A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  Continuing old destructive habits of dealing with the pain of his relationship with Jerry, Pyle had a fling with an old friend while in Washington, meeting her for an afternoon tryst at the Hay-Adams Hotel. In the middle of this dalliance Pyle received an unexpected call. A big fan of his, the First Lady, was on the phone. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt invited him for afternoon tea at the White House.5

  Pyle and the First Lay chatted about the burdens of writing columns (she wrote a daily piece called My Day), she praised him extravagantly, and asked if he might consider continuing his column in the South Pacific. It would be a great benefit to all.

  That shift to the Pacific would come in time. For now, he was headed back to the Mediterranean, by way of Miami and Algiers.

  LIKE FRANK CAPRA, John Huston was one of the first big-name Hollywood directors to raise his hand and volunteer for service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Huston signed up in January 1942 while in the midst of shooting a film called Across the Pacific, which Huston called a “follow-up” to his first film, The Maltese Falcon, because that 1941 hit had employed so many members of the cast, including Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet. Years later, Huston puckishly recalled leaving the filming mid-shoot, giving the poor director hired by Warner Brothers to replace him the task of getting Bogart out of a scene in which he was surrounded by Japanese soldiers. The script was unfinished and Huston’s parting words of advice for the substitute director were, “Bogie will know how to get out.”

  Thirty-five-years-old when the war began, Huston cut a Bohemian figure in the Hollywood of the day. He had been given the assignment to direct The Maltese Falcon after an early career in which “deviation from the norm” had been his standard characteristic. Like a flesh and blood figure from a Hemingway novel, Huston had boxed, he’d written, he’d studied art, lived in Paris and had affairs with a lengthy list of women prior to establishing himself in the movies. A lanky, deep-voiced man, who oozed volatility on the set, Huston was given the nickname “The Great Unpressed” by his cast for his ability “to achieve a remarkable rumpled effect after about a minute and a half in any given set of clothes.”6

  Huston was born in 1906 the son of a Canadian engineer turned Vaudeville actor named Walter Huston. When he was a boy, his parents divorced and John wound up in Los Angeles with his mother, while his father worked mainly in off-Broadway theaters in New York.

  Born restless and rebellious, Huston left high school in his mid-teens to try his hand at professional boxing. When that didn’t promise a future, he went to New York and took a brief turn at his father’s profession, acting. Here, too, he found his career stymied. Huston drifted to Mexico where he somehow wound up spending a couple of years in the national cavalry before heading back to Los Angeles He had begun writing while in Mexico and sold a couple of stories to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine. Now back in Hollywood, Huston took a job as a script editor for Samuel Goldwyn and worked on the new “talkies” that were being produced.

  Tragedy sent him adrift again—he struck and killed a woman while driving in Los Angeles and wound up afterwards in Paris where he studied art and immersed himself in café life for a time. He finally returned to the States, before settling down again in Hollywood, where he began to forge a screenwriting career. He got assignments for a couple of major scripts, Sergeant York and High Sierra, the latter of which became a hit for both Huston and its star, Humphrey Bogart.

  Because of these successes, Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros. Studios, offered Huston his first directing job. As his source material, Huston chose a Dashiell Hammett novel that had been twice made into a film with little success. But by casting Humphrey Bogart as Detective Sam Spade and surrounding him with a memorable supporting crew, The Maltese Falcon became one of the most talked about films of 1941.

  John Huston was a young man on the rise when he volunteered for service in World War II. Still wild and unpredictable, still something of a rake, and in the midst of directing his new movie, he didn’t take notice of the letter from the U.S. Army telling him where and when to report. The haste with which he left the set was due to the Army Signal Corps insisting that he report to duty in Washington on the double.7 In April 1942, he got his assignment. Huston was to fly to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, there to make a documentary of the war effort in the far northwest.

