CHAPTER NINE
THE BATTLE OF THE CAVES
German dead at Anzio, February 1944. [National Archives]
AT NOON ON FEBRUARY 18, 3rd Division commander General Lucien Truscott arrived in the wine cellar in Nettuno that was used as the headquarters for the Allied forces at Anzio. General Lucas had called a meeting of his generals. A situation map showed the full extent of the German penetrations. Forty-eight hours had passed since Operation Fischfang had begun. Kesselring was using up his reserves at an alarming rate but had pushed only as far as the Flyover on Via Anziate, two miles to Sparks’s rear. In some of the most intense close combat of World War II, the 157th Infantry Regiment’s I Company had earned itself a Presidential Unit Citation by preventing the Germans from advancing a yard closer to the sea.
The popular and incisive Truscott, wearing a leather jacket and tanker’s boots, examined the map. He could see lines indicating in red the German advances and in blue the Allied positions. They were all smudged, having been redrawn many times. In the center of the map was a blue circle around the caves where the remnants of the 157th Infantry Regiment’s Second Battalion were surrounded. Back in America, where the battle filled front pages, the battalion was referred to in some reports as the “Lost Battalion of World War II.”
That afternoon, across the fifteen-mile-long perimeter of the Anzio beachhead, the battle raged on. But nowhere was the fighting as savage and critical as it was in the 45th Division’s positions astride the Via Anziate. An incredible six hundred rounds of enemy artillery landed around Sparks and his men in their isolated position beside the road to Rome, in one forty-minute spell, with shells exploding every four seconds. Three men were killed, leaving Sparks and just fifteen men huddled in foxholes, their hands no doubt clamped over their ears, hearts racing so fast that some probably had tunnel vision, the noise and concussion from the shells enough to send even the deafened insane.
Perhaps one man above all, General Raymond S. McLain, commander of the 45th Division’s artillery, made the greatest impact in blunting Kesselring’s attacks. He had a habit of turning up unannounced in critical areas, in a jeep with his equally legendary driver, a former cowboy who drove as if he were on the back of a bucking steer in an Oklahoma rodeo. McLain carried only a Colt .32 automatic, good enough at close range, and appeared at the division command post looking like many a tramp Sparks had avoided in roadside jungles, face caked in sweat and dirt. A few words shouted over his radio led to the sky falling in on the onrushing Germans and their tanks. He constantly swigged a lemonade made from a flavored powder mix in K rations and told Thunderbirds who dared withdraw even a few yards: “The fight’s up front, not back there.”
All that day, they kept fighting, but even some of the toughest veterans broke under the strain, as Corporal Holt had done, weeping uncontrollably, ashamed beyond words that they could take no more. One Thunderbird sniper finally fell wounded after taking down twenty-five Germans. Medics performed acts of wonder. Others were just as selfless: wiremen who crawled between positions, risking death with every yard, to maintain vital communications; drivers and others bringing supplies to the caves, who were also direct targets. Nowhere was safe from the German shells. The rear areas were just as dangerous as the front lines.
Despite the unrelenting German assault, most Thunderbirds held steady through that endless afternoon of February 18, into the evening, and through the long night. By the following morning of February 19, interlocking American machine-gun fire near the caves had killed so many Germans that their corpses formed a bizarre cross. But it was McLain’s artillery and other Allied batteries, which fired ten times more shells than the enemy, that finally halted Kesselring’s forces, just as they had at Salerno. Shell-shocked Germans began to surrender in droves. In one sector, German machine-gun and mortar units were ordered to open fire on anyone trying to give up without a fight. When later interrogated, some prisoners confirmed the horror of the Allied shelling. “They [also] told of attacks starting out in battalion strength,” recalled one Thunderbird, “being whittled down to less than the size of a platoon by our artillery before reaching our forward positions.”
A German in the 715th Division, which went head-to-head with the Thunderbirds, wrote in a letter to his parents: “It’s really a wonder I am still alive. What I have seen is probably more than many saw in Russia. I’ve been lying under artillery barrages like the world has never seen.” He was not exaggerating. During twenty-three days of combat in Sicily, artillery units attached to the Thunderbirds had fired almost fifteen thousand rounds. In the last three days alone, since Operation Fischfang had begun on February 16, they had fired four times as many—more than sixty thousand.
