The Day of Battle (61 page)

Five hundred yards downstream, at the 3rd Battalion crossing site, no retreat was necessary since not a single soldier had reached the far shore. Plagued with bumbling engineers and skittish riflemen, companies had wandered in and out of minefields for hours. “The flashes seemed to turn the fog rising from the river into a reddish glow,” one officer wrote. “The men were unable to identify even the path at their feet.” At midnight the battalion commander reported that he had five boats remaining and still was unsure where to find the river; at five
A.M
. he was relieved of command, and his successor soon canceled the attack.

This bad news was scribbled on a message slip for General Keyes and entrusted to a carrier pigeon by a II Corps liaison officer near the Rapido. At 7:25
A.M
., with a great flutter of wings, the bird was released and flew straight to a nearby tree, perhaps dispirited by the fog and gunplay. “I had to throw dirt at it to get it out,” the officer reported. “When it flew to another tree, I just left it there.”

Neither Keyes nor Walker needed a pigeon to tell him that the evening had not gone well. After sitting by the field phones in his command post all
night, Walker advised his diary on January 21, “The attack last night was a failure.” But now what? Crossing the river in daylight would be foolish, he believed. Time was needed to draft new orders, to position new boats, and to replace leaders who had been wounded or killed. At 8:30
A.M
., Walker told the 141st and 143rd to resume the attack in just over twelve hours, at nine
P.M
.

Keyes had other ideas. At ten
A.M
. he strode into Walker’s Monte Rotondo command post. A few minutes earlier, Clark had urged Keyes by phone to “bend every effort to get tanks and tank destroyers across promptly.” Keyes concurred. Weren’t there at least some troops from the 141st Infantry still on the west bank? he asked Walker. No effort should be spared to reinforce them, preferably before noon: the rising sun would blind German defenders. A II Corps staff officer with a clipboard sketched a crude map of the Rapido, with arrows pointing from east to west. Walker argued briefly, then agreed to set H-hour for two
P.M
.

“Anybody can draw lines on a map,” he wrote after the corps commander drove away. “I felt like saying that battles are not won by wishing while ignoring the facts, but this was no place to court insubordination.” Instead, Walker channeled his frustration into his diary: “The stupidity of some higher commanders seems to be profound.”

Neither Keyes nor Walker was privy to the secret, but Fifth Army’s attack had already fulfilled part of Clark’s ambition. An Ultra intercept two nights earlier disclosed that Field Marshal Kesselring had ordered the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division near Rome—half of his reserve force—to reinforce Tenth Army on the Garigliano; another decrypt soon revealed that the other half, the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division, had also been ordered south, leaving the Anzio beaches virtually undefended. However ineffectual, the British X Corps attack had spooked the Germans. Kesselring believed that Tenth Army was hanging “by a slender thread.”

This intelligence, available to Clark and Alexander but not to their subordinates, had little impact on the Rapido battle. Pressing the attack would further distract the enemy from
SHINGLE
, Clark believed. And if Walker could punch through at Sant’Angelo, unleashing his armored horde up the Liri Valley, so much the better.

Off they went, trudging like men sent to the scaffold. A soldier stumping down a sunken road toward the Rapido observed, “There was a dead man every ten yards, just like they were in formation.” Close to the river, the formation thickened. Another soldier, carrying a rubber boat, later wrote, “It didn’t seem what we were walking on was dirt and rocks. We soon found out it was dead GIs.”

On the division left, the 143rd Infantry crossed more adroitly on Friday afternoon than it had on Thursday evening. Confusion delayed the attack for two hours, but at four
P.M
., beneath a vast, choking smoke bank, the 3rd Battalion began to paddle west. By 6:30 all rifle companies had found the far shore, and Colonel Martin ordered his 2nd Battalion to follow in train late that night. A quarter mile upstream, the 1st Battalion also crossed at dusk, although the laconic battalion commander, Major Frazior, radioed, “I had a couple of fingers shot off.” Three battalions crowded a bridgehead only five hundred yards deep and six hundred yards wide. “When twilight turned to darkness,” one soldier later wrote, “I was thinking this is my last old day on earth.”

