Assignment to Hell (31 page)

Bigart described the pipe-smoking Bernard as “wiry,” but photos taken the next day suggest that “wan” might have been a better adjective. With his men squatting in front of him, Bernard “told some jokes, unprintable here but suited to the occasion,” Bigart wrote. “Faces relaxed.”
⁶

A battalion mate remembered that Bernard had two favorite expressions, which, for effect, he often spliced together: “Horseshit!” and “Get off the beach!” Out of affection his men dubbed him Horseshit Bernard.

“He was never satisfied with the speed with which we got off the beach,” the friend recalled. “At the beginning of every critique, he would say, ‘What I saw out there was a lot of horseshit! You were too slow getting off the beach! That’s pure horseshit!’”
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As the men strained to hear Horseshit Bernard, a blare came from the foredeck. Some commandoes scrambled for cover alongside a hunk of tarpaulin; others jumped behind a mast.

“Then someone laughed, and the laughter spread uncontrollably,” Bigart noted. “The cry that cleared the decks was ‘Chow!’”

Bernard led his officers into the wardroom where they ate their snack while reviewing a map of Brolo and Monte Cipolla. Each officer had been assigned a series of specific tasks. A kid engineering lieutenant from Anoka, Minnesota, named Walter W. Wagner had a big job. Once he cleared the beach of mines and barbed wire—no small task—Wagner would be in charge of loading ammunition and supplies onto vehicles moving inland.

The officers studied their landing target, a five-hundred-yard tuft between the dry mouths of the Naso and Brolo rivers. Bigart joined them in examining air reconnaissance photos of a culvert beneath the railroad that hugged the coast. Bernard reminded his duck and amphibious tank drivers that the underpass was navigable—probably the best means to get inland in a hurry. He also stressed that the first two hundred yards beyond the beach were fairly flat, dotted with vineyards and lemon orchards. But once the invaders got beyond the road they would hit what Bigart called the “sheer slopes” of Monte Cipolla.

At one o’clock Bernard halted the briefing, lit his pipe, and lightened the mood by reading a letter written by his three-year-old daughter. Bernard’s gentle blue eyes again turned serious.

“Amphibious operations are no fun—definitely,” Bernard said. “It’ll be darker than the inside of a witch’s hat on that beach. And this time the Germans should be ready for us.”

The first and second waves of attackers went below, boarded the duck boats, and waited. And waited. Ghostly blue lights made the moment even eerier, Bigart noted.

“Helmeted heads and rifles glistened in the semidarkness,” wrote Homer’s friend Tom Treanor. The men were allowed to smoke until the attack boats shoved off. A seasick soldier began retching. Finally, someone barked, “Kick over your engines!”
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A lone harmonica player began a mournful rendition of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”
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The soldiers might not have known the lyrics by heart, but the reporters surely did. By the time they murmured “in the roaring traffic’s boom,” Bigart, Treanor, Belden, and Whitehead were no doubt anxiously scouring the shore for signs of enemy artillery.

Sounding like a flotilla of motorboats, the ducks circled for several minutes until what Treanor called “their little flock” had fully gathered. “Let’s go, then!” Bernard bellowed.
¹⁰

As they got under way, a GI sitting near Don Whitehead stage-whispered, “Why don’t we do this more often?” drawing nervous chuckles across the water.
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An orange quarter moon had gone down; the sky was now filled, Treanor noted, with “pitiless” stars. “The black mass of Monte Cipolla
¹²
blotted the stars directly ahead,” Bigart wrote.

It took a bit longer than Bernard had reckoned to churn the two-plus miles to shore. It was 0243, thirteen minutes past H hour, before the first wave of ducks, hauling minesweepers, wire cutters, and a detachment of infantry, waddled across the pebbly beach. Bigart was in the second wave. From his perch on the DUKW, he breathed a sigh of relief that the initial attackers had “done their work without arousing the shore sentries.”

Remarkably, for the second time in three days the Second Battalion caught the enemy napping, at least at first; Brolo’s beach and adjoining fields were unoccupied. “Our duck scrunched through the sand and came to a gentle halt near the orchard rim,” Bigart wrote. “A big gap had been cut in the barbed wire and we started running down a lane toward the hill.”
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Their furtive dash—“Watch the fucking barbed wire!”
¹⁴
one GI warned—took them to the edge of the village. “Tense and breathless, we huddled in front of the first house in Brolo, our ears straining for the sound of enemy traffic,” Bigart noted.

