Dr. Lance Bertelsen is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin.

Texans at San Pietro In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas." So begins Ernie Pyle's most famous World War II dispatch, "The Death of Captain Waskow"-a piece that describes the reactions of troops from the 36th "Texas" Infantry Division to the death of a young officer during the Italian campaign of 1943-44. Pyle, the renowned American war journalist, had joined the 36th near the end of the battle for San Pietro Infine. It had been a cruel battle. Committed to frontal attacks on well-entrenched Germans in the town and surrounding hills, the troops of the 36th responded with determination, but were slaughtered by the score in the terraced olive groves and high rock ridges that marked the southern entrance to the Liri Valley. The battle for San Pietro Infine was a relatively small operation tucked between the bloody landings at Salerno and the muddy stalemate at Monte Cassino. Yet, typical of the bizarre transactions of war, it inspired two of the great documentary works of art to emerge from the Second World War. Pyle's article, which appeared in newspapers across the country on January 10, 1944, was the first. The second was a film called San Pietro by John Huston and photographers from the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Huston had already directed the now classic version of The Maltese Falcon, and would later direct such films as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, and The Red Badge of Courage, but in the winter of 1943 he was a captain assigned to document, in his own words, "the triumphal entry of the American forces into Rome." It didn't work out that way. Instead, Huston and his crew produced one of the most harrowing visions of modern infantry warfare ever filmed: a documentary that conveys the raw repetitive grind of battle and the grim vulnerability of the men who fought it with a respect and bitterness unprecedented in the history of film. The Second World War was more than any previous war an event for the camera and news dispatch. It was the war that began during the documentary movement of the 1930s and early 1940s and that drew heavily upon its techniques and resources. In "The Death of Captain Waskow" and San Pietro the results of this legacy are evident. Both works present themselves as factual records of real events, yet are deeply and allusively informed by literary and cinematic tradition. Both comment on the stoic dignity of man, yet deplore the heartbreaking conditions that evoke it. And both focus not on the grand invasions and the daring raids, the D-Days and Ploestis, but on a single minor battle fought for an obscure Italian town by troops from a former Texas National Guard unit. The 36th Division's road to San Pietro had not been easy. Trained in Texas, Massachusetts, and North Africa, but untried in battle, it struggled through the Salerno landings and was eventually pulled out of the line after suffering 1,800 casualties. By early December the reinforced 143rd Infantry Regiment, to which John Huston would eventually be attached, was preparing to attack San Pietro and the surrounding hills. The job faced by the "T-Patchers"-as troops of the 36th were sometimes called-was simple, direct, and brutal. On December 8, 1943, the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the 143rd infantry were committed to a frontal assault across the olive groves to the northeast of San Pietro. At the same time, the 1st battalion of the 143rd was to climb and seize Mt. Sammucro (Hill 1205) which towered above the olive groves. It is the story of this attack that Huston attempts to tell cinematically. Beginning with the dark ironies of ravaged agricultural landscape and a sardonic voice-over, Huston leavens conventional heroic scenes and phrasing ("It was up to the man with the rifle, the man under fire from all weapons, the man whose way all our weapons-land, air, and sea-serve only to prepare") with bleak images of destruction, bad weather, and frightened human beings. In a memorable sequence preceding the attack, he focuses on the individual faces of the 143rd close up-smiling, talking, worrying, their eyes full of deference and humor and fear-in a way that makes disturbingly clear their humanity and the non-military aspect of their being. "Of the original force to establish the beachhead at Salerno," Huston says of these men, "the 143rd had since been all but a fortnight in action, under extremely bitter weather conditions. At Salerno, at the Volturno crossing, it had taken mortal punishment. The task ahead promised no less bloodshed, yet it was undertaken in good spirits and high confidence." To frame the attack, Huston records an intense night artillery bombardment which fades into an early morning scene of widely-spaced troops advancing cautiously through sodden olive groves. "It had rained most of the night and was raining at H-hour when the 2nd and 3rd battalions crossed the line of departure" runs the simple narration, but the sequences which follow are some of the most striking of the film. A blustery wind shakes the olive branches, and the troops wear raincoats as they move forward hunched against the weather. They have been ordered to assault an impossible objective in miserable weather, and Huston brilliantly conveys their resignation and foreboding as they move to the attack. The soundtrack crackles with automatic fire and explosions, and the troops plod forward: an officer waving men on, several riflemen hunched against fire, a machinegun team-the gunner carrying his weapon over his shoulder, his loader with