The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The highland glens above Cassino concealed more than four hundred German guns and rocket launchers. Field wire linked each battery to observers in field gray who nested in the high rocks like birds in a rookery, watching with supernal omniscience the movements of the living creatures below. For more than two months German engineers and press-ganged Italian laborers had blasted gun pits from the rock face, reinforcing the bunkers with telephone poles sawed into eight-foot lengths and roofing the structures with oak beams, more poles, and several feet of dirt. The defenses extended up to three thousand yards in depth. In Cassino town, fields of fire were cleared around the fortified rail station and Hotel Continental. Hitler provided even more defensive matériel than Kesselring demanded: more concrete, mines, and barbed wire; more antitank guns, engineers, and slave laborers; more three-ton armored turrets with charcoal burners to keep the gunners warm.
It was here that Kesselring hoped the Anglo-Americans would “break their teeth,” and it was here that they intended to attack.
The impending landing at Anzio on January 22 lent urgency to Fifth Army’s assault on the Gustav Line. On this southern front, Clark now counted seven divisions in his army, parceled into three corps across a thirty-five-mile front. Although the winter fighting had already left many units disorganized and bereft of reserves, Clark intended to press the attack immediately to divert German attention from the beachhead. “The momentum of our advance must be maintained at all costs,” Alexander urged four days after leaving Marrakesh.
In Operations Instructions No. 34, confidently titled “The Battle for Rome,” Alexander ordered Clark to force the enemy’s retreat beyond Rome and to press on to Florence and Pisa. Intelligence analysts at 15th Army Group predicted that Kesselring would withdraw when confronted by the pincers of Fifth Army from the southeast and the SHINGLE force from the northwest. To speed the enemy’s departure, all three corps would attack the Gustav Line. The two-division French Expeditionary Corps, or FEC, new to the theater and keen to redeem French honor, had surged forward on the far right of Clark’s front on January 12 and was making a mile per day, mostly uphill, with grenades and bayonets. On the left, the British X Corps would attack across the Garigliano River beginning on January 17, with two divisions near the sea and another one eight miles upstream.
The heart of the assault would fall in the center. On January 20, the U.S. II Corps was to cross the Rapido River, just a mile from Monte Trocchio and three miles downstream from Cassino. With a bridgehead secured by the 36th Division—the same Texans who had fought at Salerno and San Pietro—tanks from Old Ironsides, the 1st Armored Division, would storm across two new-laid bridges, veer up the Liri Valley to Frosinone, and merge with the Anzio force for a grand entry into Rome.
Clark later denied paternity of this plan, fingering Alexander instead. Yet it bore a striking resemblance to a scheme concocted by the Fifth Army commander as early as mid-December. Like SHINGLE, it embodied audacity and tactical plausibility. The Rapido even at flood stage was hardly fifty feet wide, though steep-banked and deep. Here lay the most direct route into the Liri Valley, and thence to the beachhead and Rome.
But also like SHINGLE, the Rapido plan had defects. Possession of the heights at the mouth of the Liri Valley, particularly Monte Cassino, gave the Germans an unobstructed view of the river and the ability to mass fires on all approaches. Truscott, whose 3rd Division had briefly been considered for a Rapido assault before being consigned to SHINGLE, told Clark in December that the attack would fail unless those heights were captured or attacked with enough fury to divert German attention.
“As long as this condition existed, bridges over the river could not long exist and any of our troops that succeeded in crossing would be cut to pieces,” Truscott’s chief of staff, Colonel Don E. Carleton, later observed. But Clark seemed “convinced that by some act of divine providence the well-entrenched defenders at Cassino would fade away and his tanks would go storming up the Liri Valley.”
The prospect of being cut to pieces displeased Major General Fred Walker, and it preyed on him body and soul. Since shortly after Salerno and through the scalding fight at San Pietro, the 36th Division commander had eyed the Rapido on the big map in his command post, sensing that destiny was tugging him toward this obscure creek below Cassino. By early January he had persuaded himself that the Rapido resembled the Marne, where in July 1918, as a thirty-one-year-old battalion commander, he had earned the Distinguished Service Cross for repelling an attack across the river by ten thousand Germans. He had never forgotten the sodden enemy corpses lining the muddy banks and drifting on the current. “I do not see how we, or any other division, can possibly succeed in crossing the Rapido River,” he confided to his diary on January 8. A week later he added, “This is going to be a tough job and I don’t like it. There is nothing in our favor.”
