The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
“We do not want to defend Ortona decisively,” Kesselring complained to General Joachim Lemelsen, who had taken temporary command of Tenth Army after Vietinghoff fell ill. “But the English have made it appear as important as Rome.”
“It costs so much in blood it cannot be justified,” Lemelsen replied.
“No,” Kesselring said, “but then you can do nothing when things develop in this manner.”
And then, as such things do, the battle ended. Squeezed into the old quarter around the shell-torn castle, Heidrich’s men waited until nightfall before slipping up the coastal road toward Pescara, leaving dead comrades spread-eagled on staircases and the grass-grown ramparts. “There is no town left,” a German officer told his diary. “Only the ruins.”
A new sign posted at the city limits disagreed: “This is Ortona, a West Canadian town.” Tacking up that sign had cost General Vokes another 650 casualties; Canadian battle losses for the month of December would exceed 2,300, including 500 dead. “Everything before Ortona was a fairy tale,” Vokes said. In one typical battalion, of forty-one officers who had landed on Sicily in July, only nine remained, and six of them had been wounded, according to the historian Daniel G. Dancocks. A Canadian psychiatrist who made his rounds from camp to camp on a motorcycle reported an alarming number of “gross hysterias with mutism [and] paralysis.”
Alexander’s plan had miscarried. In five weeks, Eighth Army had moved just fourteen miles, averaging less than thirty yards an hour. Pescara still lay ten miles to the north; Rome lay beyond the snowy Apennines, on the other side of the world. Montgomery recommended that the Adriatic campaign come to a halt, and Alexander agreed.
In Ortona, above the purple sea, a Seaforth piper played the threnodic “Skye Boat Song” in memory of those fallen. A Canadian combat artist who prowled the rubble with his sketch pad later summarized his aesthetic assessment: “The familiar world had disappeared.”
Too Many Gone West
A few minutes past sunrise on Saturday, December 11, a four-engine British York skidded to a stop on a bleak, deserted landing strip forty miles from Tunis. As crewmen tethered the propellers and chocked the wheels, a short, thick figure stumped down the metal stairway and sat heavily on a packing crate next to the runway. Removing his hat, Winston Churchill daubed the perspiration from his scowling gray face. A chill breeze teased his wispy hair, and sand swirled around the luggage now being unloaded from the aircraft belly, including the crated gifts he had recently received for his sixty-ninth birthday: a porcelain bowl from President Roosevelt; a silver drachma coin, minted in 300 B.C., from his daughter Sarah; a silver Isfahan cigar box; and, from the traveling press, a Persian astrakhan hat, which the prime minister had taken to wearing with his air commodore’s uniform.
Nearly an hour passed. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, entreated him to escape the wind and reboard the aircraft; the scowl simply deepened. The prime minister had planned to spend a single night with Eisenhower at Carthage before pressing on to inspect the battlefield in Italy with General Brooke, yet this diversion—Where was Eisenhower? Why had they landed here?—taxed both his patience and his strength. “I want to sleep for billions of years,” he had recently told Moran. Churchill had logged more than 100,000 miles since the beginning of the war, but the last thousand, since leaving the strategy conferences in Teheran and Cairo, seemed especially cruel. In Egypt he had felt too exhausted to dry himself after a bath, and simply flopped sopping on the bed. “We are only specks of dust that have settled in the night on the map of the world,” he told Moran.
At length the mystery was solved: through misunderstanding, the specks had settled on the wrong Tunisian strip. Baggage and shivering passengers were bundled back into the square-windowed York, and fifteen minutes later Churchill felt the grip of Eisenhower’s hand at El Aouina field, where the worried general had been pacing for two hours. As he settled into the rear seat of Eisenhower’s sedan, Churchill confessed, “I am afraid I shall have to stay with you longer than I had planned. I am completely at the end of my tether.”
