The Rapido River is a fast river. Molto rapido. In January 1944 it was in flood, sixty feet wide, ten feet deep and icy cold. The Germans were bunkered down in hills on the north side of the river with machine guns, mortars and artillery. On the night of January 20 that shithead back in Fifth Army Headquarters, General Mark Clark, ordered our whole division to paddle across this river in M-2s—little plywood boats about the size of your living room sofa—and attack the Krauts on the other side, head-on.
The first problem was to get the boats to the river. That meant we had to carry them by hand about three miles at night across the fields to the south bank of the river. The damn little things weighed about half a ton each. We had to carry them because the ground was too muddy for trucks—a truck would sink to the axles in that old Dago muck. Also the ground was full of mines. And I mean those wooden box mines, hard to detect. The engineers had tried to clear safe paths for us through the minefields but in the dark it was mighty difficult to find the paths. We practically had to feel our way by the tape markers and the marline cord. And of course as we stumbled through the mud hauling those damn boats the Krauts were firing at us with their big guns, the 88s and that godawful thing they called the Nebelwerfer that fired six shells at once. Those shells had holes in the side that made a kind of whooping noise when they flew through the air. Just the sound was enough to make a man shit in his britches. We called them the Screaming Mimis. So by the time we even got to the river half the men in our battalion were dead or wounded or lost or hiding in shell holes. Our platoon leader, a young guy from Waco, Texas, was killed right away, and half the platoon was gone. Our captain was gone. Half the company was gone. We couldn’t see a damn thing. We had no radio or phone contact with anybody. But me and Floyd and Homer and Dick Holyoak and the Spivak brothers and Ernie got to the bank without a scratch on us. The only one missing was Bill Gatlin and he was safe and warm in a V.D. ward in the base hospital in Naples. He always was smarter than the rest of us. Real exciting, except for the Screaming Mimis and the machine-gun bullets flying over our heads. And we still had our boat and we still had our orders: cross that river and start killing Germans. No officers in sight, though you couldn’t see much anyhow. So we set the boat down on the bank of the river and I looked at my squad and they looked at me and I said, Well, boys, what do you think we should do? Nobody said anything at first, then a couple of shells exploded about fifty yards behind us and old Homer, he said, goddamn it, Will, it can’t be as bad on the other side as it is here, let’s cross. So we lowered the boat as best we could down off this six-foot mudbank and into the water and climbed in and started to paddle toward the other side. It was pitch-black dark except for the flares here and there but we could tell where the Germans were because that’s where all the bullets were coming from. We’d gone about ten feet across and about twenty feet downstream when I felt the water inside the boat getting up to my knees and rising fast. The damned boat was full of holes and water spurting in like a high-pressure spigot. Okay, boys, I said, let’s do a one-eighty: this here M-2 is sinking. We were all loaded down with our rifles, steel helmets, hand grenades, extra bandoliers of ammo, trenching tools, bayonets, combat packs and our shoes full of water. We almost didn’t make it back but got there somehow and climbed up that mudbank and let the boat sink and then we started digging in. We dug real deep, you can bet your bottom dollar on that, and there we stayed for the rest of the night. And oh but it was a long cold wet January night but we didn’t mind too much because we figured come daylight things would get even worse. We couldn’t see anything but we could hear plenty. The artillery fired all night, on both sides, and now and then when there was a pause you could hear the wounded fellas crying for help. Then the daylight came and there was that great big old Monte Cassino fort on top of the mountain looking right down on us. It was the ugliest evilest building I ever saw in my life and we knew the German observers were up there somewhere with binoculars studying our positions and pretty soon the artillery fire got worse for sure. A few of our boys had made it across the river in the night and were dug into the mud on the other side. We couldn’t see them but we could hear their M-1s and a couple of guys with the BARs. After a while we couldn’t hear very many. And then after a while we couldn’t hear none at all. We saw three men try to swim back across the Rapido. None of them got halfway across. We wanted to give them covering fire but we couldn’t even see where the Germans were, they were fortified deep in the rocks on the side of the hill or maybe up in that Monte Cassino monastery, we didn’t know. And besides—and don’t think we didn’t think about it—if we fired and gave away our position why inside two minutes we’d have six Screaming Mimis coming right down on top of us in one neat compact bunch. There wasn’t anything we could do except hunker down in our holes and wait. I mean wait until somebody got a good idea. Like how to get out of there. By noon the air was full of smoke from the smudge pots that was supposed to conceal our troops and then about three in the afternoon this fresh young second lieutenant showed up through the smoke waving a carbine and yelling. We’d none of us ever seen him before. He had a crazy gleam in his eyes and even though it was cold and foggy he was sweating. Or maybe it was just the oil from the smoke screens. He looked awful. He ordered us out of our holes. Attack! he screamed, we’re going to attack! Shells and bullets flying all