A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  Together he and Gerda went to Spain in 1936 to cover the civil war for the French photography magazine Vu. Here, on a bare Spanish hillside, Capa captured one of the most memorable wartime images in the history of photography. Traveling with a group of Spanish militia who were suddenly attacked on that hillside, Capa dove for cover but kept shooting images by holding his Leica above his head and pointing it back toward a nearby militiaman. He managed to capture the exact moment a bullet struck the Spanish Loyalist, and the resulting image was a stunning portrait. The man’s body reels back; his eyes are shut; arms dropped behind him, as if to catch his fall. He is suspended on his way to the barren ground. One moment living, one moment dead, and Capa’s image caught the intersection.16

  The photo appeared in Vu in September 1936 and made Capa’s reputation as a photographer “so daring he was there to capture the instant of a man’s death.” He and Gerda continued to cover the war in Spain, where they met and congregated with a host of famed writers and journalists who were also flocking to the war, including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Martha Gellhorn.

  There was a romance to this conflict from the start: unlike World War I, which had soured so many in “The Lost Generation” on the brute powers of Europe, here was a fight with a cause they could believe in. “The Spanish Civil War,” according to Hemingway, “was the happiest period of our lives. We were truly happy then, for when people died it seemed as though death was justified and important. For they died for something they believed in and that was going to happen.”17

  But it all ended badly for Capa. The Loyalists were defeated, and Gerda was killed gruesomely, run over by a tank.

  Nonetheless, he kept looking for action. Capa went to China to cover the war in Manchuria between the Japanese and Chinese; he moved to the U.S. and did work for a number of American magazines. He visited Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn in Sun Valley, Idaho; and finally returned to Europe to cover the war, first in England and then North Africa, where he hooked up for a time with Ernie Pyle. Finally, he went to Sicily where he began to grow tired of the action, saying, “this war is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.”18

  Still, he waited with other journalists to cover the invasion of Italy. A number of these were put up by the Army’s P.R. office in the official press hotel, the Aletti in Algiers. A.J. Liebling, John Steinbeck, Ernie Pyle (who was on his way out of the theater at the time), Jack Belden (Time-Life), and Capa were among eighteen journalists crowded into a single room in the hotel. Capa, looking for a scoop, was told by General Matthew Ridgway that he would let the photographer parachute into Rome with the 82nd airborne on the first day of the invasion. Capa was excited by the prospect and imagined himself photographing Mussolini at the deposed leader’s home while others were taking photos of “dreary beaches and local mayors.” Unfortunately for him, the idea of parachuting into Rome—promulgated by the notion that the Italian surrender would make the invasion a cakewalk—turned out to be wishful thinking.

  Capa wound up instead coming ashore at Paestum on September 15 with Richard Tregaskis. They spent a couple of days together at Altavilla with the 504th of the 82nd Airborne, and then moved to Maiori.

  Capa quickly found a center for his work that suited him just fine. He moved up to Fort Schuster at the Chiunzi Pass with his fellow Life correspondent, writer Will Lang, and made himself as comfortable as possible given the near constant shelling. “Whisky was offered to us as we sat and talked in the command post, and whisky was necessary,” recalled Lang. “As each nearby explosion blew open the front door, Capa would put down his glass, raise his camera, and, still seated, photograph the dust and confusion through the doorway, remarking, ‘This is the only way to cover a war.’”

  Capa was also enamored of the half-track employed by one of the Ranger companies. It carried a 105 mm cannon, which it would lug up to the crest of the hill at Chiunzi Pass. The half-track crew would lob shells down on the valley below, before quickly backtracking to Fort Shuster and beyond, out of harm’s way.

  Capa did venture out with the troops, both the Rangers and Henry Waskow’s Company B, a unit which he met and traveled with on patrol. Riley Tidwell had his picture taken by Capa as the company was nearing a house that held a sniper that Company B was trying to decommission. Tidwell took some shots at a window in the house with his carbine as Capa snapped away. Then a first sergeant from the company got to the door, kicked it open, and silenced the German with his tommy gun.