Ringed by sentries and antiaircraft guns, the La Marsa seaside cottage in December was a study in melancholy. Churchill collapsed in a chair, and was ordered to bed after Moran found that he had a fever of 101 degrees and a “shabby” pulse. “I feel much disturbed,” the physician wrote. That evening, the lethargic prime minister complained of a sore throat. “It’s pretty bad,” he said. “Do you think it’s anything?” At four o’clock on Sunday morning, Brooke awakened to a dolorous voice in his room, crying, “Hullo, hullo, hullo.” Bolting upright—“Who the hell is that?” he demanded—Brooke switched on a flashlight to find the prime minister in pajamas with his head bound in a brown bandage, wandering the room in search of Moran and complaining of a headache.
“My master is unwell,” one of the prime minister’s servants wrote home, “and future movements remain uncertain.” Harold Macmillan found a portable X-ray machine in a Tunis hospital, and a pathologist arrived from Cairo, followed by a cardiologist and two nurses from Algiers. Chest film on Monday showed “a considerable opaque area at the base of the left lung,” the telltale sign of pneumonia, and Moran prescribed sulfonamide antibiotics. The patient’s pulse grew irregular and spurty, and the edge of his liver could be felt beneath his ribs. Churchill complained that his heart “feels to be bumping all over the place.” The heart specialist administered digitalis.
More specialists were summoned, as well as the Churchill family and a Coldstream Guards battalion to protect the house. “He’s very glad I’ve come,” Clementine Churchill told Moran, “but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.” Randolph Churchill insisted on discussing French politics with his father. To daughter Sarah, the prime minister murmured, “If I die, don’t worry—the war is won.” Confessing to being “tired out—body, soul, and spirit,” he flung out his arms and cried, “In what better place could I die than here, in the ruins of Carthage?” More heart fibrillations followed, and more digitalis. Moran, who found the patient “very breathless and anxious looking,” feared that Winston Churchill had indeed come to the end of his mortal tether.
The preceding fortnight could have killed anyone, particularly a proud, aging Tory whose overarching war aim—to preserve the imperial construct of His Majesty’s realm—now seemed jeopardized less by Britain’s enemies than by her friends. The Allies had met in three distinct sessions: first in Cairo, where Churchill and Roosevelt were joined by the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek; then in Teheran, where the Anglo-Americans met for four days with Stalin; then in Cairo again, in a conference exclusive to Yanks and Brits. The epicurean excess had taxed even Churchill’s iron constitution. There were bottomless glasses of vodka and cognac with the Russians, of course, but the Cairo conferees also consumed 22,000 pounds of meat, 78,000 eggs, 4,600 pounds of sugar, and 1,500 cigars, as well as curried prawns, Turkish delight, and ice cream with chocolate sauce. Quartermasters reported an average daily consumption of 80 bottles of whisky, 34 of gin, 12 of brandy, 528 of beer, and 20,000 cigarettes.
If Egyptian and Persian excesses contributed to Churchill’s physical malady, surely the diplomatic developments indisposed his soul and spirit. That Britain’s senior role in the Grand Alliance was irrecoverable had never been more obvious than in the presence of the emerging superpowers personified by Roosevelt and Stalin. Even Churchill could see the tracings of a bipolar world that had no room for nineteenth-century empires. He and his small nation were overshadowed; no wonder he was sick at heart.
Much had been achieved in two weeks, but as usual all progress first required the spilling of fraternal blood. “Brooke got nasty and King got good and sore,” one witness in Cairo, Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, wrote in his journal. “King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God, he was mad. I wished he had socked him.” When Churchill urged a British and American invasion of Rhodes—“muskets must flame,” he thundered, grasping his lapels in both hands—Marshall replied, “Not one
Perennial American suspicions that Churchill intended to sidetrack OVERLORD by subordinating the cross-Channel invasion to “peripheral and indecisive ventures in the Mediterranean” were again inflamed by British suggestions that a stalemate in Italy might require a postponement in France. The time had come, in Marshall’s phrase, for the British to “fish or cut bait.” Churchill had privately urged Brooke “to swing the strategy back to the Mediterranean at the expense of the Channel.” An alert Henry Stimson, who as war secretary prayed every night for a cross-Channel attack, warned Roosevelt that the prime minister was prepared “to stick a knife in the back of OVERLORD.” An ill-advised autumn campaign by the British in the Aegean—the debacle cost more than five thousand casualties and twenty-six ships—added to the distrust. The British had long justified the Mediterranean campaign as a vital antecedent to the death blow to be struck in northwest Europe; but, as Michael Howard observed, London now regarded “the Mediterranean theater not as subsidiary, but as an end in itself, the succcess of whose operations was its own justification.” Major General John Kennedy, a British planner, later conceded, “Had we had our way, I think there can be little doubt that the invasion of France would not have been done in 1944.”