around. Lieutenant, I said, we got no boat. Our boat is sunk. And you better get down in this hole right quick. Sergeant, he says, get your men out of there and follow me. Sir, I says, we don’t have any goddamned boat. Sergeant, he says, don’t argue with me, the engineers are building a pontoon bridge up the river. Now come on out of there. I looked at the boys; they looked at me; we knew how long that bridge would last, if the engineers even got it finished. Which they didn’t. About five minutes, that’s how long. The Krauts had every crossing point sighted in with heavy artillery. I saw the Spivak brothers looking at their knuckles and Dick and Ernie shaking their heads No. Sir, I said to the looey, they don’t want to go. Now why don’t you get down in this hole before you give away our position? Across the river we could hear the Nebelwerfers howling: whoop! whoop! whoop! whoop! whoop! whoop! Six fat shells rising into the air. The lieutenant pointed his carbine at me. Sergeant, he said, I am ordering you and your squad to come with me. That’s an order. But Ernie and Homer and Dick had their rifles pointed straight at him. Lieutenant, I says, I guess we’re not going to go right now. And I thought I could see his finger tighten up on the trigger. He was dead if he pulled it. But he hesitated. We heard the Screaming Mimis coming our way. Get down! I hollered, get down! He was staring up into the smoke. The six shells hit about ten yards away. Things like black broken dinner plates whipped over my head. Made a noise like a buzz saw cutting into nails. There was no sound from the lieutenant. When I looked up a second later he was still standing there like before except his head was gone. Whole thing: face, helmet, ears, brains, skull, most of the neck. Blood shooting up like a fountain. And then what was left took a couple of steps back and sort of telescoped down into the mud.
At this point in the story Will stopped to finish his beer. He only told me about it once. Then continued:
The dog tags were still there. His name was Burkett. He came from a little town in Pennsylvania called Coal Run. A ninety-day wonder fresh out of OCS. God, it could have been Charlie Kromko if Charlie hadn’t lucked out and been sent to England instead. No brains but lots of nerve. He’d been a student at Penn State. Majored in history. Didn’t have time to learn much though. Poor bastard trying to do his duty. His mission, as he saw it, was to get us across that river and get us all killed, wounded, or captured. Homer and Ernie and Floyd and them they had a different view: their mission as they saw it was to stay alive. And me—well my mission was kind of intermediary between the squad and the officers. I had to please the officers somehow, make them think we were doing what we were told. But I had different orders from the boys. Their orders to me was to get them home in one piece. I thought about it
carefully during those two days and nights on the Rapido and decided I’d take my orders from my men. I led where they agreed they wanted to go. We spent 85 percent of the war hiding in holes. That’s how we won.
That’s how we won when we spent that month in the rocks on the east side of Monte Cassino. There’s not much dirt on that mountain. Nothing but broken stone. We couldn’t hardly dig in anywhere so we built little stone walls and hid behind them. Stone chips flying through the air all the time. Lots of eye wounds in our outfit—needed more eye doctors than surgeons in the field hospital. Rained on us all through February. We like to froze to death. That’s where Floyd got his million-dollar wound—sliver of granite in the left eye. But it took him back to Naples and then back home and he’s got a 33 percent disability pension for life. He didn’t complain at the time. And then we got sent to Anzio and spent two months there, holed up twenty-foot deep behind sandbags. The Germans was so close once we could hear the burp guns stuttering—those machine pistols they had. And they had that big railroad gun about fifteen miles up the coast—what they called the Anzio Express. Then came the breakthrough past Velletri and the march into Rome on June the fourth—two days before the Allies landed at Normandy. In Rome we marched in a circle because of a traffic jam—the general didn’t trust his Italian guides and got lost for an hour—and had time for a few bottles of grappa and a few kisses from the signorinas before they herded us right though the city after the goddamned Krauts. As usual the infantry won the battle and the headquarters staff enjoyed the victory. And then by God just one mile north of Rome our whole column was stopped dead by seven Germans in a stone farmhouse. Seven young soldiers with one machine gun and a self-propelled antitank gun and no place to retreat and they held up the whole Thirty-sixth Division for two hours. And damned if our platoon leader—our third in three months—didn’t volunteer us to kill them, and we snuck around through the woods, just like we used to do along Stump Crick playing Indian, and outflanked them and shot them when they wasn’t looking. The dead Germans lay in a trench under some orange trees. The trees were in bloom (said Will), this was late springtime in Italy, and the one thing I remember and will never forget is the sweet smell of those orange blossoms over the smell of cordite and the sound of bees mixed in with the buzzing of flies closing in for lunch. We searched the bodies and found a letter in the German lieutenant’s pocket which ended, “…In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.” He was a schoolteacher, that crazy Kraut, his name was Kretschmer, and he came from a town in Bavaria called Augsburg. I kept the letter and delivered it myself to what was left of his family—no more brothers—about a year later. No, I didn’t tell his parents that I was the guy who killed their son. It was a lucky shot anyhow.
