A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  General Wilbur of the 36th devised a plan for a nighttime attack against Vittore; and on December 20, the 141st’s 1st Battalion, and 143rd’s 3rd Battalion inched around the western edge of Mt. Sammucro at its base toward the village. Meanwhile the 2nd Battalion of the 143rd moved up the mountain to attack from higher ground.

  More fighting among the rocks ensued. Again the 36th was stymied. The 143rd was finally relieved on the morning of December 23 by the 1st Special Forces unit—the mountain troops who had taken Mt. La Difensa at the start of the assault. The special forces were reinforced by the 504th Parachute Infantry and a battalion of the 141st. They coordinated a successful attack against San Vittore, and by Christmas Eve, the village was finally in Allied hands.

  Still it was apparent the enemy would contest every inch of ground. Nothing would be easy, a fact that General Walker felt was not evident to his immediate superiors, Clark and Keyes.

  They had come to his command post on December 19, two days after San Pietro had been taken, this time with Eisenhower and Major General Bedell Smith. After lunch, Walker took them along Highway 6 to get a clear view of Mt. Sammucro and the village of San Pietro. Eisenhower surprised Walker by asking him to lay down some artillery fire on the village, which was obviously a pile of rubble already. Just what this shelling was supposed to accomplish, Walker had no idea. He was trying to figure out how to deal with the suggestion, when Bedell Smith whispered to him that he ought to simply ignore it. Meanwhile, Clark and Keyes were wondering, in less than subtle fashion, why it had taken so long to render the village.2

  Walker was already deeply discouraged by the Italian campaign. “[It] will not be finished this week, nor next,” he confided to his diary. “Our wasteful policy or method of taking one mountain mass after another gains no tactical advantage, locally. There is always another mountain mass beyond with Germans dug in on it, just as before. Somebody on top side, who has control of the required means, should figure out a way to decisively defeat the German army in Italy, instead of just pushing, pushing.”3

  Two days before Christmas, his thoughts were with his soldiers. “This is about as miserable a day for the troops as one can imagine,” he wrote. “Several units are moving to new positions this afternoon. I regret the hardships they must endure tonight. Wet, muddy, cold, and hungry, they will go into a camp in the mud and rain without rest or sleep. They have been going for thirty-five days.”

  The Germans were defending every mountain, but the high command seemed to be paying little attention to the toll this was taking on his men. “They set up schedules of progress to be made from day to day, but they do not consult the German soldiers, who are defending the positions in our front . . .”4

  Christmas was not very merry for him or his men. Walker spent it visiting his three infantry regiments and handing out Silver Stars and Distinguished Service medals. Some troops got a very nice Christmas dinner complete with roast turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, cauliflower, fruit salad, rolls, butter, cake, coffee, and three kinds of pie, apple, custard, and chocolate.

  As with the Thanksgiving turkey, those still on the front lines were promised this same meal as soon as they were relieved.

  Walker’s quarters were in a mountain near the village of Presenzano. Next door in a larger cave slept his aides and others in the general staff. The offices of the command post were housed in tents down the hill from the caves; and each morning, Walker and his staff would take the trails down, and each evening, they’d head back up. On Christmas Eve, Walker received a visit to his command cave from some carolers who sang a number of Christmas melodies. As the songs echoed on the mountainside, his neighbors stepped from their caves, too, to listen and dream of better days to come. When the music died down, a general wish was expressed that next year’s Christmas be conducted under peaceful skies and circumstances.5

  ON CHRISTMAS Day, bazooka man Lee Fletcher of Company I and Jack Clover of Company K helped the Graves Registration teams pick up battalion dead along the hillside of Mt. Sammucro near San Pietro. Fletcher never forgot the sight of two men from that grim duty. Both were found within feet of each other on one of the terraces. A single mortar shell had killed them in the same instant. The first body was riddled with shrapnel. The second body left Fletcher numb. It had both legs and an arm blown off. The man’s intestines had gushed out onto to the terrace and had to be scooped up into a mattress cover and carried off the mountain. “Not a pleasant thing to do,” he wrote later. When he got back to that Christmas Day party, turkey with all the trimmings held no appeal to him. He couldn’t eat.6

  Clover was working the terraces, too. He was exhausted, having just been pulled from the front lines at San Vittore, for this duty. Clover and the burial team he was working with came upon one G.I. lying facedown on a terrace. The dead man was wearing a raincoat with just one leg sticking out from beneath. The other leg, with its foot in a muddy combat boot, was just behind and to the left of the rest of the man’s body. They covered the man’s head, torso, and one leg in a blanket and lashed it to a litter for the hike down the mountain, placing the detached limb next to its partner, making a pair of muddy combat boots once again. Then they kept on with their work.

