The Day of Battle (71 page)

Each yard, whether won or lost, pared away American strength. In a two-acre field diced by German artillery, survivors counted ninety bodies. Six new lieutenants arrived in the 2nd Battalion of the 135th Infantry; a day later just two remained standing. Medics jabbed morphine syrettes through olive-drab twill without taking time to roll up a sleeve; many kept their sulfa powder in salt shakers for easy dispensing. Snow dusted the dead, and the living woke in dank burrows to find their uniforms stiff with ice. By now few men still had their bedrolls; many had eaten nothing but iron rations and drunk only snowmelt for a week or more. A visiting New Zealand brigadier found the weatherbeaten 34th Division so hobbled by frozen feet that he considered the men incapable of launching another attack.

Still, they tried. In the first fortnight of February, three efforts were made to break through the final mile to the Liri Valley; each failed. On February 11 alone, fifteen hundred grenades could not dislodge German defenders from the cockpit of violence known as the Albaneta Farm, near Point 593; at the end of the day, two reinforcing battalions from the 36th Division mustered only 170 men together, one-tenth the authorized strength. Their regimental commander, who had survived the Rapido debacle three weeks earlier, was killed when a ricochet shell demolished his sandbagged command post.

A German corps commander believed the Americans were “within a bare 100 meters of success.” Alexander and Clark had perhaps attacked on too broad a front, failing to exploit cracks in the Axis line with the requisite alacrity. Yet their men had given all they had to give. To eight thousand French casualties could be added ten thousand American; by mid-February, losses in the 34th Division’s rifle companies totaled 65 percent. “Personally I’m glad we didn’t take our objectives,” a soldier in the 135th
Infantry wrote home, “else they would think us immortal and make us go on forever, despite fatigue, slaughter, almost annihilation.” Allied field commanders looked to the heavens, averting their eyes from the carnage below. “Snow-clad Monte Cairo a beautiful pink,” Keyes scribbled in his diary. “Full moon over the monastery.”

Enemy flares also drifted above the abbey, hanging “as if suspended by invisible wires,” one soldier wrote. A new mortar crew arrived at the front unaware that the building was a no-fire zone; a few rounds smacked the roof, provoking happy whoops from troops along the American line.

Early on February 14, the 4th Indian Division sidled forward to relieve the Americans. Scarecrow Yanks stumbled to the rear or were carried on stretchers, many unable to rise from their holes without help; the 34th Division alone used seven hundred litter bearers. Dead GIs lay stacked like sawed logs to await evacuation on mules that clopped uphill in long, steaming trains; the 34th Division also employed a thousand mules. “Thank God their mothers couldn’t see the sadness and indignity of it all,” a British officer wrote. A new arrival in the 141st Infantry, Lieutenant Harold Bond, found consolation in Shakespeare. “A man can die but once. We owe God a death,” he recited, quoting Feeble in
Henry IV, Part 2.
“He that dies this year is quit for the next.” Robert Capa, stumbling among slit trenches crammed with dead boys from the 34th Division, had murmured an invocation of his own: “I want to walk in the California sunshine and wear white shoes and white trousers.”

As the Americans began to pull back a few miles to recuperate, a German courier bearing a white flag proposed a brief truce on February 14 to collect the dead near Cairo. Soon German soldiers fashioned litters from saplings and shelter halves; an American detail delivered 150 enemy corpses on bloodstained canvas stretchers and carried away an equal weight of comrades in olive drab. “There were bodies all over the hill and the odor was bad,” a GI wrote in his diary. During a break the troops swapped cigarettes and family snapshots, chattering about Italian girls and favorite movie stars. An American officer asked
auf deutsch, “Wie geht’s bei Hitler jetzt?”
Wrapped in a slate-blue overcoat, a redheaded sergeant from Hamburg shrugged.
“Gut, gut.”
Rome was pleasant enough, the Germans advised, but the city “could not be compared with Berlin.” From Monte Cassino came the rattle of musketry; the local cease-fire was scheduled to end at noon.
Auf wiedersehen,
they called to one another, trudging off with a last load of dead.
Goot bye.
A German soldier trotted forward for a final handshake. “It is such a tragedy, this life,” he said.