The Thirty-sixth marched on, Will and his squad in the recon column. The Thirty-sixth Division would have no rest. With victory in Italy assured, Mussolini and his mistress soon to be hanging by their heels at a gas station near Milan, Will’s outfit was transferred in August to southern France. They took part in the swift advance up the Rhine. Then came the miserable winter of 1944-45, when they fought in rain and snow in the Vosges Mountains. Will’s battalion was cut off, surrounded, nearly destroyed. Temperatures close to zero. Still alive, Will and his squad found shelter in snow-covered ruins near the town of Colmar. Homer Bishop lost three toes to frostbite—another lucky wound—and was sent home. The snows melted again and Will Lightcap, still a buck sergeant, followed his squad into the flooded valley of the Rhine. White flags hung from every house and the young frauleins—“furlines”—were there to greet them, eager to trade virtue and honor for cigarettes and C rations. Fair enough. Ernie Houser caught the clap, as Bill Gatlin had done in Mignano, and became the squad’s fourth casualty. In jeeps and weapons carriers Will and his three remaining teammates—Dick Holyoak and the Spivak brothers—rode through Bavaria, through the Black Forest, and on to Kitzbühel and V-E Day. Will saw Von Rundstedt and Hermann Goering brought as prisoners to division headquarters. He saw some other things as well—the death camps full of stacks of dead Jews, Slavs and gypsies—and thought that perhaps there was a meaning, after all, to Churchill’s War.
But what Will cared most about was his private victory: every member of his original squad would return alive and mostly intact to Shawnee County, West Virginia, in the Appalachian region of the United States of America. That, he’d admit with pride, was the real reason he wore a Bronze Star among his ribbons. The official citation mentioned “gallantry in action while under constant machine-gun and mortar fire.” Actually, explained Will, the officer he dragged back to safety, there among the rocks under Monte Cassino, was only drunk, not wounded, and making so much noise Will’s squad was afraid he’d bring down the Screaming Mimis. That was Captain Fred H. Sprankle of Chambers, Pennsylvania, a mortician by trade. The captain, falling-down drunk, was bellowing the song about Angelina, the waitress at the pizzeria (the one with the gonorrhea), when Will went out to get him. The captain was awarded a Silver Star for leading a charge that nobody followed. “Anyhow,” says Will, “he was a friend of mine, that Sprankle: I won forty dollars from him in a poker game.”
Nor was Will the only one to return with a medal. There were three Purple Hearts in the squad: Floyd Hendrickson for his eye wound, Homer Bishop for his lost toes and Bill Gatlin for his case of Angelinitis.
Old Bill was a-layin’ on his bed in the Army hospital in Naples when this tall hawk-nosed three-star general came striding in followed by an aide with a briefcase full of Purple Hearts, followed by two Army photographers, three reporters from The Stars & Stripes and about sixteen colonels. (As Bill told it.) This was a week after the glorious disaster at Rapido River and the Fifth Army commander was real busy that afternoon a-passing out the Purple Hearts mainly for the consolation of the folks back home and for whatever passed for a Christian conscience in his cold and calculating brain. Making a gesture. In a big hurry, thinking about more important things, the general made a wrong turn in a corridor and charged into the venereal disease ward. Before anyone in his retinue could muster up the courage to whisper a word in his ear, Mark Clark reached for the hand of the first casualty he came to, shook the hand, and said, “What’s your name, soldier?”