  The detritus of war was everywhere: the stone terraces were smashed and ruined; olive trees were torn literally, limb by limb; burned up M 1 rifles and scattered back packs and cartridge belts lay all around. Two soldiers were killed against a stone wall, clutching their rifles as a mortar hit and took their lives. All the while he worked, those two muddy combat boots stayed in Clover’s mind.

  Back in the bivouac area, he found himself slowly getting into the holiday spirit. There were fires around the tents and some members of his platoon were singing Christmas carols. “Mail from home had arrived and a turkey dinner was upcoming. The late afternoon sun shone brightly in the Italian sky as it sawed its way into the massive snowcapped peaks above,” he wrote.7 Yet those muddy combat boots still haunted him.

  On New Year’s Eve, a storm blew down from the mountains, whipping tents and dumping snow all around the bivouac and headquarters, reminding one Texan of “a Blue Norther, blow[ing] in cold and fierce . . .”8

  Up on Sammucro, a part of the 142nd Infantry was given the assignment of guarding the summit for one last night. Newcomers to the top, they tried to set up tents but had little luck securing a substantial shelter in the rock. They took two tent halves and tied one to a boulder and staked the other side in a patch of thin soil, then tried, with little success to fix the two halves together with buttons.

  The rain and wind came with the evening. The shelter leaked like a sieve. Water ran down the rocks and soaked them to the bone. They huddled under blankets until the wind blew their shelter off the rock to reveal that the rain had turned to snow inches deep. Sleep was impossible.

  In the morning, they got their hands on a Coleman stove and huddled as close as they could. It was New Year’s Day 1944. Before it was through, all elements of the 36th were relieved of duty and sent into bivouac. The battle of San Pietro was over.

  22

  The Death of Captain Waskow

  ERNIE PYLE RETURNED to his room at Caserta to get some writing done in the aftermatch of the battle for San Pietro. He was housed in the castle in a large room that he shared with a couple of other reporters, though eight cots were available for those times when the press corps filled the place. The room was “big and bare and cold,” he wrote to Jerry. “Several of the windowpanes were blown out; the door was blown out; the place was cold and dirty.”

  An Italian “houseboy” just showed up one day and started tidying the room and running errands for the reporters. He got the windows fixed, found some wood for the stove, and did laundry for the correspondents. He even brought in flowers and tables for them to work on. “He looks over my shoulder when I’m writing,” Pyle wrote to Jerry, “and sits in the room all day trying to anticipate our wants . . .”1

  Pyle told another correspondent that his plan
in Caserta was to catch up on his work with about five days of writing before heading back to the front “which means I’ll spend Christmas in the mud . . .” But he had a hard time getting the columns out and wasn’t particularly satisfied with what he was doing.

  Don Whitehead returned to Caserta just before Christmas as well. He described visiting with Ernie in the big castle room. “Usually he would be huddled in his bedding roll with only his head sticking out, looking like a pixie in that knit cap.”

  Whitehead and the other reporters had grown protective of Ernie. He was so frail and got sick so often. “I suppose we sensed that war was a heavier strain on him than on most of us,” Whitehead wrote later, “because he was more sensitive to cold and hunger and pain and the shock of seeing men killed and wounded.” Ernie told Whitehead that he’d grown depressed after his time at the frontline, and heard complaints from Ernie about “losing his touch” and writing “stuff” that “stunk.”2

  He was working on columns about the artillery and the mule trains that he had visited, and a third story, a piece about the captain who had been brought down off the mountain on the back of a mule. He showed this last column to Whitehead, who said to Ernie, “If this is a sample from a guy who has lost his touch then the rest of us had better go home.”

  The Captain Waskow piece couldn’t be printed until the family itself was notified of Henry’s death. Regardless, Pyle’s work was done and he took his columns to an office in Naples to be transmitted to the United Press in New York. Pyle decided that in the interim, instead of returning to the front, he would have a few drinks. Those few drinks turned into a lot of drinks.

  There was a bar at the Caserta palace, and that Christmas Eve Pyle began drinking cognac. He was soon joined by a member of the Special Forces unit, who was heading out for an assignment in the next few days. Together they went on a days’ long bender that ended just before New Year’s Eve when the chief public relations officer of the Fifth Army sent a young doctor to Ernie’s room at the palace to wake Pyle up and give him a shot of B-1 vitamins for his hangover.

