Unfit for War – America’s Most Lethal Soldier

Vito Bertoldo wasn’t meant for war. Army recruiters had told him so seven times;  he was half-blind, unfit for combat. When a   recruiter finally stamped his papers out  of pity, it was only as kitchen staff. Bertoldo didn’t care what  patch was on his uniform;   he was in, and he would find a way into the fight.

In January 1945, in the French village  of Hatten, he got his chance. The command   post where he was peeling potatoes received  alarming news; German armor was closing in,   and the situation outside the village was  collapsing. The officers ordered a hasty retreat. Bertoldo begged to stay behind alone,   to cover their escape.

Better to return home  in a box than return having never fought. He dragged a .30-caliber machine gun and  placed it at the entrance of the building. Moments later, two German armored  battalions rolled into the village.   They expected a handful of fleeing Americans. Instead, they found a half-blind cook  who’d waited the whole war for this moment.

Pearl Harbor was still burning when Vito Rocco  Bertoldo marched into the Decatur, Illinois,   recruiting station. December  8, 1941. America was at war,   and every able-bodied man in  town was lining up to fight. The coal dust was still embedded under  his fingernails from the morning shift   when the Army doctor held up the eye chart.

Bertoldo squinted through his thick glasses,   leaning forward, straining to make out even  the largest letters. The doctor didn’t need to   see more, saying: (QUOTE) “Son, I’m sorry.  You’re 4-F. Unfit for military service.” The words hit harder than any punch Bertoldo had  taken in the mines.

Around him, his friends and   neighbors were getting approved, shaking hands,  ready to ship out. The son of Italian immigrants,   born December 1, 1916, Bertoldo had  grown up believing in the American dream. Now, when America needed him most, he was being  told he wasn’t good enough to fight for it. Bertoldo told the recruiter  there had to be a mistake,   his accent carrying traces of his parents’  Calabrian dialect: (QUOTE) “I can work.

I’ve   been hauling coal since I was sixteen. I drive  trucks. Test my strength, test anything else. “ But the answer was final: (QUOTE) “It’s your  eyes, son. You’d be a liability in combat. Next.” Liability. The word burned as Bertoldo walked  past the line of accepted recruits. Outside,   Decatur’s streets bustled  with 1940s wartime energy.

Factory whistles announced extra  shifts for military production.   Women headed to work jobs that  yesterday had belonged to men,   now bound for boot camp. Everyone was  doing their part. Everyone except him. For weeks, Bertoldo haunted that recruiting  office. He tried the Navy. Rejected. The Marines.   Rejected. Even the Coast Guard turned him away.

Each time, the same verdict: 4-F. The bulky lenses   that helped him navigate the dark mine shafts  were now a prison, keeping him from the fight. His fellow miners started calling  him “Lucky Rocky”, lucky to have a   free pass while they shipped overseas. They  didn’t get it.

Bertoldo didn’t want safety;   he craved purpose. His parents had fled  poverty in Italy for opportunity in   America. This was his chance to repay that  debt, and his own body was betraying him. By spring 1942, Bertoldo had memorized the eye  chart. Not well enough to pass legitimately,   but well enough to get creative.

When the Decatur  recruiting station started recognizing him,   he took a bus to Springfield, then to  Champaign, and then to Chicago. Each time,   he got a little further in the process  before the eye tests exposed him. But Army quotas were rising. Casualties from the  Pacific were mounting. On his eighth attempt,   Bertoldo found a recruiting sergeant  who was behind on his monthly numbers.

Reviewing Bertoldo’s file, the man finally said:  (QUOTE) “I can get you in, but only for limited   service. Stateside only. Military police  or kitchen duty. That’s the best I can do.” Bertoldo didn’t hesitate to sign in. He’d spent six months fighting for the privilege  of peeling potatoes for soldiers who could   actually fight.

It wasn’t heroic or glamorous,  but Private Vito Bertoldo was finally in uniform. The man who’d been rejected seven  times was now Private Bertoldo,   serial number 36793293,  cook and military policeman. At Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, they put  him through basic training alongside men   who’d be storming beaches and jumping from  planes.

Bertoldo struggled with marksmanship;   his thick glasses fogged in the humidity and  shifted when he ran, but he refused to quit. When others complained about kitchen duty,  Bertoldo volunteered for extra shifts. When   they needed someone to stand guard in the  freezing rain, Bertoldo took double watches. He would later admit: (QUOTE): “I wanted to do more than just stand guard or do the cooking,” But for now, this was his  war: chopping onions until   his eyes streamed tears and standing gate duty.

All Vito Bertoldo knew, as 1942 turned into 1943,   was that he’d rather perish trying  to serve than live knowing he hadn’t. By late 1943, the war had become a numbers  game, and America was losing. Fatality rates   in Italy were exceeding replacement rates.  The impending invasion of France would require   every available trooper.

Standards that seemed  iron-clad in 1942 were bending under necessity. The Army granted Bertoldo special permission to  retrain as an infantryman and deploy to Europe,   not as a combat soldier, exactly,  but as something in between. He was   assigned to Company A, 1st Battalion, 242nd  Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division,   the famous “Rainbow” Division from World War  1, now reconstituted with fresh recruits.

Officially, he was still on kitchen duty,   but with a critical addition, he  could: (QUOTE) “fight as needed.” The 42nd Infantry Division was in an odd  position in late 1944. Once a legendary force,   it had been deactivated after World War 1, then  hastily reassembled with whoever was available.   It had green troops who’d never seen combat,  support personnel trained as emergency infantry,   and recently appointed officers trying to  make a fighting unit from scattered parts.

