Battle Mountain
Monte Battaglia

Battle Mountain stories collected or contributed for MtMestas.com.

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One More Mountain

From: The War North of Rome
By: Thomas R. Brooks

G Company fought in the driving rain under the inspired leadership of its commander, Captain Robert C. Roeder, who seemed to be everywhere at once, encouraging his men to stand fast. Every man with a rifle in the battalion’s Headquarters Company was sent to defend the left flank, where they remained for three days. At dawn, after a night of shellfire, G Company was still on the mountain. The Regiment, however, was stretched beyond the breaking point. The 2nd Battalion was under heavy attack and nothing was available for reinforcement. Colonel Fry endured “the torments of the damned” that first night, but finally decided on an additional gamble: he ordered forward Company K of the exhausted 3rd Battalion. Fry joined them. A partisan guided them along a muddy trail in drizzling rain. After an hour or so, Fry became puzzled by the direction taken by the Italian guide. “I have always thought,” he said later, “the man deliberately led us into the enemy lines,”

Fry called a halt. The company retraced its steps until he ordered it to dig in on the high ground framing a farmhouse in a small horseshoe- shaped valley. In setting up outposts, two men were killed by a German patrol. Their bodies had to be placed in a farm cart to keep them out of reach of two famished hogs.

The windows of the house were covered with blankets and a fire started to warm soldiers as they were relieved of guard duty. Out of contact and out of control of his regiment, Fry was furious at himself for what he called “an inexcusable blunder.” Furthermore, no doctor was on hand, although a crack Medical Corpsman, Owen L. Sanderlin, improvised an aid station in the house: a litter on the table, a few bottles of plasma and first-aid packets nearby. When a soldier, hit in the thigh and bleeding profusely, was brought in and placed on the stretcher, Sanderlin deftly cut away the trouser leg and applied a tourniquet. Plasma ready, he inserted the needle but a faulty connection broke. The plasma poured out on the floor. Sanderlin grabbed another plasma container, but it was too late. The medic collapsed across the dead man’s legs, sobbing, “The goddamn thing. I could have saved him. I could have saved him.” That terrible moment was an all too apt summation of that wasted night.

Morning dawned, the sun appearing long enough to restore warmth and morale. K Company went forward, accompanying a mule train with badly needed supplies. Fry returned to the Regimental CP at Valmaggiore. On the mountain, C Company drove back a dawn counterattack that came within a few yards of the crest. Captain Roeder was wounded by shrapnel and knocked out by a shell burst. He was carried to the company CR where he regained consciousness. Refusing medical treatment, Roeder dragged himself to the doorway, picked up a dead man’s rifle and began firing at the attackers. He shouted orders, encouraging his men. He accounted for at least two Germans before he himself was killed by a mortar burst. For his intrepid leadership, Roeder was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

That afternoon, the Germans shelled Battaglia for three hours, then followed through at 1700 with a four-battalion attack, one coming in from the right flank as the rest headed for the castle and the crest. The enemy carried pole charges and flame throwers to dust off the defenders.

Out on the forward slope, Pfc. Felix B. Mestas “. . . mowed the enemy down like grass” with his BAR. He would be in his lonely post for three days. On the last, he ordered his assistant to leave, then killed 24 Germans before he was overrun and downed. When Staff Sergeant Rocco Cotoia’s machine-gun section was cut down to four men, he went a thousand yards to the rear along a trail exposed to enemy tire, rounded up 19 men and brought them up to reform his group. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Edmund B. Maher knocked out a German mortar crew with his rifle, a bazooka and his bayonet. He rallied his platoon as the German attack mounted in intensity; then he clashed to the castle, bayoneting four enemy paratroopers as they reached the doorway. G Company had repulsed the attack but was nearly out of ammunition when K Company arrived with the mule train and much-needed supplies.

Back at his Command Post, Fry learned that the 351st had reached the vicinity of Castel del Rio, securing his right flank sufficiently to warrant committing his entire regiment to Battaglia. The 3rd Battalion was on its way, and the 1st was coming up as fast as the terrain would allow Major Mike Oreskovitch joined Fry on the morning of the 29th in the command post for instructions. Fry told him that he and a small party would accompany 1st Battalion to Battaglia to set up an advance CR Major Mike reported that he had about one hundred fighting men left in each company. “We really caught hell on Puntale.”

