Hidden Tuscany

by John Keahey

  As fascinating as the battle through north-central and eastern Italy was, my interest centered on the war in western Tuscany along two routes: the coast between Pisa and Massa-Carrara and through the Serchio River Valley north of Lucca. It was in these places where the U.S. Fifth Army’s Ninety-Second Division, eventually joined by the 442nd Infantry Regiment, fought the Germans. These Americans often were joined in the two sectors by British and Brazilian units.

  The Ninety-Second Division, a creature of a long-segregated military, was made up of African-Americans who were typically commanded by white officers. Many of these commanders were openly racist and distrusted troops who they felt were incapable of performing under the stress of battle. The 442nd Regiment was made up of Japanese-American soldiers who volunteered despite their families being imprisoned in U.S. internment camps. These soldiers were known as Nisei, a Japanese-language term usually meaning those in the second generation of immigrants to a new country.

  The black soldiers, who adopted the sobriquet of “Buffalo Soldiers” after post–Civil War black cavalry units, were trained as combat troops at various U.S. Army posts beginning in the spring of 1944. The first units of the Ninety-Second had arrived in Italy by mid-August, and by August 25 were facing the enemy across the Arno at Pontedera—today a center for manufacturing scooters—on the road between Pisa and San Miniato.

  While the Buffalo Soldiers were lined up along the Arno, the Japanese-Americans were in France. The Nisei, who had landed at Salerno and Anzio-Nettuno, would not be transferred back to Italy to fight along the coast of Tuscany until April 1, 1945.

  * * *

  By August 31, units of Buffalo Soldiers had crossed the Arno without opposition and were en route to the hills on the northern edge of the Plain of Pisa and to Lucca. The Americans captured Pisa on September 2 and Lucca three days later. Lucca would serve as a launching point for infantry and armor to advance northward, up the Serchio River Valley and along the coast. An entry in a volume of the history of the U.S. Army in the Mediterranean theater, Cassino to the Alps, describes the scene well: “They moved easily as if on autumn maneuvers through countryside dotted with ocher-colored villages set amid ripening grain-fields, orchards, and vineyards.” This lull would not last. Germans were digging in along both routes—the western Tuscany coast and high in the Serchio River Valley. Plus, one of Italy’s harshest winters in modern times was ahead.

  By early September along the coast, the Germans had withdrawn fourteen miles north of the Arno to beyond Viareggio and Pietrasanta. This retreat gave Buffalo Soldiers a free ride over those fourteen miles. The Serchio Valley Campaign for the Americans was proving to be more difficult.

  Various American units were barely poking their noses into the south end of the thirty-five-mile-long Serchio River Valley when they came against major Gothic Line fortifications. The official army history describes these obstacles are “almost invisible to the approaching troops. Many had been constructed of reinforced concrete or blasted into the rock. Roofed with three feet of logs and earth, each position could accommodate five men.” Today, some of those Gothic Line fortifications can still be seen, especially in the area around Borgo a Mozzano where the narrow twelfth-century Devil’s Bridge sits in architectural majesty. In addition, the Germans had laid mines and strung rows of barbed wire twenty-five feet deep and a foot high.

  This valley was strategically important to the Germans. It protected their right flank as they retreated north along the coast. Stopping the Americans in the valley would prevent the Allies from making an end run north and then swinging northwest to a point above Massa-Carrara to cut off the Germans’ coastal retreat. And the Americans wanted to control the valley to stop enemy troops being pushed north from counterattacking and heading south down the valley—an action that would put at risk Allied-held Lucca, Pisa, and the vital port of Livorno.

  * * *

  During the American push up the coastal route, Pietrasanta had shifted from being a German headquarters to an American command post. U.S. units based there controlled a six-mile-wide swath of land from the sea to the slopes of the Apuan Mountains.

  One battalion of the Ninety-Second was arrayed west to east along a line north of Pietrasanta, another was in reserve south of Viareggio, and a third was being moved to the coast from the Serchio River Valley. The goal of these three battalions was to eventually occupy Massa and the Italian navy port of La Spezia. It would take until spring 1945 to get there, and it would require the help of other U.S. Army units to finish the job.

