Sgt. Alfred Dietrick: San Antonio veteran remembers Italy, 65 years later

by Major Eric N. Atkisson

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Sept. 1, 2008) – When Sgt. Alfred Dietrick saw Italy for the first time, it was little more than a dark strip of land in the night. He was on the deck of a 30-man landing craft cutting fast across the Sergeant Alfred Dietrick Gulf of Salerno with the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson at his back. The surface of the water was calm and peaceful, but the reception waiting for Dietrick and the other soldiers of the 36th Infantry Division was not. Lurking on the dark plain beyond the beach were elements of four German Panzer divisions, heavily armed with machine guns, mortars, tanks and antitank guns, waiting for the Allies to come.

It was Sept. 9, 1943.

“Luckily we didn’t hit any obstacles on our beach,” says Dietrick now, 65 years after the Salerno landing. “But at the break of dawn, we began to hear the German Panzer divisions in the distance.”

His unit was at the far right end of the Allied line, just east of Paestum. As they moved forward from the beach, there was an explosion. Dietrick instinctively cringed and looked to his left, where a fellow soldier, Pvt. Frank Miller, was slumped over.

“Frank, are you all right?” Dietrick shouted, and when he got no response, he picked up his rifle and ran to Miller, lifted him up by the shoulders, and saw that his eyes were glazed and blood was running down his temple.

“As I looked up,” he says, “a German jumped out of the brush and faced me.” He dropped Miller and started firing at the German, who fell back into the brush.

“I don’t know if I killed him or wounded him, but it appeared that he was out of commission,” says Dietrick. “I threw a grenade, and then I threw another grenade in there. I don’t know why, but I just said, ‘There’s gotta be some more Germans. This guy’s not alone.’ I would have thrown a hundred grenades in there if I’d of had them with me. I was just that sure that there were more Germans in the brush.”

Moments later, he heard his name called: “Sergeant Dietrick! Rocket launcher! Tanks!”

He ran in the direction of the voice and found the platoon sergeant, Sgt. James Whitaker, firing his Thompson sub-machine gun at one of three Mark IV tanks about a hundred feet away. Dietrick took position behind a small rock wall and yelled for his ammo loader.

“Load!” he shouted.

“I felt the tug on the tube, I knew he was loading it, and then he tapped me on the shoulder, indicating it was ready to fire. He got out of the way and I fired at the tank and I hit him between the rear two bogies.”
The rocket disabled the tank’s engine, but Dietrick’s ammo loader had disappeared, soon to be found dead, and the platoon sergeant was out of ammunition. He turned and fled, and Dietrick followed. The tank’s machine gunner opened fire on them and Whitaker fell, his hip bone shattered—he would later be medically evacuated—but Dietrick kept running, bullets stitching the ground around him. He took cover with the rest of Baker Company in an irrigation canal and saw a German infantryman pointing down at what Dietrick presumed was another wounded G.I. He raised his rifle, blew the water from his rear aperture sight, and pulled the trigger. The German went down.

A team of Navy personnel was hiding in the canal too, coordinating naval gunfire from the ships. They saw the tank Dietrick had disabled and called its position into their radio. Somewhere out at sea a ship’s huge guns responded, and giant fountains of earth erupted around the tank. It wasn’t a direct hit, but it was close enough. Three Germans poured out with their hands up, and Dietrick and his platoon took them prisoner. He turned them over to the first officer to appear, Lt. Koy Bass, who had been his platoon leader back in Texas. Bass was impressed, and he promised to recommend Dietrick for a silver star.

All of this happened in just the first two hours of a battle that would last a week. But it proved something valuable to Dietrick. Until that day he had believed the Germans were a relentless horde of goose-stepping fanatics who would sooner fight to the death for the Fatherland than surrender to a 5’9” sergeant from San Antonio. But now he knew better.

“They’re just like anybody else,” he thought.

Pope John Paul II shakes Sergeant Dietrick's hand during a visit to the Vatican Dietrick has returned to Italy five times since the war, revisiting the scenes of the division’s triumphs and tragedies there in 1943 and 1944. During a visit in the mid-1980s, he was one of several thousand WWII veterans granted an audience with Pope John Paul II, who specifically thanked the 36th Division for helping liberate Rome and—to the surprise of veterans and priests alike—left the stage to shake hands with the old soldiers, including Dietrick. In 1994, during the 50th anniversary of the Liri Valley campaign, he received the same honor in Nettuno from the Clintons and Senator Bob Dole.