Square-jawed, with a heavy brow and a large nose that made him seem bigger than his actual five feet, ten inches and 173 pounds, Fred Walker once was described as an “amiable mastiff.” Born in Ohio, he earned a degree in mine engineering from Ohio State and enlisted as a private in 1911. After fighting in the Punitive Expedition against Mexico in 1916, he won fame—and survived mustard burns—in France. Walker was curious, alert, and ironic, a chess player although not a good one, and an excellent dancer. He was the sort of man who jotted down unfamiliar words to memorize—“factitious,” “chary,” “pretentious,” “abjure”—as well as quotes from Emerson and inspirational passages from Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin. As an instructor at the Army War College in the 1930s, Walker had taught a young rising star named Mark Clark. Despite their nine-year age difference, the two became “very good friends,” in Walker’s estimation, and shortly before Pearl Harbor the ascendant Clark had persuaded Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the Army Ground Forces chief, to give Walker command of the 36th Division.
The very good friends had since drifted apart. Perhaps envious of his former protégé, Walker had also begun doubting Clark’s tactical acuity while the division was still training in North Africa. After Salerno and San Pietro, his disaffection blossomed. In a black, cloth-covered diary with red corners, he recorded his disdain in the neat cursive he had once used to scribble vocabulary words. “Our wasteful policy or method of taking one mountain mass after another gains no tactical advantage, locally,” he wrote shortly before Christmas. “There is always another mountain mass beyond with the Germans dug in on it.” The reserved Clark kept his distance, disinclined to heed advice from his old mentor yet admiring Walker’s performance at Salerno. Clark suspected that Walker resented not receiving command of VI Corps after Dawley’s relief at Salerno. Privately, he disapproved when Walker chose one son as his operations officer and another son as his aide; soldiers grumbled that the division commander was keeping his kin out of harm’s way.
At fifty-six, Fred Walker was now the oldest division commander in the field. Age and stress had taken a toll, which he carefully concealed. Since the summer of 1942, he had suffered from severe headaches and tachycardia. He wore heavy wool underwear to combat severe arthritis in the shoulder, hips, and knees. Easily fatigued, he had recurrent spells of “partial blindness and [an] inability to articulate properly.” Several times a week he felt heart pain, or faint. A physician had diagnosed arteriosclerosis, and Walker privately complained of “impaired memory, lack of endurance, emotion tensions, [and] restlessness.” As the third week of January unspooled, he caught a bad cold.
Walker also concealed his trepidation about the Rapido. In discussions with Clark and other senior officers, he told his diary on January 13, “I have mentioned the difficulties involved. They do not want to talk about them.” He proposed attacking upriver, where the Rapido was fordable, but chose not to press his case forcefully. “They do not understand my problems and do not know what I am talking about,” Walker wrote. Staff officers fed his anxiety. “General, it’s going to be awfully hard for me to keep from sounding so pessimistic about this,
On Tuesday morning, Walker strode from his command post on the eastern face of Monte Rotondo and drove south through Mignano on Highway 6. The January sun sat low in the southern sky, “sickly, whitish and weak,” as one lieutenant said, and even wool underwear hardly warmed Walker’s bones. The usual odors of damp canvas and scorched coffee filled the II Corps headquarters tent, where staff officers drew on acetate maps with colored grease pencils. Walker was greeted by Major General Keyes, the corps commander, who was trim and impeccable in polished boots.
Walker reviewed his attack plan as crisply as if delivering a War College lecture. At eight P.M. on Thursday, the 141st Infantry Regiment would cross the Rapido in small boats at a single ferry site one mile upstream from the town of Sant’Angelo in Theodice; simultaneously, the 143rd Infantry intended to cross at two points downstream. In this sector, the Rapido meandered north to south, so the attack would flow east to west before securing Sant’Angelo and swinging north into the Liri Valley. In keeping with Keyes’s orders, “large, strong fighting patrols” had slipped across the river for the past two nights to “keep contact with the enemy” and assess German defenses.