On their way to the next circle of Hell, Fry and Major Mike passed by the dribbling stream of walking wounded and stretcher-bearers with their burdens. Among the wounded was Lieutenant Charles Lesnick, who, tears streaming down his begrimed face, told Fry and Major Mike about Captain Roeder’s death. Lesnick did not want to leave the mountain, but the doctors considered the shrapnel in his neck “too dangerous to fool around with.” Major Mike put his arm about Lesnick and said something in Polish, an apparent comfort to the wounded soldier.

On the eerie crest---swaddled in dust, smoke from mortar fire and drifting smog-men poked their heads out of their foxholes to greet their commander, whom they soon fondly dubbed “Fearless Fosdick.” German and American bodies were strewn everywhere. Men killed on the steep slopes rolled down until caught by some obstacle, grotesque testaments to the nature of war.

While Fry scouted his defenses, the sun came out and an artillery liaison plane flew overhead. Friendly artillery silenced the enemy and suddenly, Fry says, “we felt strangely safe and secure.” It was not a feeling that would last, for the enemy had a way of hitting Battaglia with mortar fire and then, when the shelling ceased as suddenly as it started, they would again attack the crest.

Fry recalls his first night on Battaglia as “passed in relative quiet,” punctuated by the occasional call of the artillery observer at the field telephone-”Fire Becky” or “Fire Daisy” or “Fire Mary,” designated reference points for enemy concentrations. Restless, Fry stepped outside the command post and chatted briefly with a sentry posted nearby. He was standing in a foxhole half-full of water with a shelter half over his head. To reassure the soldier, who looked up at the castle on the crest, silhouetted against black clouds, through chattering teeth Fry said, “It is a lot better here than on top of that hill.

Aroused by the sounds of battle at daybreak, Fry rushed out to get a look at the crest. A German flame thrower lit up the sky beyond the castle and the rattle of machine guns and rifles suggested that a full-scale attack was underway. This time, indeed, the Germans made it into the castle. A flame thrower burned the face of Staff Sergeant Lewis R. Hamm. In agony, the feisty Texan killed the German and his assistant. Though his hand took a bullet, Hamm stuck it out long enough to kill three more of the enemy before he was evacuated. Finally, the Germans were driven out of the castle and back downhill.

Fry sprinted across the top of the hill and joined Lieutenant Nicolas Vergot, an artillery observer huddled with his radio operator behind the forward stone wall. A mortar round hit close by, and the radioman dropped the transmitter and sagged across his radio. Expressionless, Vergot, himself wounded in the leg, said, “He’s dead,” pulling the radio free to call in a concentration of artillery fire. Fry walked back up the hill, met Lieutenant Walter Scott of A Company and told him to relieve exhausted G Company, which was now down to 50 men.

As Fry and Scott scouted the hill to plan the relief, Fry, standing, was surprised by a mortar round and hit in the right arm. On the way back to the aid station, he was asked by an A Company sergeant what he was to do about rifles so clogged with mud that he was afraid they would not fire. Fry told him that ground taken must not be relinquished. “You have undershirts,” he told him, unbuttoning his shirt to tear off his own. Wrapping it in a scarf he wore about his neck, he gave it to the sergeant. “Undershirts make good rags,” he said. “See that your rifles are cleaned.”

At the aid station, Colonel Fry told the 2nd Battalion surgeon, Captain Willard Stoner: “The Germans must be worse off than we are. We are certainly killing enough of them.”

When the enemy all but overwhelmed the castle on the crest, T/Sgt Ben Mazzarella picked up a handful of grenades and charged the old fortress, tossing grenades. He killed six and wounded more. Out of grenades, he emerged from the fog firing a machine gun to drive off the enemy. Pfc. Jose D. Sandoval fired his BAR until it overheated and jammed. He then ran to a nearby machine gun whose crew had been killed, unhooked the gun from its tripod and fired it from the hip-to the consternation of the attackers.

