The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’ ”

  O’Neill turned back to face the enemy. He could see a man digging, a hundred yards away.

  The German stopped digging.

  O’Neill believed the man was a sniper sent up to kill him.

  “I’ll fix that son of a bitch.”

  He grabbed his M1 rifle and waited for the German to start digging again. When he did, O’Neill fired over and over, finally hearing a ping as the ejected clip signaled his rifle was empty.

  “Bitte … bitte … bitte …” moaned the sniper. The only German O’Neill probably knew were the words Kraut and kaput, preferably used together. Bitte sounded like “Peter.” He didn’t know what it meant.

  A Thunderbird lieutenant approached.

  “You can come down,” said the lieutenant.

  O’Neill and his Psalm-reciting compatriot didn’t waste any time getting back to the relative safety of the caves, fifty or so feet below them. In a corridor leading to the caves’ aid station, a hundred and twenty men lay on litters. “No one had slept,” recalled surgeon Peter Graffagnino.

  “We were out of plasma, morphine and bandages.” Local Italian women who had also taken refuge in the caves helped to nurse the wounded. Others made a thin soup from the handfuls of dried beans and a few chickens they had grabbed as they fled their homes. As candles cast ghoulish shadows across the underground labyrinth’s damp walls, white-faced Thunderbirds sipped the soup slowly, not knowing if they would ever eat a decent meal again.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CROSSING THE LINE

  German propaganda leaflet dropped on Thunderbirds at Anzio. [National Archives]

  ANZIO, ITALY, FEBRUARY 23, 1944

  IT WAS TIME TO move out. At 1:30 A.M., the able-bodied survivors from Sparks’s Second Battalion shouldered arms, said last prayers, and formed a line leading to the mouth of the caves. They were a pitiful group, bleary-eyed, bearded, covered in bloodstains and mud, their gaunt faces blackened by grime and cold sweat. The walking wounded and those with trench foot, limping along, brought up the rear. Like Sparks, they had managed just a few minutes of nightmarish sleep between heart-pounding barrages and gut-wrenching close combat. They were numbed and many were stupefied, all at the very limit of their physical and mental endurance, sustained only by last reserves of adrenaline and the determination to live. What lay ahead would be the greatest test of their young lives—crossing German-held territory, dotted with machine-gun nests, for more than two miles.

  As Sparks prepared to leave the caves, he heard intense fighting outside. It was time to retrieve the machine gun he had left with the British. Near the entrance to the caves, he found Colonel Brown and told him he was going to get the machine gun.

  The battalion’s planned escape route led across a bridge that spanned a deep draw.

  “I’ll meet you at the bridge,” he told Brown, and then slipped out of the caves and made his way north through draws and gullies, remembering the route to his old position close to the Via Anziate, around four hundred yards north of the caves. To his shock, there was no one there. The position had been abandoned and his machine gun had disappeared. The British had either been captured or surrendered. Empty-handed and “spooked” by the disappearance of the British, he groped his way back through the darkness and eventually caught up with a group of about fifty men who were trying to break out. He decided to lead the way. Terrified Thunderbirds followed him in single file.

  Sparks reached the small bridge over the draw he had mentioned to Colonel Brown and then led some of the men across it. Others lagged behind, slowed by uprooted trees, rocks, and blasted vegetation. He went back to make sure the stragglers, several of them walking wounded, got across the bridge. When he was sure every man in his party had done so, he moved forward once more, heading down a supply trail. He spotted some biscuits and a water-holder that had been dropped by a British soldier. He had not eaten properly in over a week and was ravenous. He stuffed his mouth full of biscuits and washed them down with the clean water.