  The Germans were well dug in, and their heavy artillery based around the Gulf of La Spezia just north of the Liguria-Tuscany line was hammering the American-controlled coastal area. This situation, as winter was setting in, was a distinct change from the relatively easy time the Americans had moving up the coast from the Arno to Viareggio and Pietrasanta.

  The fighting in both the coastal and Serchio River areas was brutal. By mid-October, serious numbers of battle casualties were not being replaced with fresh troops. In the face of undermanned units, the U.S. Fifth and British Eighth armies halted; individual unit drives farther east toward Bologna and Rimini were halted as well.

  During lulls in German artillery pounding their coastal positions, a few Buffalo Soldier patrols occasionally would venture out for a couple of miles north of Forte dei Marmi. When the Germans and Americans traded artillery fire, casualties on both sides would mount.

  By early winter, fourteen thousand Allied combat casualties had been reported since the beginning of the Gothic Line assault. In just one six-day stretch, across the entire Mediterranean-to-Adriatic front, four infantry divisions were hit with nearly twenty-five hundred casualties.

  During the fall campaign, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged the Americans for more divisions to be diverted to Italy. But George Marshall, army chief of staff based in Washington, D.C., refused. According to army historians, Marshall and some of his commanders believed that “northwestern Europe and not the Mediterranean was the main theater of operations, and a ‘diversion of divisions to Italy would withhold needed fresh troops from southern France while committing those forces to the high attrition of an indecisive winter campaign in Italy.’”

  Marshall was right. Given the approaching winter, most strategists felt the time had passed when the Allies could drive the enemy across the now-snow-blocked Italian Alps and back into Germany. Essentially, the military brass felt Allied forces already committed to the Italian campaign were keeping tens of thousands of German soldiers tied up in northern Italy and unable to reinforce the struggling German army in France, Belgium, and Holland.

  In the midst of all this strategizing, the Buffalo Soldiers on the coast, supplemented by black soldiers who had been transferred from the Serchio River Valley, were ordered to move closer to Massa, six miles northeast of Forte dei Marmi. They were only able to reach the outskirts of Querceta, a tiny village just outside of Pietrasanta and five miles south of heavily fortified Massa.

  Buffalo Soldiers were also dispatched to take control of two low mountains, Monte Cauala and Monte Castiglione. After twice winning, and then twice losing, the battle for Monte Cauala, the regiment at last gained the summit. Then, because of approaching winter weather, continued thrusts were called off near the end of October.

  The Americans mostly sat, in places like Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marmi on the coast and in a handful of towns and villages along the Serchio River. The Allies controlled a fifty-mile west–east front, from Forte dei Marmi to the Reno River Valley on the east slope of the Apennines.

  Soldiers from a Brazilian expeditionary force and units of the Buffalo Soldiers’ Ninety-Second Division were brought to the front and were trained to participate in small operations. The Brazilians moved northward up the Serchio against light resistance, capturing the town of Barga, home of the painter Bruno Cordati, by the end of October.

  * * *

  On the day after Christmas, the Germans began to attack
outposts along the Serchio River. They retook Barga. The Brazilians had left, and the Buffalo Soldiers who took over there were forced to retreat. In response, two Allied brigades from India quickly won back Barga, along with villages around the medieval city.

  By year’s end, the status quo reached in October and November was painfully reestablished. The brief thrust southward in the valley had given German troops a couple of short-lived, morale-boosting victories, forcing the Americans to move units that had been part of the drive to Bologna on the east side of the Apennines to bolster forces in the Serchio sector.

  From the American point of view, it was even more damaging because it forced the Allies to wait until better weather to attack German positions in and around Bologna. Everything between the Ligurian and Adriatic Seas was ice- and snowbound. Leadership determined that the next major offensive would not occur until April 1.