They did not have their way. Stalin gruffly threw his support behind Roosevelt, insisting on both OVERLORD and a concomitant invasion of southern France. (It was said that Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, spoke only four words of English: “Yes,” “No,” and “Second front.”) Moscow also agreed to join the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. Roosevelt left Teheran convinced that Stalin was “getatable”—susceptible to the president’s charms. “The Russians are perfectly friendly,” Roosevelt insisted. “They aren’t trying to gobble up all the rest of Europe or the world.”
Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Churchill had little choice but to agree that OVERLORD, now scheduled for May 1944, would “have first claim on the resources…of the Allies, worldwide.” The strategic drift had ended. As the historian Mark A. Stoler later wrote, “After two full years of controversy and more than ninety days of meetings, the Allies had adopted a unified, coordinated strategy for the defeat of the Axis.” Roosevelt capped the decision by selecting Eisenhower to command the western invasion, telling Marshall, “I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.” Eisenhower, the president concluded, “is the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him.”
As for Italy, London and Washington agreed on the capture of Rome and a subsequent advance limited to the Pisa–Rimini latitude, two hundred miles above the capital. Churchill had at least won that concession.
Despite the frictions, the fortnight had also seen renewed brotherhood and mutual affection. “Large families are usually more closely united than small ones,” Roosevelt proclaimed in a dinner toast. The president had roared with laughter when an Army band struck up a tune and Churchill danced with Pa Watson, the burly White House aide. Yet even before the second Cairo meeting adjourned, “things were changing,” a British staff officer, Brigadier Ian Jacob, later recalled.
It was all too clear that “by the end of the war there would only be two great powers,” Jacob said. “From that moment on, I would say, we were nothing so close as we had been.” Though Roosevelt remained “extremely friendly,” he seemed “to keep Churchill somewhat at arm’s length.”
The prime minister did not die amid the ruins of Carthage, of course. It would take more than curried prawns, Turkish delight, and Yankee estrangement to kill Winston Churchill. After six days the fever broke, although his pulse still raced to 130 on December 19; perhaps the acceleration came from the large cigar and the whiskey with soda he had consumed a couple of days earlier. Churchill became fixated on his own white blood-cell count, envisioning the battle against the pneumococci as a titanic clash of forces not unlike the world war itself. One visitor to La Marsa reported that “a lot of the fire had gone out of his eyes,” but they seemed to rekindle at the discovery of some thirty-five-year-old brandy. Churchill spurned the efforts of Eisenhower’s culinary staff to prepare meals suitable for an invalid; a Royal Navy cook was summoned to gratify his palate. When Sarah read aloud to her father from Pride and Prejudice, he interjected, “What calm lives they had, those people!”
“The Bible says you must do just what Moran orders,” Roosevelt cabled from Washington, “but at this moment I cannot put my finger on the verse and chapter.” Couriers came and went from the La Marsa cottage at all hours with war news, including landing craft tallies from the Indian Ocean and drydock status reports in the Mediterranean: Churchill had taken a keen interest in launching another amphibious landing to outflank the Winter Line. “The stagnation of the whole campaign on the Italian front is becoming scandalous,” he cabled the British chiefs. When Beetle Smith and a gaggle of staff officers came to Churchill’s bedroom, he peppered them with questions about available landing craft before snapping, “You don’t seem to know much. You’re no use.”
