DECEMBER 3, 1943
MONTE LA DIFENSA, ITALY
5:30 A.M.
The Forcemen stand atop Monte la Difensa.
Perfect quiet. Germans doze, hidden in the rocks like hunters waiting for a stag. The morning watch huddles over small fires. Breakfast smells. Thin snowfall. Mountain shale. Darkness.
Forcemen fix bayonets and creep along narrow paths. More and more men haul themselves up onto the summit. An order is passed in whispers and hand signals: no gunfire until sunrise.
A sentry stumbles into their midst. Throat immediately slit. Shoved off the cliff.
First blood.
So far so good.
Then someone kicks a rock.
Forcemen dive for cover, pressing flat behind chunks of shale. But there is no place to hide. The 15th Panzer Division fought at Bir Hakeim, responding to the French breakout by lighting up the desert night with phosphorus flares. These veteran fighters now do the same atop Monte la Difensa, an automatic reflex bathing the Forcemen in the same bright red-green glow.
Sunrise has come early. Time to open fire.
Luck is with the Forcemen. The German guns are aimed the wrong way, still waiting for an attack from the opposite slope.
That changes.
Quickly.
Most German soldiers fire the K98k bolt-action rifle, which can be fitted with a sniper scope for precision. Others fire the lightweight MP 40 “Schmeisser” submachine gun. But it is the Maschinengewehr 42 that truly commands the mountaintop. The MG 42 is a twenty-six-pound, tripod-mounted, air-cooled machine gun now swiveling 180 degrees to fire 1,200 rounds a minute at the Forcemen.
“It was a terrible weapon,” one American private will remember. “Muzzle flashes blinking at me, but there wasn’t much I could do at the time. I never saw so many flashes in my life.”
Just two months ago, as the 15th Panzergenadier Division retreated up the Italian Peninsula, a small group of their soldiers tried to rape a local girl as she peeled vegetables in her family’s garden. Her uncle stepped from the house and shot one soldier dead, then fired again, wounding a second German. Desperate, uncle and young niece fled into the mountains.
The 15th went house to house through the town of Bellona the next morning, dragging every male villager into the local square. A priest was pulled from the altar as he said Mass. Monks were arrested in the local monastery. The Germans randomly selected fifty-four innocent victims to avenge the death of one rapist soldier. These men and boys were taken to a quarry, lined up on the edge of a cliff, and slaughtered with the same MG 42 machine guns now firing atop Monte la Difensa.*
A similar horrendous drop may soon await the Forcemen.
The clatter of machine guns, rifles, and smaller submachine guns melds with the thunder of exploding grenades. Much too loud to hear right. Forcemen stranded in the open make easy targets. Hidden MG 42 fire ricochets off rocks, spraying splinters of shale.
The Forcemen strip their dead friends of weapons, ammunition, and those precious V-42 killing blades. Fighting becomes hand-to-hand. The enemy is no longer a distant apparition but real flesh-and-blood human beings, just as wet and cold and desperate to stay alive. Stabbing and strangling and doing whatever else it takes to kill becomes intimate.
Panzergrenadier fighters grow desperate. Many hold up their hands in surrender, only to reach for their weapons and open fire when unsuspecting Forcemen step within range.
From that moment on, the Forcemen adopt a policy they will follow for the remainder of the war: no surrender.
“Some of the guys were shooting German prisoners, but hey, that’s the way it was,” one Forcemen sergeant will remember.
“They were the enemy.”
The Allied strategists are wrong: Monte la Difensa is not the gateway to Rome. Despite the British also capturing nearby Monte Camino, Hitler’s Winter Line stands strong, its many other Apennine peaks uncaptured.
In the words of the Führer, Kesselring’s defenses will “mark the end of all withdrawals.”
No retreat. No surrender.
And Rome must never be taken.