Then there was the incident at Villafranca. Forty miles north of the Po and ten miles short of Verona, the 85th Regiment pulled into Villafranca di Verona after an all-night march with orders to secure the town and its airport. Shortly after their arrival, a German fighter pilot landed his plane and walked, astonished, into captivity.
At dawn D Company’s four machine guns were set up to guard the north and south approaches to the town, while Harry Poschman befriended a local family and began frying up hotcakes, from a stash of Aunt Jemima ready-mix that had been sent from home. The fire was roaring and the girls of the family were fascinated by these torte da farina when all hell broke loose down the road. Harry had long since become accustomed to the noise of explosions in the distance as retreating Germans blew up their fuel dumps and ammo supplies. But this sound was different. These were his own gunners at the south entrance to town firing their water-cooled .30-caliber machine guns with a definite urgency. By the time Harry got there, it was all over but for the rounding up of prisoners—the ones who weren’t burnt to a crisp—and Harry had to piece the story together.
Once again, the speed of the 10th’s advance had resulted in deadly confusion. Bob Woody, who was there in Villafranca too, with C Company, remembered:
[Two trucks were] hurtling up the road toward us. They were filled with Germans. . . . A German in the lead truck was spraying the road ahead with a machine gun on the cab roof. We were stunned. We had not expected any Germans from that direction. They were obviously stunned too, having come from the south into the rear of our column. They hadn’t been able to stop in time or turn around. They were making a desperate dash.
And they almost made it through, but for the D Company gunners whose tracers ignited fuel drums in the second truck. (Ahead, the first truck turned over, spilling its passengers into the road.) Harry Poschman continues, “The driver was cremated in his truck. The man on top was blown up on the roof of a house very near. He still had some fight left and pointed his gun at someone in the street. One of our guys shot that man with one round from his carbine without taking his arm from around a cute little girl he was cuddling. The diehard Nazi fell dead from the roof, just like in the movies.”
Woody ran forward, through the flames and charred bodies, to help with the prisoners. Most were just boys, with newspapers stuffed in their holsters where pistols should have been. No Americans died in the kamikaze rush, although one man was shot in the shoulder. Woody shook his head: “Caprice as much as courage determines who lives and who dies.”
Later that same day, as if to prove that things could get even weirder, Harry and some mates discovered two large chests in the airport office at Villafranca—a German army payroll. The loot totaled ten million Italian lire, a hundred thousand dollars at the official exchange rate; it would double the pay (roughly $100 per month) of every man in the battalion. U.S. servicemen were not allowed to send cash home from Italy. But they could spend it in the country, and beneficiaries of Harry’s find bought everything from jewelry to paintings—the trophies of which General Hays had spoken—and shipped them later to the States.
That night the order came down for the 86th Regiment to move through the 85th and take Verona, while the 87th, with the 85th at the rear, would shove off directly for Lake Garda. “Damn,” Harry thought, “they’re going to get all that wine and maybe Juliet, too . . . oh, well. The 1st Battalion of the 85th Regiment moved out of Villafranca with the coin of the realm bulging from every pocket.”
The seesaw of emotion continued in the walled, pink-brick city of Verona. As the 86th entered the historic home of Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets, they were shelled from south of the city. Worse, it soon became clear that the shells were not coming from German artillery but mistakenly from the U.S. 88th Division. One of the regular, flatland divisions on the 10th’s right, the Blue Devil Division was not at fault. There had been a mix-up in the hastily prepared map overlays; Verona was on its liberation list too.
From far back as Roman times, Verona has marked a key crossroads. The road north leads up the Adige River to Austria and the rest of Europe. To the west is Milan and to the east Venice. It is also home to Bardolina, Valpolicella, and Soave, three of Italy’s classic wines. David Brower and his 3d Battalion were looking forward to sampling the fruits of the city.
Italians, in the streets and squares by the thousands, welcomed us with almost embarrassing enthusiasm. At each momentary stop vehicles would be covered with civilians, laughing, crying, and singing. Flowers covered the streets and colorful flags hung from the buildings. Balconies almost sagged with people. Signs were scrawled on the sides of buildings, “Liberate,” and “Vive Americani.” Everywhere, damage from the explosions could be seen. Windows were broken, and buildings along the river had collapsed from the blasts.
The high point of the day came when the mayor of Verona stepped out on the city hall balcony to proclaim the war was over. This was it, we thought. Everyone went mad, soldiers included. Weapons were fired and people danced in the streets, drinking wine or whatever was available.
The celebrating among the GIs soon ended, however, when they were told that the mayor was referring only to Verona’s war. The 10th’s work still was not done.
The snafu with the 88th Division ended poorly for the 86th Regiment. Not only had the 88th shot at them, now they were usurping their accommodations to boot. Apparently, higher powers than David Brower had ruled in favor of the 88th. That night of April 26, as the Blue Devils moved in, the men of the mountain division had to move out. They gave up their pleasant beds in the homes of local families, shouldered their packs, and motored several miles out of the city to a bivouac area in a field. It was raining.
Worse yet, Brower remembered, “Along with the billets—and the spoils, we can assume, of war—they [the 88th] took credit for the liberation of the city.”
