CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ACROSS THE PO AND INTO THE ALPS

THEIR WORK IN THE MOUNTAINS COMPLETE, the division now ran a foot race to catch the Germans in the Po River valley before they could reach the Alps. Assigned by General Hays to lead a platoon of tank destroyers, the 86th’s 2nd Battalion, and a team of bridge-building engineers, General Robinson Duff pushed the men to keep up the pace, roaming the advancing column like a nervous sheepdog. Apparently, his coaching worked. Running ahead of thirty other Allied divisions, the advancing mountain troops sometimes arrived in towns just three hours after the Germans had left. So quickly did they cover the fifty miles from Mount della Spe to the Po that German general Frido von Senger had to decide whether to run or give himself up. By the time he reached the bridgeless river—just hours before the mountain troops arrived—Allied planes were already so ubiquitous that crossing by ferry was impossible. At dawn he decided to swim.

“I no longer entertained any hope of again having a combat-ready force at my disposal south of the Po,” he would write. “I had tried repeatedly to drive such stragglers back to their units still fighting at the front. These were only ineffective, isolated measures, however, since the commanders were themselves physically exhausted and could no longer see the utility of this. It was demonstrated here that after catastrophes of this sort, when whole major units have been disbanded and the infantry troops are exhausted from long marches, swimming across rivers, and sleepless nights, there remains for psychological reasons but one alternative: to act in accordance with the instincts of the ordinary soldier and order the units to withdraw.”¹

Fast in pursuit, Dan Kennerly’s unit moved forward from village to village, skirting artillery attacks and sniper fire. Through his binoculars, Kennerly could see C Company up ahead, filing down a slope into a gorge right in the path of his own men’s fire. He ordered a cease-fire. Almost instantly, German sniper fire began peppering Kennerly’s position. He also got some troubling news: C Company’s commander, Captain Herbert Wright, had been wounded, and his men had commandeered a tank to try to get him off the front. Glassing the area, Kennerly could see that Wright’s back was very bloody; he hoped his kidneys had not been hit.

Lieutenant D’Ooge ordered his men to retrieve a pile of ammo boxes. For the first time in his career, Kennerly questioned the order. Couldn’t the lieutenant hear the sniper fire? It made no sense getting someone shot to save a couple of empty ammo boxes. The lieutenant said the orders had come from battalion headquarters, and they had been emphatic. Kennerly had heard enough.

“We’re going to get someone killed because some fat-ass rear echelon colonel thinks up a hare-brained idea because he’s got nothing else to do?” Turning to his men, he said, “Let’s go get those boxes.” As one of Kennerly’s men tossed his gun into a trailer, a live round exploded out of the chamber, tore through the side of the trailer, and passed between Kennerly and the lieutenant. The two men looked each other in the eye. The lieutenant spoke for both: “Everybody in the jeep. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They turned left on the main road and dropped sharply toward the river. Along the way, they passed a group of beautiful Belgian horses lying dead and bloated, their feet stretching toward the sky. The sight shocked Kennerly, a farm boy who had always felt a deep empathy for animals caught up in warfare.

Once on the floor of the valley, Kennerly’s unit turned left on a dirt road and came upon a courtyard with a well in its center, surrounded by a house and a barn. Drawing water from the well to slake their thirst, the men looked up to see the farm’s owner emerging with a stack of bread and cheese. His wife and two teenage daughters followed, their rustic beauty and shy giggles doing more to lift the men’s spirits than the food. After an hour, they loaded themselves back into the jeep and started up a mountain slope toward their next position. As they moved out, they met a German prisoner in an SS uniform being led past in the opposite direction. Kennerly figured he must have been the sniper. The man smiled as he walked past, revealing a mouthful of large yellow teeth. Kennerly smelled what he had come to recognize as the emblematic odor of the German soldier—a mix between damp earth and a new puppy—that he was sure he could notice from thirty yards away. As riflemen from the 10th pushed the soldier along, the Italian farmer walked over and kicked the man in the seat of his pants. Kennerly figured the man would be lucky to leave the stockades alive. Few SS did.

Once on top of the hill, Kennerly once again took out his binoculars. To the east he could see the towers of Bologna; to the north, he could see the flat Po River valley stretching off toward the horizon. This was the prize they had been striving for since February. Moses, Kennerly thought, never got to the promised land; General Hays would surely not deny his men the pleasure.

Kennerly’s vision was fleeting; the next day, April 20, proved so hazy that he could no longer see Bologna or the Po River valley. What he could see, down in the gorge below, was a group of 10th Mountain Cavalry Reconnaissance troops flying along on the backs of beautiful horses they had commandeered from the Italians. Kennerly, a student of heroes such as Light-Horse Harry Lee, Jeb Stuart, and Nathan Bedford Forrest, suspected this might be the last horse cavalry action in the history of the U.S. Army.

