The Daring Dozen (17 page)

The Force was not allowed long to rest and recuperate after the rigours of capturing la Difensa and la Remetanea. Withdrawn to their base at Santa Maria, they shivered in tents as the European winter intensified and men reported sick with frostbite and ‘trench foot’, a debilitating condition that had tortured thousands of men on the Western Front a generation earlier.

Meanwhile the Germans were still stubbornly holding on to southern Italy, fighting bitterly for every inch of land. In the Venafro sector, north of Naples, the Germans were entrenched in and around Monte Sammucro, and once more it fell to the 1st Special Service Force to dislodge the enemy and so ease the passage of the main Allied advance.

Frederick once again scouted the area personally before the attack, postponing it for 24 hours as he organized resupply lines for his men once they had taken the target. At nightfall on Christmas Eve the attack began. The 1st Regiment moved up the snow-clad mountainside in darkness, clearing Germans from foxholes and repelling small pockets of counter-attacking troops. The closer the Force got to the summit of Monte Sammucro, the more intense the fighting became. Even in the darkness German snipers were close enough to kill, and machine-gun fire and mortar fire caused further casualties. Frederick advanced with his men, tending to the wounded and encouraging the unscathed. By dawn the mountain was in the hands of the Force, although Christmas Day was spent fighting off several German counter-attacks.

From Monte Sammucro Frederick led his men to the next targets in the mountain range, Monte Radicosa and Monte Majo. The former was seized by the 2nd Regiment, now under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Bob Moore after his predecessor had been RTU’d (returned to unit) on Frederick’s orders. The officer, while far from disgracing himself, had nonetheless failed to live up to Frederick’s expectations and he no longer considered him fit to command.

The honour of securing Monte Majo, a key obstacle to the advance of the Fifth Army (and which was important strategically for the attack on Monte Cassino) fell to the 3rd Regiment under Colonel Edwin Walker. Having not been involved in the previous mountain assaults, the men of the 3rd Regiment were eager to prove themselves the equal of their Force comrades. Scaling a cliff almost as impressive as the one conquered by the men of the 2nd Regiment on la Difensa, the 3rd Regiment surprised the Germans on Majo and within five hours had triumphed. Furious German counter-attacks followed over the course of three days but the Special Service Force would not be moved and the attackers suffered 75 per cent casualties in their attempts to regain possession of the cold, forlorn mountain. When the photographer Robert Capa toured the battlefield a few hours later he described how ‘… every five yards a foxhole, in each one at least one dead soldier. Around them empty cans of C rations and faded bits of letters from home. The bodies … were blocking my path.’

In the fighting of late December and early January, the Special Service Force had suffered 75 per cent casualties, with 100 men dead or missing and a further 429 wounded or laid low with sickness. Yet still there was no respite for Frederick (who had been wounded a third time) or his men.

On 22 January 1944, the Allies landed at Anzio with the aim of outflanking Axis forces (estimated to consist of 70,000 men) on the Winter Line and expediting the capture of Rome. Crucial to the success of the operation – codenamed
Shingle
– was the speed with which the Allies moved across the marshland in the Anzio basin and into the mountains where the Germans and Italians were dug in. The initial landings caught the Germans off-guard and the Allies got ashore virtually unopposed, but within three days the Germans had reinforced their defensive positions around the beachhead with troops from the south, including a Panzer Grenadier Division and the Hermann Göring Panzer Division.

After ten days’ rest the Special Service Force, its fighting strength bolstered to 1,300 men by replacements or the return from field hospitals of wounded and sick, landed at Anzio on 1 February. The Allied front line was now 32 miles wide, and the Force’s mission was to hold an eight-mile stretch of its right-hand flank against any German attack to force them back into the sea. General Mark Clark had chosen the Force for this task because, as he wrote later, they were ‘aggressive, fearless and well-trained’.