This April, in what was very likely the last visit of his life, Dietrick, now 86, traveled in the company of three young soldiers currently serving in the 36th Division, public affairs officers carrying cameras and microphones to record Dietrick’s memories of the war on the very ground where he fought—a rare opportunity that will soon be gone forever, as the “Greatest Generation” slowly fades away.

Like the division itself, Dietrick was born and raised in Texas. Not counting his five and a half years of active service from 1940 to 1945, Dietrick has lived in San Antonio his entire life. His father, a veteran of the First World War, served the last 20 of his 30 years in the Army at Fort Sam Houston with the 2nd Infantry Division. He retired in 1939, the same year that Dietrick graduated from high school and enlisted in the National Guard.
His outfit was Company B, or “Baker Company,” 1st Battalion, of the 36th Division’s storied 141st Infantry Regiment, which traces its roots as far back as the Texas Revolution. Dietrick’s two years of high school ROTC had prepared him well and he made sergeant quickly, impressing others with his marksmanship, soldierly bearing and mastery of drill and ceremony.

But those easy days of peacetime Guard service were, like the still waters of Salerno in the early hours of Sept. 9, 1943, the calm before the storm. In November 1940, the 36th Division was activated for federal service and began two and a half years of training for war, from Texas to Louisiana to Florida and finally to Massachusetts. While they were still at Camp Bowie, near Brownwood, Texas, Lt. Bass promoted Dietrick to platoon sergeant, but he was later demoted to assistant platoon sergeant after lingering too long with his new wife Berdie and returning from leave 24 hours late.

The division deployed to North Africa in April 1943 to continue training for the invasion of Europe, and to guard German and Italian prisoners as the war there came to a victorious, if hard-fought end for the Allies. In September they loaded aboard ships once more, this time as part of an Allied invasion fleet bound for Italy. On Sept. 7, Hitler issued an ultimatum that Italy resist the invasion or the Germans would, in effect, take matters into their own hands. On Sept. 8, as the fleet drew closer, Italy announced its surrender to the Allies. The soldiers on the ships were elated, but as long as there were still German armies on Italian soil, there was never any question of calling off the invasion. The attack commenced, and when the Battle of Salerno was over the Allies were victorious and Dietrick was a platoon sergeant again.

After 46 days of rest, he and his men were carried by trucks to a drop-off point near the town of Presenzano and then marched five miles more through rain and artillery fire to the front—the infamous “Winter Line” of German fortifications in the Liri Valley—where they replaced the 3rd Infantry Division. Baker Company dug foxholes along a narrow saddle between Monte Rotondo and Hill 197, a round, bare spur that looked like the top of a giant skull in the moonlight. Their positions were about 200 yards from Monte Lungo, and the Germans there wasted no time in welcoming their new neighbors with artillery, machine guns, sniper rifles and lethal infiltrations.

“One morning,” Dietrick recalls, “a German soldier stood across the highway with arms up and surrendered. He left his ranks during the night without being noticed by his comrades.” Dietrick ordered a Pvt. Charles Cathcart to take the prisoner to the company command post for questioning, only to learn five hours later that the private had been killed in an artillery barrage.

On another occasion, he and a Sgt. Hubert Nickelson were leaning against a bluff eating C-ration crackers when a bullet suddenly hit the bluff between them, sending them scurrying into their foxholes for cover.
“Since then,” he muses, “I have often wondered who the sniper had in his sights: me or Sergeant Nickelson.”
In 2000, Dietrick revisited the area and was telling the story of a German patrol his men had ambushed when one of the young men in his group called out, “Hey Al, look here.” He pointed to a hole in the ground—the same hole, amazingly enough, that Dietrick’s men dug in December 1943 to facilitate the ambush.
“It was an emotional moment for me,” says Dietrick. “Of course we took pictures of it.”

But now, eight years after that visit, the foxhole is finally a casualty of time. The maintenance road that crosses the saddle has a fresh layer of gravel, and the old holes around it are filled with rocks. Hill 197 no longer resembles the top of a skull but is covered with a tall pine forest, as is most of Monte Lungo, where a somber war cemetery contains the remains of 974 Italian soldiers. Under the control of the 36th Division, the 1st Italian Motorized Group tried unsuccessfully to take Lungo from the Germans on Dec. 8, 1943 and suffered heavy casualties. It was the first major action of the war in which the Italians fought with the Allies rather than against them.