  According to Tidwell, Capa told the platoon that they were craziest bunch of soldiers he’d ever seen. He was amazed that after they’d taken care of the sniper, they set up in the middle of a vineyard outside the house and started to reach up and pluck grapes from the vines, even as they continued to fire at the nearby Germans. It turned out that they were half a mile inside German lines at the time.19

  BRITISH COMMANDO forces had been waging battle to the east of the American Rangers and the 143rd since D-Day. They were at a location centered on the village of Vietri, which lay between Salerno to the east and Maiori to the west, right at the crook of the Bay of Salerno. Though the commandoes had been pretty badly battered for the first couple of days of the invasion, they had managed to secure the heights above Vietri, now at a place dubbed Commando Hill. The heights were taken with a heavy toll: when the battalions who’d waged the fight were finally relieved, their replacements saw a battlefield that would become a familiar sight in Italy: a rocky hillside covered with the dead bodies of both British and German soldiers. The Germans had used phosphorus shells in the fighting and the acrid smell of the chemical was all over the field, including the still smoldering bodies of dead British soldiers. Among those killed in the shelling was the Duke of Wellington, Sir Henry Wellesley.

  It was about this time that Lieutenant Burrage, as battalion information office, received a copy of the first casualty report written by Clark to General Eisenhower. Since D-Day, the British X Corps had lost 531 killed, 1,915 wounded, and 1,561 missing. The American VI Corps had 225 killed, 835 wounded, and 589 missing. And the two forces were only now in a position to begin the push toward Naples.

  ON SEPTEMBER 25, the British 23rd Armored Brigade began moving out of Vietri along the very narrow road to Maiori. The plan was for the British brigade to join forces with 1st Battalion and the Rangers, and head down the Chiunzi Pass road to the Vesuvius Plain. From there, the two units would link with the 82nd Airborne and move toward Naples along a central highway and coastal roads. A second British armored brigade would come at Naples after sweeping around the north side of Vesuvius.

  It was no easy task to move the armored brigade between Vietri and Maiori. The highway between the two towns chiseled into the cliffs of the peninsula was hardly conducive for Sherman tanks and two-and-a-half ton trucks. The trek along the winding and narrow macadam road was achingly slow and laborious. According to Burrage, vehicles were stacked up all the way from Maiori to Vietri, at least seven or eight kilometers. It wasn’t until the evening of September 27, that the joined forces began the descent down the hills from the Chiunzi Pass.

  Company B entered the village of St. Egido the next morning, expecting to find Germans, but the enemy had pulled out in the night. Waskow was ordered to move on and occupy the nearby village of St. Lorenzo, which Company B did by noon. Here and in towns yet to come, Italian villagers greeted Americans as heroes, despite the fact that the air force and artillery had decimated scores of homes.

  The next morning, the Texans had the otherworldly experience of passing through Pompeii, frozen in time since 79 A.D. Within the city wall and along the excavated streets, the GI’s gaped at the ruins of homes caught in mid-day destruction. New archaeological work on the eastern end of the city, along what was called the Strada Abbondanza—the Street of Abundance—had been interrupted by the war. Here the lives of wealthy Pompeiian business leaders had faced their own interruption in the ash of Vesuvius almost two thousand years earlier. Nearby
, a sunken amphitheater, large enough to hold a crowd of 20,000, was likewise buried and now recently revealed.

  On the northeast side of Pompeii, 1st Battalion was linked to a Royal Scot brigade and trucked on to the village of Torre del Greco, tight to the shore of the Gulf of Naples, and just to the southeast of the city. The Allies were given the assignment of taking a castle built on a promontory high above Toro del Greco, held currently by some three hundred German troops. Company B was chosen to take the lead in the assault and found itself facing a wooded terrain honeycombed with concrete walls eight to- ten feet high. The enemy had filled the area leading up to the castle with snipers and machine gun nests and Waskow’s company was almost immediately stymied. After nearly seven hours of intense fighting, which devolved into “hand grenading” the machine gun posts, they were still two thousand yards from the castle, and thankful, at the end of the day, when they were pulled back to their original position.20

  The fight at the castle turned out to be a rearguard action to slow the Allied advance into Naples. By October 1, the city was empty of Germans.

