The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
By early January, Churchill was again master of all he surveyed. “Can’t I ever get any commanders who will fight?” he complained to one senior officer. “You don’t care if we lose the war. You just want to draw your pay and eat your rations.” Patting his staff officers on the shoulder, he had told them, “Be good boys and write me a nice plan.” But when logisticians carefully documented the shortfall of landing craft needed to carry out his various amphibious schemes around the globe, he replied, “Magnificent, but negative as usual.” In his air commodore’s uniform, he mounted a reviewing stand to take the salutes of parading French colonial troops bound for Italy—“black as pitch, in reddish uniforms with red fezzes and bayonets on their rifles,” one witness reported, “hopelessly out of step but obviously tough soldiers.” The jubilant crowd huzzahed him with shouts of “Vive, Churchill!”
Finding that he could easily phone Algiers, he pestered AFHQ with calls despite warnings that the French had likely tapped the lines. “Undue discretion was never one of the P.M.’s faults,” Macmillan wrote. In London, a peevish Brooke told his diary:
Winston sitting in Marrakesh is now full of beans and trying to win the war from there. As a result a three-cornered flow of telegrams in all directions is gradually resulting in utter confusion. I wish to God he would come home and get under control.
Not likely. As Moran noted, “The P.M. has a bright idea. He is organizing an operation all on his own…. Twice the picnics have had to be sacrificed to stern duty.” When Moran observed that Hitler seemed engrossed not only in grand strategy but also in the minute details of German war operations, the prime minister nodded. “Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s just what I do.”
Churchill’s “bright idea” had been bandied about since shortly after the capture of Naples, when Fifth Army planners began studying the beaches southwest of Rome. Alexander in a dreamy reverie had envisioned five fresh divisions falling on the German flank. But when neither the troops nor the means to move them materialized, Clark proposed landing a single division, reinforced to 24,000 troops who would cling to the shingle for a week until relieved by their Fifth Army brethren arriving overland through the Gustav Line. The scheme in fact was code-named SHINGLE. Truscott’s 3rd Division was to be given the honor of landing alone one hundred miles behind enemy lines. “You are going to destroy the best damned division in the United States Army,” Truscott warned Clark. “For there will be no survivors.” When stalemate froze the Winter Line, a chastened Clark recommended canceling the plan. On December 22, Alexander complied.
Churchill refused to capitulate. “It would be folly to allow the campaign in Italy to drag on,” he said while still in his La Marsa sickbed. He wheedled and pleaded, bullied and petitioned. If Rome were not captured, the world would “regard our campaign as a failure,” he insisted, because “whoever holds Rome holds the title deeds of Italy.” Without Rome, the campaign would “peter out ingloriously,” he wrote Clark. A jab in the flank could well compel Kesselring to withdraw his forces from central Italy, freeing Fifth and Eight Armies from their hyperborean fetters. Galvanized by the prime minister’s elan, Clark replied, “I have felt for a long time that it was the decisive way to approach Rome.”
The revival of Operation SHINGLE had gathered momentum on Christmas Day, when Churchill extracted from Alexander and other senior commanders pledges of support for a larger, two-division landing. With Eisenhower’s departure, leadership in the Mediterranean devolved to the British; the malleable Field Marshal Wilson simply observed that it was “a good idea to go around them rather than be bogged down in the mountains.” Eisenhower had tendered a few departing words of caution, noting that the enemy “hasn’t been predictable so far, and there’s no guarantee he’s going to act the way you want him to now.” If disquieted by SHINGLE, the departing commander-in-chief chose not to assert himself; the British formally recorded that he and his top lieutenants “signified their agreement with the prime minister’s proposal.” As Eisenhower left the theater, he concluded that Churchill had “practically taken tactical command in the Mediterranean.”
“I have arrived in Italy, O Best of Emperors!” the Byzantine general Belisarius wrote to Justinian in A.D. 544 at the start of his campaign against the Ostrogoths. “In great want of men, of horses, of arms, and of money.” For latter-day invaders, the want was mainly of ships. The Anglo-Americans from 1940 to 1945 would build 45,000 landing vessels of all types, but there would never be enough: every major American and British campaign in World War II began with an amphibious operation, and the global demand for shipping far outweighed the supply.
“Shipping [is] at the root of everything,” Admiral King observed, and that prosaic truism obtained for Italy as it had for North Africa and would for Normandy. To land and sustain two divisions required 88 LSTs and 160 lesser landing craft; of the 105 LSTs currently in the Mediterranean, two-thirds were scheduled to return to England by January 15 for refitting in time for OVERLORD. First at La Marsa and then in Marrakesh, Churchill “produced set after set of calendar dates” to prove that delaying the departure of several dozen LSTs for a few weeks would not upset the sacrosanct Normandy timetable. To the prime minister’s elated surprise, Roosevelt endorsed his efforts in a cable from Washington. “I thank God for this fine decision,” Churchill replied. “Full steam ahead.”