Saddest of all were those who simply vanished, like Otto Henry Hanssen, known to the Army by serial number 37042492 but known to his family in
Monticello, Iowa, as Bud. The third of nine children, Hanssen had worked before the war as a farmhand for $10 a week. The pay was a bit better in the Army, and the job had heft: he had ascended to platoon sergeant in Company G of the 168th Infantry. A letter from the War Department reported Sergeant Hanssen missing after Germans ambushed his patrol near the abbey on February 4; the adjutant general expressed “heartfelt sympathy during the period of uncertainty.” Almost a year later, a soldier who had lost a leg and had been captured in the same skirmish would write Hanssen’s family after being medically repatriated from a German camp: “I’m very sorry that I have to tell you that I believe he was killed in action…. Us fellows when over there never thought of being killed.” In April 1945, the government would declare that soldier 37042492 had died in combat—another comrade reported witnessing his death by gunfire—but his body was never found. Bud Hanssen was twenty-nine.

Ernie Pyle had joined Company E of the same battalion near Cassino. Two hundred men, mostly Iowans, had shipped overseas in the company two years before; only eight remained. Of those veterans, Pyle wrote:

Among the Company E old-timers was Sergeant Frank “Buck” Eversole, a twenty-eight-year-old former Iowa cowboy who had earned two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart, and who, like Hanssen, had risen to platoon sergeant. “I’m mighty sick of it all, but there ain’t no use to complain,” he told Pyle. Still, the losses frayed him. “I’ve got so I feel like it’s me killin’ ’em instead of a German. I’ve got so I feel like a murderer,” Eversole said. “I hate to look at them when the new ones come in.”

I want to walk in the California sunshine and wear white shoes and white trousers.

“They live and die so miserably and they do it with such determined acceptance that your admiration for them blinds you to the rest of the war,” Pyle wrote in January. Few reporters were shrewder than Ernie Pyle, but his admiration may also have blinded him to frontline disaffection. After inspecting the Cassino front in early February at Alexander’s request, Brigadier General Lyman L. Lemnitzer reported that morale was “becoming progressively worse,” with troops “so disheartened as to be almost mutinous.”

Certainly both life and death were miserable at Cassino, beginning at Shit Corner, where Highway 6 emerged from the shadow of Monte Trocchio. Every movement from that point north came under German observation; so many visiting officers from Naples and Caserta had blundered into the Cassino kill sack that British MPs posted a huge sign: “
HALT!
THIS IS
THE FRONT LINE
.” Fifth Army replacements bound for that line later received an orientation booklet, which urged, “Don’t be scared…. Remember that a lot of noise you hear is ours, and not dangerous.” That soothing warrant was undercut by chapters titled “If You Get Hit” and “If a Buddy Gets Hit.”

The lucky ones found shelter, perhaps a roofless ruin with a tarpaulin stretched overhead where they could cook supper over splintered sticks of furniture, nipping on the Canadian moonshine known as steam or cheap Italian cognac redolent of “perfume and gasoline.” “We sit around quibbling and arguing like a bunch of old women about…whose turn it is to get water, who cooked up the last mess of eggs without cleaning the skillet, and who stood mail call last night,” a sergeant from Indiana later wrote home. At night they might listen by wireless to Axis Sally, also known as the Berlin Bitch. “Who’s sleeping with your wife tonight while you are over here fighting?” she purred before reciting, accurately, Fifth Army’s daily passwords.

The unlucky crouched in damp sangars ringed with stone parapets or snow screens, so tormented by snipers that many hesitated to expose themselves even when authorized to strike for the rear. Royal Engineers in greatcoats and wool balaclavas kept the high passes open with wooden plows and rock salt, while skiers supplied the remoter outposts and evacuated the frostbitten. Infantrymen thawed their machine guns with matches and were advised to urinate, if necessary, on frozen rifles. An American tank officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry E. Gardiner, catalogued his wardrobe in a February 7 diary entry: heavy underwear, “windproof slipover,” wool shirt and trousers, sleeveless sweater, turtleneck gaiter, cotton socks, wool socks, one-piece coverall, combat jacket, tank boots, overshoes, wool cap, helmet, trench coat, and goggles. Winter clothing issued to frontline troops in January included kersey-lined trousers and 99,000 sets of what the quartermaster called “mittens, insert, trigger finger”; but “socks, arctic, wool” proved too thick for most GI boots, and parkas designed for Alaska were too bulky for riflemen scaling Italian mountains. An infantryman’s lot, as one veteran observed, “is a life of extremes, either not enough or too much.”

Rarely was the food excessive, in quantity or quality, although a pork-chop dinner in mid-February provoked Colonel Gardiner to speculate that “the quartermaster must be running for reelection.” More typical was a
nurse’s quip to her parents, “Our meat is dead but not edible.” Some troops logged their deprivations. “I’ve had no fresh milk for nine months, no ice cream for ten months, no Coca-Cola for twelve months, no apple pie à la mode or lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches or chocolate malteds for over a year,” one major complained. Lousy food contributed to the mutinous mood Lemnitzer observed. An engineer who referred to himself in the third person told his diary, “Sometimes it felt like he was fighting the whole fucking war by himself. Picks up his rifle, heads toward the line, swearing and burping peanut butter and jelly.” Disaffected Tommies had their own cry from the heart: “What’s the use of the food coming up if the tea’s as cold as a corpse?”

As usual, frontline British troops paid more heed to personal hygiene than their Yankee cousins, who tended to be “disheveled, unshaven, unkempt,” as a Royal Engineer officer noted. During lulls each Tommy was expected to whip out his razor, comb, and toothbrush so that “the outer man would be refurbished to the ultimate advantage and benefit of the inner.” British tolerance for unorthodox battle dress also found free rein along the Gustav Line, where the finery included leather jerkins with extra sleeves cut from U.S. Army blankets, puttees made of empty sandbags and slathered with mud for insulation, soft-soled desert boots known as brothel creepers, and a sergeant major’s hand muff sewn from a panther skin.

Artillery tormented everyone, aggravating the sense of isolation and life’s caprice. Day and night the guns boomed, “regular as a scythe-stroke.” One GI wrote, “There is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God.” Allied gunners fired 200,000 shells at Cassino in the first two weeks of February; the cannonade included new U.S. 240mm howitzers with a range of fourteen miles and a projectile weighing 360 pounds. A mortarman whose battalion had fired four thousand shells wrote his family, “That’s sure a lot of war bonds.” Cairo was said to be “the most heavily shelled pinpoint in Italy,” but Cassino town, Shit Corner, Point 593, and other battered landmarks near the abbey vied for the title. An ambulance driver trying to sleep near an artillery battery told his diary in mid-February, “As the guns fire I feel as if someone is pounding the soles of my feet with a heavy board.” Massed fires of sixty or more guns on a single target were known as serenades, bingos, stinkos, and stonks; open terrain exposed to complete artillery coverage was known as the murder space. White phosphorus particularly vexed the enemy: a captured German paratrooper document dated January 29 ad
vised, “Extinguish burning clothing with wet blankets…. Scrape phosphorus particles from the body. Stretcher bearers must be issued olive oil. Wet earth gives some relief.”

If less profligate, German artillery was just as vicious. GIs consigned to cramped immobility in their holes learned to relieve the overpressure from pounding shells by breathing hard with their mouths agape. A British gunner’s diary for three consecutive days in January noted: “Digging and swearing”; then, “Digging and swearing”; then, “Digging finished. Swearing stops.” Between barrages the carrion crows strutted and pecked, stiff-legged, unsentimental; when the rounds began to fall again, they rose in a flapping black gyre. “Keep your nut down,” a veteran advised newly arriving troops. “Death-or-glory boys don’t last.”

Those who did last became hard and wise in the ways of war, as Pyle had seen. Cynicism sometimes helped. “Enlisted men expect everything to be fucked up,” an American corporal explained. “It is a conceit founded on their experience from the day they are inducted.” A British colonel concluded that most platoons under fire had a small number of “gutful men who go anywhere and do anything,” plus a few who shirk and a majority “who will follow a short distance behind if they are well led.” The “gutful men” who survived at Cassino needed cunning and luck as well as courage. “Use good judgment but use it fast,” an Allied tactical study warned.

On few battlefields would soldiers endure harsher conditions or witness worse carnage. “Came across three dead GIs,” a twenty-two-year-old American engineer told his diary. “They were killed by a shell concussion, skin on their face was burnt and rolled back, no eyelids or hair.” Nearby, a German coal-scuttle helmet had “half a head still in it.”