On 2 February the Special Service Force embarked on its first aggressive patrol across the Littoria Plain, through which ran the Mussolini Canal, and above which the Germans lurked in the mountains. The Force was soon losing men to snipers and mines, but within a week their belligerence had forced the Germans to pull back half a mile. Snipers became less of a threat, but the German artillery fire was still heavy at times. Undeterred, the Force moved beyond the canal and occupied the villages that lay between the waterway and the mountains. The village of Sabotino was renamed ‘Gusville’ in honour of Lieutenant Gus Heilman, whose patrol had been the first to enter. Soon Gusville became the headquarters of the 2nd Company, 1st Regiment, and it received a visit from a correspondent for
Stars and Stripes
, the US Army newspaper:

On the surface, this fantastic community appears to be just a collection of huts and tents and a few buildings; the home of cows, chickens, horses and a few pigs. But it is also home of sudden death – for Gusville is the base used by our reckless Anzio commandos whose motto is ‘Killing is our business’.

Every night the Black Devils of Gusville, American and Canadian troops, steal quietly out of town, move over deep into enemy lines to kill or capture Germans. ‘Black Devils’ is what the Nazis call them; the Fifth Army troops call them the wild men of the beachhead … it is another spot where it is being proved that the men of the Allied nations can be fused into a deadly fighting machine. And it is being demonstrated here that these fighting men do not lose their high courage, their lighthearted spirit and their sense of humour, even under the toughest battle conditions.
⁹

According to Robert Adleman and George Walton in their account of the Special Service Force,
The Devil’s Brigade,
the satanic moniker originated in a diary found on the body of a dead officer from the Hermann Göring Division killed during a patrol. An entry when translated read: ‘The Black Devils are all around us every time we come into the line, and we never hear them come.’

The blackness, a reference to the chalk used as camouflage by the men, wasn’t the only sinister accessory of the Special Service Force men at Anzio. To further strike fear into the enemy, Frederick had some calling cards printed for his men to leave on the bodies of the German dead. Underneath the Force’s red arrowhead insignia was a message in German:
Das dicke Ende kommt noch
, or ‘The Worst is Yet to Come’.

Unlike the fighting on Monte la Difensa, where killing took precedence over capturing, at Anzio Frederick wanted as many Germans as possible caught for interrogation purposes. One of the most successful hauls netted 111 Germans, when a patrol led by Lieutenant George Krasevac infiltrated the enemy’s front lines and surprised them as they assembled for a patrol of their own. One German officer subsequently admitted to Frederick that they had assumed the Special Service Force was a division and not a brigade.

The patrols continued throughout the early spring, with Frederick often accompanying his men. One of his fellow officers, Colonel Kenneth Wickham, recalled that his reason for doing so was to ‘check the conduct of the night patrols. He had a sense of where and when he was needed. The men became aware that they would often find him in a critical area.’

After 99 days on the front line, the Force was withdrawn in May and allowed 12 days of rest. By now the unit’s fighting strength was 2,000 and when they saw the arrival at their rest camp of several armoured half-tracks they guessed their role was soon to change. Sure enough, when they returned to the fray on 23 May it was as part of the VI Corps breakout from Anzio, codenamed Operation
Buffalo
.

While the main thrust was aimed at Campoleone, Velletri and Cisterna, the Special Service Force’s job was to protect the right flank of the advance. The first day’s objective was to seize Highway 7 to Rome, which was achieved, but some of the men advanced so quickly once across the highway that they became isolated and were caught by the retreating Germans.

One by one the Allies’ aims were fulfilled and the breakout from Anzio quickened, although the Germans staged an aggressive withdrawal, bombarding the Allied units who chased them too vigorously. In one such incident the brigade suffered many casualties at Artena when they ran into a barrage of German 88mm artillery. Nonetheless on 3 June Frederick, now a brigadier general in overall command of a pathfinder task force called ‘Howze’, led his brigade towards Rome. He had suffered two slight wounds in the preceding days but he was determined to be at the head of his men as they entered the Eternal City. Later, in a report written at the request of the War Department to clarify the timing of the seizure of Rome, Frederick described the hours leading up to the Force being one of the very first Allied units into the Italian capital:

Early on 4 June 1944 the First Special Service Force was directed to enter the city of Rome and to secure bridges over the Tiber River. Elements of the First Special Service Force with attached elements of the 1st Armored Division proceeded toward Rome from the East, the assault force attacking along Highway 6.