Operation SHINGLE now carried an inexorable momentum. “Clark and I are confident that we have a great chance of pulling off something big if given the means with which to do it,” Alexander wrote Churchill on January 4. In truth, Clark felt ambivalent. Even two divisions landed behind German lines would be exposed “on a very long limb,” he had confided to his diary on January 2; yet he felt that “a pistol was being held at [my] head” by the prime minister. He pressed without success for a three-division landing, and for restricting all assault troops to a single nationality to simplify logistics. “We are supposed to go up there, dump two divisions ashore…and wait for the rest of the Army to join up,” Clark told his diary. Perhaps to buck himself up, he added, “I am convinced that we are going to do it, and that it is going to be a success.”
To clinch the deal, Churchill proposed a conference in Marrakesh on Friday, January 7. Too busy to leave Italy, Clark sent several staff officers who arrived at the exquisite La Mamounia Hotel to find confusion beneath the Art Deco sconces and Moorish arabesques. Regardless of Fifth Army’s request for enough shipping to provide fifteen hundred tons of supplies per day indefinitely, the Royal Navy planned to put the assault force ashore like castaways, with a week’s provisions and no resupply. Alexander had consented to an American commander for SHINGLE, Major General John Lucas, while insisting on a multinational invasion because “heavy casualties might be expected” and should be shared, “lest undesirable reactions occur at home.” Yet Alexander harbored several misapprehensions about Lucas, who had replaced Dawley as the U.S. VI Corps commander after Salerno. “Lucas, who is the best American corps commander, planned and carried out the Salerno landing, and consequently has experience of amphibious operations,” Alexander had written Churchill and Brooke. None of that was true.
The conference convened at La Saadia at 6:30 P.M. on Friday evening. The throb of drums carried from the medina, and the perfume of honeysuckle drifted through the villa where Churchill sat in his living room amid nineteen officers. The prime minister quickly reviewed the history of SHINGLE: how the single-division plan had expired only to be resuscitated with a bigger, better plan that eventually would fling more than 100,000 Yanks and Tommies into the enemy rear; how at least eighty-four LSTs would remain in the Mediterranean until February 5, landing not only the U.S. 3rd and British 1st Divisions, but reinforcements from the U.S. 45th and 1st Armored Divisions; how Kesselring would be forced to thin his defenses near Cassino to confront this threat to his supply lines on Highways 6 and 7, allowing Fifth Army to sunder the German line; how the quick capture of Rome would give the Allies those “title deeds” to Italy.
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The conclave broke for supper, then reconvened for more discussion at the Mamounia without Churchill. Few cared to provoke the prime minister’s caustic contempt with overt opposition to SHINGLE. “You take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, and the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together—what do you get? The sum total of their fears!” Churchill had recently complained. Hour by hour the officers edged closer to consensus. Minefields and shallow shore gradients had narrowed the landing site options to several beaches bracketing the resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno. Those beaches also had the virtue of not being overlooked by high ground, like those at Salerno; the Alban Hills—the southern portal to Rome—lay twenty miles inland. Initial photo reconnaissance showed Anzio to be heavily fortified, but analysts soon realized that the area had once been an Italian military training ground; most defenses now lay abandoned.
Could the Germans quickly reinforce the beachhead with troops from the north? This seemed unlikely, particularly given Allied air superiority. Would the beachhead force and Fifth Army be too far apart—at least sixty miles at the outset—to support each other? This was deemed “an unavoidable risk.” Alexander’s intelligence staff posited that German Tenth Army forces would “make an attempt to seal off the beachhead, and [would] thereby be maneuvered out of their strong defensive position at Cassino.”
Field Marshal Wilson found the conversation so soporific that he went to bed. Beetle Smith, who remained the AFHQ chief of staff pending his departure for London, apologized for the commander-in-chief’s early departure. “After all,” Smith quipped, “he is getting old.” Not until Saturday morning would Wilson learn that by 1:30 A.M. his minions had talked themselves into an invasion at Anzio. Skeptics remained, including Brigadier Strong and several logisticians, but a majority supported Churchill’s daring gambit. Alexander voiced enthusiasm, but seemed to hedge his bets in a note to himself on Saturday: “Take no chances. Keep a reserve.”
Bleary-eyed, they reassembled in the La Saadia villa at 9:30 A.M. Saturday. Churchill had prevailed through intimidation, endurance, and imaginative panache, wearing them down like water on stone. “It will astonish the world,” the prime minister said of SHINGLE, “and it will certainly frighten Kesselring.” He remained contemptuous of logistical anxieties, telling Alexander, “I do hope, General, that when you have landed this great quantity of lorries and cannon you will find room for a few foot soldiers, if only to guard the lorries.” As Harold Macmillan had recently noted, “Winston is getting more and more dogmatic…and rather repetitive.” SHINGLE was not a bad plan, and it embodied the military virtues of audacity and surprise. Yet enough pieces of it were bad to risk rotting the whole. The belief that Kesselring would ignore this spear in the ribs and withdraw to the north was simply wishful. “It was a bluff, to scare the Germans into pulling back,” Alexander later admitted. No flinty-eyed assessment analyzed the likely strategic reaction of an enemy that did not scare easily. Once again, the Allies lacked the true measure of their adversaries.
