by Tim Brady
Captain Kratka, the battalion surgeon had aided the badly wounded Laughlin on Hill 424, and stayed with him all the way to the German field hospital. Six other captured aid men from the battalion were there as well. With the help of a German doctor and medic, they tended to the wounds of about 40 American casualties, including August Waskow.
On September 15, the changing tide of battle forced the Germans to evacuate their wounded prisoners from Altavilla. Those Americans who could not walk were loaded in the back of trucks and driven off to an old stone building serving as a hospital about twenty miles from the battlefield. Those that could walk began to march in the same direction.
At the new medical station, the Germans fed the wounded prisoners with black bread, Limburger cheese, liverwurst, and soup. Captain Kratka and his aid men continued to care for the Americans, working side-by-side with a German doctor. Kratka did surgeries in an operating room at the hospital, including the amputation of one soldier’s arm.
Three days passed in the stone hospital, after which the Germans received word that they were to evacuate the medical prisoners to a hospital even further behind their lines. That afternoon, the medical station admitted a host of wounded enemy troops. The German medics were too immersed in caring for their own wounded to pay much attention to the Americans, and eventually, when the order to evacuate became more pressing, the Germans decided to take only the American walking-wounded with them. That included Ray Goad and Bill Yates.
Among those left behind were White, Waskow, and Laughlin. Kratka was left to care for them and the others. He was spared, Kratka thought, because the German doctor with whom he’d worked had learned that the American doctor had two children back home and felt empathy for his situation. There were kindnesses in this war. And there was luck, too. In all about twenty-eight wounded remained behind. The Germans left them with more black bread, more liverwurst spread, jam, and cans of sardines.
Some locals offered assistance, bringing eggs and bread. Kratka attached a Red Cross flag to the top of the building to prevent strafing. Two days after the Germans left, the doctor sent an English-speaking Italian man in search of American help. The next morning, September 21, a jeep arrived from divisional headquarters, and soon after that, seven ambulances were pulling up to the building to take the wounded back to American field hospitals.3, 4
HENRY WASKOW remained uncertain about his brother’s fate once he and Company B got back to the rest of the division after Naples.5 He quickly learned of August’s wounds, but in searching the area for his whereabouts, Henry discovered that there was confusion about whether or not his brother was still a prisoner of the Germans, or had even survived. Some Italians, trying to be helpful, added to his uncertainty; they took him to a freshly dug grave and told Henry that August had been killed and was buried there.6
After the shock of this initial misinformation, Captain Waskow finally learned that August had, in fact, survived and was currently on a hospital ship in the Gulf of Naples. Henry wrote home to his mother and sister Mary Lee to let them know of his and August’s circumstances—in case they hadn’t been informed of his brother’s wounds by the Army. In fact, the family hadn’t heard from either brother since just before Salerno. Word from Henry was obviously welcome, though news of August’s wounds was frightening.
The Waskow family passed Henry’s V-mail on to the Belton newspaper. He had made some interesting observations about the fighting in Italy, and he colored those comments with the sort of bravado that the local Texas papers loved to hear from their soldiers, especially early in the war. “We can lick the Germans anytime and anywhere,” Waskow wrote. “They are tough, that’s true, but our men are much, much tougher; and a lot more courageous.”
Henry offered a brief description of the country and its people: “The Italians have greeted us everywhere with cheers. I have never been kissed so much in all my life . . . men, women, and kids.”
Always conscientious about saluting the men in his command, he gave them a bow in this letter, too: “I wish I could tell you the stories of individual heroism among the men, but let’s just say they are all heroes and ‘the infantry with the dirt behind their ears, just keeps rolling along.’”
And thinking of Robert Capa and the time the photographer and Life writer Will Lang spent with Company B, Waskow let his folks know that he and the others in his outfit might be in the news. “Be sure to watch Time and Life magazines about this date [October 9],” he wrote with obvious excitement and pride.
