by Tim Brady
To crown his achievements for the year and validate his newfound fame, Pyle was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in the spring of 1944—presented for the quality of his war reporting in the previous year. Lee Miller nominated him, but Pyle didn’t think he had a chance “because my stuff just doesn’t fit their rules.”15 He even made a $100 bet with his editor that he wouldn’t win. Pyle was in London, preparing for D-Day, when word of the award came. Don Whitehead phoned him with the news. “Well I’ll be goddamned,” Pyle said. “Now I lose a hundred dollars.”
Ernie Pyle remained a guy with a myriad of aches, pains, and insecurities. He was still an Indiana guy who wanted to be liked by the people he met along the way. He was still escaping a bad marriage (Jerry was once again back in the hospital in New Mexico, and more tribulations were to come) by risking life and limb on the front lines of a world war. He would ultimately spend another year leading this dual life that combined fame and uncertainty, acclaim and heartache, fraternity and loneliness, all without ever finding simple happiness.
His time would finally come far from North Africa, or the Italian mountains, or the beaches of Normandy, where he was soon headed. Even far from the infantry that he so admired. Instead, Ernie Pyle would die on an island in the Pacific, almost as an afterthought to the ground war, as the fighting wound down in April 1945.
For now, however, back in Italy in the third week of January 1944, Pyle had had enough of the comforts of Naples, and the notes from Lee Miller telling him of his successes back in the States. It was time to return to the frontlines, to follow the troops as they butted heads, once again, with the German Panzer divisions on this slow and agonizing journey to Rome. He decided to skip, for the time being, the Allied landing at Anzio, and instead join the 34th Division as it contemplated an attack on the Gustav Line.
He barely missed the prelude to this assault, which once again featured the 36th Division, in a disastrous attempt at crossing the Rapido River.
24
Rapido
THERE WAS ONE MORE STORY to be written about the 36th Division in the Liri Valley, one more tragedy.
After almost three weeks bivouac, during which replacement troops poured into the division to fill the enormous number of slots vacated by all the casualties inflicted on the Texas Division at San Pietro, the unit made ready to advance against the next of the Winter Lines constructed by the Germans in the Liri Valley, the formidable Gustav Line.
Extending down from the famed monastery on top of Monte Cassino and through the town of Cassino, which, much like San Pietro, was tucked into the foot of the mountain near the valley floor, the solid defenses of the Gustav ran right across the Liri on the north side of the Rapido River. The 15th Panzer Grenadiers had had months to build and perfect the interlocking system of defenses along and above the river. They constructed concrete bunkers, embedded tanks in the landscape, planted mines along approach routes, cut down trees to open lines of fire and set up artillery pointed at every possible approach to the Rapido.
The river itself presented difficult challenges. It was eight to twelve feet deep and forty to fifty feet wide. There were steep banks leading into and out of the water, the flow of which was rapid, and, in January, freezing cold. In a word, the Rapido was unfordable. It also had no bridges. The only means across were assault boats and pontoon walking bridges, which would need to be erected by troops operating under the well-placed guns of the German forces arrayed before them. Only four of these bridges were available for use by the 36th.
Approaches to the river were almost all uncovered, leaving German artillery and small arms fire with wide-open views of the American attack from the surrounding hillsides. And finally, once across the river, infantry would be greeted by the ubiquitous barbed wire that seemed to be everywhere in the valley.
Since the battle at San Pietro, General Clark had decided that the only way to break the German Winter Lines in the Liri Valley was to go around them by means of an amphibious assault. He had been mulling over such a plan since late October. The idea for that attack had advanced to the point where it was now scheduled to take place at Anzio in the third week of January. But to ensure its success, he would need to pin down German troops in the Liri Valley, to keep them from hindering the planned amphibious assault at Anzio. Enter the 36th: as part of his Liri Valley strategy, General Walker and his division were ordered to advance across the Rapido on January 20.
Walker’s 141st and the 143rd regiments drew the short straws. More than 1,000 enlisted replacement troops and ninety officers had been plugged into their ranks, yet both regiments remained undermanned, particularly the 143rd. The Rapido crossing would be the first action for the great majority of the new troops, including many of the officers, who were largely fresh from officers’ training school.
Walker smelled a disaster in the works and voiced his trepidations to Clark. He was told, essentially, that Clark knew this would be a difficult fight, but it was a military necessity for the larger success that would come at Anzio. Victory at Anzio, it was understood, would open the door to Rome.
Walker’s World War I experience included a battle on the Marne, where he had commanded American troops against a German attack similar to the one that he was about to undertake with the 36th. “On that day, in my battalion sector, a German division of about 10,000 men made an attack across the river,” Walker wrote later. “In good defensive position along the Marne, my battalion of 1,200 solders turned the Germans back, disorganized, confused, and slaughtered them.”1 Now he feared the same thing would happen to his own troops.
As with earlier attacks in the mountains and valleys of Italy, the British X Corps led off the assault on the left side of the front, nearer the coast. On January 17 the Brits had some initial successes, crossing yet another river blocking the way north, the Garigliano, and establishing a beachhead on the opposite side. The Tommies were soon stalled, however, which left the left flank of the Americans uncovered as January 20 approached.
