I Heard You Paint Houses Read online

  At the time he uttered these words to the men of the 45th, two of their comrades were facing courts-martial for murder. Captain John T. Compton had ordered a firing squad to shoot approximately forty unarmed prisoners of war, two of whom were civilians, following a battle to take Biscari airfield in Sicily on July 14, 1943. In a separate incident Sergeant Horace T. West had personally machine-gunned thirty-six unarmed prisoners of war that same day following that same battle.

  Patton’s personal diary for July 15, 1943, a day after these killings, reads:

  [General Omar] Bradley—a most loyal man—arrived in great excitement about 0900 to report that a Captain in the 180th Regimental Combat Team, 45th Division [Sheeran’s actual regiment within the division], had taken my injunction to kill men who kept on shooting until we got within 200 yards seriously, and had shot some fifty prisoners in cold blood and in ranks, which was an even greater error. I told him that it was probably an exaggeration, but in any case to tell the officer to certify that the dead men were snipers or had attempted to escape or something, as it would make a stink in the press and also would make the civilians mad.

  General Omar Bradley, Patton’s equal in rank, did no such thing. Bradley engaged in no cover-up, and his investigation led to murder charges against the captain and the sergeant.

  Captain John T. Compton was tried by a military court, but he was acquitted on the grounds that he was merely following Patton’s explicit instructions to the 45th to shoot prisoners in cold blood.

  Sergeant Horace T. West was also tried by a military court for murder, and he used the same defense as Captain Compton. A lieutenant testified for the sergeant that the night before the invasion of Sicily, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Schaefer went on the ship’s loudspeaker and reminded the men of Patton’s words: they “would not take any prisoners.”

  Sergeant Horace T. West, however, was convicted and given life in prison. The unremitting outcry that ensued following the acquittal of an officer and the conviction of an enlisted man for essentially the same course of conduct, on the same day, following the same battle, in the same campaign, from the same 45th Infantry Division, led to the sergeant’s prompt release and return to combat, where he served out the balance of the war as a private. Four months after his acquittal, Captain Compton was shot and killed as he approached German soldiers who were displaying the white flag of surrender as a deadly trick.

  There were hushed reports of other atrocities in Sicily as well. In his book General Patton: A Soldier’s Life, Stanley P. Hirschson cites one well-known British newspaperman of the day who witnessed two busloads of about sixty prisoners each being shot, but who chose not to report the story after Patton gave his word he would put a stop to all atrocities. The newspaperman, however, told a friend, and that friend prepared a memorandum that recounted the events. The memo states: “Patton’s bloodthirsty way of talking, and wording of his instructions, before the landing in Sicily was taken too literally by the American troops of the 45th Division particularly.”

  “Later that day, Diggsy asked me about a rumor he had heard from a neighborhood pal he had run into overseas that I had enlisted because Yank knocked a girl up and blamed me. Can you imagine, halfway around the world and rumors are going around about me. I knew Yank was out there in college somewhere still having his little jokes.”

  chapter six

  Doing What I Had to Do

  “For me the easiest part of the war was Sicily. The Italians were terrible soldiers. The Germans were keeping the backbone in the Italians. We’d advance, and sometimes the Italian soldiers actually would be standing there at attention with their suitcases packed. While I was in Sicily, Mussolini surrendered and the Germans took over the war from the Italians. The Sicilian people were very friendly. Once we drove the Germans out I got to see Catania, where every house had homemade spaghetti drying on the clothesline. After the war Russell Bufalino liked the fact that I went right through his town.

  My first new pal was a tough guy in our squad out of the Jewish section of Brooklyn named Alex Siegel. We had our picture taken together in Sicily with my arm resting on his shoulder, but he got killed a month later in a strafing on the beachhead at Salerno.

  Salerno is a town just below Naples on the western coast of Italy. In September 1943, we jumped off landing craft into the Mediterranean with German shells exploding all around us. Salerno was the worst of the three invasion landings I made. Those of us who made it ashore had the goal of getting about 1,000 yards up to secure the beachhead. Each soldier had a shovel on his pack, and we began digging in. No matter how tired you are, when you hear enemy artillery, you dig with a passion.

  Our position was pounded by artillery and strafed by German planes. If you saw German soldiers coming at you, you shot your rifle. I know I was there shooting. I know I asked myself why the hell did I volunteer for this, but I have no recollection of the first time I fired at an enemy soldier in Salerno.

  We almost got pushed off the beach by the Germans. But I know I stayed there the same as everybody else did. Everybody’s scared. Some don’t want to admit it. But it doesn’t make a difference whether you admit it or not, you’re still scared.”

  The Combat Report quotes an on-the-scene general of another division who said: “The 45th prevented the Germans from driving the Allied invaders into the sea.”

  “When our Navy artillery brought in heavy firepower, the Germans retreated back out of the range of the Navy’s guns. That gave us a chance to move up, and we advanced off the beach and hooked up with other divisions for a push north.

  Riflemen would do whatever we were assigned to do. If you didn’t follow an order in combat they can shoot you automatically, right then. Jimmy Hoffa was never in the service. He got a hardship of some kind to keep out. In combat you learned fast, if you didn’t know it already, certain rules are strict rules and nobody’s above those rules. Before combat I was never much on following orders myself, but I learned over there to follow orders or else.”

  Sheeran was there following orders for what the Combat Report calls the “sickness and exhaustion that had developed among the troops” in the “fatiguing and heart-breaking fighting over rough terrain” in the drive from Salerno north to Venafro. In unrelenting succession came the “suffering attendant to a winter campaign in the cold vastness” of the Apennine Mountains under the guns of the German-held monastery at Monte Cassino.

  “We pushed north in Italy from Naples toward Rome, and by November 1943, we got as far as the foothills where we began being shelled by Germans above us on the mountains around Monte Cassino. We were pinned down there for over two months. There was a monastery on top of Monte Cassino that the Germans used as an observation post so they could see our every move. It was an ancient monastery, and certain factions didn’t want it bombed. When they finally did bomb it, they made the whole situation worse because now the Germans could get protection from the rubble. In January 1944 we tried to assault the German line but got thrown back down the mountain. Some nights we’d go out on patrol to capture a German soldier for interrogation. Most nights we just tried to stay dry from all the rain and keep from getting hit.

  By then I was learning not to get close to too many people. You get to liking people and you see them get killed. A nineteen-year-old kid would come in as a replacement, and before his boots got a chance to dry he was dead. It’s got to affect you mentally. I was close to Diggsy and that was it. It was tough enough seeing Diggsy get shot twice.

  Then came the worst of it. They decided to send some of us back to a rest area near Naples in Casserta. It had been the Italian king’s palace. We had it easy for about ten days and then we took off in landing craft for Anzio. This was a coastal town that was north of the German line at Monte Cassino but south of Rome. The idea was to attack the German flank and give our main force a chance to break through at Monte Cassino.”

  The 45th Division was pulled back from the repeatedly unsuccessful and costly Allied attacks again
st the monastery at Monte Cassino to open up another front on the German flank by the amphibious invasion of Anzio. In moving the 45th away from the front line at Monte Cassino, General Mark Clark wrote, “For the past seventy-two days the 45th Infantry Division has been engaged in continuous combat against strong enemy forces and under extreme combat conditions.” General Clark reflected upon the “bitter cold, wet and almost constant enemy artillery and mortar fire” to which the 45th Division—and Private Frank Sheeran—had been subjected at Monte Cassino. What the general didn’t know was that he was taking the 45th out of the frying pan of Monte Cassino and putting them right into the fire that was the hell of Anzio.

  “Before a battle or a landing, you get a little nervous tension. Once the shooting starts it goes away. You don’t have time to think. You just do what you have to do. After the battle it sinks in.

  We took the Germans by surprise at the Anzio beach, taking a couple of hundred prisoners. Everything was quiet that first twenty-four hours as we moved up off the beach, but instead of advancing, the general in charge thought it was a trap. He decided to play it safe and wait for our tanks and artillery to land. This delay in advancing gave the Germans time to get their tanks and artillery into position above us and to dig in so they could pin us down and keep our tanks and artillery from landing.”

  As Sir Winston Churchill put it, and despite his expressed wishes to the contrary, “But now came disaster…. The defenses of the beachhead were growing, but the opportunity for which great exertions had been made was gone.” Hitler poured in reinforcements, pinned the Allies down, and ordered that his army eliminate what he called the “abscess” of the Allied beachhead at Anzio.

  “Then along came their heavy artillery and their airplanes strafing us. We had to dig deep because foxholes wouldn’t do us any good. We ended up in dugouts that went down about eight feet that we dug with our shovels. We used foot ladders to climb out, and we put boards and tree branches on top to protect us from the rain and to absorb the shrapnel from the constant shelling.

  We stayed like that under a never-ending attack for four solid months. You couldn’t leave your dugout during daylight or they’d pick you off. Where are you going to go anyway? You’d take your chances and come out at night to relieve yourself or empty your helmet of your body waste if you couldn’t hold it in during the day and you had to go in your helmet. You ate K-rations out of a can. They couldn’t get any cooked food to you. The Germans bombed our supply ships. You played cards and you talked about what you were going to do after the war. And most of all, you prayed. I don’t care who you were or who you thought you were, you prayed. I said more Hail Marys and more Our Fathers than I could count. You promised to sin no more if only you got out of this alive. You swore to give up women and wine and cursing and anything you ever did that you could use to offer up in your prayers.

  The worst shelling was done at night by what we nicknamed the Anzio Express. It was a giant piece of artillery that the Germans kept camouflaged during the day so our airplanes couldn’t find it. It was kept on a railroad track outside of Rome. They’d bring it out and put it into position after dark, when our planes were on the ground, and fire round after round at us. Its incoming shell sounded like a boxcar on a freight train overhead in the night sky. It was so loud and scary it was demoralizing every time you heard it, and you never let yourself think too long that some poor GIs not far from you were on the receiving end of it and getting blown all to hell so there’d be no bodies left even to send home to their families. And you could be next.”

