Oppose Any Foe

by Mark Moyar

  Keyes’s forecast had led the Forcemen to expect a sumptuous reward in return for taking La Difensa, such as an extended leave to a beachside resort. General Clark, however, decided on a different sort of recompense, notifying the Forcemen that he would give them “bigger and better hills to climb.” Clark sent the Forcemen to Mount Sammucro, whose 4,000-foot peak gazed down upon icy precipices and slopes. Attacking on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day, the Forcemen drove a German unit from the mountain at a cost of sixty-five North American casualties.

  THE REALITY THAT small stabs could not bring down the German dragon was on the minds of leaders in London, Washington, and Ottawa at this very moment. Over the course of December 1943, the Allies devised a plan to circumvent the rock-hard defensive lines that the Germans kept laying across the Italian boot. An amphibious landing in the German rear would be the means, and the port of Anzio would be the place. Located just thirty miles south of Rome, Anzio was best known as the city from which Coriolanus had launched his rebellion against the Roman Republic in 491 BC. If Allied forces could secure a beachhead at Anzio and drive rapidly north, they would cut the supply lines and escape lanes for the German divisions arrayed along the Winter Line.

  Among the units assigned to the Anzio landing was the recently formed 6615th Ranger Force. Commanded by Darby, who had been promoted to colonel on December 11, the 6615th consisted of the three Ranger battalions, the 83rd Chemical Battalion, a Cannon Company, and a headquarters element. Invasion planners surmised that German units garrisoned in Anzio would put up a fierce fight at the water’s edge, so they wanted a crack unit at the spear tip of the invasion force, and the 6615th Ranger Force was the most obvious candidate. Darby received orders to storm Anzio’s beach and then seize the harbor and port facilities.

  The Ranger Force landed at Anzio early on the morning of January 22, 1944, disembarking near the Art Deco domes of the Paradiso sul Mare casino. The dreaded German beach defenses turned out to consist of two men, both of whom the Rangers shot on sight. Hustling straight through the beach and up the street leading to the Paradiso sul Mare, Darby and his headquarters staff set up a command post inside the casino. The Ranger battalions moved into the center of the town, where they caught the German garrison by complete surprise. The Rangers broke into one German headquarters while officers were in the midst of breakfasting on sardines and Danish bacon, gunning down several Germans before the remainder could escape.

  The Germans had only two understrength coastal battalions in the vicinity of Anzio, precluding a quick counterstrike that could pin the invasion force to the coast and crush it on the beaches. The Allies, it appeared, had a promising opportunity to cross into the interior and cut off the enemy forces on the Winter Line. But Major General John P. Lucas, the commander of the Anzio invasion, adopted the more cautious approach of keeping units in a shell around the small beachhead in anticipation of eventual German counterattacks, of the sort that had nearly wiped the Allies off the map at Salerno, while bringing more forces and supplies into the port. The Anzio salient, shaped like a half moon, had a radius of only ten miles after the first week.

  Lucas’s caution permitted the Germans to shift infantry, armor, artillery, aircraft, and U-boats toward Anzio, threatening the beachhead and simultaneously building a protective wall between Anzio and the lifelines connecting the Winter Line to Rome. To Allied leaders who had envisaged a swift rampage through the German rear, the passage of precious days without forward movement was maddening. “I had hoped we were hurling a wild cat on the shore,” groused Winston Churchill, “but all we got was a stranded whale.”

  On January 28, Lucas received orders to get off his duff and push aggressively toward the highways. He directed the 3rd Division, commanded by Major General Truscott, to head eastward into “Jerryland”—slang for German-held territory—and seize a series of population centers and roads. The first objective would be Cisterna, a manufacturing town four miles beyond the Anzio beachhead. General Truscott in turn assigned the mission of taking Cisterna to Darby’s Ranger Force, which had recently been attached to the 3rd Division. Truscott told Darby to send two of the three Ranger battalions to Cisterna, while the third cleared a nearby road for the benefit of two infantry regiments that would soon follow.

