The 756Th Tank Battalion in the Battle of Cassino, 1944

By Roger Fazendin

Roger Fazendin spent the last three years of his life collecting memories from his 756th Tank Battalion brothers who survived WWII and the Battle of Cassino. Fazendin's design was to give the comrades who fought in that battle, and their families, a full picture of "what the hell went on".

Battle action is fast and disjointed; each soldier's grasp of the action is limited by the intense focus required by his specific orders, hardware, and survival imperatives. This book is a collection of material from over fifty survivors, with a half dozen primary contributors, into a coherent series of narratives. The results make for riveting reading.

What is unique about this book is the fact that it is written by the men themselves-not by the commanders, not by historians, not by the military. It is a record written by mature men about the thoughts and memories recorded in their young minds while they were surviving the chaos and madness of unrelenting battle in terrible winter weather.

Fazendin's additions of context and historical record make for a wise and compelling assembly of the experiences of one battle. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 8, 2003
• ISBN: 9781475921243

Roger Fazendin

Platoon Leader Roger Fazendin was critically injured by a land mine and sent home in a body-cast just prior to Cassino. He survived to raise five children and build a successful real estate business in the Minneapolis area. Fazendin compiled this book for his fellow soldiers of the 756th, their families, and to honor those men in history.

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The 756th Tank Battalion in The Battle of Cassino, 1944

All Rights Reserved © 1991 by Nancy Fazendin Tsuchiya

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

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taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written

permission of the publisher.

iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

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www.iuniverse.com

Major Authors

David D. Redle,

French G. Lewis

Robert H. Rydman,

Charles M. Wilkinson

Osgood Tower

Assembling Author and Editor

Roger A. Fazendin

Assistant Assembling Author

Nancy Fazendin Tsuchiya

Author’s Contact Information:

P.O. Box 594

Cave Creek, Arizona 85327

[phone]

ISBN: 0-595-28212-1

ISBN: 978-1-4759-2124-3 (ebk)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ROSTER OF THE MEN WHOSE NAMES ARE IN

THIS BOOK

Congressional Record

Background

Introduction

The Battle of Cassino

Crossing the Rapido

THE ACCOUNT OF FRENCH G. LEWIS

THE RIVER CROSSING

Assault on Cassino

The Drive on Rome as

Remembered

By Dave Redle

The Drive on Rome as

Remembered

by French G. Lewis

Through His Wife’s Eyes

Glossary

END NOTES

For all the men who fought with

the 756th Tank Battalion, and their families.

And for all the men of heart who have, duty bound,

fought in wars since the beginning of time.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the many who contributed to this manuscript, particularly

1. Dick Adlard. Eric L. Biegler, Jack Brown,

Joseph Catrone, John J. Deenihan, Dennis Hannan,

Howard Hunsaker, Willis A. Trafton, Robert Kremer,

Roy Collins, David Loeb, Frank Piotrowski, Ralph H. Perdue,

Howard M. Harley, Gene Palumbo, and Lieutenant Grace P. Hayes,

U.S.N., Retired, Historical Section, Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Additional contributors are listed on the following page.

ROSTER OF THE MEN WHOSE NAMES ARE IN

THIS BOOK

*Killed or Missing in Action

>Submitted Material for the Book

Image427.PNG

Congressional Record

Vol. 137 WASHINGTON,

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 1991 No. 82

In Recognition of the 50th Anniversary

of the 756th Tank Battalion,

World War II

The speaker pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from Maryland [Mrs. Morella] is recognized.

Mrs. Morella:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the 756th Tank Battalion, which was activated on June 1, 1941, at Fort Lewis Wa.

The 756th was mobilized with only 5 Regular Army officers and approximately 50 Regular Army enlisted men. The remainder of the Battalion—whose authorized strength was 800—included 35 Reserve officers and 730 enlisted men who were volunteers and draftees from 43 States. The average age of these men, when they were sent overseas, was 21.

The Battalion was engaged in combat almost continuously for 26 of the 32 months that it was overseas from October 1942 until the end of World War II in May 1945. The 756th fought in North Africa, Italy, France, Austria and Germany, amassing six campaign streamers to their colors. It was attached to one of the finest divisions in the U.S. Army—the U.S. Third Division—for most of their operations. The other attachments for combat included the 36th, 34th, 45th, 85th, 88th and the 103rd U.S. Divisions and the French 2nd Armored Division.

The 756th’s mission was to engage and destroy the enemy and liberate occupied territory. The Battalion accounted for thousands of enemy casualties and itself suffered 640 casualties. Of these, 111 were killed, the remaining were wounded, missing in action or became prisoners of war. The authorized officer strength was 40; of these officers, 14 were killed, 17 were wounded, 3 were missing in action, and 2 became prisoners of war. Seventeen noncommissioned officers were promoted to second lieutenants on the battlefield.