An enemy truck rumbled in the distance, then drove past, unsuspecting; the commandoes held their fire. “A minute later along came a small tan Italian car. Sixty rifles blazed and the [vehicle] burst into flames,” Bigart wrote. Two men leapt out, screaming. One went down; the other kept running. “There he goes! Hit the bastard!” a GI shrieked.
¹⁵
There was another shower of bullets. “We could hear them whimpering for another ten minutes, then silence,” Bigart wrote. One of the enemy soldiers had been killed; the other severely wounded.

Soon enough, they heard an ominous clanking. They assumed it was an enemy tank and dove behind a stone wall. It turned to be a less lethal half-track.

“Shoot, you stupid clown!” hissed an officer at a bazooka gunner. “‘Can’t,’ drawled the soldier. ‘Some of our men across the road are directly in the line of fire.’” The bazooka man waited until the half-track was fifty yards removed before cutting loose.

A dazed German soldier, probably wounded, stumbled out. He staggered over the stone wall, heading toward the murky figures he could see under a copse of trees. His last words before being shot by a dozen riflemen were “Herr Lieutenant!”
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By now the Germans in Brolo were wide-awake and scrambling. Within seconds an enemy machine gun started firing, sending a stream of red tracers over the attackers’ heads and into the Tyrrhenian. The Americans began clambering up Monte Cipolla, until an enemy gunner spat at them from farther up the slope. “We pressed against the cliffside as bullets whined over our heads,” Bigart wrote. “A spate of rifle fire silenced the gun. We heard no further shooting until dawn.”

Sweating buckets in the oppressive heat, the raiders continued to climb, often reduced to all fours, hoisting themselves up the hill by grabbing shoots of grass and bushes.
¹⁷
They could hear trucks being unloaded on the beach instead of at the base of the mountain and instinctively knew something was wrong. The railroad underpass had proved too narrow; a precious half hour had been squandered while Lieutenant Wagner and his engineers rigged a ramp.

It seemed to take forever to the out-of-shape correspondents, but finally they crested the summit. To their astonishment they discovered eight slumbering Germans sharing the same blanket, oblivious to the bedlam seven hundred feet below. They tied up the Germans and spent the predawn hours digging foxholes and trenches, then tried to catch some rest under a grove of olive trees.
¹⁸
At daybreak they spotted forty to fifty enemy troops in the valley making a beeline toward Brolo, but a U.S. machine gunner forced them back into the woods. The Germans soon retaliated by killing fifteen GIs bravely stringing phone wire uphill. Grenadiers also slaughtered twenty-two of the twenty-four mules the Army had requisitioned to haul ammunition and food up the mountain.

Whitehead happened to overhear Bernard mutter something about the “absolute confusion” that plagues amphibious landings.
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No doubt Bernard peppered his remarks with a few well-chosen “horseshits,” which Whitehead kept out of his journal.

Around 0800 Bigart heard Bernard predict that before long German artillery and tanks would begin zeroing in. “I’m going to ask the Navy for point-blank fire on the town.” What Bernard didn’t know was that the
Philadelphia
and its escorts, worried about daylight attacks from the Luftwaffe, had already vacated the beachhead. It took two and a half hours before the worried Truscott, who’d just learned that his inland troops had been stymied in their advance toward Cape Orlando and Monte Cipolla, prevailed on the
Philadelphia
to get back into range to fire at enemy entrenchments.

The cruiser’s guns kept the Germans at bay for a while. But again the ship turned back toward Palermo Harbor. By late morning the raiders’ luck had run out. At 11:40, Bigart spotted a big enemy gun being mounted in an orchard east of town. Seventy minutes later, the reporters could see German soldiers hustling at the foot of the mountain, reconnoitering to counterattack. Mortar fire began plastering the hill.

“From a jutting crag atop the mountain we saw two Tiger tanks creep down the single street of Brolo,” Bigart wrote the next day. “Almost simultaneously a Tiger and a Mark IV tank crawled out from behind a bend in
the coastal road west of our position. They looked like harmless little bugs as they scurried for the cover of a closer bend.

