by Tim Brady
The 1st Battalion continued to fight and an hour later sent another message down the hill. While the Rangers on Hill 905 to the right flank were “having a pretty stiff fight . . . We are in supreme command of 1205.”3 Two hours after that, just after noon, the 1st was holding twelve German POWs on top of the mountain and catching its breath from eighteen hours of hard climbing and hard fighting.
Hard fought and hard won: it was a good way to start the battle for San Pietro and the Liri Valley. Not everyone involved would have such success.
WEARING FEATHERED caps to match their Alpine uniforms, two battalions of the 1st Italian Motorized Group set out that same morning from Mignano. A sharp American artillery cascade had preceded their move onto the hill, which occurred in the midst of the subsequent smoke and a fog that settled down in the valley. With vengeful spirit the Italians started to climb the ridges to the peak of Mt. Lungo boldly shouting challenges to the German troops above. Unfortunately, the Italians had failed to send out any recon the night before, and now blinded by the weather and smoky haze, they moved in tight units directly into a blast of German machine gun and mortar fire. The enthusiasm of the Italians was short-lived as the devastating fire quickly took a heavy toll.
A company of the 141st on nearby Mt. Rotondo set up firing positions to back up the Italians, and discourage the Germans from pursuing their advantage. But by noon, the 1st Italians were in a sorry condition, having already lost more than half of its original 1600 man strength, most of whom were missing, having high-tailed it off the mountain.4
Down below San Pietro, the 2nd Battalion of the 143rd was having a rough time of it as well. From their position on Mt. Cannavinelle, troops of the 2nd had headed out in the early morning darkness, moving down the three thousand foot mountain, where they’d been stationed in preparation for this attack. They headed toward the western slope of the Sammucro, just above San Pietro, but even their first steps were troublesome. Unlike Sammucro with its rock cover, Cannavinelle was blanketed in mud, which made footfalls treacherous. To prevent frantic sliding down Cannavinelle to the line of departure in the valley below, troops grabbed at roots, branches, tree trunks, anything that would catch their fall, all the while loaded with battle gear that included machine gun belts, mortar shells, boxes of hand grenades, and bazookas.5
White tape had been laid out the day before to mark the route, but rain that night had pretty well mucked up the markings. A bridge down below served as the point of departure, and the first troops of the 2nd—Companies E and F—set out from there at 6:20 after a booming display of “outgoing mail” from American artillery. Just two hundred yards into their trek into the valley below San Pietro, they hit a line of barbed wire backed by well-placed pillboxes armed with automatic weapons. Mines were also liberally laid in the field. All of which stopped the battalion in its tracks and allowed German mortar and artillery fire to zero in.
Efforts were made to move the troops back a hundred yards so that American artillery could safely pound the pillboxes; but when the guns started blasting the German posts, they did so to limited effect. The only openings in these fortresses were narrow slits designed for small arms fire, which served as great protection for the Panzer troops inside. More than one American lost his life trying to jump the barbed wire and roll a grenade through those narrow openings. Meanwhile, the artillery continued pounding away, creating an enormous echo chamber in the valley that reverberated with deafening explosions.6
Colonel Martin sent the 3rd Battalion swinging out to the right of the 2nd, in an attempt to flank the German line. Company L arced wide to the northeast, and headed back to the west, straight at San Pietro down the Venafro-San Pietro road. 600 yards into its westward advance it hit the same mix of mines, mortars, wire, and pillboxes that had stopped the 2nd. One Company L staff sergeant put it plainly, after all their efforts, “The Germans still held the high ground and had clear view of the valley.”7
Martin committed two more companies of the 3rd Battalion, I and K, into the fight to the right of the rest of the battalion. “Texas cowhand and rebel yells pierced the air,” according to one eyewitness account. “A German colonel leading his men was cut to pieces by a BAR. Other Jerries plopped down in a heap behind. The ‘spang-spang’ of the trusty MI’s and rattle of our .30 caliber machine guns and BARs became more intense. Brave men were dying.”8 Again, however, the attack across what was about to earn the nickname, “Purple Heart Valley,” made limited headway.
