At War on the Gothic Line

December 1944

In the first week of December 1944, American Marines in the northwestern Pacific watched as a small volcanic island ahead of them was bombarded by hundreds of naval guns and air strikes. The island they were about to storm was called Iwo Jima, and it was one of the last stopping-off points before the Japanese mainland. Eleven thousand miles and fourteen time zones to the west, the Germans were about to launch a massive counteroffensive in the Ardennes forest in Belgium. At the other end of Europe, in Greece, British and Indian troops had just arrived in Athens. The Germans had pulled out, and the partisans’ Communist National Liberation Front was fighting against Greek nationalists who had sympathized and fought with the Germans. The Red Army was pushing toward eastern parts of Hungary. On the east coast of Italy, the Allies found themselves blocked—again—by the weather. The lightning strike of combined operations that liberated Ravenna at the beginning of December had turned into an impasse.

On the western flank of the Gothic Line, meanwhile, in the Serchio valley, the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division were confronting a new enemy none of them had ever seen before: snow. On December 6, Private Ivan Houston received a message at headquarters of the 3rd Battalion of the 370th Regimental Combat Team. Effective immediately, all men in the 92nd Division were to stop stealing and killing chickens following persistent complaints from the local Italian population. It seemed a suitable message to accompany the men of his company into winter. The 370th were now under the command of a South African armored brigade operating in western Tuscany in the Apennines between Bologna and the sea. It was an extraordinary racial mix: the white South African officers had black orderlies who would make their beds for them and do their ironing and bring them food. When the commanding officer of the 92nd asked a South African officer the size of the population of South Africa, he answered, “We’re three million white and ten million black.”

The one unifying factor between both units was that neither side had seen snow. Houston saw his friend Hiram MacBeth—who had slept through an artillery barrage in September—standing guard outside battalion headquarters wearing a white snowsuit and looking very cold. Houston thought it unreal that here were black troops from the American South wearing white snowsuits and fighting in ten-foot-deep snowdrifts. Houston was freezing. He wrote a letter to his grandmother asking for warmer clothing, and just before Christmas a newly knitted khaki wool sweater arrived for him, accompanied by one of his grandmother’s fruitcakes. He put on the sweater, and on Christmas Day 1944 shared the fruitcake with a friend in battalion headquarters. The holiday was quiet.

Then just before dawn on Boxing Day, the radio net almost seemed to blow up with activity. The Germans had counterattacked along the Serchio River. Machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire started coming into the positions held by the 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 92nd, trying to push them back down the Serchio valley toward Barga and eventually Lucca. It was the terrain they had fought so hard to take since September. The most advanced position held by the Buffalo Soldiers was in Sommocolonia, a small mountain village up in the valley. Two platoons of a sister unit of the 92nd were pinned down in an observation position in a stone house set on a steep slope facing the enemy. The squads from the 366th Infantry Regiment, entirely made up of African-American officers and men, were advised to withdraw.

One of the platoon commanders was a young 1st lieutenant from Cincinnati, twenty-nine-year-old John Fox. Knowing the Germans and Italians were attacking with several battalions, Fox volunteered to stay behind in Sommocolonia with his men to coordinate and observe artillery fire: without this, the Germans would simply break through unchecked straight down the strategically vital Serchio valley. During Christmas night, German and Italian soldiers gradually infiltrated the town of Sommocolonia in civilian clothes, and in the early morning were joined by other uniformed units. The Germans stormed into the village under cover of an enormous artillery barrage that began at four o’clock in the morning of Boxing Day. Most of the American units in the town withdrew.

By eight o’clock, Fox and his party had been forced to pull out of the village and climb into the second-floor bedroom of the stone house—almost like a small tower—that overlooked Sommocolonia and the advancing Germans. Here he had set up his radio communications, while the men with him opened fire with their Garands and a .30 Browning machine gun. Battalion headquarters told Fox to withdraw. He stayed put. Six miles down the valley, 105mm and 150mm artillery pieces opened fire on Fox’s defensive fire coordinates, the shells whistling and screaming over the snow-topped mountains to land exactly where the lieutenant wanted them: right in front of him. At 0800 hours, Lieutenant Fox reported that the Germans were in the streets and attacking in strength. So he called for more defensive artillery fire to slow the enemy’ advance, but the Germans continued to attack toward the area behind the village and on the mountain slope that he occupied, so he issued a new set of fire orders, bringing the incoming shells much closer to his own position. The German soldiers were right in front of his platoon’s position—he urgently needed time to allow other American units behind in the valley to reorganize for a counterattack. So now he radioed in to have the artillery fire adjusted closer to his position, then radioed again to have the shelling moved even closer. The soldier receiving the message was stunned, for that would bring the deadly fire right on top of Fox’s position; there was no way he would survive.1 This shelling delayed the German advance until other units could reorganize to repel the attack. Finally Fox was warned that the next adjustment would bring the deadly artillery right on top of his position. Lieutenant Fox acknowledged the danger but insisted this was the only way to defeat the attacking soldiers. He said, “Fire it.”

