by Alex Kershaw
On June 19, the Thunderbirds boarded trucks and the regiment headed south, back the way it had come, passing an endless caravan of olive-green vehicles. Men stared in silence as the trucks rolled through the ruins of Cisterna and along dusty roads where vengeful Spitfires had obliterated fleeing German convoys. Burned-out Panzers and armored vehicles had been shoved clumsily into ditches; charred corpses swarming with flies marked Kesselring’s route of hasty retreat. Finally, they arrived back where they had come ashore, at Paestum, near Salerno. Rumor had it the division was returning to the States. The Thunderbirds had done their part. But then they discovered they were to stay in the area and train for what would be their fourth major invasion, this time of southern France.
Operation Dragoon would land three American divisions, reinforced by the French 1st Armored Division, along the spectacularly scenic Côte d’Azur. At several briefings, Sparks examined extraordinarily detailed photos, taken by OSS agents, of the landing beaches. Planners had attempted to avoid a repeat of Salerno, opting to land where there was no high ground immediately beyond the shoreline. Nevertheless, it was estimated that there would be 20 percent casualties for the entire Seventh Army.
While they waited with dread for yet another D-day, men did their best to enjoy their first extended break from combat in a year. The temptations of Rome and Naples were ever present, the weather glorious, and the USO shows first-class. And there were young American women, serving doughnuts from Red Cross vans, to flirt with at last. “Everyone fell in love simultaneously with the girls and the doughnuts,” recalled Jack Hallowell.
As was usual during rest periods, generals visited to make rousing speeches and pin medals on chests. None other than Mark Clark, now referred to as “Marked Time” by some Thunderbirds, arrived to present Distinguished Unit Badges to the Second Battalion for its actions during the Battle of the Caves. Sparks himself was presented with the Silver Star, which he would soon send home to his parents for safekeeping. “I’m not crazy about earning any more!” he told them in a short V-mail.
Another Thunderbird, Technical Sergeant Jim Rutledge of L Company, received a Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest award for valor.
“Rutledge,” said Clark, “I’ve heard a good deal about you.”
“Yes sir,” replied a cocky Rutledge. “And I’ve heard a good deal about you, too.”
Clark then made an impassioned speech, vowing that the regiment would stay in Europe to the very end, until the fall of the Third Reich, and share in the glory of defeating Nazism. The speech was not greeted with loud applause. “The 157th had seen too much to be so easily inspired,” recalled one bystander. “Given their choices, they would gladly have sat out the march into Germany.”
The training grew more intense as the summer went on, as did the urge among the latest batch of replacements to “throw out the first pitch” and lose their virginity. “Have your fun,” young Italian men told their sisters. “But when the Americans go we will have nothing to do with you.” Few of Salerno’s signorinas paid much attention. They swam with Thunderbirds in the blue waters of the Bay of Salerno, visited Virgil’s tomb, and held hands with their American boyfriends in the cheap seats at the opera.
On terraces along the waterfront, GIs sat with Italian families, sharing tossed salads and zuppa di pesce as they watched the sun set over hundreds of ships gathering in the bay. Some had spent almost a year in Italy and a few had fallen in love with a country they now knew more intimately than many natives. “They had been more steadily in her rain, her snow and her mountains,” recalled Thunderbird Paul Cundiff, “and slept longer on and nearer her earth than most Italians.” Italy had indeed left its mark. “I have been in Italy so long I feel like a Dago, and probably look like one too,” one man wrote. “We speak about half Dago and about half English now, with a lot of Army slang thrown in.”
Then came news that the regiment was once again to be called to the boats gathering in the bay, just as Jupiter had summoned the warriors of Virgil’s epic Aeneid to their destiny. A nearby beach resembled a battlefield of sex as men lined up one last time to “jog their haunches” with a prostitute while others thoughtfully held up sheets to provide a modicum of privacy. They had paid not a bit of notice to the exhortations of the council president of the Mormon Church back in America: “We should say to our boys: come home in purity, or come home not at all.” Few would return home unharmed. None would be pure.
