The Ulysses of the Parachute Infantry

Ross Carter Fights on Hill 687

The serrated slopes of Hill 1205 was one of those places that lingered on the lips of the old men. When in earshot of one of these otherworldly figures, a manicured, smooth-faced replacement would sometimes hear the sterile army reference—Hill 1205—be verbalized. Like its earthly mass, Hill 1205 loomed large in their memories. Ross Carter slides a reminisce into an exchange with one of these manicured men in Chapter 38.

The most intense portions of the battle were fought on the sloping northern face of Hill 1205. That face, gray and pockmarked, broadly sloped into a trough. On the other side of the trough lay another hill, barren, shallow and pimple-like. It was just as sterilely known as Hill 687, the scene of great drama for the platoon chronicled within the pages of Those Devils in Baggy Pants.

Hill 687’s only value was that it could be used as a jumping point to still another hill; one that could cut a German retreat. It was just a pawn in a large struggle being fought over San Pietro. This small village, which brought two full armies to clash, was in itself a small cog in a large goal, that of sacking Rome through the Liri Valley. Battles within battles.

Enter Ross Carter and the 3rd Platoon…

Adding Context to Chapter 18

The 2nd Battalion of the 504th broke its back trying to usurp 687. It was at its limit of physical endurance when Sergeant Ross Carter and his battalion received them under darkness on December 17. In Those Devils in Baggy Pants, Carter writes that Sergeant George McAllister (“Winters”) took a patrol down to Hill 687 and skirmished with some Germans. The intelligence officers, and Sergeant McAllister, went to sleep that night thinking Hill 687 was defended. It wasn’t. McAllister likely ran into the German rear guard or a patrol.

Two German stragglers, Gefeiter Joseph Rduchand and Grenadier Joseph Sezesny, were the two lone defenders of the hill on the morning of December 18. Stragglers. It baffled the intelligence officers when no contact was reported, and Sergeant Carter subsequently took his squad and skulked down and took Hill 687 on the night of the 18th. They encountered only two Germans in a shepherd’s hut—likely Rduchand and Sezesny.

That is not to say the trek was uneventful. On the way, Sergeant Carter’s squad encountered another American patrol. Trigger happy, they engaged Carter and his men, letting loose a fusillade that struck and killed Corporal Michael Ogonowski (“Olson”). This patrol was from the attached parachute engineer company.¹

Frank Dietrich (“Berkley”) described Hill 687 as “a spur running out toward the town of Cassino and was barren of any kind of cover or protection and was covered with the enemy.”² For days they hunkered amongst the spare gray rock and wallowed in the flea- and dung-infested shepherd’s hut they pulled the two German stragglers from before Ross Carter went on patrol.

We slipped down a draw and slithered up some terraces which extended down under the north side of Hill 687. We lay down along the terraced terrain behind the Krauthead defenses. I was posted as a rear guard to look out for encircling maneuvers. The fog lifted, leaving us exposed in the middle of the enemy lines… A machine gun started to pour a leaden hail over the terrace. We got the hell out and back to the huts late enough to miss an artillery barrage directed at them.

— Ross Carter, Those Devils in Baggy Pants (Chapter 18)

Reading Carter’s bashful account within Those Devils in Baggy Pants, one would never think he did anything remarkable. In fact, he treats himself as a casual observer in the rifle exchange that occurred, leaving untold any depressions of the trigger his finger may have enacted—he was a simple “lookout.” In reality, the rearguard man earned the Silver Star. Frank Dietrich describes what the author omitted.

Two days before Christmas a strong patrol had penetrated deep into the enemy positions but was ambushed there. Ross was part of this patrol. During the fighting several men became casualties and it looked as if the patrol would be annihilated. But Ross moved over on the flank to the part of the hill that was most exposed to fire and began to return the fire of the enemy. Due to his action most of the patrol was able to withdraw. Ross’s action saved the lives of the members of the patrol as if he had rescued each man from drowning or some similar fate.³

—Frank Dietrich

There were probably dozens of heroics just like this omitted by the author. There would have to be for Frank Dietrich to so vehemently profess that Carter was the bravest man he knew. Dietrich was no slouch himself, and Ross Carter was his measuring stick.

The setting of Chapter 18. The video opens with a drone being launched, more or less, from Hill 687 and panning up to the imposing forward slope of Hill 1205, where the 2nd Bn was pinned by artillery.

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Next Saturday on Ridgway’s Notebook: “The Dueling Airborne Advisors: Sicily & the Operation Art.”

This one is a result of the poll a few weeks ago, so prestigious reader—you asked for it!

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📚READ OF THE WEEK📚

Featured this Saturday are two (shorter) reads in the vain of this humble publication’s foundation in division operations. How these things relate to the current day, I will leave to the reader’s imagination.

Chasing Shiny Objects

So, what went wrong?

1. The identity of the two Germans and the American patrol which committed the fratricide were obtained by Ridgway’s Notebook’s author through reviewing unpublished regimental interrogation and S-2 reports, which are held in private hands. A full layout of the action is in A Fine Sense of Honor.

2. As Keegan argues in Face of Battle, a voluminous number of personal accounts of battles can in invalidated by walking the ground. In this vain, Dietrich’s description is not technically correct. Hill 687 is behind the town of San Pietro, which is itself over seven miles from Cassino. However, the whole winter’s action has been amalgamated into the “battle for Cassino,” and 504th veterans routinely evoked the city’s name in the post-war, despite the regiment never getting close to the city; it was simply how they related these battles within the historiography of the Italian campaign. As for the hill being “covered” with Germans, historically not accurate at the time Dietrich was describing, but undoubtedly to the men of 3rd Platoon, it felt a true statement. There were plenty of them above the hill.

3. Frank Dietrich to Marie Niehaus. Letter, April 25, 1947. Ross Carter Papers, Carnegie-Vincent Library, Lincoln Memorial University.