The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Darby had been busy since dawn. After a war council with his three battalion commanders, at one P.M. he conferred with Truscott in the Conca monastery, then scouted the road to Isola Bella. His 4th Battalion, led by an eight-man minesweeping crew, would press down that road at two A.M. on Sunday, opening a path toward Cisterna for heavy weapons and supplies. The 1st and 3rd Battalions would creep up the Pantano fosso, a deep irrigation ditch that roughly paralleled the road from the Mussolini Canal to within a mile of Cisterna. Ranger infiltration had succeeded admirably in Tunisia, and Darby stressed “avoiding contact with the enemy” as long as possible through the terrain the Rangers now called Jerryland. Behind the Ranger spearhead, Truscott’s 7th Infantry Regiment on the left and 15th Infantry on the right would advance on a seven-mile front, to cut Highway 7 north and south of Cisterna.
While careful to display only robust confidence to his men, Darby felt uncommon ambivalence about this evening’s mission. The size of the attack heartened him, as did intelligence suggesting the road to Cisterna was lightly held, perhaps by a German infantry regiment protecting artillery and antitank batteries. An OSS agent—one of several anti-Fascists recruited in Naples and living in a Nettuno barracks equipped with a radio and a Ping-Pong table—had just returned from two days behind the lines to report seeing only four enemy battalions along the Conca–Cisterna corridor. The Rangers seemed indomitable. When Darby asked a young private first class if he was nervous, the soldier replied, “I’m not nervous, sir. I’m just shaking with patriotism.” They were “the finest body of troops ever gathered together,” Darby had told an OSS officer. “They don’t surrender either. They fight for keeps.”
Yet the expansion of the force from one battalion to three, and the loss of veteran Rangers since the TORCH landings fifteen months earlier, had led to a deterioration in fighting skills, noise discipline, and fieldcraft. Too many men still bunched up when moving cross-country, or failed to freeze when a flare popped. How many knew to muffle a canteen with an old sock, or to suppress a cough with fingers pressed on the Adam’s apple, or to dull a helmet’s gleam with mud or wood smoke?
The Cisterna plan also nagged at Darby. Was it too risky, too bold? Would Truscott’s infantry quickly reinforce the Ranger infiltrators? No Ranger reconnaissance had been possible past Isola Bella for fear of alerting the Germans. Aerial photos had seemed to show fields crisscrossed with hedgerows, which instead proved to be briar-choked irrigation ditches. The loss on Wednesday of two mortar companies aboard the ill-fated LST 422 had been a blow, and this afternoon Darby realized that the ground was too boggy for other mortarmen to negotiate the Pantano Ditch; the heavy tubes instead would have to come up the road behind the 4th Battalion, along with the machine guns. Finally, a new fragment of intelligence had arrived an hour after sunset, at 6:35 P.M.: “The city may have considerable opposition.”
By then the men had begun to filter out of their pine redoubt, singing “Pistol Packin’ Mama” as they shambled under an overcast sky in columns of twos toward the line of departure, seven miles north. Usually the passwords chosen for an operation contained sounds difficult for German-speakers to pronounce: the “th” in “thistle” or the rolling “r” in “price.” Tonight’s challenge-and-parole was simple: “bitter/sweet.” Upon reaching Cisterna—known by the unfortunate code-name EASY—the Rangers were to loft several red Very flares to signal their success.
The singing ceased. “Morale of men was excellent,” the 1st Battalion log noted. The 3rd Battalion commander, Major Alvah H. Miller, had recently written a poem describing a walk through the Ranger bivouac late at night, listening to the sounds of his slumbering men: one laughs aloud, playing with the son he has never seen; another murmurs his wife’s name, Marilyn; another whimpers under dreamy shell fire that unsettles his sleep.
At midnight, Darby met for a final time with his battalion commanders beside the Conca road. The officers stamped their feet against the biting cold as he reminded them to maintain radio silence for as long as possible.