In early August, the regiment moved to the deepwater port of Naples. The day before the Thunderbirds were scheduled to load onto boats bound for France, Second Battalion commander Colonel Krieger fell sick with malaria. Sparks was ordered to take his place. Aged just twenty-six, he was now in charge of three rifle companies, E, F, and G, numbering around six hundred men in total, as well as a heavy-weapons company with considerable firepower: eight .30-caliber water-cooled machine guns; six 81mm mortars that could fire fifteen pounds of high explosive over two miles; and several antitank guns. Including his headquarters staff, he would be responsible for the lives of almost a thousand young Americans as the Allies stormed the golden sands of southern France.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DAY 401
(LEFT) Dead German soldiers lie near a machine-gun emplacement, St. Maxime, France, August 16, 1944. [National Archives]
(RIGHT) Thunderbirds from the 157th Infantry Regiment greeted by citizens in Bourg, southern France. [National Archives]
PROVENCE, SOUTHERN FRANCE, AUGUST 15, 1944
THE RED LIGHT WAS ON. Major General Robert Frederick stood anxiously at the door of the C-47 plane, waiting for the green “GO” light to flash on. His standard-issue paratrooper watch showed the second hand ticking toward 4:40 A.M. He had a .45 on his hip, a white silk scarf at his neck, and a blue flashlight in his hand for signaling once he was on the ground. The plane’s engines roared. At 4:40 A.M. precisely, the green light flashed on.
“All right, fellows, follow me,” said Frederick.
Chutes soon filled the skies above southern France as five thousand Allied troops floated through the darkness. Frederick shook with fear as he dropped through thick fog. Then the ground rushed up to meet him. He landed badly, colliding against a wall. A ten-inch scar from an old wound opened up. He cut a piece of cord from his parachute and used it as a tourniquet to stop blood from running down his leg into his boots. Then he looked around for other parachutes but didn’t see any. Perhaps he had jumped too soon. He pulled out a map and turned on his flashlight. In its blue glow, he tried to figure out where he had landed.
Frederick set off into the darkness. He had gone perhaps fifty yards when he saw what he thought was a German in the early-morning mist. He crept behind the man and then leapt onto him, grabbing him by the throat.
“Jesus Christ!” blurted the man in a thick English accent.
Frederick relaxed his hold. The man belonged to his First Airborne Task Force.
“Who are you?” asked Frederick.
“I’m from the Second British Independent Parachute Brigade.”
The paratrooper was as lost as Frederick.
“You’d better be careful. Your helmet in this mist looks like it’s German.”
Frederick was anxious to link up with others in his unit, code-named Rugby Force, which had jumped into the Argens Valley between the towns of Le Luc and Le Muy. It was critical to secure the valley and prevent the Germans from counterattacking through it. To the south, beyond a range of hills, lay Operation Dragoon’s landing beaches near St. Raphael and St. Tropez. The Germans must be denied control of the heights at all costs if the Allies were to avoid heavy casualties as they came ashore.
ST. MAXIME, CÔTE D’AZUR, AUGUST 15, 1944
SPARKS AND HIS men, among fifty thousand VI Corps troops scheduled to land on August 15, crouched down in landing craft as they moved through a haze of gunpowder smoke that clung to the water. They were headed toward a beach near St. Maxime on the Côte d’Azur. There was thick cloud cov
er. Conditions were perfect for an invasion.
Will I be alive or dead by tonight? wondered BAR carrier Bill Lyford.
A nineteen-year-old held up his sixty-pound flamethrower and called to a friend.
“Hey, Joe. How do you like your Germans, rare or well done?”
For some of the men, it was their fourth D-day.
“Hell,” said one grizzled veteran, “I’ve been on more boats than half the guys in the Navy.”
Watching the VI Corps’s landing was Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He had fiercely opposed Operation Dragoon, as had Mark Clark, both arguing that it would divert resources from Italy, where the campaign to defeat the Germans dragged on. But now a delighted and excited Churchill chomped on his cigar on board the destroyer Kimberley, looking through his field glasses as the first wave prepared to hit the beaches.
