The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Bells rang in Orsogna, too, but Kiwi troops heard them only at a distance since Germans still held the town. “I had not seen men so exhausted since Flanders. Their faces were grey,” Brigadier Kippenberger wrote. An Italian woman living furtively in Orsogna wrote to her missing son about the “poor sad Christmas” in the battered town, then added plaintively, “And where are you?” On the other side of the hill, where German soldiers agonized over reports of carpet-bombed cities in the Fatherland, the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment order of the day declared: “Hatred and revenge overcome our hearts as we ponder the magnitude of our misfortune and the anguish which these attacks have brought to our German families.”
“Usual targets of opportunity were engaged all through the day,” an American field artillery battalion reported, “climaxed by a salvo of colored smoke for Xmas greeting.” In one field hospital, surgeons operated by flashlight and fell flat whenever they heard the rush of approaching shells. When blood for transfusions ran short, nurses circulated among the gun crews and motorpool drivers, soliciting donations. A clerk in the 36th Division sorted Christmas packages and scribbled “KIA” on mail to be returned to the sender; at length, utterly spent, he sat at a typewriter and pecked out, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
And in the 34th Division, Captain Leslie W. Bailey assembled his company and read aloud from the second chapter of the Gospel According to Saint Luke. “Glory to God in the highest,” Bailey concluded, “and on earth peace and good will toward all men.”
The bottom of the year brought the Allied camp more hope than despair, even if it delivered neither peace nor universal goodwill. “The war is won,” Churchill had told his daughter, and War Department analysts now forecast Germany’s defeat in October 1944. If too optimistic by eight months, optimism seemed warranted. Life magazine noted in a year-end editorial that American factories already planned to resume production of consumer goods on a modest scale in 1944, including bobby pins, baby buggies, hot water heaters, and two million irons. On all battlefronts, with the notable exceptions of Italy and Burma, Allied forces were advancing. In the Pacific, the outer perimeter of Japan’s empire had been pierced in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the inner ring of the Carolines and Marianas would soon loom in American crosshairs. General Douglas MacArthur continued to angle toward the Philippines, which would provide a springboard to Formosa and the Chinese mainland. Allied domination of the seas, among the signal achievements of 1943, was further demonstrated on December 26 when the Royal Navy trapped and sank the German battleship Scharnhorst off northwest Norway. Nearly two thousand German sailors were lost. On the Eastern Front, 175 German divisions continued their epic retreat.
Italy was a different matter. “The campaign is heartbreakingly slow,” John Lucas told his diary on December 26. “We haven’t enough troops to go very fast and I am afraid we will get weaker instead of stronger as time goes on because I figure this is becoming a secondary theater.” Fifth Army’s strength of 200,000 had hardly grown since October, and in December alone the army tallied 23,000 hospital admissions. Battle casualties had whittled away more than 10 percent of U.S. combat power since Salerno; for the British, the figure was 18 percent. The German high command on December 31 noted with satisfaction that the Allied advance on Rome had been “equal to about six miles per month.” Moreover, the Anglo-Americans were stuck not only in the Italian mud but also in the Mediterranean: more than twenty-five Allied divisions and five thousand combat planes remained in the theater “with no shipping available to move them elsewhere,” the Army concluded. Except for the seven divisions already sent from Sicily, overburdened British ports could not handle additional transfers from the Mediterranean on top of the floodtide of Yanks now arriving from the States. Italy, as Martin Blumenson wrote in the official U.S. Army history, had become “a war of position, static warfare at its worst.”
Dark thoughts intruded. “One rather wondered what we achieved,” admitted Major General Freddie de Guingand, the Eighth Army chief of staff. “We began to think about Passchendaele.” Farley Mowat told his family in Canada, “Things have changed so much since Sicily. Too many pals gone West. Too many things that go wump in the night.”