Then Henry, who always seemed aware of his role in the grand scheme of things, got back to the big picture: the status of the war and the condition of Italy. “History will never forget what the Fascists have done to destroy this country,” he wrote, “one would think he was living 100 or so years ago, for the civilization has just stopped.”
Waskow closed the letter with a reassuring note about August. He was “okeh and safe” and getting some mail from home.7
As with the Belton paper, the Mexia Weekly Herald was also happy to publish letters from the front, especially those tinged with bravado. Willie Slaughter, one of the thirteen grandsons in the war, and eventual winner of two Silver Stars (one for his heroics in the Sorrento campaign) sent a note to his mother that she shared with the local paper: “Tell granddad I got my German,” he wrote. “Shot him out of a tree with my tommy gun.”
Slaughter said that he had been in action from the day he landed in Italy for a full month afterward. “The Germans have kept me pretty busy dodging bullets and artillery shells.”
There had been some little time to admire the countryside. According to Slaughter, “Italy was pretty except for the war torn parts.” And, oh by the way, he asked his mother, “Can you send a pair of leather gloves from home? And it sure would be nice to get some candy, too.”8
Other Mexia soldiers writing home from Italy included Jack Berry, Hubert Ingram, Charles Morgan, and Billie Sunday. All reported themselves safe and sound, with Sunday adding, “The Italian people seem to be real proud to see us. They give us apples, grapes, and English walnuts. The parts of Italy that I have been through are pretty well torn up.”9
Even in the midst of the brave postures exhibited in the letters, however, were the unavoidable tragedies of death and injury that were also being reported to the people back in Belton and Mexia. Word was coming home to Texas that the 36th was taking a lot of casualties in Italy. In Belton, the Journal reported the first two deaths from Company I, First Lieutenant Mallory Miller and Private Walter Roy Cole. Miller had worked in Belton as a constable and was a volunteer fireman. Cole was the son of a military man. Also reported in early October was the wounding of Corporal Jack White.
WITH A CAMPAIGN under his belt and more fighting expected soon, General Walker thought it would be a good time to offer some relaxation for his men. In mid-October, Captain Henry Waskow was rewarded with a trip to Capri for being the best company commander through the Naples campaign. No one recorded exactly how long he stayed on the island, or what exactly he did there, except for the fact that he picked up a folder postcard of its sights, with the intention of sending it later to his sister Mary Lee.
Then, as now, Capri was a beautiful tourist haven. In the days after the invasion, the Allies quickly turned it back to its former purpose and it bustled with soldiers and journalists. The isle of Capri is about 3.75 miles long and a mile and a half wide, and consists of two ridges of Apennine limestone with a high point of 1,920 feet. Before the war, there were about 7,700 inhabitants. The city of Capri was built in the saddle between the two ridges. A funicular dominated its heart. Baedecker’s noted that the city offered fruit, oil and good red and white wines. “The walks in the island are all more or less steep,” cautioned the guide.10
Blue Grotto on the north side of the island, a cavern hollowed by the waves, was the most celebrated of a number of these grottoes on the island. Then (and now) small boats entered a space less than three feet high, which opened up to an enormous interior cav
ern nearly fifty feet high and the size of a football field. Within the grotto, objects in the water assume a silvery appearance, and, for a few lire, local boys would dive in to create the silvery effect for the tourists. But it was cheaper just to stick your own arm into the water to create the illusion, according to Baedeker’s. Near the middle of the grotto, a rift in the rock about sixty-five yards long was once thought to connect to the villa of the Roman Emperor Tiberius—another indication both of the antiquity of the area, and the antiquity of Capri as a getaway spot for vacationers.
John Steinbeck, only forty-one years old, but already author of Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and Tortilla Flats, was in Capri that month as well, reporting on the war for the New York Herald Tribune. He came to Italy in the aftermath of Salerno and would soon head out with the U.S. Navy on a special operations mission along the coast north of Rome. In the interim, he visited Naples, Salerno, and Capri, and wrote pieces on the predilection of American soldiers for collecting souvenirs (“It is said, and with some truth, that while the Germans fight for world domination and the English for the defense of England, the Americans fight for souvenirs”);11 and on the soldiers’ habits of stuffing their pockets with good-luck charms and amulets.