About four hundred yards into their trek, Companies I and K, were told to hunker down and dig in. Private Jack Clover, from Columbus, Ohio, and his digging buddy Jabe Curry chose the front edge of a gulley and quickly started to spade out a foxhole. They were waist deep in the project and hustling to finish when a giant shell landed nearby, burying them in their own hole. Clover clawed his way out of the would-be grave and waited a moment for Curry. He appeared “mole-like” beside Clover. They exchanged terrified glances, knowing there was no place for them to go.9
UP ON TOP of Sammucro, the situation was far better, but about to get dicey. The Germans were not willing to cede the summit of the hill so easily to the Allied advance. The first counterattack began at 6:30 a.m. the next morning and lasted for more than half an hour. Another assault hit from all sides at 8:10, wounding Lieutenant Roy Goad among others. A third came just after 10 a.m., and yet another hit just after noon, this one seriously wounding Lieutenant Colonel Burgess, who had to be evacuated and replaced by Major David Frazior of Houston, Texas.
The commanding officer of Company C, Captain Lewis Horton, attempted a probe of German positions to the west toward San Vittore with the idea of aiding the 3rd Rangers, which were having trouble taking Hill 960. Under heavy fire, Horton took his platoon leaders to a post where they had better vantage of enemy defenses. While devising a plan of attack, a sniper caught the company captain in his sights, killing him instantly.
So it went all day on the ninth of December. Counterattacks continued to a number that was either seven or eight—it was hard, under the circumstances, to keep an exact track. German prisoners later explained that they had been ordered to retake the mountaintop at all costs, which meant the nature of the fighting was often savage. Platoon leader Willie Slaughter of Company B saw one of his men engaged in a peek-a-boo style shootout with a German sniper. “They were crawling around in the rocks and every time one would stick his head out, the other would start shooting. They looked like a couple of lizards crawling in those rocks.” From his “ringside seat” Slaughter could hear his man shouting, “Where is the son-of-a-bitch?”10
Using mortars that had been painfully hauled up the hill the day before, mainly by Waskow’s company, the 1st Battalion was able to use its position to assist the 3rd Rangers on Hill 960. The Rangers were finally able to surmount the hill and thus relieve some of the fire heading up toward the 1st Battalion from the neighboring mountain.
As 1st Battalion battled counterattacks and assisted the 3rd Ranger Battalion, it also began to probe down the mountain toward San Pietro and San Vittore. As it did, the lines between Germans and American got crossed and intersected, particularly down the northwest side of the mountain toward San Vittore. Captain Jalvin Newell of Huntsville, Texas on the side of the mountain with three companies of the 143rd had his phone lines cut as he was trying to reach Lieutenant Richard Burrage, communications officer for the new commander, Major Frazior, who was at the top of Sammucro. Newell was afraid the Germans would intercept his radio messages to command, but he needed to pass on info and questions to Frazior. Companies A, B, and C were rapidly losing men. Should they head back up to the summit from their position or stay and fight down the hill?
To relay the communication, Newell resorted to a code that could be known only to Texas boys: he used references to Texas towns whose first letter coincided with Companies A, B, and C. A well-known Texas politician named Jerry Sadler became a stand-in for all the “Jerries” on the hill. There was talk about mail and numbers
of letters addressed to each of the towns. It took a while for Burrage and Frazior to figure out what the hell Newell was saying. The numbers of letters to each town indicated the dwindling numbers of men in each company. The “Sadlers” were pressing hard meant the Germans were all around. Should the companies come back up to the summit?
After finally figuring out what was being transmitted, Burrage radioed back instructions—not necessarily happy news: Newell was asked to keep the battalion in place and hold on.11
Meanwhile, the wounded on the hilltop began to stack up. More than forty members of Company A were killed or put out of action in the two days of fighting; another dozen members of Companies B and C suffered similar casualties.