Those were formidable, Walker said with a knowing look. German troops from the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division—escapees from Sicily who had also fought at Salerno and Monte Camino—were “very well organized, wired in, and in depth, supported by automatic weapons, small arms fire, [and] prepared defensive fires of artillery, mortars.” Of seven boats launched the previous night by the 141st Infantry, five had been lost on a current clocked at four miles per hour. Scouts reported a double apron of barbed wire beyond the far bank and a broad mine belt nearly a mile long. As expected, German demolitionists had blown the bridge at Sant’Angelo three days earlier; the river had been dredged two years before, and spoil lined both banks to form steep gravel dikes. Mud remained “shoe mouth deep” despite recent dry weather. Six-man mine removal teams crawled about on their hands and knees each night, but German sappers sneaked over the river to reseed cleared approaches. Yesterday, a division surgeon reported “an epidemic…of traumatic amputations of one or both legs.” As he finished sketching his plan, Walker again cocked an eyebrow.
Keyes listened intently. He was careful not to betray his own doubts, about the attack and about Walker. A frontal assault across the river was “unsound,” Keyes had warned Clark; given German command of the high ground, the crossings would be made “in a fishbowl.” Even back in Sicily, Keyes had drafted alternative plans for precisely this tactical conundrum. His favorite, dubbed Big Cassino, envisioned an assault across the Garigliano by both II Corps and the British X Corps, which then would scale the massif southwest of Cassino to outflank the fortified mouth of the Liri Valley. The scheme intrigued Clark. But Alexander and McCreery, the X Corps commander, considered it “a tactical monstrosity”; British troops had neither training nor equipment for mountain warfare. Clark sided with the British—he was increasingly beguiled by the image of American tanks roaring toward Rome—and Big Cassino slid into a drawer.
Keyes persisted. In late December, he proposed crossing the Rapido “a day or two” after the Anzio landings. “If the enemy withdraws forces now on our front to oppose VI Corps [at Anzio], there is a chance that this corps can make a real advance,” he wrote. Clark demurred, insisting that the Rapido attack precede SHINGLE. On January 13, Keyes warned that the British 46th Division, which was to protect Walker’s left flank, planned to cross the Garigliano with a modest, two-battalion assault. “The effort of the 46th Division should be made by the entire division,” Keyes wrote, otherwise it risked a “gradualism” that could leave the Americans exposed. Clark again declined to intervene.
Geoff Keyes knew his business. He possessed, in the estimation of George Patton, “the best tactical mind of any officer I know.” Son of a cavalry officer, Keyes grew up on horseback along the Mexican border. Two years ahead of Eisenhower at West Point, Keyes in one football game scored two touchdowns, kicked both conversions, and booted a forty-three-yard field goal to account for seventeen points; the academy’s legendary Master of the Sword, Marty Maher, proclaimed him “the only man who could stop Jim Thorpe” on the gridiron. “If there is a man in the Corps who is more universally liked than he,” the academy yearbook stated, “we have yet to find him.”
Also a cavalryman, Keyes had attended the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris and served as Patton’s deputy during the invasions of Morocco and Sicily. “The impetuous, vitriolic, histronic Patton is considerably leavened by the calm, deliberate, circumspect Keyes,” a War Department observer had reported to Washington from Palermo. Slender, pleasant, and tactful, Keyes was a devout Roman Catholic who attended mass each morning and eschewed profanity—“not even hell or damn,” one comrade said. Eisenhower unfairly described him as “a man who has everything but a sense of humor”; in fact, he possessed a puckish streak. Behind Patton’s endorsement, Keyes in September took command of II Corps after Omar Bradley’s departure for England. “Don’t be afraid to show pleasant reactions in your contact with your subordinates,” Eisenhower told him. “Every commander is made, in the long run, by his subordinates. We are all intensely human, and war is a drama, not a game of chess.”
