A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  Since early October, the Germans had stripped the village of San Pietro of its manpower and draft animals to labor on defenses. Two hundred men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were forced to haul supplies up the mountains and build entrenchments for the Germans. Knowing what was coming to the area, most of the remaining residents of the village evacuated themselves to a miserable life in a number of caves that dotted the hillsides surrounding the village. Food quickly began to run out. The town well, dug in the heart of San Pietro, was inaccessible. Periodically the Germans would sweep through the village and the caves, looking for San Pietrans fit enough to provide more slave labor in building more defenses in the area.7

  Even before the Bernhardt Line, the Germans had constructed a chain of outposts meant to delay the Allies once they crossed the Volturno. These ran across the Mignano Gap and Highway 6, up into the mountains on either side of these lowlands. Given the delays caused by the German defenses, the overflowing Volturno, and the deplorable weather, Truscott’s divisions moved as quickly as possible to a point where they were ready to probe the German positions.

  What they could see in the distance as they approached the Bernhardt Line was Sammucro, the tall, bare mountain that loomed above San Pietro and everything else in the area. Below Sammucro down to the south in the direction of Naples, was Mt. Rotondo and Mt. Cannavinelle. Mt. Lungo was to the southwest, and between it and Mt. Rotondo, to the south, was the Mignano Ridge and Mignano Gap. Running through the gap and into the Liri Valley was Highway 6. Nearest to the Fifth Army position were Mt. Camino and Mt. La Difensa.

  As Truscott and his 3rd Division prepared to face the defenses in front of them, they were already exhausted from their month-long effort. So, too, were the 34th and 45th divisions, positioned on the 3rd’s right flank. The same was true of the two British divisions on Truscott’s left.

  Relief was in the works: the 36th Division was prepping for the moment—coming soon—when it would replace the 3rd Division at the center of the Allied assault. But at the same time, the pressure to continue moving forward was intense. Rome by Christmas might not have been a realistic timetable any longer, but after the victory in Tunisia, and the swift taking of Sicily, continued expectations of a well-paced advance were high. A whole month had passed and the Fifth Army was only a few miles further along the Italian peninsula than they were in Naples.

  The realization that the Germans were digging in to defend Rome and central Italy against the Allied advance seemed almost like an affront to public sentiment. The Germans simply weren’t doing the expected. They were dragging the Allies into a fight at some godawful site in the mountains of Italy. But any second thoughts about the operation among Allied command were stifled: a commitment had been made to invade Italy, and now a commitment was made to make something of that invasion.

  Clark decided to probe German forces. The British divisions on the left were asked to swing around Mt. Camino, the first of the rocky, barren summits on the way to the Liri Valley. On November 5, the Brits set off and ran smack into the Bernhardt Line, with all its “mines, machine guns, and mortar pits . . .” The fighting quickly turned murderous with British soldiers “claw[ing] up a succession of summits only to find that they were false crests overshadowed by still higher ground.”8 The German positions were so well laid out that it felt like they had been there for years. In spite of this, the British forces somehow made it to the summit.

  Panzer counterattacks came close to sweeping the British brigade off Camino, but they hung on—without winter gear and desperately short of food and water—for a full week before Clark mercifully called for their withdrawal.

  In the meantime, Truscott’s troops had begun an assault on the ridge that connected Mt. Camino and Mt. La Difensa. The ridge was likewise well-defended by the Germans. The 3rd, after a tough, ten-day fight, was ultimately as unsuccessful as the British.

  Not to be thwarted, Clark asked Truscott to send his infantry against both Mt. Lungo, which rose above the Mignano Gap, and Mt. Rotondo, which stood to the east of Lungo on the other side of the Gap. The 3rd Infantry was able to capture the summit of the brush covered Rotondo, but could only grasp a toehold on Mt. Lungo.

