A Death in San Pietro

by Tim Brady

  In addition, the white phosphorous shells, which emitted a photogenic puff of white smoke, were being used less and less in the war. And large cameras, easily spotted as they were poked out of foxholes, were quick to draw enemy fire, making many combat groups “allergic” to being accompanied by such units.

  What Huston and company were able to shoot was a lot of “after the fact” footage: the ruins of San Pietro, scenes of battle destruction, blown-out bridges and tanks, etc. They also had footage of the landscape—ravaged olive trees and holes made by shells in the valley—and shots of the two units of the 36th that they’d made near the olive grove on the way into San Pietro. They got background footage of artillery units rapidly loading and firing howitzers. They had the footage of German prisoners, coming down off Mt. Sammucro that Ernie Pyle witnessed and reported on. They had a number of long shots of artillery fire and some tanks moving in toward San Pietro. They shot several powerful images of dead bodies, German, Italians (in white sheets being tossed in the back of a truck), and even some Americans. Someone had also gotten very dramatic footage of one of the tanks being destroyed by the Germans.2 There was more incidental footage gathered in their days with the 143rd. But much more was needed in order to tell the blow-by-blow story of the battle for San Pietro.

  Scenes of combat could be reenacted, but given the strictures placed on film crews at the front to produce the most realistic movies possible, to pursue re-creations was not a thing done lightly. In fact, Huston sought Frank Capra’s advice in Washington before deciding to do so. He, Ambler, and Buck took a few days off and went to Naples, where Huston wired Capra explaining the circumstances and asking for counsel.

  By coincidence, his old friend and colleague Humphrey Bogart was in the city with wife Mayo on a USO tour. As Huston waited for Capra’s response, he had “a grand reunion” with Bogart, who threw a party in his hotel room to toast the occasion. The festivities got out of hand and ended, according to Huston, with Bogart telling a complaining general from across the hall “to go fuck himself.”3

  Meanwhile, word came back from Capra to get the film done any way that Huston could.4 Huston returned with Buck to the 143rd in the Liri Valley (Ambler had received orders to head back to England for a new assignment with the British Film Unit in the interim). Though Huston would never confess to doing so in later descriptions of the filming, they proceeded to use troops from the unit to reenact moments of the battle that the battalion had just fought.

  The recent University of Texas law school grad, newly married on Cape Cod, and son of a Texas Democratic Party bigwig, Captain Joel Westbrook, operations officer for the 143rd, who also happened be an old friend of Henry Waskow, was asked to facilitate Huston’s work. The two men would go over maps together and Westbrook would describe the battle action to the filmmaker—which units were where, the various areas and landscapes in which they worked, the weaponry they would have been using, how the fighting ensued.

  Beginning in late December and working together until mid-January, Huston and troops from the 143rd returned to the different corners of the battlefield to re-enact action from the fighting. Westbrook was able to secure concussive, rather than the more dangerous fragmentation grenades for the shoots, allowing Huston to get dramatic footage of GI’s popping up out of crouched positions to heave their ammo.5

  They went back to Sammucro on December 31 and shot images of infantrymen cautiously and laboriously trudging back up the mountain among the rocky rubble. They took shots of riflemen from the mountaintop, shooting downward toward the valley, and shots of riflemen among the rocks on the way to the top, shooting up the hill.

  On other days, in December and early January, they shot a variety of scenes: wounded soldiers being carried down the hillside on a litter, a medic treating a wounded GI, an officer taking a phone call in the field, infantrymen carefully advancing through the olive groves, and over the valley directly to the south of San Pietro, soldiers passing smokes to one another, and men of the 143rd soldiering in the various terrains associated with the battlefield.6

  Shots of the destroyed town were also collected, with images of infantry cautiously entering the village and checking inside its many downed buildings, as well as footage of the Italian refugees, emerging from their caves in the wake of the fighting. A scene with General Walker and his staff overlooking a map of the battlefield, pointing here and there at various positions, was shot, so were images of the 143rd post-battle, clustered in repose at the foot of a hill. A haunting shot of Italians digging neatly lined graves in a cemetery, and pounding dog tags and names on grave markers was also made.

