Cleghorn’s Company A had been reinforced by Company B, commanded by another Texan, a twenty-five-year-old captain named Henry T. Waskow. Raised in the cotton country south of Temple, one of eight children in a family of German Baptists strapped enough to sew their clothes from flour sacking, Waskow was fair, blue-eyed, short, and sober—“a sweet little oddball,” in the estimate of a school chum. “He was never young,” another classmate recalled, “not in a crazy high school–kid way.” A teenage lay minister, Waskow took second prize in a statewide oratory contest, won the class presidency at Belton High School, and graduated with the highest grade-point average in twenty years. At Trinity College he joined the Texas Guard, in part for the dollar earned at each drill session, rising through the ranks on merit and zeal. At Salerno, Company B had fought with Darby at Chiunzi Pass.
“I guess I have always appeared as pretty much a queer cuss to all of you,” Waskow had written in a “just-in-case” letter to his family as he shipped overseas. “If I seemed strange at times, it was because I had weighty responsibilities that preyed on my mind and wouldn’t let me slack up to be human like I so wanted to be.”
Now, after almost a week on Sammucro, the entire 1st Battalion was hardly bigger than a company, and Waskow’s company no bigger than a platoon. Ammo stocks had dwindled again; the men threw grenade-sized rocks to keep the Germans dancing. At nightfall on Tuesday, December 14, the battalion crept forward beneath a bright moon and angled northwest along the massif toward Hill 730, a scabrous knoll almost directly behind San Pietro. The trail skirted a ravine with shadows so dense they seemed to swallow the moonbeams. “Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?” Waskow asked his company runner, Private Riley Tidwell. The captain had a sudden craving for toast. “When we get back to the States,” Waskow added, “I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.”
Those were among his last mortal thoughts. German sentries had spotted the column moving across the scree slope. Machine guns cackled, mortars crumped, and Henry Waskow pitched over without a sound, mortally wounded by a shell fragment that tore open his chest. He had never been young, and he would never be old.
Wearing his trademark knit cap and tatty field jacket, Ernie Pyle had arrived in Ceppagna, at the base of the Sammucro trail, earlier on Tuesday. Pyle’s columns now appeared in two hundred daily newspapers, making him a national celebrity; Al Jolson joked that to soldiers he had become “Mr. God.” But in this disfigured village, only two miles from San Pietro, Pyle could find near anonymity as just another unwashed Yank a long way from home. In a dilapidated cowshed near the olive orchard that served as a mule livery, he set his typewriter on a packing case and then poked about the battalion base camp. Engineers were corduroying the muddy paths to the gun batteries, filling ruts with logs, stones, and brush. Occasionally, a serenade—a barrage of every gun in the corps, fired at the same time at the same target—screamed over the hills toward San Pietro.
Late at night the pack mules returned from Sammucro with bodies trussed facedown across their wooden saddles, each corpse slithering “on the mule’s back as if it were full of some inert liquid,” as one corporal wrote. Sardinian muleteers feared the dead and trailed behind the trains.
Pyle stood outside the cowshed and watched as the first body was unlashed. “They slid him down from the mule, and stood him on his feet for a moment. In the half light he might have been merely a sick man standing there leaning on the others. Then they laid him on the ground in the shadow of the low stone wall beside the road.”
Four other mules arrived. “This one is Captain Waskow,” a man said. Pyle watched and said nothing. “You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don’t ask silly questions,” he subsequently explained. A few days later, after returning to Fifth Army headquarters in Caserta, where he played gin rummy and drank to excess, Pyle would recall how the bodies lay uncovered in the shadows and how several of Waskow’s men edged over to the dead captain to voice regret—“I sure am sorry, sir”—or to curse—“God damn it to hell anyway!” Riley Tidwell appeared and the company runner held his commander’s hand, studying Waskow’s waxy face.
Finally he put the hand down. He reached over and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of the uniform around the wound, and then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. The rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall.