The focal point of the American attack was a village on a bluff on the north side of the river called Sant’Angelo. Another thunderous barrage of artillery preceded the 36th’s advance, which began at 7 p.m. the night of the twentieth. Darkness had fallen and a heavy fog blanketed the valley but neither prevented the Germans from detecting the movement and almost immediately opening fire with mortar, small arms and artillery.
The 141st took the lead, but confusion reigned from the start. Inexperienced troops wandered off the paths markeds to crossing points and into heavily mined areas. Of the pontoon footbridges to be employed in the crossing, one turned out to be defective; one was destroyed by a mine as it was being carried to the river; and a third was lost to artillery fire.2 Assault boats were sunk or damaged, drowning a number of infantrymen in the process. Just before dawn a few score men of 1st Battalion had crossed on the only functioning bridge, but they were soon left to their own devices as other members of the battalion and regiment continued to be stymied on the southwest side of the river.
Meanwhile the 143rd, which had set out at 8 p.m. the evening before, was having similar bad luck. Companies B and C—far different creatures from a month and a half earlier, with almost all new personnel—had made it across the river, but most of their boats were wrecked in the process, which meant that few others could get across the Rapido to assist. The two companies were pinned down and taking a terrific pounding, when Colonel William Martin, still in command of the regiment, ordered them back to their starting point across the river from Sant’Angelo. A third and fourth crossing never even got off the ground due to intense enemy fire.
Keyes ordered General Walker to do it all over again on January 21. More boats were found, and now the 3rd Battalion took the lead. But again the 36th butted into a hard enemy wall of fire. Starting in the late afternoon of the twenty-first, the 3rd, the 1st, and eventually the 2nd battalions were all able to make it across the river, but because of heavy enemy fire, they couldn’t shore up
their gains by constructing any bridges across the river that would allow armored reinforcement. They were ordered to withdraw by early afternoon the next day.
To the south, the 141st was likewise able to get a couple of battalions over the river, and likewise was unable to secure those gains with bridgeheads. They could also find no remnants of Companies A, B, and C, who’d been left on the far side of the river that morning. Soon the 2nd and 3rd battalions were themselves trapped on the wrong side of the river. When the 143rd completed its withdrawal, German forces concentrated their attack on the two trapped battalions, moving to within yards of them. In the end, just forty men from the two battalions were able to escape by swimming across the Rapido. Everyone else was either killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
Unbelievably, Keyes wanted Walker to take one more try at the river, but this time the commander of the 36th balked. It just could not work, he argued. The 36th had taken too much punishment and they could not make any gains. Keyes argued that the Germans had taken a hard blow, that their morale was probably low. But as Walker wrote later, “This was wishful thinking.”
Keyes spoke with Clark about Walker’s misgivings and after some back-and-forth, Clark agreed to call off the third assault. He would continue to pursue the Gustav Line from a higher position, near the village of Cassino with the 34th Division taking the lead.
Meanwhile the 36th withdrew with an agonizing toll. In 48 hours of fighting, they suffered more than 2,100 casualties, including 155 killed, more than 1,000 wounded and more than 900 captured. Battered and bruised, needing to rebuild itself one more time, the Texas Division was, in the words of an historian “for all practical purposes, no longer an effective combat unit.”3
Recriminations followed quickly. Walker knew that someone would pay for the disaster at the Rapido and he fully expected that someone to be himself. It was not in Clark’s makeup to fall on his own sword. Two weeks after the battle, Walker’s staff was dismissed by Clark, including: General Wilbur, Colonel Martin, and Walker’s son, Fred, Jr. Walker was not even given the opportunity of naming his own replacement officers.
Privately to Walker, Clark acknowledged the failure of the Rapido attack, but never fully accepted that an error in judgment—his own—had occurred. He continued to suggest that the assault had been a necessary component of the Anzio action. In years to come, Clark never mentioned the battle at the Rapido and he failed to write anything about it in his memoirs.
Though he had obviously lost Clark’s confidence (a mutually felt sentiment from Walker towards Clark), Walker was told that he would not be dismissed until he had a chance to rebuild the 36th and lead it one more time into successful combat. This would happen in early June at the village of Velletri, where Walker led the rebuilt division in a breakthrough that would help get the Fifth Army finally to Rome.
Soon afterward, Walker was sent home to serve as commandant of the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Walker had made it to Rome, but that was as far as he would go. As he arrived in the city on June 26, 1944, and took up a brief residence in a villa before his departure from Italy, his remaining officers arranged for a dinner at which he was saluted. It was, Walker confided to his diary “The only real reward I receive[d] for my past three years with the division . . .”4
25
A Final Posting
WORKING FROM THE ARMY Pictorial Services production facilities in Astoria, New York, John Huston edited an initial version of a documentary film that he wanted to call San Pietro (Frank Capra preferred Foot Soldier or The Foot Soldier and San Pietro)1.
