Incident on the Rapido

At night, after two days of preparatory shelling, orders came to attack the enemy positions across the Rapido. A thick haze rose from the ground, and through it men stumbled toward the river. Here & there, the earth heaved and roared, and exploding mines killed and maimed men. Many others were killed in boats or on a narrow, ice-coated footbridge. But some got across and dug their foxholes. The haze was still thick.

Late in the morning the sun tore the haze into milky shreds. With the visibility good, German machine guns, mortars, artillery opened up. The Germans sat behind their log-and-stone defenses and shouted in English: "Yank, give up." Or, "Major Brown says surrender."

The men squatted in their foxholes, now filled with icy water, and waited. Occasionally they tossed hand grenades. The wounded lay quietly, or mumbled "Medic." No supplies or food could be brought across the river, no wounded could be moved back.

On the second night the attack was resumed across the plowed fields sown with mines. Advance elements cut the German barbed wire. But when the second morning arrived, the Germans were still all around, and still no help could come. U.S. artillery beyond the river could not fire for fear of hitting its own men. Casualties were heavy.

By that afternoon, the ammunition had run out. German counterattacks were in force, and the U.S. position was untenable. Retreat was ordered. Some swam across the Rapido. Others formed human chains. A sergeant tied wire to a pick, and hurled the pick across the river until it stuck behind a rock. Seven men then pulled themselves across. All the equipment was left behind. A huge German Tommy gunner on the bank shouted: "Hey, Yank, don't you want to surrender?" But he did not fire.

Then weary men, with a restless look in their eyes, sat behind the front and talked: of the "awful accurate" fire by Jerry snipers and machine gunners, of the bare and hostile Italian field sprinkled by shrapnel, of the muddy holes, of hopelessness and death. They said: "It's sure not a soft war."

Among them was a second lieutenant who said: "As soon as I was safe I remembered I had left the pictures of my wife and parents on the other side. I had carried the pictures through Salerno and San Vittore, and when I realized they were gone I sat down on the bank and cried."

One afternoon last week the two sides arranged a 105-minute truce to remove the dead and wounded. Seventy-five U.S. medics recrossed the Rapido. As one of the wounded was lifted into a litter, he grinned weakly and said: "Look, I have maid service."

Afterward, cannon again dueled across the dead field. To the north, other U.S. soldiers had crossed the Rapido, filtered to the outskirts of Cassino. But German guns in the mountains above swept the village, and it could not yet be occupied.

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