Moreover, the SHINGLE force was sized not by the number of troops required to succeed, but by the number of divisions and ships available. “You need more men,” General Middleton told AFHQ after examining the plan. “You can get ashore, but you can’t get off the beachhead.” A weak corps was being dispatched for a job that required an army. Respected voices that might have given the planners pause were unheard: Admiral Kent Hewitt had opposed SHINGLE in December, but was subsequently summoned back to Washington; Hewitt would not return to the Mediterranean until late January.
True, Allied air-and seapower caused perturbations in the German high command. “Where can the enemy land? Everywhere,” Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, lamented in December. “When will he land? The enemy is not tied to any season.” Yet if command of the seas gave Allied commanders the mobility to attack where they pleased—and the British had built an empire on that principle—Churchill continued to underestimate the ability of a motorized defender, using roads and rails on interior lines, to concentrate forces overland faster than they could be consolidated over a beach.
Another die had been cast, another lot of fates consigned. Churchill “had imposed his will on the generals and admirals against their better judgment,” Samuel Eliot Morison concluded in the official U.S. Navy history of the Mediterranean. Alexander accepted SHINGLE “out of loyalty to his patrons,” a British officer wrote. “It was an error of judgment to have done so.” He also had failed to clarify precisely what his lieutenants were to do upon reaching shore; ambiguity rarely meliorated a flawed plan.
For now a buzz and bustle took hold, a sense of possibility and purpose. “Operation SHINGLE is on!” Clark told his diary on January 8 upon hearing the news. A chance to break the winter stalemate was at hand. Whatever ambivalence Clark harbored, surely the prime minister was correct: without risk there could be no honor, no glory, no adventure.
As for Churchill, he was the lion redux. Morocco had restored his health, his verve, his roar. Soon he would fly back to England, ending a two-month absence and keener than ever to obliterate Nazi despotism from the face of the earth. On January 8 he cabled Roosevelt:
A unanimous agreement for action as proposed was reached by the responsible officers of both countries…. Everyone is in good heart and the resources seem sufficient. Every aspect was thrashed out in full detail.
The wariness of his lieutenants worried him not at all. Perhaps influenced by the lush ambiance of Marrakesh, Churchill turned to a horticultural metaphor. “They may say I lead them up the garden path,” he said, “but at every stage of the garden they have found delectable fruit and wholesome vegetables.”
“Nothing Was Right Except the Courage”
AT last, at long last, they had reached the end of Purple Heart Valley. On the chilly Sabbath morning of January 16, a footsore regiment from the U.S. 34th Division crept up the limestone flank of Monte Trocchio, four miles northeast of San Pietro Infine. Olive trees bearded the lower slopes and a few splintered cedars ringed the crest. So many American artillery shells had crashed across Trocchio before dawn—shells chalked in vengeance with the names of American soldiers killed or wounded in the recent fighting—that red-hot fragments “fell in gusts like a thunderstorm,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White. Now the riflemen plodded upward, scrutinizing every lichen-covered rock for booby traps and straining for the telltale clap of exploding shoe mines. An occasional pop! carried across the slope, followed by an anguished shriek, but German troops had decamped. At noon the lead scouts wriggled onto the rocky summit to behold a panoramic view of the perdition behind and the perdition still ahead.
To the rear lay the Mignano Gap and a seven-mile stretch of sanguinary eminences: Camino and La Difensa, Rotondo and Lungo, Sammucro and the slag heap once known as San Pietro. To cross that seven-mile stretch and pierce the Bernhardt Line had taken the Fifth Army six weeks, at a cost of sixteen thousand casualties.
Ahead lay a pastoral river plain, three miles wide. Highway 6 bisected these alluvial flats from Monte Trocchio to Cassino—now the most fortified town in Italy—then swerved up the Liri Valley toward Rome, eighty miles distant, before vanishing in the midday haze. Behind Cassino loomed its beetling namesake, Monte Cassino, crowned with the gleaming white Benedictine abbey that for fifteen centuries had been among Christianity’s most venerated shrines. A serpentine river threaded the alluvial flats from right to left past Cassino. The complex watercourse bore several names, but to American engineers—who had built intricate plaster relief models of this terrain, based on seventy thousand aerial photos—it was known as the Rapido. Several miles downstream, the Rapido swam into the Liri to become the Garigliano, which then flowed southwest for fifteen miles to the sea.
The Rapido-Garigliano floodplain and the steep uplands beyond it formed the western segment of the Gustav Line, the most ominous of Kesselring’s fortified barriers below Rome. The line stretched for one hundred miles across the Apennines to the Adriatic north of Ortona, but nowhere was it stouter than around Cassino, gateway to the beckoning Liri Valley. Already in spate from January rains, the Rapido and other streams were enhanced by a German “flooding program” under which dikes were demolished and canals diverted to create shallow polders across the flats.