The Day of Battle (52 page)

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 loved you,” he added, “with all my heart.”

“A Tank Too Big for the Village Square”

L
IFE
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 was 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.

“You need have no fear of being left in the backwater of the war,” Eisenhower had told Patton, but that was before Patton slapped the two soldiers. For more than three months that secret had held, with at least sixty reporters in Algiers and Italy sitting on the story. But Sicily now felt like the ultimate backwater. Patton tramped around Gela and other Sicilian battlefields, reliving past glories while disparaging the commanders struggling on the Winter Line. “I wish something would happen to Clark,” he told his diary. Montgomery was simply “the little fart.” To Bea he wrote with his idiosyncratic spelling and grammar: “Send me some more pink medecin. This worry and inactivity has raised hell with my insides.”

He took little interest in governing Sicily, which desperately needed a caring hand. Allied planners, drawing on irrelevant experiences from the U.S. Civil War and the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I, had assumed the Italian economy would “maintain itself at a minimum subsistence level,” particularly in agrarian Sicily. That proved dead wrong. By early winter, to forestall famine and bread riots, Allied commissaries were forced to provide flour for three-quarters of the Sicilian population. At feeding centers, starving women feigned pregnancy with pillows stuffed beneath their skirts to claim an extra ration. Black marketeering drove up the price of salt a hundredfold, to 350 lire per kilo.

Shortages plagued the island, from coal and fertilizer to nails and lightbulbs. Typhoid appeared. Officers also reported “some recrudescence of Mafia activities,” including occasional murders with the
lupara,
a sawed-off shotgun that was the traditional weapon of choice for revenge killings. Power outages were chronic, and courts handed down criminal sentences by matchlight. Occupation authorities jailed sixteen hundred “politically dangerous” Sicilians for months and scissored Fascist cant from school textbooks, but the locals still greeted Allied soldiers with absentminded Black Shirt salutes. The liberators soon grew weary of the liberated. “The Sicilian has been found by experience to be utterly untrustworthy,” U.S. Army logisticians complained. “They adopt every possible ruse to cheat
and generally outwit us.” OSS agents agreed. “Lying, stealing, and general dishonesty…can be considered a prevalent folk characteristic.”