  The next day he wrote a letter to Jerry in which he told about the drunk, but added, “I’m not sorry, for I guess we had to relax somehow, and I was more than a week ahead with the columns, and also we stayed in our room most of the time and didn’t bother anybody . . .”3

  A couple of days earlier, Henry Waskow’s family having been notified of his death, Pyle’s story was transmitted via the Signal Corps to United Press in New York for distribution. Staff Sergeant Wallace Irwin’s job was to read one news article after the next into a microphone, each to be sent by short-wave radio across the ocean for transcription and publication. Suddenly Irwin found himself struggling to finish the copy that was in his hand. Ernie Pyle’s story, soon to be published across the country under the title, “The Death of Captain Waskow” had that sort of effect.4

  Who knows where the power of the piece came from? It was obviously built out of the miseries, frustration, and horrors of the previous month’s engagement in the mountains and valleys of Italy, but Pyle had seen other hard moments in this war. He had never met Henry Waskow in life, but Pyle knew him in the way that he knew hundreds of other brave young men who were climbing this war’s mountains, only to be carried home on the backs of mules.

  Regardless, its impact was deep and immediate. Simple, stately, steeped in respect and empathy—of all the stories Pyle wrote during World War II, none would have a greater force than this one:

  At the Front Lines In Italy—

  In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow, of Belton, Texas.

  Captain Waskow was a company commander in the 36th division. He had been in this company since long before he left the States. He was very young, only in his middle 20s, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

  “After my own father, he comes next,” a sergeant told me.

  “He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

  “I’ve never known him to do anything unkind,” another one said.

  I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley. Soldiers made shadows as they walked.

  Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly down across the wooden packsaddle, the heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.

  The Italian mule skinners were afraid to walk beside dead men, so Americans had to lead the mules down that night. Even the Americans were reluctant to unlash and lift off the bodies, when they got to the bottom, so an officer had to do it himself and ask others to help.

  The first one came early in the morning. They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the other. They laid him on the ground in the shadow of the stone wall alongside the road.

  I don’t know who that first one was. You feel small in the presence of dead men and ashamed of being alive, and you don’t ask silly questions.

  We left him there beside the road, that first one, and we all went back into the cowshed and sat on water cans or lay on the straw, waiting for the next batch of mules.

  Somebody said the dead soldier had been dead for four days, and then nobody said anything more about him. We talked for an hour or more; the dead man lay all alone, outside in the shadow of the wall.

  Then a soldier came into the cowshed and said there were some more bodies outside. We went out into the road. Four mules stood there in the moonlight, in the road where the trail came down off the mountain. The soldiers who led them stood there waiting.

  “This one is Captain Waskow,” one of them said quickly.

  Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the stone wall. Other men took other bodies off. Finally, there were five lying end to end in a long row. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zones. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

  The uncertain mules moved off to their olive orchards. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually I could sense them moving, one by one, close to Captain Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

  One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud: “God damn it.”

  That’s all he said, and then he walked away.

  Another one came, and he said, “God damn it to hell anyway!” He looked down for a few last moments and then turned and left.

  Another man came. I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for everybody was grimy and dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face and then spoke directly to him, as though he were alive: “I’m sorry, old man.”

  Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: “I sure am sorry, sir.”

  Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

  Finally he put the hand down. He reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

  The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a li
ne end to end in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.5

  23

  Finishing Up

  JOHN HUSTON’S DOCUMENTARY film was in trouble. The order from the War Department and the president himself that real combat footage be included in the making of quality documentaries about the war—documentaries that would exceed the quality of filmmaking efforts from “our allies”—was proving more easily demanded than done. In spite of their harrowing journey to the village of San Pietro and back as the battle pulled away to San Vittore, Huston, Buck, Ambler and the camera crew from the 163rd had failed, like many other filmmakers in this war, to get actual combat footage.

  The difficulties of gathering the sort of Hollywood-style war film that was hoped for and anticipated, were delineated in a long report from the Signal Corps in Italy to the War Department in Washington, written just days after San Pietro had ended. To get combat scenes, it was “not enough” for camera crews “to risk life and limb” by getting close enough to the action, said Major Herbert Freeland of the 163rd in the report. That had been done. One of many problems in shooting combat was that the war was in many ways “invisible.” Troops in this war were spread out over wide areas, worked often at night and in small patrol units. Much of the action was centered on artillery, mortar, and air fire, which, by the nature of its unexpectedness, made it impossible to get the sort of combat footage that was anticipated by viewers wanting to see a war movie. “From a photographic standing, the enemy is most perverse and unaccommodating.”

  “Recently we spent time with cameras set up behind rocks on Mt. Lungo overlooking the town of San Pietro and San Vittore,” Freeland continued in the report. “Our lines and those of the enemy were less than half a mile away, and shells were often landing within one hundred yards of us, yet all that could be photographed were our own shells landing in San Vittore, and those of the enemy dropped into San Pietro. We shot these shellings under adverse conditions and the quality of the material is questionable.”1