The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
At times, Clark seemed to feud with every senior general in the Mediterranean. “He treats his corps commanders as he would a company commander—and of course with less consideration for us Americans,” Geoff Keyes told his diary. Weary of Clark’s carping, Truscott twice reminded him that he had the authority to sack the VI Corps commander “at any time”; in his diary, Clark decried Truscott’s “whining attitude.” An ancient grudge with his former West Point mathematics instructor, Lieutenant General Devers—now the senior American commander in the Mediterranean—grew so toxic that Devers refused to deal directly with Clark; he used Lyman Lemnitzer, Alexander’s American deputy, as an intermediary. “They could not be together three minutes without being in a fight,” Lemnitzer said later. Clark considered Devers “a dope” and informed him that he had “too many bosses already.” To Field Marshal Wilson, Devers said of the Fifth Army commander, “He thinks he is God Almighty. He’s a headache to me and I would relieve him if I could, but I can’t.”
Clark’s frictions with the British had only intensified in the spring. He complained that the Royal Navy “acted in many high-handed ways” and was “in no way cooperating with me.” On several occasions he grew so insolent with Alexander that Lemnitzer expected him to be fired, and warned Clark accordingly. The British high command in the Mediterranean so resented Clark’s “vexatious attitude” that in March there had been talk of requesting his relief; the insurrection collapsed after word of it leaked to the Pentagon, and for lack of support from Churchill.
“Many happy returns of the day,” the prime minister had written in a birthday greeting to Clark. If still fond of the man he called “the American eagle,” Churchill was not above using other wildlife metaphors to assail the stalemate at Anzio. “We hoped to land a wildcat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche,” he told Eisenhower. “Instead, we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.” Churchill also fretted, as he told Wilson, about “a feeling of bitterness in Great Britain when the claim is stridently put forward, as it surely will be, that the Americans have taken Rome”; he urged that credit be “fairly shared.” While refusing to countenance a coup in Caserta, Churchill mused aloud about having Alexander command the Beachhead Army while Wilson took over the Cassino front, a crackpot notion that caused poor Brooke to confide, “I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic.”
The task of handling Clark fell to Alexander, who demonstrated both patience and the shrewd eye of a gifted draftsman. From his palette of adjectives, Alexander later captured the man with precise brushstrokes: “Temperamental, very sensitive, extremely ambitious, vain, learned a lot as the campaign went on.” Although General Alex would have preferred to see Omar Bradley or Patton in command of Fifth Army—even if he suspected the latter was “too restless for slogging”—he rated Clark a fine commander. “Always cool in battle,” he added. “Never saw him frightened.”
Never frightened, perhaps, but often anxious. A thousand cares weighed him down. Air cover at the beachhead remained spotty, and Clark disrupted his birthday festivities at Caserta on May 1 for a snarling row with Alexander over the disproportionate fighter and bomber support given Eighth Army at the expense of the Fifth. Casualties had become so corrosive that each U.S. infantry division in Italy could expect to lose its entire allotment of 132 second lieutenants in less than three months of combat. Although basic training had expanded from thirteen to seventeen weeks, many enlisted replacements arrived with marginal military skills, and some were unable to read. The newest units to join Fifth Army—the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions, both in Keyes’s II Corps—were the first into combat of fifty-five U.S. divisions built mostly from draftees; their worth had yet to be proven. Four of six infantry regimental commanders in those two divisions had already been relieved, as Clark advised Marshall, “for a combination of age and physical reasons.”
There was more: the two British divisions still at Anzio remained so weak that both Truscott and Clark believed they would contribute little to any renewed offensive. The British Army since Salerno had suffered 46,000 battle casualties, with thousands more sick, yet replacements had not kept up with losses. Moreover, as Gruenther also noted, “Many British troops have been fighting for four or five years, and are in some cases pretty tired.”
Few British commanders disagreed. “Absenteeism and desertion are still problems,” wrote General Penney, back in command of the British 1st Division at Anzio after recovering from his wounds. “Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.” On average, 10 British soldiers were convicted of desertion each day in the spring of 1944, and an estimated 30,000 “slinkers” were “on the trot” in Italy. “The whole matter is hushed up,” another British division commander complained.
Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. The U.S. Army would convict 21,000 deserters during World War II, many of them in the Mediterranean. Clark condemned the surge of self-inflicted wounds in Fifth Army and the “totally inadequate” prison sentences of five to ten years for U.S. soldiers convicted of “misbehavior before the enemy.” A psychiatric analysis of 2,800 American troops convicted of desertion or going AWOL in the Mediterranean catalogued thirty-five reasons offered by the culprits, including “My nerves gave way” and “I was scared.”
A twenty-two-year-old rifleman who deserted at Cassino after seven months in combat was typical. “I feel like my nervous system is burning up. My heart jumps,” he said. “I get so scared I can hardly move.” Those symptoms affected tens of thousands, and added to Clark’s worries. “Combat exhaustion,” a term coined in Tunisia to supplant the misnomer “shell shock,” further eroded Allied fighting strength in Italy, as it did elsewhere: roughly one million U.S. soldiers would be hospitalized during the war for “neuro-psychiatric” symptoms, and half a million would be discharged from the service for “personality disturbances.”