  Meanwhile, Huston worked on the script in the evenings, crafting a powerful and straightforward description of San Pietro and the battle in elegant language, tightly focused on the infantry, the action, and the consequences to the village. Huston offered no great triumphal message to the taking of San Pietro; instead he wrote a salute to the bravery, determination, and sacrifice of the men who waged war in the Liri Valley. His narration was a deep and moving bow.

  Huston lost his re-enactors in the middle of January, when the 36th moved out to the next hard fight on the way to Rome—the Rapido River, at the German Gustav Line. He finished up shooting through the end of the month, picking up shots of tank maneuvers, landscapes, and more Italian citizens.

  By the end of February, Huston was back in the States, already beginning the editing of a film that would one day be considered one of the greatest documentaries produced during the war.

  RILEY TIDWELL was hurt badly enough on his walk down the mountain with Captain Waskow that he was sent to a hospital in Naples, and from there, a C-47 transport plane took him to further medical care in Bizerte. The plane took off and as luck would have it, hit some turbulence en route. Tidwell was in a row of litters stacked to the side of the plane; he was not strapped down. When the C-47 hit an air pocket, Tidwell bounced up off the canvas and hit his head on the litter above, breaking open the stitches on his wound near his left ear. There was lots of blood, but the company runner was none the worse for wear when the plane was forced down in Sicily.

  A two-day stay on the island followed before Tidwell finally got to Bizerte, where he promptly caught pneumonia. It wasn’t the pneumonia, nor the wounds, however, which were the primary concern of his doctors. The trench foot that he’d contracted in Italy was threatening his feet. Without the proper care and without him “working” the circulation by walking the hospital hallways, there was a good chance he could lose his toes. To reinforce the message, he was shown a jar full of digits in formaldehyde—pickled toes, he and his fellow trench foot victims called them—as an object lesson in the benefits of exercise.

  He spent two months in Bizerte before getting his discharge. From the hospital, he was sent to a replacement camp outside of the city, where he was expected to get back into shape for further service. While there, he was told to expect to be shipped to England. From England, he would probably be shipped back to the U.S. and then quickly to the Pacific.

  Less than thrilled at the prospect of leaving his Company B comrades in Italy, Tidwell simply decided to head back to Naples and join up with his old division. As soon as he felt sufficiently mended, Tidwell went AWOL from his replacement camp, hitched a ride on a plane bound for Naples, and soon after landing, reported himself to an MP. The military police were so surprised at an AWOL soldier heading toward the frontlines, that they simply told Tidwell to return to his unit. He got back with Company B in mid-February, just in time to witness the bombing of the monastery at Cassino.

  Riley Tidwell would spend another year and several months in the Army with stints in the 36th at Anzio, and briefly in the south of France, before heading back to the States in the fall of 1944.

  Once home, he would surprisingly find that his ties to his old captain were not yet severed.7

  MARY GOTH WASKOW was born in MacGregor, Texas, in 1877 to a sheepherder named George Goth, and a young German immigrant, also named Mary
, who died just five years after her daughter’s birth.

  Twenty- years later, young Mary Goth married a neighbor boy—another child of German immigrants—named Frank Waskow, and the two of them proceeded to have eight children, the youngest two being Henry Thomas and Mary Lee.

  The Waskows farmed a few central Texas homesteads before settling onto a place in Bell Country between the towns of Temple and Belton. The home they inhabited teemed with children and young adults, whose ages spanned a full twenty years. They kept some livestock and grew cotton; they nurtured a pecan tree in the front yard. The boys slept on a porch kept open in the hot Texas summers, and tied off with tarp in the cold winter winds. Mary made her children’s clothing out of flour sacks and it was expected that a pair of shoes would last until they were outgrown, at which time they would be passed down from one sibling to the next.8

  She baked bread, encouraged a close reading of the Bible, and raised a troupe of honest and hard-working children, six of whom were still living around Belton at the end of December 1943.

