Assignment to Hell

by Timothy M. Gay

  The 807th’s saga began in Catania, Sicily, when their routine medical flight to pick up wounded at Baria on the Italian mainland went awry. Soon after takeoff, the C-53 transport got trapped in a violent thunderstorm; the pilots lost their bearings. After three hours of aimless flying they finally spotted terra firma, found an airfield, and tried to land on what they believed was friendly soil. As they went wheels down, however, the Iron Crosses on the planes parked on the runway told them that something was dreadfully wrong. By the time the pilots aborted the landing, tracer bullets were lacing into the fuselage.

  With fuel now running low, they somehow shook off two Messerschmitts by flying in and out of clouds. The main pilot, Lieutenant Charles B. Thrasher of Daytona Beach, Florida, saw a field in the middle of a mountain range and crash-landed. The plane lurched nose first into a bank of mud, causing a toolbox to careen through the plane’s innards, bloodying several squadron members. They still had no idea where they were.

  “As the party piled out in the pouring rain, a band of 15 or 20 partisans approached,” Boyle recounted. “Where are we?” a member of the party nervously asked. “One who spoke a little English replied: ‘This is Albania.’ He warned the group that the hills were full of German troops.”

  Thrasher set the plane afire to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. The little party followed the Albanians to the leader’s home, where they were fed corn bread. They stayed hidden for forty-eight hours before setting off on a three-day hike to a larger village.

  “The villagers billeted the party in various homes, but one morning they were forced to flee to the hills as the Germans dive-bombed and shelled the town,” Boyle wrote. In the frenzy of escaping into the mountains, three of the nurses got separated.

  The main group wandered from one mountain village to the next, often getting caught in blizzards but somehow pushing onward. “While in one village awaiting help they were caught in the middle of a feud between pro-Nazi and pro-Allied natives. Nazi sympathizers shooting down from the surrounding hills fired on the Americans but no one was injured,” Boyle wrote.

  A few days later the local Resistance leader arranged for an Allied plane to rescue them. But as the plane attempted to land, it was fired upon by German troops. The rescue mission was scrubbed, breaking the hearts of the Americans. Their Resistance friends came up with an alternative escape plan—but it involved getting to a boat on the Adriatic.

  So they proceeded to lumber for twenty-six harrowing hours to the coast, eluding German patrols along the way. “That night they waited tensely on the rocky shores as a single motorboat took them, a few at a time, out across the shallow waters to the waiting British launch,” Boyle wrote. “It was after midnight until the last of the little group was aboard. With muffled motors the launch turned and the rocky shores of Albania faded into the night.” The launch motored south to the safety of the Allied-controlled Mediterranean.

  “As the rescue vessel neared its home port the nurses—feminine to the end—spruced up as best they could and dabbed on their last bits of lipstick which they had been saving for this moment,” wrote Boyle.

  Amazingly, the three nurses who got separated from the group in the Albanian mountains were also rescued and rejoined their unit a few days later.28

  BOYLE’S FASCINATION WITH WOMEN WAS almost Liebling-like; even given the sexist tenor of the times, it bordered on the unseemly. His great pal and boss, AP’s Wes Gallagher, wrote in January of ’44 that Boyle talked about women nonstop, then impatiently waited for letters from his wife.29

  That winter, after talking to several recently jilted doughboys, Boyle curiously chose to pen an article chastising women back home for being unfaithful to their men in khaki. Stop writing Dear John letters, Boyle lectured, because they’re too devastating to the boys in the trenches. So many Mediterranean Theater GIs had been dumped that they’d formed their own organization, the Brush-off Club, Boyle noted.

  The response from the distaff set was pointed—so pointed in fact, that Boyle was forced to backtrack in a follow-up column. Boyle sheepishly acknowledged that the Rosie the Riveters were doing an extraordinary job back home under trying circumstances—plus most were keeping the home fires lit for their men. His piece also admitted that “Some of the boys in uniform have been playing traitor to Cupid, too.”

  Boyle tried to make amends by writing, “Well, girls, if your boyfriend in uniform has passed you up for another frill, cheer up—you can always become a ‘WABOC’”—the Women’s Auxiliary of the Brush-off Club. The WABOC, Boyle revealed, had been championed by a female reader in Santa Monica, California, one Irene M. Cozine, whose passion-filled letters were apparently not enough to prevent her soldier boy from taking up with someone else. “Perhaps the WABOC club members could hold a joint meeting after the war and burn our ex-sweethearts in effigy or something,” Miss Cozine suggested. Her proposition, Boyle claimed, was immediately embraced by male founders of the Brush-off Club.30

  THE FIGHTING AROUND SAN PIETRO Infine, the tiny hamlet tucked halfway up the southern slope of Monte Sammucro on the southeastern side of the Rapido, inspired as much literary and cinematic outpouring as any battle in the war. San Pietro is where Ernie Pyle wrote his posthumous tribute to Captain Henry Waskow, not only among the most celebrated pieces of war correspondence in American history but also the essay that helped propel Hollywood into filming Pyle’s story, with Boyle playing himself in a cameo. The village is also where filmmaker John Huston created The Battle of San Pietro, one of World War II’s finer documentaries, even if it did take liberties with the facts, deployed GIs dressed up in enemy uniforms, and required extra footage shot at mountain venues that were manifestly not San Pietro. Finally, San Pietro is where Bigart buttressed his reputation by writing a series of searing articles that captured the pathos of the Italian campaign.

  Exactly one week before Christmas 1943, Bigart and his cohort from the Brolo raid in Sicily, AP’s Don Whitehead, plus Farnsworth Fowle of CBS Radio, followed a platoon of men from the 36th Division across a valley “littered with dead” below San Pietro.

  “The battlefield was strangely still,” Bigart wrote. “A thick haze lay stagnant above the pass and a wan sun bathed the scene in sickly light. There was not a sound except our own cautious footsteps as we crossed the pasture, still uncleared of mines.”31

  Near a forward aid station they encountered a medical officer from Oklahoma who’d been heroically evacuating wounded men within sight of snipers. He showed them a steep mountain path that the Germans had somehow failed to mine. The captain also warned that the enemy had thoroughly booby-trapped San Pietro and was still shelling the town from a distant mountaintop. Bigart’s platoon came upon three dead Americans at the base of the path.

  One boy lay crumpled in a shallow slit trench beneath a rock. Another, still grasping his rifle, peered from behind a tree, staring with sightless eyes toward the Liri plain. A third lay prone where he had fallen. He had heard the warning scream of a German shell. He had dropped flat on his stomach but on level ground affording no cover. Evidently some fragment had killed him instantly, for there had been no struggle. Generally there is no mistaking the dead—their strange contorted posture leaves no room for doubt. But this soldier, his steel helmet tilted over his face, seemed merely resting in the field. We did not know until we came within a few steps and saw a gray hand hanging limply from a sleeve.

  The platoon resumed its cautious advance near a creek bed along the path singled out by the medical officer. CBS’ Fowle scrambled over a patch of barbed wire that the Germans had strung perpendicular to the creek. Whitehead was poised to do the same when Bigart suddenly shouted, “Watch out!”32 The bottom strand had been booby-trapped; Bigart’s eagle eye spotted a trip wire connected to a hidden Teller mine. It had been a miracle that Fowle hadn’t set off an explosion that might have killed them all. Bigart’s account, typically, did not acknowledge who sounded the warning, but Whitehead’s description credited Bigart with saving the
day.33

  Immediately below San Pietro the platoon crept through a field littered with abandoned rifles and cartridge belts. Nearby were immense caves that the Germans had used as ammunition dumps and machine gun sites. On the other side of town were secret caverns in which scores of San Pietro families had sought refuge—and where young men had concealed themselves from Gestapo thugs looking for slave laborers.

  The platoon began creeping up a cobbled alley. As they neared the village they came upon old Fascist slogans painted onto the cobblestones. STRAIGHT AHEAD WITH MUSSOLINI! one shouted.34 Two charred Sherman tanks sat at the top of the alley, ghostly sentinels guarding an eviscerated town. The stench of dead mules and pigs overwhelmed the smell of battle.

