Showing posts with label The Boldest Plan is the Best. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Boldest Plan is the Best. Show all posts

The Raid on El Djem, A Nonfiction Excerpt

Since we recently released our first historical fiction work, The Bridge at El Djem, I thought I would share an edited section from the nonfiction book it was based on. The Boldest Plan is the Best: The Combat History of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion is an amazing story for a nonfiction book, (forgive me if that sounds less than humble, really I’m talking strictly about the true history of the unit). But I’m a sucker for a pulpy adventure story, so when it came to writing a fiction work, I took a number of liberties with history. And I don’t really think that’s a bad thing. Growing up I learned a lot of history reading mass-market paperbacks and watching old movies on Saturdays. That being said, I wanted to provide the opportunity for fiction fans to know the true story that inspired The Bridge at El Djem.

So here it is, footnotes removed, an excerpt from The Boldest Plan is the Best:

Raid on El Djem

By mid-December [1942], the Germans had two armies in Tunisia. General Juergen von Arnim’s Fifth Panzer Army was in the north around the ports of Tunis and Bizerte. General von Arnim had counterattacked the British First Army and held them at the mountain line approximately fifty miles west of Tunis. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had retreated from Libya into southern Tunisia under pressure from the British Eighth Army. Rommel, under orders from the Axis high command not to retreat further, held the Mareth Line, a fortified border between Tunisia and Libya.

Hitler was attempting to resupply his armies in North Africa through the ports in the north. Those supplies for the Afrika Korps that were not lost to Allied attacks at sea, were sent south by rail. Rommel’s army was consuming 400 tons of fuel a day. Stopping the flow of supplies would cripple Rommel’s ability to maneuver in the south. General Anderson’s First Army headquarters believed that the German supply line would be cut by destroying a key railroad bridge near the village of El Djem. The steel girder bridge was on the coastal railroad line between the cities of Sousse and Sfax. The Air Corps had hit it multiple times with bombers and again with fighters shooting rockets. The bridge would not come down.

The original concept for parachute troops was more like what we think of today as Rangers or Special Forces. The 2/509’s initial training emphasized hand-to-hand fighting and demolitions. Some unknown staff officer must have remembered this or perhaps they had read of the exploits of the paratroopers in the press. Regardless, the order came down from Allied Forces Headquarters for a platoon from the 2/509th to jump into the area of El Djem, some sixty air miles behind enemy lines, and blow up the bridge from the ground.

The original order called for two officers and twenty-one enlisted men, making up an assault-security team and a demolition team, to jump in at 2100 hours on December 20. After blowing the bridge, the raiders were to move to a spot for a pickup by aircraft. Whoever wrote the original order must have thought that the paratroopers were supermen who could do anything. It specified that each man would “act as [an] Intelligence agency,” capturing papers and documents, capturing officers, and cutting telephone lines. Secondary tasks were included such as creating diversions in the enemy’s rear area and acting “generally as guerrillas.” First Lieutenant John Martin, the demolitions platoon leader, was chosen to lead the raid, with Second Lieutenant Dan DeLeo leading the assault team.

Ignoring the fanciful “intelligence agency” directives, the mission was actually doable. That is, if the platoon was dropped where they needed to be, they did not encounter any sizeable enemy force and were able to make it to their pickup point before daybreak. Then the changes came. First, the aircraft pickup was canceled. Reasons were not provided, but it was assumed that the Air Corps thought the risk of losing their aircraft was too great. Nevertheless, the risk of losing paratroopers was not. The raiding force would have to walk out and exfiltrate to the nearest Allied unit.

Lieutenant Colonel Doyle Yardley, as battalion commander, could make the final call on who would go on this mission. Rather than arguing with higher headquarters and getting the mission canceled (as the men believed Raff would have done), Yardley decided that he did not want to lose his best men on an operation that was starting to look like a suicide mission. He based his roster decision on men he thought would “most easily be replaced.” Yardley removed Lieutenant Martin and Corporal Lloyd Bjelland from the demolition team and radioman Ellis Bishop. Second Lieutenant DeLeo would now command the operation.