  Along the coast, a few patrols made progress through January and into February. They pushed a short distance beyond the Cinquale Canal, north of Forte dei Marmi, to feel out enemy defenses and reconnoiter routes for soldiers to follow in the spring. Other patrols moved a few miles northward along the main coastal highway, the ancient Via Aurelia, into the lower slopes of the Strettoia Hills, going as far as Seravezza and the terraced olive groves on the slopes of Mount Cauala.

  More units left Camaiore, that small inland town a few miles southeast of Pietrasanta, and pushed northward through the rugged mountains of the Apuan range that separated the coast from the Serchio River Valley. These soldiers may have made their way through what was left of Sant’Anna after the massacre six months earlier.

  Except for in the relatively flat but narrow coastal area, winter weather was making it more difficult to supply these soldiers inland in pockets that could be reached only along the treacherous mountain roads. Soon it became impossible to drive trucks on these roads. The Allies recruited locals and their mules to get that job done, in return offering food and supplies for their families.

  In the hiatus that followed, leadership began a major reorganization of the Buffalo Soldiers’ Ninety-Second Division. The best men from various units were brought together into one new regiment. The Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat team, one of the war’s most highly decorated units, returned from France and was added to the Ninety-Second at the beginning of April. An infantry regiment, the 473rd, of former anti-aircraft artillerymen from all-white units, joined them. These artillerymen became ground soldiers simply because German aviation was virtually nonexistent in the dying days of the war, and anti-aircraft guns were no longer needed.

  Meanwhile, the Germans’ position was deteriorating. They could no longer count on Mussolini’s Fascist Italian units to support them. Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, had to shift four divisions to other fronts outside of Italy. Railroads had been heavily bombed, from above by Allied planes and from the ground by Italian partisans, making it difficult to bring more German troops, motor fuel, and vehicles into the Italian theater in a timely manner. This German difficulty, plus the introduction of new American units into the fray, would lead to a shift in American progress along the coastal area.

  Renewed action began on April 5. British destroyers offshore near the Gulf of La Spezia bombarded German gun emplacements that had harassed the dug-in Americans. The newly constituted regiment of Buffalo Soldiers moved back across the Strettoia Hills while the Japanese-American units now assigned to the Ninety-Second went higher up on the steep flanks of the Apuan Mountains. The artillerymen-turned-infantrymen were briefly sent into the Serchio Valley, but they quickly returned to the coast to strengthen various units that were making good progress.

  The Nisei proved magnificent. They pushed around Massa and, by April 11, occupied the marble quarries above Carrara. But by April 19, the reconstituted Ninety-Second was forced to dig in seven miles north of Carrara. Despite being stopped, the division’s actions forced the Germans to move soldiers from the east around Modena to the Ligurian flank, giving Allied troops in northern Italy’s center easier access to the Po Valley.

  Over the next several days, the Ninety-Second’s units kept pushing northward. A few battered German artillery outposts on a small peninsula just south of La Spezia pounded American-held Massa and Carrara until April 19 and 20, when the Germans destroyed those outpost guns during a hurried withdrawal north.

  From April 20 onward, the operation was to become a pursuit for the Allies, driving the Germans across the Po Valley. There, soldiers of the Third Reich would be halted on the south bank of the Po. Bridges had been destroyed by American aviators intent on denying the Germans an easy route home, and, ironically, by German gunners intent on not allowing Allied troops across.

  * * *

  The day is, again, hot and incredibly humid, perhaps in the nineties, maybe pushing one hundred. I am riding the bicycle the owner of my apartment generously loaned me and am heading to Marina di Pietrasanta along the Ligurian Sea, some two miles west. My once freshly laundered T-shirt is now soaked as I pedal along village streets that nearly seventy years ago were full of German military trucks and tanks.

  Just across from my apartment, I pass a group of modern buildings that had replaced the rubble left in 1944, after American gunners shattered the relative calm of this tiny town. On this small block only a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century bell tower was still standing in the midst of rebuilt modernity. It was then a convent’s elementary school and remains so today.

