Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Ranger successes in North Africa generated enthusiasm in the upper ranks of the US government for additional Ranger battalions. But recommendations to expand the Rangers provoked stiff opposition from a number of senior leaders in the Army, including Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, a curmudgeonly workaholic who headed Army Ground Forces within the War Department. As McNair saw it, special units were likely to sit unused for long periods of time for want of suitable missions, or else they would participate in “unprofitable missions” for the sake of demonstrating their ongoing relevance. Diversion of high-quality officers to Ranger units, McNair warned, “will seriously handicap the selection and training of leaders who are so essential in the present training program” of the regular Army. Thus, it would be better to provide special training and equipment to existing infantry units as needs arose.

  McNair occupied a high rung on the Army ladder, but there were other men of different opinions who stood on rungs still higher, and they decided to overrule him. In May 1943, the Army formed two additional Ranger battalions, the 3rd and 4th, putting both under Darby, who was given six weeks to obtain and train the necessary personnel. Darby employed recruiting methods he had used in the past, and he devised new techniques as well. Two of his roughest sergeants strutted into bars frequented by American servicemen and announced that they were ready to fight any and all comers. Those who stepped forward for fisticuffs were signed up as Rangers. Darby also scoured the centers where the Army sent newly trained troops prior to unit assignment, seeking out, in his words, men who “were young, usually of medium size, and rugged looking.”

  AFTER THE LANDING at Gela, the Rangers participated in two other major operations in Italy. The first began with an amphibious landing on September 9, 1943, at the resort village of Maiori, near Salerno, as part of a broad offensive by the US Fifth Army toward Naples. The Rangers met no opposition when they stepped from the royal blue waters of the Amalfi Coast onto Maiori’s black-sand beach. Marching six miles up a steep road that snaked through orchards of lemon trees, they drew on months of hard conditioning to bear their heavy packs and equipment at a steady pace. They reached the Chiunzi Pass, 4,000 feet above sea level, in just five hours. No Germans were to be seen.

  The absence of Germans was testament to the Rangers’ speed and achievement of surprise, rather than to any lack of German concern about the Chiunzi Pass. Overlooking Naples, Mount Vesuvius, and Highway 18, the pass was perfectly situated for sighting German military traffic and strongpoints. Darby’s Rangers trimmed the chestnut trees to facilitate observation, then marked the coordinates of targets and radioed them to warships sitting off the coast, whose guns sent massive shells screaming over the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Italian countryside.

  Germans soon showed up at the Chiunzi Pass to give battle. Too few in number to pose a serious threat, the German soldiers were easily thrown back by Darby’s Rangers. “We are sitting pretty,” Darby radioed to the Fifth Army headquarters.

  No one else in the Fifth Army, however, could say the same. Difficult terrain, German resistance, and Allied disorganization conspired to slow the advance of most American units, giving the Germans time to organize a slew of counterattacks. Several of the counterattacks took place at the Chiunzi Pass, each of which the Rangers stymied with the assistance of reinforcements that included an infantry battalion, a field artillery battalion, a medium tank battalion, and a company of combat engineers. The Rangers lost twenty-eight killed, nine missing, and sixty-six wounded in ten days of conventional battle. German counterattacks at other locations proved more effective, and at one point the Germans came very close to overrunning the Allied beachhead at Salerno; only the enormous projectiles of Allied warships and the bombing and strafing of Allied aircraft averted utter ruin.

  After failing to deprive the Allies of a foothold, the German Tenth Army withdrew northward from Salerno to what became known as the Winter Line, where fortified hills and passes afforded superb defensive positions. General Mark Clark, commander of the US Fifth Army, split up the Ranger battalions, attached them to larger units, and sent them to breach the Winter Line. Thus, rather than loitering or dreaming up “unprofitable missions,” as General McNair had prophesied, the Rangers would be fighting conventional battles alongside the regular infantry.

