by Alex Kershaw
Sparks and his men climbed down netting and into the landing craft that would take them to the shore. It was around 8 A.M. when E Company’s boats left the mother ship and made for the beach. The air was soft, the skies a bright blue except where scarred by ugly black puffs from anti-aircraft fire. Before them lay the Gulf of Salerno with its long beaches of white sands. In the distance, to the north of the bay, Sparks could see 3,556-foot Monte Soprano and adjacent Monte Sottane, which had provided the perfect vantage points for German artillery observers.
Ramps came down. The landing craft disgorged a foul soup of puke and seawater. Men pushed forward onto the churned sands and began weaving through piles of Allied supplies. Sparks led his men inland, passing the ancient ruins of Paestum, famous for its three great temples, whose towering columns still stood, seemingly in defiance. Evidence of fierce and desperate fighting lay all around as he moved farther inland: abandoned German anti-tank guns, packs dropped by men in a hurry, vehicles blackened and still smoldering. Not far from one temple stood the charred hulk of a German tank that had received a direct hit and then “brewed up” as the British put it, exploding into flames. The Germans had been trapped inside, and a puddle of their fat, coated in brightly colored flies, spread slowly beneath the tracks.
As Sparks moved off the plain of Salerno and onto higher ground, one of his men couldn’t help show his feelings.
“Captain, I’m scared,” said a young private.
“Well, soldier, we’re all scared,” Sparks reassured him. “Don’t let that bother you.”
E Company was soon soaking wet. The famous Italian autumn rains began, turning road junctions into muddy bottlenecks and slowing the Allied advance. The mud caused as much delay as Kesslering’s divisions, which had destroyed bridges and blocked roads with felled trees covered in booby traps. Early on September 24, Sparks learned that Colonel Ankcorn had been injured on a reconnaissance patrol when his jeep hit one of the countless mines the Germans had also left in their wake. The Thunderbirds’ commanding general, Troy Middleton, was as worried as Sparks at the possible loss of the man he regarded as the finest regimental commander he had ever encountered.
At first, it was reported that Ankcorn had a bad fracture near his ankle. He might return to duty soon, the injury being relatively minor. Middleton waited, like Sparks and others throughout the division, for more news. When it arrived, it was not good. Ankcorn’s leg was so badly mangled, it would have to be amputated. His war was over, and Sparks had lost his mentor, the man who had taught him more than any other about leadership. Colonel John Church, the 45th Division’s chief of staff, took over command of the regiment, but as far as a bereft Sparks was concerned, Ankcorn could “never adequately be replaced.”
The Allied advance continued. On October 1, the Fifth Army seized Naples. As if the gods had ordained it, nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted for the first time in thirty-eight years and began to spew ominous clouds of soot and ash. The city was in a woeful state, with no water or electricity and a starving population, having been sacked by the departing Germans.
Naples was a harbinger of greater disappointment still. In front of the Allied advance, Kesselring had constructed three defensive lines across Italy from east to west. The strongest of these was the Gustav Line, which spanned the narrowest part of the country, some eighty miles south of Rome and seventy north of Naples. Its strongpoint was the ancient town of Monte Cassino, notable for a wondrous Benedictine monastery established on a mountain almost fifteen hundred years before. To reach Rome, the Gustav Line had to be breached and Monte Cassino taken.
In early October, Sparks received orders to advance toward the Upper Volturno Valley, a key objective if the Allies were to reach the Gustav Line before winter set in. Heavy rain fell and rivers burst their banks, washing away the few bridges that the Germans had not destroyed. As Caesar’s legions had before them, Sparks and his men passed through the town of Benevento’s famous archway in jeeps and trucks. Most of the men couldn’t have cared less that they were now the ones making history as they headed toward the small town of Ponte, where division commander Middleton hoped to trap German forces retreating toward the Gustav Line. Dead Germans lay by the roadside like carrion, hawks and crows circling above limbless corpses that looked like large hams wrapped in gray uniform.
PONTE, ITALY, OCTOBER 6, 1943
DAWN WAS NIGH. A cold mist clung to the ground near the village of Ponte, providing cover as Sparks led his men across a hillside. E Company was acting as the point of the regiment’s advance.