  Mary was sick in bed quite often that winter. She suffered from high blood pressure and had been feeling a little woozy and worried about Henry. All of this fighting in Italy only added to her anxiety. It was enough to be concerned about her son, August, who had come home on December 16, ravaged by war wounds and soon to depart to a hospital in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for more rehab. Having barely survived Altavilla, August was now about to spend his third month in a hospital—first on a ship in Naples harbor, then in Bizerte, now this new one in Atlantic City, New Jersey9—with no telling when he’d be better.

  And she hadn’t heard any news from Henry in weeks. He was always the most punctual one in the family. Up to that time, his letters had arrived faithfully every three weeks, the last one arriving at the end of November. Where was his new cablegram? Why hadn’t she heard from Henry?

  She couldn’t keep her mind off pending disaster and it was wrecking her own constitution. Her children were so concerned about their mother’s health that they worked out a plan if anything happened to Henry. They didn’t want to think about such things themselves, but just in case, Mary Lee, the youngest in the family, knew the women who worked in Belton’s Western Union Office. If they were to get a telegram about Henry, she arranged to have them contact her, instead of her parents. She would pass the word on to her mother.

  That very thing happened on the twenty-ninth of December. The women from Western Union called Mary Lee, who was doing volunteer work at the hospital, and told her there was a telegram. The military had been holding news of fatalities until after Christmas, which is why word was so slow getting to Belton. After a good deep cry on her own behalf, Mary Lee got ahold of her older brothers.

  Together they drove to the Waskow home, where they found their father and mother together. Mother was in bed. She saw them all coming in with those faces and knew in an instant what had happened. Her youngest son, her dutiful boy, was dead.10

  THE WAR news in Texas that January was nothing but grim. The toll from the fall and winter campaigns in Italy continued to resound in headlines of death and injury in the ranks of the 36th. There were so many wounded Texans waiting for an opportunity to recuperate at home, that for the first time ever, the army organized a mass evacuation by transport plane of Texas patients from a hospital in South Carolina, where they had originally been flown from North Africa. Instead of being loaded on trains for a two or three-day trip, seventy-five soldiers, including Jack White of Belton, were flown to McCloskey General Hospital in Temple to resume their treatments.

  Amid these headlines, news of Henry Waskow’s death appeared on the front page of the Belton paper a week after his family got word of the same. The story had no details of what had happened in Italy, but told of Captain Waskow’s early life in Belton, his graduation from Belton High and Temple Junior College. It said he had earned a bachelor’s degree from Trinity University and that he had been a member of the Belton National Guard since he was a teenager. It mentioned that another son of Frank Waskow, August, had been seriously wounded in Italy in the fall, and was just finishing a visit at home in Belton, before heading off to a hospital stay in New Jersey. The article was simple and brief, but its placement on the front page suggested there was more to be said.

  That happened four days later, on January 10, when Ernie Pyle’s column was published for the first time.

  PYLE’S EDITORS knew they had something special from the moment the piece arrived. Without giving the story a headline, the Washington Daily News, Pyle’s old daily and the flagship newspaper of Scripps-Howard, ran the story in large type across its entire front page, using that striking first paragraph to grab the reader’s attention: 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 . . .

  The edition sold out. Pyle’s story was likewise placed on the front pages of his syndicators across the country, often under the title, “The Death of Captain Waskow.” It was picked up by other newspapers in Texas—Laredo, El Paso, Brownsville, Paris, Port Arthur, Anson, Abilene, Lubbock and elsewhere. Newspapers in Reno, Nevada; Kingsport, Tennessee; Helena, Montana; Troy, New York; Madison, Wisconsin; Long Beach, California and scores more featured the piece. Time Magazine asked Scripps-Howard if it could reprint the column; the Readers Digest published it whole; Arthur Godfrey read it to his CBS radio audience.