Pyle had written his most famous dispatch, perhaps the finest expository passage of World War II. But still he felt small in the presence of dead men. “I’ve lost the touch,” he told a friend. “This stuff stinks.”
Mark Clark had proposed using tanks to capture San Pietro as early as December 9. He had pressed Eisenhower and Alexander in the fall to send the 1st Armored Division—Old Ironsides—to Italy, and he felt chagrined that the mountainous terrain afforded so few chances to unleash it. Fred Walker, the 36th Division commander, doubted that the gullies and six-foot olive terraces ringing San Pietro would accommodate tanks, a skepticism reinforced in an early foray when the lead Sherman threw a track and blocked the trail.
Walker planned to try again at midday, Wednesday, December 15. This time the attack would be filmed by a pair of Signal Corps cameramen perched on Monte Rotondo, part of a movie crew working for Captain John Huston. Assigned by the War Department to document “the triumphal entry of the American forces into Rome,” Huston, who two years earlier had directed Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, instead found himself trying to concoct a celluloid epic from the Army’s frustrated assault on an anonymous village in southern Italy. At least his cinematography would be unimpeded by trees: after weeks of shelling, Rotondo reportedly “looked as if a large mower had been used on the side of the hill.”
At eleven A.M. the mist lifted, the cameras rolled, and two platoons from the 753rd Tank Battalion clanked to a hairpin bend in the high road from Ceppagna. For fifteen minutes, Shermans and tank destroyers hammered San Pietro with 75mm shells. Then loaders with asbestos gloves shoveled the fuming brass from their turret floors, and at noon the attack by sixteen tanks trundled forward. It was doomed, of course. Only the lead Sherman made headway, churning through a terrace wall to shoot up several German machine-gun nests. The second tank struck a mine. The next three closed to within half a mile of the village only to burst into flames from German antitank fire. Three more hit mines. By midafternoon four surviving tanks were limping back toward Ceppagna with crews from the less fortunate Shermans clinging to the hulls like barnacles. Seven tanks had been destroyed, five others immobilized.
Walker’s foot soldiers had no better luck. The 141st Infantry’s 2nd Battalion launched another frontal assault across open ground at one A.M. on Thursday morning. “Dead and wounded marked the route of advance,” a regimental account noted. A few intrepid souls grenaded and bayoneted their way into the lower village, scrambling through breaches in the wall by standing on one another’s shoulders. Most were captured or killed by plunging fire; the 2nd Battalion fell back, now shorn to 130 men by “the stupidest assignment the battalion ever received,” according to Major Milton Landry, the unit commander. A lieutenant disemboweled by grenade fragments repeated the name “Erika” through the small hours, then died at dawn. A second attack at six A.M. also failed, as did lunges on the right flank by two battalions of the 143rd Infantry. When a pinned-down soldier began waving his undershirt in surrender, a sergeant put his rifle muzzle to the man’s temple and warned, “Put that damn rag away or I’ll blow your head off.”
Wisps of steam rose from shallow revetments in the rear where exhausted riflemen lay beneath their sodden blankets. Clark arrived at noon on Thursday, listening to the cacophony of mortars and machine pistols just ahead. Through field glasses he studied the charred tank hulks on the Ceppagna road. “What
troops are in front of you?” he asked a lieutenant. “Sir,” the officer replied, “Germans.” Clark uttered a few words of encouragement, and drove off.
“The losses before the town have been heavy,” Walker told his diary. “Many wounded had to be abandonded within enemy lines…. This is bad.”
And then it ended. Monte Lungo had always held the key to San Pietro, and by dusk on Thursday two battalions from the 142nd Infantry had overrun the hogback from the west, threatening to encircle the village. Captain Meitzel’s grenadiers launched a brief counterattack from San Pietro to cover the battalion’s withdrawal. At midnight on Friday, December 17, a fountain of colored flares above the north slope of Sammucro signaled retreat. German troops fell back two miles to yet another hillside village, San Vittore, which they would hold for the next three weeks.
