"Purple Heart Valley": A Combat Chronicle Of The War In Italy

Margaret Bourke-White

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781786257437
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

An excellent, richly illustrated, account of the bloodiest phase of the Italian campaign.Here is a report—in pictures and in words—of exactly what happened to our men during the bitterest phases of the Italian campaign. This report is not based upon a hurried visit behind the lines; Margaret Bourke-White spent a full five months on the Italian front photographing, questioning, observing, and living in close association with our troops. She was not content to remain safely behind the combat area. She flew over the German lines and narrowly escaped being shot down. On the ground she came closer to the enemy lines than any woman has been before the most advanced American post around Cassino.

THEY CALLED IT PURPLE HEART VALLEY

CHAPTER 1—Over the Lines

“THIS STRIP is really a nerve jerker,” Lieutenant Mike Strok called to me over his shoulder.

We were circling above the tiniest airfield I had ever seen. The landing strip was so pocked with shell craters that I did not see how my Grasshopper pilot was going to slip in among them. It was nothing more than the beaten edge of a plowed field, but for the Air OP’s, the “Eyes of the Artillery” as they are called in heavy-gun circles, this strip was their most forward operating base.

Lieutenant Strok had to divide his attention between the shell pits below and the sky above. This was because we were landing in the region airmen called Messerschmitt Alley. If an unarmed, unarmored observation plane such as our Cub is attacked, the pilot’s means of escape is to outmaneuver the enemy.

“Good idea to make sure there’s no Jerry fighter hanging about,” said Lieutenant Strok. “If you can see him first, then he doesn’t get the chance to blast the daylights out of you.”

A final inspection confirmed that the sky was clear, and he brought our tiny Cub to a standstill on a piece of earth as big as a back yard in Brooklyn.

The commanding officer of the field and his ground crew of one ran up to greet us.

The ground crew spoke first. “If that ain’t an American girl, then I’m seeing things!” he exclaimed.

The young officer laughed. “Sorry we’re out of red carpet,” he said. “We live like gypsies up here.”

The CO of the Grasshoppers was twenty-six-year-old Captain Jack Marinelli of Ottumwa, Iowa. He was chief pilot and supervisor for a group of artillery liaison pilots who hedgehopped along the front lines in their Cubs, acting as flying observation posts to spot enemy targets and adjust fire for Fifth Army artillery. I had seldom seen a flier who bore less resemblance to Hollywood’s idea of a pilot than Captain Marinelli. He looked more like the tractor and hay-machine demonstrator which I learned he had been back in Iowa before the war. He was plump, pleasant, and easy-going. This last characteristic, I was to find, faded as soon as the enemy was in sight. He had the reputation of being the coolest and most resourceful artillery pilot on the Fifth Army front.

Mike Strok explained that I wanted to take airplane pictures of the front, and Captain Marinelli said, “Well, I’ve just had a call to go out on a mission. There’s a Nebelwerfer holding up an infantry division and they asked me to go out and try to spot it. She can come along if she wants to.”

“Jees, you don’t want to take a girl on a mission,” said the ground crew of one.

“She’ll go if you’ll take her,” stated Lieutenant Strok.

“What’s a Nebelwerfer?” I inquired.

“You’ve heard of a screaming meemie, haven’t you? Wicked weapon! It’s a multiple mortar: eight-barreled rocket gun.”

By the time the screaming meemie was explained to me, I had been strapped into the observer’s seat, and the ground crew was adjusting a parachute to my back and shoulders.

Knowing that one of the functions of observer is to watch all quadrants of the sky for enemy planes, I said to the Captain, “I’m not going to make a very good observer for you. Most of the time I’ll have my face buried in my camera, and even when I haven’t, I’m not sure I’ll know the difference between an enemy fighter and one of ours.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Captain Marinelli said. “If you see anything that looks like an airplane, you tell me and I’ll decide whether it’s a bandit or an angel.”