Doubts about the battlefield leadership also intruded, among both high and low. Alan Moorehead decried “a plan that was distinctly conservative and lacking in imagination”; the Allied armies, he added, “had come into Europe with very muddled ideas of what we were going to find.” Now when Alexander strolled into his war room to study the map in quiet reflection, some might wonder not what he was thinking but whether he was thinking at all. The manipulation of an army group “required weeks and months of forethought, not hours or days” as with smaller tactical units, his chief of staff later noted, and it was uncertain that Alexander possessed the capacity for such forethought. “He had the average brain of an average English gentleman. He lacked that little extra cubic centimeter which produces genius,” said Lord Louis Mountbatten, commander of forces in Southeast Asia and hardly a towering intellect himself. The disjointed attacks by Fifth and Eighth Armies allowed German forces to shift back and forth across the peninsula to parry the blows in turn. Thanks to Ultra, Alexander was better informed about his adversaries than any general in modern history: “the Allies often knew almost as much about the enemy’s formations as he did himself,” a British intelligence history concluded. Yet the Allied brain trust seemed unable to overcome “the old methodical way” of war, as Kesselring put it.
Discontent clattered down the chain. Eisenhower privately wished that Patton rather than Clark commanded Fifth Army, although, given Patton’s inattention to logistics and medical issues in Sicily, his mastery of the infinitely harder welfare issues in an Italian winter was hardly assured. Clark in turn groused about Lucas and threatened to sack Doc Ryder, commander of the 34th Division, while Lucas groused about Middleton of the 45th Division and Middleton groused about his own subordinates. “The battalion commander problem is serious. It is our weakest link,” Middleton wrote in December. “My battalion executives are no good.”
Fortunately for the Allied cause, the enemy had problems, too. Twenty-three German divisions were mired in Italy, with nearly 300,000 troops. Joseph Goebbels lamented that if the Wehrmacht had another fifteen or twenty division to throw into the Eastern Front “we would undoubtedly be in a position to repulse the Russians. Unfortunately we must put these fifteen or twenty divisions into combat in the Italian theater.” Even Smiling Albert turned querulous. “For two months now,” Kesselring complained, “I have not been able to exercise proper command because everything evaporates between my fingers.”
War was never linear, and in the Mediterranean its road seemed especially meandering and desultory. “What will 1944 do to us?” Lucas asked his diary. Yet sometimes a soldier in a slit trench saw more clearly than the generals on their high perches. “You got the feeling that you were part of a vast war machine which could not be defeated and would never retreat,” wrote P. Royle, a Royal Artillery lieutenant in the British 78th Division. “It had all been so different a year ago in Tunisia when we were very much on the defensive and at times hanging on for dear life.”
For the Allies, things would continue to go wump in the night, and many more pals would go West. But the winter solstice had passed; each night grew shorter. Light would seep back into their lives, bringing renewed optimism as well as firm ground and fair skies.
“A terrible year has ended,” the monks in the Benedictine abbey atop Monte Cassino wrote in their log on December 31. “God forgive us our errors.”
The old year slipped away, lamented by no one. A ferocious storm with gale winds howled through Italy, destroying forty spotter planes and uprooting acres of tentage. Undaunted, troops in the 36th Division commemorated New Year’s Eve with a concoction of ethyl alcohol and grapefruit juice; the bitter weather made many nostalgic for a Texas blue norther. Soldiers across the front listened to German R
Truscott’s 3rd Division headquarters roasted a piglet, then threw an Auld Lang Syne party in an abandoned church. Officers danced with thirty nurses and Red Cross workers until midnight, when fireworks—machine-gun tracers, mortar shells, and Very lights—welcomed the new year. The festivities continued until dawn, ending with a champagne breakfast. “Thought I might as well let them get it out of their systems because it will be a long time before they have another fling,” Truscott wrote Sarah. He added, “The road to Rome is one on which one does not make speed, at this season at any rate. After all, Hannibal spent 14 years on the road.”
