22

The Last Battles: Colle Musatello and Chioggia

April 1945

By April 1945, the Red Army was closing in on Vienna and fighting on the Seelow Heights outside Berlin. They had occupied Danzig and Slovakia, and broken through into Austria. The British had meanwhile arrived in Frankfurt. General Eisenhower had already broadcast an appeal for the Germans to surrender. In the Pacific, the Americans had landed on Okinawa, the closest island to the Japanese mainland, which they would use as their springboard for a planned invasion. But on the Gothic Line, some of the German units appeared to be determined to hold out to the last. There were three reasons for this. First, regiments or battalions made up of soldiers who originated from eastern Germany, in territory now occupied by the Red Army, knew they had no homes to return to. Second, some units preferred to face the Allies in open battle rather than retreat through territory behind their own lines that was controlled by Italian partisans: they stood a much better chance of making it alive as prisoners of the Allies than as prisoners of the partisans. Third, until the fall of Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Venice in April, discipline among the majority of German units across northern Italy remained relatively high.

So in late March, when Daniel Inouye and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team arrived back from France at the Tuscan port of Livorno, there was still fighting to do. The unit had been involved in extremely heavy combat in the Vosges mountains of eastern France since before Christmas. They’d taken very high casualties—at the end of one battle in November, no more than half the unit could physically walk, or stand up, to parade before their commanding officer. General Mark Clark had asked that the Nisei be returned to Italy, and on disembarking on the Tuscan coast, they jumped straight into trucks to join the new division to which they were now attached. It was the 92nd, the Buffalo Soldiers. They’d be fighting together as the American advance pushed up the western flank of the Gothic Line.

Inouye was now a lieutenant, after being given a battlefield commission in France. On the day his commanding officer told him to report to regimental HQ, the young Japanese-American sergeant had weighed exactly 111 pounds. Eating K rations and fighting in combat for months on end, he had lost nearly 30 pounds. Astounded to be told he was being promoted, Inouye was then told that an officer had to weigh a minimum of 135 pounds. There was no way he could put on 24 pounds instantly, so the paperwork was altered, and 1st Lieutenant Daniel K. Inouye took over command of his men. The officer’s bars weighed heavily on his shoulders. On the naval transport from France back to Italy, he had eaten in the officers’ mess while his noncommissioned colleagues and enlisted men in his company queued up with their mess tins in the chow line in the galley. Inouye found the wine, the cognac, and the cigars amusing. It seemed a million miles away from the war.1

The 442nd and the 370th Regimental Combat Teams were given the task of taking a mountain that overlooked the main coastal highway that led to the key port of La Spezia. At midnight on April 5, they moved through a gorge and climbed the cliffs on the enemy’s right flank. It was completely quiet. Some men lost their footing on the climb and slipped and bounced to their deaths on the rocks below. Yet not one of his men made a sound, the lieutenant noted. The Germans were lining up for breakfast when the Nisei charged them; two hours later, they were surrendering. The Allies had been blocked on this section of the Gothic Line since the previous winter, when the Indians and the 92nd had driven off the German counterattack on the Serchio valley. Snow, mud, bad visibility, and roads washed to nothing had blocked any advance. The men of the 442nd were given a week to take the first position; they did it in one night. For the following week, they moved up and down hills and mountains, through freezing streams, and over scrub-covered mountains. The Germans were being pushed back toward La Spezia and up the western seaboard of Italy. Daniel Inouye said there was a cautious feeling throughout the 442nd “that the end might be in sight. The Allies were nearing Berlin. If we could drive the Germans out of Italy, they would have to surrender.”

Later that week, headquarters gave his company the task of taking a village called Altanagna. It lay on the mountains overlooking the coast. It was dusk, and suddenly spring seemed to be coming. When the Germans opened fire with mortars and machine guns, Inouye’s platoon, from long and instinctive practice, hit the ground. Shrapnel hit one of his men, who crawled away behind some rocks and bled to death; his friends found him only days later. It was the only soldier Lieutenant Inouye was to lose as an officer. The village of Altanagna was tiny, and a company of Germans was defending it, but overnight, as the Nisei waited to attack, the Germans suddenly pulled out. The Japanese Americans charged into the village and searched it. Clearing the basement of one house, ready to throw a hand grenade through a door that barred his way, Inouye found a group of terrified nuns hiding there. He left them, excusing himself in a few words of bad Italian, and rushed forward to take command of his platoon—a German counterattack could only be hours away. And when it arrived, he positioned himself in the church steeple, directing his men’s fire. By daybreak, the Germans had fled.

His men started reloading their Garand, BAR, and Thompson magazines. The wounded were treated; the soldiers wolfed down cold K rations, smoked, and slurped water from the village standpipe. Then, in the middle of the night, with oil lamps burning, a delegation of villagers came to talk to the young officer. Despite the war, despite the fighting, they had put on smart suits and dark dresses, “shabby with age and streaked with the gray dust of war.”2 They thanked Inouye and asked him, in recognition of what he had done, if he would do them the honor of becoming the mayor of their village. Inouye insisted that the honor lay with the Americans, and the villagers had nothing to thank him for. But they insisted. An Italian who spoke some English pointed to three of the younger girls of the village, who were doing their best to hide and vanish into the shadows. “The villagers ask me to tell you that they have bought these three maidens for your comfort, Lieutenant. They wish you a pleasant evening.”3

Inouye realized what the Germans had made the Italians expect after a battle. He addressed the whole village and told them that he had not come to take their wine, their women, their food, or their land. They were different from the Germans. They bought peace. The three girls kissed him on the cheek. The next morning, as he led his men out of the village, the local people cheered the platoons passing ahead of his, but Inouye’s platoon was bombarded with flowers.

Once again, he thought, he had survived another night and day of combat. He didn’t know what to attribute it to. Was it the lucky charms he and his men carried? Some of the Nisei carried a sen ninbari in their pockets, given to them by old ladies in Honolulu before they shipped out. The piece of white cloth had a thousand stitches and was meant to protect the wearer against one thousand misfortunes. Other soldiers carried a St. Christopher medal or a Buddhist charm. Inouye carried two silver dollars he had won gambling back in the States—he carried them in a breast pocket, and they were bent and disfigured after absorbing the impact of a German bullet in France. Ever since, he had not gone into battle without them.

The Attack on Colle Musatello

When the 442nd RCT heard that Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, they were in the middle of attacking an enemy position uphill. When word got to them, the men began jumping out of their foxholes and tore straight at the enemy. That day, said Inouye, “we were moving up for FDR. Every Nisei who had been invested with first-class citizenship by virtue of the uniform he wore knew this.” The 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 442nd were now just south of La Spezia: for two weeks they advanced up and down mountains three thousand feet high, encircled, flanked, marched, crawled, and fought and fought and fought. They were up against MG-42 positions dug into the mountains that looked directly over at the Mediterranean and La Spezia—to the north they could almost see as the coast curved around and became the Gulf of Genoa. In the third week of April, the regimental commander—who had received some word of Operation Sunrise, of other peace overtures being made by the Germans—called his officers together. The war, he said, could end next year or next week, he didn’t know. So nobody was to take any unnecessary chances. And on April 20, headquarters gave Inouye and Easy Company of his battalion a new objective: a high and heavily defended ridge called Colle Musatello. At dusk, the men went off to prepare for the following day’s battle. As he opened cardboard boxes of .45 ammunition for his Thompson, and transferred the heavy golden rounds into his magazines, Inouye knew something was missing. He checked his equipment. Pistol, sidearm magazines, magazines and pouches for his Thompson, knife, canteen, six grenades, medical equipment, water … but he couldn’t find his two lucky silver dollars. He looked everywhere, but without any luck. He had lost them. And “from the message center in my heart, I kept hearing forebodings of disaster.”4