I placed my airplane camera on my knees and arranged additional equipment and a couple of spare cameras, telephoto lenses, and some aerial filters on the low shelf behind my shoulders. The space was so cramped, and any extra movement so pinched, with the parachute crowded on my back, that I wanted to be sure I had everything near at hand where I could reach it in a hurry. There was no room in the Cub to wear helmets, as our heads touched the roof. Someone had lent me one of the fur caps used by our Alaska troops, and I tucked my hair back under it and tied it firmly around my chin. When you lean out into the slipstream with an airplane camera, any escaping strand of hair will lash into your eyes and sometimes blind you during just that vital second when you are trying to catch a picture. The Captain lowered the whole right side of the airplane, folding it completely out of the way so I would have an unobstructed area in which to lean out and work. Then he spoke into his microphone. “Mike-Uncle-Charlie! This is Mike-Uncle-Charlie five-zero. I’m taking off on a mission. Stand by!”

“Who is Mike-Uncle-Charlie?” I asked.

“That’s our brigade HQ’s code word for today,” replied the Captain. “Just our phonetic alphabet for MUC—today’s call letters. When I find something that radio guy will be sitting up there with his ear phones on, listening.”

The ground crew spun the props. “We’ll be back in time for lunch,” shouted Captain Marinelli to Lieutenant Strok as we started to taxi between the shell craters. I glanced at my watch, which registered quarter after eleven, and couldn’t help wondering if we really would be back for lunch. I was trying hard not to wonder whether we would be back at all.

As we headed toward the front I was impressed with how regular the pattern of war, seemingly so chaotic from the ground, appears from the air. The tracks of pattern bombing on an airfield were as regular as though drawn with ruler and compass. In some olive groves the traffic patterns made by trucks and jeeps which had parked there looked as if a school child had drawn circles in a penmanship exercise, his pen filled not with ink but with a silvery mud-and-water mixture which held the light of the sun. Each bridge had been demolished with a Teutonic precision. The delicate arches of the small bridges were broken through the crest; larger bridges were buckled like giant accordions. Paralleling these were bypasses and emergency bridges which our engineers had thrown up. Most regular of all was German railroad demolition. Between the rails an endless succession of V’s marched into the distance, an effect produced by the giant plow which the retreating Germans had dragged from their last railroad train, cracking each tie in two so neatly that it seemed as if someone had unrolled a narrow length of English tweed, flinging this herringbone strip over the hills and valleys of Italy.

The irregularities were furnished by the smashed towns, so wrecked that seldom did two walls stand together, and never was a roof intact. Flying low, sometimes we could see Italian civilians picking through the sickening rubble that once had been their homes.

As we flew over the ghastly wreckage of Mignano and headed toward the still more thoroughly wrecked town of San Pietro, suddenly our plane was jarred so violently that it bounced over on its side, and we heard what sounded like a thunderclap just below.

“That’s a shell leaving one of our big hows,” Marinelli said as he righted the plane.

“Sounded close,” I said.

“I’d hate to tell you how close,” Captain Marinelli replied.

“How are you going to know when you get to the front?” I asked. “Oh, that’s easy,” he explained. “When you stop seeing stars on things you know you’ve left your own side behind.”

I looked down and saw our jeeps, trucks, and half-tracks crawling along Highway Six below us, each plainly marked with its white star.

“But the best way to tell is by the bridges,” he continued. “As long as you see trestle bridges below you know we’re over friendly territory, because those are bridges our engineers have built. When you begin spotting blown-out bridges you know we’re approaching no man’s land. The last thing the Germans do when they pull out is to blow up their brid...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CHAPTER 1-Over the Lines
• CHAPTER 2-Number-Three Priority
• CHAPTER 3-Nothing Ever Happens in Naples
• CHAPTER 4-Life Goes Underground
• CHAPTER 5-Hot Spot
• CHAPTER 6-Monks and Engineers
• CHAPTER 7-Foxhole Studio
• CHAPTER 8-The Muddy Road to Rome
• CHAPTER 9-The Eyes of the Artillery
• CHAPTER 10-Cloak-and-Dagger Men
• CHAPTER 11-“See Naples”
• CHAPTER 12-Salt of the Earth
• CHAPTER 13-Fifth Army Field Hospital
• CHAPTER 14-We Move Toward the Front
• CHAPTER 15-At the End of the Horseshoe
• CHAPTER 16-1.55-mm. Flash Bulb
• CHAPTER 17-Invitation to a Big Shoot
• CHAPTER 18-Box Seat for a Battle
• CHAPTER 19-One More Purple Heart
• A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR