My Not So Happy Journey to Nettuno and Anzio!

Diario di Roma Tre
Friday March 17, 2017

Cloudy 66°F/ 19°C in Cedar Park, Texas 78613

Sunny 63°F/ 17°C in Roma, Lazio, Italia 00128
Buongiorno,
       When my folks bought the house in Riverhead, Long Island where my brother and I grew up, I started second grade at the Roanoke Avenue Elementary School. It was 1947. I was the new kid in

American Cemetery, Nettuno, Italy

a new school. Most of my classmates had started together in kindergarten two years before. In fact, the teacher had introduced me at the start of the class, telling everybody that I had attended first grade at rural Aquebogue Elementary School, my mom was a registered nurse and my dad had served in the U.S. Navy during the war. So for the second time in a year, I was meeting new friends and classmates. Most of those getting to know you conversations focused on basic questions like, do you have any brothers and sisters?, how old are you?, where do you go to church?, does your mom work or does she stay home? and, what does your father do? Did he kill any Japs in the war? These were talking points that led, in many cases, to the formation of life-long friendships.
       Eager to fit in with the other second graders, I joined in these childhood conversations, asking each new acquaintance about their families and making new friends until I happened to ask one little boy what his dad did. His smile was replaced with a very sad look, and he stammered, choking back a tear. Oh, I don’t have a dad any more. He was killed in the war! I hadn’t expected an answer like that, and I was dumbstruck. Mumbling a whispered Oh, I’m sorry, I slunk off to another corner of the playground. When I got home from school that afternoon, I told my mother what had happened. As it turned out, my mother knew the little boy’s family and the story about his father’s death. I would meet other classmates who had lost their dads in the war, but, this was my first experience with this kind of tragedy, and I was badly shaken by what the boy had told me. His father was killed at a place called Anzio, my mother told me. It’s in Italy. With that, she went over to  our bookcase and brought back the globe that she had used to follow my fathers wartime journeys around the world aboard the LST 920. Anzio is right here, she explained as she pointed to a place on the coast of Italy, not far from Rome. Your friend’s father was a soldier in the U.S. Army. His unit was part of the Allied invasion force trying to liberate Italy from the Nazis. He was killed by the Germans. That’s why your new friend doesn’t have a father. You are lucky! Your dad came home safe and sound, but a lot of boys and girls weren’t so lucky. That’s why you have to work hard to be a good friend to that little boy. Some kids don’t understand, and make fun of children like him. It was an important lesson in compassion.
          The Anzio beachhead is part of what Winston Churchill called the soft underbelly of Europe! Churchill had persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch an Allied invasion from North Africa