Like so many American generals, Keyes distrusted the British, and his spare, bemused diary entries revealed an intense Anglophobia as the Rapido attack drew near. “God forbid we ever have to serve with or near the British again,” he wrote on January 16. A day later he added, “Clark insists we are not being sold down the river but I am not convinced. Every move is a repetition of the slick maneuver of the British in planning HUSKY and the Sicilian campaign.” On the day of Walker’s visit, he wrote, “The British are going to contribute nothing as usual.”
As the conference in the II Corps command post drew to a close, much remained unsaid, and in that silence sprouted mistrust and discord. Walker privately considered Keyes “too cavalry,” with a “Boy Scout attitude” toward the grim infantry combat ahead. The notion of Sherman tanks storming up the Liri Valley was “visionary,” Walker believed; the term was not a compliment. Sensing Walker’s hostility, Keyes felt a reciprocal antipathy. He wondered whether the division commander was overmatched.
More important, both men remained mute about their shared disquiet. Can-do zeal required obedience and a bluff optimism. Walker finished his brief, then scooped up his maps and papers. He would prefer to attack elsewhere, he said. But in a final burst of bravado, and perhaps sensing that his rendezvous with the Rapido was ineluctable, he advised Keyes that he was “confident of success.” The 36th Division, he added, would “be in Sant’Angelo on the morning of the 21st.”
Only in his diary did Walker speak from the heart: “We have done everything that we can, but I do not now see how we can succeed.”
Sant’Angelo was a drab farm village on a forty-foot bluff above the turquoise Rapido. The local cantine served Peroni beer and a vino renowned for potency. Pastel houses with iron balconies and red tile roofs crowded the narrow main street. Flying buttresses shored up the church of San Giovanni Battista, with its handsome campanile. Black-bordered death notices were pasted on a billboard beneath the narthex.
The notices had multiplied after the first bombs hit Sant’Angelo on September 10, killing a three-year-old girl and her parents. The Germans soon arrived from nearby Cassino, carrying large hooks with which to drag the haystacks in search both of contraband and of young men for their labor battalions. Electricity and running water became sporadic and then nonexistent. Mail delivery ended. Phones went dead. Farmers toiled at night, hitching oxen to their plows and listening for what the locals called the “she-wolf,” the six-ba
Three hundred impressed Italians dug trenches and cleared brush on the Rapido flats for better fields of fire. German commanders now considered Sant’Angelo the “strongest point of the defensive line.” The river’s west bank was defended by two battalions from the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, described by Allied intelligence as “the strongest single German division in the Italian theater,” with a full roster and ample heavy weapons. Aggressive American patrolling kept them alert and edgy. “Extensive enemy movements observed opposite left wing of 15th Panzer Grenadier Division,” the Tenth Army war diary recorded on January 17. “The enemy has crept up to the riverbank.”
The Germans grew even edgier after the British attack began on the lower Garigliano at nine P.M. that night. The 5th and 56th Divisions surged across the river, a dozen miles downstream from Sant’Angelo. “The waiting is the worst part,” the Royal Artillery signaler Spike Milligan had written as the assault began. “I oil my tommy gun. I don’t know why, it’s already oiled.” To the surprise of Jerry and Tommy alike, by dawn on January 18 ten battalions occupied the far bank; German commanders had doubted the Allies would attack on a moonless night. “Moving off in trucks with our hearts in our mouths,” a Scots Guards lieutenant told his diary. “Passing very ominous blood wagons coming back the other way…. I wonder if we look heroic filing away in the darkness.”
They gained the far bank but not much more: the X Corps bridgehead barely extended three miles, and a ferocious German counterattack almost shoved the lead companies back into the river. The crossing sites would remain under German artillery fire for three months, and British soldiers complained that the alluvial plain resembled a “mine marsh.” Still, they had made a promising start. “I am convinced that we are now facing the greatest crisis yet encountered,” Kesselring advised Vietinghoff, his Tenth Army commander, shortly before ten A.M. on January 18. The Americans, he added, would now likely attack below Cassino in an attempt to storm the Liri Valley.