“I want your squad to secure our flank,” Sparks told Sergeant Vinnie Stigliani, a fluent Italian speaker who had joined E Company at Salerno. Also a gifted musician, Stigliani had quickly learned to dig his hands into the earth whenever he came under fire, terrified he might never play an instrument again. Since arriving at Salerno, Sparks had come to rely on this short and wiry eighteen-year-old rifle squad leader from Boston to converse with the often surly locals in order to obtain chickens and other fresh food.
Stigliani and his squad set out, each man fifteen yards from the other. They had not gone far when the mist lifted, leaving E Company terribly exposed. German machine gunners opened up. Volleys of bullets swept the open ground, sounding like rough fabric being ripped apart. Stigliani hit the dirt and flattened himself. “I was lower than a rat on the ground,” he recalled. “Machine gun bullets passed over my head, buzzing like bees, and I could hear guys moaning all around me.” Something hit his back. Then he felt warm blood trickle down his leg.
Sparks meanwhile shouted for his other rifle squads to pull back to a bare hillside to his left. They could take cover from the German machine guns there. He and his men had just reached the hill when he spotted enemy tanks four hundred yards farther to his left. The tanks opened fire. There wasn’t time to think. All he could do was react. He tried to make himself heard above the firing, which sounded like hammer blows close to the ear, and the explosions that peppered the bare hillside with lethal shards of hot metal. A few men no doubt urinated and defecated as their shocked bodies automatically rid themselves of excess ballast and locked into survival mode.
Sparks stayed focused and shouted as loud as he could. There was a ridge, around half a mile to the rear. His men were to head for it. They should bring their weapons. It was to be an orderly retreat. But few could hear him as the sky seemed to collapse on them and explosions ripped the earth apart.
Mortarman Jack Hallowell watched as some men panicked and ran for trees. He didn’t follow them, knowing that one shell burst in the treetops would shower fragments of wood and metal, killing anyone cowering below. It was safer to stay in the open. And then it happened. A shell screeched through the air and exploded amid the trees. Three or four men were hit. Hallowell would never forget their last screams. He was tempted to drop the mortar barrel he was carrying over his shoulder and run for his life, back to the ridgeline, but he knew Sparks would be furious if he left any part of the weapon behind. He ran as fast he could, but the barrel was so heavy he had to stop and catch his breath. A shell whistled over his head. He had been spotted. Another shell landed closer. He knew the next would kill him, so he jumped up and ran, setting what surely must have been a new world record for the hundredyard dash, before finally reaching the ridgeline to his rear.
Several wounded men lay in agony. Medics were busy tending to them, slapping on dressings and punching morphine spikes into their torn bodies. Sparks stood nearby, still shouting orders to his platoon leaders.
As machine-gun bullets raked the ridgeline, Hallowell and others took cover in a farm building where a small and frightened boy sat crying.
“You’re going to be okay,” Hallowell said to soothe him. “You’re going to be okay.”
Back on the exposed hillside, where the mist had lifted, Vinnie Stigliani heard the guttural sound of German soldiers. He dared to glance up and saw them examining American corpses.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Stig
liani decided to pretend to be dead. It didn’t work. One of the soldiers grabbed his head and pulled him up by his helmet. The German was all of sixteen years old. He was wearing an Afrika Korps hat with a bull’s-eye marked on it. Soon, another German was helping drag Stigliani toward captivity.
On the ridgeline, Sparks examined some of his injured men. Among them was a young private called Campbell. He had been hit in the chest and was a blood-drenched mess with a serious wound to one of his lungs. The medics had done their best to stem the blood flow, but Sparks gave him little chance, knowing such “sucking wounds” were almost always fatal.
The German tanks finally moved away, no doubt low on ammunition and gas, much to the traumatized riflemen’s relief. Like the men under his command, Sparks would now have experienced the backlash from the stress of combat. A profound exhaustion probably hit him as his adrenaline ebbed.