  The decision to employ the Rangers as standard infantry attracted its own set of detractors, which included many of the Rangers themselves. Ranger officers objected to the use of their troops in this manner, on the grounds that it squandered the specialized capabilities they had toiled months, if not years, to develop. Instead, they recommended, the Ranger leadership should determine the missions of Ranger units. These objections made no impression on General Clark, who believed that keeping special units in reserve until the need for special missions arose was a luxury that he could not presently afford. His need for infantrymen had reached such proportions that he was pulling musicians from division bands to plug holes on the front. Clark discerned, moreover, that opportunities for creeping up on the enemy and putting a dagger into his back had become scant now that they were fighting tough and canny Germans who held stout defensive lines, rather than the dispirited Frenchmen or disorganized Italians of the campaigns in North Africa and Sicily.

  Bitter mountain combat at the Winter Line would expose the Rangers to German conventional military power as never before. Over a period of forty-five days, 40 percent of the Rangers became casualties. The stresses of failure and the death of comrades debilitated men’s minds such that some of the bravest Rangers had to be sent to the medical area, two hundred to five hundred yards to the rear of the rifle pits, for a week or more of mental convalescence. The attrition of experienced Rangers led, in addition, to an influx of green troops who had not been selected or trained with the same care as in the past, causing Ranger units to commit errors that would have been unthinkable with the original members.

  While Darby’s Rangers were trying to wrest the Germans from their mountaintop redoubts, another elite force arrived at a different section of the Winter Line to try its hand against the Germans. The First Special Service Force, a combined unit of US and Canadian soldiers, had been formed in July 1942, but had not yet had a taste of battle. Created originally for Operation Plough, the force had been expected to enter the war in circumstances far different from those prevailing in southern Italy. But fighting somewhere was better than fighting nowhere, in the opinion of most Forcemen, who were itching to put more than a year of training to real use.

  Operation Plough was the brainchild of Geoffrey Pyke, an English scientist whom the British government had hired in its quest for alternatives to blood-soaked infantry campaigns on the European continent. Averse to bathing and personal grooming, entirely devoid of social graces, Pyke irritated most of his professional colleagues and most of the other people he met in life. Those very quirks, however, led several men of great influence to see in Pyke a mad genius. Pyke convinced Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British chief of combined operations, to enlist him as an idea man by showing up at Mountbatten’s office and declaring, “Lord Mountbatten, you need me on your staff because I’m a man who thinks.” Pyke and Mountbatten, in turn, convinced Churchill and Marshall that Pyke’s imaginative schemes deserved to be funded.

  As conceived by Pyke, Operation Plough would revolutionize warfare by exploiting a new domain: snow. “Our studies of the strategic situation have led us to the concept of snow as a fourth element—a sea which flows over most of Europe each year,” Pyke posited. “We must obtain mastery of the snow as we have of the sea.” According to Pyke, the Allies should airlift snow commandos and motorized snow-sleds into Norway, Romania, and the Italian Alps to conduct precision strikes on power plants, factories, and oil fields. Pyke predicted that the snow forces would wreak such havoc on Nazi Germany’s military and economic production that Hitler would have to divert half a million or more troops to contend with the menace.

  Great Britain, the United States, and Canada invested h
efty sums of treasure and manpower in the transformation of the mad scientist’s vision into reality. Studebaker designed a snowmobile prototype, with treads resembling a tank’s on the lower half and an open seating bay on the upper half. The prototype would eventually be developed into the M29 Weasel, a two-ton, four-passenger vehicle capable of traveling up to thirty miles per hour in snow at an average of five miles per gallon of gasoline. The Canadians contributed eight hundred of their finest soldiers to the initial snow commando unit, the First Special Service Force, a commitment the Americans matched in quantity but not in quality. The Forcemen received special training in the use of the snowcraft as well as skis, and parachutes.

