Inferno - Max Hastings [289]
The American field ambulance service won warm praise, retrieving casualties hour after hour and day after day under continuous fire. One driver’s vehicle was blasted into a ditch by a near miss, after which he went forward on foot and brought in four Indian casualties one by one “under a hail of fire … Day and night, and non-stop if necessary, those American boys would carry on. They could always be trusted to get through, no matter how sticky the situation.” The 1/2 Gurkha Rifles spearheaded one of many attacks on Cassino. “The leading companies walked into a death trap. This scrub proved to be thorn thicket seeded with anti-personnel mines, its outskirts threaded with trip-wires linked to booby traps. Behind this deadly barrier stormtroopers lay in wait, in machine-gun posts less than fifty yards apart. Between these nests foxholes sheltered enemy tommy-gunners and bomb-throwers. A shower of grenades arched out of the night … The leading platoons dashed into the undergrowth and blew up almost to a man. Colonel Showers fell shot in the stomach. Two-thirds of the leading company was struck down within five minutes, yet the survivors continued to force their way forward. Riflemen were found afterwards with as many as four trip-wires around their legs. Naik Birbahadur Thapa, although wounded in many places, managed to burst through the scrub and seize a position … Stretcher-bearer Sherbadur Thapa made sixteen trips across this deadly ground before he was killed. An unscathed handful battled on until ordered to withdraw. Seven British officers, four Gurkha officers and 138 other ranks had fallen.” In six weeks, the 4th Indian Division suffered more than 4,000 casualties. Its own officers conceded that as a fighting formation it was never the same again.
Sprits were no higher on the other side of the hill. “I feel that much will be written in the future about these battles,” wrote Sgt. Franco Busatti, a member of a fascist pioneer unit still serving alongside the Germans, “and I am curious to know the answers of tomorrow to the ‘why’ of today.” Swept along in the retreat of Kesselring’s army, he was struck by the contrast between Italian soldiers, chronically disordered, and the Germans, disciplined even in defeat. “The war will be won by either the Germans or the English and Americans,” he wrote fatalistically. “The Italians are irrelevant.” Like many of his countrymen, Busatti eventually decided that he owed allegiance to neither side: deserting the battlefield, he took refuge with his family at their home in Citta di Castello until the end of the war.
For the Allies, however, there was an iron imperative to renew the assault. Capt. Henry Waskow, a twenty-five-year-old Texan, led his diminished company on an attack against one of innumerable German mountain positions, known only as Hill 730, on the moonlit night of 14 December 1943. “Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?” he murmured wryly to his runner. He felt a sudden yearning for toast. “When we get back to the States, I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.” A few seconds later, he was mortally wounded by a shell fragment when the Germans spotted the advancing Americans. Waskow left behind a letter for his family, of a kind which many young men wrote: “I would like to have lived. But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along … I will have done my share to make the world a better place … Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again … If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.” It was only because many young men of many nations shared Waskow’s dogged commitment to do “the right thing,” as each belligerent