The 34th Division and this Battalion hammered on Cassino, the gate to the Lira Valley, for more than 30 days. The 756th was awarded the United States Presidential Citation and the French Croix de Guerre. Many members of the Battalion were decorated, including two who received the Congressional Medal Of Honor.

The Battalion was the first wave to hit the beaches of southern France, using DD tanks that floated in the water. From D-day in southern France on August 15th, 1944, until the end of the war on May 8th, 1945, the Battalion was in constant combat action except for one 10 day period after the devastating Colmar Pocket battle. After the Colmar Pocket, attached to the 3rd Infantry Division, the Battalion participated in the successful siege of the Sigfried Line and the capture of Nuremberg, Munich and Berchtesgaden. It was stationed in Salzberg, Austria, at the end of World War II. The Battalion had traveled approximately 5000 miles—from Casablanca to Salzberg.

In the opinion of knowledgeable military officers, the 756th was one of, if not the, outstanding separate tank battalion in the U.S. Army during World War II.

The 756th Tank Battalion monument will be placed in the Fort Knox museum on September 21 this year. I congratulate the brave men who were part of the 756th and recognize the great sacrifices they and their families have made over the decades.

Background

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The following is entered here as background

for circumstances leading up to Cassino.

The 756th Tank Battalion had been commissioned at Ft. Knox, Kentucky, in early 1941. A cadre (skeleton crew) of the Battalion was ordered to Ft. Lewis, Washington, where training began. We had no tanks because the Army had none for us.

On December 7th that year, the Japanese began the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. New recruits were sent to fill out the Battalion and we were issued our first tanks in February 1942.

That spring we were moved down to Fort Ord, California, where we spent the summer in amphibious landing training with the Third Infantry Division, on the beaches of Monterey Bay. The Third Division was an outfit we were later to support in months of combat. Then, in September of 1942, we were moved, with that division, to the east coast, where we prepared for shipment overseas.

I was a young man then, and the memory I hold from that long train crossing is about the heart of the country. As our troop trains passed through those small towns of Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and eastward, the word got out that we were a fighting unit destined for duty overseas. The townspeople came into the backyards of the towns where the trains passed through at a slower pace. People waved their hands and little flags at us, showing their appreciation and love for the young soldiers going out on those troop trains. A division of 20,000 men, their attached units, the trucks and tanks, take a lot of trains, one after the other, moving across that heartland.

When our train stopped for fuel and water the townspeople, in their gratitude, brought cookies and coffee down to the station and passed them up to the GIs in the traincar windows. They knew we would win, but they knew we were going to war.

There were no bunks on that crowded train. These were old railroad cars, brought out from retirement in the rail yards.

We slept sitting up on those wooden seats for the four or five days it took us to cross the country.

On October 24th a convoy of a hundred ships carrying the invasion forces for Operation Torch, including A and C Companies of the 756th Tank Battalion, sailed for North Africa.

B Company was to follow with the Battalion Headquarters, Supply, Maintenance, and Service Company, in January 1943. The two tank companies made an amphibious landing just north of Casablanca and engaged in brief combat with the French for a couple of days. The following summer we moved across Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

The German Africa Corps, joining with Mussolini’s Italian Army, successfully campaigned in North Africa. They enjoyed great success in their attack on Libya in April 1941, until their supply lines across the Mediterranean were choked off by the English Navy. The intelligence information uncovered by the secret Ultra code-breaking unit in England provided tips on the whereabouts of German supply convoys. Only the top officers of the Allies were privy to the existence of the Ultra code-breaking unit. The British Navy always put on a show of accidental discovery of these German convoys, keeping the existence of the Ultra a secret. That secret was not released until 1972, twenty-seven years after the war.

The Africa Corps drove eastward in North Africa with the intent of taking Egypt and, strategically, the Suez Canal. German control of the Canal would force all Allied shipping to go around the horn of Africa. The British finally stopped Rommel in the battle of El Alamein, near the west border of Egypt, in October of 1942, and then pushed Rommel all the way back to Tunisia.

The decision to put American forces into Africa was a long, hard decision. Churchill and the British staff promoted it as a way of giving Stalin a second front (which Russia had been promised) to take the pressure off the desperate Russian forces.

At Churchill’s urging, and after much discussion, Roosevelt accepted the concept early on, but the American military chiefs wanted an invasion across the channel, directly onto French soil, in 1942. The British recognized this as being too soon with too little, a position which was to be correct in hindsight. Much materiel and equipment was yet to be manufactured, and the war in the Pacific, after the Japanese nearly wiped out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, was urgently in need of everything.

One of the major weaknesses of the later Anzio landing in early 1944, where failure was a micron away, was the shortage of landing craft, manpower and materiel. General George C. Marshall, a man of vision and courage politically, adamantly resisted the decision Roosevelt had made, until finally Roosevelt gave him an unequivocal, direct order to put American troops into Africa. Marshall’s view was that no matter how successful a Mediterranean campaign might be, the results would have no direct effect on the final result the defeat of the Germans in Germany.

It was the British who suggested that Eisenhower be responsible for the planning of Operation Torch, the campaign to fight the German Africa Corps, in Africa. Soon after, on August 15th, the Combined Chiefs of Staff named Eisenhower commander of Torch. Allied forces landed in North Africa, primarily at Oran and Casablanca, and converged with the British to defeat the Africa Corps. General Rommel’s Africa Corps surrendered in Tunisia in the late spring of 1943.

From the beginning, the Allied command was at odds. The British wanted a Mediterranean campaign, an idea abhorrent to the Americans. The British continued to push this idea, and the American top command continued to reject it both sides determinedly standing firm on their position. The result was a lack of a clear plan, strategically, and eventually, tactically. The American command wanted nothing to do with the theater.

North Africa, Sicily and Italy were separate, piecemeal, one-at-a-time programs. The Americans felt operations in the Mediterranean a waste of effort, and advocated a major invasion of northern France as early as 1942, believing the Mediterranean a costly diversion of men and materiel. Even in August of 1943, after the taking of Sicily, Marshall threatened General Sir Alan Brooke with the statement that if the effort in Italy went any farther than Rome, the build-up of American troops in England (for the cross channel invasion) would be but a single corps, and America would concentrate on the Pacific War. (And America certainly had her hands full there.) The above quote is taken from page 16 of John Ellis’s book, Cassino, the Hollow Victory, McGraw Hill, 1984.

There was an arrogance on the part of the top commanders. One reads a clear tendency to be continually tentative on the part of British commanders. This tendency spawned a lack of coordination and communication. Add to that a deep-seated disrespect and disregard for the value of the officers and men of other nations’ armies such as the Canadians, French, New Zealanders, Indians and Polish.

How could this occur when Dwight Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander? Understanding Eisenhower’s back-ground and his life’s journey into that position helps. Eisenhower had been recognized for fine staff work by such men as George Marshall, U.S. Chief of Staff, whom he had worked under in the early days of his career, and General Douglas MacArthur, under whom he had worked to create and train the Philippine Army from 1935 until January 1940.

Eisenhower had demonstrated to them the unusual quality of being able to accept circumstances as they were, under men whose ideas or programs he might disagree with, and to carry out those programs efficiently and well, without rancor. He could work with what he had. Yet he was no Yes-man. He was always ready to put forth his differing opinion.

Because these qualities are rare, he was highly valued by those men from whom he took orders. If one reads the accounts of his trials with both the English generals under his command and the politicians who were his superiors, there is a compelling recognition that he was a correct selection for the command of the Allied forces. Once he was placed in command, he adhered to decisions for the execution of the strategies of the armies, and he became more decisive and forthright as his experience progressed.

Due to these characteristics, Eisenhower was kept in staff work most of his time prior to this war. He had always been denied his real desire to serve in a line unit. Just months before Pearl Harbor he was released from service in the Philippines, where he had been MacArthur’s chief of staff, to return to the States and Fort Lewis, Washington, where he commanded the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division. However, his reputation for superior executive work among the top commanders in the U.S. removed him from his desire to be with the troops.

Just after his promotion to full colonel on June 11, 1941, he was assigned as Chief of Staff, Third Army, at Fort Sam Houston, then shortly promoted to brigadier general as a result of his fine work in the big Army maneuvers of 1941 in Mississippi.

Because of his extensive duty in the far Pacific, General Marshall called Eisenhower to Washington a week after Pearl Harbor, where he was surprised to have Marshall ask for his recommendation on a strategic plan for addressing the new war in the Pacific where the U.S. was in a bad position. We had no war machine for production of arms and no trained army of any size.

People who claim the U.S. programmed the intent for that war were not around to see how poorly prepared we were. If the Japanese had invaded the West Coast, they could have had an easy penetration. About a week after Pearl Harbor, this writer took part in an alert based on a suspected Japanese invasion. At that time, we of the 756th Tank Battalion were still at Fort Lewis. We had no tanks.

A tank battalion with no tanks is a pretty useless unit. They pulled us out of the barracks at Fort Lewis and put us into trucks to move down to Montesano, Washington, where the Third Division had set up its command post. I was in a truck in which we had a total of three weapons a Thompson submachine gun, a revolver and a rifle. The balance of the men had no weapons. They got some old Springfield rifles to us that night which still had the cosmoline grease on them. I remember standing in the rare winter Washington moonlight, in the middle of the street, in front of the town courthouse, showing our tankers how to load those bolt action rifles and put the slings and bayonets on them. The Third Division was stretched out so thin the men were no more than a picket line.