  THAT SAME MORNING, General Walker, who hadn’t received a word of the 1st Battalion’s activities for days, set out for Naples from his division command near Altavilla. He drove with his aides northeast through Battapaglia, which had been racked by U.S. Navy shelling. The destruction appalled him. He couldn’t see a single building left intact, and told his diary, “We could smell the dead bodies buried in the rubble.”

  Continuing on Highway 18, the main thoroughfare to Naples, Walker noted the wreckage of the railroad yards near Salerno and the “bewilderment” of the Italians standing around, looking at their ruined homes. “But even in the midst of destruction and grief, they were friendly toward us,” he noted.21

  They took a quick tour of Pompeii, which had been spared by both Germans and Allies. From nearby Vesuvius, Walker and his aides could see smoke drifting skyward from the crater. Like his stroll through the temples at Paestum, the general had a sense that he was treading on sacred ground as he walked along the streets of old Pompeii.

  Walker griped about the pace in which the British X Corps had moved against the Germans. The fact that he came upon two sets of graves, British and German, between Salerno and Naples, indicated to him that the enemy had “retired voluntarily and were followed, not pushed, by the British.”

  Walker also cast an eye on the Sorrento mountains that his son, Lieutenant Colonel Walker, Jr., and the 143rd’s 1st Battalion had been navigating for the past few weeks. He pronounced them rugged and speculated that “[the 143rd] must have had very rough going.”

  General Walker found his son and the 1st Battalion at the outskirts of Naples. They were there along with the 505th of the 82nd Airborne and the British 23rd Armored, waiting for orders on how to proceed into Naples.

  Just as they were about to advance, a jeep from General Clark’s command came speeding up to Colonel James Gavin, who was commanding the 505th. Clark himself wanted to lead the contingent into the city in triumphal fashion, said the messengers in the vehicle.22 The 143rd’s 1st Battalion and the 23rd Armored were told to continue on the coastal road into the city. Clark, in an armored half-track, would lead the 505th, riding mostly in trucks, into the Piazza Garibaldi, where a crowd of Neapolitans was expected to cheer his entrance.

  As it turned out, however, the citizens of Naples mostly stayed indoors, which meant the triumphal entry was conducted through largely deserted streets. In fact there were some Italians waiting to greet the Americans in another plaza in the city (the Plaza del Plebiscito), but the hook-up between commanding general and adoring natives was never made, and Clark wound up turning around and heading back to the outskirts of Naples.

  General Walker followed Clark into the city and was impressed with the complete destruction of the railroad yards and piers. “Both are a total wreck,” he noted.23 Again, he saw small groups of Italians, who, despite the devastation “were pleased to see the Americans in their city.”

  Heading back toward Altavilla late that afternoon, Walker and his aides came across clusters of young girls near Pompeii, waiting to throw bouquets at the passing troops. They also tossed walnuts into the divisional jeeps and gave Walker yellow flowers. In return, some of the aides broke up pieces of their dark chocolate bars and handed them out to the malnourished and sickly children.

  Walker thought that it would be a kind of justice to drive Hitler and Mussolini through scenes like those he had witnessed that day, the misery and heartache brought to their own people, “and then behead both of them with a dull axe.”

  Walker noted one other sight on his way back to camp: he ran across several groups of discharged Italian soldiers heading to homes in southern Italy. Some were helping local farmers harvest their damaged crops in exchange for something to eat; some were begging for rides. To Walker, they were reminiscent of how he imagined Confederate soldiers, headed for home at the end of the Civil War.

  HENRY WASKOW’S Company B had its own interesting encounters with the local population. After its aborted entry into the heart of Naples, 1st Battalion was posted to a village on the north side of the city, and found one of its biggest difficulties was keeping order between the citizens of Morano and the German stragglers and Italian Fascists who were left behind. Along with dealing with minefields laid by the evacuating Germans, Waskow and company had to break up several lynching parties, which were trying to stretch the necks of local followers of Il Duce.