Henry Waskow, with his souvenir postcards in his pocket, might have been interested to know that Robert Capa also visited Capri after the Naples campaign.
Capa entered Naples on October 1 with Colonel Gavin and the 505th of the 82nd Airborne. Like everyone else on the Allied side moving into the city, he joined in the initial sense of accomplishment and elation, but soon the sight of dead bodies lying helter skelter on every street and in every piazza sobered him. The retreating Germans had taken out their anger and rage against the Neapolitans for Italy’s surrender on the eve of the Allied invasion. No corner of the city was spared; hospitals were looted; public works were destroyed. Even schools were attacked. Huge parts of the city, which had already suffered through Allied bomb attacks, were largely turned into rubble by the Germans.
Capa snapped shots of the devastated waterfront, where boats and ships were piled in heaps, one on top of another, as if in the wake of a hurricane. He took photos of an Italian mob surrounding a trio of Fascists who had assisted the Germans in their defense of Naples. He took shots of a British tank crew washing up and shaving, getting gussied up for their triumphant entry into the city. He grabbed images of the pockmarked road through the suburbs into the city.
On October 7, one of the many booby-trap bombs left behind by the Germans exploded in the midst of a crowd gathered outside the Naples post office. Both Italians and members of the 82nd Airborne were in the streets. In all, more than 100 people were killed. Capa was only a few hundred yards away and took shots of the chaos and destruction.
When the fighting was all over in Naples and the bombs quit exploding, Capa sent his photos off to Life magazine and took a trip to Capri. There he took photos of an old Italian hero of the antifascist movement, sailed around the island, bedded a wealthy Italian countess in her beautiful seaside villa and did a little shopping in the village of Capri. In a few days times, he would be back in Naples, ready to cover the next advance of the Allies.
Meanwhile, on October 18, Life published not only his shots of Naples, but a second photo essay, devoted to the “Battle of Chiunzi Pass.” There were images of the hills, several photos of the half-tracks that seemed to fascinate Capa; shots of the interior of Fort Schuster with American and British officers pointing spy glasses out a window, spotting German positions. Then came a series of photos of the T-Patchers: first, moving off through vineyard with Mt. Vesuvius steaming in the background; then a shot of a Texan, kneeling with his Garand rifle across his thigh, “coolly puffing a cigarette” in silhouette in a lemon grove, on his way to root out Germans at the base of Vesuvius; a continuation of the scene with Vesuvius even more prominent in the distance and a line of T-Patchers moving cautiously through an orchard. Finally, the last shot shows the same group from the 143rd’s 1st Battalion outside an old vine-covered farmhouse, damaged by shells but still basically intact. The photo depicts GIs stand outside the front door of the home with guns leveled. Writer Will Lang’s copy tells us that they’ve just shot the bolts off the door and have sprayed rounds within, but any Germans inside are dead or gone. He quotes an unnamed Texas private as muttering “It’s a shame to hafta do things like this to people’s homes.”12
10
Why We Fight
AS AMERICAN TROOPS WERE winding down the first step in their invasion of Italy, Hollywood directors Frank Capra and John Huston were in London, working on a documentary film that would ultimately receive decidedly mixed reviews. A joint production between British and American filmmakers, Tunisian Victory was supposed to detail the Allied victory in North Africa, but the movie turned out to be a hodge-podge of footage that suffered from a lack of quality shots of American participation as well as suffering from the ongoing disputes between the Allies about who ought to receive the bulk of the credit for the North African victory.
