Assignment to Hell (39 page)

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN A VICTORY
—but it came at great cost. In San Pietro Bigart sat down with Lieutenant Colonel Howard K. Dodge of Temple, Texas, a battalion commander with the 36th Division. Dodge’s men were among the first to encircle the village; they had to withstand a furious nighttime German counterassault that lasted four hours. In the confusion of the first few minutes of the enemy surge, Dodge and the officers back at the regimental command post didn’t know what they were up against. Over the telephone wire they heard a frontline infantryman groan, “My God, when are we going to get artillery support!”

“At first we thought it was merely the usual enemy patrol probing our position and we didn’t dare to fire for fear of endangering our men,” the colonel told Bigart. “But when the firing increased in intensity we ordered a barrage. It came within a few minutes and fell smack where we wanted it. It must have caught a lot of the Germans, for we could hear them hollering and moaning in a draw just beyond our lines.”
³⁹

Three more times that early morning the Germans tried to crack Dodge’s position. Each time they inflicted horrible casualties but were repulsed. An officer from Wilmington, North Carolina, named Henry C. Bragaw rallied his men when the Germans shifted their attack from the right of the American line to its center. Bragaw, a redhead who sported a huge handlebar mustache, was a horticulturalist by training. But he had little time to admire Sammucro’s flora and fauna; he and his men had been on the front lines for days without a break.

Equally exhausted was a lieutenant from Waco, Texas, whose name—Rufus J. Cleghorn—sounded like something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Cleghorn was a barrel-chested former lineman for Baylor University. His platoon was the first to reach the mountain’s summit.

“Exulting in battle,” Bigart wrote, “Cleghorn clambered to the highest rock of Sammucro’s pinnacle and howled insults at the Germans, pausing now and then to toss grenades. For variety, Cleghorn occasionally put his weight against a huge boulder and sent it rolling down the slope. He roared with laughter as the Germans attempted to dodge the hurtling boulders.”

Bigart ended his remarkable three-thousand-word dispatch from San Pietro with one of his uncanny observations. “It is very cold these December nights on Sammucro’s peak, and the uniforms and overcoats issued to the men were not too warm. Yesterday Army cooks carried warm combat suits to the troops and a can of Sterno to each man.”
⁴⁰

J
OHN
H
USTON AND HIS
S
IGNAL
Corps crew were probably issued warm coats and Sterno cans, too. They began filming their documentary two days before Whitehead and Bigart made their trek up Sammucro.

Positioned atop Monte Rotondo, Huston’s cameras whirred as two platoons’ worth of Sherman tanks began their arduous climb toward San Pietro. They didn’t get far before German artillery began raining down; the American tanks retaliated with seventy-five-millimeter shells but soon found themselves overwhelmed. Four Shermans struck mines and were quickly disabled; three others absorbed direct hits from enemy antitank batteries.

Intent on capturing a triumphant moment for the American fighting man, Huston and his photographers were instead filming a debacle. In full view of the cameras, crew members from disabled tanks were either huddled on top of machines going backward or beating a hasty retreat on foot. Much blood had been spilled while no ground had been gained; Huston’s first day of shooting didn’t make for inspirational celluloid.

But Huston’s cameras stuck around long enough to see American tanks actually scale Sammucro. Still, the director had to embroider battle sequences using GIs disguised as Germans, another village that pretended to be San Pietro, and a different mountaintop that masqueraded as Sammucro. Huston put together a fifty-minute film whose battle sequences were hailed as gritty and real—perhaps
too
gritty and real—but George Marshall’s staff insisted it be chopped to a half hour. The Army liked it so much they used it as a training film. It was generally well received, although some critics thought the left-wing Huston had produced an antiwar polemic. Huston, who’d now seen the misery of combat up close, supposedly said that if he ever made a “pro-war” film he should be shot. Humphrey Bogart’s favorite director, the auteur behind
The Maltese Falcon
, went on to make two other wartime documentaries for OWI and the Signal Corps.
⁴¹

H
USTON, IT APPEARS, NEVER TOOK
his cameras to the Anzio beachhead—which is a shame, because he could have filmed a saga of human failure and redemption more stirring than
The African Queen
. Bigart and Boyle, however, did cover Anzio. Bigart stayed there, without reprieve, for week after excruciating week; Boyle wasn’t far behind.