When Pfc. Cleo Peek’s gun jammed, he, too, threw grenades; this was nothing unusual, except that when he ran out of grenades he started throwing rocks. Whether the enemy was surprised or stunned, they stopped less than 25 yards from Peek’s position.

S/Sgt. Raymond O. Gregory ran out of ammo and grenades on the crest, but then, undaunted, he rolled huge boulders down the steep slope into the enemy ranks. Sergeant Manuel V. Mendoza earned the Distinguished Service Cross when he cut loose with a tommy-gun on two hundred Germans who were following their barrage up the forward slope. Before Mendoza was through, after using another gun and grenades, the surviving enemy withdrew. Then, while leading his platoon to beat the remaining Germans to the crest, after the enemy barrage had lifted, Mendoza spotted a G.I. cowering in a shell hole. “C’mon,” he said, “the Jerries are coming.” “I can’t, I’m just a replacement,” said the G.I. Mendoza grimaced. “I know you can’t shoot, but come on up and watch me.”

Slowly but surely, the enemy attacks waned. Gazing out over six dead German paratroopers killed during the second and last time the Germans actually reached the castle, Fry noticed that their clothing was relatively fresh and clean. He was puzzled at the time, but later learned from captured prisoners that fresh battalions had repeatedly been brought forward from far to the rear, with orders to take Battaglia at all costs. “From the way they performed,” Fry concluded, “they must have been drunk or doped.”

Some twenty enemy attacks were made over the very same ground-poor sods carrying heavy weapons or equipment, all of them doomed. The enemy side of the mountain was clotted with its dead. Neither side could remove them. Those who died at the aid station were laid out in rows outside along the trail that threaded the mountain’s ridge. Litter hauls stretched five to fifteen miles. Much of the way was under enemy observation and frequently subjected to fire. To ease evacuation, emergency relay posts were set up at intervals along the track to the rear.

The daily morning counterattack on October 1 was driven back in less than an hour. Clear skies that afternoon enabled the 338th Field Artillery Battalion to fire 3,398 rounds, effectively dampening German shellfire. The capture of Monte Capello by the 351st Infantry two days before, and the arrival of British units on the right, cut off enemy attacks from both flanks. One morning, Fry said,”. . . suddenly it was all over for me.

Brigadier General Rufus Ramey, Assistant Divisional Commander, had called to tell Fry that the British were going to relieve the 350th; an advance party of the Coldstream Guards would be up that afternoon. Colonel Avery Cochran would take over until Fry recovered from his wound. “I had begun to wonder if I was entirely rational at all times,” Fry said. His departure from Battaglia remained hazy in his memory. He recalls briefing Cocheran, talking with the British commander, not much else. “As we left, we passed the row of neatly stacked up bodies, ready to be tied across the mules’ back for their trip to the rear that night.” And, once on the trail back, he noted that "nearly every rock was marked by blood".

On the night of October 2, the first of the 2nd Battalion’s weary men came down from Battaglia. Just before they left, however, they had to fend off yet another enemy counterattack. The 3rd Battalion, still on the mountain, was hit by another German assault. Sergeant Lee H. Beddow of Company L moved quickly to the defense of Regimental Headquarters (then housed in the castle), killing every German who had managed to gain entry with bursts from his sub-machine gun. He then positioned himself in the doorway and fired at attackers seeking to enter the ruins. Beddow held out until grievously wounded and blinded by a shell burst.

Over the next few nights, the British replaced the Blue Devils on Monte Battaglia-forever known as Battle Mountain to the men of the regiment. After seven days of continuous action, the 2nd Battalion was off the mountain on the night of October 3-4; the remainder of the Regiment followed the next night. The Regiment suffered 50% casualties, and every company commander but one was either killed or wounded. The bulk of the 1,420 casualties that the 350th Infantry suffered during the drive that extended from September 21 to October 3 occurred on Battaglia. Of these, 235 men were killed in action, 277 missing and 908 wounded.

Source: The War North of Rome
By: Thomas R. Brooks
Click Here: Da Capo Press
Contributed by: The Italian Campaign: Click Here

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