  By the time the Weasel was ready for mass production, however, the plan for Plough had come under fire from the Royal Air Force, which doubted the value of diverting its premier bomber, the Lancaster, to the lugging of the snow-sleds across Europe. The Norwegian government-in-exile raised objections to Operation Plough, as it did not consider destruction of the country’s power facilities to be in the nation’s long-term interests. Nor were Allied military planners able to find satisfactory solutions to essential logistical problems that to Pyke had seemed mere trifling details, such as how to refuel and repair a vehicle in a country where the enemy controlled all the gas stations and owned all the facilities capable of servicing tracked vehicles. In the fall of 1943, more than one year after the creation of the First Special Service Force, the idea of using the Forcemen as snow commandos was pitched into the dustbin.

  The crushing of Pyke’s dreams stimulated talk of dissolving the First Special Service Force and sending its personnel to regular US and Canadian units. But the force’s enterprising commanding officer, Colonel Robert T. Frederick, skillfully reconfigured the unit to make it attractive as an all-purpose assault force. Removing snow-sleds and skis from the unit’s table of organization and equipment, he obtained flamethrowers, mortars, machine guns, and bazookas. Frederick made emotional pleas to American and Canadian generals, asserting that retention of the unit would promote a spirit of cooperation between the United States and Canada. His efforts ultimately paid off with a one-way ticket to the Italian front for the entire First Special Service Force.

  General Clark, in his desperation for combat troops, had gladly accepted the 1,600 men of the First Special Service Force into the Fifth Army. From his headquarters at Caserta’s cavernous Bourbon palace, Clark ordered the newly arrived Forcemen to enter the Winter Line fighting at the hill mass of Monte la Difensa–Monte Maggiore. The mission was ideally suited for an elite infantry unit, as this terrain demanded physical fitness of a higher grade than anywhere else on the Winter Line. From Monte la Difensa, with an altitude of 3,120 feet, and the adjacent Monte la Remetanea, at 2,948 feet, the Germans had repulsed and slaughtered several Allied assault forces that General Clark had sent in their direction. The plan now was to send the Forcemen via a different route, up the western face of La Difensa, the top 1,000 feet of which ascended at a seventy-degree pitch.

  Walking toward Monte la Difensa in daylight on December 2, the Forcemen had to step over the bodies of men killed in prior attacks on the peak. That evening, a reconnaissance team left the rest of the force at the base of the mountain and headed up La Difensa to identify the best marching routes and string the cliffs with ropes for the use of the main body of the force. Allied air and artillery bombarded the mountain, striking on all sides with white phosphorous and high-explosive rounds to prevent the Germans from discerning the direction from which the attack would come. “It looked like the whole mountain was on fire,” remembered Bill Pharis, a former roustabout from the oil fields of Texas.

  The lead battalion began the upward march several hours before midnight. The paths charted by the reconnaissance teams had been well chosen, and the ropes deftly placed. At 5 a.m., the foremost Forcemen reached a position just one hundred meters from the summit. From there, they ascertained that the Germans had not ruled out the possibility of an attack up the steep mountainside, as they had posted several sentries near the top of the cliff face. The Forcemen used double-edged stilettos to kill these sentries, shoving their free hands into the mouths of the victims to muffle the screams.

  Resuming the climb, the Forcemen planned to keep going in silence until 6:30 before opening fire with their rifles and machine guns, in order to allow more men and weaponry to come up the cliff. But their presence was discovered at 5:30 when several Forcemen slipped on loose stones, which the Germans had positioned near their emplacements to give warning of intruders. One man who slipped kicked the helmet off a man below him, causing the helmet to clatter down the mountain. Germans sprang to their weapons and a German flare gun went into action, shooting a green flare first, then a red one, then two magnesium flares that lighted the whole mountain.

  American and Canadian hopes that the preparatory air and artillery strikes had killed off much of the German force proved to be unfounded. By sheltering in the mountain’s caves or in concrete pillboxes, most of the Germans had remained alive. From positions looking down on the face, Germans shot at the Forcemen while awaiting reinforcements from other sections of the perimeter, who needed time to bring their heavy weapons over.

  Taking advantage of an early morning fog to obscure their movements, Forcemen hurled grenades at the enemy defensive positions on the upper face. Several of these positions went silent, opening corridors through which the Forcemen quickly scrambled. Americans and Canadians poured into the bowl-shaped mountaintop before the Germans could haul their machine guns near the cliff. Colonel Frederick, one of the first Forcemen up the mountain, dashed from place to place across the bowl to shout instructions and exhortations.

