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Marshall Burwell Hardy, Jr.

Kentucky is a state famous for its handsome gentlemen, lovely ladies, and mint juleps. "Marsh "falls in the first category, thrills the second, and is an expert on the third. Marshall has always been eligible for those coveted academic stars, and is one of those rare individuals who is capable ofgetting the most out of a thing, and he has always found plenty of time to share his knowledge with his less fortunate Brother Rats. Marshall's rea/love is his military duties. The result ofthis love and of his ability can be readily seen in his military record, collection which he finished off by being a first lieutenant in F Company. He plans to enter the Army and that organization will gain a true man while V.M.l. loses one of its best. -1940BOMB Project

By the subject. .. War at One of my mother's favorite maxims was this little jingle:

"The fear of HellVMI is a hangman's whip, to hold the wretch in order; When you feel your Honor grip, 0532.let that be your border!" Needless to say, that philosophyMS fitted perfectly with VMI. Moreover, lam a third-generation peacetime lawyer and "red-leg" citizen-soldier. 1 My grandfather, William Jarvis Hardy, Jr. '865, served the entire four years of the Civil War in the Richmond Howitzers of the Army of Northern Virginia; and my father volunteered the day after World War I was declared, serving nineteen months, mostly in the 138th Field Artillery, KyNG-the same regiment in which I first had active duty. Neither of them ever donned a uniform again when peace came, practicing law the rest of their lives; but I had trained fromArchives. my freshman year in high school, and stayed on as a Reservist for another twenty-two years-in all, thirty-four and a quarter years in service. Of that time, I was in uniform fourteen years, one month,VMI or rather, I was in seven different uniforms.2 My Army retirement pay is now a substantial financial aid. In my grandfather's and father's times, peace meant peace; in my time, it meant Cold War. My greatest achievement was winning the hand of Miss Whitney Treat Knowles. We reared six children, including two sets of boy-and-girl twins, througp~hewfui·asma of the 1960s. My greatest failure is that none of our three sons became either ci ti zen-soldi e~r I w ~ ow ever, on their own (with some he! p from family) all six-our three charming daughters an ee sta wart sons-got themselves well educated and into other worthwhile careers. (By virtue of our eldest daughter's marriage to a French citizen and oldest son's marriage to a British subject, five of our six [so far] grandchildren have dual citizenship.) Both my wife's family and mine are members of the church in which we met and were married, Calvary

174 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

Episcopal in Louisville, Kentucky. We've served it in many capacities. [My efforts forthe church, along with other professional and personal activities, are summarized in my current Curriculum Vitae.) So much for me and my family; what about all the people I've encountered along the way? To paraphrase Kipling, "I've fought with many men acrost the seas, An' some of 'em was brave, an' some was not. "3 I've also contended with a lot of lawyers since 1948, and some of them was good and some was not. (I wonder how the enemy, or opponents in court, perceived me?) It was always a surprise to get beaten by the underrated, or when the overrated caved in. 4 My first big battle was with the U.S. Army. When we graduated, Great Britain was expecting invasion and France was falling; young officers were suddenly so important that the chaplain of the Senate, then considered the best preacher in the U.S., Reverend Peter Marshall, preached our Baccalaureate sermon; and the chief of staff, General George Catlett Marshall '0 1, made the commencement address. (I only claim kin to the General.) Most of us gave up our dreams of civilian careers; mine was to build railroads in South America, at $600 a month,*h" his, to some degree, why I had studied civil engin ring and Spanish atcollection VMI. (Stateside pay for civil e ineering grads was $90 to $125 a month.) So, I a ied for active duty. Because of a childhood eye injur, , a umed down. I made a nuisance of mysel , nd pulled every string imaginable. As part Of this effor y dad wrote to his second cousin, then-Lieut nt General Douglas MacArthur. I got a as an engineering clerk with the construction division ofE.I. DuPont de Nemours & Company, at $125 per month; three months later, I was chief expediter in the Projectsoutheastern United States for the construction of the Charlestown, Indiana, powder plant -at $216 a month-largely because VMI taught me good engineering lettering and how to read constructif~lans.War ,., J Then the Army finally acted. I was ordered to the~onth~ldat 1st Armored Division at Fort Knox, Kentuc~l)>r a year's active duty-at $125 a month, agam. Moreover, I soon fell to that scourge ofnewly­ forme~ies: measles. The 1st Armored Division was Regular Army, andVMI I was a 2nd Looie with the sole Military Occupational Specialty of "equitation instructor." Naturally, despite being a country boy who couldn't even ride a bike, I became battalion motorcycle officer, after being assigned to the 27th Field Artillery Battalion (Armored). The battalion's senior officers all became0532. generals: Maraist, Williams, deShazo, Cortand more. Some senior enlisted men held Reserve commissions, and the sergeant major, a World War I Distinguished Service Cross holder, was suddenly "Major NapierMS," the post adjutant. On the "Grand Maneuvers of 1941, "5 I rode a Harley-Davidson 65 about 1,500 miles, and the twenty-five cyclists I had trained (using equitation techniques) survived, with only one minor injury. I still see or hear from some of them. My first lesson in field soldiering concerned city boys. After supplying the cadre for the 4th Armored Division, the 1st Armored Division had become about twenty percent recruits, mostly America's first peacetime draftees.Archives. Our officer vacancies wer filled with 1941 ROTC grads. The third day of the motor­ march to Louisiana, our battalion surgeon co men ted that we were having an epidemic of constipation; we hadn't VMItaught the city boys how to dig "c holes" to relieve themselves whetytway from toilets! During those three-month maneuve , learned some other things: (l),.l(eep a reserve ...That lesson became clear to me while pinned down i cotton patch; my "cyclists," with our M-1928 Tommy guns, had charged an infantry platoon and got high scores from the umpires7ntil another platoon moved through some woods to attack our flank and we had no reserve to call on; (2)~·rain for stamina ... As Colonel "Teddy Bear" Heflin '16 had trained us in wrestling my Rat year; and (3~ the middle of the night, don't stumble around a command post. I stepped on Brigadier General Orlando Ward in his sleeping bag; he was a real gentleman about it, though. ~ For all of this, we got our first campaign ribbon, the American Defense, appropriately colored yello , since the rest of the world was desperately fighting.