Driving toward the river in jeeps, Kennerly’s unit passed the wrecks of innumerable German vehicles, among them monstrous 170-mm cannons, their forty-foot-long barrels mounted on steel tires; these were likely the guns used on Castel d’Aiano and Mount della Spe. Crosses, marking German graves, also lined the road. Why do Europeans bury their dead where they fall? Kennerly wondered. It seemed so impersonal. Soon no one will know where they are. In a few years, no one will give a damn.²

For meals, the soldiers would stop in at a farmhouse and ask for some bread and cheese, a piece of sausage, a cup of wine. At one stop, a Catholic priest blessed the men in Kennerly’s platoon. There was no way Kennerly was going to tell the priest he wasn’t Catholic; in war, he figured, you could use all the help you could get. At one crossroads, a large group of 10th soldiers had gathered to await their next orders. Emerging out into the yard of a stone house, an old woman said she would prepare a roast made from a German horse for supper. Kennerly asked the woman if she had seen any German soldiers. “Tedeschi tutti via,” she said. The Germans have all gone.

Almost on cue, German gunfire sounded to the west. Kennerly grabbed his gun and jumped for cover. Since Lieutenant D’Ooge had joined the unit on Belvedere, Kennerly’s team had not lost a single man. It would be a shame to get it so close to the end. As suddenly as it began, the shooting stopped. In the distance, a group of Americans stood over a German soldier lying on the ground with a bullet hole over his still-blinking left eye. Every few seconds, his lips moved and his arms and legs twitched. He had apparently tried to run the roadblock. You dumb sonofabitch, Kennerly thought. Why didn’t you surrender? Don’t you realize the war is almost over?

As Kennerly and his team prepared to make their way down to the river, a motorcycle with two German soldiers aboard came roaring down the road, apparently oblivious to the arrival of the Americans. Under a barrage of rifle fire, the motorcycle spun out and crashed, its driver tumbling off to the side with a bullet in his thigh and a surprised look on his face. A crate of eggs that had been lashed to the rear of the motorcycle had landed in a ditch by the side of the road. Apparently the soldiers had been sent to Bologna on a shopping run for their company mess and were unaware that in their brief absence their fortunes had changed dramatically. As medics patched up the German soldiers, Kennerly and his men commandeered their motorcycle, pistols, and what was left intact inside the crate and went off to cook up the first fresh eggs they had had since arriving in Italy.

The Germans seemed now to be in full retreat. The 10th’s foot soldiers continued to move forward, using any vehicles they could find: abandoned German trucks, Volkswagen jeeps, Italian sports cars, motorcycles, bicycles, horse-drawn wagons, a school bus, even an old 1936 Ford. To Kennerly, they looked like a band of heavily armed gypsies.

As they advanced along the flat bottomlands to the Po River, the chalky roads weaving through an endless chain of irrigation canals threw up a fine dust that turned everything white. Dust got into their pores, their eyes. In places, the dust was so thick, the truck drivers were having a hard time keeping their vehicles on the road. At one point a dust-covered jeep driven by a fearless, sandy-haired, and completely grimy soldier nicknamed Nellie came screaming up the road toward Kennerly, who couldn’t help but notice the dents in the jeep’s chassis, apparently the result of Nellie plowing into the rear of a six-by the day before.

“Why don’t you slow down?” Kennerly asked.

“If I slow down,” he said, “I can’t get to where I’m a-goin’.”

Getting killed by Germans was one thing, Kennerly thought; getting killed in a wreck would be damn stupid.

As the men moved on, hundreds of demoralized German prisoners, unguarded, marched in the opposite direction. They must have known the war was almost over, Kennerly figured; besides, there was nowhere else for them to go. By the time the division reached the river, some four thousand prisoners would be captured, disarmed, and taken in trucks to the rear.³

GENERAL ROBINSON DUFF’S advance task force reached the banks of the Po River on April 22. On its shores, willows were beginning to leaf out. The south bank of the river was low and flat, broken by three high dikes a hundred yards apart. Two hundred yards across (about the width of the Colorado River where the men had once practiced river crossings), sandy beaches lined the north bank. As the 87th Regiment approached from the south, the main blacktop road to a ferry landing ran atop one of the dikes, which offered some shelter to the men as they waited to load up. They needed it. As the trucks were delivering boats to the riverside, the Germans were wasting no time battering the American position with artillery shells. Just 2,500 yards to the west, they had set up two crescents of 20-mm antiaircraft guns.