All troops were at risk, but none more than infantrymen, who accounted for 14 percent of the Army’s overseas strength and sustained 70 percent of the casualties. A study of four infantry divisions in Italy found that a soldier typically no longer wondered “whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.” The Army surgeon general concluded that “practically all men in rifle battalions who were not otherwise disabled ultimately became psychiatric casualties,” typically after 200 to 240 cumulative days in combat. “There aren’t any iron men,” wrote Brigadier General William C. Menninger, a prominent psychiatrist. “The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.”
Treatment by “narcosynthesis,” often using sodium amytal or nembutal, healed some combat-exhausted soldiers with deep sleep. The 45th General Hospital in Naples, which would admit more than five thousand neuropsychiatric patients in 1944, also used extensive electric-shock therapy. But generally fewer than one “NP” patient in five returned to duty.
All of these issues impaired Fifth Army’s ability to reach Rome, and it was Rome that increasingly obsessed Clark. In Washington, he had learned that OVERLORD was now scheduled for early June; to capture Rome and invade Normandy concurrently would provide a glorious double blow to Axis morale. Even if the Eternal City was of dubious military value, it offered a dramatic symbol, a rightful and prestigious prize after so many months of struggle.
But getting there quickly was paramount, before OVERLORD eclipsed the Italian campaign—and before the British could steal Fifth Army’s thunder. Churchill’s suspicion was well founded: Clark had no intention of sharing credit for capturing the capital. He had, in fact, begun to exhibit signs of paranoia about British designs.
“I know factually that there are interests brewing for the Eighth Army to take Rome,” Clark confided to his war diary in early May, “and I might as well let Alexander know now that if he attempts anything of that kind he will have another all-out battle on his hands. Namely, with me.”
“On the Eve of Great Things”
This grand offensive, code-named DIADEM and set to commence on May 11, required a three-to-one edge in infantrymen to knock the Germans from the Gustav Line at a familiar point of attack: the Cassino redoubt and adjacent heights looming above the Liri Valley. For this paramount honor, Alexander had chosen Eighth Army. “Between ourselves,” he privately told Brooke, “Clark and his army HQ are not up to it, it’s too big for them.” Fifth Army, including Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps, would attack on the left through the Aurunci Mountains, advancing “on an axis generally parallel to that of Eighth Army.” Once the Gustav Line was pierced, Truscott’s VI Corps would burst from the beachhead, shouldering aside the German Fourteenth Army to help destroy the Tenth.
Alexander’s final order, issued in early May, remained silent on which force would seize Rome and thus further inflamed Clark’s suspicions. But for weeks the battle plan had clearly laid out a scheme in which Eighth Army bulled up Highway 6 before veering east of the capital toward either Florence or Ancona on the Adriatic, depending on whether the Combined Chiefs chose southern France or Austria as Alexander’s ultimate destination. Fifth Army would follow the Tyrrhenian coastline to Viterbo and then Livorno.
There would be glory enough to go around. Still, sensing fraternal rivalries, AFHQ informed all reporters that “no invidious comparison [should] be made between Eighth and Fifth armies and the FEC; no exaggeration, no overcolorful narratives…. Speculation should be avoided.”
Monochrome proved difficult, given the vivid legions assembled for DIADEM. On the Allied right, Eighth Army—having tramped from Cairo across two continents in the past nineteen months—now secretly sideslipped more than a quarter million men east to west over the Apennines. Their commander, Lieutenant General Oliver W. H. Leese, was as tall as Clark and much stouter, with a black mustache and twinkling brown eyes that could darken in sudden rage—“a big ungainly bruiser,” in Keyes’s tart description. Blooded at the Somme, with the scars to prove it, Leese was bluff and toothy, given to khaki plus-fours and a straw hat. He remained a Montgomery protégé at heart, fond of thunderous artillery barrages, cheap smokes tossed to the lads, and conferences with subordinates while he soaked in his tub. “Never frig about on a low level,” he liked to advise. Leese later became an expert in horticultural succulents, such as cacti and begonias; now he settled for tending his tulips.
He compared this, his first big battle as an army commander, to “having a baby.” Alexander thought him methodical to a fault. “Not the pusher Clark was,” he said after the war. “Some army commanders have to be pushed with a little ginger, like Leese, who always needed a little prodding.” A Canadian general at one point decried his “prancing about waving his hands like a whore in heat.” Yet Leese’s guffaws and ribald humor masked a shrewd cunning. “I think I can work with Clark,” he wrote his wife. “He thinks I am a bloody fool. He will have a great awakening.”
