At the Point of the Line: The Attack on Seravezza
October 10, 1944
The beginning of October 1944 saw the Russians and the Allies closing in on the Germans and Japanese. The Red Army had entered Yugoslavia and Hungary but had done nothing to help the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising, which the Germans had just crushed. In mainland Greece, British forces took Corinth and then liberated Athens, while the Americans were already fighting inside the German border for the town of Aachen. Churchill and Stalin met for the first day of the Moscow Conference on October 9, where they intended to decide the makeup of postwar Europe. In the Far East, the Americans had landed in the Philippines and were two weeks away from a major naval victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy at Leyte Gulf. But both the Japanese and the Germans were resisting stubbornly: few thought the war in Europe would be over by Christmas, and nobody wanted to predict how long it would continue in the Pacific. An invasion of mainland Japan seemed to be a possibility. General Harold Alexander’s optimistic predictions of that summer, that the Allies could be through the Gothic Line before October, now rang terribly hollow. They were still short of 60 percent of their main objectives on the line, it was nearly the middle of October, and winter was approaching fast.
On the far west of the Gothic Line, near the Mediterranean, Mark Clark thought that the German defenses of the Serchio River valley could be taken at the same time as another assault on Bologna in the center. Then the mixed multinational task force could advance up the Mediterranean coast. So two days after the Germans withdrew from the high ground that included Mexico, Brazilians arrived to take over part of the ground held by the Buffalo Soldiers of the 370th, who were to be pulled back out of the line for rest and recuperation. When the South American troops arrived for the unit handover, Private Houston was the only person in battalion headquarters who could speak any Spanish: the Brazilian commander spoke Portuguese, a little Spanish, and a little Italian; the American regimental commander spoke only English. Through a combination of patience and four languages, the Brazilian officer and Houston worked out the complexities of the replacement. Most of the 370th were then pulled south out of the line, through the muddy, rain-spattered white-water torrent of the Serchio River, and back south for a shower, a change of clothes, and food that was actually hot, eaten in clothes that were dry, in a location that wasn’t under artillery fire.
By this point, the men from the 370th who had arrived on the Arno on August 24 had been under constant artillery fire for nearly fifty days straight and had fought several stiff battles, often at night, against defensive positions, achieved while climbing nearly sheer mountains carrying sixty pounds of equipment, wearing sodden uniforms in conditions so dark the men couldn’t see their comrades in front of them. Many of them had seen the physical and organizational centers of their military existence—reliable officers and NCOs—blown into small pieces by artillery, shot dead, or hideously wounded. Most of the black soldiers had had only ten weeks’ combat training before leaving the United States, were poorly educated, and their upbringing had left them with little trust in any form of authority. It was extraordinary that their prowess against dug-in, experienced German troops was so positive. The creed of the Buffalo Soldier was establishing itself.
By October 9, the 370th’s advance up the Mediterranean coast and along the mountains that ran above it had reached the town of Pietrasanta, two miles inland from the sea. Once again, the high ground overlooking the town had to be taken. This time, it was a feature called Monte Cauala, which overlooked the small town of Seravezza at the confluence of the Sera and Vezza Rivers. A road some three miles long led from Pietrasanta up into the hills toward the junction of the two, and the lower slopes of Monte Cauala. Not surprisingly, every foot of it was under the observation of the Germans on the mountain, whose mortars and artillery were well within range of the northern suburb of Pietrasanta where the 370th was preparing for the oncoming attack.
Private Ivan Houston, M1 Garand slung over his shoulder, curious as to his surroundings, was walking through the tree-lined streets in the north part of the town. German artillery opened fire from above Seravezza: the sound of it was now so regular and routine the soldiers often hit the ground instinctively without realizing they had done it. Houston ducked into a warehouse that stored huge slabs of the marble that was quarried from the mountains above Carrara. The German shells exploded near the slabs and their shrapnel hit the hard, white marble, shattering shards of it into hundreds of tiny splinters of stone—each of which, the battalion headquarters man noted, could kill a soldier in a second. He left fast. Houston preferred the British response to German artillery. Later that day, he came across an English patrol that had made tea during a German bombardment, and he was invited to join them. As they drank their afternoon beverage, Lee-Enfield rifles and a Bren gun leaning against the trunks of the orange trees lining the streets, the air around them seemed to explode.