IN A LARGE map room, surrounded by sycophantic generals, Adolf Hitler seethed with frustration and thumped the briefing table, his face reddening with rage. Operation Fischfang was not going to plan. The Allies had not been pushed back into the sea. The abscess below Rome had yet to be lanced. He began to rant about his generals in Italy. They were the problem, not his brave troops. After a twenty-minute tirade, his voice grew calmer. Another all-out attack might do the trick. And if his useless generals on the ground did not succeed this time, he would consider taking over the command of the battle himself.
HE COULD NOT see his battalion’s command post, some five hundred yards to his rear, even with the sky lit up with flares and explosions. But from the small rise, where he had dug in two days before, Sparks had a superb view of the enemy and was able to track his movements and direct his battalion’s artillery fire. At 2:55 A.M. on February 20, he reported: “HEAVY EQUIPMENT ROLLING BY.… DOESN’T SOUND LIKE TANKS. SOUNDS LIKE TRACTORS PULLING GUNS. MOVEMENT S [South].”
Before dawn, Sparks sent a runner back to the caves to find out what the Second Battalion planned to do next. He could not continue as a forward observer indefinitely. He and his last fifteen men had run out of supplies and were low on water. They had been forced to scavenge abandoned positions nearby for ammunition. When the runner returned, Sparks learned that the British would relieve the Second Battalion the following night of February 21.
To Sparks, it was a crazy idea, one of the “stupidest” things he had ever heard. He and his battalion were surrounded and yet hundreds of British troops were being sent to relieve them. How would any of them get to the caves, let alone hold out once they arrived? The sensible course of action would have been for the battalion to withdraw and reinforce the regiment’s new front lines, rather than waste yet more good men on a hopeless position.
The runner also told Sparks that he should be prepare to pull back to the caves. Once the British arrived, he and the rest of the surviving Thunderbirds in the Second Battalion were to break out and try to get back to the regiment’s forward lines, some two miles to the rear.
THE BRITISH SET out after dark on February 21, moving anxiously forward, rifles slung, beneath the brilliant green light of enemy chandelier flares that seemed to never go out. A German plane swooped and dropped anti-personnel “butterfly” bombs. They made a hideous popping sound as they exploded in orange and white splashes of blinding light, as if Hitler himself had lit a long string of firecrackers. Dozens of men from the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment were killed and more wounded, blood seeping from ears, mouths, and noses, their moans piercing the silence after the plane had passed. By the time the hundred or so survivors reached the caves, they had lost most of their weapons, armor, and supplies. But to the bearded and haggard Thunderbirds’ amazement, the shocked British survivors insisted on taking over the Americans’ positions.
One Thunderbird, Lieutenant John Cookingham, was soon escorting some brave British troops to a critical defensive position near the caves. A shell exploded nearby and he was hit in the shoulder. Cookingham, who had fought for five days and nights, fending off savage German attacks on the caves with only a few hours’ rest, fast lost strength as he was helped back to his foxhole.
“The lieutenant is down,” cried some men.
Lieutenant William Beckman rushed to Cookingham’s side.
“How ya doing, Cookie?” asked Beckman.
“Not too good, Becky, I’m so tired.”
A few seconds later, twenty-two-year-old Cookingham died. He had joined the regiment the previous November on the Winter Line. “His wounds were not life threatening,” his younger brother Vincent would later write, “but he [had] stayed up there for many days without sleep, food, and little water and his body was not able to stand the shock.” Beckman and others from G Company had to leave Cookingham’s body where he died because of the intensity of German fire. As Beckman pulled back, another shell landed close by and he was thrown in the air and knocked unconscious. The next thing he knew, he was lying in a hospital bed in Naples, one of a very fortunate few from the Second Battalion’s G Company who would return home after the war.
Later that night, Colonel Brown sent two British rifle squads to relieve Sparks and his men. Less than a dozen traumatized soldiers made it to Sparks’s position. Sparks said they could borrow his last machine gun. Clearly, they would need it. But they could only have it for so long. He would come back for it just before he tried to break out. To stand a chance of getting across no-man’s-land to American lines, he would need all the firepower he could get.