Only an hour before the task force reached San Benedetto Po, the primary point of departure, General Duff saw an antitank mine lying in the path of one of his own advancing tanks. When his warning shouts went unnoticed by the tank’s driver, the general ran forward to get the tank to stop. Just as he arrived, the tank hit the mine. The explosion wounded Duff badly. Determined to complete the push, General Hays took command of the spearhead himself.⁴

Given more time, division commanders would likely have decided that a crossing farther east would have lessened the army’s vulnerability to German antiaircraft artillery. But the sheer speed of the division’s advance meant that no aerial reconnaissance photos had been taken of the river, and the German position on the north bank had been noted too late for thorough reconnaissance. Though some artillery protection arrived before the crossing, it was far from the air support and heavy artillery the men needed. In fact, the division had moved so quickly that there weren’t any vehicles available. Worse, almost no bridge-building material had arrived, nor were power boats or amphibious vehicles available. The men would have to paddle themselves across. They didn’t even have a telephone cable sturdy enough to withstand the river’s strong current. There were no maps. General Hays had concocted the plan only the night before; at 6 P.M. on the twenty-second, he dispatched an engineer to Bomporto to round up fifty assault boats. Twelve hours later, the “assault boats” arrived south of San Benedetto Po on the back of five 2⁄2-ton trucks. Hays could hardly have been impressed. The boats were little paddleboats that could hold just four oarsmen and six soldiers. Moving an entire division across in these things would be a trick.

As D Company of the 87th set up machine guns and 81-mm mortars on the left side of the road, the 85th’s 3rd Battalion did the same on the right.⁵

The night before the crossing, the Germans strafed the south side of the river; the next day their antiaircraft batteries chased Allied planes away, then leveled the same guns on the mountain troops. When Kennerly arrived, he could see, far down the river, a bridge that had been blown out. He dug a gun pit and hunkered down—just in time to see General Hays and a couple of colonels arrive with their aides. Snapping to attention, Kennerly saluted.

“At ease,” Hays said. “How you boys doin’?”

“Fine, sir,” Kennerly replied. “We’ve been giving the Germans a good ass-kicking.”

The general grinned. “We sure have.”

Hays told his men that he was looking for some large rowboats to help get across the river but that German warplanes had been creating some problems upriver. He advised the men to put covers over their foxholes.

Later on, word came down that the 87th would be crossing the river that same afternoon, a couple of hundred yards to Kennerly’s left. To cover the crossing, the 85th would lay down a barrage aimed at the other side of the river and would only lift it when the boats arrived on the opposite bank. As soon as the 87th established a defensive perimeter, the 85th would cross. The prospect of crossing the Po made many of the men nervous. They had never made such a move before, except in training, and the idea of rowing across two hundred yards of open water under marauding German warplanes hardly improved the prospect. Kennerly, who had started his military career as a swimming instructor, didn’t even know how many of his men could swim. He told them to put their packs in the bottom of the boat; if the boat capsized, they were to hold on to the upturned bottom of the boat and kick their way across. The boat would not sink, and the men would not drown—unless they wasted their energy trying to flip the boat right side up and climb back in. ⁶

As the 87th loaded up on April 23, German artillery shells began splashing all around them. Small-arms fire popped everywhere. In Denis Nunan’s boat, men who hadn’t been given paddles dug in with the butts of their rifles, trying to push their boat across as fast as they could. Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, Nunan raised a camera to capture the scene and the camera was shot right out of his hands. Bullets tore into men right next to him, but once again Nunan survived without a scratch.⁷

As Dan Kennerly watched, the lead boats made it halfway across the river; then German artillery opened fire, their initial shells exploding in the air and pounding into the river. My God, he thought, they are going to be slaughtered. Where in the hell were the American airplanes? Kennerly’s platoon strafed the opposite bank with their machine guns, spraying the spot where the boats hoped to hit the beach. As the first men made it ashore, a rifleman fired on a German-occupied house on the bank above. From the south side, an Allied tank destroyer dropped two shells on the upper story of the house, finally convincing five Germans to come out with their hands above their heads. At last the Allied planes arrived, and the German artillery stopped. The first boats made it ashore, the men scrambling up the banks and disappearing over the top of the dike. The landing was so swift that some six hundred German soldiers, including a corps commander, were taken prisoner before they could make it to their foxholes.

At 4 P.M., Kennerly’s battalion was ordered into the boats. Kennerly had his men lay their gun pack and equipment in first, then pile in on top. At first the anxious soldiers started rowing at will, sending the boat spinning erratically rather than forward in a straight line; Kennerly, like a giant coxswain, ordered his men to paddle only on his count. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Halfway across the river, their oars hit the sandy bottom. The men could probably wade in from here; instead, they leaned more heavily still into their oars and moments later struck the riverbank, climbed out, and hustled over the dike. Off in the distance to the north lay a sight the men had waited to see since leaving Camp Hale: the snowy peaks of the Alps.

