Word: rapido
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...entirely different point, Texas' Senator Tom Connally was ready to oppose the nomination. Clark, he said, "showed himself unfit" for any high position by the way he directed the Rapido River battle in Italy during World War II. The 36th Division (Texas National Guard) suffered heavy losses there, and Texans can't forget...
...Clark defends his order of the bloody and abortive attack by the 36th Division across the Rapido below Cassino. It was necessary to draw German defenders away from the projected Anzio landing. The casualties were not 2,900, as the indignant 36th claimed, but 1,681. "If I am to be accused of something, thank God I am accused of attacking instead of retreating...
...fertile valley of the Rapido, below Monte Cassino, the seed buried in the spring had germinated and borne fruit. Columns of two-wheeled donkey carts, piled high with long sheaves of grain, wound slowly along the dusty roads to the marketplaces. High above, on a barren hill, the ruins of one of Christendom's most famous and ancient abbeys gleamed chalk white...
...winter of 1943-44, after a bloody mauling at Salerno, the men of the 36th Division went back into the line. A few weeks later, at the Rapido River, the Fifth Army's Lieut. General Mark Clark committed them to one of the bloodiest engagements of the Italian campaign...
Last week, as the 36th Division, built on a skeleton of Texas National Guardsmen, held a reunion in Brownwood, Tex., the men who still remembered the frightful days at the Rapido did what they always promised they would do. They demanded that Congress investigate the "colossal blunder [and] take the necessary steps to correct a military system that will permit an inefficient and inexperienced officer, such as General Mark W. Clark ... to destroy the young manhood of this country." Said one company commander: "I had 184 men . . . 48 hours later I had 17. If that's not mass murder...