  “We passed the first house,” Bigart wrote. “A rifle was in position near the doorstep. Looking within we saw an American man lying beneath a heap of straw.” Inside were three other dead GIs. “Every approach to San Pietro, every ravine and sunken path offering shelter from machine-gun fire, had been covered by German snipers.”35

  San Pietro was “ghastly,” Bigart wrote. Every dwelling around the tiny Piazza San Nicola was buried under five feet or more of rubble. Since the Germans had built their defenses in the heart of the town, “Americans had no choice but to beat the fortress to pieces,” Whitehead maintained.36 The village had been bombed from the air for three weeks and attacked from the ground by American—and now German—artillery.

  A barefoot mother nursing her baby begged the Americans for food, but they had none. The Church of St. Michael was so decimated Bigart could barely read the prayer above its alcove: ST. MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL: ALWAYS REMEMBER US, HERE AND EVERYWHERE. The choir loft dangled atop an altar that had all but collapsed.

  Beneath a statue of St. Peter, Bigart and Whitehead noticed an inscription that the young mother translated for them: BY THE DEVOTION OF AMERICANS FROM SAN PIETRO. Many San Pietro emigrants had settled in Syracuse, New York, she explained. Amid the wreckage was a figure of Christ whose head had been torn off; an arm of the Madonna of the Waters had also been severed. The village priest had vanished earlier that fall, apparently killed by the Gestapo.37

  Bigart and Whitehead examined a nearby house that the Germans had used as an ammunition depot. Next door they discovered a batch of letters that had been written to an American soldier, who was now presumably dead or captured. Sitting on the table, inexplicably, was a baseball glove. Did the mitt belong to the unfortunate GI? Bigart never found out. Up the street they wandered into what they reckoned had been the enemy’s command post. In it they found a copy of the December 6, 1943, edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s propaganda sheet dating back to the days of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.

  In another house, Bigart found two American medical aides dressing the wounds of San Pietro peasants. “One of the natives had retrieved a case of wine from the ruins and toasts were offered to the American victory,” he wrote.38

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN A VICTORY—but it came at great cost. In San Pietro Bigart sat down with Lieutenant Colonel Howard K. Dodge of Temple, Texas, a battalion commander with the 36th Division. Dodge’s men were among the first to encircle the village; they had to withstand a furious nighttime German counterassault that lasted four hours. In the confusion of the first few minutes of the enemy surge, Dodge and the officers back at the regimental command post didn’t know what they were up against. Over the telephone wire they heard a frontline infantryman groan, “My God, when are we going to get artillery support!”

  “At first we thought it was merely the usual enemy patrol probing our position and we didn’t dare to fire for fear of endangering our men,” the colonel told Bigart. “But when the firing increased in intensity we ordered a barrage. It came within a few minutes and fell smack where we wanted it. It must have caught a lot of the Germans, for we could hear them hollering and moaning in a draw just beyond our lines.”39

  Three more times that early morning the Germans tried to crack Dodge’s position. Each time they inflicted horrible casualties but were repulsed. An officer from Wilmington, North Carolina, named Henry C. Bragaw rallied his men when the Germans shifted their attack from the right of the American line to its center. Bragaw, a redhead who sported a huge handlebar mustache, was a horticulturalist by training. But he had little time to admire Sammucro’s flora and fauna; he and his men had been on the front lines for days without a break.

  Equally exhausted was a lieutenant from Waco, Texas, whose name—Rufus J. Cleghorn—sounded like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Cleghorn was a barrel-chested former lineman for Baylor University. His platoon was the first to reach the mountain’s summit.

  “Exulting in battle,” Bigart wrote, “Cleghorn clambered to the highest rock of Sammucro’s pinnacle and howled insults at the Germans, pausing now and then to toss grenades. For variety, Cleghorn occasionally put his weight against a huge boulder and sent it rolling down the slope. He roared with laughter as the Germans attempted to dodge the hurtling boulders.”

  Bigart ended his remarkable three-thousand-word dispatch from San Pietro with one of his uncanny observations. “It is very cold these December nights on Sammucro’s peak, and the uniforms and overcoats issued to the men were not too warm. Yesterday Army cooks carried warm combat suits to the troops and a can of Sterno to each man.”40

  JOHN HUSTON AND HIS SIGNAL Corps crew were probably issued warm coats and Sterno cans, too. They began filming their documentary two days before Whitehead and Bigart made their trek up Sammucro.