Later that day, a counterattack retook the position from the Germans, and Fox’s body was found, with some hundred dead bodies of German soldiers around it. “His gallant and courageous actions, at the supreme sacrifice of his own life, contributed greatly to delaying the enemy advance until other infantry and artillery units could reorganize to repel the attack. His extraordinary valorous actions were in keeping with the most cherished traditions of military service, and reflect the utmost credit on him, his unit, and the United States Army.”2

As the Germans were attacking the Serchio valley, the Maratha Light Infantry and the 21st Indian Infantry Brigade were dug into positions on the top of the Apennines, facing German paratroopers, where the temperatures were considerably colder than down toward the coast. A Scottish officer fighting alongside the men from Bombay in the same brigade described the conditions in a letter:

I know how my grandfather felt at Majuba Hill [a battle in the Boer War, 1881]. We had the high ground and it was of little use to us. Our positions were under constant observation. We had to sit tight all the time, just like old Bill in Flanders [cartoon character—an unhappy soldier in World War I]. A bitter wind whistled up the valley and curled over the crests, adding one more misery to sitting in a slit trench all day and all night, with a drizzle gradually soaking clothing and blankets, and freezing the bones. A heavy mist would come down; if the paraboys could not see us, neither could we see them. It was rather eerie this being hunted through the fog, and we grew very quick on the trigger.

The Indians knew the attack in the Serchio valley was important. The area around Lucca and the coastline was logistically vital to the American formations, which landed almost all of their supplies in Leghorn, or Livorno, a port less than forty miles behind the front. The tightly stretched supply route then ran to Pisa, toward Lucca and up into the Serchio valley itself. Intelligence reports reached General Dudley Russell’s HQ on December 22: almost all of his 8th Indian Division apart from one brigade had to move to Tuscany. For the Marathas, like the rest of the division, it was a logistical nightmare: their unit was scattered across different Apennine peaks. Captain Eustace D’Souza’s company of the 1st Battalion was a whole mountain away from battalion headquarters. He ordered his men to climb out of their frozen slit trenches, shoulder all of their weapons and equipment, and just follow him down the mountain. The scene couldn’t have been farther from the summer evening at the Castello di Montegufoni, guarding the Italian art, walking under the mandarin trees. In late December, the Marathas were dressed in a combination of issued snowsuits, makeshift white cloths tied around their helmets, heavy greatcoats that got wet very quickly and then froze each night, and their 38 Webbing equipment that was a noncompliant mass of hard, dirty, frozen canvas straps. Nevertheless, by Christmas Eve, the Marathas were ready and headed out. A day later they were in the Serchio valley, deploying into defensive positions. For four months, the riverbed had become a nightmare incarnate for the Buffalo Soldiers of mountain ridges, mud, rain, artillery fire, and well-dug-in Germans. For the Marathas, arriving from the very top of the frozen Apennines, things looked rather different. “The Serchio valley is wide, easy and well cultivated. A railway and two highways follow the line of the river, a quiet stream which averages one hundred feet in width. The area is heavily populated, with clusters of farmhouses and small hamlets scattered along the roads and in the glades among the beech woods. The countryside exhibited no signs of devastation, and the gracious contours and pleasant expanses delighted the Indians, fresh from a nightmare existence in the gale-swept valleys of the winter Apennines.”3

The German 148th Division held the line advancing down the Serchio valley. It was accompanied by parts of three Italian Fascist divisions, and all the troops were of what the Allies called “second-rate quality.” There were a lot of Polish troops in the German units, and the Italian divisions had a desertion rate of forty soldiers per day. One Italian sergeant from a mountain unit was stationed on the top of a mountain in a windy grove of elm and hazel. He had a German headquarters team attached. Unlike most of their fellow countrymen’s military units after the armistice, the Italian Alpini units—their mountain troops—were extremely capable. The Italian Alpini sergeant was told by a German NCO that the troops opposite them in the line were the Buffalo Soldiers and Indians. “I knew then it was not going to be an easy or even fight.”4

It was not. The German offensive lasted a little under forty-eight hours. The advance positions of the 92nd and the 366th held the Germans long enough to allow the Marathas, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and the Punjabi Frontier Force Rifles to dig in and form blocking positions as far back as the outskirts of Lucca. General Russell took command of all the troops in the valley—including the Americans and South Africans—and went straight on the offensive. In a small skirmish that hardly made the divisional log, but that would stay with him all his life, Captain Eustace D’Souza was wounded and decorated leading a platoon of C Company of the Marathas as they forced a company of Germans back from a forward American position. An enemy soldier—D’Souza for some reason always thought he was Polish—got off a loose round from his Mauser rifle that went through the Bombay officer’s side without touching any organs, arteries, or veins. Like many people who are shot, D’Souza at first didn’t notice it, as he led his three sections straight at, and around, the Germans. It was only afterward that one of his corporals pointed out that he was bleeding all down his right side, the bloodstains spreading under his greatcoat, which he had opened because he was so hot. He was decorated in this small action—a British Army honor called Mentioned in Despatches, where the soldier in question has exhibited sufficient bravery or ability on the battlefield to merit named recognition in the official written report of the battle in question. One battle diary described it thus: “After the rigours and deadly encounters of the mountains, this excursion into the west had proved to be something of a frolic. It was a different enemy and a different sort of war.”

It wasn’t a frolic for the Marathas, and especially not for D’Souza. But by January 30, the Frontier Force Rifles had relieved the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders so they could go off and enjoy the feast of New Year’s Eve, their traditional Hogmanay. And so 1944, under the shadow of the gentle snows of the Serchio valley, became 1945.