Moreover, Sicily is where George Patton forever sullied his own legacy. On the afternoon that Lieutenant Colonel Bernard’s raiders were hanging by a thread on Monte Cipolla, the man who sent them into harm’s way was visiting the 93rd Evacuation Hospital near San Stefano. There, for the second time in a week, Patton confronted a soldier suffering the effects of battle fatigue. Patton slapped the private twice as he loudly ordered that he be removed. A reporter from the London Daily Mail followed Patton back to his staff car. The correspondent overheard Patton tell a doctor, “There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews.”69
Omar Bradley, Patton’s deputy, was alerted about both incidents—and so, eventually, were various correspondents, including Hal Boyle and, almost assuredly, Homer Bigart. Reporters agreed to keep it quiet, as Bradley promised them the matter would be addressed with superiors—and that Patton would be duly punished.
Weeks later Patton’s deeds finally became public when Washington columnist Drew Pearson ran a scathing column. It sparked calls for Patton’s head. Before reassigning him, Eisenhower ordered Patton to apologize to both soldiers—and to his men at large. Before five separate audiences of GIs, Patton delivered profanity-laced “apologies” that left his bewildered men staring at one another, since he never explained what had triggered his appearance before them in the first place.70
BEFORE HOSTILITIES ENDED IN SICILY, Homer Bigart encountered another ghastly tunnel—this one even more pestilential than the one in Castel di Tusa. On August 18, while most reporters, including Boyle, were fixated on Patton and the Seventh having finally beaten Montgomery and the Eighth to Messina, Bigart was writing about the human tragedy he’d witnessed in a long tunnel at the end of the Via Protorolia. For many weeks, thousands of Messina’s citizens had sought refuge in the underground warren to escape the wrath of Allied bombing and German guns across the strait.
“The siege claimed three more victims,” Bigart wrote. “A seven-month-old baby starved, two old people died of dysentery. Their bodies lay somewhere in the black recesses, jostled by the crawling mass of the living. Not one of the survivors, estimated at 5,000, had the energy or will to drag the corpses out into the sun and to the cemetery up the hill. They were unmourned. People living in a black hole for months are not apt to waste pity on the dead.”
A distraught doctor was pleading for the American liberators to give him disinfectants, iodine, bandages, anything that might alleviate suffering. The physician took Bigart inside the tunnel. “A swarm of black flies, sticky with filth, spread infection to every portion of the cave. Children were afflicted with malnutrition and scabies and looked almost as dirty as Arabs. Their parents quarreled and fought over scraps of food pillaged from stores.”71
The rest of what was left of the city was only marginally less abhorrent. “This correspondent walked two hours in the heart of Messina and found fewer than a score of buildings unscathed and none habitable. From end to end, the Via Garibaldi was a wide lane of rubble between walls of blackened stone.”72
Much of the Sicily that Homer Bigart and Hal Boyle saw in July and August 1943 was a wide lane of rubble. Five thousand Allied soldiers, nearly ten thousand Axis soldiers, and untold civilians perished on the island in the hellish summer of 1943. Yet compared to what was to come, the Sicilian campaign was a cakewalk.
CHAPTER 8
WHITE CROSSES ALONG THE RED RAPIDO
In my mind swam a picture of the stricken valley crossed by the Rapido River beneath a terrible hill called Cassino. If they put up a cross for every man killed or wounded there, it would be a white forest.
—HAL BOYLE, 1952
HELP, HELP! ANOTHER DAY!
Straining his eyes as he peered through the binoculars, Hal Boyle could barely make out the two American soldiers tramping through the dank gloom along the swollen river. It was cold and foggy, as it had been practically every day that benighted winter. Everything around the riverbed reeked of death.
The two soldiers—David Kaplan, a thirty-year-old medical officer from Sioux City, Iowa, and Arnold Fleischman, a twenty-year-old private from Wood Haven, Long Island—were carrying a makeshift Red Cross banner stretched between two sticks. “Amid a deathly silence,” Boyle watched as they “marched through battered no-man’s-land to the brink of the bloody Rapido River.”
A rubber raft was supposed to be waiting. But in typical Army fashion, as Kaplan conceded later, there’d been a screwup. Kaplan and Fleischman were forced to scavenge their own vessel. There were plenty of choices: the river’s edge was littered with abandoned boats. They picked one that wasn’t too badly shot up, grabbed a discarded oar, and paddled their way across the angry Rapido, making sure to keep the Red Cross banner in full view.