Prior to coming to London to take advantage of a much higher quality of film shot by British crews during the Tunisian campaign, Capra and Huston had been laboring jointly to re-create shots that were absent from American footage shot during the fighting itself. A single film crew had been employed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps to take moving pictures during the invasion of North Africa. All of that footage was subsequently sunk in port with the ship that was to carry it back to the States for editing.
President Roosevelt himself had expressed an interest in seeing film coverage of the North African invasion. According to Huston, the Signal Corps was so embarrassed that it had none, that when he and Capra were asked to re-create footage, they were advised to keep their re-creation on the low down, on the off chance that word of their activities would reach the president. Capra and Huston went to an Army training facility in the Mojave Desert in California where they shot footage of mock troop movements and artillery fire in conditions that approximated Tunisia. To get aerial shots, Huston went to Orlando, Florida, where he filmed some P-39 fighters planes in action.1
The re-created footage didn’t work out so well. After trying, with little success, to fashion it into a quality film in New York, someone put forward the idea that the Americans ought to combine their efforts with the Brits, which is how Huston and Capra wound up in London putting together Tunisian Victory.
The two of them arrived in England in August, and shared a suite at the famed Claridge’s Hotel. They spent the bulk of their time at the offices of the British Army Film Unit butting heads with their English counterparts over such issues as the title of the film, whether or not an all-American roster of actors should be used to provide commentary for the documentary, and the general tenor and direction of the film. They found time to have dinner with Bob Hope and his singer, Frances Langford, at the home of British actor, John Mills. And Huston spent some time squiring a red-headed opera singer named Lennie, but for the most part, they were kept busy trying to resolve the issues of the film.
Major Capra was Captain Huston’s superior in the film work, and took the lead in the enterprise. Huston would later confess some embarrassment about what transpired. Capra apparently had refused to let the British see the film footage that he and Huston had re-created in the Mojave and Florida prior to the meetings. Had the Brits known the poor quality of the footage, Huston hinted, they would never have agreed to a joint production. In other words, what merit there was in Tunisian Victory came principally from British film work in the field; and yet Capra was able to not only elbow his way into a joint venture, he would actually come to dominate the subsequent debate over how it ought to be put together.2
BY THIS STAGE of the war, Frank Capra was an old hand in Army filmmaking procedures. In fact, he had been at it since shortly after Pearl Harbor, having enlisted the week after the attack (one of the first Hollywood directors to do so).
Not only was Capra quickly put to work
, he was sent straight to the top of command. In February, 1942, the director of It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and You Can’t Take It With You was called to the War Munitions Building in Washington, D.C., where he found himself standing before the door of Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. A man as ego-driven as any in Hollywood, Capra’s knees were nevertheless rattled at the prospect of meeting the most powerful military man in the United States, in the midst of the nation’s greatest war crisis in eighty years.
He had been given Marshall’s reasons for wanting this chat a few days earlier, soon after his arrival in Washington. Capra’s new boss at the Signal Corps told him that the general had handpicked the director for special duty within a newly created morale division of the Army’s Signal Corps, Special Services unit. Marshall wanted someone with the highest-level of filmmaking skills to produce a series of informational training movies to show to every member of the U.S. Army before they shipped off to war. The idea was that it was not just important, but crucial, for all American servicemen to understand why they were in uniform, why they were being called upon to wage war on behalf of the nation.
The task was considered so essential that Marshall wanted the very best man available. He didn’t quite trust the well-established Signal Corps to do justice to the idea, despite its long history of directing Army communications of every stripe stretching all the way back to the Civil War. Long a Hollywood film buff who well-knew the quality of Capra’s work, Marshall was a man already known in the Army for his ability to pick the best man for a given job. In fact, for years Marshall had kept a little black book in which he’d jot notes on the talents and abilities of the officers that he trained and served with over his long career in the Army. It was a list that had generally served him well, first when he was named Chief of Staff of the Army in 1939 and now, in the frenetically paced few weeks after Pear Harbor, when Marshall was organizing the Allied war effort with the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Winston Churchill and the military forces of Great Britain.