“The name’s Bill Gatlin, General, and I’m mighty glad to meet you.” (Our Cousin Bill.)
“Pleasure’s all mine, soldier.” Photographers taking pictures; flashbulbs flashing. “Where you from?”
“Stump Crick, West Virginny, sir, and mighty proud of it.”
“That’s good country, soldier. Good country. Where’d you get wounded?”
Old Bill was wearing hospital pajamas and a blue corduroy robe. He placed his right hand on his groin, closed his eyes and groaned a little bit. “Right here, General.”
The general made a face of deep sympathy. “Ah, that’s a tough one, soldier, a tough one. But I mean, where’d it happen? Which battle?”
“Well sir,” says Bill, “it was up yonder by that Mignano town. Me and Homer Bishop was havin’ a smoke in this old stone barn when we found this Ginzo signorina and her young pig hidin’ under a pile of straw in the corner of the stable just about the time them Screamin’ Mimis a-started comin’ down agin, and I says to Homer, Homer I says, I don’t care—”
The general was already pinning the Purple Heart to Bill’s chest and looking ahead to the next wounded man.
“—don’t care if it’s agin all regulations, this might be the last chance I’ll ever have to slip the old bone to a good piece of foreign pussy and by God I think I better do it now before them Nebelwerfers blows my ass clean over the whole MTO so I give this girl my last pack of Lucky Strikes and I says to her I says how about you and me honey have a little that there you know fucky-wucky okay? and she says—”
General Clark shook hands again with Bill, not hearing a word he was saying, wasn’t even listening to him, and says, “Carry on, soldier. It’s men like you who make our victory certain,” backs off the regulation three paces, s
alutes and hustles on to the next bed.
Private Gatlin, sitting up, returned the salute, and kept gabbing away:
“—she says hokay Joe presto presto prestissimo so I crawled in with her and her young pig she’s a holdin’ all the time and unloaded my rocks presto presto and pulled up my pants and I says to Homer, he’s standin’ guard at the window, I says all right Homer your turn, go ahead and top her off and, wait a minute, General, I hain’t even got to the interesting part yet—” He winks at the reporters.
But the general was already five beds down the aisle passing out his Purple Hearts. So Bill finished the story for the benefit of the reporters, all three of them grinning these shit-eating grins.
“—So that ol’ Homer he dives into that heap of straw on top of that signorina and her shoat and just about the time he’s set to hide the old baloney why down come six of them Screamin’ Mimis right outside the barn and I hear the pig squeal bloody murder and some stones fall out of the wall and when the dust clears I see old Homer with his teeth gritted and his eyes shut a-humpin’ the holy hell out of that poor little innocent pig and the pig a-squealin’ and the signorina watchin’ and in a second Homer fires his wad and opens his eyes and here’s this pig in his arms and Homer shuts his eyes agin thinkin’ hit’s all a bad dream but now the signorina is a screechin’ at him and she wants two packs of cigarettes not one because she claims that shoat was cherry and she is mad and Homer he’s sore as a boil but he got to pay up because sure enough that poor little virgin thing is bleedin’ some and there’s witnesses but I reckon maybe Homer got the best of the deal anyhow because six days later I got this dose of the blue munge and all he got was the crabs. All the same me and the boys figured Homer should of done the right thing by that pig and married it anyhow….”
General Clark was now striding out of the V.D. ward, his face red with rage, followed by his platoon of chicken colonels. One of them gave Bill a cold evil dirty look as he went by and Bill he gave the colonel a grin and another salute from the sitting position. Some captain came back in a minute and reclaimed the Purple Hearts but he didn’t get Bill Gatlin’s. No sir. The reporters were still there, talking with Bill, and Bill refused to surrender his medal. The captain went away mad but he went away. Bill gave his Purple Heart to a reporter for safekeeping, in case the captain came back with a couple of MPs. They kept the story out of the papers but every G.I. in Italy heard about it inside of a week. Ruined Mark Clark’s career—he got that fourth star, made full general, but never got to be a hero in anybody’s mind but his own. If there, even. And nobody felt sorry for Clark. The Thirty-sixth Division—T for Texas—had lost 1,681 men, within forty-eight hours, at the Battle of the Rapido.