The Day of Battle (60 page)

Keyes and Clark were both alarmed. “Always the same story,” Keyes wrote in his diary. “Too few, too little practical preparations. This is serious for us tonight.” Clark attributed the aborted British crossing “to lack of strong aggressive leadership at the division level.” Fifth Army engineers reported that Hawkesworth had failed to properly reconnoiter the river or the crossing site. In a memorandum dictated on Thursday, Clark added, “The failure of the attack of the 46th Division to reach its objective…was quite a blow. I was fearful that General Hawkesworth had a mental reservation.” The army commander dispatched Gruenther to see McCreery, who warned that the Rapido attack “has little chance of success” and should be canceled. Unmentioned was McCreery’s growing concern at Clark’s apparent willingness to accept high casualties for dubious gains; the British commander now thought of Clark as “the Man of Destiny I somehow imagined he always wanted to be.”

That surely was unfair, although not untrue. With Eisenhower gone from the theater, Clark now stood in the footlights at center stage as the most prominent American commander in the Mediterranean. Yet the Man of Destiny was hardly a free agent. Clark had been ordered by Alexander to attack quickly, and to eject the enemy from Rome; for all practical purposes, he also had been ordered by Churchill to plop two vulnerable divisions behind German lines the day after tomorrow. Were he to curtail the Rapido offensive, nearly fifty thousand men now embarking for
SHINGLE
would face the full fury of a German counterstrike in isolation.

Destiny held Clark in thrall, but not Clark alone. A great rolling tide of tragedy and fate and human folly swept them all along, like those fog-swaddled boats beating against the Garigliano current.

“It is essential that I make the attack, fully expecting heavy losses, in order to hold all the [German] troops on my front and draw more to it, thereby clearing the way for
SHINGLE
,” Clark wrote on Thursday. “The attack is on.”

Since the Salerno landings, nineteen weeks earlier, war had gutted the 36th Division. Rifle company losses in the 141st Infantry exceeded 60 percent. In one typical 143rd Infantry battalion, three-quarters of the officers had joined the unit in Italy. Texas drawls no longer dominated the division. “We were no longer a team,” a captain complained. “Gone was the feeling that you knew you could rely on your people.” Together the two assault regiments mustered about four thousand men; many units were understrength, often by a third, and undertrained. New bazooka teams arrived at the front having never fired a bazooka. Training for a river assault was limited to paddling on the placid Volturno. A platoon leader in the 141st considered his soldiers “unprepared physically, mentally, and morally.”

Several hundred replacements showed up on the eve of the Rapido attack to find that all troops had removed their unit insiginia to confound the enemy; sergeants spent hours trying to determine who belonged to whom. Many replacements never found their proper companies, and some would die without meeting their squad leaders or knowing a single comrade in their new platoons. “Can’t expect these replacements to be good soldiers,” an officer told the reporter Will Lang. “They ain’t mad.”

Walker continued to fret in private. “The mission should never have been assigned to any troops and, especially, when both flanks will be exposed when we get across,” he scribbled on January 20. Clark phoned on Thursday afternoon to wish him luck. “He is worried over the fact that he made an unwise tactical decision,” Walker concluded, then added:

And then it began. The last smudges of violet light faded in the west. Hundreds of soldiers rose from their burrows on Monte Trocchio and from behind the marsh hummocks on the Rapido flats. Fixing bayonets with an ominous metallic click, they looped extra bandoliers over their twill field jackets. Fog coiled from the riverbed and crept across the fields, swallowing the stars and a rising crescent moon. A company commander handed a cigar to each of his sergeants, as a talisman.

At 7:30
P.M
., sixteen artillery battalions opened fire in gusts of white flame. Soldiers flinched as more than a thousand shells per minute shrieked overhead in a cannonade that ignited the mist and gouged the far bank with rounds calibrated to explode every six and a half yards. Crewmen flipped back the camouflage nets on fifty Sherman tanks, hidden four hundred yards from the river, and yellow tongues of flame soon licked from the muzzles to join the bombardment. Sixty fighter-bombers swooped down the river, and their tumbling silver pellets blossomed in fire and black smoke across Sant’Angelo, adding ruin to ruination. Four hundred white-phosphorus mortar shells traced the river line with topographic precision; the night was windless, and instead of billowing to form a low screen, the smoke spiraled vertically for 150 feet, framing the shore in fluted alabaster columns.

The attack was to fall across a three-mile front, centered on Sant’Angelo. On the right, the 141st Infantry tramped down a farm road toward an oxbow in the river, led by the 1st Battalion in a column of four companies. Wet fog grew as thick as cotton batting. Barely able to see their feet, soldiers bunched up to keep sight of the bobbing helmet ahead. Stragglers and shirkers melted away. When the column stalled, men dozed off and awoke to find that those in front had vanished. Units became jumbled, and sotto voce queries carried in the night, calling for 3rd Platoon or B Company.

Along the rail tracks south of Trocchio, boats had been readied in a hidden dump: rubber dinghies that carried two dozen men, of whom half would paddle, and M-2 plywood scows, weighing nearly a quarter ton each and capable of ferrying a dozen men with a two-man crew. German artillery that afternoon had already holed twenty rubber boats, and ugly gashes marred several M-2s. Wooden catwalks also lay scattered about the dump: laid across rubber rafts lashed together as pontoons, they would make footbridges. Two sturdy Bailey bridges, dubbed Harvard and Yale,
would subsequently be erected for the two hundred tanks waiting behind Trocchio to storm the Liri Valley.

Hoisting the heavy boats, their rifles banging against the gunwales, the men staggered toward the river on a narrow, muddy road. Enemy artillery now answered the American barrage, and the shriek of westbound volleys was exceeded by the rush of eastbound German shells and that she-wolf howling of Nebelwerfer rounds, also known as screaming meemies, moaning minnies, and howling heinies. “It could damn near make your blood turn solid,” one soldier confessed. Brown smoke foamed from mortar rounds tromping across the flats, and the maniacal cackle of machine guns carried from Sant’Angelo, including the dread MG-42, known in the Wehrmacht as “Hitler’s bandsaw.” Riflemen tossed away their cumbersome bandoliers, which soon lined the road like a trail of brass necklaces. A thousand smoke pots, ignited as a deception far south of Trocchio, drew more than five hundred German shells in two hours. U.S. artillery battalions received a frantic order to “check all shells for mustard gas as such shells had been issued by mistake” from an ammunition depot; no mustard was found or fired.

Little else went right. An engineer guiding Company B to the oxbow missed the path to the river by several hundred yards; as the troops and boats turned around for a reverse march, their clatter attracted a German volley that cut down thirty men, including the captain who had distributed his cigars. Paddles, rifles, and human limbs rained across the road. Survivors scattered for cover, but the cleared corridors through the minefields were no longer visible: minesweeping teams initially had marked the paths with white tape, but switched to a brown cord that was less conspicuous to German observers. Confused GIs pelted through the fog, triggering shoe mines and drawing more mortar fire as sergeants tried to hush the wounded. “It’s pretty hard when you’re dying to keep quiet,” a platoon leader observed. Another befuddled guide also led Company A into a minefield. “We walked as men do in a cow pasture,” said one man, “placing each foot carefully on a pre-selected spot.”

Corpses and abandoned M-2s blocked the swept lanes to the river. Screaming Nebelwerfer rounds reminded an officer of “a streetcar coming down sideways with its brakes on.” Exhausted men dragged the cumbersome rubber boats the last few hundred yards, tripping more mines. German flares silvered the water, and tracers sliced scarlet vectors through the fog, or bounced like flaming marbles off the Rapido. Those who managed to shoulder their vessels down the steep bank found that many had been holed and sank immediately; others capsized, dumping men and equipment into the icy river, or were swept away on the current.

Soldiers fell without ever firing a shot. “It was like fighting an octopus in a crooked sack,” recalled Lieutenant William E. Everett, a platoon leader in Company C. Everett rebuked several men for shirking in a ditch, then realized they were dead. “I could hear paddles slapping and hitting together, and then the men yelling when their boat turned over,” another lieutenant wrote. “It curdled your blood to hear those men drown.” Sodden twill trousers and field jackets dragged the men under. “I had to let go of the young man and he drowned,” a private later said of one comrade. “Eight of us drowned and four swam to the German side.”

By nine
P.M
., an hour into the attack, fewer than one hundred men had reached the west bank. Many burrowed into the marsh, using their helmets to scrape a few inches of defilade and piling the spoil in parapets around their shallow trenches. Thirty-one thousand artillery rounds had not discouraged the fuming German guns at Sant’Angelo. Glowing shell fragments blew in orange swarms across the bottoms. “Close explosions leave one vibrating like a tuning fork,” reported one soldier. At least four MG-42s stitched the oxbow crossing site with machine-gun fire. Of four footbridges to be laid across the Rapido, two were destroyed by artillery fire, and mines claimed a third. For hours engineers muscled the last span into the water, and by four
A.M
. on Friday the river had at last been bridged.

Dozing men on the east bank were awakened to scramble across the rickety catwalk, squad by squad, platoon by platoon. “The Germans opened fire with every automatic weapon they had,” an officer said. “The slapping noise of the planks against the water would draw fire.” Another officer confessed to feeling “like a Judas goat, leading the sheep to slaughter.” By 6:30, as dawn leaked into the bottoms, about half of the 1st Battalion had reached the west bank. Shell fire damaged the bridge, dropping segments of the catwalk below the river surface. All radios had been ruined in the crossing; most artillery observers had been wounded or killed; and all phone lines back to the east bank were soon severed. So many litter carriers had fallen that few wounded could be evacuated across the river. “I don’t know how many dead and wounded there were,” a medic in Company A later recalled, “but there were plenty.”

The 141st Infantry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Aaron A. Wyatt, Jr., had intended to send his 3rd Battalion on the heels of the 1st, but with the bridgehead barely two hundred yards deep he canceled the order. After a night of confusion, the new day simply brought more derangement, including contradictory orders that first instructed men on the west bank to hold fast, then advised them to pull back. A few scuttled across the submerged bridge or swam to safety, grabbing at tree roots to haul themselves onto the east bank. Most dug in to await reinforcements, or raised their
arms in surrender. Engineers stretched a net across the Rapido, seining for bodies adrift on the current.

Downstream, on the division left, the attack proved no less gallant and no more successful. “When I saw my regimental commander standing with tears in his eyes as we moved up to start the crossing, I knew something was wrong,” said the commander of Company L in the 143rd Infantry.

Two crossing sites had been selected for the 143rd, and at eight
P.M
. on Thursday night the point platoon at the upper site paddled across without drawing fire. Then German gunners leaped to life, riddling the boats and wrecking a footbridge in progress. Engineers scorched back to the boat dump, where the regimental commander, Colonel William H. Martin, found them cowering in foxholes. Rallied with threats and supplications, the men lugged more M-2s to the river, and by six
A.M
. Friday most of the 1st Battalion—the late Captain Henry Waskow’s former unit—had reached the west bank.

Their stay was brief. Machine guns and panzers flailed the bridgehead with grazing fire, lashing the buttocks, backs, and legs of soldiers unable to hug the ground any tighter. Facing annihilation, Major David M. Frazior shortly after seven
A.M
. asked permission for his battalion to return to the east bank. Walker refused, but by the time his stand-fast order arrived, Frazior had abandoned the bridgehead with the remnants of his command.