I came across some Life magazine pictures being hosted by Google, and I asked him if they looked like what he saw. He fought west of Monte Cassino, where most of these pictures were taken, but he did say that this view typified what he saw much of the time.

He graciously agreed to write down some memories of that time and let me publish them here. Thanks Uncle Bill, and happy birthday!

It might be appropriate to outline my involvement in the infamous Italian campaign. On turning 18, I was drafted, after a year in college. In the fall of 1943 I was sent for basic infantry training to Fort McClellan in Alabama. After 13 weeks of training the companies were divided into two groups, one going to Fort Ord in California for the Pacific and the other to Fort George G. Meade in Maryland for the Atlantic. After a week at home I was sent to Fort Meade and then to Camp Patrick Henry in the Hampton Roads area, embarking on a troop transport for Oran, North Africa. Naples had fallen and a British ship took me to Naples. From there I subsequently found myself in the front lines north of the Garigliano River, the Gothic Line. There I was inserted, as a replacement, into a combat division, the 88th Infantry Division, 350th Regiment, first Battalion, Company B.

In an active combat division the attrition rate is high, some 60 percent in six months. Replacements are necessary. Unfortunately, replacements are at a disadvantage. Not having trained with your comrades, replacements were strangers in the midst of veterans. You were sent up to the line, stuck in a foxhole, not even knowing your comrades in the next foxhole over.

For a couple on months the Gothic line was static. I did watch the massive bombing of Cassino in March and could see the eruption of Vesuvius to the south. It was a spectacular display but I would have appreciated a better and more comfortable seat than a foxhole. On May 11, after an unusually fierce artillery bombardment, we pushed off, headed for Anzio. I remember walking behind tanks through devastated villages. Once, near Santa Maria Infante, my helmet was hit by shrapnel. My helmet was holed and I was knocked silly but the wound was superficial and after a few hours I was sent back into the line. We eventually met the troops from the Anzio beachhead and on June 4th we entered Rome, the first infantry troops in the city.

North of Rome, progress was rapid with only sporadic German resistance. On July 14, 1944, while trying to circle around a German machine gun emplacement, I was hit in my left ankle and foot. After some hours I was evacuated to a cave, where along with other wounded soldiers and civilians, I remained for a couple of days before being carried across the valley to battalion aid station, thence to Rome for surgery, to Naples and a hospital ship home. I had been ZIed, a wound sufficient to be sent to the Zone of the Interior, home!!!

My memories of Italy have been softened and blurred by time. Sixty years puts a bit of a strain on recall. I do remember the rain, the mud, and being supplied entirely by mule trains, carrying supplies in and the dead and wounded out. I remember the isolation and fear lying in a foxhole. I remember the never ending mountains and the uncanny ability of the Germans to use this advantage in defense. I remember the dead and the wounded and the cruelty on both sides. Sherman had it right.

I also remember the freedom from fear when pulled back from the front for R & R, the walk through Rome treated as conquerors, returning to Rome and seeing the Pope at the Vatican, those were the good days. I remember the trip home on the hospital ship, the attentive nurses, fried chicken and, most improbable, all the ice cream one could eat. And I remember my parents, scraping to borrow tires to make the trip to McGuire General Hospital in Richmond to visit me.

If you’re interested in the Italian campaign, I recommend Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, which I wrote about previously here. Also, while trying to locate some information on Santa Maria Infante, I found some old newspapers that have turned up on public archives. Here’s a link to a short article on the Americans marching through Santa Maria Infante and Castellanorata, but if you zoom out, you get a fascinating glimpse into a day of news in the all-consuming story of that war.

I just finished a book on the subject, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy by Rick Atkinson. It’s a great read and does a lot to put the campaign in perspective. Atkinson gives you the viewpoint of commanders and soldiers, although I wish there were more material from the German side of the line. Atkinson refers to Italy as, at times, employing the tactics of World War I with the weapons of World War II. The reason is obvious in hindsight: there was no clear strategic directive. In France there was a simple objective. Drive your tanks into downtown Berlin. In Italy the objective was… what? A diversion from Normandy? A thrust deep into the “soft underbelly” of the Axis? A battle of attrition designed primarily to grind down German divisions? All these things? Even to the commanders, it was never clear.

Although Atkinson shows what the generals are thinking, he gives the last word to war correspondent Ernie Pyle. Here’s how Pyle sums it up.

I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was.

I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew that I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.

By the way, one of the nice resources available to the modern reader of military history is Google Earth. If you want to know why Monte Cassino was so important, you can just fly there and inspect the landscape. You can also find map overlays like this one of the Salerno landings.

My uncle fought in the Italian campaign for several months before being wounded north of Rome and sent home. I’m sending him a copy of Day of Battle to get his opinion, but in the past he has highly recommended Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang as an unblinking memoir of what Italy looked like to an infantryman. Maybe I can get Uncle Bill to set down some of his thoughts for reading on this site…

La bella scienza

Florence has a science museum, but you can be forgiven for not knowing it.

