War Stories III (20 page)

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Authors: Oliver L. North

BOOK: War Stories III
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CAPTAIN FELIX SPARKS
Company E, 2nd Battalion, 157th Infantry,
45th Infantry Division
Anzio, Italy
23 February 1944
Our first battle was the invasion of Sicily—that was my first time in combat. We made an amphibious landing from large ships and small boats. In our area, we lucked out because Italian soldiers occupied our landing beaches—and they didn't really want to fight us.
We lost a few men who drowned when their landing craft capsized, because the weight of their equipment took them to the bottom. Each rifleman carried two extra bandoliers of ammunition swung around his shoulders, gas masks, grenades, three days of rations—all told about forty pounds of weight not counting their rifles.
My rifle company landed with 192 men and we took very few casualties until we got to Palermo in July. That's where I was wounded in the abdomen by shrapnel and was sent back to hospital in North Africa.
The company went on without me to Italy for the landing at Salerno. Meanwhile, I recovered enough to where I could get up and walk around and was shipped to a convalescent hospital. After about a month there they classified me as Class B duty, which meant that I couldn't go back into combat.
But I didn't want to spend the rest of the war sitting on my duff in North Africa. So, in November, I went out to the airfield where I knew they wouldn't ask any questions and caught a ride on a B-17 to Naples. From there, I made my way up to the front line, where I rejoined my company. When I got there, they were stalemated at the Gustav Line.
In December my company made a couple of assaults, trying to penetrate the enemy lines. But we couldn't make it across the valley in our
sector because the Germans were dug in on the high ground and decimated our troops every time we attacked.
I was always amazed at the how the American solider responded in combat because it was a terrible, dirty business. The weather was awful. When you're outside in December, and only have a foxhole to sleep in, and it fills up with water all the time—it's miserable and depressing. But our soldiers learned very fast how to adapt.
I loved the rifle company because that's where the action was. We were the ones who went first in any attack. But it always amazed me—why do men do that? Every attack we made, my men knew some of their buddies would be wounded or killed. Yet, when I gave the word, they moved forward without hesitation. They were very good, brave men and I was very proud of them.
In January, our whole division was pulled off the line and loaded up on amphibious ships for the Anzio landing. It was supposed to be an end-run around the Gustav Line that would catch the Germans by surprise and get behind them so we could press on to Rome.
The landing went perfectly. We just walked ashore and nobody fired at shot at us. But within a couple of days, the Germans brought in troops from Northern Italy, Austria, and the Balkans. Before we knew it, they had us outnumbered and surrounded with our backs to the water. When the Germans counter-attacked on February 16, my battalion, which was on the Anzio-Rome highway, was pretty well cut to pieces by those reinforced German units.
My rifle company was straddling the road and I had four machine guns with each platoon. I also had two tank destroyers with me from Division. The tank destroyers had three-inch guns and when the first three German Panzer tanks came over the hill without any infantry in support, those tank destroyers just blew them apart at about 200 yards range.
But later in the afternoon when the German tanks came again, they came with infantry. So, they got my tank destroyers—pretty quick—they went up in flames. Within an hour they effectively overran the units on
either side of my company—killing a lot of my men. So, I got on the radio and called for artillery fire on top of our position because we were in foxholes and the Germans were in the open. Well, I don't have to tell you—against troops in the open, artillery is devastating.
That night, with Germans moving in front of us, on both flanks and to our rear, I got a radio message asking if I could hold out. I said, “I think I can if I had some tanks.” The CP said they'd send me a platoon of tanks during the night. When they arrived there were only two tanks, but the next morning there were enough of us alive that with the tanks we were at least forcing the Germans to avoid our little position.
By the morning of the third day, I had twenty-six men left. We dug in on a small hilltop more or less on line with one of the other two rifle companies that were left. But I had an artillery radio, so I could direct artillery fire all the time. The two tanks got called back around noon so we just dug our holes a little deeper, redistributed ammunition, and hung on. The Germans, for all practical purposes, ignored us.
We stayed up there for six days—cut off from anyone else except by radio. Almost all of our battalion had been wiped out and we finally got the word that a British battalion was going to try to relieve us. Just getting up to us, the British battalion lost almost half their men. A British major told me to wait until dark and then move back down toward the beachhead and make contact with friendly lines.
We sure tried. We broke up into two squad-sized units and started moving back toward the beach but the Germans woke up to the fact that Americans were moving through their lines and they started firing on us. We dove into a ditch, crawled through the German positions, and reached our lines at daylight.
Of the dozen men following me, only one sergeant made it. We were the only two members of my entire company of 192 men to make it back without being killed or captured. Our battalion had well over 50 percent casualties; in my company, we had 99 percent casualties; and the British battalion that came to relieve us was overrun.
