The Taking of White House Hill

In the first five days of invasion, the U.S. Seventh Army seized and widened its bridgeheads in southwestern Sicily (TIME, July 26). On the night of July 15-16, the Seventh Army then began the northward push which culminated last week in the occupation of central and western Sicily (see p. 33).

First important step in this drive was the capture of Barrafranca, a town of stone houses at the end of a narrow valley, guarded on either side by three rugged hills and many smaller ones. The veteran 1st Division's 26th Infantry Regiment was assigned to take these hills, thus opening the way into the town. With the regiment's 2nd Battalion, one of three in the action, was TIME Correspondent Jack Belden. His report, which arrived last week, is of a battle as it looks to the soldier in battle, with all its desperation, irrelevance and confusion.

"Move out! Move out!" Like an alarm, that midnight voice cut through our sleep. The walkie-talkies spoke: "Move out! Move out!" A soldier said: "I'm all set to go. I got new bandages on my feet." Suddenly we were on the path, moving in single file--no vehicles, no tanks, just a bunch of foot soldiers.

The sound of machine guns was like an urgent tapping at a door. "Those ain't ours," said a soldier. "Sounds like Hermans," said another voice, referring to the fast-firing guns of the Hermann Goering Division. Vaguely alarmed, we crested the slope and looked out into a narrow alley of plain, hugged by hills--high ones to the left, low gentle slopes to the right. Dead ahead another hill blocked the end of the valley.

The yellow balls of German tracers dropped in from three sides. The red balls of oar machine guns grew less & less, seemingly overwhelmed. We marched on, knowing that we had not surprised the enemy. We would have to fight for the hills in daylight.

The Rockets. With quiet, efficient cruelty, the day dawned.

What to do? Where to go? We had planned to seize the hills in the darkness and then move up the valley to the town. Now it was impossible to proceed with our plan. The lieutenant colonel in command of the 2nd Battalion made a quick decision. He ordered his soldiers to get on and behind a slight ridge of ground to the left of our road.

"Pick 'em up and lay 'em down," bellowed the Colonel. "They're looking right at you!"

The Colonel, his short legs pumping up & down with extraordinary speed, churned straight up the slope toward the firing. A queer glimmer of a smile played around his lips. Three riflemen, an officer called Jack, two soldiers with walkie-talkies and I scrambled after him, while the rest of the battalion flew across the lower slopes.

An early morning haze was lifting from the hills. In the valley below us, smoke was flowering from small buds into huge white blossoms. German heavy guns had opened up.

The Colonel, with his mobile command post, worked quickly along the top of the ridge away from the road. Forward of him the battle raged. Back of him his own soldiers swarmed, as yet with no destination. Here was excitement, uncertainty, no use for last night's plans, no time to ask for instructions. The battalion commander was on his own.

Two or three hills ahead of us, across a series of steep slopes and gulches, was the highest ground in the area. The Colonel ordered Captain J. Kelly and Captain Morris Belisle to take that hill. Off they went, with two companies of men.

It was now 5:15 a.m. We had light enough to see our little Honey tanks emerging from dust clouds in our rear and going into position below us. German observers also saw the tanks.

From some place far away came a whining roar, and the whole sky seemed to be screaming toward us. Something like the sound of a dozen railway trains thrashed overhead, and the slope back of the tanks erupted. Soldiers looked up wide-eyed, and one said: "That must be that six-barreled rocket gun." (Prisoners had told us of this new German weapon, some with six barrels, some with five, on a revolving, electrically driven cylinder, firing five or six rocket shells almost simultaneously.) Our Honey tanks began climbing up the slope toward us, "Goddamn them," said an infantry officer, "why don't they stay down in that draw where they're protected? They'll only bring fire down on us by coming up here."

The White House. We began moving forward. Officers yelled: "Scatter! You want to all get killed at once?" We panted up a big hill. In the middle of an almond orchard we came out on another crest. Here, with two walkie-talkies, the Colonel again set up his command post.