175 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

We had hardly gotten back to Fort Knox when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor-eleven days before my year's active duty was up. I had asked my ring figure date, Kitty Hill from Richmond, to Louisville for Christmas, but she hadn't yet accepted, and, oh, well. All of the West Point class of 1941 who had joined us for the last half of the maneuvers were transferred out; the division was reorganized, losing a tank regiment and most of our motorcycles, but gaining an artillery battalion; and we were alerted for overseas movement. I went to the new field artillery outfit, the 91st Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Our weapons were new, too: lOSs self-propelled, "on the half-shell" (T- 19 half-tracks). My job would be combat trains commander and battalion ammunitions officer. The commanding officer was Charles P. Summerall, Jr. , son of the former chief of staff, and our new division commander was the gentlemanly Orlando Ward. Assembling all the officers, he said: "I consider it a signal honor to assume command of this splendid division upon the eve of its greatest adventure." He also told us that he didn't know whether we would go to "Siberia, Liberia or Iberia." In the event, we went to none ofthe above. After staging at Fort Dix, New Jersey, we sailed in May 1942 into a North Atlantic scourged by submarine "wolf packs." A week earlier, celebratingcollection my promotion to first li eutenant, I had ~?e the mistake of visiting Atlantic City with my parents and 16-year-old sister, and we saw the four-f~de tarred strip nning north and south out of sight at highwater level on the beach­ from the oil of torpedoed Ameri n ships! We sailed aboard the transpo Thomas H. Barry, ex-Oriente, a New York-to-Havana cruise ship. With bunks seven tiers high in her ba age hold, she was rated at 3,500 troops;Project but, as an experiment, she_ was double-loaded with 7 ,000. This meant four barracks bags on each bunk, upon which the men slept in ~e- ~ J ;)_ hour shifts, moving to the open deck for the other twelve hours. DysenteryWar bra ut, water and morp~ out, and in these conditions we were fortunate to have no deaths.at For our t elve- ay voyage to Belfa~~ received our second campaign ribbon, American Theater (i.e., "Battle of the ntic "),and first battle &r­ just for being targetl.0 convoy's escort claimed aU-boat off Iceland. The depth-bombing was quite a sight. VMI Landing at Bel fa ·, e suddenly became provisional infantry; our guns had been on a ship damaged and delayed. Our missio was to guard Ireland against the threat of German invasion which could have severed the Atlantic supply line to Britain. We replaced0532. British troops who had thesamemissionand were now posted to India to stop the Japs, or to Egypt to face the Afrika Korps. Starting with three-mile marches under full 60-pound burden, in three monthsMS we worked up to twenty-eight miles per day through beautiful County Down. We supplied volunteers for the 1st Ranger Battalion, but I was turned down-my bad eye, again. I was detailed to a British combat intelligence school. Our guns came in and we engaged in maneuvers with troo s-and one lovely donnybrook: troops (American and British) versus Constabulary, soldiers ers vilians, British (civilians ommies) versus Americans, I.R./(vs:'Q,rangemen. We made the m· eofpayingthetroopsonSaturday,July 12, ' ," qi~nedtobebattalionofficer of the day; our Archives.casualties swamped the Medical Detachment by midnight. Later, we called this event "The Battle of the Strand Cafe" because that bar's facade had been pulled down into the street in the melee. (Irish whiskeyVMI contains enormous belligerence.) More about city boys: Ireland was cold, with a minimum ration of coal for our barracks, but our wooded billet had plenty of down timber. Detailing a dozen men to chop firewood for a day produced a scant cord, so I set up an axemanship school under Corporal McGee, a former lumberjack called "Mississippi Mud­ Puppy" by the men and who was later one of the Ranger volunteers. Thereafter, we got four cords per day. The idyll of our training in Ulster lasted five months; thelongestspell without rain had been six days. Then came our second voyage: overnight to Scotland and on to the English Midlands to stage for another voyage rumored to be Norway. But after Combat Command B of 1st Armored Division (as part of Operation Torch) invaded Oran, Algeria, on November 8, 1942, we knew it would be Africa. We were now in CC"A," which sail ed from Liverpool on November 30, 1942, landing at Oran on December 21, in the rainy season. This

176 r. voyage (number three) was aboard the H.M.S. Duchess ofRichmond, formerly the Empres ofCanada. This ship was a large, flat-bottomed (to getup the St. Lawrence River), and she wallowed terrib inthegreatstorm into which we sailed; the troops dubbed her "The Drunken Duchess." Many of the ere , nd 90-odd percent of the soldiers were seasick; one man washed off the after deck, forty feet above the aterline. We sailed unescorted to Gibralter, hidden by the storm. Our night convoy from there into Oran lost one transport loaded with nurses, torpedoed by a U-boat; most were rescued and were brought in wet and bedraggled on a destroyer. The French had opposed the landings of CC"B"; and now Djebel Ksaira (Lion Mountain), looming behind Oran, held an American military cemetery. We stayed in the mud near Oran only long enough for our vehicles to be unloaded, and within two weeks were moving by road and rail toward the British First Army front, nearly 800 miles to the east in Tunisia. On the right flank was U.S. II Corps, whose front was being held by French troops at Faid Pass; a the headquarters ofCC"A," 1st Armored Division, was at Sbeitla, about thirty-five miles to the we ere, 91 Armored Field Artillery Battalion bivouacked about January 25, 1943.6 From this locatio , ne battery advanced to harass an Italian outpost force. Then, in a few days, CC"A" was drawn intocollection action, 1ghting fi:s~/ the lOth Panzer Division and later most of Rommel's Desert Army, including the Afrika Korps, in these~ of battles now called "Kasserine Pass." [In fine, 1st Armored Division was decimated.] At some ti!T\e,")'e received our third ribbon for our campaigning in Africa, later to be called Africa-Europe-Middle East, dnfch to our disgust at its loss of exclusiveness. Project With personnel and equipment badly depleted,7 the 1st Armored Division scrounged equipment wherever it could be found, and received a few replacements. My battery got three parolees from the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, and a few "careful culls" from 2ndWar Armored Division, 1,100 miles to the rear in Morocco. I wound up equipped with an Aussie blanket, Britishat leggins and anti-gas cape, Italian gas mask and goggles, etc.; and I had my first shower bath since leaving shipboard. However, the battalion, by swapping guns, did acquire eighteen fairly new M-7 self-propelled 105mm howitzers, called "Priests" by the British. And MajorVMI John W. McPheeters, who would become a hero of the Italian Campaign, replaced Lieutenant Colonel Summerall as battalion commander. Major General Lloyd Fredendall was relieved as commanding general of U.S. II Corps by Major General GeorgeS. Patton '07. The Corps now had0532. four U.S. divisions: 1st Armored, and the 1st, 34th and 9th Infantry. On St. Patrick's Day, we attacked south from Kasserine, two divisions-1st Armored Division and 1st Infantry Division-abreast. It was a brave show, but launched into a drenching rain; poEJapidly formed MS 8 in the desert, and we bogged down near nightfall. Meanwhile, the enemy had decamp d· • The Axis troops had withdrawn on both north and south sides of the Petite Dors ountain range (imagine Massanutten Mountain, stripped of all foliage). 9 Patton was sucked in, sending 1st Armored Division alo~gt e northern face and 1st Infantry along the southern face of the ridge. The enemy calmly entrenched an ined-in a reinforced regimental combat team at El Guettar on the south and Maknassy on the north, sto Archives.ing both U.S. divisions. 10 At Maknassy, one of my parolee replacements deserted in the face of the enem , nd was caught three months later. I preferred charges, but he wasn't hanged; he got off with twentyVMI years and was shipped back to Leavenworth. General Ward was wounded, and Major General Ernest N. Harmon was assigned to command 1st Armored Division. Ultimately, British Eighth Army fought its way north through both the Mareth Line and the Wadi Akarit to push the enemy out from in front of us. The 91st AFA did have one jolly shoot over the ridge, bagging ninet vehicles of the lOth Panzer Division when they withdrew to avoid being cut off by Eighth Army. My ecommendation for a medal in this month-long operation was turned down by Major General Harm with the terse, hand-written endorsement: "NO-not killing Krauts.- /s/E.N.H." Once agai , e spruced up to go back into action. Over night, the rainy season ended and the desert suddenly blo edina great profusion of wildflowers. It lasted less than ten days, and then turned hot-and our water ration was one quart per day. We were bivouacked near Faid Pass when a lone French Colonial