At 0620 hours, 4 June 1944, the head of the assault force column passed the city limits of Rome and entered the city. This column was preceded by reconnaissance personnel who worked into the city as far as the main railroad station before returning to report their observations. This assault column consisted of 1st Armored Division vehicles on which personnel of the First Special Service Force were riding, with personnel of the First Special Service Force on foot ahead and on the flanks of the motor column.

When a portion of the assault column had entered the city, the enemy opened fire with anti-tank artillery which prevented further forward movement of the Armored Division vehicles until after the enemy defences had been neutralized. However, troops of the First Special Service Force continued on into the city in a manoeuvre to outflank the enemy defences. I can state the time of entering the city with certainty as I was in a radio vehicle near the head of the column and checked the time frequently during the advance. I definitely remember that it was 0620 hours on 4 June 1944, when the leading vehicles crossed the city limits.
¹⁰

What Frederick omitted to include in his report was the moment he was wounded when an enemy shell exploded close to his armoured half-track, a shard of shrapnel cutting open his leg. Despite the wound, Frederick spent the afternoon of 4 June checking the bridges along the Tiber for demolition charges. At the 110m-long Margherita Bridge Frederick’s patrol encountered a detachment of Germans, holding the bridge for any stragglers from the east of the city. A firefight ensured in which three Germans were killed and 12 captured, but Frederick’s driver was killed and he suffered further wounds to his leg, as well as one to his arm. The wounds, the eighth and ninth that Frederick had sustained in the war, gave rise to his reputation as the ‘most-shot-at-and-hit general in American history’.

While Frederick was flown back to a hospital in Anzio, his men decamped to Tor Sapienza, a suburb in the east of Rome, and from there they were sent to the far more salubrious shores of Lake Albano, 12 miles south-east of the capital. Frederick soon joined his men at the lake, albeit with an arm and a leg in plaster, and on 23 June he had them assembled for an address. To the disbelief of the Special Service Force, Frederick announced he had been posted to another command. One sergeant present said that the men ‘cried like babies’ when Frederick informed his men he was moving on.

Frederick had been promoted to major general (at 37 the youngest man to hold the rank in the US Army Ground Forces) and was destined for command of the 1st Airborne Task Force and a role in the invasion of southern France. Nevertheless despite the honour, he regretted the severance of a two-year bond with the Special Service Force and it pained him that he wasn’t able to tell his men why he was leaving.

Having left the 1st Special Service Force, Frederick took up his new appointment and hurriedly began preparing for Operation
Dragoon
, the codename for the invasion of southern France. With the Allies struggling to break out of the Normandy beachhead, it had been decided to open a second front at the other end of the country. The task fell to the soldiers of the American VI Corps under Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott, all of whom were veterans of the bitter fighting in and around Anzio. To assist VI Corps, a new airborne division had been raised – the 1st Airborne Task Force.

With the exception of the British 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade, the Task Force was all-American, comprising the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the 517th Parachute Combat Team, the 550th Glider Infantry Battalion and the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion. In addition another unit was formed specifically for the invasion – the Provisional Troop Carrier Air Division, consisting of 450 American transport planes and 550 gliders, the aircraft that would take the Task Force into France.

To assist Frederick in his daunting task of preparing the Task Force for Operation
Dragoon
, 35 airborne staff officers were posted to his side. In a matter of weeks they had to devise the best strategy for carrying out their allotted task: to jump into the Le Muy area, a few miles inland between Cannes and Toulon on the French Mediterranean coast, and prevent German reinforcements reaching the beaches where the main landing was taking place. Facing Frederick’s Task Force was the German Nineteenth Army under the command of General Hubert Weise. The Nineteenth Army contained many Eastern European volunteers who were prepared to fight to the death rather than risk capture and execution on return to their homeland.