  He attacked the job with his typical brio. Huston quickly arranged to take his film crew on bombing missions out on the western edge of the Aleutians toward Japan. Time and again, he flew on bombing runs to the outer island, making friends with the crews along the way, including Jack Chennault, the son of Claire Chennault of Flying Tiger fame. Jack would later assist Huston in Orlando, by arranging the mock bombing missions filmed for Tunisian Victory.

  Huston put his footage together in Hollywood, named the film Report from the Aleutians, and then carried it across country to the Signal Corps production studios in Astoria, New York, where more editing was done. An initial showing in Washington followed; and then there was a trip back to L.A. to add music to the documentary. Huston was just finishing up in California, when he got a call from Frank Capra. He was needed for a special assignment, a film on the desert triumph in Tunisia.

  That led him with Capra to London; and during his stay in London, he met an English writer of suspense novels working with the British Film Unit. Huston and Eric Ambler quickly formed a collegial bond.

  According to Ambler, it was Capra’s idea to get Huston to Italy to work on a documentary. The pressures to get quality American filmmakers into the combat theater were growing daily. After an initial bump at Salerno, things seemed to be going well for the Fifth Army in Italy. Why not have Huston hook up with Mark Clark for the army’s presumed triumphal march to Rome? The subsequent film, complete with images of cheering Italians and caring Allied soldiers, would be shown as psychological tool in occupied territories.8

  In the spirit of the Allied film ventures represented (or not) by Tunisian Victory, Huston asked Ambler if he would like to travel to Italy on this new documentary project. Ambler agreed to serve as writer, and Capra became the Executive Producer of the project. Conferences in London with representatives of the American Office of War Information, the British Ministry of Information, and the Public Relations office of European Theater of Operations U.S. Army (ETOUSA) produced a title, “Welcome to Italy,” but not much else in terms of content and outline.9

  Huston and Ambler packed and readied for their trip as best they could. They had no real idea what might lie ahead in the mountains of Italy.

  12

  Winterstellugen

  “Italy would break their backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits. But first it would break their hearts, and that heartbreak began north of the Volturno, where the terrain steepened, the weather worsened, and the enemy stiffened.”1

  —Rick Atkinson, Day of Battle

  AT FIRST GLANCE, the Naples campaign looked to Allied command like a qualified success. The near disaster in mid-September at Salerno—the day when the Germans had exploited the gap between the Sele and Calore Rivers and nearly drove the American Fifth Army all the way back to the beach—was set aside. Mistakes had been made. There had been some indecisiveness and a lack of communication in the command, and Ernest Dawley ended up paying the price for those mistakes. Clark was encouraged by Eisenhower to cashier the general and he did.

  But in spite of some messiness, the landings in Italy had taken place and Allied troops now had boots on the ground in Europe, seemingly poised to move quickly up the peninsula toward Rome. In fact, talk of taking the Eternal City by Christmas was heard not just among enthusiastic soldiers, but with Allied commanders as well. Eisenhower cabled Marshall on October 4 to say that both he and British Field Marshal Alexander felt that Rome might be actually taken by the end of October. Churchill and Roosevelt were likewise encouraged. FDR sent a message to Stalin that “It looks as if American and British armies should be in Rome in another few weeks.”2
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  It had taken the Allies just a month to take Naples and the cost, while high had not been alarmingly so—12,500 British and American casualties: 2,000 killed in action, 7,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.3 Of course, Naples’ harbor was virtually destroyed in the process, negating its value as an Allied port. And the aims of the invasion remained soft. Of the two stated purposes —to take Italy out of the war, and to keep German divisions occupied and away from other fronts, East and West—the first had been attained even before the first troops set down in Italy; and the second was not so much a goal as a continuing task.

  Despite these cautions, some Allied strategists began to double-down on the original plans. This thinking went that taking Italy all the way to the Alps would be advantageous to the entire European theater. It would make an attack on southern France, timed to coincide with next year’s cross-channel invasion, an easier chore if troops were fully occupying the Italian peninsula. It would further mean that German troops were fighting in Italy rather than France or on the Eastern Front. There was a strong feeling, too, that German resistance would be less obstinate on the road to Rome. It just didn’t make a lot of sense, went this line of thinking, for the Germans to expend a lot of military capital in the defense of Italy. The more they did so, the greater the advantage to the Allies elsewhere in Europe.