Out with the old year went two familiar faces from the Mediterranean theater. Escorted by Spitfires, Montgomery flew from Italy on December 31, having been ordered back to London to command an army group in OVERLORD. He would be replaced in Italy by a protégé, General Oliver Leese, commander of the British XXX Corps. Before departing, Montgomery mounted the stage in the Vasto opera house to bid farewell to his assembled Eighth Army officers. He closed his half-hour address by telling them, “I do not know if you will miss me, but I will miss you more than I can say.” Alan Moorehead reported, “There was a silence among the officers as he turned abruptly and began to walk off. Then a perfunctory, well-bred, parade ground cheer broke out.”
“So there we are,” Montgomery wrote in his journal, trying to assay the Italian campaign. “After a brilliant start, we rather fell off. And it could have been otherwise…. I have enjoyed the party myself and am full of beans.” In northwest Europe he would start anew, if not quite afresh; for good and ill, he left the Mediterranean encumbered by a reputation. “No one who has not been in the Eighth Army can appreciate just what he meant to us,” a British sapper wrote home. “He was a real human person.”
Eisenhower also left on the thirty-first. At 11:30 A.M., he strode for the last time from the Hôtel St. Georges, where he had kept his headquarters through fourteen months of reversal and triumph. An hour later he lifted off from Maison Blanche airfield, bound for Washington via Morocco, the Azores, and Bermuda. Roosevelt a week earlier had announced Eisenhower’s appointment as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and Marshall insisted that he come home for a brief rest before traveling to London. “Allow someone else to run the war for twenty minutes,” Marshall urged. The new Mediterranean theater commander, Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, known as Jumbo for his elephantine bearing, had hoped for three days’ overlap with Eisenhower in Algiers; Wilson instead arrived from Cairo to find him long gone. Most of Eisenhower’s inner circle would follow him to England, including Beetle Smith, Harry Butcher, and Kay Summersby.
Some believed his departure overdue. “He has lately been rather going to seed here,” Harold Macmillan confided to his diary. After conferring with Eisenhower during his final visit to Italy, Lucas wrote, “Ike looked well but much older. The boyish look is gone and he has the guise of a man. I think he is. A job like his will either make or break anyone.”
He left believing he had accomplished what had been asked of him. North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and a large patch of mainland Italy had been liberated. “Fascism had been given its death blow,” he wrote in his final assessment of the Italian campaign. “Elimination of Italy from the war had been accomplished.” Some two dozen German divisions were tied down in Italy alone, and many more in the Balkans and Greece. The Mediterranean had become an Allied pond: more than a thousand ships crossed the sea in December, three times as many as in June. Even Stalin had conceded that fighting in Italy seemed to be easing some pressure on the Eastern Front.
Vigor, authenticity, and integrity remained Eisenhower’s trademarks; he possessed a big brain and a big heart. He despised the enemy—hate had finally lodged in his bones—and cherished his polyglot alliance as the surest instrument of victory. From Algiers, he would take the template for an Allied headquarters and use it to build SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—and eventually NATO. He also would take with him sixty hard weeks of battle experience, in logistics, diplomacy, military governance, leadership, character, and mass slaughter.
He left with a nagging sense of loose ends, as well. “I am very disappointed to leave here before we could attempt one ambitious shot at Rome,” he told Marshall. Though he was uneasy at Churchill’s advocacy of an amphibious landing near Rome, his prescience was imperfect. “Jerry is going to write off this southern front,” he told reporters, “and I don’t think he is going to defend it long.” He vowed, wrongly, that there would be no frontal attacks against entrenched defenders. But he did not shy from the hardest of the hard truths he had absorbed: “Sometimes it just gets down to the dirty job of killing until one side or the other cracks.”
Eisenhower’s arrival in Washington would remain secret, allowing him a cocoon of privacy for perhaps the last time in his life. At 1:30 A.M. on January 2, after plucking the general’s stars from his cap, he climbed the servants’ stairs at the Wardman Park Hotel on Connecticut Avenue for his first reunion with Mamie in eighteen months. The White House sent a cooler of thick steaks and fifty Chesapeake oysters. Later he would visit John at West Point, and his mother in Kansas. “Why, it’s Dwight!” Ida Eisenhower exclaimed. “Nothing seems real any more.” To his family he appeared “heavier and definitely more authoritative,” in John’s words; when Mamie complained of his abrupt manner, he growled, “Hell, I’m going back to my theater where I can do what I want.” Twice he absentmindedly called his wife Kay, and when the moment came to leave she told him, “Don’t come back again till it’s over, Ike. I can’t stand losing you again.”