With thousands of pairs of field glasses trained on every step, Kaplan and Fleischman trudged another eight hundred yards through the mire. As they picked their way over corpses, they were careful to tread near exploded mine craters. Their theory was that the craters would mark a safe path through the muck, since the Germans weren’t likely to place deadly explosives one on top of the other.
Eventually they came up against a barbed-wire barrier. After making Kaplan and Fleischman wait an uncomfortably long time, an officer from the 15th Panzer Grenadiers emerged from hiding. He was from the same Wehrmacht unit that at Brolo five months earlier had nearly martyred Homer Bigart. Kaplan and Fleischman later told Boyle that the German officer was wearing a crisply pressed uniform and freshly shined boots, which stood in stark contrast to their own filthy garb.
Private Fleischman’s German was so impeccable that the enemy negotiator, impressed, asked where he had learned it. “In school,” Fleischman fibbed, loath to admit he’d spent his childhood in the Fatherland. With Fleischman interpreting, both sides affirmed a three-hour truce to remove their dead and wounded.1
Did Hitler’s surrogate appreciate the irony of the Americans sending soldiers of probable Jewish ancestry to negotiate the truce? Boyle, observing from the opposite bank of the Rapido, never got the chance to ask.
Once white flags were bared, some seventy-five American medics and litter carriers crossed the river to help Kaplan and Fleischman comb through the detritus. They were joined by a smaller contingent of Germans. One enemy soldier bummed a cigarette from an American private, proudly revealing in broken English that his brother had emigrated to Brooklyn before the war. Another German, perhaps a minion of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, took footage of the surreal scene with a motion picture camera. At one point the officer with the shiny boots eyed an Allied observation plane hovering nearby, sputtered “This is very unfair!” and demanded that the Piper Cub be grounded since it was violating terms of the truce. Kaplan ordered a runner to scurry across the river, but by then the plane had disappeared. A few minutes later a muffled burst of gunfire sent men from both sides sprawling—but it turned out to be from a distant German gunner at a different spot on the battlefield.
The Rapido was something out of Dante’s Inferno. For more than a week, the two sides had been exchanging wretched artillery and machine gun fire. As they had done throughout Italy, the Germans had implanted thousands of mines. On the evening of January 20, in the chaos of the initial charge across the Rapido, a company of GIs from the 141st Infantry had stumbled into a minefield; one explosion followed another, each punctuated by chilling screams. Many bodies had been rotting for three or four days, some longer.
In the hours leading up to the truce, the Germans carried American corpses down from the hills sub rosa, lest U.S. medics deduce exactly where enemy troops were positioned. Working in concert, medics from both sides stacked the mutilated remains of some eighty bodies; virtually all belonged to the 141st.2 Many of the riverbed victims had perished in the artillery exchange that signaled the beginning of the nighttime attack. Others had succumbed the following morning when the American high command, despite appalling losses and the attack’s failure to gain any ground, ordered the assault renewed.
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Hal Boyle had seen all manner of death and deprivation in North Africa and Sicily and during the push north from the beachhead at Salerno. But he’d never witnessed anything like the carnage along what GIs were now calling Purple Heart Valley. No one had. On top of the hundreds of deaths inflicted by mines and guns, scores of Allied soldiers drowned when the Germans dynamited upriver dams and levees, sending water rampaging down the Rapido and Garigliano.
The 36th Division had already been through hell in Italy, absorbing big losses on the Paestum beachhead, during the bloody crawl up the Sele Valley, and in the mountains surrounding San Pietro Infine. Its roots were in Texas as a National Guard outfit. The men proudly wore their Texas allegiance in the patches on their sleeves; a T was embedded in their unit’s insignia. But so many “T-Patchers” had been killed and wounded that the division no longer had a dominant Texas flavor. Along the Rapido alone, more than four hundred men in just three regiments of the 36th had perished. One company sent into the hellhole lost all but 17 of 184 men.3 The Rapido crossings were, in sum, a tragic—and utterly avoidable—reprise of Great War foolishness.
