In one of my dispatches, I reported the experience of a Brazilian woman newspaper correspondent who visited one of the most advanced combat centers on the front that winter in Italy. Returning, she related to fellow correspondents and friends how she stood on a mound beside a blasted and gutted house and looked down into the valley below on a battle in progress.
One of her listeners asked her, "Well, after you saw this battle from the front row seat, what did you write about for your newspaper back in Brazil?" "A yellow flower," she replied. "I saw it there beside that blasted old house, a yellow jonquil, lonely but standing bravely amid the muck and mud. Giant trucks had plowed through that flower bed, tanks had parked there at night, hundreds of soldiers' feet had trampled around that house. All of the others in the bed of flowers were gone, but this one stood there, its petals bravely pushing out, reaching toward the sun just then breaking in chill splendor through the clouds. That lonely, brave yellow flower seemed to me the only thing that day which I could really understand and describe in all of the avalanche of the mechanics of war around that desolate and blasted home."
The experience of that Brazilian woman correspondent is more or less typical of anyone who attempts to put down on paper the realities of war. Just a few days before the Brazilian correspondent visited the front in the sector mentioned above, this writer stood on that same point, beside that same battered house and saw the opening of the operation the correspondent saw. We saw that same lonely jonquil, then not quite in full bloom, and we too, had the urge to philosophize a little upon it. But if that Brazilian woman correspondent had looked into the basement of that shattered house she would have had something else to write about.
The day we looked into the basement, a group of soldiers were sitting on ration boxes, playing cards at a broken table. They were a small, special unit, normally operating at night and were hiding out and waiting the day out in this old house which was so obviously an observation point that Jerry did not take the trouble to shell it because apparently he assumed that no sane CO would make an observataion post out of it.
The walls of that basement were splattered with blood, torn clothing, and parts of human flesh still stuck to the ceiling. It was beginning to stink but there is no time to worry about stink and dirt in a war and the GIs were calmly going about their task of "keeping under cover" and whiling away time until the next order to move.
Another picture to write about: there was the Italian peasant plowing his hillside farm as the guns of the Germans and the answering fire of our batteries blasted overhead. Kingdoms might fall, shells might scream, the machinery of war might come and go, but the Italian peasant knew it was planting time and come danger or quiet the wheat must be planted and plant it he would.
On February 26, I was again on the Fifth Army front and moving along the single roadway leading up to the coast toward Genoa, where I ran square into a major Fifth Army operation. It went down in history books, I suppose, as the seige of Mt. Belvedere. Mt. Belvedere was on the western wing of the high Apennines, a 1500-foot cliff which was fortified by the Germans. From this point they could look down the valley for miles, and through their field glasses see everything that moved in the village below. It was the anchor to the Kesselring line, and it had to be taken before the way could be cleared for our tanks to swing around and eventually go over the Apennines into the Po Valley.
This battle that I witnessed from just a few hundred yards away was literally a classic. Our planes were bombing the German positions on the hillside. The planes would buzz in and drop their loads, the earth would shake; in the meantimes heavy artillery in back of us was lobbing in shells. Our infantry troops and our tanks were moving slowly around and up the flanks of the mountain in an effort to circle it and cut off support for the troops on the mountain.
This battle went on for a good part of a day while I was stalled in the village in the middle of military traffic going and coming under the intense bombardment. Finally there was a break-through and our tanks circled this famous outpost. The Germans, in the meantime, retreated in force, but they left a suicide group on the mountain to hold as long as they could. These were officially taken prisoner and I took some slide pictures of them as they were marched to the rear, and on to prison compounds back of the lines.
In late February and early in March the sun began to shine, the daisies and jonquils bloomed, and the warm sun helped brighten the spirits of civilian and military alike. Activity in the city of Florence was picking up and while I don't suppose anybody froze to death or starved in Florence during that winter, it was very rough. It was a wonderful feeling to have a warm sun and see green sprouting again in the sunshine.
In the meantime I had been permitted to move into an old palace built and occupied in the 14th century by one of the great deMedicis, Lorenzo the II. I do not pretend to know how many rooms this palace had, but it had been used by some of our Generals as headquarters and also as a billet during a good part of the winter in Florence. By now, they had moved on to other places and we in the Military Government were allowed to establish our headquarters there and to have some of the rooms.
My room was a former butler's room. It was about six feet by ten feet with a very high ceiling, unplastered stone walls, and a single door opening into the main palace. A single 16x16 inch window with bars over it served as a sole source of light and air. The place was cold and chilly, but with a cot and a few blankets it was considerably more comfortable than my previous quarters -- a pup tent.
Our mess, now being prepared by Italians, was excellent and served in style. It was miraculous what a good Italian cook with a little olive oil could do with powerdered eggs, spam and toast in a situation like that.
In mid-March I was on my way over to the Eighth Army to see what could be done about threshing some wheat which had been left in the fields -- shocked but unthreshed by the Italian farmers. This was a part of the psychological warfare campaign which we had launched almost a year before in Naples. These farmers were asked to not thresh their wheat, thresh only what they had to have to eat, and not allow the wheat to get into the hands of the Germans. In this particular area they seemed to have done so with some vengeance. There were acres and acres of wheat in shocks, but due to the rains and green grass growing up through the shocks, it was in pretty bad shape. I did my best to get some threshing floors and the few threshing machines that were in the area going in order to save what good wheat was left.
On this trip I visited the little Republic of San Marino. This famous spot in Italy had been a sovereign state of some kind for over 300 years. Back in 1862 it got a nod as a free Republic from President Abraham Lincoln. That letter is proudly displayed by the San Marino people in their city hall.
My visit to San Marino over, I again went up the coast behind the Eighth Army as they were slowly edged westward in the valley. We were advised that Gracie Fields, the famous British entertainer of World War I and World War II, owned an elaborate and beautiful estate up in the valley in that general territory. I was asked to check in on it to see how it had fared in the fighting. Its owner, of course, was in London or entertaining the troops on some front, but her caretaker had done a good job of preserving the property and keeping the estate in production of wheat and other products.
I went to Ravenna and the old cathedral and again gazed at the life-like mosaics of the classic sheep to which I have referred earlier.
Ouside and near the old city of Ravenna is a famous patch of woodlands. It is something more than a park, it being famous for the fact that Lord Byron, the English poet who often visited Ravenna, walked in these woods on his evening strolls. The forest is known as Lord Byron's Forest. Over the years it has been preserved as almost a sacred shrine by the Italians and cultural people from all over the world -- a tribute to one of the great poets of history.
On this occasion I ran into trouble, not only between the Italians and the Armies, but also between various factions who wanted to keep almost intact this famous forest with never a sprig to be touched. Fuel was very scarce in Italy during this early winter and the armies rarely had enough fuel even to cook a meal.
The commanders of the British Eighth Army, wanting to make its soldiers a little more comfortable and have fuel available for cooking, decided that the dead trees and some of the older trees in Lord Byron Forest would be harvested and used by the army. This set up a furor. In an effort to resolve this problem we called in an American Major who had been the chief forester for the State of New York and who was very familiar with the kind of trees growing in the Lord Byron Forest. After a great deal of controversy and talk they decided that the old trees and trees that were dying would be cut by Italians under an American forester's supervision. This was done, not necessarily to the satisfaction of everybody, but at least the forest was not leveled as the Italians had feared might be the case.
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