Men from the area embrace the returning veteran During his visit this April, two workers burning brush on Rotondo saw Dietrick and his companions walking slowly along the maintenance road and came over to question them. Though they didn’t speak more than a few words of English and the Americans didn’t speak any Italian, the workers quickly realized that Dietrick was a veteran who had fought on the very ground where they were standing. Warm smiles, grateful embraces and an effusion of gratzi’s followed.

Their town, San Pietro Infine, sits at the southern foot of Monte Sammucro, a giant of a mountain that looms above the countryside for miles in every direction, its craggy summit—“like the backbone of a dinosaur,” Dietrick describes it—often shrouded in clouds. The original town was occupied by the Germans and destroyed by Allied artillery, events hauntingly captured in John Huston’s 1945 documentary, “The Battle of San Pietro.” Despite the appalling devastation, residents of the town continue to honor Allied veterans of the war as their saviors. The vine-covered ruins of old San Pietro Infine include a monument to the 36th Division that looks upon the valley between Montes Sammucro, Rotondo and Lungo. It’s a beautiful vista now, but in December 1943 it was a deadly no-man’s land the G.I.s called “Death Valley.”

San Pietro Infine

After being relieved by Italian soldiers on Dec. 8, 1943, Baker Company bivouacked near the town of Ceppagna on the east side of Sammucro. At noon on Dec. 22, they were ordered to take rations, water and ammunition up to the 504th Parachute Infantry fighting on Sammucro. Dietrick grabbed a 10-gallon can of water and led his 36 men up the steep, rocky slope. During a break on the mountain that night, he recalls, “I noticed three dead parachutists lying side by side.” Their mouths were wedged open with dog tags so they could be easily identified later.

“It was a gruesome sight in the moonlight,” he would write years later.

Baker Company made it to the summit after midnight, resting for just a half hour with the grateful 504th before making the long trek down the mountain, only to learn that they would have to go back up to relieve the 504th completely. For the next few days and nights, they sought out the remaining Germans on Sammucro in a series of fierce firefights above San Vittore.

In one surreal nighttime encounter, a runner from the company command post came looking for 3rd platoon, calling Dietrick’s name. Shortly after the runner left, a thickly accented voice called out from somewhere in the darkness, “Sergeant Dietrick! Sergeant Dietrick! Kommen Sie hier!”

It was probably the last joke the Germans enjoyed on Sammucro. On the night of Dec. 23, Baker Company received an order to attack at 0400 with fixed bayonets and not to fire a shot. The order made no sense to Dietrick, so he ignored it. He gathered his squad leaders in the dark and told them to fix bayonets, load their rifles and fire at their own discretion. About an hour before the planned attack, a runner brought them a lieutenant to lead the assault.

“It was a relief for me,” admits Dietrick, whose previous platoon leader, Lt. Martin Tully, had been reassigned before the fighting on Sammucro. “A great responsibility had been taken off my shoulders.”

In the attack that followed, Dietrick fired a grenade launcher that took out a German machine gunner, but it gave away their position and the Germans responded with a withering barrage of grenades, machine-gun fire and flares. The lieutenant ordered them to withdraw. The following night, Christmas Eve, they were reinforced by an outfit of 125 men wearing U.S. paratrooper uniforms and carrying a mixture of American and British firearms; the elite U.S.-Canadian 1st Special Service Force, whose daring capture of Monte la Difensa earlier that month would be dramatized in the 1968 movie, “The Devil’s Brigade.” At dawn on Christmas Day the 1st SFF and the 60 men of Baker Company launched a joint attack that quickly wiped out the last German stronghold on Sammucro.

“I never saw the officer who took charge of the platoon that morning,” says Dietrick. “He was like a passing shadow in the night. I never knew what he looked like or what happened to him.”

But for Baker Company, the victory was tinged with tragedy. During the night their company command post was hit by one round of artillery that killed six men, including the company commander. A company runner was missing in action for 24 hours before someone finally found his upper torso about 100’ downhill—a grotesque reminder, as if any of them needed it, of the grim capriciousness of war.