Ironically, the 36th’s commander, General Fred L. Walker, was a World War I veteran who’d earned his stripes in July 1918 rebuffing a reckless German attack across the Marne River.4 It’s clear from Walker’s bitter diary entries that he knew fording a stream against an enemy entrenched on high ground would be disastrous.
The 36th’s gambit was supposed to be part of a coordinated series of assaults against enemy positions in the hills bordering the Liri Valley and its 1,300-year-old Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino. But earlier flanking thrusts by the British 46th Division and a group of Free French Algerians and Moroccans had failed to dislodge the Germans; both Allied units were forced to retreat.
Without personally eyeballing the 36th’s position, Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the Fifth Army’s commander, insisted that the river attack go off as planned. Clark and the overall British commander, Sir Harold Alexander, wanted the 15th Panzer Grenadiers occupied so they could not be sent northwest to reinforce the beachhead at Anzio, where a big—but, as it turned out, not big enough—Allied amphibious end run was scheduled to take place on January 22.5
On January 23, three days after the 36th’s assault, Boyle filed a story about the heroic actions of Staff Sergeant William C. Weber of St. Marys, Pennsylvania, a rifle platoon leader in the 142nd Regiment. Weber and another member of the 142nd, a private from Rockford, Illinois, named Harry W. Lund, dove into the frigid Rapido to save six companions who’d somehow survived the onslaught while stranded on the far side. Boyle caught up with Lund and Weber a few minutes after the dramatic rescue; they were shivering in a dugout on the “safe” side of the river.
“We figured the best way back after the situation became hopeless was over one of the [temporary] pontoon bridges not knocked out,” Private Lund told Boyle. “We found the bridge all right, but it was half sunk in the middle of the river. I tied a rope around me and swam out and tied it to the bridge. Then we tried to pull it into position. We couldn’t because one section was under four feet of water.
“I tied a piece of communications wire around me and set out again,” Lund continued. “This time I tried to swim to the other side, but I was tired and might have drowned if the boys hadn’t hauled me back. Then Sergeant Weber said he would try it.”
“I took off all the clothes I could so I would not get waterlogged,” Weber told Boyle. “I was out as far as I could—it was like somebody putting an icicle on your toe and running it up to your waist. But that current bothered me more than the cold water. There was also an awful undertow. I was never sure I would get over until I finally crawled out on the other side.”6
GIS COULDN’T BE SURE OF much that winter: Visibility was so poor and the fighting so intense along the Rapido that, for weeks, Allied and German lines got confused. Early one morning in late January a captain from San Antonio named John Henning was on the far side of the river looking for the rest of his patrol. Armed only with his service revolver, Henning suddenly happened upon a Volkswagen jeep carrying a pile of enemy soldiers and dragging a seventy-five-millimeter gun.
Henning, a North Africa veteran “not exactly unacquainted with the working of the Teutonic mind,” told Hal Boyle that he decided to try a bold bluff.
“Henning jumped into a crevice, and as the bouncy little volkswagon7 with its cargo of Nazis rolled past, he suddenly called out: ‘Halt!’”
The Germans rolled right past but hit the brakes when Henning yelled even louder. “Believing they were surrounded, they climbed off the volkswagon and gave themselves up.” Henning knew he’d be overpowered if they realized he was all alone, so he called out for help; fortunately, two GIs were nearby.
“A few minutes later,” Boyle wrote, “the crestfallen Germans were marching to a prisoners’ camp, and their 75-mm gun was earmarked for an American ordnance dump.”8
In Italy there weren’t enough moments of semitriumph like Captain Henning’s. On January 27, the day of the truce, Boyle interviewed Captain Kaplan and the team that had brought back some twenty-five bodies and four wounded men, one of whom happened to be a medic who’d been languishing for days. “When he was lifted into a litter, [the medic] grinned feebly and said: ‘Look, I have got maid service—you can’t beat this battlefield!’”
Within minutes of the truce’s expiration, “both sides opened up with heavy, rolling artillery barrages,” Boyle wrote. “This sector of the sanguinary Rapido River again became a ‘no-man’s-land.’”9
“SANGUINARY” WAS A FAVORITE ADJECTIVE of both Boyle’s and Bigart’s. It means “bloody,” and there was no shortage of opportunity to use it in the Italy of 1943 and 1944. Italy was, as Ernie Pyle called it, a “tough old gut,” pockmarked with one gory field after another. The insidious German strategy that Boyle and Bigart witnessed firsthand in Sicily—blowing up roads and bridges, falling back to high ground, turning and fighting, then slipping away to blow up more roads and bridges and falling back to even higher ground—was magnified on the mainland.