Some, like Ben Palmer, who took a hit of shrapnel to his right wrist from a German mortar, began to work their way down the hill on their own. Palmer made his way with a group of walking wounded. They were pretty quickly out of reach of small-arms fire, but the German artillery continued to drop shells all the way down. It took forever to reach the terraces that made more manageable steps of the base of the mountain, but Palmer did it. Ultimately, he caught a jeep ride all the way back to Naples.12
Many others were unable to make it down unassisted, and the perils of descending the mountain were nearly as great as heading up. Litters were carried over the same steep cliffs, inclines, and jutting rocks that were climbed on hands and knees, and with the aid of ropes on the way up. The wounded went down first, carried by others from their own units, who struggled against the hillside as they listened to the moans and cries of their comrades, essentially helpless to make the journey any easier. Still better than the dead, who came down when it was convenient, and then, most often, only to the way station at the tree line, where bodies covered in tarp and roped tight to the litters began to accumulate.
GIVEN ALL of the attacks and counterattacks, supplies of ammunition quickly began to dwindle on top of Sammucro. So did food, water, blankets, boots, and any sense of comfort. On the summit, snow took the place of the valley rain. The ground was all rock, which made foxholes impossible to dig; cold boulders and hard crevasses served as cover instead. Even without standing in muddy holes, boots remained constantly damp and feet were frozen. Trench foot was endemic.
Supplies going up the hill followed the path of 1st Battalion. There were about eighty mules in the train, led by Italian skinners who dressed, as had the Motorized Italian Army unit that had charged Mt. Lungo, in Tyrolean gear, including feathered hats. The mules were packed during the day and set out toward the mountain only after dark. According to Ernie Pyle, who had joined a 143rd supply unit a few days earlier, typical loads were 85 cans of water, 100 cases of K ration, 10 cases of D ration, about 1,000 rounds of mortar shells, a radio, telephones, 4 cases of first aid kits and plenty of sulfa. Also in the packs were cans of sterno, heavy combat uniforms (the men had originally gone up in regular gear), the “gas cakes” that Riley Tidwell had been using to cover his face in the rain, and what Pyle called the “most tragic cargo,” the mail, which went up every night in what would turn out to be a long stay on the mountain.13 Sometimes it would be received by dead men; sometimes by the wounded who were already heading down the mountain; sometimes it would be received with more than a little irony, as in the case of one corporal in Company B, who got a Christmas necktie in a package while up on Sammucro.14
The supply unit worked out of an olive grove near Venafro, and there Pyle shared quarters with about ten members of the unit in an old cowshed. Lem Vannata, a private from Valley Mills, Texas, who worked as a supply clerk at the post, remembered his arrival: An older man, relatively speaking, wearing a war correspondent patch on his shoulder and skinny as all get out. An officer told Vannata who the man was and said, basically, to leave him alone, that Pyle would contact them if he wanted to talk. His name, of course, was recognized by everyone in the theater, including Vanatta, who let him be until one day, Pyle caught him taking a nip from some bootlegged liquor that Vannata had stored near the dump. Turned out Pyle was just interested in taking a snort himself and there began a daily ritual between the two that lasted for the length of Pyle’s stay.15
As noted, the Italian mules were unable to negotiate the full 4,000-foot climb up the mountain. It was just too steep and nasty. In fact, they were only able to haul about a third of the way up its sides. A whole column of assistants from supply, transport, and HQ stations down below would accompany the train each night, and when the mules gave out, the men would take over, strapping the loads to their backs and humping toward the battalion above.
Through the course of the battle, the battalion was forced into carrying its own supplies up the mountain. Carefully slipping down the mountainside, they would meet the ascending collection of cooks, truck drivers, and clerks who were hauling from the point where the mules gave out, and proceed to lift the cargo up to the summit, bringing their own K rations and mail to the rocky fortress on Sammucro. Company B had this assignment at the start of its time on the mountain.
Pyle, too, climbed up Sammucro, as much as anything else, to see the effort involved. He marveled at the strength of one packer, who could make it to the top with a full can of water in two and a half hours. Pyle’s guide was a member of 1st Battalion, who had been at the top fighting, and was now supposed to be resting below. Instead, he was escorting Pyle on feet so sore from blisters that he walked only on his toes to save his sensitized heels from rubbing against the hard rock.