A first showing that spring elicited a strongly negative reaction from the Army brass who saw it. According to Huston, one unnamed three-star general walked out about three-quarters of the way through the movie and was followed by a string of officers, taking their lead from the general in descending order of rank.2 Huston got the message through the Pictorial Services that the War Department wanted no part of the movie.
San Pietro languished through the summer, the subject of debate in the conference rooms of the Pentagon, and in editing suites at the offices of Hollywood branch of the Signal Corps, where Huston had taken the movie for more editing. But in early August, Capra was able to get the film a viewing with George Marshall and its fortunes soon changed.
Marshall knew at a very personal level the hardships of this long war. He had recently lost his stepson to a sniper bullet near Velletri in Italy. He was working with Capra on a new set of documentaries intended to prepare the American public for the ongoing battle with the Japanese after the war in Europe was over. He thought San Pietro was too long, and could be judiciously edited, but he was not about to stifle its release. In fact, he said “this picture should be seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage but rather will prepare them for the initial shock of combat.”3
Huston cut the movie down from five reels to three. He added a prologue from General Mark Clark, who stands stiffly in front of the camera and intones a brief message acknowledging the hard fighting at San Pietro, but proclaiming its value to the Allied cause. The film needed further vetting and feedback from an array of viewers at the Signal Corps and in the War Department.4
Finally, in March 1945, the film got a preview with a general audience at Twentieth Centry Fox studios in Hollywood. “I can’t say it was a joyous evening,” Huston later wrote in a thank you note to Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox. “San Pietro is a dolorous goddamn picture, full of hacked up towns and tanks and bodies, but the response from the two hundred assorted people present was very gratifying. In other words, I succeeded in making everyone of them utterly miserable which is the purpose of this picture.”5
San Pietro opened with a long shot of the Liri Valley and its surrounding mountains, describing the history of the region and its agricultural roots. Footage of denuded olive trees are followed by the first close-ups of the destruction in the village of San Pietro, ending on a shot of the shell-racked walls and a roofless chancel of the Church of St. Michael the Archangel, and its statue of St. Peter, the village’s patron saint.
There follows a straight-forward description of the battle from its opening moments at the muddy Volturno River, to its conclusion at San Pietro, with Italian refugees coming out of the caves in the hillside. What was shocking to many were the images of death and suffering littered throughout the film: stacks of dead bodies were seen being tossed into the back of a truck; dead soldiers, both German and American, were shown on the battlefield; a body strapped to a litter, much like Henry Waskow, was shown being carried down the mountainside. In conjunction with images of smiling Texas infantrymen, shown gathered on the eve of battle at the start of the film, the implications were startling. This was an Army film, intended to be shown to a large audience of recruits and even the general public, telling a story that did not shirk from the horrors of war. Huston was told that he’d made an “anti-war” film, and his initial response was to say that if he ever made a pro-war film, he hoped someone would take him out and shoot him.6
The movie was released in April 1945 and got largely glowing reviews, particularly from film critic James Agee in Time who named it one of the two best films of 1945. Despite the fact that much of the combat footage was actually reenacted, the documentary was seen as one of the most realistic portrayals of the life of a foot soldier ever put on film. Even though it was released as the war in Europe was coming to an end and a year and several months after the battle itself, San Pietro remained a vivid and truthful description of the cost of battle.
Photographs of dead Americans on the battlefield had been published before in World War II (beginning in the fall of 1943), but San Pietro put those images in an ongoing narrative context that remains haunting to viewers almost seventy years later. As Huston panned the aftermath of the fight, including images of the men of the 143rd weary, resting after the battle, some smiling in a measure of relief at having survived the fight, many just gazing off with their own thought, Husto
n’ narration intones: “Many among those you see alive here have since joined the ranks of their brothers in arms who fell at San Pietro. For ahead lay San Vittore and the Rapido River and Cassino. And beyond Cassino more rivers and more mountains and more towns . . . more San Pietros . . . greater or lesser . . . a thousand more.”
In 1991, San Pietro was chosen to be preserved in the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board. It was picked ten years later to be one of fifty films included in a boxed DVD set compiled by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
The film has not grown old without controversy. Some in the film community have criticized the army for insisting upon the cuts that reduced the length of the feature from about fifty to thirty-two minutes. Others have chided Huston for never coming totally clean about the fact that he used re-creations in the making of the film. But the last word on the subject rightfully belongs to Joel Westbrook, the 143rd Battalion captain who helped make the filming possible. Not only did Westbrook think it was an accurate depiction of the battle, he actually promoted its showing when he returned to Texas after the war.7,8,9
THE OTHER film named by James Agee as the best of the year in 1945 was The Story of G.I. Joe, the movie that Ernie Pyle had worked on with Arthur Miller back in the fall of 1943. Miller had long since been detached from the production but it had continued in the Hollywood pipeline and came out in the fall of ’45. Essentially it followed the story of Pyle’s reporting in North Africa and Italy, with the dramatic conclusion centered on a version of Henry Waskow’s death. Like Huston’s San Pietro, The Story of G.I. Joe was lauded for its realistic and unsentimental portrayal of U.S. infantrymen.