A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  Waskow was far from alone up at the station where the mule train ended. Many more dead were waiting to come down the mountain; and many more of the living congregated around them, resting themselves on the way, sitting among the dead bodies, as if they weren’t dead, but simply dead-tired, like the soldiers of the 143rd seated around them.

  That didn’t ease things for Tidwell. It just wasn’t right for the captain to be so long on the mountain. The company runner decided to take matters into his own hands. He “acquisitioned” a mule from one of the trains and took off by himself up the trail determined to fetch Captain Waskow. There was still sporadic gunfire on the hillside; still the persistent mortar fire from stubborn German troops, slowly retreating on the far side of Sammucro. But the slow process of bringing the dead off the mountain continued.

  Riley Tidwell found his captain just where he’d left him. He draped Waskow over the mule like others were doing with the dead at the head of the trail. Tidwell pushed down his rigor mortis–stiffened legs on one side of the mule, bent Waskow’s rigid waist over the mule’s spine, and let his arms drape over the other side. He strapped his captain on the animal’s back and headed down. For a time, the sporadic German fire focused on the mules coming down off the mountain and artillery came dangerously close. Tidwell was nicked by shrapnel: once across the back, once on the wrist, once by his left ear. The last wound left him bloody, but still upright as he neared the base of the hill. It was his feet that still were giving him the most pain.

  “Here comes Riley,” he heard someone from down below call, “and he’s got Captain Waskow.”

  Several people helped him take the captain off the back of the mule and lay him down with the others who’d been brought down the mountain that day. His mission done, Tidwell went off to the field hospital, where they sewed fifteen stitches into the wound by his ear, and decided that his feet were bad enough to send him to the hospital.9

  ERNIE PYLE was still at the shed below, watching the procession of mules and men, mingling with the living soldiers at the foot of the mountain, as the dead were placed among them. All day long the bodies were carried down the mountain on the backs of mules, according to Pyle, one at a time, as the exhausted men of 1st Battalion sat around talking in tired voices with vacant eyes. They would get quiet as each fresh body was laid next to the road that ran by the shed—convenient for taking the corpses away for their final disposition.10

  Pyle saw the gangly Texas private he had run into in the shed a few days earlier, coming down the hill with a group of four other bodies on four more mules. He watched as they wound their way down the last few yards and got within earshot of the bottom of the hill.

  Someone in the group said, “This one is Captain Waskow,” and Pyle instantly noted a change in mood. What had been somber air became all the more heavy. A number of them stood up, tamped out cigarettes, and slowly sidled over to help him off the mule.

  There he lay with all the rest, but Pyle could tell this death was a little different. This one was a little harder to take. One by one, the men from the company came over to pay their respects. Pyle carefully noted how they did so, catching the small gestures, the soft words. Later, he asked a few questions about the man who had just come down, listened for a while to the muted expressions of sorrow coming from the men who had known him best—the men who had served with him.

  As the night continued in its black vein, Pyle slipped away, back to his bedroll in the cowshed to ponder this war and think on deaths like these. He shut his eyes and tried to get some sleep.

  20

  Aftermath

  DON WHITEHEAD OF THE Associated Press and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald crossed “Purple Heart Valley” on December 18, heading toward San Pietro in the wake of the 143rd to view the aftermath of the battle—except the fight was not entirely over. German snipers were still hiding out in bunkers to the north of the village and enemy artillery was zeroed in on the town, which was empty of both German and American troops. Only the wounded and medical aid groups, like the one Whitehead and Bigart were joining in their dangerous sightseeing, remained in San Pietro.

  They were warned not to enter, even as they crossed the valley. It wasn’t only the hazards of the intermittent shelling and the snipers that made the village a dangerous place; it was also full of booby traps. The two journalists went toward the town anyway, passing the dead Americans who had charged across the open field toward the village terraces a couple of days earlier. “One boy lay crumpled in a shallow slit trench beneath a rock,” wrote Bigart of the trip. “Another, still grasping his rifle, peered from behind a tree, staring with sightless eyes toward the Liri plain. A third lay prone where he had fallen.”