Below us was a deep ravine clothed in low bushes. On the other side of the ravine was a steep hill--the one which Captains Kelly and Belisle had already gone ahead to take. Kelly's company and a company from another battalion were on the slope nearest us; Belisle's company was on the rear slope, out of our sight.

Near the end of a sharp cliff on this hill was a white house, and we promptly nicknamed the hill White House Hill. We could see Kelly's men climbing from the ravine to the lower slopes of the hill. We could also see some of the enemy, but Kelly could not see them. Near the white house was an enemy machine gun. Enemy soldiers came out of the house, some going to the machine gun and some creeping on their bellies to the edge of the cliff.

Kelly might be ambushed. We tried to warn him, but our walkie-talkie couldn't pick him up. The Colonel was very worried. He conferred with Captain Bernard Kotin, an artillery observer, about the possibility of hitting the enemy without hitting our own men. "At least we could burn 'em out of that white house if you could land a shell on top there," said the Colonel to Kotin. "Pretty narrow target, though," he added. Kotin decided to try a smoke shell first and gave the range.

The first shell was far to the left of the target. The next bud of smoke was right in back of the white house. Kotin squealed with delight and snapped out his next order: "Fire H.E. [high explosive]. Repeat range. Fire when ready."

Flame flashed in front of the white house. Our shell struck home.

"Look at 'em run," yelled the Colonel. We thought that Kelly's company had been saved. We were wrong.

The Ambush. It was now 8:55 a.m., and the situation was bad. Kelly, Belisle and Company A of the 1st Battalion were making their way up the hill toward the place where, unknown to them, the German machine-gunners waited.

On top of our hill we heard, from somewhere on White House Hill, a curious kind of guttural howling and yelling. Then, from just below the white house, figures rushed down the hill. They were our men, the men of the 1st Battalion's Company A. The German machine gun had found them.

Heartsick, we watched those broken ranks stumbling down the slope. It was worse when mortar shells landed in the middle of them. Beside me an awed voice said: "They're getting hell kicked out of 'em, aren't they?" One of the figures suddenly fell over, then gripped himself between his legs. Men tried to reach him but were driven off, and he sat there alone on the slope of White House Hill.

Oh, Suzanna--Kelly's company of our 2nd Battalion was still working up the slope. When he was still some distance from the Germans, rocket shells topped the crest and struck the slope. The brush burst into flame and the whole side of the hill began to burn.

Out of the smoke and flame, Kelly's voice came to us over the belatedly functioning walkie-talkie: "Tanks, definitely German, are now on our right flank below the hill." Then, down the slope in back of us, a voice shouted: "Tanks are around here." Someone yelled uphill to the Colonel: "The 1st Battalion is withdrawing. Get these goddamn men faced around."

Our rear protection was going. The men in the C.P. jumped to their feet and stared at each other.

The valley was shaking with heavy gunfire. Close at hand, above the heavy sound of artillery, came the sharp crackle of machine guns. Bullets whined through trees. A voice yelled, "X unit is trying to haul ass!"

Soldiers were lying behind rifles, facing out into the valley and toward White House Hill. They craned their necks and looked back at us. The Colonel ran toward them and shouted: "Drive down in there and chase the bastards out! Shoot them! Get in there and clean those bastards out! Come on, get up into firing position!"

The men got up uncertainly.

"Get off your ass!" said the Colonel. "Get some men on top of the hill so we can see what's coming up, or for Christ's sake they'll be on top of us before we know it." Drawing his pistol, the Colonel rushed toward the vicious firing himself.

Dozens of voices were shouting at once. The fog of war had descended on us in earnest. Amid these wild scenes, Private "Pete" Sher sat beneath an almond tree, fingering his droopy mustache and guarding the Colonel's radio. Through the crazy chatter of guns he sang plaintively, humorously: "If I had the wings of an angel. ..."

He looked up at me, winked, took out his harmonica and played: "Oh, Suzanna, don't you cry for me."