  You took your turn on point a hundred yards out on the perimeter as an outpost so the other guys could get some sleep, but there wasn’t much sleeping during those four months. I’ve found better places to be than to be out on point all night. Nighttime is always scarier than daytime. Even without the Anzio Express at night you’re getting conventional shelling all day long. It rattles your nerves, and you harden up inside to keep from rattling all over. It’s got to affect you unless you’re a complete nut. Twice the Germans advanced on our position trying to drive us off the beach, but we held on.”

  The Combat Report states that the 45th “ripped to shreds” the German attempt to “erase the beachhead.” This period of repelling the German assault was followed by “the long months of holding and waiting” at Anzio and constant bombardment and loss of more than 6,000 Allied lives. In May the main force that had been at a standoff broke through the German line at Monte Cassino. By the end of that month, 150,000 weary but happy soldiers moved out of their dugouts in Anzio and linked up with the main force advancing from the south toward Rome. Meanwhile, on June 6th, the Allies landed in Normandy and opened up another front.

  “We marched into Rome without a fight. Rome was what they called an open city, which meant neither side would bomb it, but there was a little bombing. Rome is the first time I ever saw a sidewalk café. We’d sit there and relax, eat our lunch, and drink a little wine. I saw my first blond Italian women in Rome parading by the cafés. I had a few adventures. It wasn’t hard to do. We were issued chocolate bars and tins of cheese and chopped eggs in a can. That’s all it took. The people had nothing so you can’t judge them on morals. Fraternizing with the local women was against regulations, but what were they going to do, send us to a combat unit?

  We fought the Germans in Italy for a while, and then we got put on landing craft for the invasion of southern France called Operation Dragoon on August 14, 1944. We had some resistance as we landed. It was more harassment than real fire power. But fire is fire. Two shots of fire is still bad.

  Running up out of the surf on to the beach at St. Tropez I thought I was shot. I looked down and saw red all over my uniform. I hollered for the medic and Lieutenant Kavota from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, came running over to me and shouted, “You son of a bitch, that’s wine. You ain’t shot. Get up and get going. They shot your canteen.” He was a good Joe.

  We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German. I had a pal from Kentucky that we called Pope. He was a damn good soldier. You can’t say such and such a guy is a coward. You can only absorb so much. In Alsace-Lorraine I saw Pope stick his leg out from behind a tree to get a million-dollar wound so he’d be sent home; only a heavy round came in and took his leg off. He survived and went home with one leg missing.

  Another way I saw guys snap a little bit is when it came to taking prisoners. Here these Germans were shooting at you, trying to kill you and blowing your pals all to hell, and now you’ve got a chance to get them back, and they want to surrender. Some people take that personally. So maybe you didn’t understand what they were saying. Or if you did take them alive and you took them back behind your own line, maybe they tried to escape. I don’t mean a massacre. If you had a load of prisoners you took them back, but with a handful of Germans or less you did what you had to do and what everybody else expected you to do. The lieutenant gave me a lot of prisoners to handle and I did what I had to do.

  In a fire fight in the Alsace, Diggsy got hit in the back halfway up a hill. The medics got him and started bringing him down the hill. I didn’t have much emotion left by this time in the war, but I have to say seeing little Diggsy hit on that hill and I was emotional. I saw his rifle on the ground where he fell. They didn’t want you to lose your rifle over there. I must have snapped or something. So I called for cover from the other guys, and I crawled up and got Diggsy’s rifle for him. When we all crawled back down the hill, Digs said to me, “You got to be nuts. You could have been killed for this friggin’ M-I.” I said, “Ah, the Germans didn’t know they had us outnumbered.” It was the second time I had seen him get shot.

  In Alsace-Lorraine we heard that the Germans had launched a desperate counteroffensive up north through a forest in Belgium to halt our advance after Normandy in what they called the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans were advancing in a bulge and so Allied troops were needed to be sent from our southern f
ront to reinforce their northern front. Our company was left to cover the division’s whole southern front, which meant 120 men were covering a front that might have been covered by a full division of 10,000 or 15,000 men.

  All we did was retreat. We walked the whole night New Year’s Eve of 1945. We watched the French people of the Alsace pulling in the American flags on their houses and start putting the German flags back up. But soon reinforcements came in, and we built up our strength and pushed back into the German part of the Alsace.

  From there we fought our way to the Harz Mountains. The Germans occupied the summit. One night we intercepted a mule train with hot food for the Germans on top. We ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste. We left the German women alone. They were like our WACs. They had prepared the food. We just left them there. But the mule teams were driven by a handful of German soldiers. We had no intention of taking them back down the mountain, and we couldn’t take them with us as we advanced up, so we gave them shovels, and they dug their own shallow graves. You wonder why would anyone bother to dig their own graves, but then I guess you cling to some hope that maybe the people with the guns would change their mind, or maybe your own people would come along while you were digging, or maybe if you cooperated and dug your own grave you’d get a good clean hit without any brutality or suffering. By this time, I thought nothing of doing what I had to do.