  In fact, within the German high command a fierce debate about how much of Italy to defend was being waged. Erwin Rommel, who commanded Italian troops in the north, argued forcefully for a German retreat to just below the Po River. It simply wasn’t worth it, in his estimation, to be waging a strong defensive war in a strategically unimportant land.

  Albert Kesselring commanded the eight divisions in southern Italy, and argued just as forcefully that Rome ought to be defended. The narrowest part of the Italian peninsula could be found just north of Naples, he said. Eighty-five miles of rocky, mountainous terrain made for an ideal defensive line running across the waist of Italy. It was perfect territory in which to bog down the Allied advance and make British and American forces pay a heavy price for every inch of ground. In an argument that exactly mirrored optimistic Allied thinking, Kesselring suggested that if a large contingent of Allied forces were fighting in Italy, they would not be amassing in England for a more direct assault on Europe. In early October, he was able to convince Hitler of the efficacy of defending this line, despite Rommel’s objections.4

  Allied interrogation of German prisoners of war taken at the end of the Naples campaigns revealed that the Germans were setting up a series of Winterstellungen, or winter positions. Constructed by German reserves and forced Italian labor, along the narrow stretch of central Italy, the lines were being built from the Tyrrhenian Sea all the way across to the Adriatic, in order to stop Allied advances south of Rome for the winter.

  The landscape was daunting enough anyway. North of the Volturno River, just above Naples, was about forty miles of rugged hills and mountains characterized by narrow roads, steep climbs and rocky streams running from the heights toward the coast. The mountains were part of the Appenine range, which ran down Italy’s mid-section like a nobby spine, and ranged from heights near four thousand feet downward.

  Beyond this cluster of mountains lay the Liri Valley, an expanse that ran north toward Rome and was key to the Allied advance and the German defense. The main German Winter Line, called the Gustav, followed the Garigliano River up from the Tyrrhenian coast, where it hooked up with the Rapido River, running down from the heights around an old monastery on top of Monte Cassino. This was the staunchest German defensive post, the one that Kesselring felt would be extremely difficult to breech and would be asked to hold the Allies through the whole of the coming season.

  As an additional measure however, the Germans constructed another line just ahead of the Gustav. This was called the Bernhardt, or the first Winter Line, and it was constructed south of the Gustav, along the entrance to the Liri. The Bernhardt was meant to halt the Allies temporarily, but it would ultimately prove as formidable as the Gustav Line.

  The Bernhardt Line was a series of interconnecting defensive positions centered around a cluster of mountains and villages on the north side of the Volturno River plain. Highway 6, the famed Via Latina, the ancient pathway to Rome, ran through this plain and squeezed between the mountains, before coming out again in the Liri Valley. The tallest of the peaks was Mt. Sammucro, an almost 4,000-foot high rocky massif that overlooked the Liri Valley to the east, and shaded the village of San Pietro, which was built into its side. Fronting Sammucro on the road from Naples, were the smaller mountains: Mignano, Lungo, Rotundo, Camino, La Difensa, Maggiore. All were formidable and more than able to present difficulties for an advancing army.

  To the northeast of Sammucro, ran the spiny ridges of the Appenine mountain chain, which extended back into the Italian interior and across the narrow mid-section of the country. Here four-thousand-foot summits became commonplace, but villages and people were not. Just two narrow and hazardous roads probed the region from Highway 6, clinging to hillsides as they traversed the mountains. So restrictive was the access to the region that the German Winter Lines evaporated not far into the mountain range.

  In the days following the capture of Naples, Mark Clark set up his Fifth Army Headquarters in the stunning Palace of Caserta, an eighteenth century, 1,200-room structure built by the Bourbon monarchs of Naples on vast grounds about twenty kilometers from Naples. It was just south of the Volturno, which would be the first obstacle the army would face on its continued path to Rome. The allied plan was for the brunt of the assault to begin here in October, with the Fifth leading an initial push toward Rome.