It sits on the banks of the Arno river in the shadow of the world famous Uffizi art gallery, home to numerous paintings by Botticelli, da Vinci, and Michelangelo, among a great many others. The Galeria degli Uffizi is always jammed with tourists. The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza is not.

Florence has the look of a city that was freeze-dried in the early 17th century. The crooked, narrow streets are paved with medieval flagstones. The architecture and art seem to have been suspended in place for some four hundred or more years. Only the noisy fume-spewing motorbikes and cars place you unmistakably in the modern age. It is home to some twenty museums, almost all of them devoted to art and religious artifacts.

Near the end of a five day stay in Florence, I had been to the best known of the art museums in town and was casting around for something fun to do on the last day in town. I decided to take a peek at the science museum. I felt lame going to it, because, hey! this is Florence. You’re supposed to do art and cathedrals. And eating and shopping. But science? Don’t be such a geek.

Without putting it in so many words, a voice somewhere in my brain was saying geeks are bad and art is good. Why is that? Where does that sentiment come from? The Florence science museum was itself an eloquent commentary on that very perplexity. My visit went from being an afternoon’s afterthought to one of the glowing high points of my entire week in Italy. In short, I was amazed.

It starts off with a bang: a room filled with brightly polished astrolabes, quadrants, armillary spheres, theodolites, and compasses, each housed in an elaborate case. Some of them were from the Near East, with beautiful flowing Arabic script, and every single one was an original piece that was used for navigation or calculation as early as the sixteenth century. These were practical devices dating from a time when art, magic, science and religion freely co-mingled. They were ornamented like exquisite works of art. As a result, they seemed to radiate a kind of magical energy. I could picture some desperate Moorish sailor trying to fix his latitude with this very astrolabe on a tossing bark in the Mediterranean back in 1570.

Some of the instruments, though, were so painfully overwrought, having been ordered for show by Cosimo I de’ Medici, that they could scarcely have been used. I had seen so much lovely artwork in Florence on my trip, that it didn’t seem surprising so much of it would encrust Italian scientific instruments. But I also wondered if all that art wasn’t getting in the way of the task at hand, namely: where the hell is my boat? The Florentines were dedicated to beauty, and manufacturing scientific instruments was not going to divorce them from it.

Several rooms followed along these lines, adding to the collection elaborate Renaissance maps, globes, orreries, cosmographical spheres, clocks, and calculating rods. I was still dazzled by these when I walked into the Galileo room and saw the telescope through which he first saw the moons of Jupiter.

Look at it! After all those filigreed astrolabes and gold-plated orreries, here is this plain little stick of a thing, a homely tube through which Galileo brought riches that changed the world. I confess that at that moment, I felt an unexpected reverence, like something I imagine a more religious person might feel in a famous cathedral. It’s hard to name a figure more important to the history of science than Galileo. He was the first to truly lay out a method for the process of scientific discovery. And of the outstanding highlights of his life, it’s hard to name a more dramatic time than when he first turned his telescope to the heavens and saw thousands of never before seen stars as well as the moons of Jupiter. And here was the very telescope that inspired him to say, “I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries.”

And yet Galileo was a man out of tune with his culture, for which he suffered. Consider the two diametrically opposed quotes below. The first is from the vigorous young Galileo eloquently arguing for informed reason over blind faith. The second is from the seventy year old Galileo, broken by the Inquisition, confessing the errors of his ways.

I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.

I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, … of having held and believed that the Sun is at the center of the Universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not at the center and that it moves. Therefore, … I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith these errors and heresies, and I curse and detest them as well as any other error, heresy or sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.

The scientific revolution would have to move elsewhere from Italy in order to thrive. Twenty four years after Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton would begin his years of wonderful invention in England. Italy, so steeped in the traditions of art and religion, could not untangle them from science, and so slowed development of the new discipline to a crawl.

Oddly, there is another quasi-religious twist in the Galileo room: just as Italian cathedrals have reliquaries that enshrine the arms, toes, and noses of various saints, the science museum has a jar containing Galileo’s middle finger. The irony is striking: when Galileo is finally acknowledged after his death, he is treated like a religious saint rather than a secular hero.

I have long been fascinated by the historical connections between art, mythology, and science. They repel and attract one another in surprising ways. This museum provides a snapshot of the last period in history when these things were still seriously intertwined. The beauty of Florence takes us back to a time when the aesthetic and the religious overpowered the scientific. Now the situation is reversed: science is ascendant and we have stricken our mythologies and arts with anemia. And that’s why a visit to the medieval cities of Italy is so much fun. It’s a trip to another world.

Note: The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza has an impressive web site. Try the interactive 360 degree image of the Galileo room and check out the
gruesome picture of Galileo’s finger.