177 M. B. Hardy, Jr. soldier approached, marching with his long Lebel rifle. He was from the 6th Moroccan Infantry Regiment, but this outfit had been annihilated at Faid by lOth Panzer Division on January 30, 1943-three months earlier, while he was in hospital-but he was trying to return to it. We picked him up as a "straggler" on our morning report, and, misreading his identification card, recorded him as "Private Moses Mohammad." He served the rest of the cam ign with us, and we turned him over to French MPs, after the German surrender, with letters of comm n ation. We then learned his correct name was Mohammad Meludi-un bon soldat! Patton was rep lac a by Major General Omar N. Bradley, the best Corps commander under whom I ever served. In late April, e marched north to attack through the Medjerda River valley toward Bizerte. When the 34th Infantry tvision was stopped by tough Krauts on Hill 609, Bradley narrowed its front, and committed 9th Division on one side and 1st Armored Division on the other. 11 We went straight through to the sea, and on May 9, 1943, General Gustav von Vaerstsurrendered the Fifth Panzer Army to Major General Harmon. In all that day, V-A Day to us, Bradley's II Corps received the unconditional surrender of six German generals commanding 40,000 troops. Over 200,000 more, German and Italian, capitulated within a week. For the last time during the war, in this action two of my men deserted their collectionposts of duty. The first rejoined the battery, and I simply proposed to shoot him if any casualties resulted from his misconduct. None did, to our joint relief. Afte~. th the was okay. The other turned himself in also, and, tried by a General Court Martial, was convicted as A OL, reduced from sergeant to private and given six months at hard labor and two-thirds pay forfeiture. In the aftermath of batt , was promoted to captain-at last with pay,Project including overseas bonus, back up to $216; and now, as com an ding officer of Service Battery -all battery commanding officers above age twenty-four had become c~suties or had broken down-I hadWar two serious problems: ( 1) the battery mess, left behind during much oft campaign, was terrible; andat (2) the enlisted men were declining promotions. To cure the first proble , made my toughest section chief, a former Golden Gloves champion, acting mess sergeant with orders t ear out all hangers-on, to spruce up the personnel ... and to hell with the chow. After a fortnight of Sergeant Stem's heavy hand (thatVMI was his name), not only was the kitchen and its crew continuously spic-and-span, but the food began to improve! As to the second problem, every battery was affected, so all five BCs went to the British, t;ho aughed at our discomfiture. They had learned 0532.to deal with it on the barren Northwest Frontier in India: rivileges. There, as in Africa, extra pay meant nothing, and promotion meant greater responsibility. W worked out a uniform system; I remember that privates, first class, got their choice of guard posts, first-3-graders got their own mess, and master sergeantsMS got orderlies. The problem disappeared at once. Meanwhile, the 1st Armored Division had moved by road, rail and sea the 1,100 miles back to Morocco. There, with the mission of defending Gibralter should the Germans drive down from France and overrun Spain, we replaced the 2nd Armored, bound for Sicily. Commencing our second year overseas, we drilled through the hot summer, the only drill schedules I ever saw with a two-hourArchives. siesta in them, then motor-marched east for 300 miles to stage again at Oran. Formally encamped on bare ground east of the city, Lieutenant Colonel McPheeters wanted a sentry box and, as ServiceVMI Battery commanding officer, I got the job. Using scrap wood, we copied the sentry box in the Barracks at VMI. The colonel was delighted and, when we left, "willed" it to an outfit newly arrived from the States. This outfit was partly officered by majors and lieutenant colonels from the West Point class of 1941 who had left us as 2nd Johns right after Pearl Harbor. Oh, well, as the Tommies sang: "You'll get no promotion, this side of the ocean; So cheer up m'lads-Bless 'em all!" Our fourth voyage 12 was to Naples, after Italy had surrendered, and this time we saw our escorting destroyers sink aU-boat off Bizerte. Ashore, we were soon moved to Hannibal's old campground at Capua and promptly greeted by German air attack. Thence, into the line in the mud in front of Cassino. There was no room to maneuver, so few tanks were engaged. The mountain valleys were quagmires, and the weather was miserable. Our uniforms were poorly suited for the cold and wet. For more than forty days the artillery

178 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

of 1st Armored Division supported one infantry regiment after another, our own 6th Armored Infantry, the Nisei of 1OOth Infantry Battalion and regiments from 34th and 36th Divisions, as they ground slowly forward into the Gustav Line. It was in this operation that Lieutenant Colonel McPheeters earned the Distinguished Service Cross for infiltrating two miles behind enemy lines in order to direct our fire accurately onto a German counter-attacking force. In mid-January 1944, we were pulled out of the line to stage for what proved to be the invasi_g~Anzio­ Nettuno, our fifth voyage; but I again missed the D-day amphibious landing. We had so fewfinding craft that each combat unit was reduced to its minimum strength, especially in vehicles. By no~, Jhe men were calling Italy "The Second-hand Front." I wound up staying back at Naples, in charge of one\,ffiird of the men apd half the vehicles of the battalion. Our returning wounded came to my rear echelon, and when another ,CaptaJ~im Rominger, a Texas A&M grad and outstanding citizen-soldier, arrived to convalesce, I got a I roun~ voyage (numbers five and six) to Anzio to check on my men there. I found them in dugouts a la World War I. In addition, all guns and vehicles were dug-in, as were all hospital tents, ammunition, fuel dumps, etc. Every inch of the beachhead, and well out to sea, was being pounded bycollection the German artillery and the Luftwaffe. I got two more overnight rides on LSTs to Anzio (voyages seven through nine). The second was to stay on as battalion S-2,replacing Vice Captain GeorgeRomeiser, a Purdue gradandanothercrackcitizen-soldier who had been invalided back to Naples. My first job was to set up a jointProject counter-battery section with 91 (coincidence!) Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery, supporting British 5 Division. They had twenty-four 25-pounders, and with our eighteen lOSs and an attached company of tanks and another of three-inch tank destroyers, we controlled the fire of sixty-nine artillery pieces.War German artillery was using roving guns, mostly self-propelled, for continual harassing fires. We burnedat at least a half dozen of them, and silenced many more. 13 Lieutenant Colonel McPheeters was killed by a tree-burst, and our executive officer, Major Loren D. Buttalph, took cornniand. He and I sat for an hour on an observation tower fifty yards inside 5th Division's front line, which was only fifteen yardsVMI from the Krauts. This, to prove to VI Corps Field Artillery headquarters that it was suicidal; we were wrong, and survived the experience-but no one else used that tower. At eleven o'clock on a clear, mild0532. Easter morning, every German cannon fired, bombarding all the locations they had identified as the places our troops met for church services. Miraculously, no one was killed; however, many learned MSto pray harder. The barrage was short, if intense, and most continued their worship. With warmer weather, planning for a break-out began. Despite serious losses of shipping to German air, submarines and artillery, the beachhead had been strongly reinforced. We reconnoitered, laid wire and fully prepared for an attack south along the coast (code-named Leapfrog), or inland to the north (Buffalo). We executed Buffa/o. 14 It was a great success, right from D-day, May 23, 1944. By nightfallArchives. ofD-day plus three, 3rd Division had reached the coastal mountain range, Colli Lazialli; had linked with 1st Armored Division which was reinforced with crack infantry from 34th Division; and was followingVMI us through the Velletri Gap between Colli Lazialli and the Alban Hills. Next day, on the inland side of the Gap, dismounted tankers cleared the village of Artena. Downhill ahead of us lay Frosinone on Highway 6, the principal escape route of German Tenth Army as it fled from the Gustav Line. 15 This was a golden opportunity to cut off its retreat. Unaccountably, General Mark Clark pulled both divisions back from our salient, and hurled us into the battle of 45th Division and British 5th Divisio , grinding toward Rome through the damaged, but fiercely resisting, Fourteenth Army and the tangled t rrain on the coastal side of the Alban Hills. We took heavy losses while Tenth Army escaped, but at nightfall on June , e finally reached the southern edge of Rome. I slept, peacefully for once, in the Catacombs. Rome had b declared an open city, and the Germans withdrew through it that night.

