Seventeen Days

As the Fifth Army fronts in Italy hung in stalemate last week, military observers suggested that a special medal should be struck off. The candidates for the medal: the few U.S. infantrymen who got across the Rapido River, cracked their way into Cassino, then clung to a few shattered buildings for 17 days & nights.

Those days saw fighting as bitter as any in the war. It was a succession of desperately fought street battles, with U.S. and German tanks rattling past each other on adjacent streets, while progress was measured by the capture or loss of a single house, even a single room in a house.

Every day the artillery on both sides poured thousands of shells into the doomed town. Stone buildings were chewed apart, room by room, floor by floor. Some of the men who came out were close to madness from the strain. A British Eighth Army officer who watched the fighting later said: "Ortona was not half so bad as Cassino."

The Infantry Stays. On the first day the Americans, behind a smoke barrage, drove into the northern edge of town. They dug in. At dusk the order came : "Tanks will leave town. Infantry will stay." During the night more doughfoots moved in. The Germans counterattacked at dawn, were held and pushed back, then settled down to a fierce defense of every house, every pile of ruins.

Lieut. Henry Hodgkins took a squad into a U-shaped building on one side of the town square. He and his men fought Germans with rifle fire from room to room until the last enemies were chased out. Then two potato-masher grenades flicked in through the window. Two Americans were wounded. By the time another had sprung to the window, the Germans had disappeared into a doorway only ten yards away.

On another street Sergeant Howard Finch (Sheldon, Iowa) found himself in a building with Germans in the basement below. He boldly hung out the window, signaled wildly to an approaching Sherman tank, then jumped back as the tank hurled five shells through the basement window a few feet below him.

After U.S. doughboys had captured one house, four Germans stalked in through the front gate, throwing grenades and rattling machine-pistol fire through the open door. Two Americans were hit; one German was killed as the attackers scuttled back around the corner.

Major Warren C. Chapman (Nevada City, Calif.), attacking a strongly held building, called for artillery fire at a point only 75 yards from his own men. Five direct hits landed on the place. Said Chapman: "When the smoke cleared, the building wasn't there any more."

The Infantry Flees. Tanks within the town hugged the buildings to escape German shelling. One Sherman was hit and set afire beside an outpost building with one room intact. Privates Tony de Meo (Brooklyn) and Fred Ratcliff (Pontiac, Mich.) sweated as the tank's 75-mm. shells began to explode just outside the room. Then they vaulted from the window and dashed to safety with snipers' bullets pinging through the air around them.

After a while time ceased to have much meaning; sometimes it was dark, some times daylight. But the fighting never really stopped. One night the Germans, trying to get behind the Americans in town, blundered into one of their own minefields. The doughboys heard explosions, then the screams of the wounded.

At 4 a.m. another dark night Lieut. Ralph Brown led a patrol of six men with thermite grenades and wine bottles of gasoline to burn the fortified town jail. They turned the structure into a roaring inferno, but by morning the blaze had burned out, the stone walls were still standing, the Germans were back again.

Wine & Cake. There were rare intervals of crazy humor. Lieut. Vincent Kelley took a group into one building, killed two Germans and found a bottle of German Army issue champagne. The Germans at once counterattacked with 75 men and chased the small band of Americans away. "It couldn't have been the house they wanted," Kelley solemnly observed. "It wasn't worth a damn any more. They must have been sore about losing that champagne."

Lieut. Bill Morris and his men were driven from a gully. Too late, Morris remembered that he had left behind his pack with a fruit cake just received from his mother. Next night he led a patrol back to the gully, found the fruit cake, still uncut, lugged it off.

The heavy artillery barrages settled over Cassino like constant squalls of steel, slicing the buildings down while soldiers fled from the upper to the lower stories, then to the basements. Whole squads disappeared beneath collapsing walls. The limits of the barrage froze something approximating a battle line running through the town, with a No-Man's Land sometimes only ten yards wide. Any soldier who stepped into that strip in daylight was a dead man.

Men slept, when they slept at all, during the relatively quiet midday period. They munched packaged K-rations, slipped in to them the night before. At night patrols prowled the streets, trying to make contact with enemy forces. Challenging a dark figure in the normal way was suicide. The Americans used a code of whistled recognition signals; the Germans seemed to be using a kind of cat cry.

Missing in Action. Sometimes patrols never returned. A sergeant nicknamed "Knobby," with a reputation for taking prisoners, led one eleven-man patrol out to capture a house. Behind and out of sight another patrol waited for the signal to join the first. The signal never came. No shots were fired, no sound heard. Knobby and his men, all veterans of 25 months overseas, simply disappeared, swallowed up in the dark ruins.

The bombing of the Monte Cassino Abbey cheered the men up, but that, too, failed to break the stalemate, as the Germans rushed in more troops. Finally the men in Cassino stopped even hoping for relief by fresh troops. Some of them had been eating, sleeping, fighting in the same room for eight days.

But on the morning of the 17th day mail came, the first they had seen. That night cautious whispers summoned the men from their battle-torn houses and cellars. They slung their packs and shuffled out. The relief had moved up. In Cassino soldiers went on fighting house to house, room to room.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.