American riflemen creeping through the blue battle haze found San Pietro in ruins, “one large mound of desolation,” in a gunner’s description. The detritus of total war littered the rubble: cartridge belts, stained bandages, dead pigs, “a gray hand hanging limply from a sleeve.” St. Michael’s was reduced to a single upright wall, with a headless Christ hanging on His cross. The choir loft dangled above an altar now buried in masonry. The correspondent Homer Bigart also discovered a December 6 copy of the Völkischer Beobachter and, inexplicably, a baseball glove.
A few dozen wretched San Pietrans emerged from the ruins to huzzah their liberators. The dim, fetid caves below the village were “the nearest thing to a journey in Dante’s Inferno that I was to know in the war,” wrote J. Glenn Gray, an Army intelligence analyst. “Children were screaming, old men and women coughing or moaning, while others tried to prepare gruel over smoking coals.” Some 140 San Pietrans were dead, one villager in ten. A baby’s corpse lying in the mud was repeatedly run over by military vehicles before someone finally noticed and a medic buried the remains. Graves registration men arrived with their leather gloves to police the battlefield, folding the hands of dead GIs across their chests before lifting them into white burial sacks. As the soldier-poet Keith Douglas wrote, “About them clung that impenetrable silence…by which I think the dead compel our reverence.”
Those who had fought for the past ten days supposedly “slept where their bedding fell from the truck.” San Pietro had cost Fred Walker’s 36th Division twelve hundred battle casualties, and two thousand nonbattle losses; the 143rd Infantry Regiment alone lost 80 percent of its strength. Engineers, tankers, Rangers, paratroopers, and the Italians who also fought for the village had hundreds more killed, missing, sick, and injured.
At an evacuation hospital near Mignano, patients lay listening to the shriek of artillery, calling out the guns by millimeter. A chaplain played “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” on his Victrola. Margaret Bourke-White spied “a small grim pile of amputated legs” covered with canvas outside a surgical tent. When one dying Texas boy asked for watermelon, a surgeon replied, “They’re not in season, son.” To Bourke-White he added, “They often ask for their favorite food when they’re near death.”
As the front lurched forward another mile or two, John Lucas advised his diary on December 18, “We find the country thick with dead as we advance…. I think the swine have taken a lacing.” But, the VI Corps commander added, “Rome seems a long way off.” A 36th Division soldier offered his own summary: “This is a heartbreaking business.”
For John Huston, the battle for San Pietro went on. The director’s footage of the star-crossed tank attack was dramatic but incomplete. Although he later claimed to have done most of his filming “during the actual battle,” Huston in fact spent two months staging elaborate reenactments in olive orchards and on Monte Sammucro, using 36th Division troops. Casualty scenes were staged in a hospital, a dead German in a foxhole was actually a GI actor in a grenadier uniform, and sequences inside the ruined village were filmed at another town accidentally bombed by American planes. After draconian editing by George Marshall, who ordered the film cut from fifty minutes to half an hour, Huston added a brief introductory speech by Mark Clark and a soundtrack that included the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. San Pietro would be released nationwide in the spring of 1945 to rhapsodic reviews. Time called it “as good a war film as any that has been made.”
The telegram announcing Henry Waskow’s death would arrive at his Texas home on December 29, delayed by the War Department along with similar notifications until after Christmas. Henry’s mother had been troubled with premonitions, and when the family appeared to break the news she blurted out, “I was right, wasn’t I? Henry’s gone.” Pyle’s column would appear on January 10, 1944, covering the entire front page of the Washington Daily News. Hollywood seized on the story and a year later released The Story of G.I. Joe, with Burgess Meredith as Pyle and Robert Mitchum as a “Captain Bill Walker,” who dies on a mountainside in Italy.
But Waskow had the final word, a “last will and testament” mailed to his sister for safekeeping and made public more than fifteen years after his passing. “I would have liked to have lived,” he told his parents in a ten-paragraph meditation. “But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along. I was not afraid to die, you can be assured of that.”
I will have done my share to make this world a better place in which to live. Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again…. If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.
“I loved you,” he added, “with all my heart.”
“A Tank Too Big for the Village Square”
LIFE in exile had its compensations for George Patton. As the viceroy of Sicily, he slept in a king’s bedroom on three mattresses and dined on royal china. Every day he rode an Italian cavalry horse in the Palermo palace riding hall, serenaded by a mounted band and attended by 120 plumed, saber-wielding carabinieri. With a snub-nosed Colt revolver in his pants pocket (“for social purposes only,” he said), Patton also took daily walks of precisely two miles, which a trailing driver measured on the jeep odometer. “I can now chin myself five and a half times and do it three times a day,” he told his diary, impressive enough for a man who had turned fifty-eight on November 11.
On mild afternoons Patton sailed the Gulf of Palermo or swam at his beachhouse, where a young female attendant insisted on helping visitors disrobe. There was quail hunting with Sicilian guides at a beautiful lodge in the mountains. To brush up his French—just in case—he listened to language lessons on phonograph records. On cold winter nights he stirred the embers of a blazing fire while sipping wine and reading a biography of Wellington, later regaling his staff officers with stories of the Iron Duke. He flitted conspicuously about the Mediterranean; Marshall and Eisenhower hoped the enemy would assume he was preparing another invasion force. Sardinia intrigued him, but Cairo was “really a disgusting place. It looks, and the people act, exactly as they did in New York in 1928.” He wrote verse, including a poem titled “God of Battles”—“Make strong our souls to conquer”—for which Women’s Home Companion paid him $50. Visitors came and visitors went, including John Steinbeck and Marlene Dietrich, who thought Patton looked “like a tank too big for the village square.” He even found time to reopen Palermo’s opera house with a sold-out performance of La Bohème. Crowds packed the balconies and thronged the streets outside to listen by loudspeaker. As the house lights dimmed, a beam on the royal box revealed Patton holding an American flag, arm in arm with Palermo’s mayor, who held an Italian tricolor. The audience cheered wildly, then wept from the overture through the final arias. For days, snatches of Puccini could be heard around the city from would-be Mimìs and Rodolfos.
Yet even a heartsick bohemian swain could not have been more miserable than Patton. A few months earlier he had commanded a quarter million men; now Seventh Army was reduced to a shell of five thousand, and in late November even his signal battalion w
as plucked away for service in Italy. “It almost looks like an attempt to strip the body before the spirit has flown,” Patton wrote. John Lucas during a visit found him “very depressed,” and a British general thought he looked “old and dessicated,” chin-ups notwithstanding. His chief engineer strolled into Patton’s office one day to find him “literally cutting out paper dolls” with a pair of scissors. On November 7 he had written Bea that in the 365 days since the TORCH landings, “I have been in battle seventy-two days.” She replied with an eight-syllable telegram: “Atta boy. Love. Confidence. Pride.”
Still, he had not heard a shot fired in anger since mid-August, except during occasional air raids. (German prisoners-of-war were issued wicker baskets and ordered to collect body parts from the rubble.) Gesturing vaguely toward the front, Patton told an old friend, “I want to go out up there where it is hot, with an enemy bullet in the middle of my forehead.” When Jimmy Doolittle flew in for a chat, Patton threw his arms around the airman with tears streaming down his cheeks. “I didn’t think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me,” he said. As the 1st Division sailed from Syracuse for Britain, Patton waved farewell from a harbor barge, blowing kisses and yelling God-bless-yous. Still resentful at the treatment of Terry Allen and Ted Roosevelt, soldiers stood three deep at every rail and peered from every porthole, utterly silent. “It was awful,” Clift Andrus reported.
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 134