  On the far right of the American line, the 34th and 45th Divisions made some headway into the mountains, but here, deeper in the Italian interior, the Appenine terrain was even rougher than the sections surrounding San Pietro. So rough, in fact, that the Germans discounted their ability to make any meaningful headway against them. As one German commander put it, “Enemy gains constituted no grave threat and every step forward into the mountainous terrain merely increased his difficulties.”9

  His men exhausted, his division depleted by more than 8,500 casualties since its arrival in Sicily, the time was nigh for Lucian Truscott to pack it in and wait for the 36th to arrive and take over the struggle.

  Rome still lay in the distance.

  13

  Replacements

  ON OCTOBER 8, GENERAL FRED WALKER learned from Mark Clark in Naples that General John Lucas had been chosen to replace Ernest Dawley as Corps Commander, despite the fact that Clark had promised Walker that post “if anything happened to Dawley.” Again, Walker swallowed his disappointment, telling his diary, “I am satisified where I am.”1

  He was otherwise occupied with the demands of his command. The 36th headed into reserve for a few weeks while the 3rd Division took over primary combat duties. The 36th’s bivouac area was moved closer to the front—near the city of Nola, northeast of Naples and southeast of Caserta, where Clark had set up Fifth Army headquarters. Walker authorized visits from 36th Division troops to Capri, Pompeii and Naples. Many got to tour Vesuvius and Pompeii as well.

  The weather turned damp, chill and rainy as the move to Nola was made. Toward the end of October, Walker visited Clark at Caserta and learned that he was considering an amphibious assault against the Germans in an attempt to outflank the line that the enemy was establishing north of the Volturno. A lack of amphibious assault craft and the difficult terrain at potential landing sites made the planning seem impractical to Walker, who hoped that Clark would not order such an effort.

  Replacement troops were filling the ranks of the 143rd and the rest of the 36th Division after the operations in Salerno and the Sorrento Peninsula. They were sorely needed. Of its near 14,000-man strength at the start of the campaign, the 36th had lost almost 2,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action. The 143rd was hit hardest: 8 officers were killed in action, as were 124 enlisted men. Total wounded was above 300. Captured were 35 officers and 153 enlisted men, and missing in action, most of whom were presumed prisoners of the Germans, numbered 4 officers and 488 enlisted men. The bulk of these were lost from the 2nd Battalion in the fighting between the Sele and Calore Rivers during the second week of the battle.2

  The Texas Division quickly grew less Texan, as its ranks were filled with newcomers from all corners of the country, including Ben Palmer, a farm kid from upstate New York. Palmer had spent his senior year in high school on an assembly line, building military transport planes at the Curtiss-Wright plant in Buffalo. Before the school year was done he turned eighteen, registered for the draft, and entered the U.S. Army in February 1943. After five months of basic training, he shipped out of Norfolk, Virginia for North Africa in late July.

  After landing in Casablanca, Palmer and his fellow soldiers, now dubbed the 36th Replacement Battalion, spent a few days in Morocco before being shipped by train to Oran and then Bizerte. Palmer, blond-haired and full-cheeked, looked younger than his eighteen years and was still wide-eyed. He noted that the old Moroccan steam engines had been made in Elmyra, New York, just 120 miles from his home. They moved so slowly that it took days to make the journey from Casablanca to Oran, and troops were actually able to jump out of their cars on the journey and grab melons from the passing fields and jump back before the train passed away. Apparently, the allure of Moroccan melons remained irresistible within the 36th.

  So
on after he’d arrived in Bizerte, Palmer and the others heard news that the 36th had been involved in the invasion of Italy at Salerno. It wasn’t until October, however that the replacements shipped to Naples, and got their first sight of the devastation wrought by the Germans as they were evacuating. The city was a shambles and the streets were full of little boys begging for food.

  It was here that Palmer got his assignment: he was to serve as a replacement in the 143rd Infantry Regiment, whose strength had been depleted by 65 percent. Specifically, he was to join Henry Waskow’s Company B.