179 M. B. Hard

At first ligh, we entered the Eternal City, marched through the cheering throngs, and, before eleven o'clock that m ing, were several miles north of the Tiber-in action, and receiving mortar fire. 16 This was the Great Victory we had battled six months to achieve, and the beginning of our third year overseas. That night contact was again broken; the next morning, D-day for the troops of Overlord, landing 800 miles away in Normandy, 1st Armored Division began the pursuitthrough the rolling fields of the Campagna. (The English word "campaign" is derived from its long history of battles.) This was our first action of this type: in proper fashion, CC" A" led off with reconnaissance provided by th e 8lst Reconnaissance Battalion, followed by an advance guard of one company each of tanks and mechanized infantry, with one battery of our SP howitzers. At the first crossroad, the Recon peeled off to scout the flanks. At the next, the tanks did the same, and, at the third crossroad, the infantry moved out to establish road blocks. This left our SPhowitzer battery leading the column. Hastily, our commanding officer, Major Buttalph, radioed for our observation aircr~ft,~a~lorcraft L-5, to cover the lead battery and sent the 9lst Field Artillery's entire contingent of armor~-two medium and one light tanks, plus our M-8 scout car-doubling up the column to screen its advance. ~~S collection It was well that he did. The L-5 had barely reached a point overhead when the battery blundered into the first German rearguard and veered off the road to commence firing. Targets were plentiful; and our air observer, Lieutenant Charles B. Anderson, a Princeton grad with the diction of an English professor and another superior officer, began adjusting three simultaneous fire missions.Project 17 Meanwhile, I, as S-2, was lying in a ditch beside the guns with my radio remote, trying to keep our armor-borne observers informed as they moved up. A couple of miles back in the column, our other two batteries chimed in as quickly as our little armored section reached positions to observe. And an infantryWar company in half-tracks came forward and deployed. The German rearguard pulled out, and our pursuitat resumed-until we hit the next rearguard. Daily for the next week, before we had advanced more than a couple of hours, the same thing happened. We became quite adept at this skirmishing. 18 At Viterbo, more than fifty miles beyond RomeVMI, the French Expeditionary Corps relieved us on June 9. Lieutenant Neidringhaus, a Princeton grad, and I got a ride from the famous French General, Alphonse Juin, tooling along alone in his jeep. He had many questions about what we had encountered. We were approaching the more rugged Tuscan Hills, had attacked0532. continuously for seventeen days (and about fifteen nights), often on short rations, and were skin-and-bones. I weighed 145 pounds, down from 180 in England and 165 at Anzio. I was to lose another fifteenMS pounds in the next two months. The 1st Armored Division was reassigned to IV Corps, another higher headquarters fresh from the States. After a week's recuperation on the shores of Lake Bracciano, we went back into the line at Roccastrada. In th e Tuscan Hills, most towns were built on the hilltops and many were walled. The village farmers daily went down to work in the fields. Since before Christ, each town had been a citadel-and they still were in 1944. Our "pursuit" became a series of small sieges. 19 Sadly, we hadArchives. anothernew experience: the attack of occupied towns. We could see our fire pounding these hilltop villages to rout the German rear guards, and could only hope that all civilians were under cover. 20 Of course,VMI the Germans also defended the forested hills, castles, defiles, stream crossings, etc. We took losses at each skirmish, especially of tanks. One notable event was picking up a British partisan, one Captain Herrod who was a combat engineer officer. Captain Herrod had been captured at Tobruk in 1942, escaped into the Tuscan Hills and, with two Sikhs and three Ghurkas, had established a reign of terror. (Later, he was joined by an American Ranger, captured at Anzio.) Their exploits had been legendary, and he half-regretted our liberating him-until he realized he could now get his dental problems treated. Y f We pushed on, taking the little towns and hilltop castles21 on~ytpne past Siena to, at last, the Arno river at Pi sa. During the pus , e encountered the German division that II Corps had overrun en route out of Anzio, now restored to stren with Russians, and overran it again. I saw the Leaning Tower from an OP, and

180 M. B. Hardy, Jr. "'II watched the mortar~o bs of our infantry bursting in the German positions around its base. The 91st Armored Field Artille was then attached to 34th Division. First Armored Division had just about run out of medium tanks; an , hortly be re it was relieved, had been using composite armored platoons of lights, scout cars and tank ddtroyers. In the first week of Augu we came out of action at Leghorn. This was my last day in the line, number 250. Our battalion surgeon, ~pta in Robert Beuhrig, had me flown to the 300th General Hospital at Naples to get an impacted and infected wisdom tooth cut out and to be checked for tuberculosis or other diseases. I weighed 130 pounds. Lieutenant Colonel Buttolph gave me a letter of commendation. ;)- Two weeks in hospital, with one day of dental agony, plus innumerable tests and extra foo1_,turned me back to duty at 145 pounds. But the 1st Arn1ored Division had been reorganized and "down-sized"; I was now surplus, and was ordered to a Replacement Depot. With my extensive service, my name went at once on the list for rotation back to the States. This was late August. I in ructed replacements near Naples for a month, then was sent to another "Repo Depo" near Florence, be d 1st Armored Division which was then battling into the Gothic Line, just in case I was needed. One da ' , hitched a ride to Monghidorocollection to visit my old battalion. As usual, it was under fire, and I only tarried long enough for lunch and to see friends who remained. !received orders assigning me to newly arrived 423rd Field Artillery Group Headquarters, but got them canceled by Fifth Army when they found out I was in for rotation. Finally, after another month, I received orders to em bark at Leghorn for Naples to start for home, this timeProject on a Liberty ship (voyage number 10). My eleventh and last voyage was aboard the posh Army transport, West Point. We landed at Boston on November 30, 1944, and the Fulton Fish Pier looked every bit asWar good as the Statue of Liberty would have! I arrived in Louisville on the first Saturday in Decembeat , and my dad met me on the street outside the railway station. My ribs still remember his hug. The next y we naturally wentto church, where, for the first time, I saw Miss Whitney Knowles. She was not quit fifteen, but beyond all question, one whom I was to wait for while she grew up. While on rotation leavVMI visited Fort Knox and found a former 1st Armored Division Artillery commander from Africa. Colonel aydon Y. Grubbs was chief of the gunnery department of the Armored School; and the fmmer commanding general of CC"B", Brigadier General Paul McDonald Robinette, a great tanker, was its commandant.0532. When I reached the Redeployment Center at Miami Beach in early January, Colonel Grubbs had requested my assignment to the Armored School. Thus, I spent the last eight monthsMS of World War II teaching gunnery, and, still a captain, rose to chief of the Tank Destroyer Section-a lieutenant colonel's job. My long service got me out in September, a month after the Japanese surrender. I only hesitated once-when I was offered promotion to major and assignment to Rio de Janiero as military attache; but I still felt I was a citizen-soldier, and the war was over. What next? More than five years away from civil engineering, I would need schooling. Besides, civil engineering is an outside job; after soldiering that long, with two winter campaigns, I was ready to come indoors. AlthoughArchives. the term "role model" had not yet been invented, my father and his great-great grandfather, John Marshall, were mine. Both had been, in turn, surveyors, soldiers and lawyers. I tookVMI a battery of aptitude tests, whlch were negative only as to clerical, clergy and social worker employment. The University of Virginia had offered me a law scholarship in 1940, so I enrolled there in January 1946 under the GI Bill of Rights. My taste of college life in Charlottesville was delightful. 23 And I learned law from great professors and able fellow-students. In my senior year, Miss Whitney Knowles enrolled at Fairfax Hall in Waynesboro. In June 1948, I received my LLB, and Whitney d I announced our engagement to be married. I struggled through the ordeal of the Kentucky Bar exam ina ·on, was admitted to practice in September,joined my father and his partner, Ralph H. Logan, and was marri din November. Our first Christmas was spent at the hospital; Whitney had lost an eye to cancer. That yea , earned $1,550. We lived happily ever after. In the Army Reserve, it took me six years o obtain command of a battalion, and another eight years to

181 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

become a regimental commander. Upon retiring in 1966, I received my only medal, the Distinguished Reservist. My practice of law was as undistinguished as my military career, but somewhat more lucrative and sometimes almost as exciting. When, in Ireland, we pressed a British liaison officer for details of his combat experiences, he replied: "Actually, its all about ninety-nine percent extreme boredom, and one percent extreme excitement." So, in my experience, is the practice of the law. (And isn't life itself?) David Frost once said, "Thepracticeoflaw is the only blood-sport left in the Anglo-American culture." Aftermyfather'sdeath in 1954, Ralph Logan and I continued the firm; it still bears our names, although Ralph isn't fully active and I retired in 1982. Both of us are considered "senior counselors" by the Kentucky Bar Association. I have known many, many more than "a few good men," and a few exalted ones (who, to me, differed little, if at all); they, and the good, lady-like women, all "kept the faith." I'm proud that I never intentionally hurt any of them for my own benefit. Like the "Jolly Rebel" in the old song of that name, "An' I don't ask no pardon-for anything I done!" collection ENDNOTES

1All healthy male citizens are in the militia of the Union, from age 17 to 45; confer, U.S. Code, Title 10, Sec. 311. But, to me, they are not citizen-soldiers until (in the words of the Second Amendment) they have become "well-regulated."

2My duty assignments were: ( I) Cadet-Louisville Male High School and Virginia MilitaryProject Institute (1932-1940); (2) Enlisted­ ! 38th Field Artillery, Kentucky National Guard (1937-1938); (3)Commissioned-476th Field Artillery (1940); 27th Field Artillery Battalion (Armored) and 9 I st Armored Field Artillery Battalion, both I st Armored Division (I 940-I 944); Instructor, The Armored School (1945); 373rd Field Artillery Battalion, commanding officer (1954-1959),War Division IG (1959-1960), both IOOth Infantry Division, USAR (I 949-1960); student and instructor, USAR School ( 1960-1963); commanding officer, I OOth Training Regiment, I OOth Training Division, USAR (1963- I 966). at

3The opening line of "Fuzzy-Wuzzy," from Barrack Room Ballads. VMI ~In the class of I 940, despite the fact that most of us saw much active duty, our only Brother Rat to wear stars was a private his first class year: Major General Charles Beach, Jr., USAR; talk about underrating!

5Second Army (I 30,000 men) and Third Army (330,000); less than three years earlier, the entire U.S. Army had fewer than 200,000. 0532. &rhe Luftwaffe dominated the skies. HJ... ~ no camouflage paint, we smeared vehicles and helmets with a pinkish-white clay to break up their outlines, and salvaged . ~ibre machine guns from our own downed aircraft to use for air defense. MS 7The 91st AFA had been less mauled than many outfits, but had lost one-third of its officers, one-fifth of its men, and one-half of its guns on "Bloody Sunday," February 14, 1943.

8Patton had committed the cardinal error of "throwing a blow in the air." (This could have been avoided by using s~}>robing attacks to develop the situation.) (2

~his was the same trick of dividing a retreating force to split the pursuit used by Stonewall Jackson in the Valley campaign, and which Major GeneralArchives. Ward had used successfully on the Afrika Korps a month earlier.

10The third mistake was to commit 9th Infantry Division in aid of 1st Armored Division, and 34th Infantry Division to help 1st ~InfantryVMI Division . With no reserve left, II Corps waged two separate battles, with mutual support or shifting of forces impossible. 11 A textbook-perfect use of reserve to restore impetus to an attack (and equally important, as the 34th was pinched out, to simultaneously re-create a Corps reserve). ( 12 Aboard H.M .S. Kosmsko, a 7 ,000-ton former Polish training ship, with Polish officers and a Lascar (Indian) crew. Her crew when ~she escaped Danzig in 1939 had been Polish midshipmen-long since commissioned in the Free Polish Navy. -='" 13 VJ Corps, in charge of all counter-battery, permitted us to shoot if it did not preempt (because we were faster-90 seconds from ( flash report to first round-and could catch the roving guns). We mostly used fixed, surveyed observation posts, and located targets by triangulating muzzle-flashes at night. In daylight, our air O.P s fired most of our C-B missions. 14 0ur four-division attack struck "Division Greiner," the Germ~&62nd Infantry, as I recall; it was chosen because prisoners said they had a ditty, translated as: "Smaller, smaller, Division Greiner; soon all that's left is General Greiner!"

182 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

151 had my first experience of performing "the tactical squeeze"-initial interrogation of prisoners of war. We had learned some psychological "softening" tricks from the British, and one prisoner, a Czech Nazi, broke down when reminded that he would be repatriated to his homeland, where the Lid ice atrocities had been inflicted. He answered all questions after that.

160ne battery sent me a prisoner for interrogation, caught in civvies. It was suggested that I shoot him, since he was either a spy or a deserter-"and either way, he should be shot." I declined the suggestion. 17 1 never saw this done, before or since. As I recall, Anderson used howitzers I, 2 and 3 1~ri~nJ4, 5 and 6 in for fire for effect; meanwhile, he was commencing to adjust on another target. I think he fired 7 or 8 missigout twenty minutes.

18Typically, these rearguards consisted of one field artillery battery, an infantry company with engineers and a platoon of tanks or anti-tank guns. They would blow a bridge or block a defile, lay mines and entrench. They would disengage only when decimated or (rarely) out-flanked; mostly, at a greater cost to us than they suffered.

19The IV Corps sector was about 20 miles wide; it extended inland from the Tyrrhenian Coast, with about half in the littoral plain and the other half mountainous. The commanding general, Major General Willis D. Crittenberger, reasoned (correctly) that the enemy would expect armor in the plain, infantry in the mountains; to cross-up the Germans, he advanced the Corps with 34th Division in the plain, I st Armored Division in the mountains. The Krauts were delighted!

20With better training and equipment, i.e., good direct-fire sights and high-velocity cannon, we couldcollection have limited our fire to knocking down the battlements of these towns. But World War II artillery men were not well trained in direct laying (what used to be called "firing over open sights"). I hope these deficiencies have been corrected.

21 0ur battalion headquarters occupied one castle at dusk, and it had a wine cellar. On a terrace after supper, several staff officers from Xavier University, Captain Stan Krekeler, Lieutenant Johnny Graeber, eta!., got to singing German songs. Faintly, from across the creek at the foot of the castle cliff, the Kraut outposts joined in! ("Lilli Marlene" gotProject the best chorus.)