“Lying snug in a tuft of red-top hay, we felt no fear. We were 700 feet above the road, and height gives a deceptive feeling of confidence. We had yet to learn that the Germans could lift a storm of shrapnel to our ledge, ripping some of us to shreds before the day was gone.”
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Stuffing his last tobacco into a pipe, Bernard again radioed Truscott for help. The Third Division head ordered the
Philadelphia
to resume its barrage; for forty brief minutes it did, but repeated Focke-Wulf attacks sent it hightailing west. “We’ll catch hell this afternoon,” Bernard solemnly predicted.
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They did. German mortar, artillery, and tank shells killed and wounded dozens, triggered fires that destroyed the hastily laid telephone wires, and cut off Bernard’s communications down below with both his troops and naval gunfire observers.

“The sun beat mercilessly on our summit bivouac,” Bigart wrote. “Dripping perspiration, we hacked slit trenches in the rocky soil beneath the almond trees.”
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They soon began running out of water, food, and ammunition. The reporters were so parched, they stood in line to stick their canteens in a slimy ditch “alive with wrigglers,” Treanor reported.
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But German artillery soon zeroed in on the spring, eliminating the raiders’ only water source.
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At around four o’clock a cheer went up and down the mountain as seven American A-36 fighter-bombers zoomed over. But poorly directed pilots bombed Bernard’s command post by accident, scattering GIs into their slit trenches and inflicting nineteen horrific casualties. Then, compounding their woes, the friendly planes bombed the commandoes’ position farther down the hill, immobilizing their last four howitzers. A medic whose arm had been mangled in the air attack tried to amputate it with a pocketknife. The Germans began moving snipers and machine gunners up the slope; it looked like the enemy would storm the crest at any instant.
²⁵

His hands tied, Truscott ordered a reprise attack from the
Philadelphia
, which this time had to fight off a swarm of Focke-Wulfs as it fired a thousand
shells in a fifteen-minute fusillade. Once the shelling stopped, Bernard sent word for the few survivors down below to join the men at the summit for what he felt sure would be their last stand. A few of Bernard’s valley charges chose a different route, jumping into the Tyrrhenian and thrashing toward Palermo.

Enemy sharpshooters got close enough to knock out Bernard’s only functioning radio; now the men of the Second Battalion were completely cut off and surrounded. Resigned to their fate, they dug deeper trenches, with Bigart, Treanor, and Whitehead furiously scraping, too. Bernard fortified his position by collapsing his rear and flank guards into a tiny perimeter. Most men by then were out of bullets. In toto, they had fewer than two dozen mortar shells.

Into the night and early morning, they braced themselves for the attack that would obliterate them. It never came.
²⁶

At first light they were startled to see American trucks and jeeps heading up the coast road. A few minutes later, an Army runner who’d pounded up the mountain informed Bernard, between pants, that the enemy had abandoned Brolo and was retreating toward Messina. Sure enough: Bernard trained his binoculars west and could see forward elements of the 30th Division coming to relieve him. Miraculously, the Second Battalion had again beaten the odds.

So had Bigart and the other correspondents, all of whom were lucky to be alive. “Well, we took a licking,” Bernard told Bigart as they started down the hill. “We put the cork in the bottle but we couldn’t hold it in.”
²⁷

At about 0800, Bernard, his exhausted men, and the reporters gingerly worked their way “past the torn bodies of American and German dead,” Bigart wrote. They reached the valley in time to see Patton’s command jeep, its three silver-starred pennants streaming, shriek to a halt in front of a Messina road sign. With Patton was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican whose bristly prewar isolationism had made him a darling of the America First movement.

Patton’s public relations officers, the same execs who, at their boss’ insistence, had arranged for the reporters to go on the Brolo raid, now contrived a photo opportunity. Without deigning to leave his vehicle, the
general posed for pictures with Bernard. Patton stood in the back of the jeep, imperiously staring down at his valiant lieutenant colonel, while the telltale arrow in the backdrop pointed toward Messina. The picture ran in the
Herald Tribune
and scores—probably hundreds—of other newspapers back home.

With photographers, reporters, and a U.S. senator present, Patton felt obliged to make a little speech. “Only American soldiers can climb mountains like those,” he effused, dramatically gesturing toward Cipolla with his swagger stick. Patton was full of it, of course. The Germans had been all over the mountain for months and could easily have recaptured it.