Not until late Friday afternoon, December 24, did he rise from his sickbed. Wrapped in a padded-silk Chinese dressing gown with blue and gold embroidered dragons, he scuffed to the dining room in slippers stitched with his initials in gold thread across each foot. “Looking in his strange costume rather like a figure in a Russian ballet,” as Macmillan put it, he joined Alexander and other senior British officers at the table for a discussion that lasted until midnight. When they broke, Christmas had come, and with it a consensus that an amphibious assault in Italy “must be carried out on a sufficient scale to ensure success.” The most promising beaches lay southwest of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea, near a resort town called Anzio.
Churchill telegraphed the news to the British chiefs in London, then scribbled a note to Roosevelt in hope of the president’s concurrence. “This,” he wrote, “should decide the battle of Rome.”
Christmas had come, and across the Mediterranean a million soldiers far from home opened gifts that, however impractical or improbable, made them long for home all the more: black silk socks, cologne, Life Savers, canned Spam, slivers of prewar soap, a volume of Lytton Strachey, polka-dot neckties, Cherry Blossom boot polish, straw house slippers, Brasso, louse powder, a carefully wrapped bottle of Coca-Cola, and crumbling loaves of “war cake,” baked without benefit of sugar or shortening but larded with love.
Had he been home in Ohio, “I would be fussing with tree lights or a tree stand or doing my last second shopping or coming home from an office party,” Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey wrote Helen on Christmas Eve. “As far as I am concerned it is time for me to see you all again.” Sutlers shipped 170 tons of turkey to the troops, along with 90 tons of apples and 112 tons of Sicilian oranges. Combat units also received “morale crates” that implied a certain rear-echelon misapprehension of life on the Winter Line. Box no. 11, for example, included eighty phonograph records and a pair of tennis rackets, while box no. 21 contained 258 Ping-Pong balls and box no. 171 held wrestling mats, tennis nets, boxing gloves, makeup kits, and masquerade costumes.
In Naples, shoppers and boulevardiers swarmed along the Via Roma. Harbor restaurants offered decent black market meals for 140 lire, or $1.40. Soldiers polished their shoes for a dance at the enlisted club and wished one another “Merry Typhus!”—the disease had become epidemic. MPs prowled the streets, fining officers caught with their hands in their pockets; sergeants who had removed their chevrons at the front to confound snipers now risked $10 per stripe for not sewing them back on. The city evinced the “spurious brightness which you find w
Jolliness faded farther north. Mark Clark on Christmas Eve gave a carton of cigarettes to each man in his Fifth Army headquarters, which now occupied the enormous royal palace at Caserta. He then served eggnog to his staff officers during a round of caroling. After attending a concert by the Royal Artillery band, he mingled with revelers at the Red Cross club and went to midnight mass in the packed royal chapel. To his daughter, Ann, Clark wrote, “I am anxious to get this thing over and get back to see you and have a good old laughing contest.”
In a Bari hospital, where mustard gas victims continued to die, a major walked the wards in a cotton beard and a St. Nick costume fashioned from two red hospital robes. Up the Adriatic coast, in Ortona, soldiers built plank tables in the candlelit church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, then laid the settings with white linen and silver scavenged from the ruins. Companies rotated through for Christmas dinner served by their officers in the British tradition, with soup, roast pork, pudding, and a bottle of beer apiece. A lieutenant with the wonderfully seasonal name of Wilf Gildersleeve played the pump organ while a battalion padre led the caroling. “Most of the men found it hard to take in,” an officer said. Radio calls to units on the perimeter began with a few bars of “Silent Night,” played by an adjutant strumming a mandolin near the microphone. General Vokes dined alone, and wept.
“The stars have crept low tonight / To comfort half-buried dreamers,” wrote a mortarman-poet, Hans Juergensen. Sprigs of holly and mistletoe decorated various encampments, and C-ration foil festooned little pine trees. In Venafro, near the Mignano Gap, pealing bells competed with booming guns, and five priests tendered communion to filthy, bearded soldiers on their knees at the altar rail. “I prayed that there would be no more wars after this one,” a private from Denver wrote his family.