Sparks had seen young men ripped apart, felt the ground shudder beneath him and groan as 88mm shells exploded all around. He had lost more than a dozen men, the highest count so far in combat for his company. But it could have been far worse. Thankfully he had been able to pull most of his men out of danger before even more could be captured or killed.
He had not panicked. He had been able to think and act quickly once the shooting began, and he had felt little fear. Important lessons had been learned. Only a few of his men could be counted on to advance under heavy fire. Good lieutenants and experienced sergeants were essential. Before long, he would place a particularly formidable sergeant, an ex–football player, just to the rear of his most vulnerable men to stop them turning tail.
He was delighted with most of his company, however, and particularly pleased with several Mexican-Americans under his command. He had wondered how they would behave in combat, knowing they had been discriminated against throughout their lives and might therefore lack the will to fight for a country that had treated them so shabbily. In Miami, Arizona, more than half his classmates had been Hispanic, and he could fully understand why some would not want to give their all for Uncle Sam. But like all the other poor boys in his company, they had turned out to be excellent soldiers.
Later that day, in a farmhouse behind German lines, a badly wounded Vinnie Stigliani sat opposite a German intelligence officer. The lieutenant had already examined Stigliani’s dog tags and discovered that he came from Charlestown, Massachusetts.
“Did you belong to the Boys’ Club?” the officer asked in perfect English.
“Yeah. Everybody belonged to it.”
“Do you know who I am?”
“No.”
“I was a swimming instructor at the club before the war.”
The German had worked at the club while attending MIT in Boston as a German army officer.
“Did you find any ponds destroyed?” asked the German.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” the German said, and then placed a Luger pistol to Stigliani’s head.
Stigliani started to cry. The German asked him again. He said he didn’t understand the question. Then the German pushed Stigliani into an adjoining room. But he did not shoot him. Only later, as a POW, would Stigliani realize that the German’s English had not been perfect after all. The German must have forgotten the English word bridges and used the Italian instead. Pontes had sounded just like “ponds” to a terrified eighteen-year-old bleeding from shrapnel wounds. The German had wanted to know if E Company had found destroyed bridges, not poisoned ponds, during its advance.
PONTE-CASALDUNI, ITALY, OCTOBER 12, 1943
THE MOUNTAINS OF Matese towered to the north, skirted by forests of beech and black pine. The leaves were turning, especially at higher altitudes, where they resembled the yellowing aspen back in the mountains of Arizona. The disappearing cover was beautiful to behold, but it also exposed men to German artillery observers hiding on ridgelines, as cunning as the Apennine foxes that roamed the area.
Sparks set up his command post a mile and a half east of the town of Ponte, where the Volturno and Calore rivers met, and awaited his next orders. He had been on the line almost three weeks. He had reached the period of maximum efficiency for young officers in World War II, no longer a battle virgin, too soon to become overconfident and then exhausted as his mind and body shut down because of accumulated stress and deprivation.
It was around 10:30 A.M. on October 12 when he heard the regiment’s 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns open up, filling the area with their frantic barking. Enemy planes came in low, wings spitting fire, strafing E Company’s positions. There was no time to take cover. Caught in the open, near his command post, Sparks fell to the ground. Blood poured from a serious wound in his abdomen. Medic Jack Turner may have been the first to get to him and stem the bleeding, possibly with a compress, and then inject morphine to kill what must have been excruciating pain. Mortarman Jack Hallowell was there to help carry him to an ambulance. So great was the blood loss that he quickly lost consciousness. He had been felled by friendly fire: a splinter from a 40mm American anti-aircraft shell had in fact penetrated all the way to his liver. For Captain Felix Sparks, the war appeared to be over.
THE APENNINES, NOVEMBER 1943
THE ALLIES’ BLOODY slog up the mountainous spine of Italy continued, the cost in lives growing higher and the gain in ground less every day. “I do not think we can conduct a winter campaign in this country,” wrote General Montgomery on October 31. “If I remember, Caesar used to go to winter quarters—a very sound thing to do!” Nevertheless, Eisenhower insisted on pushing ahead: “It is essential for us to retain the initiative.” Tying down German forces was crucial to his preparations for Overlord, the planned 1944 invasion of northwestern Europe via Normandy.