22 1 summarize my World War II overseas service thusly: No wounds, no decorations; thirty months, 250 days in combat, two campaign ribbons with six battle stars; I believe I personally killed five men,War three Germans in battle and two Americans, one _~ r_ {J ' accidentally and one compassionately. J-tv at 23 1 promptly visited VMI and sought out Colonel John M. Fray, to whom the class of 1940 had dedicated its issue oft& BOMB) He was then commandant, and, in a long talk about my service, he asked if my qualification card still listed equitation. M~ that it now appeared in the "Hobbies" section, nearly crushed the old man. Imagine! An artillery officer, with equitation as only a hobby. VMI

0532. Curriculum Vitae MS Birth: Louisville, Kentucky, September28, 1918; son of Marshall Burwell Hardy and Amanda Walker Fitch Hardy.

Family: Married Whitney Treat Knowles, November 27, 1943; children: (1) Marshall Burwell III (b. 10/ 1/49); twins, (2)Archives. HenryS. Gray and (3) Jane Whitney Gray (b. 2/17/51); twins, (4) Arthur Tabb Fitch and (5) Anne Amanda Fitch (b. 2/27/55), and (6) Katharine Jarvis (b. 4/16/66). [(3) m. 6/14/75, Jerome deCourcel-threechildren; (5) m. 7!7/79, John Lawrence Shoemyen (now, Shermyen)-one son; (1) m. 6/ 13/81, AnneVMI Jenns-two children; (4) m. 4/8/88, Susan Elizabeth Desmond, nee Oulette; and (6) m. 12/30/ 89, James Bernard Failing.]

Education: Rogers Clark Ballard Memorial School; Louisville Male High School [cum laude], 1936; Virginia Military Institute, BS in civil engineering [Dist.], 1940; University of Virginia, LLB [now, JD], 1948.

Church: Calvary Episcopal, Louisville, Kentucky, since birth. Vestryman, Treasurer, Secretary, Trustee, Teacher, Jr. Warden, Sr. Warden, etc.

183 M. B. Hardy, Ir.

Army Education and Service: ROTC, 8 yrs. (L.M.H.S. & VMI); Enlisted, two years (138th FA, KyNG); Commissioned 1940 and volunteered for EAD; AUS, 5 years (27th & 91st AFA Bns, 1st Armored Division [1940-44]; Instructor, The Armor School [ 1945]; Service Schools, 6 months (Armor, Artillery and C&GS); USAR, 23 years (lOOthDiv., 373 FA Bn, [CO 1954-59]; DiviG [1959-60]; lOOth Regiment [CO 1963-66]0 •

Campaign medals: American Defense, American Theater [1 BS], African European [5 BS], World War II Victory and Armed Forces Reserve.

Professional: Const. Div., E.I. duPont de Nemours & Co., 1940; partner, Hardy & Logan (now, Hardy, Logan, Priddy & Cotton), Attorneys, 1948-82; Gen. Counsel & Director, Southern S&L, 1955-82; The Peoria Un. S.Y. Co., 1963-85, and other small companies. Retired, 1982. Member of Kentucky Bar Association and (formerly) of Louisville and American Bar Associations.

Articles Published in Trends for Field Artillery (1958) and Louisville Bar Associationcollection Journal (1969).

Memberships: American Legion; Louisville Country Club; ROA (Judge Advocate, Dept. of Kentucky (1965-69), 1971; 1st Armored Division Association (J.A., 1970, 1990); MOWW (J.A., Louisville Chapter, 1987-88); Patton Museum/Cav-Arm Foundation (Trustee; V.P., 1976-80);Project Soc. of Colonial Wars. References: Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory; Marquis' Who's Who in the South and Southwest (1957). War Hobbies: Boating, tennis, equitation and military historyat (of which I now pursue only the first and last). Rev. 8/90 VMI

From an Address to the Military Order0532. of the World Wars by the su"Qject. .. MSThe Battle of Kasserine Pass Fifty years ago, as he retreated along "the shores of Tripoli," Field Marshall Erwin Rommel conceived his brilliant plan for the attack which led to Kasserine Pass. (Of course, I didn't know that then; all I knew was that we were hit incredibly hard, and should have been destroyed-but for the heroic actions of a few small elements.) Ironically, Archives.the series of battles collectively known as "Kasserine Pass" were fore-ordained by two allied successes three months earlier and 2,000 miles apart: one was the victory of British Eighth Army over Rommel'sVMI Desert Army at El Alamein in Egypt; the other was Operation Torch-the landing on November 8, 1942, of American and British forces along the coasts of Morocco and Algeria, which took place just as Rommel's long retreat began. Always offensively minded, he saw the troops of Torch as a new target for his Desert Army. He fell back, averaging only ten miles a day along 1,000 miles of the Libyan coast; en route, he thoroughly wrecked what little rail and highway there was, along with the Mediterranean ports of Tobruk, Dema, Benghazi, Sirte and Tripoli, itself. Before the war, France had built a smaller version of the Maginot Line, called the "Mareth Line," along the border between French Tunisia and Italian Libya. Rommel manned the Mareth Line's fortifications facing the pursuing Eighth Army-still far behind. He was sure that General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery

184 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

would not hurry it forward to attack again until its line of supply was restored. The Tunisian coast runs northward some 300 miles from the Mareth Line to the modem city of Tunis, at the site of ancient Carthage. That city was headquarters for the hastily-assembled German Army of General Jurgen Von Amim and its sizeable Air Force; the coastal road now became Rommel's axis of supply. Rising a few miles southwest of Tunis, the Grande Dorsale Mountain Range runs for approximately 150 miles due south, about forty miles in from the coast. It then turns west for an unbroken sixty miles, called the Petite Dorsal e. (If you can imagine the Blue Ridge in Virginia stripped of all its foliage, you can envision the bare rocks of the Dorsale Range; it is of similar size and has about the same number of passes, and they're the only places troops can march through.) Immediately to its south is the extensive salt marsh of the Chott Djerid, above the great sand sea of the Sahara. General Eisenhower, commanding general of Torch and now theater commander, had established his headquarters at Algiers, 400 miles west of Tunis. Three hundred miles east of Algiers, the British First Army under Lieutenant General Sir Kenneth Anderson was assembling some of the units from Torch in the central Tunisian plain, just west of the Grande Dorsal e. The right, or southern, flank of First Armycollection was to be manned by U.S. II Corps, under then Major General Lloyd Fredendall. So much for "The Big Picture"; but to understand any battle, we all need "The Little Picture," as well. Both sides recognized the importance of the mountain passes, and had fought several sharp, see-saw battles over the northernmost three or four of them. Further south, a battalionProject of French Colonial troops of the 6th Moroccan Infantry, with a few horse-drawn 75mm guns held Faid Pass-until Von Amim's lOth Panzer Division attacked with about forty tanks at 4:00A.M. on January 30, 1943. The French artillery stalled the tanks temporarily, but German dive bombers, artillery andWar infantry sto~~hrough the pass by mid- afternoon, and emplaced 88mm guns on the slopes above.at J . . At 9:00A.M., the nearest Allied troops-Combat Command "A" ofU.S0lst Armored Division, which was theoretically in rese~ve at the ancient oasis and now, railroad town, ofSbeitla, thirty-five mil:s to the ---we~s)rdered to relieve the French. (Actually,VMI the Corps commander, Fredendall, had sent out penny­ packet'~ forces in all directions, and one company of 6th Armored Infantry, one light tank company and "B" Battery of 91st Armored Field Artillery was all that could be sent to aid the French.) I This day was my personal "baptism of fire." 0532. Under persistent air attack, CC"A"'s small force moved swiftly, counter-attacking in the afternoon. Fourteen or fifteen of the seventeenMS light tanks were promptly shot up, and the attack only succeeded in stopping the 1Oth Panzer force from coming on through the pass. A second counter-attack the next day with a full battalion each of infantry and artillery got nowhere. Fredendallleft CC"A" there, four or five miles from Faid Pass, around the oasis village of Sidi Bou Zid. No minefields were laid; but he beefed us up with the only battalion of M-4 medium tanks thus far issued, and one company of 70 1st TD Battalion; and he attached the 168th Infantry (less one battalion) from 34th Division-ourArchives. General Butler's regiment. Also attached was a 155mm howitzer battalion of 17th Field Artillery and an armored car squadron of the Derbyshire Light Yeomanry from Eighth Army, which had scoutedVMI through the Sahara to make contact with First Army. Across the central plain of Tunisia, about sixty-five miles to the west of Sidi Bou ~cNies Kasserine Pass. It was the ancient border of the Roman province created by conquest of Carthage, andleftls upward and north to the high plateaux of eastern Algeria. There the main supply depot for U.S. II Corps was building up at the railhead of Tebessa. This situation was ideal for Rommel's plan. He could guard his rear at the Mareth Line with a handful of troops, mostly Italian, and throw 1Oth Panzer, plus the bulk of his Afrika Korps-15th and 21st Panzer and 90th Light Divisions-against Anderson's weak right flank, roll up, seize the supplies at Tebessa, and, joining with Von Arnim, drive First Army back into the Algerian mountains. The code name for his plan was, ironically, Frucklingswind, (Spring Breeze).