The German counter-attack that wiped out Capt. Felix Sparks's rifle company finally succumbed to massive American air, naval gunfire and artillery bombardments. When the Wehrmacht 14th Army finally broke off their assault on 22 February, the Germans had sustained more than 5,300 casualties. Allied killed, wounded, and missing totaled nearly 3,500. The following day, General Lucian Truscott relieved Lucas as commander of VI Corps.
But a change in commanders didn't stop the killing. Over the course of the next two and a half months the Anzio beachhead came to look like a World War I battlefield as the Germans and the Allies probed each other's trench lines and pounded opposing fortifications with air and artillery strikes. The Germans even brought up a giant 280 mm rail-mounted siege gun to blast the Allied beachhead from the safety of the Alban hills. The Americans—living in a warren of stinking, sodden trenches and bunkers—had nicknamed the gun “Anzio Annie” and made wagers on when it would be silenced by an Allied air strike. It never was.
Finally, in mid-May 1944, the American 5th and British 8th Armies launched a concerted effort to breach the Gustav Line and break the siege at Anzio. On 18 May the Polish II Corps succeeded in capturing Monte Cassino in a costly, bloody assault. On 23 May, Truscott's VI Corps broke through the German 14th Army lines at Cisterna northeast of Anzio, and two days later effected a link-up with the lead elements of II Corps, which had charged north on Route 6, past Monte Cassino.
By the morning of 26 May, the twin Allied breakouts—at Anzio and Monte Cassino—had created an opportunity for Clark and the 5th Army to either encircle the bulk of the German 10th and 14th Armies or go for a victory parade in Rome. Ever conscious of the power of the press—and knowing that Overlord would soon consume every inch of newsprint—Clark chose Rome. On 4 June, less than forty-eight hours before the Normandy landings, the 5th Army marched into the city of the Caesars.
As the Americans were rolling past the Coliseum to the Piazza Venezia, Kesselring—the master of strategic withdrawal and defense—was extricating his battered but still capable 10th and 14th Armies to a new set of defensive positions further north. By early August he was firmly entrenched 150
miles north of Rome on the Gothic Line—a continuous set of fortifications that ran from Massa on the west coast to Rimini on the Adriatic. Behind him were the great industrial cities of Italy and the Alpine passes leading to the heartland of the Reich.
For the next eight months the campaign in Italy became a classic stalemate. In August 1944, Clark had to give up seven divisions for Operation Anvil—renamed Dragoon—the invasion of southern France. Throughout the winter of 1944–45, the Allies in Italy refitted and fought the bone-chilling cold as much as they fought the enemy.
In February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta on the Crimean peninsula to discuss the shape of postwar Europe. In March, the U.S.-British Combined Staff urged a new Italian offensive to hasten the now-inevitable German collapse. Clark, now commanding the Allied 15th Army, was provided with additional air and land forces to break through the Gothic Line, but no sealift for amphibious operations.
By the second week of April 1945, Clark had massed seventeen divisions south of the Gothic Line and set 12 April as the date to commence a new offensive. Among those troops was Bob Dole, a young second lieutenant from Russell, Kansas.
SECOND LIEUTENANT ROBERT “BOB” DOLE
Company I, 3rd Battalion, 85th Infantry,
10th Mountain Division
18 May 1945
I became a member of the enlisted reserve in December 1942 and got one of those “ninety-day wonder” commissions from Officer's Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in November 1944.
I've always wondered how I ended up in the 10th Mountain Division. I'm from Kansas, where there aren't any hills—much less mountains. The division was full of great skiers and mountain climbers—but I had never learned to ski.
At one time, you had to have at least two letters of recommendation to get into the 10th Mountain Division. The idea for such an outfit had come from the president of the American Ski Patrol—Minnie Dole. I don't think he's any relation but maybe that's why the Army sent me there.
I arrived in Italy just before Christmas, 1944, and by early January of'45 I was in a replacement depot with a whole group of 2nd lieutenants when we were told to report to the units up on the Gothic Line. Second lieutenants were sort of expendable in those days.
I was ordered to the 10th Mountain. General George Hayes, the division commander, was revered by the “mountaineers.” He was a great leader. When I arrived in early February '45, the division was fighting on Mount Belvedere. The company commander in Company I, 3rd Battalion of the 85th Regiment was Captain Butch Luther, the great All-American football star of Nebraska. And a day or two after I got there I remember seeing his helmet, with a hole right between the captain's bars. He was killed and several second lieutenants were killed or wounded. Our new company commander was Captain Jerry Butcher.