The attack went in at first light. Inouye strode calmly up the hill, directing artillery on his radio. A mortar and machine-gun position were destroyed. Their platoon had outflanked the Germans and arrived abreast of them before the other two platoons had reached them. So Inouye led his men forward. Three machine guns opened up. The young lieutenant lay on the grass, devoid of cover, then pulled out a grenade, stood up, and threw it. There was a sudden wallop in his side as though somebody had punched him. He lobbed his grenade over the logs in front of the MG-42 position, and as it exploded, blowing showers of mud, metal, and wood out of the position, he machine-gunned the crew with his Thompson. He waved his men toward the other two gun positions as one of his GIs screamed at him that he was bleeding. The Germans had shot him in the stomach. The men were pinned down. Inouye knew it was up to him. When informed of the severity of his wound, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine-gun position, which he successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss. As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, coming within ten yards. As he raised himself up and cocked his arm to throw his last grenade, “I saw him, that faceless German, like a strip of motion picture film running through a projector that’s gone berserk. One instant he was standing waist-high in the bunker, the next he was aiming a rifle-grenade at my face from a range of ten yards. And even as I cocked my arm to throw, he fired and his rifle grenade smashed into my right elbow and exploded and all but tore my arm off.”

The primed grenade was reflexively clenched in a fist that suddenly didn’t belong to him anymore. Inouye’s horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. While the German in the bunker reloaded his rifle, Inouye pried the live grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. As the enemy soldier aimed his rifle at him, Inouye tossed the grenade into the bunker and destroyed it. He stumbled to his feet and continued forward, silencing the last German resistance with a one-handed burst from his Thompson, “the useless right arm slapping red and wet against my side.” Then, before being wounded in the leg and tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge, he awoke to see the worried men of his platoon hovering over him. His only comment before being carried away was to order them back to their positions, saying, “Nobody called off the war!”

The Liberation of Chioggia

On the same day, April 21, a week before the end of the war in Italy, a former college football player, 1st Lieutenant George M. Hearn, was operating on the northeast coast of Italy. Originally from the United States Marine Corps Reserve, he was now attached to the Office of Strategic Services. He was on a boat off the Adriatic coast near the town of Chioggia, which lies on a sea lagoon south of Venice and north of Ravenna. George Hearn had entered the Marine Corps in 1943 following graduation from San Jose State College in California, and after being commissioned, he had immediately volunteered for duty with the OSS. As soon as he finished his Marine basic training, he was sent to the OSS operating base at Algiers, and afterward he joined one of their Maritime units operating in the Adriatic.

In the dying days of the war in Italy, he was operating with a group of partisans who had been detailed with finding a way to negotiate the fall or surrender of Chioggia, a medieval city that is surrounded by water on two sides. The Germans had 88mm maritime coastal batteries on the seawalls and moles protecting the lagoon, and antiaircraft batteries that could be used against any attacking infantry. They also had three whole battalions of combat soldiers. Hearn had one American corporal with him, a company of Italian Marines, and the equivalent of two platoons of partisans. They were based on the Isola della Donzella, a large area of lagoons, reeds, swamps, and low-lying fields that lies at the mouth of the River Po, where it merges into the Adriatic south of Chioggia. They were forty miles ahead of the combined armies of the advancing Allies, who had just taken a three-pronged route of advance now that they were through the Apennines and across the Gothic Line. In the center of the country, their main line of assault was toward Bologna, and four American and Indian divisions were heading for it. Two more were aiming for Ferrara, and another for Venice. The race was to get to Trieste—Marshal Tito’s partisans had liberated the city of Zagreb, and were heading south toward the Adriatic. In the forefront of the Allied advance was a New Zealand division, but from Venice southward to the defenses of Chioggia, there were only partisans, the OSS, and one SOE mission. Farther south still, the town of Argenta and the huge saltwater lagoon of Lake Comacchio had been the scene of incredibly heavy fighting in the first half of April as the Allies tried to dislodge two divisions of German defenders. By mid-April they had succeeded.