There was surprisingly little resistance as the Thunderbirds landed on the sands of St. Maxime. Massive naval bombardment and General Frederick and his men had made sure of that. “The best invasion I ever attended” was how Bill Mauldin, now working for the Stars and Stripes, described the landings in southern France, the most successful of the entire war. Not one man from the regiment was killed. Just seven were wounded as they took cover from halfhearted mortar fire and the odd machine-gun burst. By lunchtime Germans were surrendering in droves, filing down from the hillsides before being herded onto the beaches.
That afternoon, as Sparks and his men pushed inland, a Frenchwoman rushed from her house. “From the woman came a torrent of rusty English,” remembered Jack Hallowell, “most of which added up to: ‘Where in hell you been? We been waiting years for you.’ ” It was the beginning of what one journalist, welcomed by a waiter carrying a tray stacked with flutes of champagne, would call the Champagne Campaign—a heady advance north from the French Riviera past some of the world’s finest vineyards. Fresh flowers were thrown in the Thunderbirds’ path, and petals clung to their dusty boots. For the first time, they were truly greeted as liberators. Young women embraced them, planting wet kisses on their cheeks, and presented vintages carefully hidden from the beastly Boche. On they marched beneath parasol pines, feeling the warm sun of the Riviera beating down on their faces, admiring the brightly painted buildings, inhaling the balmy evening air perfumed with mimosa and jasmine.
Sparks’s command post that first night in France was in the bucolic village of Plan de la Tour, five miles inland: a very good gain, he felt, for his first day in France. He was delighted his men had gotten off the beach so quickly. The casualty rate had been less than 1 percent rather than the 20 percent predicted. The enemy might be running out of troops, he figured, and could no longer fight effectively on so many fronts.
SPARKS WAS RIGHT. The Germans had expected the landings, but Hitler had not been able to reinforce his Army Group G in southern France, which comprised eleven under-equipped infantry divisions and a badly depleted armored division. He needed every man he could find to hold back the Russians in the east and the Allies in northern France.
In Russia, Operation Bagration had, since June 22, dealt a serious body blow to the Wehrmacht. Two million Red Army soldiers, backed by almost three thousand tanks, had inflicted more than four hundred thousand German casualties—a quarter of Hitler’s manpower in the east. Fifty thousand captured German troops were paraded in a rapid march through Moscow that lasted ninety minutes before all the humiliated had passed by. In a symbolic gesture, the Soviets washed down the streets after the defeated fascists had been escorted back to POW camps, where most would not survive the war. As Sparks snatched a few hours’ sleep for the first time in France, on his 401st night of war, Hitler’s forces in Russia were now in full retreat, forced back to a line along the Vistula, just four hundred miles from Berlin, with only the Oder River serving as a natural obstacle to the Red Army’s accelerating advance.
In the south of France, where Sparks and his men would begin the push north just after dawn, Hitler’s forces were also living on borrowed time, fugitives from the law of averages, outnumbered in men and in tanks by four to one. To the north, they were also on the run. Eisenhower’s armies had finally broken out of Normandy after brutal fighting around St. Lô and Caen and were now barreling toward Paris, having taken two hundred thousand prisoners, many from Hitler’s finest Panzer divisions. Beyond Paris lay the last great prize—Berlin. No wonder Hitler called the day Sparks arrived in France the worst of his life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE CHAMPAGNE CAMPAIGN
Thunderbirds from the 157th Infantry Regiment take a rest in Pertuis, Provence, on August 21, 1944, after a six-day march in pursuit of the retreating Germans. [National Archives]
PROVENCE, FRANCE, AUGUST 16, 1944
THE THUNDERBIRDS’ MARCH TOWARD the Third Reich resumed the next morning shortly after dawn. They pushed farther inland, past seemingly endless vineyards where fat grapes ripened. Despite four years of conflict, the pastel-shaded houses and lovingly tended orchards and gardens gave the impression of a prosperous region little affected by world war.