185 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

But Rommel was ill, and he had trouble with "Commando Supremo" in Rome, while Von Arnim was uncooperative. Nonetheless, lOth and 21st Panzer Divisions moved to assembly areas in the cactus patches east of Faid and other units, both German and Italian, began to mass. The Afrika Korps were masters of deception in the desert, and the few Allied aircraft able to fly out of the muddy valleys in the Algerian mountains thought that less than a division had been assembled behind Faid. But Eisenhower was concerned, and the night of February 13, 1943, he came to see the disposition of CC"A." Satisfied, he then went back to Algiers. I was twenty-four years old, in command of the combat train of 91st Armored Field Artillery Battalion. I'd heard the rumors of German build-up, and had started to mine-in our position. But, then I saw Ike leaving our battalion headquarters, and felt reassured; after all, CC"A" had, on its front of seven miles or so, nearly 6,000 men, forty-two artillery pieces, and about sixty-five tanks including over fifty ofthe new M-4s. (I then had no idea that our density of one-half man per yard of front, one cannon per 300 yards and one tank per 200 yards was about ten times too thin.) I turned in and slept soundly. It would be a week before I got another night's rest.collection I awoke Sunday morning, St. Valentine's Day, at 6:30 to a leaden sky and the continuous crash of thunder-I thought. German aircraft were flying under the clouds, but that was not unusual; practically everything that flew had Maltese Crosses on it. And the Stukas had the bright yellow noses of Goering's best squadrons. Project Over and over we were hit, each time from a different quarter, by the amazingly precise rotation of the German attacks: dive bombardment, artillery fire, tank fire, and then infantry-each commencing as the other tailed off. War By 9:00A.M. the desert was strewn with burning tanks, mostlyat ours. (Desert tank battles opened at long ranges, where the high velocity German guns had enormous advantage.) Soon the vertical black columns of smoke, spreading at the to , resembled a gigantic grove of palm trees. The sky had cleared; it swarmed with the Luftwaffe, and our r treat began. Exiting Sidi BouVMI Zid, I passed the 17th Field Artillery's battalion­ eleven of their twelv ld-fashioned 155 howitzers ablaze with their prime movers, where the JU-87s and ME-109s had caught hem displacing. By late afternoof,'!CC"A" survivors 0532.had retreated fifteen miles, and we were forming a defensive line along a low rise in ltlfe desert at a place we called "Kerns' Crossroads," named after CC"A'"s executive officer, Colonel Kerns, whose "penny-packet"MS force had been heavily attacked from the air therein January. We had about 1,000 men, eight 105s and four light tanks; all of the new M -4 mediums had been lost. This force was all thalws left in action-except for the two battalions of 168th Infantry still holding out on the mountain peaks. Lumping our owitzers together as one battery, we began shelling the Germans scavenging the battlefield; the infantry dufu and, after dark, put out patrols. Of the three officersArchives. with the combat trains of 91st Field Artillery, I was the only one left. Before taking a mounted patrol back a couple of miles to recover another of our SP-1 05s, I got my chiefs- f-section together to "countVMI noses," set up a perimeter defense, etc. The battalion had lost one-thir its officers, twlnty percent of the men, and half its howitzers. We felt pretty badly, and as we broke u t hit me that every e needed a chuckle. I called them back and said, "I don't know about you all, but if I tout of this mes , 'm going to do two things on every Valentine's Day the rest of my life: I'm going to church, and then I'm oing to get drunk!" (And I have, each year now, for fifty times.) Although elements of three German and three under-strength Italian divisions had been spotted, Eisenhower and Fredendall still thought our enemy amounted to no more than one division; and they didn't know that Rommel was in command, despite our claims that his 21st Panzer and 90th Light Divisions were involved. This fallacy gained credence from the puzzling failure to follow-up the destruction of CC"A." (Actually, we later learned that Rommel thought that no commander would leave so small a force as CC"A"

186 M. B. Hardy, Jr. without a reserve; his army corps, my best guefiwas and is somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 men, was digging in to meet our expected counter-aW'k.) Within a day, 1st Armored Division had gathered the "penny-packets" into a provisional combat command, and on the afternoon of February 15 launched frontal counter-attack from our position at Kerns' Crossroads. Again, we lost all of our medium tanks-a battalion of old M-3s. The 68th Armored Field Artillery had to "circle the wa ons" and back into a depression to stand off the German tanks until dark, for which it received a Presidenti 1citation. Meanwhile, the battalion of 6th Armored Infantry, mounted in half­ tracks, veered north and, er dark, was able to bring back some of the I 68th Infantry off ofDJ. Lessouda. Late the next afternoo , he German advance slowly resumed. We had no medium tank unit left, and we backed off, firing continu sly. Some of their tanks were~ VIs, invulnerable to our weapons. All we could do was to blind them with smoke and dust. CC"B" of 1st .Mmored Division, under superb tanker Briga~i General Paul McDonald Robinette, was recalled from a pass thirty or more miles north of Faid. At dus e crossed our rear to go into action on our exposed southern flank. Then, behind us, an ordinance depot as blown-up; some of our people panicked and ran, but Brigadier General McQuillan, collectioncommanding CC"A," got them stopped. The dump bu_~ and exploded for hours, and confused fighting continued all night-highly unusual in the desert. One ~HI was destroyed by one of our howitzers at a range of twenty-five yards. By dawn we had lost ten miles and were backed up into Sbeitla, with some outfits amongProject the Roman ruins. The road from Faid Pass forks at Sbeitla, straddling a spur of the Algerian plateaus. One fork turns north below the plateau, while the other continues westward under its bluffs some thirty-five miles before rising northward through Kasserine Pass. On February 17, CC"B"War backed off toward Kasserine, while the survivors of Faid and Kerns' Crossroad marched up the forkat to the north. Six or eight headquarters and field artillery medium tanks made up a provisional rear guard platoon, leap-frogging our nine-piece howitzer battery that was substituting for tanks. Late in the day we were relieved by British 6th Armored Division, hurrying south into battle; but we marched on all VMInight, mounting the plateau at Sbiba from the east, and circling back to meet CC"B" above Kasserine the morning of February 18. Contact with the enemy had been broken, but there were no replacements of men or material. First Armored's commander, Major General0532. Orlando Ward, was finally in command of his division. His separating our retreat into two columns forced the Germans to do the same. One group which included lOth Panzer followed our column northward,MS and met and defeated British 6th Armored Division. The other column, including 21st Panzer, was stopped at Kasserine by the heroic stand of a small force of French infantry and U.S. combat engineers entrenched there. Rommel, we later learned, was furious, and the next day drove 21st Panzer through the pass-there, to encounter CC"B". CC"A" went into division reserve, continually marching hither and yon, day and night, as the forces maneuvered and clashed across the eastern Algerian plateau. (Once in the rain, I had to navigate my battery twenty miles across that barren plain by compass and odometer.)Archives. Of course, artillery is almost never really in reserve; we were frequently in long­ range action, reinforcing the fires of the direct support battalions. Meanwhile,VMI the entire Div. Arty. of U.S. 9th Division was conducting a remarkable 1,100-mile forced march from Morocco, and B-17s on Malta were preparing to head for Kasserine. Before the German force with lOth Panzer, following us (and some units of British 6th Armored Division) up onto the plateau a couple of days later, could link-up with the 21st Panzer group, heavy bombardment from both U.S. forces began t~t the Germans. Von Arnim, fearing that Anderson's First Army would attack in the north, pulled out his ~VIs; and, as we again later learned, Rommel was ordered back to Germany, and departed. On February 21, the Germans withdrew, leaving thousands of mines behind. Tenth Panzerreturned to Faid Pass, and the Afrika Korps moved into the Mareth Line to face the Eighth Army. The battle of Kasserine Pass was over. As commanding general of II Corps, Lieutenant General George S. Patton replaced Fredendall, who was promoted to lieutenant general when he got home. This gave rise