On the night of April 22, an Allied airdrop parachuted additional arms and ammunition to Hearn and the partisans on Donzella. Then familiar reinforcements arrived. At ten o’clock the next morning, several landing craft flying the White Ensign of Britain’s Royal Navy growled into the Po’s estuary. On board were sixty commandos from Popski’s Private Army with twenty jeeps and half a dozen Italian Marines. Hearn was to help their operations by going back to the mainland himself and organizing guerrilla support for both the commandos and any advancing Allied ground troops so all sides could take Chioggia and move north.

That night, as Hearn and his men lay waiting, hundreds of refugees from the fortress town of Chioggia arrived at Hearn’s perimeter and told them what was happening inside the city: the Germans were evacuating.

Hearn decided to enter the city immediately. With all his men he set off, expecting to find only a handful of Germans still clinging onto the old town. The six-foot-tall Californian had spoken to lots of his OSS colleagues and to other American, Canadian, and British officers who had been involved in the liberation of other towns and cities farther south. One moment, they had said, a town could be the most heavily defended of positions, impenetrable, a suicidal proposition to attack. An hour later, it could be deserted. It was always a matter of seizing the moment.

Within fifteen minutes, three Germans carrying a white flag appeared. Hearn stood there, hands on hips, his .30 M1 carbine held in one arm. He told the Germans he had been sent to accept the surrender of Chioggia. They seemed not to have any idea what to say. They looked at the dirty, tanned man with the filthy blond hair and the small rifle cocked across his arm, and suggested he come meet their commander. Hearn took one Italian with him and moved off.

“In ten minutes we were in the town proper. One glance at the streets and I knew my worst fears were justified. For the first time a sharp sense of personal fear hit me. Hundreds of heavily armed German troops were milling around; every second one had an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder. Barbed wire and sand bagged buildings were everywhere. Surrender? If ever a place looked ready for a fight this was it.”5

Hearn and his Italian-American OSS colleague went to the main hotel, where they met twelve Germans, of whom the most senior was a German navy captain. Hearn laid out his hand. A huge American air strike on Chioggia was ready: the fighter-bombers were just waiting for the all-clear code word from Hearn. The whole town, and the German defenders, would be shot and rocketed to pieces. However, they had one chance. If they surrendered now, and Hearn called off the attack, all could be saved. He stood there and looked at the Germans. There was silence. Then the Germans gave in. Hearn said that he had to return to his unit to make radio contact, and then would come back to the Germans to take their surrender. And incidentally, asked the American officer, how many men would the Germans be surrendering?

Eleven hundred, was the answer. Hearn was stunned. He and his corporal walked outside, climbed into a horse-drawn cart, saluted, and clip-clopped off. How on earth was he going to arrange for the surrender of eleven hundred men? The Germans would discover pretty soon that Hearn had less than a platoon.

It was a couple of hours later when he found a jeep carrying Lieutenant Harold Wallbridge of Popski’s Private Army roaring along the road. The officer listened to Hearn. Then he sent the jeeps of R Patrol off to find a way into the town. Hearn and Wallbridge found two bicycles and pedaled furiously back to Chioggia and told the German captain that the air strike had been called off. All Hearn had to do now was to keep up the bluff for another two days, until the advance guard of Allied troops arrived; in the interim, he and his thirty-five men, along with the six jeeps of R Patrol of Popski’s Private Army, took the surrender of a whole regiment, along with eight batteries of coastal 88mm guns, the maps to the minefields outside the town, the personal weapons of 1,100 men, ammunition, shells for two artillery batteries, and all of their vehicles. Not a single shot was fired. It was an honorable surrender—and a triumphant bluff.