  This last dead body affected Bigart a little more than the others. “Evidently some fragment had killed him instantly, for there had been no struggle,” he wrote. “Generally, there is no mistaking the dead—their strange contorted posture leaves no room for doubt. But this soldier, his steel helmet tilted over his face, seemed merely resting in the field. We did not know until we came within a few steps and saw a gray hand hanging limply from a sleeve.”1

  Like Pyle, Whitehead and Bigart had both spent some hours at the cowshed at the foot of the mule trail. Bigart was a bespectacled New Yorker with the look of a self-confident intellectual. Whitehead, a graduate of the University of Kentucky and in his mid-thirties, had a faint southern accent and a pencil-thin mustache. He was a buddy of Pyle’s and when he went back to Caserta, in Pyle’s room at the Palace, they were fond of sharing a drink or two or three.

  As Bigart and Whitehead retraced the steps of the 143rd across the valley, they noted the debris of battle, the “abandoned rifles, cartridge belts, blood-stained bandages.”2 As they came to the first of the terraces fronting San Pietro, Whitehead nearly sprung a trip wire connected to a German Teller mine, but Bigart spotted it and shouted a warning, saving the Associated Press its correspondent.

  They followed a mule path that widened into a cobbled alley and then came upon the first house in the village. Four dead Americans were sprawled within. They noted how “every approach to San Pietro, every ravine and sunken path offering shelter from machine-gun fire had been covered by German snipers.”3

  The was no discernible street pattern left within the village, all alleys and byways were heaped in rubble after being smashed by American artillery and bombed by American planes. Bigart noted the remnants of St. Michael and peeked inside to see the choir loft “hung crazily above an altar almost buried under the masonry.” An inscription in a church alcove where the statue of St. Peter stood armless, read, “By the devotion of Americans from San Pietro.” A young Italian woman emerged from one of the caves in the hillside, which had been home during the battle to scores of the villagers. She explained to the reporters that many San Pietrans, including her own uncle who now farmed near Syracuse, New York, had emigrated to the U.S. and sent back donations.4

  Further along in the village they saw sandbag bunkers with roofs made of rock. There were dead mules and hogs on the edge of town, along with the burned out remains of two American tanks that had made it as far as the village limits. There were a number of wounded Germans left behind by their comrades. They asked for food and water as the American medics arrived.

  As the day advanced, more Italian villagers emerged from the caves—about twenty middle-aged men, according to Bigart, some women and children “all very dirty and unkempt, but showing no signs of hysteria.”5

  Whitehead’s prose was more muscular than Bigart’s. “American doughboys have won one of their bloodiest, bitterest and toughest battles of World War II on this one hundredth day of the Fifth Army’s invasion of Italy,” is how he opened his report when he sat down to write it that night. “In all the fighting from the beaches of Salerno to the Garigliano River, none has been so packed with drama and heroism as that of this forty-eight hour span, nor has any been so costly in American lives as the battle for San Pietro, which ended today shortly
before we walked through ‘Death Valley’ to reach this pile of misery and rubble that once was a town.”

  Americans had entered “this battered, filthy, stinking little town at the bottom of Mt. Sammucro to find that the enemy had pulled back toward Cassino . . .”

  “We picked our way with a patrol and first aid men through fields ripped by mortars and shells and strewn with the still bodies of doughboys who fell in the bloody, savage fighting,” Whitehead wrote, “the fierceness of the fighting was written in those fields and in jagged piles of masonry in the town. Neither Tobruk nor Bizerte nor Battipaglia nor Toina were as ripped and torn and pulverized by explosives as this gray, little town, overlooking the approaches of Cassino. The Americans call it “Death Valley” because death was on the rampage . . .”6

  BIGART AND Whitehead weren’t the only journalists to venture into San Pietro, nor were they the first.