As they moved north, men started to practice their high school French.
“Avay voo des oeffs?”
“Voolay voo cooshay aveck moi?”
“Avay voo champagne?”
“A la Victoir!”
“And damn toot sweet!”
Villages and towns fell in quick succession as the Thunderbirds conducted their own Provençal blitzkrieg through Salernes along the D561 to Varages, north to Pertuis, and on to Apt below the Grand Luberon Mountains. It was a dreamlike rush through bleached fields dotted with neat bundles of drying lavender, its scent strong in the hot mistral winds, and along dusty roads shaded by plane trees. Photographs taken during the giddy advance showed Thunderbirds ducking their heads into yellow-stoned fountains, surrounded by excited French boys in shorts and sandals. In some villages, partisans greeted them, feverishly smoking sour Turkish tobacco cigarettes, their pomaded hair glinting in the sun, as vengeful crowds gathered to slap and kick black-eyed collaborators and watch the Germans’ French mistresses have their heads shaved.
Unlike in Italy, there were no shoeless children begging at the mess tents at chow time. No more widows clad in black scavenging in the dirt with bony hands for cigarette and cigar butts. Local partisans provided key intelligence about the Germans and their movements, and often eagerly joined forces with the Thunderbirds as they advanced, flushing enemy snipers like sangliers—wild boars—from cedar forests and gorges of the Luberon Mountains. Some would stay with the regiment until the end of the war.
One day, as he charged deeper into France, Sparks apparently learned from scouts that a key bridge was undefended and decided to check it out. As he approached the bridge, he began to feel distinctly uneasy. It was far too quiet for his liking. Nevertheless, he continued down a hill toward the bridge in his jeep. A dozen Germans suddenly appeared. Sparks put his hands in the air to surrender. A German walked over to the jeep. Then a fist flew. Sparks’s driver is said to have knocked the German to the ground and gunned the engine. Before the startled Germans could react, he and Sparks had raced around a corner and disappeared from view.
Sparks joked that he now must hold the record for the shortest time spent as a prisoner in World War II. But the near escape left him determined to be better armed in the future in case he had to blast his way out of trouble. What he really wanted was a shotgun, like the one he’d used to hunt with back in the Arizona. It wasn’t long before his men had found an old French farmer, paid him for his buckshot-loaded scattergun, and handed it to a delighted Sparks.
Sparks kept his Colt .45 in a hip holster and carried the shotgun up front in his jeep. In one village, he found a craftsman who replaced the pistol’s standard grips with transparent plastic taken from a downed American bomber’s windshield. Sparks set a photograph of his son, Kirk, and wife, Mary, under one grip and a favorite pinup under the other. From now on, beauty would be his lucky charm.
&nbs
p; THE RHÔNE VALLEY, FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 1944
THE CHARGE THROUGH Provence continued. The 45th Division’s exotic caravan, including dozens of requisitioned and hastily improvised vehicles, left a trail of dust and empty wine bottles that stretched as far back as the beaches of St. Maxime. There were battered Dodge trucks with their white stars masked by dust; coughing Renault vans driven by French peasants with FFI (French Forces of the Interior) armbands; jeeps dangerously overloaded with duffel bags stuffed with fresh fruit and bottles of White Lightning, as the local eau de vie was called; German vehicles with their white crosses painted over; Sherman tanks with sometimes an entire rifle squad of a dozen men sitting on top smoking Lucky Strikes, beginning and ending every sentence with “fuck,” warning the eighteen-year-old replacements with nervous smiles: “Just wait until our lines are overextended.”
With a new commander, First World War veteran Colonel Walter O’Brien, leading the charge, the regiment motored a hundred miles northwest in early September, to Grenoble on the Swiss border, and from there due north to Voiron, in the foothills of the Alps, where Carthusian monks made their famous Chartreuse liqueur. The Coloradans in the regiment gazed from the trucks at the snowcapped Alps to their east and at the sturdy dairy cattle in the high pastures, as they talked of Swiss cheese and watches, and felt more homesick than ever.