John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro: Then and Now
Problematic or a useful historical source?
As a historian, how should evidence that has been shown to have been manipulated be treated? Does the evidence still have value? John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1944) is a case in point and one I’m interested in exploring after visiting the ruins of the deserted little Italian village last month.
Whilst the film is presented to its audience as a real-time, actual footage documentary of the US 36th Division’s action between 8 and 17 December 1943, the film ends with a brief message:
“All scenes in this picture were photographed within range of enemy small arms and artillery fire. For the purposes of continuity a few of these scenes were shot before and after the actual battle of SAN PIETRO.”[1]
Authors like Mark Harris go much further than this disclaimer and point out that the film was scripted first and then shot based on re-enactments.[2] In the film’s write-up by the US National Film Preservation Foundation, the author says that observant viewers may be surprised by the:
“oddly large number of apparently left-handed soldiers. Evidently Huston flipped some shots to make the soldiers’ screen movements correspond to the east-to-west attack on the maps: “We” always attack from right to left, “the enemy” from left to right. Huston also restaged more footage than his end title admits.”[3]
But does The Battle of San Pietro further our understanding of the Italian campaign during the Second World War? I would argue that the film is an important historical source as long as we understand its provenance and how it was made.
Today San Pietro is a ghost-town, a deserted national monument to the sacrifice of the Italian civilian population during the war, and being reclaimed by nature and overgrown. This museum’s caretakers are a handful of cats and dogs, who follow visitors around hoping for some love and attention (and food). Before the war, 1412 people lived in this village that nestles between Mt Lungo and Mt Sammucro.
Walking around the ruins of bombed out houses, some with wallpaper still hanging in spots and looking around the terraced streets, I had an overwhelming feeling that I was trespassing on hallowed ground. Having watched Huston’s film before my visit, it is possible to recognise areas of the village that had not changed since 1944. This can be seen most prominently in the white plaster covering up the holes in the church.
When visiting San Pietro, we were lucky to have the place to ourselves when we arrived early one misty morning in October. San Pietro is now a quiet place, but it’s the kind of quiet that rings in your ears after a loud explosion. It’s unsettling and deeply sad.
I first became interested in Huston’s film after reading Eric Ambler’s biography, Here Lies (for more about the screenwriter Eric Ambler, see my previous post on The Way Ahead (1944)).[4] The British spy novelist, who had worked with Huston on The Maltese Falcon in 1941, was posted to Italy with the Army Kinematograph Service (AKS) to create a film for the Psychological Warfare Division about civilian Italy under the Allies.[5] To collaborate with Huston on the project at the Fifth Army HQ, Ambler was promoted to the equal rank of Captain.[6] Huston had joined the US Army Signals Corps in 1942 and was making films as part of the Army Pictorial Service under Frank Capra. He had originally travelled to Italy to film the liberation of Rome, but by December 1943 it became clear that the Fifth Army was a long way from making that a reality. Audiences at home wanted to know what was happening in this theatre, why it was taking the Allies so long to progress, and General Mark Clark to explain by showing how hard the fighting was in mainland Italy.
Huston’s film crew had been assigned to the 143rd regiment of the 36th (Texan) Division, and along with some cameramen from the Signals Corps and Eric Ambler, it included a British film unit and cameraman David MacDonald. Ambler describes how they arrived at San Pietro Infini on the last day of the battle and came within range of artillery fire but were not there to film the actual fighting. They used handheld 35mm cameras and the viewer feels like they are part of the action with the cameraman ducking behind rocks amid explosions. Despite arriving when the fighting was all but over, Ambler and Huston wanted to create a film that truly reflected the harsh realities of war experienced by the soldiers in Italy.