  The Germans receded slowly before the onslaught of the Forcemen. Two hours after the battle had started, the surviving Germans fled the mountaintop, leaving behind seventy-five comrades who had perished and forty-three who had been taken prisoner. The Forcemen clapped each other on the back for taking the bastion so swiftly, and for surviving their first brush with battle.

  The enemy, however, robbed them of time to savor the victory or ponder the ephemeral character of human triumph. While retreating from La Difensa, the German survivors had sent word of their departure to their higher headquarters, which directed artillery and mortar crews to plaster the summit. If the German gunners had made a prayer to the heavens to lift the fog, as the Greeks had done on the plains of Troy, the prayer was soon answered. With the fog gone, the Germans could adjust their fire, guaranteeing that the peak and the troops packed atop it would incur the full hatred of the German shells.

  Frederick immediately ordered the Forcemen to take refuge in German pillboxes. He himself, however, continued to stand and move about in the open without concern for the incoming fire. “There were times when a heavy barrage of mortar fire would send us scurrying for cover only to come back and find him smoking a cigarette—in the same sitting position and place we had vacated in a hurry,” recalled Captain Dermot O’Neill. Other officers were less fortunate. One was killed while scanning for Germans through binoculars. A mortar round killed the entire command group of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Regiment, the first battalion up the mountain. Many Forcemen rued the death of the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tom MacWilliam, a “fearless officer” who “always demonstrated superior qualities in everything he undertook,” in the description of the regimental commander.

  To Frederick’s surprise, the German infantry did not counterattack the mountaintop. Unbeknownst to the Forcemen, the recent flooding of valleys and rivers in the German rear had weakened German supply arteries to such an extent as to render further combat in the region exceedingly precarious. The Germans did, nevertheless, find other ways to hurt the Forcemen. On the night of December 3, German forward observers caught sight of the First Special Service Force’s 1st Regiment, which had been held in reserve. The night sky erupted with the howls of German howitzers and a new weapon that the Germans called the Nebelwerfer. A rocket laun
cher with six barrels, each six inches in diameter, the Nebelwerfer could fire thirty-six high-explosive rockets per minute. The English-speaking Allies would soon refer to the dreaded projectiles as “screaming meemies.” War correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was at La Difensa during the battle, described it thus: “The gun didn’t go off with a roar, but the shells swished forward with a sound of unparalleled viciousness and power, as though gigantic gears were grinding. Actually, it sounded as though some mammoth man were grinding them out of a huge machine.”

  Robert Shafer, a Forceman in the 1st Regiment, was one of those who survived the experience of watching the German bombardment blow apart the once-orderly bivouac. He saw German shell fragments slice so deeply into one man’s arm that it barely remained attached. Peering down at the expensive watch on his dangling limb, the man pronounced, “I don’t suppose I’ll wear the watch on that hand again.” Shrapnel sheared a chunk of flesh off the shoulder blade of another man, whom Shafer knew to be a star baseball player. “He was worried about it affecting his pitching arm,” Shafer recorded. In the space of an hour, the Germans killed or wounded 40 percent of the regiment, a sobering demonstration of the reality that elite units could be shattered as easily as any other units when operating near the front lines. The losses upped the total of First Special Service Force casualties at La Difensa to 532.

  The capture of La Difensa dealt the Germans a significant tactical setback, but it did not yield the strategic windfall that the Allied leadership had prognosticated. During the preparation for the attack, the II Corps commander, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, had told the Forcemen that if they took the mountain, they would so unhinge the German defenses that the Allied armies would be able to roll into Rome within two to three weeks. In the days after the battle, however, the Germans kept the Allies from exploiting the penetration of La Difensa by engaging the Forcemen and nearby Allied forces in jousts lasting long enough for most German forces to withdraw northward and occupy newly fortified positions in advantageous terrain. Rome was to remain in German hands for another six months.