a box of ammunition, and another man without a rifle-all doggedly moving forward through the smoke, past the sometimes unfocused lens of the camera. The drab realism of these scenes-the stolid, mundane materiality of the troops, the awkwardly-positioned camera, blurred images, the shock of random death-all serve to convey without narration the sense of monotonous hardship and arbitrary destruction that characterizes infantry warfare. The 2nd Battalion's attack bogs down and the 3rd battalion is committed. Again the sodden troops advance through the olive orchards, again they are riddled by defensive fire, again the artillery descends, the camera shudders, the attack fails. The advance, Huston tells us, "never got more than 600 yards past the line of departure." After the failure of the attack, Huston records unflinchingly its aftermath: not conventional, sanitized pictures of "battlefield dead," but close-ups of dirty bodies being put into white bed sacks by Graves Registration personnel. The dead soldiers' grime contrasts strongly with the white sacks. The soldier's faces are only momentarily visible, but their "deadness" and the unwieldy heaviness of the bodies generate a visual combination of horror, solemnity, and matter-of-factness that reinforces the tonal paradoxes of Huston's narration. In the final shot of this sequence, an uncovered soldier lies stiffly on the ground and, in a grim conflation of housekeeping and religious tradition, a pair of anonymous gloves quickly fold his calloused hands across his body. Huston later wrote about this sequence that he "had interviewed-on camera-a number of men who were to take part in the battle." "Later you saw these same men dead. Before placing the bodies in coffins for burial, the procedure was to lay them in a row in their bedrolls, make positive identification-where possible-then cover them. At that point it was necessary to lift the body up, and I had my cameras so placed that the faces of the dead came right to the lens. In the uncut version I had their living voices speaking over their dead faces about their hopes for the future." Such voice-overs do not appear in the final cut of the film (and may have never existed), but Huston's retrospective invocation of the motif suggests the kind of emotional effect he was striving for and provides his interpretation of the symbolic and physical relationship binding living and dead on the battlefield-a theme which is also central to Ernie Pyle's "The Death of Captain Waskow." Captain Henry T. Waskow's unit had begun climbing Mt. Sammucro at 5:00 p.m. on December 7-thirteen hours and twenty minutes before the 2nd and 3rd Battalions attacked across the olive groves. By 6:00 the following morning, they had seized Hill 1205 from the Germans. Huston presents this fighting graphically: jagged rocks and scrub brush, infantrymen moving under fire across rocky slopes, the violent choreography of ground warfare. Waskow survived the assault and by December 14 his company (or what was left of it) was in reserve, carrying supplies and ammunition. Captain Joel Westbrook, Waskow's best friend, wrote that Waskow "was ordered to attack a German OP that had come in behind us and was directing very accurate fire on our rear. Henry just had one platoon left. So naturally he took it. Tidwell, his orderly, told me how it happened. Very simple. A mortar shell, just like any other, laid open his abdomen." Later, the orderly, PFC Riley M. Tidwell, brought Waskow's body down the mountain lashed to the back of a mule. At the bottom of the trail was Ernie Pyle. With grim ambiguity he wrote several days later, "never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas." "I was at the foot of the trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow's body down," Pyle wrote. "The moon was nearly full at the time, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley below. Soldiers made shadows in the moonlight as they walked. . . . Dead men had been coming down the mountain all evening, lashed to the backs of mules." The "valley below" contained San Pietro and the deadly olive orchards. The dead men coming down the mountain and the soldiers who made shadows as they walked were men of the 143rd enacting a surrealistic version of the soldiers' Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . " In this eerie nightscape, cold dead men are taken off the mules by scared living men and laid "in the shadow of the low stone wall alongside the road." Captain Waskow's body, along with four others, is placed "in the shadow beside the low stone wall" until finally "there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road." The unburdened mules move "off to their olive orchards," leaving the burden to the living men. They gradually move close to Captain Waskow's body. "Not so much to look," wrote Pyle, "as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear." This is what he heard: One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, "God damn it." That's all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, "God damn it to hell anyway." He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left. Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain's face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: "I'm sorry, old man." Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: "I sure am sorry, sir." Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there. And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain's shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone. For the reader on the home front this passage was wrenching because its dialogue at once overthrew and reinforced the strongest kind of popular conventions. Strikingly, Pyle does something that even today is rare in syndicated newspaper columns: he uses one of the strongest forms of profanity in the language, a form extremely rare in literature of the 1940s and one which would not be allowed in films for another twenty years, and then intensifies it by adding "to hell." As far as I can discover, none of his readers complained about the profanity (although the Arkansas Democrat deleted it). This is an extraordinary fact: a transformation or momentary suspension or inversion of cultural norms in the readers that duplicates, as it records, the transforming effect of war on combat men. Pyle's more conventional appeal to the popular models is his adaptation of speech patterns associated with various "types" in Hollywood movies. The profane soldiers seem "toned up" versions of the tough-guy-with-a-deeply-sympathetic-heart most often played by John Wayne (though Robert Taylor in Bataan-the most popular combat movie of 1943-also comes to mind). The officer with the stiff-upper lip and quite upper-class "I'm sorry, old man" seems an Errol Flynn type, deeply distressed yet under control. But most poignant is the last voice-"the Kid's"-and its shy, sincere, and still respectful "I sure am sorry, sir." The speech pattern is unmistakably Robert Walker's-an actor who played just such a character in Bataan and reprised it in many movies, including Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. The scene then closes with a quasi-religious, and totally silent, meditation by a soldier who holds the captain's hand and arranges his tattered clothes: at once a battlefield Pieta and an image that finds an abbreviated but disturbingly real parallel in Huston's film. Pyle's dispatch was an immediate success, appearing in newspapers across the country, taking up the entire front page of the Washington News (the issue sold out), reprinted in Time magazine, and eventually contributing to his Pulitzer prize later that year. The immediate impact of Pyle's article is perhaps best indicated by a photograph in the February 7, 1944 issue of Time. A report on the 36th's costly attack across the Rapido River included a photograph that showed four soldiers looking down sadly at a "dead comrade in Italy." The photograph could have been an illustration for "The Death of Captain Waskow"-and I'm sure that in part it was. The AP photographer had obviously read Pyle's column and begun to look for such a shot; the editor at Time had read the column and decided to print the photograph. The elegiac tone and structure of Pyle's article seems somehow to have given redemptive meaning to the brutal deaths of American boys in Italy. "The Death of Captain Waskow" eventually achieved cinematic form in The Story of GI Joe (1945), one of the two most realistic infantry movies to emerge from the Second World War. (the other was Battleground and both were directed by William Wellman). Created primarily from Pyle's dispatches and employing Pyle as a technical adviser, it starred Robert Mitchum as "Capt. Bill Walker" who dies on a mountain in Italy and is lamented by his troops in a precise rendition (minus the profanity) of the scene over Waskow's body. So strong was the "Walker-Waskow" identification that in 1945 Mitchum went on a promotional tour with Riley Tidwell, the soldier who had brought Waskow's body down from Mt. Sammucro. Unfortunately, the original version of John Huston's San Pietro did not fare nearly as well. At the first screening a War Department spokesman labelled it "anti-war." Huston replied dramatically that if he ever made a film that was pro-war, "I hoped someone would take me out and shoot me." The film was temporarily suppressed by the War Department, then rescued by General George C. Marshall-with some judicious cutting. The approved thirty-minute version was released to the general public in early 1945. The San Pietro available today is thus the softened-up version of Huston's original film (which seems to have disappeared). Huston wanted no music, but the final edit includes not only music but the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It also includes a remarkable number of left-handed soldiers, and even a bolt action rifle with the bolt on the left side. These shots have been reversed following the Hollywood prescription that the good guys must always attack in the same direction so as not to confuse the audience. (The wounded and the dead are always removed in the opposite direction.) But research at the National Archives has revealed perhaps the most paradoxical fact about San Pietro: the great majority of its realistic and highly-lauded battle scenes are in fact staged reenactments rather than actual combat footage. Many historians have praised San Pietro's "hand-held combat footage taken at close range" and regretted that the grittier scenes (according to Huston) were left on the cutting room floor. But according to Eric Ambler, he and Huston did not even arrive at the town of San Pietro until the final day of the battle, probably December 16, 1943. They saw plenty of dead and were mortared by the retreating Germans, but got little in the way of useable footage. They did, according to Ambler, take some close-ups of Texas troops "waiting to leapfrog through after some troops ahead of them had started the attack," and it may have been this film that Huston was remembering when he talked about interviewing soldiers before the battle.The bulk of the action in the film, however, was restaged between late December and late February using troops from the 36th Division (and