A few hours later, around dawn on February 22, Sparks set off for the caves with his surviving fifteen men. He had selected one of his last sergeants to lead the way. There was no knowing where the Germans lay in wait. The British had been decimated trying to reach Sparks’s position. Would he and his last men from E Company be able to escape detection? The sergeant knew the terrain intimately, having made several trips back to the caves since February 16, and was able to find several ditches and draws that provided excellent cover.
The survivors from E Company made their way to the labyrinthine caves unobserved and unscathed. It was a distressing scene that greeted them inside, a veritable Hades. Men with terrible wounds, who had been heavily drugged to stop their screaming, lay on bloodied stretchers and on the ground in the echoing corridors.
Medics and the battalion surgeon, Captain Peter Graffagnino, worked tirelessly to save as many as they could, but stocks of morphine spikes and bandages and supplies of water were all running desperately low. At some point, First Sergeant Harvey E. Vocke and a few others dared to fetch some water from a nearby stream that was clogged with dozens of decaying German corpses. The Germans opened fire and machine-gun bullets knocked the water cans from his hands. Others were more successful. Though the water was blood red, they filled their canteens and returned to the caves, where they then boiled it and shared it with the wounded.
“I gotta go out there,” some wounded men begged as the sound of fierce fighting continued outside the caves. “They need me out there.”
In one cave, German wounded and prisoners huddled, rubbing their foreheads and begging for “Wasser.” A German officer arrogantly demanded his men be given tea. Another, with a loaded pistol still in his holster, helped Captain Graffagnino tend to the most seriously wounded. Men were as starved as they were thirsty, sharing one meager K ration between three.
Throughout the rest of that day, February 22, 1944, from positions on top of the caves, men fought off repeated German attacks. H Company machine gunner Bill O’Neill had landed at Salerno, having crossed all the way from Africa in a bucking landing craft, and had since seen more than enough combat, but nothing as intense and relentless as that at Anzio. From his foxhole above the caves, he could see a series of low redbrick buildings. Suddenly, he spotted a group of Germans moving toward him from the buildings. They were waving a white flag.
“Piss on them,” O’Neill said to a terrified replacement in the hole beside him. “I’m not buying what they’re selling.”
O’Neill pulled out some tracer rounds, loaded them into his gun, and fired at the white flags. The Germans responded with light mortars, heavy mortars, light artillery, and heavy artillery, and then sent a fighter plane.
O’Neill reached down to grab his field glasses so he could identify the plane just as it dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb. It landed what seemed like only a few yards away. The concussion was stunning, the noise enough to puncture eardrums, but somehow O’Neill remained conscious. He realized that the man sharing the hole with him was reading the Twenty-third Psalm from a Bible.
“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …’ ”
O’Neill turned back to face the enemy. He could see a man digging, a hundred yards away.
The German stopped digging.
O’Neill believed the man was a sniper sent up to kill him.
“I’ll fix that son of a bitch.”
He grabbed his M1 rifle and waited for the German to start digging again. When he did, O’Neill fired over and over, finally hearing a ping as the ejected clip signaled his rifle was empty.
“Bitte … bitte … bitte …” moaned the sniper. The only German O’Neill probably knew were the words Kraut and kaput, preferably used together. Bitte sounded like “Peter.” He didn’t know what it meant.
A Thunderbird lieutenant approached.
“You can come down,” said the lieutenant.
O’Neill and his Psalm-reciting compatriot didn’t waste any time getting back to the relative safety of the caves, fifty or so feet below them. In a corridor leading to the caves’ aid station, a hundred and twenty men lay on litters. “No one had slept,” recalled surgeon Peter Graffagnino.
“We were out of plasma, morphine and bandages.” Local Italian women who had also taken refuge in the caves helped to nurse the wounded. Others made a thin soup from the handfuls of dried beans and a few chickens they had grabbed as they fled their homes. As candles cast ghoulish shadows across the underground labyrinth’s damp walls, white-faced Thunderbirds sipped the soup slowly, not knowing if they would ever eat a decent meal again.