  Darby, who was no doubt flattered that Truscott had selected the Rangers for such a difficult and important mission, thought that an attack of this size was certain to succeed. That conclusion seemed to be reflected in the selection of the code name for Cisterna—EASY. The German forces near Anzio appeared to be less aggressive than in the past, which was attributed to the increasing number of Poles in German units. Intelligence and reconnaissance reports, moreover, showed no signs of large German concentrations near Cisterna.

  On the afternoon of January 30, the Rangers gathered in a pine forest on the fringe of the beachhead. Unfurling their bedrolls on the soft pine needles, they took turns napping. In the evening, they rolled up the bedrolls and stacked them on a tent canvas alongside their barracks bags, which would remain under the vigilant watch of cooks and truck drivers while the fighters visited Jerryland. The Rangers filed out of the bivouac singing Al Dexter’s hit song “Pistol Packin’ Mama.”

  Near midnight, the 1st Ranger Battalion left the point of departure, advancing in darkness along a deep canal that would take them straight toward Cisterna. The 3rd Ranger Battalion followed at 1:15 a.m. The 4th Ranger Battalion, which was responsible for securing the road, departed at 2 a.m.

  Wading through murky water that came up to their knees, the 1st and 3rd battalions did their best to avoid splashes and any other noises that might reach the ears of German sentries. The canal took them near two German Nebelwerfer batteries, so near that they could hear the Germans talking with one another. The Rangers chose to bypass the batteries so as not to reveal their presence. Closer to the objective, the Americans saw a number of German patrols pass in front and to the side, but the Germans did not appear to detect the marauders.

  Because of the number of units now under Darby’s command and the multiple prongs of advance, Darby oversaw the operation from a house near the line of departure, rather than from the front as in earlier days. The first piece of bad news reached him at 0248, when four radio operators from the 3rd Ranger Battalion reported that they had gotten lost. Darby called it the “god-damnedest thing” he had “ever heard of.” Then, halfway to Cisterna, the 3rd battalion became separated from the 1st. After another half mile of marching, three companies from the 1st battalion lost contact with the battalion’s other three companies. These were the sorts of mistakes that Darby’s original Rangers, selected and trained without the haste demanded by mid-campaign operational schedules, almost certainly would not have made.

  The 4th Ranger Battalion, advancing along its assigned road, walked into a German ambush at 3 a.m. The first German to see the Americans opened fire with his machine pistol to mark their location, and then the night lit up with blotches of muzzle flashes. From rifle pits and farm buildings, the Germans raked the Rangers and an accompanying column of vehicles as they tried to get off the road. American efforts to drive armor through the kill zone were thwarted by a makeshift German roadblock of wrecked jeeps and trucks. When Ranger companies attempted to charge the Teutonic tormentors, they were shredded by German munitions. Three of the 4th Ranger Battalion’s company commanders perished in the futile assaults.

  At the cusp of dawn, the 1st and 3rd battalions reached a flat field on the southern side of Cisterna. Triangular in shape, the field measured roughly 1,000 yards on each side, with roads running along two legs of the triangle and a hodgepodge of irrigation ditches bounding the third. Seeking to put the open terrain behind them before losing the cloak of darkness, the Rangers made a run for the town. After dashing four hundred yards, they came upon a German bivouac, full of sleeping soldiers. The Rangers set upon the Germans with bayonets and knives, hoping to kill the whole bunch before anyone could let out a peep, but one German emitted
a loud scream as his throat was cut. At the sound, other Germans sprang out of their blankets with weapons in hand, and rifle shots and grenade explosions filled the air. The ill-prepared and outnumbered Germans did not last long against the Rangers, but they had cost the Rangers the element of surprise as well as precious seconds of darkness.

  German reconnaissance forces had already alerted the German headquarters in Cisterna of advancing Americans, and now the headquarters learned that the Americans were in the big field on the edge of town. The headquarters happened to command an entire German division, the elite Hermann Goering Division, which had deployed to Cisterna the previous evening in preparation for a massive German counteroffensive against the Anzio beachhead. The personal creation of Nazi Vice Chancellor Hermann Goering, the division possessed some of the finest officers and most powerful tanks in the German armed forces.

  After butchering the Germans in the bivouac, the Rangers started running across the field again. When they were two hundred yards from the edge of Cisterna, with the first rays of sunlight edging the roof lines of houses and shops, the town erupted with a diabolical cacophony of German weaponry. Recognizing that no man could survive an attempt to cross the final two hundred yards to the town, the Rangers scrambled for cover in drainage ditches and the few farm buildings in the vicinity of the field. Many were cut down before they could get off the killing field.

  Shortly after the German broadside commenced, the Rangers heard the creaking of tank treads to their rear. Relief and celebration broke out within the Ranger ranks at what was presumed to be the arrival of American armor from the 4th Battalion. As the tanks came close, however, a sharp-eyed young man noticed that they bore the German Iron Cross. Driving around the flanks of the 1st and 3rd Ranger battalions, the tanks of the Hermann Goering Division had surrounded both American units in their entirety.

  The Germans brought forward flak wagons—wheeled vehicles mounted with antiaircraft artillery—to fire straight into the Ranger positions at short range, while large-caliber artillery pounded the Rangers from longer distances. The Rangers destroyed a number of German tanks and flak wagons by firing antitank rockets from bazookas or running up to the hulls to affix adhesive antitank grenades. Those who had been able to occupy stone houses used the thick walls as protection from the German heavy weapons while returning fire with the much lighter weapons in their own possession. Some of the Rangers attempted to break out of the encirclement, but the Germans stopped them cold with showers of metal from all manner of weaponry. With bigger guns, more troops, and larger supplies of ammunition, the Hermann Goering Division had time on its side.

  When news of the fighting at Cisterna reached Darby, he directed the 4th Ranger Battalion and two Army regiments to move to the rescue of the trapped battalions. All three units found German forces blocking their paths. Half of the 4th Ranger Battalion would be killed or wounded before day’s end. Darby’s Cannon Company attempted to reach Cisterna in half tracks, but in each of four attempts it had to turn back after German antitank weapons shattered its lead vehicles. A reconnaissance force of forty-three men, sent toward Cisterna in jeeps, drove into a machine-gun ambush of such deadliness that only one man returned to tell the tale.

  By midmorning, the attrition of Ranger officers at Cisterna had left a lone captain in charge of the 1st and 3rd Ranger battalions. While talking with Darby on the radio, the young captain began weeping, so Darby told him to put Sergeant Major Robert E. Ehalt on the phone. The sergeant, a twenty-eight-year-old stalwart from Brooklyn, told Darby calmly, “Some of the fellows are giving up. Colonel, we are awfully sorry.” Amid the din of bursting German shells, Ehalt continued, “They can’t help it, because we’re running out of ammunition. But I ain’t surrendering.” Ehalt had to interrupt his analysis of the Rangers to report the arrival of German infantry, stating, “They are coming into the building now.”

  Darby’s subsequent dialogue with Ehalt was not included in the detailed account of the battle that Darby dictated soon afterward, but an eyewitness made a record of Darby’s side of the conversation. “Issue some orders but don’t let the boys give up,” Darby said. “Who’s walking in with their hands up? Don’t let them do it! Get the officers to shoot. Do that before you give up. We’re coming through. Hang on to this radio until the last minute. How many men are still with you? Stick together and do what is best. You’re there and I’m here, unfortunately, and I can’t help you. But whatever happens, God bless you.”

  Shortly after 12 p.m., with American relief forces still unable to break through, Ehalt radioed his last message. “They’re closing in on us, Colonel,” the sergeant major said. “We’re out of ammo—but they won’t get us cheap! Good luck… Colonel.”

  In the early afternoon, the Germans marched twelve Ranger prisoners toward the remaining elements of the 1st and 3rd Ranger battalions, demanding that the Americans surrender. Rangers shot two members of the German party, at which point the Germans killed two of the prisoners and continued to move forward. Again, Ranger diehards shot two Germans. The Germans bayoneted two prisoners. At this point, approximately seventy more Rangers decided to surrender.