As the weather worsened late that fall, the Allied advance slowed to an average of less than two miles each week, each German life costing an astronomical 25,000 in shells. “To infantrymen the war in Italy was one fortified German line after another,” recalled the British journalist Alan Whicker. “Break through one and there was always the next, just ahead. Ford a river—and there’s its twin, behind an identical mountain.”
The Thunderbirds succeeded in crossing the raging Volturno River, most of whose bridges had been swept away in floods, and then pressed on to the mountain town of Venafro, some seventy miles north of Naples, where they finally confronted the fabled Gustav Line, defenses so strong that, in Kesselring’s words, the Allies would “break their teeth on it.” Winter had arrived in the central Apennines, marked simply as a “mountainous hinterland” on the Americans’ maps. The bare, vertiginous slopes, which even bears and wolves seemed to have abandoned, crisscrossed with almost vertical mule trails, were assigned coordinates and numbers but no names. “The country was shockingly beautiful,” recalled Ernie Pyle, who covered the Allied advance, “and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy.”
On November 7, a bitterly cold day, the 157th Infantry regiment moved north of Venafro and set up positions some fifteen miles due east of Monte Cassino in the Matese Mountains. Still in their summer field jackets, men shivered, their teeth chattering so hard their jaws ached as they slapped their arms against their bodies. When they looked back over their shoulders, they saw a long valley stretching to the south, dotted with orchards, vineyards, and hundreds of anti-aircraft guns and howitzers.
It was destined to be a long stay. The Germans had been ordered by Hitler to cease all withdrawals, and the Thunderbirds came under devastating fire whenever they tried to advance. Medic Warren Wall spent day after day crawling over sharp rocks to reach fellow Thunderbirds wounded by shrapnel, which would account for almost 80 percent of fatalities among American infantrymen in Europe. To stop his cold metal dog tags from rattling against his chest as he sprinted to the wounded, he had wrapped German insulation rubber around them. They would be his sole possession by war’s end.
That November in mountain country, Wall got lucky. In heavy rain, around 10 A.M. one morn
ing, he came under intense machine-gun fire. The bullets were so close they ricocheted off nearby rocks. A fellow medic beside Wall cracked under the strain and ran away. Wall tried to find better cover as mortars exploded nearby, but he was flipped into the air by one explosion and hit in the neck by shrapnel. Blood poured down his neck and soaked his chest. He knew he would bleed to death if he did not get treatment quickly. Adrenaline coursing through him, he ran to the bottom of a ridge and caught up with the medic who had broken down in tears and fled.
“Stop!” he begged his fellow medic. “See how bad I’m hit.”
The medic kept running. Wall followed. At the next ridge, he caught up with him.
“How bad am I hit?”
The medic looked at Wall’s wound and began to shake.
“You’re hit bad.”
Then the shell-shocked medic took off running again.
Two miles behind the lines, Wall finally got to a doctor who stopped the bleeding. A few days later, at the 45th Division General Hospital, he learned that a nerve in the back of his neck had been severed and he would be reclassified as fit for noncombat duties only. He had received the “million-dollar wound” so many of his fellow Thunderbirds, shivering above the Volturno Valley, now hoped for.
The freezing temperatures and soaking rains began to cause as many casualties as the German guns. Dozens of men in the regiment came down with trench foot, no matter how many times they changed into dry socks and rubbed Barbasol shaving cream on their blackened toes. Mule trains carried supplies to the shivering Thunderbirds, who had still not received full winter kit, and brought back dozens of crippled men. Sometimes mules slipped and fell to their deaths, screaming and kicking as they tumbled onto rocks hundreds of feet below. Rotations with men spending eight days up on the line and four days in a rest camp did little to improve morale or reduce the incidence of trench foot. “Dry feet? Sure we had dry feet,” recalled E Company’s Jack Hallowell. “We had dry feet like we had electric toasters and blondes to sing us to sleep. Dry feet were something we dreamed about when we weren’t too damn cold to dream.”