Bill Mauldin Cartoon -" Up Front" 1944

through Sicily onto the Italian coast south of Rome to outflank the Germans. Following Sicily, the Allies landed at Salerno, Anzio and the nearby port of Nettuno. But as General Mark Clark, commander of the U.S. Fifth Army later  commented, the soft underbelly turned out to be a tough old gut! It took Allied forces more than four months of the bloodiest fighting of the war to break the Nazis steel ring. The Allies-U.S., British and Canadian troops had selected an area of reclaimed marshland surrounded by mountains around Anzio as the invasion site, counting on the element of surprise for the success of the invasion. Allied strategy counted on quickly breaking out of the landing area, taking control of the mountains and moving forward to surprise the German forces under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. But, the American commander, General John P. Lucas delayed the advance so he could consolidate his positions at the beach. A big mistake! When the Allied force broke out four months later, General Lucas was relieved of his command and sent home.  The Germans reacted quickly to invading forces and quickly seized the high ground over the beach. For months they rained artillery fire down on Allied troops below. Both sides suffered horrendous casualties.  The Germans and Italian forces suffered 40,000 casualties with 5,000 killed in action and 35,000 wounded, missing or taken prisoner. The Americans, British and Canadians sustained 43,000 casualties including 7,000 killed in action and 36,000 wounded or missing. Anzio was one of the bloodiest battles fought during World War 2.
        Many years later, I have become a regular visitor to Italy. My expatriate son Michael is married to an Italian woman and has made his life in Rome, which I’ve come to consider as my second home. His job as a tour guide takes him not only to the sites of ancient cities like Pompeii and Ostia Antica, but some of the famous battle sites of both World Wars. In fact, the first time I visited Pompeii, our tour bus passed by Montecassino and Anzio. After I told the story  about my friend in grade school, Laura said, Then we should go to the American Cemetery in Nettuno. Last Saturday, we did just that. And, as we toured the memorial hall at the visitors center, my childhood memory came face to face with my study of World War 2 history as an adult. During my research for my own book about my father’s Navy service (LST 920: Charlie Botula’s Long, Slow Target, Amazon Books), I had been captivated by Bill Mauldin’s wartime cartoon saga of Willie and Joe, his typical GI’s trying  to survive the war. I had read the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s book Brave Men cover to cover many times.  Then, after my own move from California to Texas last year, I discovered another bit of history to weave into this story. The Lone Star State’s 36^th Infantry Division which fought in this campaign and suffered very heavy losses at the Battle of the Rapido River. It wasn’t only the distant memory of a young classmate’s grief that prompted me to make this pilgrimage. My parents had friends of theirs who lost loved ones at Anzio or Salerno along the Allies road to Rome on June 5, 1944 – the day before the D-Day invasion at Normandy.  And, among the thousands of troops from every state in the union were the sons of Italian immigrants who had left their homeland years be    fore seeking new opportunities and the freedom to fulfill their dreams in America. Many of these new immigrants and children of immigrants still had close relatives here in the old country. For them, the war was personal! Members of their own families were going hungry and dying because the land they loved had fallen under the boot heels of tyrants. Now, nearly eight decades after the guns fell silent, nearly 8,000 of them rest under the white travertine crosses in the American cemetery.
          One of the Texans from the 36^th Infantry Division, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, a small town in central Texas, was immortalized by Ernie Pyle in what came to be his most famous wartime column. Captain Waskow was idolized by his fellow Texans, and his death was a

Captain Henry T. Waskow

devastating blow to his comrades. Correspondant Pyle was on hand that moonlit Italian night near Anzio, when Waskow’s body was brought down the mountain on the back of a pack mule. As Pyle tells the story…..
          Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.
               "After my own father, he came next," a sergeant told me.
                "He always looked after us," a soldier said. "He’d go to bat for us every time."
                 "I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair," another one said.
                I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down. The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked.
                Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed onto the backs of mules. They came lying belly-down across the wooden pack-saddles, their heads hanging down on the left side of the mule, their stiffened legs sticking out awkwardly from the other side, bobbing up and down as the mule walked.
               Like cartoonist Bill Mauldin and the other great war correspondents, Ernie Pyle covered the war from the point of view of the individual GI’s doing the fighting and dying.  He revealed moments in wartime with well chosen words that even a photograph cannot capture, like Captain Waskow’s men saying their farewells.

Ernie Pyle

                One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.
                 Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I’m sorry, old man."
                 Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said:
                 "I sure am sorry, sir."
           Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.
            And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.
              Captain Henry T. Waskow is buried here at the American Military Cemetery at Nettuno along with 7,800 other heroes of the Sicily-Anzio-Rome Campaign. Captain Waskow is buried in Plot G, Row 6, Grave 33. I don’t where my young classmate’s father is buried, but I paid my respects to him as well. I’m sure that my friend would have done the same for me.
Caio!
MikeBo

(Excerpts from: The Night They Brought Captain Waskow Down, from Brave Men, Ernie Pyle, University of Nebraska Press 1944.)

[Mike Botula is the author of LST 920: Charlie Botula’s Long, Slow Target!  (Amazon Books)  MikeBo’s Blog is a wholly owned subsidiary of his web site www.mikebotula.com , and is linkedto Facebook,  Twitter and Google Plus!]

© By Mike Botula 2016