Dan DeLeo was new to the Geronimos, but he was not an inexperienced soldier. DeLeo had joined the Illinois National Guard in 1937 and rose to the rank of sergeant. He obtained his commission in 1942 just before entering active duty. After jump school, he came to England with the replacements for the 2/509th PIR. DeLeo had been placed in charge of the rear detachment of replacements in England. He and the other replacements had come to North Africa by ship a couple of weeks after Operation Torch. They were reunited with the rest of the battalion at Maison Carrée.

The changes to the mission were made before Yardley briefed DeLeo. The Lieutenant did not know that he or any of the men on his roster were considered to be “easily replaced.” On the bright side, foreign languages would not be a problem on this mission. DeLeo spoke Italian. One of his men, Sergeant John Betters, could speak Arabic. Another, Private Roland Rondeau, also spoke fluent French. Added to the raiding force were two French paratroopers, First Sergeant Jean Guilhenjouan and Corporal Paul Vullierme, to act as guides. Both had served in the area for several years and both spoke Arabic. The mission was postponed until Christmas Eve and then rescheduled again. DeLeo’s group, now numbered at 32 men, left Maison Blanche the morning of December 26 in three C-47s. After a brief stopover at Tebessa, they continued on to the airstrip at Thelepte where they spent the remainder of the day. The jump was scheduled for 2200 hours that night.

Colonel Raff says that he did not “know that much” about the mission until the three C-47s landed at Thelepte. He tried to stall the mission for a day in order to arrange an aircraft pickup. Unfortunately higher headquarters overruled him and the mission still had to go that night. Knowing how much trouble transport pilots had in finding drop zones in the dark, Raff asked Lieutenant Colonel Phil Cochran to go along as a copilot. Cochran was the commander of the P-40 fighter squadron and had personally attacked the bridge in daylight. Raff figured that if any pilot could find the bridge at night, Cochran could. Raff also advised some of the men going on the mission to kill any Arabs that they encountered, as they could not be trusted and would probably alert the enemy to their presence. Oddly, and for reasons unknown, Raff did not have this discussion with Lieutenant DeLeo.

The flight to the drop zone took about an hour. As the aircraft crossed the “lines” near Godsin there was some flak, but none of the aircraft were hit. Even with Cochran on the flight, they were unsure of the exact location of the bridge. They circled a small town, decided it was El Djem, and then flew to where they thought the drop zone was. No injuries were sustained on the jump, but one man was missing and the troopers were unable to locate one of their equipment bundles. This was a common occurrence on a night jump, and they decided that there was probably enough TNT in the one bundle to drop at least the center span of the bridge.

Before the raiding party set out for the bridge, a group of five Arabs appeared at the drop zone. Some of the men insisted that they follow Raff’s advice and kill them, but the lieutenant would not allow it. DeLeo offered them some of their parachutes, prized by the Arabs, for their silence. The platoon headed east toward the rail line under the heavy burden of their equipment plus an extra 500 pounds of explosives.

An hour and a half later, they reached the railroad tracks. Here they turned south, assuming they had been dropped at the right location. In the dark of night, they could only see a few yards, so it was difficult to fix their location in the desert. They had to trust their plan. The paratroopers encountered another Arab, this one with a donkey cart. The Americans pressed the Arab into service to help carry the burden of the large amount of TNT. But an extra 500 pounds was too much for the donkey and after a time DeLeo let that Arab go free as well. We do not know why the lieutenant did not confirm his position with Arabs, unless perhaps at this point he was confident that they had been dropped at the right location and all was going to plan. Regardless, after hours of marching in the dark, DeLeo realized that they should have come to the bridge by now.