  On the afternoon of December 17,7 John Huston, Eric Ambler, Jules Buck, a crew from the 163rd Signal Corps, and an interpreter set out in a pair of jeeps for San Pietro, approaching the village directly from the valley floor, rather than sweeping around Sammucro on the Venafro Road from the east. They were armed with a large tri-pod camera, able to record sound, and an Eyemo, which was a handheld 35-mm favored by newsreel photographers.

  As they headed toward the village, they ran into General Mark Clark being driven in a jeep below San Pietro. Clark was getting photos taken near the edge of the battlefield, looking “alert, determined, fighting fit,” according to Ambler. Pictures taken, the commander was quickly back in his vehicle and whisked away to safer ground.

  Huston’s jeeps proceeded up the road to a point just short of the terraced olive groves. A group of tank men worked to rescue the Shermans that had failed to breech the village outskirts, and which still blocked access to the village. Huston and his people climbed out of their jeeps and were warned by the tank guys to stay in the tracks that their machines had made so as to avoid anti-personnel mines laid by the Germans. Sound advice.

  A little further down the road, they ran into a party of litter bearers, who were lining up dead bodies and checking them for identification. Dead for a day or two, they were already becoming “awkward to handle,” in Ambler’s words. “One had an arm raised and a finger with signet ring on it pointing rigidly at the sky.”8

  The sergeant heading the 163rd camera unit lingered to talk further with the stretcher-bearers, and then raced to catch up to Huston, who had proceeded on up the road. The sergeant said that he had been strongly advised not to continue into San Pietro. There were a lot more casualties up ahead, both dead and wounded, and the Germans were still quite active. Snipers were firing on the medics; mortar and artillery fire was still coming in.

  Huston ignored the warning, though he acceded to a request that they all move in single file rather than massed in a group. As they reached the first olive grove, they came upon a unit of T-Patchers, sitting under the trees, who confirmed that medics were being fired upon in the town. When they saw the cameras, they asked if they could get filmed and be in the newsreels back home. Jules Buck, who was manning the Eyemo, took some footage of the soldiers, who were relaxed and smiling in the shots.

  Just two days earlier, Huston had had Buck film another group of T-Patchers, these from the 143rd, just prior to the attack on December 15. They were in a reflective mood at the time, and talked, according to Huston, about what they were fighting for, “what the future might hold for them, their country and the world. Some of the bodies of these same soldiers were now scattered around the trail to San Pietro.9

  Huston’s crew continued on and found another platoon of T-Patchers closer to the village. These GI’s were crouched in a drainage ditch and were surprised to see the filmmakers walking upright and uncovered toward San Pietro. They told Huston that they were waiting for orders to move into the village and expressed concern about the safety of Huston and his men. Again, Huston ignored the warnings.

  Two hundred yards further on, the director hesitated as he lead the group around a bend in the grove. There was a T-Patcher around the corner, kneeling beside a tree with his rifle at his shoulder as if frozen in a combat position. It was only when they moved closer that they could see why he’d paused: the GI’s face had been peeled off by mortar. His corpse was simply propped up by the tree.

  The dead infantryman had many companions and the land around them told the story of their demise: it was pockmarked with craters where mortars and artillery shells had fallen. “Scattered about among the dead were their possessions,” Ambler recorded, “their tubes of toothpaste and their shaving kits, their toilet paper and their girlie magazines, their clean socks and their letters from home . . .”10

  They could see now into the village of San Pietro, and the interpreter took the opportunity to tell Huston that it didn’t look as if there were any living Italians in the town for him to interpret. The hint was left untaken. The interpreter soon decided he had had enough and vamoosed. After some consideration, so did the camera crew from the 163rd. Huston, Buck, and Ambler continued on, with Buck still manning the Eyemo.