  It was a cold night. Rain fell, soaking his dirty, slicked uniform. Sergeant Fortunato Garcia, Sparks’s communications sergeant, who had courageously led the last survivors from E Company to the caves the day before, now volunteered to scout ahead and took off into the darkness. He did not return.*

  Sparks heard the rip of a German machine gun. It had a distinct sound, like fabric being torn close to his ear. The gun had opened up on men ahead of him. Then it fell silent. He stood stock-still for a few moments, listening for signs of the enemy before moving forward again. When he caught up with the column, he saw that several men had been cut down and killed, their bodies torn apart by the bullets. Others had scattered. A few were lying, frozen with fear, nearby. The column had stumbled straight into the line of fire of a German machine-gun nest.

  A machine gun sounded again.

  Bullets cracked through the cold air.

  “Fire back, fire back!” Sparks ordered.

  Few men did.

  “Everybody, follow me!” he shouted.

  He crawled forward. He knew there was a canal not far away. It would provide cover. But only a few men still had the courage and strength to follow. The canal’s banks were steep, matted with vines and weeds. He dropped into it. Rancid water came up to his shins. Others scrambled down after him. He took a head count. A few minutes ago, he had led a group of around forty men. Now there were just twelve. Not one of them was from E Company. As far as he knew, he was the lone survivor from the two hundred and thirty men he had commanded just six days ago. He figured everyone else had been captured or killed or had surrendered. He started forward again, moving along the canal, toward German lines. Sensing danger in one direction, he trusted his instinct and led the survivors down another path.

  They tried to be as silent as possible as they crawled forward, but they soon heard Germans cry out. Grenades exploded, sending fountains of earth into the sky. But the Germans could not see them and no one was hurt. They scrambled through the German lines and into the no-man’s-land beyond. Every one of them had decided he would rather be killed than captured. On they slithered and crawled through the gray mud and scrub, past the detritus of war, shivering from nervous exhaustion, terror, and the cold, unrelenting rain.

  Sparks saw men ahead in the darkness. They were British. He did not have a password for them. Would they open fire if he called out? The group of British artillerymen spotted him and, to his astonishment, ran off, horrified by the mud-coated madman emerging from the murk.

  “We’re Americans!” shouted Sparks as the British fled into nearby woods.

  DAWN HAD BROKEN by the time Sparks returned to his regiment. He was the only man to do so from his company. Few men in World War II would endure so much loss and unrelenting violence and come out of it physically unscathed. The former Montana journalist Jack Hallowell was at the regimental command post when Sparks arrived. “He was physically and emotionally done in,” recalled Hallowell. “He was a worn-out old boy. He had gone without rest for seven days and nights and had seen horror and death all around him.”

  Sparks was barely able to stand as he reported to the 157th’s commanding officer, Colonel Church, on the Battle of the Caves and the subsequent breakout. Hallowell and others meanwhile dug a hole in the side of a nearby bank. Sparks was still carrying his pistol and another gun when he finally lay down in the hole, where he then slept, undisturbed, for more than twenty-four hours.

  Just 225 other men from the Second Battalion, a thousand men at full strength, managed to make it back. They included a man from E Company, a platoon sergeant called Leon Siehr who would return two days after Sparks but would, tragically, be killed later that spring.

  Sparks was extraordinarily fortunate to still be alive. But he would never be the same. Other than Siehr, he had lost his whole company, men he had grown to admire and love. No one would ever be able to understand how that felt. It was, in Spark
s’s words, a “terrible, terrible, terrible blow.” Indeed, he had paid the greatest price for getting to know so many of his men by name.

  In holding the line at Anzio and preventing a great German victory, the Thunderbirds had been decimated. The regiment’s Second Battalion had suffered 75 percent casualties. On February 16, it had numbered 713 enlisted men and 38 officers. When Sparks returned to Allied lines a week later, there were just 162 men and 15 officers left. Ninety of these men had to be hospitalized immediately. Many had lost their hearing because of the constant din of artillery fire and the echo chamber effect of the caves that had amplified every explosion. Several could not walk and had to have legs amputated, so severe were their cases of trench foot.

  The British battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, which had relieved Sparks’s battalion in the caves, fought against all odds for three more days before it was finally destroyed in its entirety. Surgeon Peter Graffagnino and several medics, who had heroically volunteered to stay behind with the wounded in the caves, spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Germany.

