Photo By Lt.j.g. Charles E. Spirtos | On December 15, 2020 in San Antonio, TX, the Texas Military Department honored the...... read more read more
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SAN ANTONIO, Texas –One of the oldest surviving World War II Veterans serving in the Battle of Salerno, Texas Army National Guard 1st Sgt. (ret.) Alfred Dietrick turned 99 years old Tuesday, December 15, 2020. Dietrick has been a fixture of the 36th Infantry Division and the Texas National Guard for over seven decades. The Texas Military Department presented him with a series of honors on his birthday to recognize the dedication and selfless service displayed by Dietrich.
Through LTC Rita M. Holton, the State Public Affairs Officer, Maj. Gen. Tracy R. Norris, the Adjutant General of Texas, and Maj. Gen. Patrick Hamilton, Commanding General of the 36th Infantry Division presented Dietrick with their challenge coins. Additionally, Dietrick received a historical compilation video honoring his service in Italy during the Battle of Salerno, and select historical items from the Texas Military Forces Museum’s 36th Infantry Division collection.
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Maj. Erik M. Atkisson, 36th Infantry Division, has detailed Dietrick’s service:
When 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 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.
“Luckily we didn’t hit any obstacles on our beach,” says Dietrick. “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 said, “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.
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. 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.
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.”
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.
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.
Decades following his service, Dietrick contributed to the Texas Military Department in a new way, through his active involvement in the 36th Infantry Division Association, which helps to promote and maintain the history of the storied division.
In fact, the 36th Infantry Division gallery at the Texas Military Forces Museum on Camp Mabry in 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 Dietrick’s handiwork everywhere.
“Without him, our history would be extremely sketchy for the 36th Division,” says Cathleen Gruetzner, the museum’s senior volunteer coordinator. “Mr. Dietrick is a very special and giving man… He is a leader.
He has always given fully of himself.”
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.
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.
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For now, Dietrick continues to serve as an example of Texas’ legacy and fighting spirit. The sacrifices made by Dietrick and his compatriots during World War II has allowed the Texas Guard to blossom into the premier state fighting force that it is today.
Dietrick and his family were honored by the expression of gratitude from the leadership of the Texas Military Department, and expressed their thanks.
| Date Taken: | 12.15.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 12.15.2020 16:31 |
| Story ID: | 385061 |
| Location: | SAN ANTONIO, TX, US |
| Hometown: | SAN ANTONIO, TX, US |
| Web Views: | 405 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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