The Thirty-Sixth Division boarded ships at Oran on September 5 to sail for Bizerte, Tunisia, where the rest of a convoy was forming for the invasion. En route to Salerno, the soldiers in the Fifth Army learned that the Italian government had surrendered to the Allies.
"They capitulated the night before we landed. We thought the war was over," Goad said.
The division began landing early September 9 on the beaches near the ancient Greek ruin of the Temple of Ceres at Paestum. The invaders had given the beaches the names of colors. From north to south, the beaches were designated Red, Green, Yellow and Blue. Three waves of landing craft silently slipped toward the beaches by the last light of a full moon. Waskow's battalion landed at Red Beach, although his company was in a fourth wave and did not join the others in the battalion in the initial landings.
The American invasion forces had silenced their naval guns in hopes of surprising the German defenders. But the Germans were not asleep. As the landings began at Paestum, German machine guns and 88-millimeter artillery opened up on the beach. The first three waves of the invasion caught the worst of it before the Allied warships returned fire in support of the invasion at 9:30. Splawn, whose anti-tank company landed in one of the first waves, said the eight-inch guns of a destroyer pulverized several German tanks that were threatening his company on the beach. By the time Company B landed, the strip of sand was quieter but still subjected to strafing from German aircraft, small arms fire and an occasional shell. Tidwell did not stop to admire the Greek ruins‹"it was so rough there, all the ruins you saw were right in front of you."
The First Battalion secured its section of beach and moved inland to reorganize.
Chiunzi Pass lies where the Sorrentine Peninsula meets the Italian mainland and serves as a gateway from one side of the peninsul's rocky spine to the other. The Rangers had kicked the German defenders off the pass in order to use the high ground for artillery observation. Nazi General Wilhelm Schmalz, commanding the black-uniformed Hermann Goering Panzier Parachute Division, tried to counterattack but could make no headway. He wrote in his diary that the steep ravines in the mountains caused his troops to be dispersed, and that Allied naval shelling had killed and wounded many of his men. The best he could do was to send small assault parties against the Americans at the summit.
A patrol from Waskow's company, moving into the saddle between two peaks on the Sorrentine Peniinsula, encountered a machine gun nest in a stone house. The patrol overran the house and killed one German defender while suffering no casualties. Company B completed its ascent of the pass uneventfully.
On September 18, Company B was relieved by two companies from the 325th Glider Infantry of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division and given a new assignment. As the men descended, they passed fields of ripe tomatoes and peppers; red and green vegetables had been gathered in baskets and spilled on the ground as if the pickers had dropped them hurriedly. They moved through a land of orange and walnut groves into a valley near the town of Nocera.
Waskow's orders were to probe the valley for German resistance. Lieutenant Colonel Walker wanted to know how many of the enemy there were, where they were, and what kind of weapons they had.
As Company B moved over the lip of the valley and approached Nocera, Waskow dispatched one of his lieutenants and a rifle platoon to investigate an isolated house on the edge of town. Germans had been seen in the vicinity two days before. The lieutenant's platoon was 100 yards from the house when machine guns and machine pistols opened fire ahead of the advance. The platoon fired back. The exchange killed three of Waskow's men and three German soldiers, but it resulted in the capture of two machine gun nests. Waskow then ordered his men to pull back, and by firing a green flare signaled the machine guns of Company D to cover their withdrawal. Waskow walked into regimental headquarters at 7 a.m. the next day and delivered a sketch of the German positions he had seen around Nocera. He followed up the raid toward Nocera by sending patrols back into the valley later that day. They found that the Germans had pulled back too.
The next day, on September 20, Company B returned to Chiunzi Pass. The 325th Infantry that had relieved Company B had called Lieutenant Colonel Walker for help. Its right flank, resting on Mount San Angelo, was threatened by a German advance. San Angelo, the tallest mountain in the region, was barren and rocky, offering no cover except crevices in the rock face. Walker selected Waskow's company, which was familiar with the terrain, to climb San Angelo, repel the German attack and hold the heights until it could be relieved. Waskow got the order at 3 p.m. and by 4:30 was at the Summit.