His mouth organ moved swiftly up & down his lips, while his scraggly mustache perked up and bristled. Through the strains of his music the radio abruptly squealed. The regimental headquarters wanted to know if the Colonel had any news. Pete shouted this to the Colonel, who had reappeared. "It's all screwed up," said the Colonel. "I don't know what's going on. Tell 'em to send the Air Corps." Turning to me, he said: "This sure is something."

The Grand Stand. At this moment, the German tank attack .in the valley below us reached its climax.

Sweeping out of Barrafranca, thirteen Mark-IIIs and Mark-IVs had overrun our 3rd battalion, forcing it to evacuate its position in the plain. Temporarily unopposed by infantry, the tanks came on down the valley between the hills, shooting up at us as they came.

The German tanks were skillfully handled. Lingering in hull-down position on the back of one slope, they would fire for a time. Then, moving in different diagonal directions, they would race over the top of the slope and come down and halfway up the next slope, again in hull-down position.

From a high hill, our shells crashed into the valley in increasing volume. In a mist of smoke and dust the tanks flitted warily. Forced to retreat out of the plain before the superior fire of the Mark-IVs, our light Honey tanks had hidden in a draw. They now poured a hail of diagonal fire at the German tanks. An artillery observer, awed by the gun-tank battle and our grandstand seat far above it, murmured: "You'll never see anything like this again in 20 years."

Our guns and the Honeys took the steam out of the Germans; they withdrew a little. Momentarily our rear was safe. But with the 3rd battalion driven back on our right, our position was still uncertain. The only thing to do, said the Colonel, was to attack, take White House Hill and deprive the Germans of observation. It did not matter that we would be isolated. We had to take the hill.

From long-silent Captain Kelly word arrived that he was on top of White House Hill. Just as his voice died on our walkie-talkie, machine-gun fire sounded from the top of the hill. The Germans were still there, too.

Lieut. Walter Bowland knelt on the crest of our hill directing mortar fire. His judgment had to be fine, as Kelly was getting closer to the Germans.

As the sound of German machine-gun fire thickened, Bowland fired faster. A frantic voice came into our walkie-talkie, saying the shells from our mortars were dropping on him.

"Cease fire," hollered Bowland, and our mortars were silent. The German machine gun on White House still talked loudly.

"I'm going up and stop that," said the Colonel. "I don't know what's going on, but there's no use waiting here until we find out. Let's go and take that hill." Without another word, he plunged down the slope at the head of the company and then headed up White House Hill. It was 11:15 a.m.

In a dip between two hills we came into full view of the enemy, who could now strike us with enfilading fire. Some soldiers drove into a narrow ditch to ascend the slope, but the Colonel strode straight up the hill. As we climbed everyone grew faint, turning pale and looking at each other in the naked frankness of misery.

Near the crest we saw a wounded lieutenant, with two worried medics. He had been hit in the stomach. "How are you?" one of us said.

"Goddam, I ought to know better," the lieutenant said. "I heard those rockets railroading down on me and I didn't get flat enough. Piece of something hit me in the stomach." He tried to grin.

Soldiers were slow in reaching the top of that hill. They had not slept all night. They had marched a long way into battle. They had had the toughest fight of the Sicily campaign. A sergeant, his face a mass of weariness, came up the hill at the head of G company. The colonel quickly called him: "Get here quickly. Go over there to the left, contact H and F company and look out for the left flank." The sergeant went over the brow of the hill. Only four or five soldiers were close behind him. Somewhere below, the rest of the column was struggling upward with painful slowness.

Just after noon, the rocket guns started up again. This time they were not shelling our rear. They were not shelling our tanks. They were shelling us. That noise, that approaching roar, drowned out even the power to think. On the hill up which our soldiers were struggling, the rocket shells started fires. Soon, to the normal noise of the battlefield, was added the crackle and hiss of flames.

But the men came through. Trucks rushed ammunition to tanks which had no ammunition. White House Hill was taken. The assault there broke the back of the German resistance. All except a few stragglers pulled out.

That evening, with the ist battalion and the tanks, we drove into Barrafranca.

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