He would go on to greater things, becoming perhaps the largest figure on the war’s largest stage. But part of him would forever linger in the Mediterranean, where he had exchanged that boyish mien for the guise of a man. In a final message, dated January 1 and read to soldiers from Tunis to Ortona and from Palermo to San Pietro, he reduced his valedictory to fifteen words: “Until we meet again in the heart of the enemy’s continental stronghold, I send Godspeed.”
Part Three
7. A RIVER AND A ROCK
Colonel Warden Makes a Plan
MARRAKESH in midwinter remained a world apart, a world uninjured, a world where war was but a rumor. Snake charmers and professional storytellers thronged the teeming medina, along with tumblers, jugglers, henna artistes, monkey handlers, quacks, juice-squeezers, proselytizers, and dye merchants. An Army Air Forces officer described visiting a local sharif who “sat on his leather hassock fingering his white whiskers while his veiled wives brought in gorgeous five-hundred-year-old velvet robes, fists full of jade, emeralds, crystal and ambergris, and chests of gold and silver trinkets, all at very low prices.” In addition to elegant minarets and rose-tinted ramparts, Marrakesh had 28,000 registered prostitutes, and U.S. authorities attempting to curb the harlotry complained that French law required either catching a strumpet in flagrante delicto or securing from her clients a signed “statement of intercourse.” The skin trade flourished.
The Red City had been Winston Churchill’s Shangri-La since 1936, and it was here that he chose to recuperate from the pneumonia that had laid him low at Carthage. It was also here that he intended to refine his brainstorm: the plan to toss two divisions onto the beach at Anzio and “decide the battle of Rome,” as he had promised Roosevelt. Before leaving Tunisia, the prime minister donned his uniform in the La Marsa cottage—Clementine buckled the belt for him—and slowly shuffled past the drawn-up Coldstream Guard. Driving to El
In Marrakesh he occupied La Saadia, a lush former olive plantation where he and Roosevelt had stayed for a night precisely a year earlier, after the Casablanca conference. Built in 1923, the stucco villa opened onto an orangery, with the distant, snow-crowned Atlas peaks framed by swaying palms. Bougainvillea vines climbed through the courtyard where lizards basked in the winter sun; the interior rooms featured shoulder-high Moorish wall mosaics and carved-wood ceilings. A huge staff flew in from London, among them half a dozen cipher clerks and enough naval officers for around-the-clock vigilance in the map room abutting Churchill’s suite. Still weak, the prime minister loitered in bed until noon, then wallowed in a sunken bath filled with great gouts of hot water. For hours he listened to gramophone records of The Pirates of Penzance or played poker in a style described as “wildly rash but successful.” At sunset, aides improvised a sedan chair and lugged him up the winding staircase of La Saadia’s six-story observation tower—“it was certainly heavy going,” one bearer reported. Here amid the fluttering moths he sipped his tea and listened to the muezzins’ cry, as he had with Roosevelt. The mountains caught the dying carmine light, then stood as sentinels for the coming night. “This war,” Churchill mused, “will be known in history as the Unnecessary War.”
As his strength returned, he organized daily picnics in the Atlas foothills. The borrowed Cadillac roared through native villages, trailed by a retinue of servants, boon companions, and American MPs in open jeeps. Wearing a huge sombrero, Churchill flashed his V-for-victory at gaping Moroccan peasants, who soon began flashing it back. “We tear after him over the red plain in clouds of red dust,” Moran reported. “Deck chairs and hampers are piled on top of the cars…. Arab children gather round like sparrows waiting for crumbs.” Scrambling down a steep path to lunch beside a mountain brook, the prime minister found the return climb too arduous. “We took the white tablecloth, folded it like a rope and put it round his middle,” Moran added. Two soldiers “tugged him up while two of us pushed from behind, and a third carried his cigar.”