  The next step was for the British Eighth Army, fighting all the way over on the east coast of Italy, to take up the cudgel around mid-November. The operation called for the Eighth to sweep up the Adriatic coast and then swing quickly across the peninsula to attack Rome from the northeast. Meanwhile, the rested Fifth Army would reengage the Germans at the end of November to continue the push from the south.5

  Anyone holding a topographical map of Italy could sense a problem in this plan. The geography of the country made it obvious that the German defenders would hold the high ground and all the mountain passes. To enhance this natural advantage, German engineers had made every possible use of terrain to construct solid rock and concrete fortifications all along the Fifth Army front. They blew up bridges and culverts; they mined roads and mountain passes. They spent the weeks of October working on their lines, hiding machine gun and mortar nests in impregnable rocky sites, zeroed in on every possible path Allied forces might use.

  Razor-sharp concertina wire was strung along points beyond thickly laid minefields; artillery was hidden behind hundreds of mountain crags and crests and spotted throughout the region on bivouac sites, highways, and every conceivable path. Concrete pillboxes shored up the lines in the Liri Valley and around Cassino. Each of the mountains just north of the Volturno—Sammucro, Rotondo, Cannavinelle, Mignano, Lungo, Camino, La Difensa, Maggiore—bristled with German posts. Five enemy divisions, the XIV Panzer Corps, would man the defenses with reinforcements from the north, quickly available.

  The Germans were going to contest every yard on the way to Rome.

  THE POSITIONS of the German Panzer troops stood squarely in front of the Fifth Army at Caserta. It was here that the American divisions that had swept through Sicily—the 3rd, the 34th, the 45th— took the lead in the October fight in Italy. Lucian Truscott’s 3rd Division stepped off on October 13 and soon splashed into the Volturno itself. To their left flank, nearer the Tyrrhenian Coast, British divisions from the X Corps headed out through the boggy and mine-filled grounds.

  With virtually every bridge across the meandering river blown, Truscott found it was easier to get troops across the river than his tanks and other vehicles. The Volturno flowed in a winding northeast-to-southwest direction, at a slight angle to Truscott’s northerly march. The river snaked back on itself so often that in order
for troops to move forward in some semblance of a straight line, they had to cross and re-cross the river, as if they were working their way up a coiled spring. That meant that engineers were forced to bridge and re-bridge the river as well. Engineers worked feverishly to construct and keep open the flow of vehicle traffic over the Volturno even as German artillery landed around their labors. Despite all of the difficulties, by the afternoon of October 14, a good flow of equipment was streaming across the river.

  It wasn’t the river alone that provided engineering challenges for Lucian Truscott’s advance. Cold, wet weather moved into the region and settled, soon making a quagmire of the low-lying areas leading up to the first line of hills north of the Volturno. Allied vehicles using the limited number of roads heading northeast towards Rome were either mired in mud, or susceptible to German sabotage. They had mined everything. Or as British High Commander Harold Alexander put it, “All roads lead to Rome, but all roads are mined.”6

  The Volturno and its tributaries kept overflowing their banks in the autumn rain, destroying just built Allied pontoon bridges and the corduroy roads that had been constructed to negotiate the mire. The Germans blocked village streets by blowing up stone buildings; they cratered roads; they hid mines on footpaths and farm trails, river fords and back alleys. The mines didn’t just slow vehicle traffic: they took their toll on the infantry as well. Booby traps took life and limb. The muck and mire sapped spirit. Every step forward was slowed either by mud or the need for caution.

  For all the headaches and difficulties, the push north of the Volturno toward the mountains, slowly continued. The Germans yielded ground, delaying but not halting the Allied advance, allowing it closer to those hills, where even as Truscott and his divisions came nearer, the Germans were fine-tuning their next impediments at the Bernhardt Line.