The men took cover in an olive grove to rest. In the morning twilight, the lieutenant was able to take a compass reading on some nearby hills and, with the help of his French guides, fix his location. He now knew for sure that the pilots had dropped them south of the bridge instead of north of it. They had spent the night walking away from the bridge. He told the men that they were nearly twenty-two miles south of their objective.

All of the paratroopers knew that there was no way they could march twenty-two miles back to their objective in broad daylight. The best that DeLeo could do was to cause some damage and then get his men out. Their chosen target was a small building next to the tracks that they spotted another hundred yards down the tracks, near a cut through a small hill. It had electrical wires leading to it and they thought that the building was for controlling switches on the line. The demolition men set their charges to the building and roughly 100 yards of track, all set to blow at the same time.

By now the enemy was closing in on them. DeLeo had posted security men up and down the tracks. Within minutes of each other, paratroopers came running up to report enemy soldiers in at least platoon strength were approaching on foot from both the north and the south. While they were setting their charges, a switching car came down the tracks, and German soldiers onboard traded shots with the paratroopers. The Germans decided to wait for their reinforcements to arrive and withdrew back up the line. DeLeo shouted for everyone to move west and take cover. The demo men lit a three-minute fuse. They could see more enemy soldiers arriving in trucks farther down the tracks.

The ground shook under their feet as 500 pounds of explosives went off all at once. Dirt, ties, rails, and other debris flew hundreds of feet in the air. While the explosion must have shocked the approaching enemy into momentary inactivity, the paratroopers immediately started double-timing to the west. The Americans quickly split up into groups of two to six each and headed for home as best they could with enemy soldiers closing in on them from three directions.

The two French paratroopers, Sergeant John Betters, Private Frank Romero, and Private Roland Rondeau stayed with Lieutenant DeLeo. The six men moved out together almost at a dead run. They came to a road and followed it. Soon a cargo truck appeared with a lone driver. The six paratroopers stepped out into the road with their weapons leveled and commandeered the truck. DeLeo sat in front with the Italian driver. The lieutenant wrapped a sheet over his head to look like an Arab while the other men climbed in the back and remained hidden under a tarpaulin. This guise allowed them to travel for some miles that included a harrowing passage right through a column of German soldiers marching on the road. Sensing the need to get off the main route, DeLeo had the driver turn onto a secondary road heading west which soon degenerated into nothing but a camel track. Eventually, the truck landed in a ditch, broken beyond repair.

Before proceeding on foot, Sgt Betters advocated killing the Italian. As with the Arabs they had encountered, DeLeo wouldn’t hear of it. The Lieutenant gave the Italian 300 francs to compensate him for his broken truck and hoped that he would think favorably of the Americans, or at least not report their presence for a while. The group proceeded on foot, traveling by night and hiding during the day. The language skills of the group came in handy in gaining information and bartering for food during their odyssey. According to Rondeau, “After a couple of days, we gave it up [hiding during the day]. I guess we got a little cocky, and we hiked all the way in day and night until we got to our lines.”

DeLeo’s group eventually stumbled into a French outpost, only after walking into a minefield while approaching it. The French defenders were kind enough to show them the way out of the minefield, after which they called Raff’s headquarters to let them know that the paratroopers were back. A truck was sent to pick up the wayward Americans. They had been gone nearly two weeks and DeLeo estimated that they had traveled about 120 miles to get back to Allied lines.

Besides DeLeo’s group, only Private Charles Doyle and Private Mike Underhill made it home to the 2/509th while they were still in North Africa. Those two privates, moving individually, endured a similar ordeal to those who were with DeLeo. That meant that only eight soldiers who went on the raid at El Djem made it back to Allied lines. Sixteen others survived the war after serving time as prisoners of the Axis. One, Staff Sergeant Manuel Serrano, would rejoin the unit in Italy after escaping from a POW camp there. The remaining eight raiders are presumed to have been killed by the enemy. Just prior to leaving North Africa, Lieutenant Dan DeLeo had the opportunity to visit the bridge near El Djem. It was still standing. The lieutenant knew when he saw the sixteen stone pillars that held up the double-tracked steel girder bridge, that his raiding party could have never carried enough explosives to blow it. He was confident that he and his men had done as much damage twenty miles south as they would have been able to do had they found the bridge that fateful night. The raid at El Djem was the third and last combat jump for the 2nd Battalion of the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment in North Africa.