In Sicily, Albert Kesselring, the crafty commander of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group C, was constrained by the geography of a small island. There were no such constraints up Italy’s boot, where deep rivers and daunting mountain ranges provided the stuff of Confederate General James Longstreet’s dreams: natural boundaries that could be fiercely defended.
Indeed, Italy’s topography lent itself to the rearguard warfare at which the Germans had become expert, much to Hitler’s dismay. Kesselring, Joe Liebling wrote after the war, was an anomaly: a Göring protégé who never became a fanatic Nazi, a onetime artillery officer who’d learned to fly at age forty-eight, and an early blitzkrieg proponent whose name later became synonymous with defensive warfare.10 The Generalfeldmarschall and his officers studied south-central Italy’s hills and streams and established a series of lines between Naples and Rome, collectively known as the Winter Line, to which they would retreat once Allied troops began pressing north. The mountains beyond the Volturno River constituted Kesselring’s first row of defense. A few miles north came the Barbara Line, followed by the Reinhard and Gustav (aka Hitler) Lines running in front of Monte Cassino. Anchored in the rugged central Apennines, the Gustav Line proved nearly impenetrable.
It was all by wicked design. Kesselring wanted his lines farther south to retard the Allies. He wanted the Gustav Line to wreck them.
Historians often compare the long-drawn-out battle for Italy to World War I’s trench warfare. But Homer Bigart plumbed that analogy long before academics got ahold of it. Early in the campaign, Bigart drew parallels to Britain’s ill-advised maneuvers in Turkey in 1915. And by late winter Bigart was writing the likes of: “It is a depressing experience to return from the Anzio beachhead, where front-line misery rivals World War [I] Flanders.”11
Bigart’s pointed reporting on the Anzio-Cassino stalemate earned him the enmity of Allied censors, chronic grumbling from M
ark Clark and his deputy Geoff Keyes, and a stinging rebuke from Sir Harold Alexander. Allied commanders complained that skeptical reporting from Bigart and others was hurting troop morale and undermining the war effort back home.
But the irony is that the correspondents covering the war in Italy didn’t come close to reporting its ugly truths. With men still fighting and dying, journalists such as Bigart, Boyle, and CBS’ Eric Sevareid censored themselves. Had they accurately described the perils faced by Allied troops, there would have been a public outcry to stop the “senseless slaughter,” Sevareid said after the war.12 Boyle’s coverage of Italy was less barbed than Bigart’s; as always, it focused more on the grunts in the field than the dubious decision making of their bosses. But it was so human and powerful that it helped win Boyle a Pulitzer Prize.
Much of Italy’s fighting evoked not just Great War despair, but also the cannibalism of Cold Harbor. Members of the 36th along the Rapido weren’t the only Allied troops sent to almost certain death, much like U. S. Grant’s men late in the Civil War. The GIs who dug in along the Volturno and places farther north “were living in almost inconceivable misery,” Ernie Pyle wrote.13
Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin spent weeks trying to sleep in Italy’s ubiquitous muck, but concluded that lying on rocks was more comfortable. “Rocks are better than mud because you can curl yourself around the big rocks, even if you wake up with sore bruises where the little rocks dug into you. When you wake up in the mud your cigarettes are all wet and you have an ache in your joints and a rattle in your chest.”14
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN GAVE A lot of people aches in their joints. It’s where Winston Churchill’s great Mediterranean gamble finally fell apart. It’s where Franklin Roosevelt should have listened to George Marshall and drawn the line with Churchill and the Brits. But FDR exercised the kind of commander-in-chief restraint that most commentators laud: He left the ultimate decision on the wisdom of invading the Italian mainland to his field commander, Eisenhower. In mid-July 1943, one week into what appeared to be a relatively “easy” invasion of Sicily, Ike green-lighted Operation Avalanche, and put his top deputy, Mark Clark, in charge of Italian invasion planning. Clark assumed command of what he would soon insist on calling—over the snickers of correspondents—“Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark’s U.S. Fifth Army.”
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