  With the village at my back, I turn off the Via Aurelia and onto Viale Apua, a straight shot to the tiny beach community. Just a few hundred yards past that turn and a row of modern apartment houses, my wandering eye catches a glimpse of a statue set a few dozen feet off the Viale Apua’s bike path. I make a right turn, then another, and find myself in front of a bronze statue of what appears to be an American soldier wearing a World War II helmet and battle uniform. He is a short, slight figure and clearly Japanese. His right hand holds a rifle at his side. His left rests on his hip. I read the inscription, entirely in Italian. The statue was placed here on April 25, 2000, by the commune of Pietrasanta in honor of Sadeo Munemori, a Nisei and member of America’s famed 442nd Regiment. His unit had been assigned on April 1, 1945, to the Ninety-Second Division during the American drive northward along the Tuscan coast.

  He had been in Italy nearly a year earlier on the beaches at Anzio-Nettuno and eventually in the northward assault toward Rome. He had then been transferred with the regiment to southern France before it returned to the Italian coast on April 1 and immediately pitched into battle alongside the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninety-Second, those British units, and that group of white American anti-aircraft gunners who overnight had became infantrymen. Individual units of the Ninety-Second, however, were still segregated.

  On April 5, in a firefight north of Pietrasanta and near the marble-processing town of Seravezza just a few miles away, Sadeo and a few of his comrades were hunkered down in a shell crater firing against German machine-gun nests. Sadeo was a private first class. He took charge when his squad leader was wounded. He advanced on the gun emplacements and knocked them out with grenades. As he scrambled back to the crater, a German grenade bounced off his helmet and landed in front of two of his companions. In a split-second move, he pounced on it, covering the blast’s impact with his young, slight body, sacrificing his life to save his men. He was twenty-three years old. While Sadeo was fighting and dying in Italy, his family was imprisoned at Manzanar, California—one of ten camps where more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

  Sadeo was the first Nisei to be awarded the Medal of Honor, and the only one of his regiment to receive that award in the war’s immediate aftermath. It was awarded through the efforts of a U.S. senator, Elbert D. Thomas, a Utah Mormon who in the early years of the twentieth century served as a missionary in Japan. He was fluent in the language and had close ties to the Japanese-American community, which requested his help in getting th
e medal for Sadeo’s family.

  Shift ahead two and a half weeks to April 21. Nisei units had advanced just over the northern Tuscany border into southern Liguria. First Lieutenant Daniel Inouye was leading his men along a ridge above the village of San Terenzo in the province of La Spezia. This is a small village near Lerici, the home in the 1820s of ill-fated English poet Percy Shelley.

  Incoming fire pinned down Inouye’s men. When the young lieutenant stood up to attack, he was shot in the stomach, the bullet exiting through his back. He kept moving forward and took out one machine-gun emplacement with grenades. Then he rallied his men and led an assault on a second emplacement, which he also destroyed before collapsing from blood loss. He crawled within ten yards of a third machine-gun nest and raised his right arm to throw a grenade. An enemy rifle-fired grenade hit him in the elbow and exploded, leaving his arm hanging by shreds of skin. He reached around with his left hand, forced his grenade out of his clutched right hand and threw it, taking out that emplacement. He has no memory of what happened next—he blacked out—but witnesses said he stood up and continued one-handed firing at other German positions. He was shot in the leg.

  In a video interview with the National World War II Museum on February 11, 2008, Inouye said, “Someone was looking out for me” when he threw that grenade with his left hand. “It was accurate, went right in the pocket.” Several hours later, after being declared “unsavable” by Army field surgeons and a chaplain convincing them to operate anyway, he received seventeen blood transfusions. Buffalo Soldiers had donated the blood. “African-American blood saved my life,” he proudly told his interviewer.

  Declared “enemy aliens” after the Pearl Harbor attack, Inouye along with other Japanese-American men had volunteered for the Army. He was seventeen. When he lost his arm, he was twenty. His family, living in Hawaii under military jurisdiction, had not been interned. Inouye survived the war and became a distinguished U.S. senator from Hawaii, dying on December 17, 2012, at age eighty-eight.