Captain William Corson commanded Company  A, and amid all of the problems he had   with his green improvised squads, one  frustrated him the most: the messman,   Vito Bertoldo. Bertoldo wasn’t  drinking, fighting, or going AWOL. It was an ironic position for someone who’d fought  so hard just to wear the uniform.

After two years   of rejections and appeals, after finally making  it into an infantry division headed for combat,   Bertoldo was making trouble in the one place  he was supposed to belong: the kitchen. He was constantly at odds with  the Company’s mess sergeant,   and he was known as a loudmouth. This soon  made him a pain in the neck to his superiors.

By late 1944, Private First Class  Bertoldo arrived in France with   the 42nd Division. The timing couldn’t have  been worse, or from Bertoldo’s perspective,   better. In December 1944, soon  after the division landed,   the Germans launched Operation Nordwind,  also called “the other Battle of the Bulge.” Hitler’s goal was to punch through the  thinly stretched American lines in Alsace,   destroy the U.S.

7th Army, and perhaps  capture Strasbourg. The unprepared 42nd   Infantry Division was rushed to the front  to help stop this last-ditch German attack. Bertoldo’s regiment, the 242nd Troops,   went into action around the villages of  Hatten and Rittershoffen in early January   1945. These villages sat directly  in the path of the German advance.

On January 5, 1945, powerful  German forces struck. The 25th   Panzer Grenadier Division and 21st Panzer  Division, veterans of the Eastern Front,   were equipped with Tiger tanks and  88-millimeter guns. The American defenders,   many fighting for the first time, were  immediately pushed to their limits. The 42nd Division soldiers, lacking  armor or heavy artillery support,   had to improvise.

During one chaotic  week, companies and battalions were   shifted around. Corson commented that it was:  (QUOTE) “like firefighters plugging gaps.” By January 8, 1945, elements of Bertoldo’s  battalion were defending Hatten under severe   pressure. Company A had taken up positions  in concrete pillboxes outside the town. But German forces were infiltrating the perimeter,   preparing for a full-fledged assault that  would turn Hatten into a slaughterhouse.

The German offensive was three days old, and  Hatten was becoming a nightmare. Shell-shocked   soldiers stumbled back from the line with  stories of Tiger tanks crushing foxholes,   of entire squads vanishing in artillery  barrages. Company A held positions in   concrete pillboxes outside the town,  waiting for the storm to hit them.

Then orders came down from  battalion headquarters. They   needed three soldiers from each company  to guard the Battalion Command Post in   Hatten itself. Not a punishment,  exactly, but not a reward either. Corson saw this as an opportunity  to stop his kitchen troubles;   he would later recall (QUOTE): “I  told the first sergeant that the cook,   Vito Bertoldo, was number one on that  detail. Good riddance, I thought.

” Standing guard duty while your unit prepared  for combat was nobody’s idea of glory. But   Bertoldo had been the: (QUOTE) “only  real discipline issue” in the unit.   Corson believed a night guarding the Command  Post would scare Bertoldo into behaving. Company A had taken up defensive positions in  the old Maginot Line fortifications, concrete  pillboxes that had failed to stop the Germans  in 1940 and probably wouldn’t stop them now.

The men huddled in the ruins  of France’s failed defense,   watching the horizon for the  first signs of German armor. Bertoldo gathered his gear without complaint.  After fighting two years for the chance to   see combat, he was being sent away from his  unit right before the battle. “Voluntold,”   in Army parlance, volunteered by someone  else. The other cooks probably smirked.

The troublemaker was now someone else’s problem. The walk from Company A’s positions to the  Battalion CP in Hatten took less than an hour,   but it was like crossing into another  world. Outside the town, foxholes and   pillboxes dotted the frozen ground. Inside  Hatten, narrow streets wound between ancient   stone buildings that had survived one world  war and were about to be tested by another.

The 1st Battalion Instruct Post was set up  in a sturdy building near the center of town.   Maps covered tables. Radio operators hunched  over their sets. Officers clustered around   acetate-covered situation boards, marking  German positions in grease pencil. This was   the nerve center of the battalion’s  defense, and it needed protection.

Nine men total to secure the building.  Bertoldo took his position at the CP   entrance as darkness fell on January 8.  Through his specs, he could see muzzle   flashes far in the distance. The  temperature dropped below freezing. He took a deep breath. This was the night. By 11:00pm, the sound of running engines had  spread across the village’s ancient stone   roads.

Not American engines, no, it was  the deeper, potent sound of German armor. Panzers. Their shadows moving  through Hatten’s outskirts,   their commanders confident in their  night vision equipment and veteran crews. At Company A’s pillboxes, all hell was  breaking loose. German infantry had   infiltrated the positions. Captain  Corson later described the chaos:   men firing at shadows, grenades exploding  within the narrow tunnels connecting pillboxes,   the screams of wounded soldiers  echoing off concrete walls.

Company A was being stormed. Corson himself was wounded and captured  along with dozens of his men. Those   concrete pillboxes became traps, surrounded and  systematically reduced by German assault teams. But Bertoldo had no idea his unit had  been decimated. He stood at his post,   watching German vehicles probe Hatten’s defenses.

The early hours of January 9 brought artillery,   massive, earthshaking bombardments that  turned buildings into rubble. The German   attackers had broken through  the main line of resistance. Inside the CP, the battalion staff faced an  impossible decision. Stay and risk capture,   or evacuate while they still could.

Maps were burned. Radios prepared for   destruction. The brain of the defensive  efforts was about to make a run for it. Bertoldo could have simply followed  orders, evacuated with the staff,   fallen back to a safe position,  and lived to fight another day.   He was just staff after all. But he  saw this crisis as something else,   the opportunity he had so desperately been  waiting for, a chance to actually fight.

He volunteered to stay behind  and cover the retreat. One man   with a machine gun against an  entire German assault force. The staff officers must have thought