All four companies of the 370th Regimental Combat Team’s 3rd Battalion—India, Kilo, Lima, and Mike—were briefed to take part in the attack on Monte Cauala by the regimental commander, Colonel Raymond Sherman. Along with battalion headquarters, Ivan Houston moved out early in the evening of October 11. The night was black as pitch. There was a wild thunderstorm. Rain poured down in sheets. The soldiers in the line stumbled along the narrow, winding mountain trail they’d been told to use, as the main road from Pietrasanta to Seravezza was under constant artillery and machine-gun fire. The mountain path was that in name only—mules would have had difficulty negotiating it, Houston noted in the battalion log. The rain kept pouring. The only illumination the men had was the flashes of lightning that crackled out of the thunderstorm. Each man held on to his colleague in front to save himself from getting lost, or falling off the track, and it took more than four hours to march one mile, stumbling along. The battalion orderly was carrying everything on his back—his trusted M1 rifle, a sleeping roll, and the half of a tent that each man hefted as part of his equipment. Called a “shelter half,” it enabled any two soldiers to pair up and erect a two-man shelter. Houston had its poles and pegs, shovel, a bandolier of extra ammunition for his Garand, his bayonet, medical supplies, and rations of cheese and biscuits. There was a lot of shelling, machine-gun fire whipping constantly down the road that ran along the Sera River, which had risen to a torrent.
At no point did any man have any feeling that the Germans they were facing were a spent force—they were very good, far from being a broken army, thought Houston as he stumbled along the sodden trail. Soaked to the skin, slipping into the mud at every second step, almost blind in the darkness, he wondered how on earth he and his colleagues stood the slightest chance of defeating the Germans and occupying the high ground ahead. And then after that, if they were successful, they had to repeat the operation again and again, hill after hill, all the way up the Serchio valley, mountain by mountain, as the towns on the coast fell in tandem, all the way up the Tuscan coast. Only then could they break through the Gothic Line and start pushing the Germans backward. Since leaving Lucca, the pace of operations had changed from the fast-moving skirmishing in hot autumn weather that had seen different objectives fall every other day; operations where the men’s morale was constantly boosted by the weather, by the feeling of success and achievement at taking positions, by the novelty of what they were doing, by the countryside around them, and by the basic physical and mental factors that make soldiers feel human—being dry, warm at night, sleeping in clothes that were not sodden, eating hot food, being in contact with their colleagues. And for the black American troops, who for the first time had left a country where they were so often treated as second class, here were Italians reveling in their presence as liberators. And the unit was getting things done. There were triumphs. The men felt good about themselves, and about their place in the war.
Now things had changed. The terrain and the weather made the fighting a war of uphill attrition, of near-vertical assaults on mountain positions, in cold, rain, mud, and mist, where the attacking force was at a huge disadvantage. The German defenders of the Gothic Line had planned it exactly thus: their tactical forethought and their command of the terrain now combined with the lousy weather to make their positions doubly hard to attack. This was how they had foreseen the defensive concept of the Gothic Line working out in practice. And conditions would worsen, too, for the Allies. Winter, which would bring a halt to such offensive operations, was coming.
The 3rd Battalion couldn’t ford the Sera River that night—it was a coursing flood of brown water speeding along carrying logs, branches, and vegetation with it. So the men stumbled around in the dark until they found an abandoned shack. Finally out of the pouring rain, they collapsed inside until daybreak, sleeping in sodden clothes, piles of drenched equipment around them. The attack on Monte Cauala would wait until the next day. So when light came, and the gray lines of rain were still pushing down, they wound their way into Seravezza and found the battalion command post. The regimental commander, Colonel Raymond Sherman, had followed the men across the mountain track and directed the scattered groups of troops as they arrived to their positions—Houston found his headquarters emplacement in an abandoned school. Now that it was daylight, the Germans on the mountain above could see the Americans in the town below. They opened fire on them with mortars, machine guns, and the light artillery they had been able to get to the top of the mountain. The streets of Seravezza turned into a free-fire zone. The 3rd Battalion of the 370th spent the day taking cover, while establishing observation posts to watch the mountains, and a position where they would cross the Sera River that night.
The day was made up of mortar bombs, rain, machine-gun fire, and shells. Monte Cauala loomed over the small Tuscan town as the black American soldiers prepared for battle. They were the tip of the Allied advance on the western end of the Gothic Line. The eyes of 5th Army command were on them.