A few weeks later, Baker Company moved to nearby Monte Trocchio to prepare for the division’s impending attack against Sant’Angelo Theodiche, a shell-ruined village on heavily fortified high ground across the Rapido River. It was an attack the division commander, Maj. Gen. Fred Walker, had grave misgivings about. The men would have to carry rubber rafts across an open field, cross the river, and then attack uphill against firmly entrenched Germans, all under the constant observation of enemy artillery spotters on Monte Cassino. The Fifth Army commander, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark, believed the attack would draw German attention away from the amphibious landing up the coast at Anzio, if not actually drive the Germans from Sant’Angelo.

The town of Sant'Angelo

By an odd twist of fate—or, more precisely, of the knee—Dietrick was not present for the attack. On Jan. 19, 1944, he dove into a ditch during a German artillery barrage and badly tore a ligament. The Army sent him to a hospital in Naples, where he was convalescing when the casualties from the Rapido attacks of Jan. 20-23 began to come in, including some from his own platoon.

“When I saw them and they saw me they said, ‘Sarge, you’re lucky you didn’t get into that.’ They said it was terrible. That’s all they could say, that it was just terrible.”

More than 2,100 men of the 36th Division were killed, wounded or missing in action after the Rapido. Of the 1,200 who managed to cross the river, 430 were killed and 770 captured by the Germans. Of all the men in Dietrick’s 3rd Platoon, only about a half dozen escaped injury or death. It was the worst defeat in the division’s history. Congressional hearings after the war exonerated Clark of any direct blame for the disaster at the Rapido, but he was persona non grata in Texas for the rest of his life.

As for Dietrick, his knee rendered him unfit for a return to infantry duty—it would continue to bother him until 1970, when an orthopedic surgeon finally fixed it—so he was transferred to an ordnance company where he remained for the rest of the war, following the front line as the 36th reinforced the beachhead at Anzio, played a pivotal role in the capture of Rome, and landed in the south of France to begin the long fight north toward Germany. For Dietrick, and indeed for the 36th Division, the worst of the fighting was behind them now, in Italy.

For the better part of four decades, Dietrick didn’t talk much about the war.

He had other things to think about now: a wife, a son, a career, and eventually three grandchildren. For 37 years he worked as a civil servant at Kelly Air Force Base, supervising the architectural and engineering drafting section, and then another 10 years supervising the drafting section at the University of Texas Health Science Center. People would ask him about his experience in the war, but they never seemed to really understand or appreciate it. How do you explain the grueling combat of Italy to someone who wasn’t there, who has never heard a shot fired in anger or seen a dead person? How can mere words convey the sheer chaos and terror of battle? Ask Dietrick about his fondest memories of the war, and you begin to understand the emotional gulf that separates combat veterans from the rest of society.

Killing Germans: that’s what he remembers most fondly, says this otherwise kindhearted man. And the more you read or hear about the Allied campaign in Italy—center stage to the war’s longest and fiercest infantry fighting—it’s not too hard to understand why.

“Most of the time we won or broke even,” says Dietrick. “But I always felt that we got our butt kicked. Even if we won, we got our butt kicked. Because we always took casualties. We were an attacking force, and you always take casualties. So when I heard of any enemy unit that got hit hard [by his unit], I loved it… That’s the thing that I felt best about of anything that I ever did,” he admits, “other than the tank itself down at Salerno.

“I did something,” he says. “I scored.”

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, in the early years of his retirement, that Dietrick started to open up about his experience in the war, and it began with a chance encounter in the newspaper.

“I was looking at the obituary one day,” he says, “and I saw the name of a man who was in my company, and I said… I ought to go to his funeral. And I did. And there were three or four others there from my company. That was the first time I’d seen a group from B Company since the war.”

They invited him to join the San Antonio chapter of the 36th Infantry Division Association, but Dietrick was reluctant.

“I’d always been against joining associations, because every time I’d hear about them, they were always arguing about something… But anyway, I thought about it seriously for a few days and then I decided to go… and guess who was there?”

Koy Bass, the lieutenant who first promoted Dietrick to platoon sergeant and later accepted his German prisoners at Salerno. He had continued to serve in the Army after the war and retired as a colonel.
“I never did get that silver star he promised me,” Dietrick says with a laugh.

Sadly, their reunion was short lived. A few years later, Dietrick heard that Bass was dying, so he went to see him at the nursing home.

“He was laying in bed, fully dressed,” he recalls. “Dark dress trousers, black shoes, white shirt and tie. Just laying there. He could have been asleep or just dozing off.”

“Lieutenant Bass?” said Dietrick quietly, not wanting to wake him.

“Sergeant Dietrick?” said Bass.