He gave credit to his men in the report he later made to regimental headquarters:
I think the men deserve a lot of credit for this move. We had never scaled that mountain before in less than three hours, but not a man fell out on this climb. I was more proud of my company that day than at any other time. Lt. Griffin of Co. D and his platoon deserve a lot of credit also, for he was right there with his entire platoon. We were ordered to take the ground that had been overrun, but on my reconnaissance I found that Jerry had withdrawn except for an occasional sniper, so we occupied this position. We got settled just after dark and were heavily shelled all during the night and the next day, but we created enough fuss of our own to make him think we had a larger force there‹at least we were never attacked any more.
Company B had been under fire on and off for eleven days. Waskow had proved cool in the face of German artillery and machine gun fire and had demonstrated efficiency in carrying out orders. He had slept amid the rocks in the cold mountain air, sought shelter from a ferocious lightning storm and eaten no hot food‹not counting his toast and coffee‹since landing at Salerno. Through it all, he had won the admiration of his men. He had qualities that inspired them in difficult times.
A survey of American infantrymen in 1944 asked them to define what qualities they appreciated in their commanding officers‹what leadership practices were most evident when an officer had done a good job of helping his men feel confident in a tough or scary situation. The most common response was leadership by example and personal courage, mentioned by 31 percent of the soldiers. About 25 percent of the soldiers were encouraged by pep talks, jokes and information; 23 percent by the officer's demonstrating concern for their welfare and safety; and 5 percent by the officer's friendliness and lack of a formal adherence to military rules.
Waskow was all of those things except a joker and pep-talker. He would have been out of character to assume those roles, and his men most likely would not have responded as well to them. They were from southwestern farms and prairies, and they were rough-and-steady.
They looked and talked like Willie and Joe, two cartoon characters drawn by Bill Mauldin, a soldier who served in the Forty-Fifth Division, the sister division of the Thirty-Sixth. There are echoes of Riley Tidwell in the two quiet, sensible dogfaces who got their first taste of combat in 1943. Willie and Joe were in a rifle company, like Company B. They were enlisted men, like Tidwell, but they just as easily would have resembled Waskow if they had earned a commission and found someplace where they could set up a mirror and shave. As Mauldin described them,
"Willie and Joe were really drawn on guys I knew in this infantry company. It was a rifle company from McAlester, Oklahoma. There were . . . and a lot of laconic good ol' boys. These two guys were based on these Oklahomans I knew. People like that really make ideal infantry soldiers. Laconic, they don't take anything too seriously. They're not happy doing what they're doing, but they're not totally fish out of water, either. They know how to walk in the mud and how to shoot. It's a southwestern sort of trait, really. Don't take any crap off anybody."
Combat photographer Robert Capa and writer Richard Tregaskis, author of Guadalcanal Diary, visited Waskow's battalion on September 19. That was the day that Company B's patrols returned to the Nocera valley, so it is understandable that Tidwell does not recall Capa shooting pictures for Life magazine. The photographs appeared October 18, 1943, and included Capa's view of a group of Texans advancing through a grove of lemon trees toward a farmhouse held by German infantry. The final image in the series has the men shooting bolts off the doors of the house and preparing to spray the rooms with bullets.
"One Texas private, examining the damage inside, was heard . . . to mutter: 'It's a shame to hafta do things like this to people's homes.'"
Capa stayed with the battalion for a few clays. He took pictures of a medical aid station at Chiunzi Pass. Casualties included some caused by the Germans' 88-millimeter shells that pounded the forward slopes every night from September 21 to 26. During that time, the Fifth Army worked out its plans, in coordination with the British forces, for the push toward Naples. Part of the plan called for the tanks of the British Twenty-Third Armored Brigade, along with the American men of the 143rd Infantry Regiment, to descend from Chiunzi pass toward Nocera and arrive at the same time as the British Seventh Armored Division. The Seventh then would circle the ancient volcanic crater of Vesuvius, the Eighty-Second Airborne Division would move up another inland road, and the Twenty-Third Armored Brigade with its American infantry support would travel north along the coastal highway. All three prongs of the attack would converge on Naples.
text by Michael S. Sweeney, "Appointment at Hill 1205," 36th Infantry Division Association