Leese’s seven infantry and three armor divisions included a new contingent in the Allied panoply: 56,000 Poles, who had been assigned to take Monte Cassino itself. They were led by General Wadysaw Anders, a slender, handsome cavalryman with “the ardour of a boy,” in Macmillan’s phrase, and the grit of a man intent on settling scores. Anders had fought both Germans and Russians in 1939; wounded three times and captured on crutches, he spent twenty months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and other dungeons, much of it in solitary confinement. After Hitler invaded Russia, he was released—reportedly wearing only a shirt and underpants—to eventually form a Polish corps against the common Nazi foe. His men were drawn from prison camps scattered as far away as Siberia; in an anabasis that took them through Iraq and Persia, they joined other Poles who had fled through Hungary and Romania to fight with valor in the Middle East under British patronage.
Anders’s two divisions were understrength but as ardent as he: they drew lots to see which would have the privilege of liberating the abbey itself. “We never take prisoners,” a Polish colonel told one Grenadier Guardsman. “It’s such a nuisance having to feed them and, after all, they started it.” None of the Poles would hang back on May 11, as Anders later said, “for we had no men to spare for reserves.” For II Polish Corps, the way home led through the Gustav Line.
On the Allied left, wedged into a twelve-mile front from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the lip of the Rapido flats, Clark’s army also included a contingent for whom DIADEM was a grudge match. “The eyes of suffering France are fixed upon you,” Juin told his FEC. His corps had swelled to nearly 100,000 men, parceled among four divisions and three groups of goumiers, irregular Berber tribesmen known for agility and ruthlessness. After enduring eight thousand casualties in the winter fighting around Cassino, Juin had spent the spring retraining his forces in mountain warfare, with a stress on speed, stealth, and infiltration. Only by “invading the mountains,” he believed, could the Allies widen their front and circumvent the constricted tank trap in the Liri Valley.
That meant scaling the Auruncis, a primeval upland three thousand to five thousand feet high forming a broad belt between the valley and the sea. Sculpted by defiles and pinnacles, the range was crowned by the Petrella Massif, a height peopled mostly by shepherds and charcoal makers, and deemed impassable by Germans and Anglo-Americans alike.
But not by Juin. Wrapped in a greatcoat, with his blue Basque beret pulled down around his ears, useless right arm dangling, and an unlit cigar clamped between his crooked teeth, he stumped through the shadows below the range, eyeing approaches and saddles. Photo reconnaissance showed two narrow trails winding over the massif—and little enemy fortification. With patience and persistence, in passionate French and fractured English, he had persuaded first Keyes and then Clark to broaden and deepen the Fifth Army attack. “The Americans are not people one can hustle,” he wrote a French colleague. “They like us a lot, but they are also imbued with their sense of omnipotence and with a touchiness that you could hardly imagine.”
Rather than employ the FEC as a battering ram to punch a hole in German defenses, which would then be ploddingly exploited by Keyes’s II Corps, Juin proposed attacking full-fury with both corps abreast: 170,000 men, 600 artillery tubes, 300 tanks. Given the tilt of the Italian boot, the attack would initially angle into the mountains from east to west. To provision a single corps in such terrain would be difficult; to supply two would be herculean. But Fifth Army could outflank German defenses and unhinge the Gustav Line. Once across the Auruncis, the Americans could sweep up the coast toward Anzio and Rome while the FEC veered into the Liri Valley from the southwest.
Clark’s admiration for Juin had only deepened since their first encounter in Algiers during Operation TORCH. It was no accident that Fifth Army headquarters assigned him the radio call-sign Hannibal. Among other gallantries, the Frenchman had voluntarily surrendered one of his four stars in order not to outrank his army commander. “Radiate confidence,” Juin advised, “and enjoy taking risks.”
Audacious and improbable, the plan also offered Fifth Army a bigger role than the vague, subordinate mission outlined in Alexander’s order. Clark still cherished one bit of arcana memorized by every West Point plebe: “A calculated risk is a known risk for the sake of a real gain. A risk for the sake of a risk is a fool’s choice.”
He knew the difference.
Half a million players scurried to
Canadian signalers in April had gone off the air along the Adriatic; now they began broadcasting again near Salerno to persuade German eavesdroppers that an amphibious operation was being mounted. In truth, barely two hundred men operated sixty-one radios in a carefully scripted electronic deception. At Termoli, on the Adriatic, the 1st Palestinian Camouflage Company floated dummy landing craft in the harbor and spread garnished nets over two acres of jetties to inspire the imagination of any German reconnaissance pilot. To discourage collaborators, Allied leaflets resembling funeral announcements displayed the names and photos of those executed for espionage or sabotage.
Military traffic signs appeared in Polish, English, French, and Hindi. Engineers built new trails along the front, concealed with lime, straw, stones, and turf. Long screens made of chicken wire festooned with steel wool hid roads, bridges, and depots. Timber parties carefully thinned the olive groves to create fields of fire for artillery, sawing the trunks three-quarters through and bracing the trees upright until H-hour, when they would be tipped over. Anders’s troops blackened their kit, donned seven thousand mottled sniper suits, and slapped six thousand gallons of camouflage paint on their vehicles.