Good luck, Darby told them. With his rolling gait, elbows cocked, he strode to an isolated farmhouse on the right side of the road where his command post had been set up. The commanders rejoined their waiting troops, blue and vague in the moonless night. Only their eyes glinted from faces daubed with burnt cork. Beyond the Mussolini Canal, four miles from Cisterna, the three battalions separated. The 4th veered left toward the road. The 1st and 3rd tramped single file across a fallow field. Soon the column descended into the Pantano Ditch, like a snake slithering into a hole. The officers took compass readings by matchlight, then pressed north.
At three A.M., near Isola Bella, barely half a mile up the Conca road, the 4th Battalion found trouble. A long burst from a German machine pistol tore open the night, and sheets of fire soon poured from several red farm buildings. One Ranger company was pinned down three hundred yards east of the road; fifteen minutes later a second company was immobilized. Enemy rifle pits had been dug every thirty feet and stiffened by machine-gun nests at hundred-yard intervals. Grazing fire swarmed a foot off the ground, killing a Ranger captain, among others. Mortar rounds stomped across a landscape that soon reeked of blown powder and turned earth. A crude roadblock built from two wrecked jeeps and an Italian truck halted the rest of the battalion, and for the rest of the night three hundred Rangers lay flat in their icy furrows, shooting at muzzle flashes fifty yards away. Worse yet, in the Anzio anchorage twelve miles distant a burning ammunition ship exploded at four A.M. in a white pillar of flame, casting long shadows across the Conca road and backlighting the Rangers for enemy snipers. From his farmhouse command post, Darby kept an ear cocked to the commotion two thousand yards north. “This was the first intimation,” he later wrote, “that all was not well.”
All was not well in the Pantano Ditch, either. Eight hundred helmets bobbed just below field level as the mile-long column meandered through the muddy scarp, often knee-deep in black water. “We could hear mortar and artillery barrages landing to our left flank,” a Ranger later reported. “Someone whispered, ‘The 4th must be having a bad time.’” Two miles from Cisterna, the 1st Battalion commander, Major Jack Dobson, realized that the 3rd Battalion had fallen behind. Ordering three companies to wait, Dobson pressed ahead with his other three. A runner dispatched to find the missing Rangers soon returned with inauspicious news: Alvah Miller, the 3rd Battalion poet-commander, had been blown to pieces by a point-blank panzer shell in a chance encounter at a German outpost. Avenging Rangers fired the tank with sticky grenades, but the column had been sundered.
Dobson’s vanguard of 150 Rangers crept past a pair of Nebelwerfer batteries, near enough to hear German voices and to see whip antennas silhouetted against the sky. A mile from Cisterna, the ditch angled northwest to end in a culvert under the Conca road. German vehicles whizzed past in both directions, and a pair of self-propelled guns two hundred yards away fired at the beachhead with a monotonous thud. In hushed tones, Dobson tried to reach Darby by radio; the enemy force appeared much larger than expected, and with Miller dead perhaps it made sense to swing both battalions to the east, where the Mussolini Canal could shield their flank. After ten minutes, unable to raise the command post, Dobson cradled the handset. Without Darby’s approval, he could not alter the plan.
Across the road the Rangers stole, melting into an olive orchard on the far side. A German sentry flopped beneath a silver bough, blood cascading from his slashed throat. Tendrils of gray light began to bleach the eastern sky. Dobson swerved north on a trail parallel to the Conca road, the Rangers now at a trot, racing the dawn. A shout carried, then another, then a gunshot. Dark figures wrapped in blankets rose from the earth, stumbling about as Dobson’s men realized they had blundered into a German camp. Another sentry fell with his throat opened in a crimson crescent, screaming to wake the living and the dead alike. The mêlée spread across the bivouac—“chaos compounded,” in one description—and the pulpy sound of plunging knives and bayonets could b
Dawn, that harsh betrayer of predicaments, revealed this one. The Rangers occupied a triangular field half a mile across, bounded by the Conca road on the east, the Ponte Rotta road on the north, and a boggy skein of irrigation ditches to the west. Several hundred yards beyond the intersecting roads lay a rail embankment and the Cisterna train station. A ramshackle farmstead known as the Calcaprini house provided a command post for Dobson, who estimated that at least seven German machine guns now ranged his position from tree lines to the north and west.