At eleven o’clock that night, Ivan Houston, numbed by another day of artillery fire, lowered his already-sodden six-foot frame in its dripping wet battle dress into the freezing waters of the Sera River. It was a miserable way to go into battle. Any part of him that hadn’t been wet through before now was, apart from his Garand. On the other side of the river, the men walked toward the lower slopes of Monte Cauala and scrambled up wooden ladders that allowed them to climb over the most inaccessible sections of the rock face. The rocks were wet and sharp, and the drenched men encountered even more physical discomfort as the rock faces cut and gouged knees, hands, elbows, and legs as they climbed. Finally they reached ground that, while not easy, at least wasn’t vertical. Humping their equipment, keeping their eyes as closely fixed on the man in front of them as they could, ears instinctively tuned to the sound of incoming artillery and the burping wrench of MG-42s, they trudged upward to their objective. Eight hours later, at seven thirty in the morning, wet, exhausted, hungry, sodden equipment and boots chafing, rubbing, and cutting into their tired bodies, three combat companies and battalion headquarters had made it to the top. Daylight found them totally exposed to the Germans’ fire, so the Buffalo Soldiers attacked. It was a heroic moment.
The fighting continued all day: K, L, and M Companies were dug in at various positions across the huge swathe of open space at the top of the mountain, and the Germans launched attacks at them from three directions. The Americans on the summit were mortaring the Germans approaching on the surrounding slopes and across its plateau. Machine-gun fire crisscrossed in several different directions, up, down, and across the summit and slopes of the mountain. The American companies were split up—during their climb some men had lagged behind, become wounded, or fallen from the rocks. Composite units of small groups of soldiers formed quickly, launched squad-level attacks, and then took cover. The regimental headquarters at the foot of the mountain was suddenly attacked by a platoon of Germans. The Buffalo Soldiers at the top sent down runners desperately asking for rations and, most vitally, ammunition to be transported to the top. It was a huge bit of ground, twenty-five hundred feet high, and communication between the different companies, platoons, and squads was all but impossible as the German attacks zigzagged and weaved through the constantly changing American positions. The individual German and American soldiers, and their squads, platoons, and half companies, charged and withdrew and took cover and ducked and ran backward and forward, opened fire, were shot and wounded, or lived to fight another hour. They were like hundreds of constantly intersecting ants. Over and through them stitched an incessant stream of machine-gun fire from the German MG-42s and the American Brownings, mortars, rifle grenades, submachine gun bullets, and hand grenades.
Down below at battalion HQ, Private Ivan Houston volunteered to help carry badly needed ammunition up the mountain. Each metal case contained 400 rounds of .30 ammunition for rifles and machine guns, and weighed twenty-five pounds. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and picked up a case of ammunition in each hand, walking toward the base of the hill, ducking and running to keep out of the multiple lines of fire. Bullets whizzed and sped past him like hissing fireflies at the speed of sound, and when they hit a rock they bounced off into the distance with an explosive metallic ricochet. Houston, along with twelve other men, stumbled back toward the fire-drenched slopes, staggering heavily and missing his footing as he had no use of his hands. And suddenly, for the first time since arriving in Italy, he actually saw a German soldier—in fact, two of them. As he looked up, he saw a pair of German soldiers firing a belt-fed machine gun. It was the first time he had seen his foe. Every day for more than fifty days he had been on the receiving end of their artillery fire, but here, finally, was the enemy in person.
One of the German soldiers reeled back, hit by American fire, and the other soldier carried him away and vanished. Houston, jarred out of the moment of watching the enemy, carried on climbing just as another artillery barrage starting hitting the bottom of the mountain. The ammunition detail advanced onward, as mortars and machine guns started zeroing in on them. Houston was hit by hot shrapnel that burned quickly through his uniform and scorched his skin: luckily for him, it had reached the extreme end of its range, and he was not hurt. He staggered onward with his fifty pounds of ammunition. Then more men in the ammunition party were hit, the artillery intensified, and it became impossible to continue. Houston returned back down the mountain, bitterly regretting not being able to go any farther. Other soldiers came toward him, withdrawing from positions farther up the slope as the Germans’ counterattacks continued. “It became,” said Houston, with characteristic understatement, “a mess.”