  When he arrived at Nola, Palmer was informed by company veterans—those same men who had never experienced combat until a month earlier—that Waskow was a standup guy. Aside from a quick greeting, Palmer had no conversation with the captain. He was told to join up with the platoon headed by Sergeant Herbert Golden, a Mexia native. Palmer shared a tent with six other GI’s and slept on a canvas cot elevated above the soggy Italian soil by a wooden platform. A large kitchen tent provided hot meals for the company, and showers were available behind a canvas screen. It was pretty sumptuous living by field camp standards.3

  Especially by comparison to the Italian villagers, who had taken to hillside caves during the battle and consequent destruction of their homes. The natives hung around the camp begging for food and sustenance. Their lives, impoverished to begin with, had turned destitute with invasion. They’d bring buckets and hang out outside the kitchen tent, waiting for soldiers to scrape leftovers into their tins.

  In the first week of November, the 143rd executed a practice river crossing of the Volturno—just surmounted by Truscott and company—in preparation for future operations that winter. The Rapido River lay just in front of the Gustav line near Cassino and would need to be crossed for the advance to Rome to continue. For now, it seemed to the infantrymen slogging over the Volturno that this was just another of the endless amphibious exercises they had undertaken, like those back at Cape Cod, Morocco, and Oran.

  Maps soon arrived at 143rd headquarters indicating just where they were headed on the frontline. Along with the rest of the 36th, they would be taking the battle directly to the German Winter Line, even now being firmed up in the mountains beyond the Volturno.

  ERNIE PYLE’S fame followed him back to the front. On just his second day back in the Mediterranean theater, he found himself standing in Dwight Eisenhower’s office in Algiers, autographing a copy of his book for the commander. The next day, he was on a flight to Naples and just hours after that, he was heading north toward the front to join an artillery unit nearing the German Winter Line.

  Pyle was given a room at the palace in Caserta, along with others in the press corps. He took a moment to write a letter to Jerry, but Pyle was in a dark mood and afterward worried about passing his afflictions on to his troubled wife: “The long winter misery has started. By this time tomorrow night I will be in the lines,” he wrote. “Sometimes I’ve felt that I couldn’t make myself go, but now that I’m here I want to take the plunge . . . I feel very strange and lonely here, as I always do in new places. I wonder about you and think about you and hate myself for ever having left you, and yet I suppose I would have hated myself if I hadn’t come back . . .”4

  Pyle ventured out to get the lay of the land. The roads between Naples and the Winter Line were thick with truck convoys, both British and American, “pounding” along at forty and fifty miles per hour. The nice macadam roadbeds paved by Il Duce prior to the war were fast being wracked into potholes by the traffic, and Allied engineers worked to repair them even as the trucks continued to roll.

  Sycamore trees lined the entrance to the various Italian cities along the way, Pyle wrote, giving the sense of “driving through a beautiful tunnel”; but the towns and villages themselves had been mercilessly pounded first by Allied bombs and artillery, when they were occupied by Germans; then by German artillery when they were Allied-occupied. Street after street was stony rubble.

  Pyle also saw “thousands of stenciled and painted signs” along the highway, “directing drivers to the numerous units,” both American and British which dotted the landscape. At crossroads, the signs would be so thick that it was necessary to pull the jeep to the side of the road to decipher just where a destination could be found. It was like looking for a particular resort sign among dozens tacked to a tree at one of the Minnesota lakes, which Jerry had been raised among. Burma shave style signs were also popular, including one gently admonishing soldiers for their habit of discarding necessary gear to lighten their loads: “If you leave/good clothes behind/you may need them/some other time.”

  His initial impressions of the Italian landscape hailed the “uncommon beauty” of what he saw. Fertile valleys farmed up the steep slopes of hills until the rocky ridges left no soil in which to plant; stone farmhouses and sheds dotting the valley landscapes; distant mountaintops hidden in clouds; the Italians going about their business in the wake of the war passing through, hiding only when the German planes flew overhead.