Company I sustained more killed-in-action than any company in the 10th Mountain Division. Our company always seemed to be on the cutting edge when things were happening. But when you come in as a replacement you kind of feel like, “I'm the only stranger in the town here. Are they going to accept me?” Are they going to say, “This guy doesn't know anything?” Or, “You're one of these ninety-day wonders out of Fort Benning. Where have you been while we've been training at Camp Hell?”
But I needn't have worried. They were good soldiers and they accepted me as one of their own. I was assigned as a rifle platoon commander, replacing a lieutenant who'd been killed.
Sergeants Carafe and Kuschick were my two leading NCOs. They helped me get the lay of the land, ran things, and helped me along. They showed me around our lines and took me out on orientation patrol right after I arrived.
A few nights after I joined the company I was leading my own patrols. One night a week or so later, we were out on a night patrol, probing
the German positions, and we ran into some Germans. In the ensuing fight, seven of us were slightly wounded. That was my first combat experience—and for weeks afterwards it was like that every night in those cold Italian mountains.
In the daytime we kept in our foxholes and tried to stay warm without getting hit by enemy artillery or mortars. At night we patrolled in the mountains and tried to keep from getting killed by rifle fire and grenades.
I remember back in the States, right after I came into the Army, seeing guys training with broomsticks when I was in the 75th Division. We weren't very well prepared back then. But these men in the 10th Mountain were well trained, experienced, and disciplined—mentally and physically.
Winter in the mountains of Italy is very cold. Our winter equipment wasn't the best—and I remember never being able to get warm the whole time I was there.
We were supposed to start a big push to punch through the German defensive line on April 12, but President Roosevelt died that day. Of course everyone was in tears and shock—we were just kids, we didn't know anything about politics—but we knew our president died, and he was our commander in chief. So that delayed everything for two days.
I've often wondered what would have happened, had he lived, and had our offensive went off as scheduled. Maybe I wouldn't have been shot, who knows? But the offensive was postponed. After a couple days to get over the death of our commander in chief, it all started again on the fourteenth of April. That day we got up quite early about 5 a.m., got everything together, and started down the road and then up the hills.
There was a hill—number 913—that's the height of the hill in feet—near a little village called Castel Diano. The hilltop was our first battalion objective. After we cleared the village and took Hill 913 we were to move on to our next objective—Hill 785—but I never made it to 785.
As we moved up on Hill 913, Company I was the point for the battalion and we began to take a lot of fire—and a lot of casualties. My platoon was in the lead for the company and my radioman, Corporal Simms, was hit first by the Germans firing down on us.
I ran to get Corporal Simms to try to get him back into some cover. As I was dragging him back toward a hole, I felt this blow to my neck and this stinging in my right shoulder. It must have been a shell fragment—too big for shrapnel from a grenade—because it broke a couple vertebrae in my neck and pretty much messed up my shoulder.
I lay there for a long time with a lot of firing going on around us—and I remember Sergeant Kuschick wrote an “M” with my blood on my forehead—M for morphine so that the medic would give me some when he got to me. Sgt. Kuschick stayed with me for quite a while before the platoon had to move on up the hill. Before he left to continue the attack, he jammed my rifle with the bayonet into the dirt beside me and put my helmet on the stock so our company medics would see it and know—somebody's there who needs attention.
I waited a long time. Finally the medics and litter bearers got to me and they started to carry me down the hill. It was very rough going and I remember being scraped along the rocks a couple of times. I just vaguely remember the sharp pain in my back. Then everything kind of went black.
I recall waking up in a field hospital where there was a whole line of wounded soldiers, all on litters. It turned out that the 10th Mountain Division suffered more casualties that day than at any other point in the war. We had a total of maybe five hundred or more killed and that day.
Despite the losses, the 10th Mountain made all its objectives that day—and went on to take Hill 785. A few days later Company I crossed the River Po. Unfortunately, I wasn't with them for all of that—or for the big celebration when it was finally over on May 2.
From the field hospital I was brought back to the Italian coast, then eventually put on a hospital ship back to the States, and ultimately got back to Russell, Kansas. I spent four years in rehabilitation. I couldn't use my left arm, and it took me about eleven months to get on my feet again. I had a blood clot in my lungs, and had tremors in my hand, for which they injected snake venom
Then I lost a kidney, and everything just seemed to be going downhill. I lost about seventy-five pounds. But then I'd look around and see
somebody who was
really
sick. You think you're pretty sick, until you see them carting somebody out who died in the bed next to you.
You say, “I'm still here.” But it was a long recovery. You say, “I can't be too discouraged,” yet you get discouraged anyway. I couldn't dress myself. I had to ask somebody to help me with my shirt, and for a while, help with normal functions, like going to the bathroom and things like that. But once I got beyond that, I learned I could do most anything with a buttonhook. I can get dressed. I don't have much feeling in my right hand. But I've learned to adapt, and it works out pretty good.

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