A nurse came by to check on him, and Dietrick proudly told her they had served in the war together.
“This man was a great warrior,” said Dietrick. “A great warrior.”

Bass held Dietrick’s hand.

“You too, Al,” he said.

They were the last words Dietrick remembers hearing from Bass, who died soon afterward. At the funeral, Dietrick recited a poem he had first read in an issue of “Stars & Stripes” during the campaign in Italy, then carried in his pocket for the rest of the war. It was called “A Toast,” and though he had long since lost the original clipping, he could still recite it from memory:

“I toast to him who has felt the battle’s sting.
I toast to him who has felt in anguished pain
the sting of a bullet marked with his name.
I toast to him who would not boast
that he knew no fear when death was near,
but shook like a leaf in a frenzied wind.
I toast to him who still had courage to go on and win.”

Italian War Cemetery

Dietrick became an active and enthusiastic member of the association, contributing his recollections of the war to the association’s quarterly newsletter “The Fighting 36th” and serving as president from 1993 to 1994. In addition to representing the association at Nettuno in 1994, he designed the division’s monument in Brownwood and later lobbied the San Antonio city council to set aside space for a monument to the 141st Infantry Regiment that now stands downtown, not far from the Alamo.

The 36th Division gallery in the Texas Military Forces Museum at Camp Mabry, Austin, exists in no small part because of Dietrick. He raised more than $10,000 for its construction, drafted the architectural and electrical plans himself, helped build the cabinet that holds the 142nd Infantry Silver Display, prepared hundreds of mounted photographs for the walls, and helped coordinate much of the contracted work that went into completing the gallery. To walk through the gallery is to see Al Dietrick’s handiwork everywhere.

Sergeant Dietrick at age 22 somewhere in Italy “Without him, our history would be extremely sketchy for the 36th Division,” says Cathleen Gruetzner, the museum’s senior volunteer coordinator since 1986. “Mr. Dietrick is a very special and giving man… He is a leader. He has always given fully of himself.”

Dietrick served as Grand Marshal of Austin’s Veterans Day parade in 2006, riding at the front in a convertible with Berdie, his wife of 66 years. Looking at photographs of Dietrick during the war, one could scarcely tell it was the same man. Last year’s PBS documentary “The War,” directed by Ken Burns, includes one of those photos. It shows a young Sgt. Dietrick standing at the top of a stairway somewhere in Italy with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a cocky smirk on his face—the great warrior himself, 22 years old and invincible, ready to take on the world.

Of the men who served in the 36th Infantry Division during the Second World War, no one knows for certain how many are still alive. Every year their number dwindles further, and it has become increasingly difficult for the division association to fill key posts and to effectively manage its affairs. Soon, Dietrick predicts, they’ll have to shut down completely and let the association lie dormant until another generation of veterans brings it back to life.

Momument to commemorate the Rapido River Crossing But even when that sad day comes and the last of the division’s WWII veterans passes away, their sacrifices will not be forgotten. Across the Italian countryside, in small, sleepy towns with names like Paestum, Altavilla, San Pietro and Sant’Angelo, marble obelisks and monuments bearing the division T-patch will still stand, majestically silent above the beautiful fields and verdant valleys where battles once raged, their solemnly engraved inscriptions reminding residents and tourists alike of the brave men from the “Texas Division” who stormed ashore in September 1943 to liberate Italy from Nazi occupation.

These men did something. They scored.

About the author: Major Eric N. Atkisson is a public affairs officer in the 36th Infantry Division, Texas Army National Guard, and a civilian public affairs specialist for U.S. Army South at Fort Sam Houston.

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Salerno +65: On 18 October 2008 at Camp Swift, near Bastrop, the BG John C.L. Scribner Texas Military Forces Museum and the Texas Adjutant Generals Department will present a dramatic recreation of the desperate battle to hold the first Allied beachhead in Europe. This is in conjunction with Oktoberfest activities hosted by the Texas Military Forces and the cities of Bastrop, Elgin and Smithville.

36th Infantry Division WWII Pictorial History: Chronicles the Division's history from Salerno to war's end in Austria. The print version of this pictorial history was compiled by the men of the Division immediately following their return from the war.

Sgt. Alfred Dietrick: San Antonio veteran remembers Italy, 65 years later

by Major Eric N. Atkisson

Copyright © 2008 Eric N. Atkisson. All rights reserved. Article and photographs used by permission.

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