  THE THUNDERBIRDS HAD saved the beachhead but had suffered mightily for their heroism. The division had in fact lost half its strength in just thirty-six hours. “[But] the back of the German army had been broken,” recalled Jack Hallowell. “First at Stalingrad, now at the plains south of Rome.” In Kesselring’s own words, Anzio was the Allies’ greatest “epic of bravery” in Europe in World War II. Sparks and his fellow soldiers were “ausgezeichnet”—“distinguished”—indeed. “We were opposed by equals,” recalled arguably the German army’s most successful and respected general. “Our enemy was of the highest quality.”

  Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds had fought one of the most savage and important battles in the entire history of the American Army, earning praise throughout the Allied high command and also a Presidential Unit Citation. General Truscott, who took over command of Allied forces at Anzio from the weak and indecisive Lucas, was unstinting in his praise: “In the annals of American wars, there are few deeds more gallant than the defense by this gallant battalion.”

  For his heroism during the Battle of the Caves, Sparks would receive the Silver Star and be promoted to major. But neither the medal nor his promotion would salve his deep emotional wounds. Nothing could compensate for the loss of so many young men who had entrusted him with their lives and fought so courageously for him. He was alive because of them. They had stopped the waves of Germans at the very edge of his foxhole. They had made the ultimate sacrifice and given everything for him. He would never forget their agony as they lay waiting to die. Their cries and groans of desperation, the terror on their young faces, would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  * * *

  * Garcia was taken prisoner. He survived the war and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at Anzio.

  Second Lt. Felix Sparks with his future wife, Mary, before their wedding in Arizona on June 17, 1941. [Courtesy of the Sparks family]

  Young lovers. Felix and Mary, students at the University of Arizona, 1940. [Courtesy of Mary Sparks]

  Mary Sparks and son Kirk, 1943. Sparks placed this image on the butt of his .45 Colt pistol. [Courtesy of Mary Sparks]

  Monty and Patton. The two great Allied generals bid each other farewell, Palermo airport, Sicily, July 28, 1943. [National Archives]

  Three and four stars. Eisenhower and Patton, Sicily, 1943. [National Archives]

  Men of the 157th Infantry Regiment enter Messina, Sicily, August 17, 1943. [National Archives]

  Seventh Army soldier receiving plasma from a medic, Sicily, August 9, 1943.[National Archives]

  Leaving a meeting on October 22, 1943, in Italy. Left to right: Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Dwight Eisenhower, Major General J. P. Lucas, and Lt. General Mark Clark, commander of the 5th Army. [National Archives]

  Thunderbirds from the 157th Infantry Regiment buy flowers from an Italian boy near Caserta, Italy, October 26, 1943. [National Archives]

  Men from the 157th Infantry Regiment on patrol, Pozzilli, Italy, January 2, 1944. [National Archives]

  The 45th Division’s chaplain, Lt. Colonel William King, speaks to men during Christmas Day services, 1943. [National Archives]

  Dead German officer of the Hermann Goering Division lying in a gulley where Germans had tried to infiltrate Thunderbird lines, March 6, 1944. [National Archives]

  Fifth Army soldiers on the march, southern Italy, spring 1944. [National Archives]

  Felix Sparks (right) at Anzio. [Courtesy of Jack Hallowell]

  Brigadier General Robert Frederick (left), commander of 1st Special Service Force, and Mark Clark, 5th Army commander, after Frederick received DSC at Anzio, spring 1944. [National Archives]

  Thunderbird private from E Company 157th Infantry Regiment getting his shoes shined before invasion of southern France, August 7, 1944. [National Archives]

  Winston Churchill (left) and Mark Clark (right) aboard a submarine chaser off the coast of Italy, August 19, 1944. [National Archives]

  Medics treat wounded GIs, southern France, August 1944. [National Archives]

  French police bring in a German prisoner captured by partisans in southern France, August 19, 1944. [National Archives]