Plans continued to change with the extremely fluid situation on the ground. Overnight, the 10th’s assignment shifted from the Adige road and Brenner Pass to the shores of Lake Garda a few miles farther west. Garda afforded another escape route into the Alps, and concentrations of German artillery and tanks had been spotted moving up the lake’s eastern and western shores.
Rain squalls frothed the surface of Lake Garda over the next two days as 10th battalions chased enemy units up the eastern shoreline. They moved through the resort towns of Lazise and Bardolino, Garda and Malcesine, while German artillery batteries on the west shore fired across sporadically. Even in the drizzle, these were towns of sublime beauty, for centuries host to Europe’s elite. Grand villas, including Mussolini’s at Gargnano, dotted the shoreline. Shelley wrote “Ode to the West Wind” and “Adonais” there in the early nineteenth century. The great German writer and philosopher Goethe lived and worked at Malcesine, on the east shore, between 1786 and 1788. Surrounded by olive groves and citrus and palm trees, each town crowded down to a small boat harbor on the water, and each was crowned by a stone turret or other remnant of a medieval fort on the hill.
Even in the rain, the men could see that this was the true beginning of the mighty Alps. Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake, is shaped like a Chianti bottle with the south end spreading into the foothills at the edge of the Po Valley. Thirty-four miles north, the bottle’s neck is pinched by tremendous walls of snow-capped gray granite, “like a glacier-carved fjord,” to the eyes of Bob Parker. Escarpments on both sides rise as high as 7,000 feet above lake level and plunge so precipitously that the highway requires a score of tunnels to circumnavigate the northern shore. These tunnels, and countless galleries carved into the rock above them, were the scenes of bloody battles in World War I, when the northern half of the lake was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 gave this end of the lake and the adjacent high mountains, the Sud Tyrol, to Italy.
On the morning of April 28, as the 2d Battalion of the 86th Regiment approached the first tunnel, German sappers set off charges that blew the entranc
e and covered the road in automobile-sized boulders. Over on the west shore, two miles across the water, German 88-mm cannon on railroad cars rolled out of tunnels, blasted the cliffs above the Americans, and rolled back inside. The 88s were the most feared artillery piece in World War II, with a range of up to twelve miles and better accuracy than any comparable Allied weapon. With each incoming shell, shrapnel and more rocks rained down on the ski troopers. There was no place to dig in, no place to hide, with water below and vertical rock cliff above.
The battalion moved back around a corner to relative safety and considered its options. There appeared to be three. They could wait for the 126th Engineer bulldozers to clear the tunnel and proceed up the lake road. But what would prevent the enemy from blowing other tunnels? And what about the 88s dialed in on the road? A second option involved climbing overland across the high spine of Monte Baldo ridge, which separated Lake Garda from the valley of the Adige. There was a trail from Malcesine to the summit of the escarpment and then from there north, up and down along the ridge, to a point above the town of Torbole, the regiment’s objective, at the head of the lake. Third, they could try an amphibious skirting of the blown tunnel. Twenty-five-man DUKWs from the Po crossing were hot on the heels of the 10th’s advance and could conceivably be used to get around the tunnel.
Capt. David Brower argued initially for the overland climb. “Wasn’t this situation just what we were asking for? Hadn’t we, as mountain troops, been trained for just such terrain? Shouldn’t we be able to effect complete surprise by attacking along a route that the enemy—especially a disorganized enemy, few in number—would have to assume could defend it?” But one by one, Brower answered his own questions in the negative. From Remount Blue:
Here we were, mountain troops, fighting in the Alps. But where was our mountain equipment? Presumably, it was back in Naples. The equipment and clothing with us was no different from the ordinary flatland GI’s, right down to the last shred of underwear—except that even most of the flatland apparel had been left behind when we jumped off [almost two weeks before], and we hadn’t had so much as a change of underwear since then. Ropes, mountain boots, sleeping bags? Why ask about those? We hadn’t yet captured enough German blankets to give more than one man in ten a blanket to his name.
Brower concluded that the 10th at that moment was less equipped for mountains and snow than the flatland soldiers had been prepared for Attu in 1943, when they had suffered so many needless casualties.
And what about the time factor? General Hays was in a race to cut off access to the high passes. Brower estimated, based on his own mountain experience, that “in good weather, with no snow on the trail, one man who knew a little about mountains and was properly dressed for them but otherwise climbing free of load, could have covered the high route to Torbole in about 17 hours. How would a battalion fare?” Brower also worried about the experience level of the force.
We may have had many men who knew a little about mountains when we hit Italy, but the division’s 4,000 casualties had included too many of the original mountain men. We utterly lacked proper clothing and equipment. A battalion column would be four miles long, and flank protection would be all but forbidden by the steep slopes on either side of the trail. Without mules, we could hardly hope to secure such close artillery support as might be necessary. And finally, far from being free of loads, the men would have to carry weapons and ammunition. That would be bad enough for riflemen. Heavy weapons men would have tougher sledding still.