  The Germans then announced that they would kill the eighty American prisoners if the Ranger holdouts did not surrender. Several Rangers opened fire on the Germans who were guarding the prisoners, inadvertently killing a number of Americans in the process. German weapons raked the hapless clump of prisoners and the Rangers who had been shooting into it. On the heels of this baleful turn of events, a flock of inexperienced Rangers dropped their weapons in panic and came out with their hands up. A few veteran Rangers shot these young Americans as they rushed to surrender, in an attempt to stop the others, but it was to no avail. For a few minutes more, the most hard-bitten Rangers kept fighting, until they ran out of ammunition, at which point they, too, laid down their arms. Of the 767 Rangers from 1st and 3rd battalions who had marched on Cisterna, 761 ended up dead or in captivity.

  Sergeant Carlo Contrera, Darby’s driver, recalled that when the annihilation of the battalions could no longer be doubted, Darby “put his head down on his arm and cried.” Another man who was with Darby, Les Kness, attested, “I watched a great man break down. I saw defeat within a soul of one for whom I had great respect and admiration. I have never seen a person so dejected and defeated, to the point that he lost his reasoning and his drive to keep control.”

  The demise of two and a half Ranger battalions at Cisterna swept away in one stroke the high confidence in the Rangers that had built up among the US military leadership during the preceding year and a half. The mystique of stealthy elite soldiers, the aura of invincibility attained through victories unending, had been shattered outside a small Italian town in the span of a few hours. Concluding that superior fitness of mind and body could not compensate for lack of heavy weaponry, the high command dispensed with special operations in the Italian Theater and turned the theater’s remaining special operations forces into regular light infantry. The 504th Parachute Regiment took charge of the remnants of the 4th Ranger Battalion and set them on the line alongside its other battalions. William Darby was reassigned to the command of conventional infantry forces, serving in Italy until April 30, 1945, two days before the armistice, when he was killed by a German artillery shell.

  A similar repurposing was in the offing for the First Special Service Force. Following the Cisterna battle, the Hermann Goering Division joined several other German divisions in a ferocious offensive against the Anzio beachhead, keeping the Allied forces near the coast for four months while the German units on the Winter Line executed an orderly retreat. The First Special Service Force was assigned to guard a relatively quiet sector of the Allied perimeter during this period, along the Mussolini Canal, which allowed the Forcemen to conduct shallow probes and reconnaissance missions into Jerryland. Even under these relatively auspicious conditions, the force sustained crippling losses, with 114 killed, 702 wounded, and 65 missing in the four-month period.

>   The need to replace fallen men became so desperate that the Forcemen were officially redefined as “infantry shock troops,” which permitted them to take in new men who had not received specialized training. In the middle of February, Colonel Robert T. Frederick notified Fifth Army headquarters that combat effectiveness had plummeted because of casualties, the influx of replacement troops who were “not specially trained,” and the arrival of replacement officers who had not been “indoctrinated with the spirit and combat methods of this command.” He concluded that “the combat strength of the force has been so reduced that the force cannot again take any major part in an operation.”

  The commander’s lamentations notwithstanding, the First Special Service Force was ordered to take part in the breakout from the beachhead in late May. The Forcemen spent the first day assaulting Cisterna, where they lost 39 men as a bevy of German Tiger tanks pulverized the American Sherman tanks accompanying their advance. In the two-week thrust to Rome, the Forcemen sustained casualties close to those suffered during the four months at Anzio, with 127 killed and hundreds more missing or wounded. As the Allies pressed into Rome’s outskirts, the Germans pulled back to yet another fortified defensive line, the Trasimene Line, once again ensuring that the Allies would not cut off German troops or sever German supply lines. The Forcemen were among the first to enter the city of Caesar and Augustus on June 4, and at last they got some real rest, occupying hotel rooms and sleeping in actual beds for the first time in more than a year.

  Depleted of personnel and deprived of special missions, the First Special Service Force was dissolved in November 1944. Higher authorities reassigned its remaining men to other units, where they would serve out the war as regular infantrymen. Colonel Frederick received command of an airborne task force and then the regular 45th Infantry Division, which he led into Germany in the war’s final months.