The film opens with a monologue by General Mark Clark providing context to the battle. He explains that “San Pietro in the Fifth Army sector was key to the Liri valley” and therefore Rome. Clark describes Fifth Army’s role in Italy as holding down large number of German troops in the theatre and finishes by talking about the importance of the infantry in attacking “the hidden enemy”. The general doesn’t look too comfortable in this opening scene; the camera seems too close to his face, but the carefully crafted message is delivered clearly. San Pietro was important to the campaign and therefore the sacrifices and shocking scenes the audience were about to see were justified. It’s clear from his autobiography that Eric Ambler didn’t like the General and seemed to concur with Patton’s assessment of the man as ‘Too damned slick’:
“That day we saw General Mark Clark or the first time. He was looking as an army commander should look - alert, determined, fighting fit - and he was being photographed doing so. As soon as his photographers had got the shots they needed, he climbed back into his jeep and was driven swiftly away.”[7]
Whilst Mark Clark describes the significance of San Pietro as a key battle, John Huston as the narrator downplays the importance of the action, rather he describes it as typical of the kind of bitter fighting in Italy and just another hill or village to win. The phases of the battle involving 36th Division’s 141, 142, 143 regiments, the Rangers, and 504th Parachute Battalion are described in a matter of fact way by the narrator with the help of maps and re-enacted footage.
The ability to see detailed maps of the battle like this would have been a completely new experience for film audiences during the war, as most of this information would have been classified. The fact that these maps were included at all could have been due to the post-war public release date. More shocking for the film’s audience would have been seeing the bodies of dead US soldiers and body-bags. Regardless of whether soldiers after the battle were pretending to be dead, the body-bags were real, and Huston was trying to capture the true horror of war. The narrator goes into details that again would have been censored in contemporary press reports, such as 143rd Infantry regiment required 1100 replacements and many companies lost all their officers.
After describing the events of the battle for San Pietro, the film concentrates on the effect of the fighting on the villagers. Footage is shown of the villagers emerging from caves and walking into the sunlight.
Caves that are very evident near the village today.
Scenes include dead villagers and the grief of families digging their relatives out of the ruins. Nothing is held back and the audience is left in no doubt; the real victims of all of this fighting were the Italian civilians. Huston ends the film on footage of the faces of the children of the San Pietro with the backing singing of the Tabernacle Choir. To the 21st Century viewer, after the brutality of the previous 30 minutes, this scene feels somewhat artificial, like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Despite the smiling faces of the children, it is sad to think that these future generations left San Pietro forever and did not return. The narrator seems to wrestle the meaning of the battle away from General Clark’s opening explanation when he says at the end of the film, “It was to free them [the civilians] and their farmlands that we came.”
On reviewing the production of The Battle of San Pietro the Army was not pleased with the results and Huston was accused of being anti-war. He describes the War Department’s reaction in his biography:
The War Department wanted no party of the film. I was told by one of its spokesmen that it was “anti-war.” I pompously replied that if I ever made a picture that was pro-war, I hoped someone would take me out and shoot me. The guy looked at me as if he were considering just that.
The film was classified SECRET and filed away, to ensure it would not be viewed by enlisted men. The Army argued that the film would be demoralizing to men who were going into combat for the first time.[8]
It was eventually released as a training video before being cut and then released to the general public at the end of the war in 1945.
The audiences were led to believe they were seeing actual documentary footage of The Battle of San Pietro when it was released in 1945. The film may have been scripted before being shot, been filmed for propaganda purposes, re-enacted in large parts, and contained scenes manipulated to show the Allies attacking right to left, but Huston’s film remains a valuable source for historians. As well as the account of the nine day battle, it shows the brutality of fighting in Italy not only for the servicemen but tragically for the Italian civilians too. It is interesting to compare The Battle of San Pietro with the British film, Their’s is the Glory (1946) (see previous post).
[1] The Battle of San Pietro, dir. by John Huston, 1944 on YouTube [accessed 12 March 2024].
[2] Mark Harris, Five Came Back (Canongate Books, 2015).
[3] https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/t1-the-battle-of-san-pietro-1945, Accessed 16/11/24
[4] Eric Ambler, Here Lies: An Autobiography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985).
[5] Ambler, Here Lies, p. 190.
[6] Ambler, Here Lies, p. 193.
[7] Ambler, Here Lies, p. 200.
[8] John Huston, An Open Book (Macmillan, 1981), p. 119.