So, the road and the right flank were both out. That left the left flank, a risky boat ride in full view of enemy gunners, through storm-chopped waters around the blown tunnel. Here were the mountain troops, trained to ski and climb, about to rely, again, on a maritime maneuver. The 2d Battalion backtracked to Malcesine and boarded the DUKWs. The German 88s across the lake opened up on the string of ducklings hugging the shore. Timed fire burst in angry black puffs of flak over the soldiers’ heads, and point-detonation shells sent geysers of foam fifty feet into the air. Shells blasted the cliffs above the fleet and sent rocks crashing into the water as well. The DUKWs moved further off-shore, but the shelling only intensified.
Watching from the lakefront at Malcesine, Brower and his 3d Battalion, who were next in line, assumed the little fleet would be annihilated. But then the surprising word came back that they’d made it, without casualties even. They had landed in a small cove between Tunnels 2 and 3, and had moved into the shelter of Tunnel 3, which was free of demolitions. Later DUKW loads were not so lucky. When the barrages came close, the men dove as best they could to the floor of the ungainly craft, but timed fire claimed a number of 3d Battalion men.
By nightfall of the 28th, two battalions of the 86th had hunkered down just shy of Tunnel 4. There was a break in the cliff wall here—the angle of the rock backed off somewhat—and the decision was made to send I and K Companies up a steep traverse and overland to Torbole while the rest pressed ahead on the coast road. In continuing drizzle, everyone tried to sleep. They had not rested well since the Po. They had not eaten properly; the best food of late had been the sausages in captured German rucksacks. The men were wet and worn, physically and emotionally. They weren’t sure how much more they could endure. That hint of victory they’d tasted in the Po River valley had been replaced once again by the dry, tight throat of uncertainty.
In fact, though the frazzled men of the 10th could not have known it, their war was tantalizingly near its end. On the morning of the 29th, hundreds of miles to the south in the comfortable splendor of the royal summer palace at Caserta, the highest echelons—including Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, who was Allied commander in chief for the Mediterranean theater, and German Commanding General von Vietinghoff and SS commander Gen. Karl Wolff—signed surrender documents for all German forces in Italy and southern Austria. The problem was, the negotiations had been conducted in secret, without Hitler’s knowledge or consent; the surrendering generals could not guarantee the documents’ recognition by Berlin. Meanwhile, the fates of thousands of men hung in the balance as the 10th, and all of the other Allied divisions on the northern Italian front, continued to attack.
On the other side of the Alps, the U.S. Seventh Army rushed to deny northern access to a Final Redoubt. Its tanks raced southward up into the Austrian Alps through Landsberg, Germany, in whose famous fortress/prison Hitler had written Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the Third Reich’s doctrinal guidebook. Across northern Italy, following the crossing of the Po River, Allied divisions fanned out swiftly toward the eastern and western borders. Elements of the British Eighth Army reached Venice on the 30th and kept driving north and east toward Trieste, in a race for that port city with Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav Communists. On the west, elements of the U.S. Fifth Army neared Milan; Turin would be next. In a moment as symbolic as it was grisly, Italian partisans on the 28th caught Benito Mussolini, his mistress Clara Petacci, and twelve cabinet ministers in a convoy attempting escape into Switzerland. Jailed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, Mussolini had escaped (with the help of German commandos) and installed himself as puppet dictator of German-occupied northern Italy. Now, in a vengeful fury, partisans executed all fourteen fugitives outside a village near Lake Como. The next day, the bodies of Clara and Il Duce were brought to Milan and hung upside down from lampposts in the square where, a year before, fifteen anti-Fascist partisans had been executed. A crowd crazy with revenge spat upon the bodies and shot them full of holes.
As for the 10th Mountain Division, what happened next epitomized the needless waste of war. Brower’s 3d Battalion entered Tunnel 4 on the morning of the 29th, but couldn’t get out the other end. A German machine gun sprayed the exit from a World War I–era embrasure carved out of the granite beside Tunnel 5. M Company gunners brought forward one of their own .50-caliber machine guns to “seal off” the offending rock window with fire more deadly than the Germans could return. “Under this cover,” Brower recalled, “riflemen spurted forward and tossed
grenades through a doorway in the wall of the next tunnel. Two of the room’s occupants staggered out into the tunnel to die; another six lay where they were. The tunnel was ours, and advance elements of L Company moved quickly through the black interior.”
At the far end, they stumbled over a pile of debris that was at first inexplicable. This was the tunnel later known as the Tunnel of the Dead, and death was not finished with it. For the Americans, who had seen enough horror to numb them almost completely, here was a scene of special hideousness. Apparently, a rear-guard crew of about twenty Germans—it was impossible to discern exactly how many—had been hand-moving a 20-mm antiaircraft gun to a new defensive position to their rear, preparatory to blowing the tunnel up. “Somehow,” Brower writes, “they ran afoul of their own demolitions. . . . Their war ended quickly, if not prettily. The explosion set fire to their own ammunition and to them. Pieces of men were scattered as far as fifty feet out of the tunnel. Part of the massive rock roof of the tunnel collapsed and fell to the floor. But there was too little rock to complete the burial or to extinguish the smoldering.”
Climb to Conquer Page 19