  Positioned atop Monte Rotondo, Huston’s cameras whirred as two platoons’ worth of Sherman tanks began their arduous climb toward San Pietro. They didn’t get far before German artillery began raining down; the American tanks retaliated with seventy-five-millimeter shells but soon found themselves overwhelmed. Four Shermans struck mines and were quickly disabled; three others absorbed direct hits from enemy antitank batteries.

  Intent on capturing a triumphant moment for the American fighting man, Huston and his photographers were instead filming a debacle. In full view of the cameras, crew members from disabled tanks were either huddled on top of machines going backward or beating a hasty retreat on foot. Much blood had been spilled while no ground had been gained; Huston’s first day of shooting didn’t make for inspirational celluloid.

  But Huston’s cameras stuck around long enough to see American tanks actually scale Sammucro. Still, the director had to embroider battle sequences using GIs disguised as Germans, another village that pretended to be San Pietro, and a different mountaintop that masqueraded as Sammucro. Huston put together a fifty-minute film whose battle sequences were hailed as gritty and real—perhaps too gritty and real—but George Marshall’s staff insisted it be chopped to a half hour. The Army liked it so much they used it as a training film. It was generally well received, although some critics thought the left-wing Huston had produced an antiwar polemic. Huston, who’d now seen the misery of combat up close, supposedly said that if he ever made a “pro-war” film he should be shot. Humphrey Bogart’s favorite director, the auteur behind The Maltese Falcon, went on to make two other wartime documentaries for OWI and the Signal Corps.41

  HUSTON, IT APPEARS, NEVER TOOK his cameras to the Anzio beachhead—which is a shame, because he could have filmed a saga of human failure and redemption more stirring than The African Queen. Bigart and Boyle, however, did cover Anzio. Bigart stayed there, without reprieve, for week after excruciating week; Boyle wasn’t far behind.

  An amphibious assault leapfrogging the Gustav Line and putting Allied troops just thirty-five miles south of Rome was Winston Churchill’s answer to the bloody impasse along the Rapido. Like everyone else in the Allied high command, Churchill was disconsolate over the way the advance toward Rome had ground down. In the previous seven weeks, the Allies had inched forward only seven miles, incurring sixteen thousand casualties.42 At that rate it would take another year to reach the ancient capital.

  The Anzi
o plan was a hundred times bigger and more audacious than the raid on Brolo and Monte Cipolla—and a hundred times riskier. The lives of “only” seven hundred commandoes had been at risk at Brolo. And even if the Monte Cipolla raid had been completely snuffed, it would not have materially affected the outcome of the Sicilian campaign.

  Anzio’s stakes were much higher. Churchill, Alexander, and Clark were gambling with the lives of nearly fifty thousand men on top of the tens of thousands of soldiers stuck in the mountains south of Cassino. And without question, the success of the Italian campaign hung in the balance.

  The aim of Operation Shingle, as it became known, was ambitious: Grab the Anzio beachhead, make a quick strike northeast to the Alban Hills, block Kesselring’s escape routes from the Liri Valley by seizing Highways 7 (the ancient Appian Way along the Tyrrhenian) and 6 (the road leading northwest from Cassino), and capture Rome. In one fell swoop, went Churchill’s fondest dream, the bulk of Italy would belong to the Allies and Kesselring’s Army Group C would be destroyed.43

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. In contrast to the Gulf of Salerno invasion four months earlier, the initial stage of the Anzio landings went off almost without a hitch. “The first round,” Bigart wrote, “went decisively to the Allies. The troops achieved a surprise landing on beaches practically undefended. Every break went to the Allies. The port of Anzio fell intact. There was an unusual run of fine weather—rough seas hindered the landing of supplies only two days. With negligible loss the initial objectives were taken quickly…. There was no confusion. It was nothing like Salerno.”44

  It may have been nothing like Salerno the first week, but during weeks two through nine, Anzio was much more dire. Encouraged by Alexander and Clark to consolidate his position before penetrating inland, invasion commander General John Lucas dug in on the beachhead, collecting additional troops and supplies and planning his next move.