  In Morano, Waskow experienced a familiar phenomenon to American troops both in Sicily and Italy. As he headed Company B into the village, a well-dressed man approached “with a cigar in one hand and a walking cane in the other.” His first words were, “Hey Bud, what’s doing in the United States?” Like many others in the region, he’d lived for a number of years in America and was stranded in his homeland by the war. He insisted that Waskow accompany him to the garden behind his home, where he dug out his passport and a bottle of whisky. He’d been saving the Scotch for the first American officer who happened his way, and that officer happened to be Captain Henry Waskow.24

  Of course not all was light-hearted greetings in the mop-up around Naples. On October 3 outside the village of Guigliano, Lieutenant Colonel Walker ordered the battalion, minus Company B, to attack a rearguard unit of Germans ensconced in a walnut grove. A late afternoon assault took Companies A and C within 300 yards of the village when sharp small arms fire halted the battalion. They were ordered to hold their position and resume the attack in the morning. Among the seriously wounded was Lieutenant Warren Klinger of Monahan, Texas and Company A, an old friend of Captain Waskow. Klinger had been at Camp Edwards with Waskow, had shipped with him to North Africa, and served with Waskow at the Chiunzi Pass. When he was being evacuated on a stretcher from the battlefield, Waskow came to his side and offered words of encouragement.25

  On October 4, the two companies discovered that the Germans had pulled out of the town. They advanced against light resistance all the way through the village piazza. Once through Guigliano, however, they were hit by devastating artillery. A dozen officers and enlisted men were killed, and fourteen more were wounded. Gone in an instant were Captain Joseph Peterman, Company A commander, Major James Land, the battalion executive officer, Captain Ray Pederson, and seven enlisted men from Company A. It was the deadliest day for the 1st Battalion through the entire campaign. It was also the last day.26

  The following morning, as Burrage was sitting down with Lieutenant Colonel Walker to begin drafting a report of what had happened the day before, Walker’s father arrived with new orders for his son: Fred, Jr. was moving back to division headquarters where he would serve as the division’s new operations officer. A few hours later, a convoy of trucks showed up from the 36th, there to haul 1st Battalion back to their comrades near Altavilla. After almost a month’s absence the 1st Battalion would be linked again to the rest of the T-Patchers.

  For Henry Waskow and Roy Goad, both with brothers la
st known to be wounded and in the hands of the enemy, the reunion would come with mixed emotions.

  9

  Capri

  BACK IN THE MIDDLE of September, the mortar blast that knocked August Waskow off his pins and unconscious on Hill 424 also knocked him out of the war. In one instant, he was crouched tight to a rocky hillside in Italy, wishing he could dig his way to safekeeping; in the next, he was a bloody mess, lying helpless and wounded as the battle continued to rage around him. More than thirty pieces of shrapnel from the mortar blast had pierced his body: both legs and arms, his chest, and face had been hit. One fragment had lodged behind his right eye, blinding it.1 When he finally came to, he felt weightless, floating away from Hill 424 on a jostling, rocking flight, before he realized he was being carried away from the battlefield on a stretcher. In his groggy, semi-blinded state, it looked to Waskow that the men toting him from the field were wearing odd-looking caps. It took him awhile to realize that the helmets were indeed strange to him: he was being hauled away by Germans.2

  Waskow wound up in a church-turned-field hospital in Altavilla, where he was reunited with others of Company I, including Captain Laughlin, Captain Yates, Ray Goad, and Jack White, all now wounded prisoners of the Germans.

  White, who’d been hit in the ankle just hours into Company I’s initial battle, was actually captured twice by the Germans. The first time, the enemy had taken him to one aid station in Altavilla, but they soon abandoned it when the Allies counter-attacked. Unfortunately for White, no Americans came for him. He wound up spending the afternoon of September 14 lying in an open field while the .88’s screamed and burst over his head. That night, the Germans reappeared, and once again took the field. Early the next morning, they carried White and the other non-ambulatory wounded away with them to the church where he was reunited with others of his company.