possibly other units). The hours of unedited footage in the National Archives provide a good sense of how Huston went about the filming. Several scenes-including a number which survive in the final cut-appear on two or more reels and indicate that once a scene was set up, several cameramen would record the action simultaneously from different angles. A scene showing a medic approaching three "wounded" soldiers among the boulders on Mt. Sammucro, for example, appears on both reel ADC 750 (the shot that appears in the final cut) and reel ADC 582 (from a vantage point further to the right). Likewise, the scene of the machine gun crew plodding to the attack appears on two reels: the out-of-focus footage (which appears in the final cut) on ADC 750 and focused footage on ADC 588. Perhaps the best record of the actual filming occurs on reel ADC 581 during a scene in which a farm building is "cleared" by soldiers who toss smoke grenades into it and then enter the smoking building as if looking for enemy troops. During one sequence, in which a camera continued to roll after the "action" had stopped, we see a soldier in a knit cap come into the frame and attempt to kick a smoking grenade away from the door while the troops stand around watching. A second cameraman is visible behind the building, and as the soldier in the knit cap moves away, a third cameraman comes into view on the right. The shots taken from the other two camera angles appear on reels ADC 583 and ADC 587. Captain Joel Westbrook-who in Henry Waskow lost not only a fellow officer but a very close friend-was assigned after the battle to help facilitate Huston's filming. He recalls that he and Huston would go over maps together, with Westbrook describing parts of the battle and Huston asking if they could be re-created. Huston would then be assigned troops, and move to the designated area. Westbrook recalls making sure that troops throwing hand grenades were given relatively safe concussion grenades rather than the fragmentation type; indeed, in several of the outtakes we can see small explosive charges being tossed in front of troops to simulate enemy shelling; in the final version of the film, only the subsequent explosion and troop reaction appear. Westbrook does not remember the exact dates of the filming. He believes that it was sometime in late December or early January, before the T-Patchers returned to the line for the ill-fated attack across the Rapido River on January 20-22, 1944. The dates assigned to the various reels in the National Archives card catalogue are only vaguely accurate, but a final slate appearing in the footage itself indicates that Huston was filming Italian civilians and destroyed tanks in or near San Pietro on January 22, 1944. By this time, many of the 36th Division troops who had restaged the attack scenes were dead or dying on the Rapido. What the unedited footage does not contain, interestingly, are four of the five brilliant close-ups that define the humanity of the troops before the attack and any scenes of bodies being put into bed sacks. The sources of this footage remain uncertain. Almost all the other scenes in the final version appear somewhere in the unedited footage. In light of this evidence, Huston's statement, appended to the end of San Pietro, that "for purposes of continuity a few of these scenes were shot before and after the actual battle" but all "within range of enemy small arms or artillery fire" is patently false. The picture was primarily filmed after the battle and, as Westbrook remarked, "maybe in range of very long-range artillery fire." The more important question, however, has to do with the effect of this information on the viewer. Westbrook, for example, despite his intimate knowledge of the filming and battle, nevertheless contends that San Pietro is an essentially accurate rendition of the fighting. James Agee, admittedly a Huston partisan, found the film "magnificent"-as have almost all film critics and military historians since. Because "actual" ground combat footage with any degree of coherence is extremely hard to obtain, a high percentage of World War II "combat" film purporting to show infantry warfare is either long-range or restaged action. The final test for representations of something as horrifically confusing as battle, then, would seem to be accuracy of effect rather than authenticity of material. In Huston's film and Pyle's dispatch, this accuracy begins with a focus on living men becoming dead bodies in powerfully understated moments of transition. This is the massive perplexity at death so evident in renditions of what happened at San Pietro. Young men, so immediately alive, just dead. Joel Westbrook on his way up Hill 1205 encountered a group of dead paratroopers, "caught on their way up to reinforce the First. Splendid, husky young men. They seemed just barely dead. You thought, such healthy men you could shake them a little and they would come alive again." So too with Pyle's Captain Waskow, so too with the images of Huston's film: the grimy quick become the grimy dead, but remain inextricably and inexpressibly linked with the living. This is what less accurate representations of infantry warfare neglect: not death, but the dead and their eloquently unspeakable presence. Killing people doesn't mean that they go away. The physical bodies stay right there, dead, yet in imagination so alive, to be lugged around, to be worked with, to be talked about, until Graves Registration gets them out of sight. Huston and Pyle both knew this, and their extraordinary representations of the Texas 36th Division at San Pietro are enriched by that knowledge.