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A Postscript to the Chapter on Anzio

You can stay in the house that was the 509th CP during the Battle of Anzio.
(click on any image for a larger version.)

509th CP during Anzio
For the most part, I’m not a big fan of social media. But sometimes it’s a bit of a miracle. Still, years after “The Boldest Plan is the Best: The Combat History of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion During WWII” was released, I am contacted by veterans, families, and others. It's a thrill and an honor. I must admit that it is especially exciting to be contacted by someone living in a country other than the United States where the Geronimos fought.

Map courtesy of
Mike Reuter
The other day I received a message from Diego Cancelli, an architect who lives in Aprilia, Italy, just a few miles outside of Anzio. Diego owns and operates Il casale di Giulia, a working farm and B & B. The stone farmhouse just happens to have been the 509th Battalion command post during the battle. He has pictures to prove it. Moreover, I have the image of a map that was provided by 509th veteran Mike Reuter that shows unit positions in the Anzio beachhead as of January 30, 1944. Sure enough, you can match up the unit symbol on the map with Google Maps. The 509th headquarters symbol is located on the Via Carano between Crocetta and Carano. That’s exactly where you’ll find Il casale di Giulia on Google Maps. You can even get a feel for the terrain by checking out Google Street View.

Il casale di Giulia before
rennovation.
Diego has located the hill that B company occupied forward of the MLR before they were overrun. The help that Diego required was being able to prove that the house his wife’s family owns and restored was one of the houses that were the object of “Raid Nibble.” Readers of “The Boldest Plan” know the details of the raid. The objective houses were simply referred to as House #5 and House #6 in the battalion’s war diary. No grid coordinates are offered so one must assume there is a map overlay. The problem we have, often repeated, is the lack of records in the archives for this unit. The Geronimos were attached to the 3rd Infantry Division, and during the battle; they had at different times the 7th Infantry Regiment and the 30th Infantry Regiment to their right. Perhaps there is a map overlay in the archives of these units?

After rennovation
There just were not that many houses in the area during the battle, so the odds are excellent that the house in question (that is now occupied by the family’s grandmother) is House #6 referred to in the 509th war diary narrative concerning Raid Nibble. Especially considering the war relics that have been found on both properties. Diego has been practicing some applied history and has amassed quite a collection as the included pictures show. He has found dog tags and returned them to the families of American soldiers. He has found several helmets both American and German. One of the German helmets was found along with the skeleton of the soldier who wore it; found during the restoration of House #6.
Aerial view showing B/509th
position on forward hill.

Diego shared quite a few pictures with me, and I’ve included some of them for you to see as well. The next time I’m in the archives at NARA or AHEC I plan to look in the records of the 3rd ID for that missing overlay. In the meantime, I’m planning a trip after covid to visit Anzio, Il casale di Giulia, and other sites where the Geronimos fought. Ever thought about it?

 

"House #6" today

 

Collection of military vehicles

 

Shells from WWII found
on the properties.

 

509th uniform in the 
reception area of the B&B

 

Dog tags found and returned
to their owners and families.

 

Cabinet full of battlefield
relics found on the property.

 

War relics found on the properties.

 

War relics found on the properties.

 

War relics found on the properties.

 

War relics found on the properties.

 

War relics found on the properties.

 

German helmets found around "House #6"

The Hotel Le Negresco

A contemporary picture of the Hotel Le Negresco.
The January/February edition of The History Channel Magazine has a nice article about the Negresco Hotel in Nice, France. Writer Kelly E. Carter did a wonderful job of laying out the historical significance of the stylish hotel along the French Riviera that is once again becoming a popular tourist destination for those not overly concerned with a budget. The article highlights the history of the building, notes some of the artwork that can be found there. The author also points out many of the celebrities that are known to have stayed there over the years.