On the division right, delay begat delay in the 141st Infantry. Not least, engineers neglected to bring an air compressor to inflate fifty rubber boats, and Colonel Wyatt, the regimental commander, postponed the attack until nine
P.M
. without telling Walker. By two
A.M
. on Saturday, a pair of footbridges had been laid, and six rifle companies from two battalions soon crossed. They found no survivors from the previous night’s combat. Engineers wondered whether the Germans had left the catwalks intact “to draw more of our troops over.” Some soldiers balked at crossing the river, or deliberately tumbled into the water. Others displayed uncommon valor. Company E of the 2nd Battalion—the unit roster boasted mostly Spanish surnames, Trevino and Gonzalez, Rivera and Hernandez—advanced with bayonets fixed through sleeting fire from three sides. “Fire wholeheartedly, men, fire wholeheartedly!” cried their commander, Captain John L. Chapin, before a bullet killed him. Corraled by minefields and barbed wire, the 141st held twenty-five acres of bottomland that grew bloodier by the hour. “Well, I guess this is it,” a major told a fellow officer. “May I shake hands?” Moments later a shard from a panzer shell tore open his chest. He dragged himself to safety across a submerged bridge, and medics saved him. “It was the only time,” one witness said, “I ever saw a man’s heart flopping around in his chest.”

Artillery and Nebelwerfer drumfire methodically searched both bridgeheads, while machine guns opened on every sound, human and inhuman. GIs inched forward, feeling for trip wires and listening to German gun crews reload. “Get out of your holes, you yellow bellies!” an angry voice cried above the din, but to stand or even to kneel was to die. A sergeant in the 143rd Infantry described “one kid being hit by a machine gun—the bullets hitting him pushed his body along like a tin can.” Another sergeant wounded in the same battalion later wrote, “I could hear my bones cracking every time I moved. My right leg was so mangled I couldn’t get my
boot off, on account of it was pointed to the rear.” German surgeons would remove the boot for him, along with both legs.

A private sobbed as wounded comrades were dragged on shelter halves up the mud-slick east bank. Ambulances hauled them to a dressing station in a dank ravine behind Trocchio. Crowded tents “smelled like a slaughterhouse,” wrote the reporter Frank Gervasi. Outside a small cave in the hillside, a crudely printed sign read:
PIECES
. Inside, stacked burlap bags held the limbs of dismembered boys. On average, soldiers wounded on the Rapido received “definitive treatment” nine hours and forty-one minutes after they were hit, a medical study later found: nearly six hours to reach an aid station, followed by another three hours to a clearing station, and another hour to an evacuation hospital. The dead were easier: they were buried fully clothed without further examination.

Certainly the doctors were busy enough with the living. Only five physicians manned the clearing station of the 111th Medical Battalion. They treated more than three hundred battle casualties on Friday, often struggling to mend the unmendable, and they would handle nearly as many on Saturday. A wounded sergeant undergoing surgery with only local anesthesia later reported, “The doctor stopped in the middle of the operation to smoke a cigarette and he gave me one too.” Another sergeant from the same company told a medic, “Patch up these holes and give me a gun. I’m going to kill every son of a bitch in Germany.”

Three hundred German artillery rounds danced across Monte Rotondo before dawn on Saturday, causing casualties and disorder in the 36th Division command post. Dire reports from the river made the morning worse: heavy losses, no troops yet on the bluff at Sant’Angelo, ammo shortages, bridges wrecked. “Nearly six battalions across but no bridges,” Keyes wrote in his diary. “Something wrong.” The corps commander had ordered two Bailey bridges built despite the Americans’ shallow purchase on the west bank, but the effort—a six-hour task even under perfect conditions—had been undone by confusion among engineering units, rutted roads that kept trucks from reaching the Rapido, and incessant shooting. “Talking or coughing drew fire,” an engineer with the 143rd Infantry reported. On Saturday morning a visiting general found the bridge builders “dug in and no work being done.”

Smoke hardly helped. To screen the crossings, hundreds of smoke pots and mortar rounds had been laid along the Rapido. Some zealous mortarmen pumped out twenty-one shells per minute, a rate of fire so intense that many tubes burned out. By Saturday morning, visibility was only fifty
yards, blinding the observation posts on Trocchio and concealing German snipers who lurked near the river. American artillerymen were forced to orient their fire by sound, a method rarely effective on a cacophonous battlefield. Chemical officers in both the 36th Division and II Corps complained about German smoke without realizing that the dirty banks were their own.

