on [in a war] . . . hoping they never are tested.”
Harry was “too edgy” to enjoy Rome. The nightclubs “seemed like a good place to get killed,” filled as they were with drunken, armed men. He couldn’t stop thinking about his buddies and the hardship they continued to suffer “up on that terrible mountain.” At the end of the week, he was happy to start back. Much to his relief, he learned that while he was gone, the battalion had been relieved at last and sent to Montecatini, down out of the mountains, for a well-deserved rest.
Before the war, Montecatini had been a famous spa on the road between Florence and Pisa. People came from all over Europe to take the waters and stroll the tree-lined thoroughfares. Wrought-iron balconies graced second-floor hotel rooms above a circular plaza. Now in the first blush of spring, the spear-like lombardy poplars showed nascent leaves. Daisies and violets peeped out of the ground. Horse-drawn carriages roamed the streets, and knots of American soldiers walked about in the sun. There was a strange normalcy behind the lines—almost as if there were no war—but always with a twist. Bob Woody wandered Montecatini as if he “had been given a shot of emotional Novocain.” Harry Poschman’s friend John Pierpont read a letter from home. It included snapshots of a daughter he had not yet met . . .“and my wife’s thankfulness I had not been involved in combat.” The irony was nearly too much; Pierpont had seen most of his machine-gun squad annihilated on the initial attack up Gorgolesco.
Mail could take weeks crossing the Atlantic, but the news-magazines were practically as current as they were in the States. With their weekly beer and PX rations, the men got Time, Newsweek, and Reader’s Digest, in addition to the Army publications Yank and Stars and Stripes. The plates for the newsweeklies were flown over from New York to printers in Florence and distributed just a couple of days late. The 10th’s own newspaper, The Blizzard, came off the presses every week in Florence too. How odd to read about one’s exploits of just the week before. There were pictures, photographs and illustrations from the front. Jacques Parker, who had been with the 86th’s Company A on the night climb up Riva Ridge, sent pencil-and-ink drawings of that encounter down the mountain rolled up inside empty mortar casings. Within days, they appeared on the front page of the Blizzard.
R&R gave the men a chance, after weeks of living in holes, to clean up. In combat, a man’s helmet was his bathtub. During a lull in the action, he might build a fire under it, heat some water and shave, wash his socks, remove the worst of the grime. Back from the lines, in Montecatini and elsewhere, the Army set up portable showers, large enough to accommodate forty to fifty men at a time. Phil Lunday of the 126th Engineers remembered one such shower in his memoir The Tram Builders: “You take all your clothes off—they issued you all new clothes afterward—and they spray you, and you come out and here are forty to fifty men in their birthday suits. And one time I came out and there was this jeep with [Congress-woman] Clare Boothe Luce! [In an ascot and a natty Eisenhower jacket touring the Italian Front.] Looking at forty naked guys taking a bath!”
Invariably, long lines of soldiers waited for a chance at the showers. Just as there were long lines for beer, and chow, and for the movies and USO shows. Harry Poschman and John Pierpont stood in a Montecatini shower line for a few minutes one afternoon before Pierpont pointed toward a small hotel across the square and said, “Come on.”
I followed. At the front door was a pink-cheeked boy with a gun. He even had on a necktie. We threw him a fancy salute and went up the stairs like we owned the place. Down the hall there were bathrooms with signs which read: PRIVATE BATH OF GENERAL HAYS and PRIVATE BATH OF GENERAL SO AND SO, and so on. John opened a door and said, “There is your private bath.” I took it and he took the next one.
There were cakes of soap the size of a football and more hot water than I had seen since the States. I soaked and I lathered and I soaked some more, luxuriating in that big tub up to my chin. I even smoked one of the General’s cigars.
A knock on the door about a half hour later said, “Let’s get out of here.” We departed after each taking another cigar. The pink-cheeked boy on guard snapped to attention as we left, and we walked quickly away laughing like a couple of simpletons.
Poschman and Pierpont enjoyed a minor celebrity for a couple of days thereafter. It wasn’t that they disrespected General Hays; they, like most of the men, liked him personally. What they had done was pull one over on the “Rear Echelon Crows,” the officers and enlisted men with jobs well behind the lines, who sported spiffy boots and creases in their uniform pants. There was little respect among the dogfaces for these men who, despite their importance to the American military machine, enjoyed a position of permanent safety and could not have imagined the brutalities experienced by the line companies.
Montecatini was just two hours west of Florence, and perhaps more than most divisions on R&R, the college-educated men of the 10th sought out the city’s cultural offerings, which had been largely spared the ravages of artillery and bombing raids. They took guided tours, or they walked in small groups through the narrow, cobblestone streets. They crossed the Arno River on the seven-hundred-year-old Ponte Vecchio with its two-story shopping galleries. They stared at the thousands of Renaissance masterpieces in the Uffizi and Pitti galleries. They climbed the narrow stairs of The Duomo to the top of the great cathedral dome with its fine view of the city’s red-tile roofs. In the evening, if they were so inclined, they could attend the Teatro Verdi for a performance of La Traviata.
To be sure, not all mountain troopers haunted the museums or avoided completely the ubiquitous fleshpots of the city. But the many who did seek out art lent credence to growing suspicions among other Fifth Army divisions that the 10th was an elite, maybe even an aesthete, bunch. The problem began with an admiring article—post-Belvedere and della Spe—in the March 16 issue of Yank. The writer stressed the division’s high average IQ and mentioned several college association
s by name. The words “elite” and “blue-blood” were used. And there may have been a reference to “yodeling as they attacked.”
This all had unfortunate repercussions. The German propagandist Axis Sally seized on the characterization and in her radio broadcasts denigrated the 10th as mere “sports figures . . . sons of the wealthy.” Soldiers from the 34th, 85th, 88th, and 91st Divisions—proud “ordinary infantry divisions” deployed alongside the 10th on the Winter Line—took umbrage as well. These were outfits with decidedly less refined bloodlines but a great deal more experience and heritage than the 10th had. Most traced their division histories to 1917 and the Great War. And in this conflict, they all claimed more battle time—much more—than the ski troops. The 34th had been fighting since the invasion at Algiers in 1942, and the others had slogged their way north through Salerno and Rome and Pisa. Now and then an “elite” mountain trooper would be challenged to a fight, where liquor and high spirits prevailed, on the streets of Florence. One particularly telling incident occurred in an army theater. In the middle of the movie, the show stopped and a message flashed on the screen directing men of the 10th Mountain Division to report immediately to their organizations. One 10th man started up the aisle—perhaps he swaggered a bit, the memory of Riva or della Torraccia still fresh—and announced, “Well, guess we have to go take another hill.” To which a soldier wearing the red bull patch of the 34th Division answered, “Yeah. That’ll make two.”
Of course, the reality was that the 10th, despite its unusual beginnings, was at this point of the fighting indistinguishable from any other infantry division. As Harry Poschman said, “We were just a damn ski club—until we got the shit shot out of us in Italy.”
Climb to Conquer Page 16