One thing did cause the 370th’s attack to waver, despite extraordinary persistence and bravery by units on the slopes and summit: an incident of friendly fire, a “blue-on-blue.” Around four o’clock in the afternoon of October 12, as two half companies were battling on the summit, American artillery fire fell short and hit two of the 3rd Battalion’s other companies dug in at the bottom of the slope. The American soldiers poured out of their foxholes to avoid their own shells, and found the way forward toward Monte Cauala blocked by a German counterattack. So they turned back and moved fast into Seravezza, preparing to defend the town as the Germans threatened to storm into it. One American major at the base of the mountain was heard saying, “Men coming off the hill should be hit on their head with a rifle butt.” That was easy to say. Individual units on the top of the mountain were still in action, as were men on the slopes. The half companies at the bottom had turned back for Seravezza: American artillery was hitting both sides, and the Germans were launching multiple counterattacks. With a few units still fighting on the summit and slopes, the whole battalion pulled back into Seravezza, disorganized, units fragmented, with crucial command and control structures dissipating.
The enemy counterattack into Seravezza did not come: the 370th failed to retake Monte Cauala. There were 73 wounded, including 5 officers and, surprisingly, given a battalion of well-trained and combat-experienced soldiers fighting for twenty-four hours against a numerically superior and well-dug-in enemy, only 3 dead. The Germans had won the battle again, defending positions of their own choosing, on terrain they had prepared in advance. They’d held the day. The western end of the Gothic Line was standing.
The Buffalo Soldiers and Their After-Action Report
Across Italy, British, Canadian, Polish, American soldiers, as well as units of fifteen other nationalities, had been storming up well-defended hills and mountains in the middle of the night since September 1943, taking huge casualties. The four battles of Monte Cassino, and the thousands of Allied casualties, were just one example of what happens when you send men up mountains against well-dug-in and experienced soldiers. In the battle for Gemmano outside Rimini, every Allied battalion lost at least 100 to 150 dead. In the attack on Point 447 on the same ridge, the British and Canadians lost 198 dead alone. In one night in Ortona, the Canadian battalion lost 318 men.
The main casualty from the battle for Seravezza and Monte Cauala was the morale of the 92nd Infantry Division, and particularly of the men from the 370th Regimental Combat Team who fought the battle. Another casualty was the external perception of the combat performance of the Buffalo Soldiers. Many officers, NCOs, and enlisted men behaved with exceptional bravery: Private Jake McInnis of K Company personally killed twelve Germans while defending a position on the summit of Monte Cauala with his Browning Automatic Rifle. Later wounded, he was taken to the regimental aid post but asked to return to battle. He was awarded the Silver Star. The 370th’s executive officer at Seravezza was Lieutenant Colonel John J. Phelan. His predecessor was the unit’s first officer casualty, whose body, wounded by shrapnel, Houston had seen. Phelan had been with the 3rd Battalion for six months and commented, “During my period of observation, I have heard of just as many acts of individual heroism among Negro troops as among white.”
On Monte Cauala, Captain Charles F. Gandy, commander of Company F, though mortally wounded, led the stand until 3:00 the following morning when the units withdrew on regimental orders. A platoon of Company L, under Lieutenant Reuben L. Horner, fought off eight enemy counterattacks on Monte Strettoia while awaiting support from another unit that failed to locate it. This platoon remained until it used up all its ammunition. The 370th was in the spotlight: they were new, black soldiers who, out of necessity caused by the transfer of troops to France, were put on one of the most tricky, sensitive, and visible parts of the line, at one of the most crucial moments of the battle, with only ten weeks’ training, six weeks’ combat experience, under the eyes not just of the Americans and British but also other minority and colonial troops. The pressure was immense, the lessons learned about command and control huge, and the need for good officers and NCOs and replacements paramount. A unit that had almost been set up to fail, to take a fall, had in fact proved much better than expected. And months of combat still lay ahead.
After its first full month in action, a report from IV Corps estimated the 370th Regimental Combat Team had advanced some twenty miles, lost 19 men killed in action, had 248 sick, wounded, or injured, and 23 “missing,” which meant presumed dead or captured by the enemy. (The casualty figures were erroneously low.) They had captured around 280 of the enemy. And at divisional level, another report on the 370th after its first month in the line was encouraging: “In combat missions they will go wherever led. They will stay as long as their leaders, anywhere.”
And the chief of staff of IV Corps, a one-star general, reported that the performance of the 370th in the first few days, “while not without a number of incidents which would have been avoided by more seasoned troops, was on the average as satisfactory as might be expected from a similar untried and inexperienced unit. There is no question of their will to learn, alertness and attention to duty; the nervousness exhibited is natural and may well be overcome in time … The combat team showed every sign of building a splendid record of accomplishment.”