Pyle ran into a signal corps team of movie photographers—no doubt from the 163rd—as they bumped into a trio of German POWs being escorted down the hill by a lone GI. The signal corps camera operators asked the infantryman if he would go back up the hill fifty feet and come back down the trail so that they could get the shot of the POWs in action, descending down the trail. In the midst of war, reality was thrown in reverse to be captured on film. The Germans seemed only temporarily confused about what was happening. Soon enough they understood the filmmakers’ needs and not only willingly repeated their march down the hill but took time to fix their collars and straighten their trousers.16
Pyle also happened across a regimental surgeon from the 36th who had been among the group that was captured and later released by the Germans at Salerno. Now he was at the medical station housed in an old stone building at the top of the mule trail and Pyle’s arrival there prompted the doctor to break out a saved bottle of bourbon that had been waiting for the right company. Pyle later wrote Jerry about the visit, telling her that he and the doctor were talking in the loft of the station when German artillery started to land dangerously close, “but we felt so good by that time we didn’t even pay any attention.”17
He and the doctor, Emmett Allamon of Port Arthur, Texas, were talking about the “mental wreckage” of war—those soldiers broken by the dangers and stresses of the battlefield. The doctor took a pretty tough stance, saying that he thought the root cause for the number of breakdowns on the front line was societal, that too few American children were being given opportunities for self-sufficiency; and as a result, they crumbled now when faced with adversity. They simply hadn’t faced enough tough times before. He thought ex-newsboys were best suited for war, because they’d been raised from early in life to fend for themselves.
Whether this conversation was an offshoot of what had happened in Sicily with George Patton and the slapping incidents, Pyle does not say. That story had finally been leaked by the press to the American public, and the subsequent outcry was making headlines. In any case, Pyle was much more sympathetic to the phenomenon than the doctor. “The mystery to me,” he wrote, “is that there is anybody at all, no matter how strong, who can keep his spirit from breaking in the midst of battle.”18
18
A Bad Day on the Mountain
A GERMAN COUNTERATTACK on December 11, left Rufus Cleghorn wounded on Mt. Sammucro. He joined a growing number of officers and staff sergeants from Company A, who had been knocked out of action. Aside from losing Capta
in Horton, who was killed by sniper fire, and Lieutenant Goad to a wound, Company C was down two more officers and four staff sergeants by December 12. Waskow’s Company B, which, because of the time spent hauling supplies was out of the most intense action, had lost only one officer killed in action.
Four days into the action, the battalion was down to half strength, with just 340 soldiers up on the ridge. The loss of men prompted General Keyes to reinforce the 1st on December 11, with the 504th Parachute Battalion. Also sent up top was Waskow’s old Company I from Belton.1 Revolving units of the 1st Battalion, including parts of Company B, were allowed to rotate partway down the mountainside for temporary relief at the aid station, which had been erected where the mule paths ended.
Meanwhile in the valley, the Germans continued their tight hold over San Pietro. The 2nd and 3rd battalions remained stuck where they’d been since the attack on the eighth of December, about 1,000 yards shy of San Pietro. The Fifth Army might be holding Mt. Sammucro, but they couldn’t go further without access to the Liri Valley—and the Liri Valley was controlled by the German forces surrounding San Pietro.
The pressures for moving on quickly mounted. On Walker. On Clark. On all their units. Already it felt like the army was stalled again, well south of Rome. It hadn’t yet breeched the first of the Winter Lines; and the second, stouter line, the Gustav, still awaited. A plan for forcing the valley open was needed and Clark had one in mind. He bounced it off of Walker and Keyes: How feasible was it, Clark wanted to know, to mount a tank assault against the village?
Not very, Walker thought. A recon report suggested a number of formidable obstacles. Not only was the ground in the valley saturated by the incessant rain, but a series of streambeds and gullies ran along the southern base of Sammucro surmounted by a number of small bridges and culverts that could be easily destroyed by German artillery. Most daunting, however, were the terraces that fronted San Pietro to the south, east and up the mountainside. These were in the neighborhood of three to seven feet in height, all shored up by rock walls insurmountable to tanks. In addition, the snaking mule trails that led from one level to the next were simply too narrow for tanks to negotiate.