  Avez vous oeufs? GIs ask French women if they have any eggs, September 4, 1944. [National Archives]

  A Thunderbird medic writes out a tag for an officer wounded by shell fire, September 14, 1944, Villersexel, France. [National Archives]

  Thunderbirds pause to rest, September 13, 1944, Villersexel, France. [National Archives]

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE BITCH-HEAD

  Felix Sparks (left), Naples, 1944. [Courtesy Mary Sparks]

  NAPLES, ITALY, MARCH 1944

  THE STREETS OF NAPLES bustled with an exotic mix of Allied troops looking for “I & I”—intercourse and intoxication. It was a surreal and frenetic city, covered in a thin film of volcanic ash from the recently erupted Mount Vesuvius, that Sparks visited that March for a few days of sorely needed rest and recuperation. Australians ambled in their wide-brimmed slouch hats; sinister Goums strutted in their brightly colored burnooses; and at every corner, it seemed, feral water-sellers in coats cut from stolen U.S. Army blankets offered a delicious and tangy lemonade, conjuring it up on the spot, wielding enormous iron lemon-squeezers, then adding a pinch of bicarbonate of soda to make the bitter juice fizz. Even the hundreds of sadistic MPs in their bright white helmets, batons tucked under their arms, on the prowl for deserters and violent drunks, swore by the frothing limonata. It was the perfect hangover cure.

  “Biftek, spaghetti,” offered black marketers, profiting from the theft of an estimated third of all supplies landed at Naples, now the busiest port in Europe.

  “Verra cheap.”

  “Good brandy. Only five hundred lire.”

  On busy streets like the Via Roma pimps and black marketers were almost as numerous as the beggars and emaciated whores. Naples was a vast open-air bordello, it seemed, where everyone and everything was for sale.

  “You want nice girl?” asked fathers. “Beautiful signorina.”

  Every few yards, olive-skinned men would tug on a GI’s sleeve, offering yet another temptation. For those with real money, not invasion currency, there were myriad brothels full of women of all ages and body types, dark circles under their eyes, most of them infected with gonorrhea if the warnings plastered on walls along all the approach roads to Naples were to be believed. The Neapolitan strain of gonococcus was in fact so virulent that even the new wonder drug, penicillin, struggled to combat it.

  Every Thunderbird, it seemed, was determined not to die a virgin. None had an excuse, given that there were eighty thousand officially registered prostitutes in Naples by that March of 1944. No matter the rank, men fornicated with wild abandon, even if the bella signora was clearly middle-aged and pulled up her DDT-sprayed skirt to reveal a wooden leg. In nearby Pompeii, they jumped off trucks dubbed “passion wagons” a
nd headed straight past the famous ruins, along narrow cobblestoned lanes to a brothel reputed to be two thousand years old. “A massive plaster penis jutted into the street from above the entrance,” remembered one man. “A red rag was hung from it when the place was open for business.”

  Of the tens of thousands of Allied troops having sex in Naples that spring, the Thunderbirds in Sparks’s regiment were among the most enthusiastic, judging by the rate of infection with VD, which did not go unnoticed by the top brass, who were outraged that 15 percent of all American hospital beds were now occupied by “clapped-up” GIs. “We were taking more casualties through gonorrhea,” recalled the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead, “than we were through enemy action on the whole front-line.” Sparks would soon receive an acerbic note from his division commander, forty-nine-year-old Major General William Eagles: “Congratulations Sparks, your men have the highest VD rate in the division.”

  Sparks was utterly devoted to his young wife, Mary. The bordellos were not for him. He spent his invasion currency elsewhere. Restaurants were well stocked with black-market produce. The gorgeous San Carlo Opera House had not been blemished and was playing superb productions of Il Trovatore and The Barber of Seville to packed houses of raucous GIs. If Sparks had fancied a few days away from the mainland, he could even have taken a short ferry ride to the nearby isle of Capri, surprisingly unaffected by the war. Instead, he joined other officers in the many bars that lined the most popular streets in Naples.