187 M. B. Hardy, Jr. to a saying among the troops, "When a Russian general messes up, he's shot; when a German does, he's court­ martialed; when a British general does, he's retired; but when an American general messes up, he's promoted!"

By the subject. ..

The Anzio Campaign (Operation Shingle) January 22, 1943-May 23, 1943

The United States (and especially, General George C. Marshall) opposed Prime Minister Winston Churchill's strategy of attacking occupied Europe through its "soft underbelly." Becausecollection of this strategic disagreement, the mission of U.S. Fifth Anny and British Eighth Army in Italy, after capturing Naples and the Foggia air fields, became one of tying down as many German divisions as possible-to keep them away from the French coast where they could oppose the coming cross-channel invasion (Operation Overlord). The problem was that the U.S. Fifth Army and British Eighth Army, Projectin December 1943, had only fifteen divisions all told, while the German commander, Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, needed only thirteen of the twenty-seven or twenty-eight divisions available to him to hold the Gustav Line, anchored at Cassino. But, for the first time in World War II (with U.S. air power startingWar to operate from Foggia), Allied air superiority was beginning to be established. at Could this development make for accomplishment of an otherwise impossible mission? No one then knew; but it was worth trying, if some plan to use this new advantage could be devised. It was obvious that the best way to liberate ItalyVMI was by successive amphibious encirclements, on both the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian coasts-and both sides knew it. The Germans had forestalled this by refusing the flanks of the Gustav Line with prepared defenses extending north more than a score of miles along both coasts; and ample reserves to man them0532. were at hand , occupying most of Italy. Churchill was insistent that the Theatre commander, General Sir Harry M. (Jumbo) Wilson, do something with Fif~an ighth Armies-otherMS than feed them into the meat-grinder of the Gustav Line. The Army group c -rna der, General Sir Harold Alexander, and the Fifth Army commander~utenant General Mark W. , agreed. / Accordingly, Shingle was planned as a boot-strap operation. The need for landinQraft, both in the South Pacific and in England (for Overlord) far exceeded production of these craft, so only a small, stripped-down force could be transported. (Also,~ troops could be spared from the Cassino front.) VI Corps Headquarters, Archives.newly arrived from t ates, was to conduct the invasion, but it had to land beyond the prepared defenses-yet within range air support from Foggia. Thus,VMI the fishing village of Nettuno and the resort town of Anzio were chosen, despite their soggy terrain-the ancient Pontine marsh-and, for once, the Germans were surprised. The role of air power was to interdict the movement of German reserve forces, especially from north of Rome, in the pious hope that Kesselring would have to use troops from the Gustav Line's reserve, and even its defenses, to contain the invading VI Corps; and thus, might create an opportunity for a break-through at Cassino. The invading force consisted of the veteran British 1st Division, U.S. 3rd Division, 504th and 509th Parachute Regiments, and several battalions of tanks, Rangers and Commandos-in all, a superb combat force of about three divisions, but stripped of most of their vehicles and support personnel. Half of the 1st Armored Division (CC''B" was left in front of Cassino to exploit any break-through there) with 45th Division made up VI Corps reserve-to be shuttled up on later voyages.

188 M. B. Hardy, Jr.

The landing on January 22, 1944, was only lightly opposed, but Kesselring moved two divisions (under I Parachute Korps) from the Gustav Line reserve to blocking positions; and he ordered General Eberhard von M,acjnsen, commanding general of Fourteenth Army north of Rome, with three of his divisions to move so~nd take command. Von Macken sen moved promptly, under continuous Allied air attack; and, on the third night, heavy rains began which stopped the air raids. By January 29, there were 70,000 Germans opposing the beachhead. Major General John P. Lucas, commanding general of VI Corps, has been criticized by many writers for not advancing rapidly to Rome-or at least the fifteen miles to the coastal mountain range, Colli Laziali­ while he was largely unopposed. If he had, VI Corps would have been annihilated. When, on January 29, 1st Armored Division (which had only closed into the beachhead t e day before) launched a probing attack northwestward, they were strongly resisted, and the tanks mired wn. A British 1 Divis· attack northward was repulsed with heavy losses. The next night, when a Ran attalion of767 m as sent northeastward on a reconnaissance-in-force, they were ambushed and onl six escaped. By Feb ary 3, VI Corps was on the defensive. Fourteenth Army was further reinforced, an , ith seven divisio s, oncollection Mackensen began his attempts to throw VI Corps back into the sea-all of whic failed, but with s re losses on both sides. What ensued in the next three months was trench warfare, reminiscent of World War I. By mid-May, VI Corps, now commanded by Major General Lucian K. Truscott, formerly commanding general of 3rd Division, had been greatly reinforced, in spite of the toll Projectof ships taken by German U-boats, air attacks and artillery. On May 23, it launched Operation Buffalo, an attack of tremendous force. On a four­ mile front were massed 45th Division, 1st Armored Division (with CC"B" rejoined), 3rd Division and 1st Special Service Force Brigade (heavily reinforced)-roughlyWar seven men per yard of front, one tank per fifteen yards, and 1,600 artillery pieces, one every five yardsat. Artillery preparation began a week early, with daily half-hour barrages at false points of attack. The attack itself was irresistible. Operation Shingle was history, recorded as a mistake. Yet, it had tied down (and decimated) seven German divisions-admittedlyVMI , at a cost far too great. There was one lesson which should have been learned, and wasn 't: Air power alone cannot interdict the movement of determined ground forces. (I hope that lesson was finally learned from the failure of the U.S. attempt to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail by air attack, twenty-five0532. years later.) MS

Archives.

VMI

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