Hardly had the Rangers begun to dig in than from the south came the creak of tank tracks. Certain that 4th Battalion had broken through with an armored spearhead, the men cheered lustily, until the underbrush parted to reveal the iron cross insignia of a Mk IV panzer.
“Then it opened up on us,” Corporal Ben W. Mosier recalled. “After the first volley, you felt naked.” Several self-propelled guns also clanked into view. Rangers swarmed forward. Shooting at vision slits, they leaped onto the hulls to lift the hatches and spray the crews with their tommy guns. Dobson shot a tank commander with his .45 pistol and flipped a white-phosphorus grenade into the turret. Milky smoke boiled from the vents; as he leaped from the tank, a bazooka round detonated against the bogie wheels, wounding him badly in the left hip.
From Highway 7 and the hills above Cisterna, German reinforcements boiled into the fight beneath an overcast sky that kept Allied warplanes at bay. Step by step the Rangers retreated until nine companies had squeezed into an exposed swatch three hundred yards across, just below the Ponte Rotta road; three others went to ground southeast of the main force. Wounded soldiers jammed a stone building near the Calcaprini house that had been converted to an aid station. As a German soldier crept toward the window with a grenade, medic Micky T. Romine shot him in the face with a .45. “I have shot that man a thousand times in my dreams,” he later confessed. Panzer machine guns stitched the ditches and marsh brakes. “You could run about twenty yards and then hit the ground,” Sergeant Thomas B. Fergen recalled. “If you waited longer, they got you.” A Ranger severely wounded in the face asked Fergen to shoot him. “We’re finished,” he said, “and I don’t want them to get me.” Fergen shook his head. “Don’t be crazy,” he murmured.
Rangers held in reserve gave half their ammunition to comrades in the line, but by late morning precious little remained. German snipers fired from trees, houses, holes, and farm silos, each terrifying pop! punctuating the larger din. “The tracers were flying close enough to stop them with your hand,” a Ranger said. A platoon leader shot in the chest sprayed blood with every breath; so many leaders had fallen that their inexperienced subordinates struggled to adjust artillery fires.
Shortly after noon someone cried, “Them bastards is giving up!” Three hundred yards to the south, a dozen captured Rangers from the 3rd Battalion walked with their hands high toward the Calcaprini house, trailed by a German paratrooper squad and a pair of armored personnel carriers. As the group approached, Rangers on the flanks opened fire, killing two guards. Other Germans bayoneted two American captives in the back. “Surrender,” a voice called in accented English, “or we shall shoot the prisoners.” More Rangers tossed aside their rifles and with hands raised joined the captives. When the ragged procession closed to within 150 yards of the command post, a Ranger “fired a shot into our column and killed one of our men,” Captain Charles M. Shunstrom later recounted. “This one shot started everybody else firing, and the result was that two or three of our own men were killed in the column plus one or two German guards.” The Germans scattered as grenadiers and armor crews “started to spray our column of prisoners with automatic fire.” More Rangers surrendered, Shunstrom reported, and “even an attempt to stop them by shooting them failed.”
Darby for several hours had labored under the sweet illusion that despite 4th Battalion’s travails the infiltrators were “apparently okay,” as he told Truscott’s headquarters by phone. Shortly before five A.M., he added, “Things are going well.” But by first light he was worried. At 6:15 he reported that the Ranger force “is having a hell of a time. There isn’t any contact with my 1st and 3rd battalions.” A reconnaissance troop barreling up the Conca road in jeeps hit “a solid sheet of machine gun fire and hand grenades”; of forty-three men, only one escaped capture or death.
News from Truscott’s regiments was relentlessly grim. On Darby’s flanks, the 7th Infantry and 15th Infantry were each to have infiltrated a battalion followed by tanks. The 1st Battalion of the 15th Infantry was pinned down immediately and by nightfall on January 30 had covered barely a mile. The 1st Battalion of the 7th Infantry fared even worse, struggling with barbed wire, steep ditches, German flares, and casualties that by sunset pared the unit from 800 men to 150. Sergeant Truman O. Olson, a machine gunner in B Company, fired more than three thousand rounds before being mortally wounded; he was among four 3rd Division soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor for valor at Cisterna, three of them posthumously.