  From the moment it appeared, “The Death of Captain Waskow” was acknowledged not only as a masterful piece of writing, but one of those stories that catches the essence of the times. For months now, it seemed that something was not quite right with the U.S. Army in Italy; it hadn’t been moving toward Rome as it should have, as it had through Sicily. It was one thing to read of the difficulties the GIs faced in the mountains and valleys of Italy, and another to have that terrible effort boiled down to the death of one soldier brought down off the rocks and saluted by his comrades. Americans understood immediately that Henry Waskow stood for thousands of others who had already perished, and thousands more whose deaths were yet to come. At home, mothers, fathers, family, and friends read Ernie Pyle’s story and thought not only of their own sons and daughters serving in harm’s way overseas, but of each other, and the awful toll of war.

  The Belton Journal ran the column on January 13 and was instantly flooded with letters from people saddened by the death of Henry Waskow and deeply moved by Pyle’s account of it. Many readers from outside the area sent clippings of the story from their own newspapers, as if the news might not have arrived yet in tiny Belton; these included Texas Congressman William Poage, sending the front page from the Washington Daily News, and a man from Chicago, who had served with Waskow before the war. “It was my pleasure to know and serve under this outstanding young leader while with the 36th Div. in Camp Bowie, Texas, in 1941,” wrote Sgt. Edgar F. Kirby, Jr. “It grieves me deeply to learn of this loss to your community and his very dear loved one.”11

  The editor of the Belton Journal understood the power and impact of the story but worried on behalf of the Waskow family. “We will not bother to suggest that you read Ernie Pyle’s story on page 1 today about Captain Waskow,” he wrote. “If you have not already read it, we suspect that some of your friends will urge you to do so.

  “What we are thinking about is the effect of this dispatch on Captain Waskow’s own people here at home. We doubt that they can read it without tears, and for any accentuation of their grief, we are most regretful. But did ever a sorrowing family receive a more moving testimonial to the affection with which a brave man was regarded, in death as in life, by his comrades-in-arms?”

  At the Waskow home, condolences flowed freely. Stacks of cards and letters came in, none of them, unfortunately, enough to console the grief of Mary Goth Waskow. She remained bedridden. Included in the post, was Henry’s last letter home, written sometime on the eve of his final battle: “If you
are reading this, I will have died for my country and all that it stands for . . .” It was too close, too dear for the family to share. In fact, the Waskow family would hold on to it and keep it unpublished for the next fifteen years.12

  Back in Italy, Ernie Pyle decided to continue his R & R in Naples. He got sober, found a room in a house maintained by the Air Force press corps right in the city, and continued to catch up on his column writing. He found out his North Africa book, Here Is Your War, was maintaining its status on bestseller lists and his reporting from Italy was receiving unprecedented acclaim for a war correspondent.

  One reporter declared the “three great discoveries of this war are the jeep, the Red Cross girl, and Ernie Pyle.” The Saturday Evening Post called him “the most prayed-for man with the American troops”; and Life said that his work “occupied a place in American journalistic letters which no other correspondent in this war has achieved.” An editor for the Toledo Blade called Pyle’s “story of the dead men coming down the hill . . . the most beautifully written newspaper story I have ever read.”13

  The president of the United Press wrote of the story, “I’m going to hang it up and look at it every once in a while just to make me glad that . . . there are still men in [the business] like Pyle who can write stuff like that.”14 The story was used as a means to sell war bonds all across the country, including in the city of Belton itself. Above the masthead on the very day it published Pyle’s column, the Journal ran a banner that read, CAPTAIN WASKOW GAVE HIS LIFE * The Least You Can Do Is Buy Bonds!

  Praise from members of the press was echoed by soldiers in the theater. In a little more than a year’s time, Pyle had gone from a fairly anonymous reporter to one of the most recognized and famed figures of the war. His skinny frame, clothed in hanging fatigues; his knit cap, with its little bill edging down toward his brow; his sad eyes, as doleful as an old dog, were now as recognizable as Eisenhower’s bald head or Patton’s ivory handled pistols to GIs all over North Africa and Italy.