The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
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.
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.
By any reckoning, two U.S. infantry regiments had been gutted in one of the worst drubbings of the war; the losses were comparable to those suffered six months later at Omaha Beach, except that that storied assault succeeded. “I had 184 men,” a company commander in the 143rd Infantry said. “Forty-eight hours later I had 17. If that’s not mass murder, I don’t know what is.” Two scarecrow battalions of the 141st when merged under the command of a captain could barely muster two hundred riflemen. Engineers reported scavenging eight M-2 boats, 323 paddles, and 4,100 feet of half-inch manila rope “in a bad tangled mess.” After pinning a Silver Star on a double amputee, Walker told his diary, “When I think of the foolish orders of the higher command which caused those broken bodies and deaths unnecessarily, it makes me feel like crying halt.”
Clark soon summoned Walker for a conference at Mignano. The two men shook hands and then strolled down the road in the morning sun, the tall, bony army commander towering above his stocky former instructor. Clark worried about the division’s morale. What could be done? Walker acknowledged a dejection after the “recent reverses and heavy losses of leaders.” Yes, Clark agreed, but those reverses had reflected a dearth of capable officers in key positions. He intended to make wholesale changes by removing Brigadier General Wilbur, both of the regimental commanders who had fought at the Rapido, the division chief of staff, and Walker’s two sons.
Stunned, Walker asked whether he also was to be sacked. “No, you are doing all right,” Clark replied. “But you have surrounded yourself with officers whose abilities do not measure up.” Walker doubted he would be spared. “This was a blow,” he told his diary. “I am marked for relief from command of the division as soon as Clark can find an easy way to do it.” When a new commander arrived to replace Colonel Martin in the 143rd Infantry, Walker told him, “Your predecessor has committed no sins of commission or omission as far as I’m concerned.”
That was wrong. Every senior officer at the Rapido had committed sins; none emerged unstained. The Army’s official history, rarely given to indictment, detected “a series of mishaps, a host of failures, a train of misfortune,” including “a mounting confusion that led to near hysteria and panic.” Clark soon found himself fighting a rearguard assault on his generalship. “If I am to be accused of something, thank God I am accused of attacking instead of retreating,” he declared.
But bluff bellicosity would not serve, as even Clark sensed. In the last diary reference he would ever make to the Rapido, he wrote on January 23: “Some blood had to be spilled on either the land or the SHINGLE front, and I greatly preferred that it be on the Rapido, where we were secure, rather than at Anzio with the sea at our back.” Perhaps so. Some strategists linked the Rapido calamity with Normandy, and with the pinching need for landing craft that had dictated quick action in Italy. “The blame must rest with those who allowed the tyranny of OVERLORD to dominate the tactical as well as the strategic battlefield,” wrote W.G.F. Jackson. Certainly Clark and Keyes had failed to enlighten Walker about how his attack at Sant’Angelo fit into larger strategic ambitions at Anzio and in western Europe.
At a cost of two thousand casualties, not even a toehold had been won at the Rapido. That also implied tactical malfeasance. “From a military standpoint, it was an impossible thing to attempt,” Kesselring would observe after the war. German defenders were unaware that an entire U.S. division had attacked; despite Kesselring’s shift of two reserve divisions from Rome to the Garigliano, no reserves had been diverted to Sant’Angelo, because none were needed. The Americans had failed to seize the high ground, failed to coordinate with the adjacent 46th Division, failed to use tank fire effectively, and failed to neutralize German artillery on the flanks.
“The attack was insufficiently planned and poorly timed,” Kesselring added. “No general should leave his flanks exposed.” Sergeant Billy Kirby of Gatesville, Texas, was no field marshal, but he concurred. “Anybody who had any experience knew this ain’t the place to cross the river,” Kirby said. A tank platoon leader expressed the prevalent disgruntlement. “It would be nice to be a private in the ranks,” he said, “untainted by association with the leadership.”
Those ranks were in a surly mood, “on the edge of mutiny,” a lieutenant in the 141st Infantry reported. Some resented being used as “cannon fodder,” as the departing Colonel Martin put it, and many shared his conviction that “a fine National Guard division was being destroyed on faulty orders from a West Point commander,” presumably Clark. Unknown to Walker, a cabal of his Texas officers met secretly after the Rapido and resolved to request a congressional inquiry after the war.
That resolution would be revived in January 1946, when the 36th Division Association demanded an investigation into the “fiasco”; the Texans accused Clark of being “inefficent and inexperienced,” and willing “to destroy the young manhood of this country.” Both the Senate and the House of Representatives held hearings, which generated more heat than light. If the Texans blamed Clark, Clark blamed Walker. “Walker’s mental attitude, that a defeat was inevitable, was a decisive factor,” Clark would tell the Pentagon. The secretary of war determined that the Rapido attack “was a necessary one and that General Clark exercised sound judgment.” The investigat
For now, as accounts of the carnage spread across Italy, officers shook their heads and thanked their lucky stars to have been spared that particular agony. Brigadier Kippenberger, whose New Zealand troops were still recovering from their own ordeal in the Winter Line, studied the field reports and concluded, “Nothing was right except the courage.”
Some hours after the final shots faded on the Rapido, a captured American private who had been released to serve as a courier stumbled into the 141st Infantry command post carrying a written message for “den englischen Kommandeur.” The panzer grenadiers proposed a three-hour cease-fire to search for the living and retrieve the dead. GIs fashioned Red Cross flags from towels and iodine, and even before the appointed hour paddled across to both regimental bridgeheads.
They found a few survivors, including Private Arthur E. Stark, known as Sticks, who had carried a battalion switchboard across the river for the 143rd Infantry before being hit by shell fragments. For three days he had lain exposed to January weather. “Did you have a big Christmas? You should have seen mine,” he had written his eleven-year-old sister, Carole, earlier that month. “The little boys and girls over here didn’t have much Christmas.” Sticks lingered for two days after his rescue, then passed over. Other cases ended better: a forward observer with half his face blown away appeared to be dead, but a medic noticed the lack of rigor mortis. Surgeons would reconstruct his visage from a photograph mailed by his family.
For three hours they gathered the dead, reaping what had been sown. Wehrmacht medics worked side by side with the Americans, making small talk and offering tactical critiques of the attack. German photographers wandered the battlefield, snapping pictures. An American reporter studied the looming rock face of Monte Cassino with its all-seeing white monastery. “Sooner or later,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to blow that place all to hell.”