At seven A.M., the first radio dispatch from Major Dobson—with word of Miller’s death—told Darby that his entire command was at risk. An hour later, the news was even more dire, but the radio failed and not until early afternoon could signalers again raise the embattled Rangers at the Calcaprini house. A weepy 1st Battalion captain sounded so overwrought that Darby asked to speak to Sergeant Major Robert E. Ehalt, one of his original Rangers.
“Some of the fellows are giving up, Colonel.” Ehalt spoke slowly, his voice steady. “We are awfully sorry. They can’t help it, because we’re running out of ammunition. But I ain’t surrendering.”
An eavesdropping stenographer at Conca jotted down Darby’s frantic reply. “Shoot if they come any closer,” he said. “Issue some orders but don’t let the boys give up…. Who’s walking in with their hands up? Don’t letthem do it! Get the officers to shoot…. Get the old men together and lam for it…. We’re coming through…. Hang on to this radio until the last minute. How many men are still with you? Stick together.”
Muffled gunfire crackled through the speaker. “They are coming into the building now,” Ehalt said. “So long, Colonel. Maybe when it’s all over I’ll see you again.”
“Use your head and do what is best,” Darby said. “You’re there and I’m here, unfortunately, and I can’t help you. But whatever happens, God bless you…. God bless all of you.”
Darby’s voice thickened. “Ehalt, I leave everything in your hands,” he said. “Tell the men I am with them to the end.”
A moment later he phoned Truscott. “My old sergeant major stayed with the last ten men. It apparently was too much for them.” Then, asking his staff to leave the room, Darby laid his head on his arms and sobbed. Sergeant Carlo Contrera, who had served as Darby’s driver since North Africa, later observed, “He couldn’t stand the thought of what was happening to them.”
Truscott had stood watch on the second floor of his Conca monastery from two A.M. until first light on Sunday. To the north, German tracers flailed a landscape washed in cold flare light, and artillery flashes limned the horizon. “Situation is confused,” noted the 3rd Division log. At dawn a fleet of Sherman tanks and tank destroyers lumbered up the Conca road. “Smoke, dust, the tiny darting figures of men, a great cacophony,” wrote another officer, watching through the upstairs casement.
Confusion and cacophony persisted all day. Teller mines halted the tanks just two hundred yards past the 4th Rangers at Isola Bella; eventually the German roadblock gave way, but an even stronger blocking position at Femina Morta—place of the dead woman—again thwarted the American drive. Darby’s account of his conversation with Ehalt struck Truscott l
Litter bearers staggered back across the polders, “packing meat.” Exhausted soldiers chewed malt and dextrose tablets, their eyelids “heavy as silver dollars,” the mortarman Hans Juergensen wrote. Audie Murphy, now a sergeant and recently returned to the 3rd Division after a bout of malaria, described “jeeps drawing trailerloads of corpses…. Arms and legs bobble grotesquely over the sides of the vehicles.” A German shell knocked Murphy senseless; upon regaining consciousness, he found the soldier next to him dead. “Living now becomes a matter of destiny, or pure luck,” he wrote. “The medics are bloody as butchers…. I see one medic fall dead on a man whose wounds he was dressing. A scrap of metal severed his backbone.”
For a renewed push on Monday, January 31, half a dozen generals crowded the Conca monastery, including Clark and Lucas. Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers, visiting from Algiers, brought a bottle of Gilbey’s gin for Truscott’s throat, now “considerably worse” from too many cigarettes and too little sleep. Low clouds precluded air support, again, and the high command’s hopes rested with Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey, whose 2nd Battalion of the 15th Infantry was to veer west of Isola Bella before driving north into Cisterna. Toffey had endured his own close calls at Anzio, escaping with a shredded field jacket and minor wounds when a mine demolished his jeep. “Generally decrepit but still in there punching okay,” he wrote Helen on January 29. His men had deftly seized three bridges over the Mussolini Canal and destroyed four others. “Tired but sleepless; never loses aplomb or sense of humor,” Will Lang jotted in his notebook after following Toffey across the beachhead. “Not a man to let a weapon sit around without using it.”