An amphibious assault leapfrogging the Gustav Line and putting Allied troops just thirty-five miles south of Rome was Winston Churchill’s answer to the bloody impasse along the Rapido. Like everyone else in the Allied high command, Churchill was disconsolate over the way the advance toward Rome had ground down. In the previous seven weeks, the Allies had inched forward only seven miles, incurring sixteen thousand casualties.
⁴²
At that rate it would take another year to reach the ancient capital.

The Anzio plan was a hundred times bigger and more audacious than the raid on Brolo and Monte Cipolla—and a hundred times riskier. The lives of “only” seven hundred commandoes had been at risk at Brolo. And even if the Monte Cipolla raid had been completely snuffed, it would not have materially affected the outcome of the Sicilian campaign.

Anzio’s stakes were much higher. Churchill, Alexander, and Clark were gambling with the lives of nearly fifty thousand men on top of the tens of thousands of soldiers stuck in the mountains south of Cassino. And without question, the success of the Italian campaign hung in the balance.

The aim of Operation Shingle, as it became known, was ambitious: Grab the Anzio beachhead, make a quick strike northeast to the Alban Hills, block Kesselring’s escape routes from the Liri Valley by seizing Highways 7 (the ancient Appian Way along the Tyrrhenian) and 6 (the road leading northwest from Cassino), and capture Rome. In one fell swoop, went Churchill’s fondest dream, the bulk of Italy would belong to the Allies and Kesselring’s Army Group C would be destroyed.
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It wasn’t that simple, of course. In contrast to the Gulf of Salerno invasion four months earlier, the initial stage of the Anzio landings went off almost without a hitch. “The first round,” Bigart wrote, “went decisively to the Allies. The troops achieved a surprise landing on beaches practically undefended. Every break went to the Allies. The port of Anzio fell intact. There was an unusual run of fine weather—rough seas hindered the landing of supplies only two days. With negligible loss the initial objectives were taken quickly…. There was no confusion. It was nothing like Salerno.”
⁴⁴

It may have been nothing like Salerno the first week, but during weeks two through nine, Anzio was much more dire. Encouraged by Alexander and Clark to consolidate his position before penetrating inland, invasion commander General John Lucas dug in on the beachhead, collecting additional troops and supplies and planning his next move.

Boyle stayed in Purple Heart Valley to cover the ill-fated Rapido crossings. Bigart, though, was one of just six Allied correspondents who went in with Lucas’ invaders—and one of only two reporters who stayed on the Anzio beachhead for the duration.

The landing itself, as Bigart acknowledged, was fairly easy: The only
Germans they encountered on the beach were four drunken officers joyriding in a car. Two hundred other enemy soldiers were quickly captured, many still wearing pajamas.
⁴⁵
Anzio was a staggering logistical feat: By midmorning on the first day, thirty-six thousand men and nearly 3,200 vehicles had been unloaded. Only two German battalions stood between Anzio and Rome. The great Allied gamble appeared to be paying off. Still chastened by his experience at Salerno, however, the oddly passive-aggressive Clark urged Lucas not to “stick his neck out.”
⁴⁶

Kesselring sensed the Allied indecisiveness; the German commander knew that geography would trump surprise. He may have been caught “dumbfounded” at Anzio, as Boyle put it, but by January 30, day eight, Kesselring’s troops had cemented strong defensive positions to thwart advances from either the coast or from Cassino.