For the next several days, as engineers built a treadway and a pontoon bridge across the Po, the sleepless men of the 10th Mountain Division, moving with the speed and excitement of the victorious, cleared the roads north of the river to make way for a column of tanks. The intense fear of the previous weeks was beginning to drift away. Kennerly spent one afternoon pulling up and eating the hottest onions he had ever tasted from a farm field; later, a soldier with a more sensitive nose told him he had been eating giant bulbs of garlic. Guess I won’t have to shoot any Germans today, Kennerly thought to himself. I’ll just breathe and they’ll run like rabbits.⁸

What the men in the mountain troops couldn’t see was a stream of German soldiers running for the Alps. “This might have been regarded as a sign of imminent disintegration, had we not long since become accustomed to the sight,” General von Senger would write. “Every man questioned insisted that his unit had been ‘rolled up,’ or ‘outflanked,’ had fought its way out, and was assembling ‘in accordance with orders’ in its rear service area. The possibility of grouping the stragglers in units other than their own directly behind a newly occupied line of defense did not exist, for the soldiers were too fearful of being cut off from their mail, their field kitchens, and their familiar military surroundings.”⁹

With the war in Europe coming to an end and word of liberated concentration camps beginning to reach the division, the ghastliness of what the men had been fighting became all too clear. Most of the men, throughout their training and first months in Italy, had considered Hitler’s expansionism their only enemy. Only after news of the wide-reaching Nazi genocide became public did they realize the full stake of their commitment to the war. Like the rest of the world, the mountain troops at first had trouble finding words to express their horror. In a caustically sarcastic editorial, The Blizzard recommended that American soldiers become “buddies” with their German counterparts:

Dachau the unspeakable? Forget it. Forget the freight cars stacked with whip-scarred dead, the smooth efficiency of the crematory. Forget Dachau’s compound, swarming with 32,000 lice-ridden, typhus infected beings so hysterical at freedom they tore themselves heedlessly getting through the barbed wire to touch their liberators.

Forget the wholesale slaughter of prisoners at Buchenwald, prisoners who smelled like nothing else on earth. The chute below which SS guards waited to strangle them with garrotes, the hooks on which they hung until their turn at the furnaces. (They had to wait. The furnaces only handled 400 daily.) Forget Erla, whose SS guards, unable to carry their prisoners with them when Leipzig fell, jammed 295 of them into one barracks, doused prisoners and buildings with acetate, and ignited a roaring inferno. Forget the screams of terror, the bursting hand grenades tossed in the doorways, the crazed human torches mowed down with machine pistols and bazookas, clubbed to death as they tried to douse the flames in the filth of the latrine. And Belsen, where 17,000 died of starvation in March alone, where the scattered dead lay in thousands under the miles of pipes, their clothes torn off by the living to build fires for cooking roots, their hearts and livers cut out by the starving.

Oh no. Don’t embarrass these fine people, who are very sentimental about flowers and adore little children. Give them a sportsmanlike pat on the back and wish them better luck next time. Otherwise you might discourage them. The sons of bitches are terribly sensitive.¹⁰

Even with the Germans in retreat, the mountain troops were still jumpy. The roads were littered with abandoned vehicles and dead German soldiers. Here was one young man sitting upright, his face blown away, revealing a hideous smile; there were two others inside a truck, their arms and feet and chest muscles completely burned away. A German plane sat smoking on a makeshift airfield. One afternoon an unmarked sedan came screaming down the road, moving Kennerly’s platoon to follow it with their machine guns. Hold your fire, Kennerly said, and good thing: the car was being driven by a group of drunk Italian partisans, laughing and holding aloft bottles of wine. Those crazy bastards better show some discretion, Kennerly thought, or someone is going to get nervous and blow their asses away.

The soldiers’ vigilance would prove well advised. After a couple of days marching north, the men came to a number of well-to-do villages laced through with leaf-lined avenues, large estates, and carriage houses. Removing their shirts and shoes to soak up some sunshine one afternoon, a column of men from the 85th suddenly heard the whoosh, boom, and whine of an exploding artillery shell releasing its shrapnel. Silent, and terrified, the men jumped into bunkers and waited. Ten minutes later, Kennerly looked out to see medics stuffing the body of a dead American soldier into a mattress cover, his blood already staining the sheets. That poor bastard, Kennerly thought. He was lying in the sun just like the rest of us, without a worry, thinking he was miles from any action, the war was almost over, and he’s made it. Now he’s dead because some sorry sonofabitch decided to fire one last round before he abandoned his gun. What lousy rotten luck.¹¹