  But then as he delved further into the countryside, trod the path of invasion from Salerno northward, he found a countryside devastated by fighting. Every town that had been occupied by the Germans had consequently been shelled into heaps of rubble by the Allies, and still, day and night, the cannon fire rained down north of Naples. Even the farm land, on closer inspection, revealed the ravages of war: “the limb of an olive tree broken off, six swollen dead horses in the corner of a field, a strawstack burned down, a chestnut tree blown clear out, roots and all, by a German bomb, little gray patches of powder burns on the hillside, scraps of broken and abandoned rifles and grenades in the bushes, grain fields patterned with a million crisscrossing ruts from the great trucks that had crawled frame-deep through the mud . . .”5

  He ran into Dick Tregaskis, the war correspondent and author of Guadalcanal Diary, who had been at Salerno with Mark Clark and briefly visited 1st Battalion on the Sorrento Peninsula. Tregaskis was in a field hospital with a serious head wound inflicted by a German mortar while he was with the 3rd Infantry near the Volturno. He showed Pyle his helmet, which had a two-inch gash in its steel plating where the shrapnel had plunged into this head. Though he was on the mend, Tregaskis was not well. Pyle noted that he had trouble signing his name to a copy of his book when a wounded soldier asked for an autograph.

  Ernie spent some time with an artillery unit back of the frontlines. He jeeped around the mid-section of Italy, visiting Pompeii and Naples, and spent time at Caserta at Allied Headquarter. He hooked up with Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin in Mauldin’s little Naples studio. Mauldin was just a kid, twenty-two years old when Pyle profiled him, but his cartoons, which were like Pyle’s writing in sketch-form, depicted a mature vision of the war. He drew GIs—grimy infantrymen, unshaven and rough, with both cigarettes and a sardonic line or two always dangling from their lips. As with Pyle, the guys on the frontline thought that Mauldin was getting things right, and appreciated him for it. A larger audience awaited: he was about to go syndicated at home which would soon bring his iconic characters, Willie and Joe, to readers across the country.

  Pyle also visited a group of German POW’s being held at a collection point behind Allied lines. There were Poles and Austrians in the group, as well as proud Nazis. He reported that the latter usually arrived feeling confident that Germany was still in control of its fate in this world war, but were immediately made uneasy at those prospects when they saw the collection of Allied supplies and equipment, jamming the roads south of the frontlines.

  Pyle joined the 36th toward the end of November and saw, with a GI’s eyes, what they were seeing. There was rain and more rain. “The country was shockingly beautiful, and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy,” Pyle wrote. “The hills rose to high ridges of almost solid rock. We couldn’t go around them through the flat peaceful valleys, because the Germans were up there looking down upon us, and they would have let us have it. So we had to go up and over. A mere plat
oon of Germans, well dug in on a high, rock-spined hill, could hold out for a long time against tremendous onslaughts.”6

  It was long evident by the time Pyle arrived that the Allies were not going to take Rome by Christmas. He tried to explain the difficulties faced by the troops in Italy to an audience back in the States, which had become accustomed to quick advances. It had been just three weeks from Salerno to Naples; now two months had passed and the combined efforts of the Allies had only pushed the Germans about forty miles from Naples, and the Germans were firmly entrenched in a mountainous line between the Fifth Army and Rome.

  Pyle described the almost “inconceivable misery” in which the troops were fighting: “Thousands of the men had not been dry for weeks. Other thousands lay at night in the high mountains with the temperature below freezing and the thin snow sifting over them. They dug into the stones and slept in little chasms and behind rocks and in half-caves. They lived like men of prehistoric times, and a club would have been welcome more than a machine gun . . .”

  Even if there had been no German fighting troops in Italy, Pyle said, just engineers to blow up bridges in the passes, the slog to Rome would have been slow.7

  Who knew if any of this was registering with the folks back home? It was a hard truth that this was going to be a long arduous war. These mountains in Italy were like a promise of that fact. Yet who wanted to hear that?

  14

  Thanksgiving

  GENERAL WALKER WAS PLEASED with the orderly fashion in which his division replaced Truscott’s 3rd on the frontline. He was disturbed by the nature of the terrain and the fact that the Germans had assumed “very strong and well-coordinated defensive positions” all along the Bernhardt Line. Simply put, they held the heights at the center and flanks and had been fortifying the line for almost two months now. Defensive posts were well-concealed and well-constructed. The 36th, along with the British 56th Division on the left, would have to take them, hill by hill.