  They were less than 200 yards from the town now and had a choice: they could either follow the road into the village, which presented a blind entrance as it swung around the mountain and into town; or they could cut across a field that had open access to San Pietro. The second avenue was undoubtedly mined and would expose them to enemy machine-gun fire. The Germans helped them reach a quick conclusion. A machine gun opened fire from the hillside sending them scurrying for cover by a retaining wall. Mortars started to rain down showering them with dirt and bits of stone. Huston asked Buck to take some shots in the midst of this action, but ultimately he was only able to shoot the sky, reeling above, as he dove for cover. Fortunately for the filmmakers, the dust and debris kicked up by the mortar explosions created enough cover from the machine gun for them to escape their predicament. One at a time they raced back to relative safety at their jeeps, fully aware of the dangers and frustrations of combat photography.11

  HUSTON, AMBLER, and Buck returned the next day. They had been reassured that the village was now fully “taken” by the Allies. The three of them drove their jeeps along the road from Venafro carefully skirting the disabled tanks. They headed right into San Pietro this time, up to the town piazza, where rubble lay all around them. “There were one or two stumps of wall still standing,” Ambler wrote, “but nothing, not even the church, that could be identified as a particular building.”12

  An American engineering crew in the village warned them to watch for land mines and booby traps. In particular, if they saw a German pistol lying around, they were not to pick it up; it was certain to be a trap. The engineers said that they had found a couple of Italian families in cellars, buried within the rubble. There were no doors left; the people came and left through holes in the destruction.

  Huston had Buck set up the camera in the piazza and directed him to focus back over the valley behind them to create an establishing shot for the village. He should slowly pan from the landscape below, up a full 180 degrees back to the destruction of San Pietro. Buck started to film just as the first of several German artillery shells came whistling into town.

  Leaving the tripod camera behind, Buck, Huston, and Ambler scrambled with the engineering crew to a nearby cave for cover, but soon Huston wanted to check out one of the cellars, where the Italian villagers were cowering. He and Buck made a dash for it. Ambler, who was growing annoyed by Huston’s risk-taking (and expressed it through snide reference to Huston’s smoky aviator glasses), ultimately followed suit.

  Once they were in the cellar, the shells started to fall heavy on the piazza, thundering in and shaking the ground and rubble above. The thought of being entombed within the destruction of San Pietro crossed everyone’s mind.

  The three filmmakers shared the cellar with “a skinny old man, two-exhausted middle-aged women and three quiet and very dirty children.”13 The old man offered Am
bler a rickety, wicker chair, but visible on its seat were a host of scampering lice and he declined.

  When the shelling lightened, Huston, Buck, and Ambler decided to make a run for it. They ran first to the camera, where Huston had Buck make another establishing pan of the valley and then they quickly got back into the jeep and headed down the road.14 An American command car was coming in their direction and paused briefly on the open road. Huston and company yelled a warning, but in an instant, a German .88 artillery shell hit the car and in Huston’s words, “It simply disintegrated.”15

  There was one more terrifying moment: a pair of I-beams had been placed along the road to serve as a bridge across a gulley. Their width was more appropriate to a truck than a jeep, and in their haste to get out of area, Buck, who was driving, had caught one of the jeep tires up on the raised edge of the I-beams. For several horrifying moments, as they imagined the German artillery zeroing in, the jeep remained stalled over the gulley. Huston swore a blue streak at Buck, who finally was able to get traction again and steer the jeep and its passengers back out of harm’s way.

  21

  New Year

  “The downtrodden G.I. as suffering servant: this was the symbol of the new heroism of World War II. It was largely the creation of Ernie Pyle, and the key work was done during what he called ‘the long winter misery’ of the Italian campaign.”

  —James Tobin1

  THERE WAS NO LETUP for the 36th Division. The village of San Vittore remained occupied by Germans just two miles from San Pietro and beyond it was the next, even more formidable line in the German Winter defense centered at Mt. Cassino, a few kilometers passed San Vittore.