Surprised by General Marshall’s request, Eisenhower asked for a few hours to think it out. Then he wrote out his self-typed thoughts for Marshall. He recommended a fall-back to Australia, to gather military power in sufficient strength, then make the come-back fight to stop and roll back the Japanese. When he handed his report to Marshall, after a short discussion, Marshall leaned forward and declared, Eisenhower, the Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done. (From Eisenhower, by Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon & Schuster, 1983.) Eisenhower was not to fight the war in the Pacific, however. Instead he was to be Supreme Commander of the armies of the European theater.

This is not to say that Eisenhower alone made the above recommendation, but it is a fact that the above communication took place. It was reported also in the book John Eisenhower wrote about his father, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in amazingly parallel context.

The English wanted an immediate organization of an expedition against North Africa. Adamant and determined advice from his top advisors was refused by President Roosevelt, who accepted Churchill’s arguments, ruling against his own staff, both military and civilian.

Our lack of battle experience showed up in the tactical errors made in executing the early combat trials. At the landing of our 756th Tank Battalion, by A and C Companies near Casablanca, as part of Operation Torch, Lieutenant Edwin Blair Olson and Lieutenant John Rut-ledge rode in separate landing craft with the separate tank platoons of the 756th. It was 4:30 a.m. and dark. The assault wave of landing craft with the tanks and infantrymen was formed and headed for a beach landing. After a long time, they stopped dead in the water. Rutledge heard the wave commander and navy coxswain talking in the rear of the boat. Finally the coxswain came to him and asked if he had any men who could read a compass. Although all of our men knew compass work, Rutledge answered No because he did not want to loose any of his tank crew to the Navy.

Finally the Navy turned the whole assault wave around 180 degrees and started back for the shore they were to land on. They passed a destroyer which was firing on the shore. The ship had a hole in its side where the French shore batteries had hit her. In Olson’s case a destroyer emerged out of the darkness. Because it was so dark, they were very close to her. Her crew notified them by voice that they were heading for South America on a back azimuth (reverse heading) out to sea. The landing finally was executed but late and confused.

This sort of confusion, the losses at Kasarine Pass in Africa, and the disastrous error of the American Navy, which shot down twenty-three of the DC-3 transport airplanes when they came in on a different direction from the designated plan, bringing our paratroops of the 82nd Airborne Division in for a drop over the beach on the Sicilian invasion, make one wonder what might have happened if we had shot our bolt on a 1942 invasion of France.

We had not learned who our better generals were nor the necessity for intensive coordination between air, land and naval planning in large scale operations. The early American desire to invade France in 1942 might well have been a disaster without the lessons learned in the Mediterranean. There might have been either success or failure, but, whatever, the cost would have been heavy.

Eisenhower’s ability to work with others was an art of persuasion which bounced off the rigid arrogance of Montgomery and Sir Harold Alexander. This occurred early in the relationship in North Africa when Eisenhower urged those British leaders to cut off the salient which Rommel exposed in his deep penetrating attack to Kasserine Pass. He was ignored. Montgomery was to act the same way, later, up in France, when Eisenhower wanted him to move his army forward from the French coast. Faced with Montgomery’s aversion to cooperate, Eisenhower was hard put to unify a close-working command to go into Italy.

The continual badgering and politicking of the British for the Mediterranean campaign never ceased. The antipathy of the Americans continued. Eisenhower only went into it step by step but even this grudging acceptance had no real support by his military superiors in Washington, excepting, of course, President Roosevelt. Therefore the ability to do it well was never developed.

The American military believed that the British aim was the preservation of their Empire; this did not fit with America’s goals. We were in a full scale war in the Pacific. How much could we take on? Neither the manpower nor the materiel was ever delivered to accomplish the job when Clark needed help in Italy. However, Clark was the one who did the logistical plan for those campaigns. He, above all, should have been well aware of the limitations.

Couple all this with the English commanders’ egotistical independence and the reigning lack of cooperation, and it is hard to admire those leaders who expected men to sacrifice their lives in this scenario.

The first example of this lack of cooperation was on display after the Germans had finally been defeated in the Battle for Sicily in the summer of 1943. The German command was amazed at its own success in retrieving and ferrying over 40,000 of their soldiers across the two and one half miles of the Straits of Messina, which separate Sicily from Italy, right under the noses of the British, in broad daylight, along with many guns and vehicles. The American air arm had given assurance that they could prevent this, but when the time came nothing