On that bloody Sunday, Kesselring’s men were lying in wait as the Allies tried to break out of the beachhead by attacking Cisterna di Littoria on the Appian Way just twenty-four miles south of Rome. Two Army Ranger battalions—nearly eight hundred men—were at the point when Kesselring sprang his trap. Only six Rangers made it back to U.S. lines. The surviving prisoners were paraded through Rome and used as propaganda toys by Joseph Goebbels and his mouthpiece, Axis Sally.
⁴⁷
An assault three days later at Carroceto was repulsed with similarly heavy losses.

Most of the Allied troops remained on the Anzio beach, huddled in tents, dodging unending artillery and mortar shells. Hospital tents seemed to draw particularly intense fire: A hundred medical professionals—including many nurses—were killed in the line of duty.
⁴⁸

One warmish afternoon Homer Bigart decided to take a break by paddling a raft around an inlet. In midexcursion, a Messerschmitt 109 appeared out of nowhere. Bigart began furiously scrambling toward shore. After strafing the beach, the enemy pilot dove at Bigart. Bullets ripped through the raft but somehow missed Homer.
⁴⁹
Thus ended his recreational boating at Anzio. In combat, Bigart seemed to have nine lives.

Wrote a devastated Churchill of Anzio, “We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche. Instead, we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.”
⁵⁰

T
HE WHALE CONTINUED TO FLOP
at Anzio and Cassino through the bleak winter of ’44. In mid-February, Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander (Bigart, probably out of spite, always on first reference used Alexander’s full name and title, in all its initialed pretension) got in a pissing match with the correspondents covering the Anzio beachhead, chief among them the
Herald Tribune
’s prickly reporter. On Valentine’s Day, Alexander ushered the Anzio press contingent into his tent and erupted.

“Alexander said he had been notified by superiors that stories emanating from the beachhead ‘alarmed the people,’” Bigart wrote. Anzio reporters, Alexander claimed, had become unduly downcast. As a result, the high command was penalizing reporters by denying them access to radio facilities to file their stories through Allied press headquarters at Naples. Radio privileges would be restored only when reporters began following a stricter policy line, Alexander threatened.

“There’s no basis for pessimistic rubbish,” the British general scolded Bigart and the others.

Bigart’s rejoinder was to publish an article demonstrating that his previous accounts were neither “pessimistic” nor “rubbish.” The press’ coverage of Anzio had been positive, Bigart pointed out, when there were positive developments to report, such as the unimpeded landing and the surprise achieved by the Allies.

But beginning with the late January–early February reversals at Cisterna di Littoria and Carroceto, “The initiative went to the Germans. We reported it.

“We tried to report that the situation was tense and critical. We still believe it was,” Bigart wrote in a piece that took five days to clear censors and be relayed to the
Trib
.

Bigart then addressed the underlying concerns in a manner worthy of an essay in the
Columbia Journalism Review
. “Basically, the issue is this—shall the public receive accurate day-by-day reports of the changing fortunes of battle or shall we maintain an ‘even tone,’ speaking only vaguely of reverses?” Bigart argued that he and his five beachhead colleagues had
been “exceedingly careful” not to publish information of military value to the enemy.

“But the quarrel is not over battlefield security,” he wrote. Instead, the debate centered around the view of certain military advisors that American and British newspaper readers “do not yet realize that war involves risks, that the breaks do not always go to the Allies. They are afraid the public cannot stand the shock of bad news and that it must be broken to them gradually over long periods of time and preferably after some victory.”
⁵¹

Relations between the press and the Allied command in Italy remained acrimonious. Practically everything about the Italian campaign was full of anguish. Despite a lack of evidence that the Germans had occupied the abbey on the summit of Monte Cassino, Alexander and Clark ordered it destroyed by Allied bombers. The order came the day after Alexander excoriated the press. With no warning, four separate formations of B-17s decimated one of the world’s great religious shrines, to no apparent military end. There was no more dismaying sight in World War II than the specter of the abbey’s monks seeking refuge by marching toward the German lines.