Unfortunately, and much to my disappointment, Carter's only mention of the Hotel Le Negresco's witness to WWII history was one simple sentence:
"During World War II, the Negresco was seized by American soldiers and used as a rest home."
I thought that this period in the hotel's history deserved a bit more explanation, so I will quickly review that here.

This photo was simply labeled "Nice, 1944." But I believe that is the
Negresco Hotel down the boardwalk. Courtesy Edward R. Reuter.
Operation Dragoon, the U.S. Seventh Army's liberation of southern France, began on August 15th with beach landings centered around St. Tropez and airborne landings inland in the area of Le Muy. While French forces turned south to take the ports of Marseilles and Toulon, Seventh Army moved inland. Working up the coast of southern France, covering the right flank of Seventh Army, was the 1st Airborne Task Force (FABTF) that included the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion. Cannes and Nice were liberated by the 509th Combat Team (the Gingerbread Men with the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion attached) at the end of August 1944. These cities along the Côte d'Azur jubilantly welcomed the Allied forces with parades and parties. The Negresco Hotel (mentioned on page 238 of "The Boldest Plan is the Best," if you'll forgive a shameless plug) was indeed occupied and operated as an officer's club and R & R center for the remainder of the war. While the 509th PIB and other units in Seventh Army operated in southern France, soldiers were able to visit the Negresco and others like it for a well earned respite from combat and living in the field.

The boardwalk in Nice, 1944 from the other direction.
Image courtesy of Edward R. Reuter.
Although I'm sure that the men would have rather seen places like Naples, Rome, Cannes, and Nice in happier times, these areas brought unforgettable memories for many of the veterans I interviewed. Most of these "country boys" had never seen anything so spectacular and most never went back. I might also mention that one of the celebrity guests Kelly Carter forgot to put on her list was Audie Murphy, but his stay in 1945 was as a new second lieutenant commissioned on the battlefield, not as a famous actor or author. Of course in my opinion, not just the Geronimos but all of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who stayed in the Hotel Le Negresco and places like it are celebrities.

The photograph at the top of the post is of the Negresco today. I've included a couple of pictures of the boardwalk in Nice from the collection provided for "The Boldest Plan is the Best: The Combat History of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion during WWII" from Mr. Edward R. Reuter; these photos were taken in 1944. You can find out more about the Negresco Hotel in Nice at the Hotel's website.


"The Boldest Plan is the Best" now available on Kindle

Happy New Year everyone!  2012?  How did that happen?!  Well, Sheila and I are happy to start off the New Year with some good news.  We're excited to announce that The Boldest Plan is the Best: The Combat History of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion during WWII is now available in a Kindle edition.
I've been hesitant to try out any form of e-reader.  I'm old school and I like my books, to hold in my hands while I read them and to display them on the shelf when you're done.  You can tell a lot about a person by the books that they read, and when I go to someone's house the first thing I do is check out what books they have on the shelf.
All that being said, as I see it there are several advantages to owning a Kindle.  First of all, most books are cheaper in the Kindle version.  Some are only a couple of dollars cheaper, some are much more.  The Kindle version of The Boldest Plan is the Best is half the cover price of a print copy.  Amazon carries a lot of free content, mostly classic literature that is in the public domain and start-up authors who give away their work to gather a following.  Amazon also makes Kindle editions available to local libraries to loan electronically.  You can fit literally thousands of books on your Kindle device and carry it with you anywhere.  It is light and very portable to the point where I must admit that I prefer to have one with me when I'm out of the house rather than carrying a book along.
So like anything else in this world, there are positives and negatives.  But the bottom line is that if you are a book lover who has been thrust into the twenty-first century by Santa this Christmas, enjoy!