Contrary to this trend, divisions under Field Marshall Albert Kesselring were holding their own in the Elsa Valley against the U.S. Fifth Army. These units, commanded by General Mark Clark, were to push east through Volterra and San Gimignano to Florence. They would join Eighth Army forces advancing west, and attack the Gothic Line, the Wermacht’s final defensive position, fifteen miles north. But the well-fueled and fortified German divisions, with an endless supply of ammunition, had stopped Clark’s Fifth Army cold.
Adolph Hitler’s spirits soared at the news. “This is the turning point!” the Führer exulted. “As I told you it would be!”
And he had. Just a year ago, the Führer overruled his general staff, who thought San Gimignano too far west, and insisted the supply depot be located there. The ninth-century city, with its thick walls and lookout towers was not only impenetrable but also strategically located above the roads from the coast to Florence.
Allied Command wanted the depot destroyed. But they had to find it first, and had been working closely with Italian partisans who had infiltrated the valley.
Deschin, the sharp-minded Russian the Americans had code-named Gillette Blue, was in charge of partisan liaison and intelligence. Numerous reconnaissance missions into heavily fortified enemy areas had failed to locate the depot, and he had shifted his focus to San Gimignano. Few German troops were billeted there. Perhaps, Deschin reasoned, it was a ploy to divert attention from the depot. Now, he led the group up San Matteo in search of it.
A stone wall sealed off the top of the street. Much of the soil behind it had been excavated, creating a bunker that concealed two German soldiers and a machine gun. A few flat stones had been removed from the wall to provide a slit for the muzzle. Rain pinged on the corrugated steel roof as the Germans watched Deschin’s group enter a bombed-out granary. The German private trained his weapon on the entrance, waiting for the four men to come out.
“Nein,” the sergeant warned, seeing his eagerness.
“But, they will be like bottles on a wall,” the private protested.
“Nein,” the sergeant said more sternly. “You know our orders. Only if they cross toward the church.”
Unlike other buildings in the city, neither the church, the magnificently steepled Cappella Di Santa Fina, nor the German storage depot in the catacombs beneath had been touched by allied bombs. Crates of weapons and ammunition, and drums of fuel, were safely concealed in the network of rock tunnels. But months of rain had saturated the porous stone to the limit, and water began seeping through cracks and fissures. The gradual trickles had become unending cascades; and German troops were working frantically in ankle-deep water, covering the precious supplies with tarpaulins.
Deschin’s group had finished searching the granary and, having come up empty, was back out in the rain, advancing up San Matteo.
“What do you think?” he asked, eyeing the church.
Giancarlo Borsa looked up at the thousand-year-old structure, rain pelting his sharply cut features. He had organized the resistance in the area and brought Deschin into the group.
“I doubt it, Aleksei,” he replied. “Kesselring has respected our artistic treasures. And we can’t afford another Monte Cassino,” he went on, referring to the sixth-century Benedictine monastery near Naples that the Allies had reduced to rubble only to discover the Germans had never used it for military purposes.
“Maybe that’s why Kesselring thinks he could get away with it here,” Deschin replied incisively.
“Good point,” Borsa said. “But I hate to think of what will happen if you’re right.”
Theodor Churcher threw back the hood of his pancho angrily. “Horseshit!” he bellowed in a thick drawl. “Not a building on earth worth saving if it’s endangering men’s lives, let alone American lives!”
The lanky Texan had just turned twenty, a brash, ambitious, unpolished hayseed who thought the sun rose and set on Texas and the United States — in that order. He challenged the others with a look, and set out purposefully toward the church.
“On my signal,” the German sergeant ordered in a tense whisper. The private nodded, hugged the stock of his weapon, and wrapped his finger around the trigger.
That morning, during a break in the weather, an Air Force C-47, Dakota, headed down a makeshift runway north of Rome with a Waco glider in tow, and began climbing. Three hundred feet back in the Waco, pilot Ted Churcher and spotter Mike Rosenthal were fighting to keep the glider from catching the tug’s turbulence, and pinwheeling at the end of the nylon towline.
About eight months ago, Churcher had completed his junior year at Rice and had come home to Lubbock for the summer. He was flying crop dusters, as he did every vacation, when he heard the Army Air Force opened its combat glider school on the outskirts of town. Churcher graduated number one in his class, and flew over a hundred reconnaissance missions behind enemy lines in North Africa and Sicily.
When Captain Jake Boulton, OSS liaison with Fifth Army Intelligence, called for glider-recon to locate the German storage depot, Churcher volunteered.
Now, 4,500 feet above the Tuscan countryside, he checked his landmarks and nodded to Rosenthal.
“Time to part company,” he drawled. He clicked on an intercom that ran on a wire wrapped around the towline. “Thanks for the ride, Jake.”
“Anytime,” Boulton — who was at the controls of the Dakota—replied. “Matter of fact, you find that Kraut depot, and we’ll tow you all the way back home to Lummox if you like.”
“That’s Lubbock, Jake,” Churcher retorted. “And you can bet the farm we’ll find it. We’ll just keep riding the elevator till we do,” he added, referring to the air currents that take a glider back up to altitude.
He pulled the towline release. The metal fitting unlatched with a loud clank. The Waco cut free from the C-47 and soared, gaining altitude, the whoosh of air rushing over its surfaces the only sound now. Churcher put it on a glide path to the target ten miles away.
Made of canvas over a tubular steel frame, the gray-green Waco had an 85-foot wingspan that gave it a rate of descent of less than 2 feet per second — slower than a soap bubble in still air. Riding thermals, the bird could stay up for hours, needing barely 150 feet to land when it came down.
Churcher came in over San Gimignano against the camouflage of clouds, and made a silent pass over the multi-towered city. Rosenthal panned his binoculars in search of vehicle tracks or troop activity that would reveal the location of the enemy storage depot. During the next few hours, Churcher made a half dozen passes, lowering the altitude each time. Finally, Rosenthal turned from his binoculars in disgust.
“We’re wasting our time, Ted.”
“Yeah, the Krauts must move the stuff out at night. The rain washed away the tracks before we got here. Maybe, if I came in lower, you could—”
“Lower? Any lower we’ll leave the family jewels hanging on one of those pines.”
“Impossible. We’re coming in below them. Matter of fact, Rosenthal, I’m treating you to a bona fide South Texas ass scraper.”
Churcher put the Waco into a steep dive and swooped down over the north end of San Gimignano.
Flocks of ravens roosted in many of the city’s towers. The German lookout in the northernmost one saw what at first appeared to be a hovering bird. When he saw it had a shiny Plexiglas nose, he opened fire.