As the morning wore on, “a pathetic inertia seemed to take hold of American commanders,” wrote Martin Blumenson, author of the official Army history of the Rapido operation. Exhaustion, guilt, regret, despondency—all gnawed at them. A II Corps major who had fought in Algeria and Tunisia reported, “The situation as I saw it needed no further explanation to me because I had seen the same indications at St. Cloud and at Kasserine Pass.” Keyes remained pugnacious, if not prudent, and at ten
A.M
. on Saturday he ordered Walker to prepare his reserve regiment, the 142nd Infantry, to reinforce those six battalions on the west bank. Surely the Germans were “groggy” and could be overpowered by fresh troops, he told Walker.

But Clark in a phone call cautioned against throwing good money after bad. To Keyes’s vexation, the 142nd also reported that it needed almost fifteen hours to get ready and could not attack until early Sunday. When further dispatches from the river suggested that the 141st Infantry had been “practically wiped out,” Keyes rescinded his order. “You are not going to do it anyway,” he told Walker. “You might as well call it off. It can’t succeed as long as you feel that way about it.” In his diary Keyes wrote, “Our failure due to 1) lack of means 2) poor division.”

The finger-pointing began. Clark “seemed inclined to find fault with our decision to force the Rapido,” Keyes wrote. The record, the corps commander added, would show that for months he had “pointed out [the] fallacy in going up the valley unless heights on either side were attacked! And each time I was overruled by [Fifth] Army.” For his part, Walker was furious at Keyes’s suggestion that he was disloyal and disobedient. “I have done everything possible to comply with his orders,” he wrote. During a brief visit to the 760th Tank Battalion, parked a quarter mile from the river, Walker told a tank crewman: “I knew from the beginning that this would never work. Too many damned Germans over there.”

Clark seemed to recognize that recriminations would be unseemly if not toxic. Joining Keyes and Walker at Monte Rotondo for lunch, he was affable and solicitous. “Tell me what happened up here,” he said. Keyes replied that the attack had appeared worthwhile—risky but warranted. Clark interrupted. “It was as much my fault as yours,” he said. But were the regimental commanders up to the task? How had the division staff performed?

As soon as Clark and Keyes drove off, Walker asked his assistant commander, Brigadier General William H. Wilbur, to write an affidavit documenting the conversation, including Clark’s admission of culpability. “I fully expected Clark and Keyes to can me to cover their own stupidity…but they were not in a bad mood,” Walker wrote. He taped Wilbur’s memorandum into his diary, just in case.

While the generals dined and discoursed, the remnants of two regiments struggled to extract themselves from the Rapido kill sack. By midday on Sunday, every commander in the 141st Infantry except for a single captain was dead or wounded, along with all battalion staff officers. The 143rd Infantry was hardly in better shape. Orders to fall back filtered across the river. Major Milton J. Landry, commander of the 2nd Battalion, who was spending his thirtieth birthday at the Rapido oxbow, had survived three wounds, including a hip dislocation produced by a shell fragment the size of a dinner plate and a steel shard in the chest that was partly deflected by the Parker pen in his blouse pocket. Hobbling about with a pair of paddles for crutches, Landry went down again when machine-gun fire hit him in the legs, nicking an artery and severing a sciatic nerve. “Major,” a medic told him, “I don’t believe there are enough bandages this side of the Rapido to cover all the holes in you.” Evacuated to the east bank, Landry heard another medic say, “You’ve got a boot on the end of something out here. I guess it’s your leg.”

Landry survived. So did a soldier who swam the river with one foot blown off. As dusk fell, a few dozen more struggled back, clinging to flotsam as bullets frothed the water. By early evening on Sunday, the division log estimated losses at 100 officers and 1,900 enlisted men. Gunfire dwindled to a mutter. From the darkness came an occasional plea for water or faint cries for a medic, but both sides had grown inured to supplication. Then, silence. “It was reported,” the log noted at 8:30
P.M
., “that American firing had ceased west of the river.”

A rifleman from the 143rd Infantry who regained the east bank later reflected, “I had turned into an old man overnight. I know I was never the same person again.”

The preliminary tally in the division log proved close to the mark. Official medical records listed 2,019 casualties, of whom 934 were wounded. Some counts were a bit lower, others higher; preposterously, Clark would accuse Walker of inflating his losses in a bid for sympathy. The Germans found 430 American bodies on the west bank, and took 770 prisoners; 15th Panzer Grenadier Division losses included 64 dead and 179 wounded. To the victors went a cocky insolence. A captured II Corps carrier pigeon
returned on the fly with a banded message:
“Freuen wir uns auf Euren nächsten Besuch.”
We look forward to your next visit.