The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The short peace ended. Dusk rolled over the bottoms. The mists reconvened. A final clutch of medics emerged carrying a long pole with a white truce flag that caught the dying light. More than a hundred bodies had been retrieved. But hundreds more remained, and would remain for months, carrion for the ravenous dogs that roamed these fens. Here the dreamless dead would lie, leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn.
The Show Must Go On
MUCH had happened through antiquity in the half-moon port once known as Puteoli. Just inland, at Lake Avernus, Aeneas reputedly entered the underworld, crossing the river Styx to find in the Fields of Mourning “those souls consumed by the harsh, wasting sickness, cruel love.” On the Puteoli wharf, St. Paul had at last arrived in Italy aboard a grain packet after his shipwreck on Malta. The Roman amphitheater, third largest on the peninsula, featured sixty trapdoors that could be lifted as one to release wild beasts purchased from theatrical agents in Africa; it was said that the lions here refused to eat Saint Gennaro in A.D. 305, and authorities were forced to cut off his holy head. Modern Puteoli—renamed Pozzuoli—in January 1944 was home to a skinny nine-year-old girl called Stuzzicadenti by her schoolmates. After the war, skinny no more, the Toothpick would be better known as Sophia Loren.
Pozzuoli also was the temporary home for thousands of Allied soldiers. Here, ten miles northwest of Naples, the staging for SHINGLE neared completion even as the first sketchy reports arrived of fighting on the Rapido, fifty miles north. The Anzio assault force in VI Corps comprised two infantry divisions—the U.S. 3rd and the British 1st—plus paratroopers, American Rangers, and British Commandos, for a total of 47,000 men and 5,500 vehicles. Another 11,000 soldiers would follow immediately, including an armored brigade. The four-hundred-ship armada now loading in Pozzuoli and three other ports near Naples included four Liberty ships, eighty-four LSTs, eighty-four LSIs, and fifty LCTs. U.S. Navy and Royal Air Force meteorologists for days had studied their barometers and weather charts with the intensity of augurs scrutinizing entrails. Their forecast for H-hour on Saturday morning, January 22, was heartening: light airs, calm seas, haze, 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
A festive mood infused the docks. Along the Pozzuoli waterfront, LSTs had beached with bow doors yawning on the flat rocks used by fishermen to spread their nets. Columns of jeeps and overloaded trucks snaked through the crooked alleyways toward the ships. Italian vendors sang out from the street corners, offering fruit, wine, and—to the dismay of security officers—postcards of Anzio. Irish Guardsmen marched to their ships as a band played “Saint Patrick’s Day”; their commander took his troops’ salute while teetering on a statue pedestal. Supplies sufficient for fifteen days of combat were hoisted into the holds—and, upon discovery by vigilant quartermasters, some extraneous items were hoisted out, including a portable organ and several thousand hymnals.
Bum boats swarmed through the anchorage, peddling oranges to Royal Navy tars with shouts of “Good-a luck!” An airman wrote in his diary: “Native dagoes were fast to row alongside our boat and sell everything from nuts & apples to liquers.” Troops awaiting embarkation in a nearby warehouse watched a feature film, which was repeatedly interrupted whenever more units were called to the gangways. Soldiers shrugged and gathered their gear, repeating a GI aphorism always uttered with irony if not contempt: “The show must go on.”
Robert Capa arrived in Pozzuoli with his camera bag and $150 worth of black-market Spanish brandy. He joined Bill Darby, newly promoted to full colonel and now commanding three battalions that had been melded into the 6615th Ranger Force. “The boys were ordered to spread the rumor they were going home,” Capa wrote. Hundreds of Italian girls swarmed to the docks
to say goodbye, to remind their friends not to forget to send them the visas, and to collect the remaining C-rations. It was a grotesque scene: the soldiers sitting on the docks, having their shoes shined; holding in their left hand a box of rations; their right, the waist of their sweethearts.
Boarding the Princess Beatrix, the Winchester Castle, the Royal Ulsterman, and three LSTs, the Rangers slung their hammocks, filled their canteen cups with “Limey tar” from the coffee urns, and repaired to the weather decks for calisthenics. “They think it’s gonna be all love and nickel beer,” Darby said, “but I don’t think it will be.”
On the Naples waterfront, below broad-shouldered Vesuvius, the 3rd Division band crashed through a medley of marches as raw-boned infantrymen tromped past in a panoply of smart salutes and snapping guidons. “All that fanfare didn’t seem quite right,” a staff officer wrote. “The whole thing had a feeling of unreality about it.” When the band struck up the division anthem in march time, soldiers burst into song:
I’m just a dog-face soldier with a rifle on my shoulder
And I eat a Kraut for breakfast every day.
So feed me ammunition
Keep me in the Third Division
Your dog-face soldier boy’s o-kay!
Aboard the U.S.S. Biscayne, a former seaplane tender now converted to a flagship, the roaring voices pleased Lucian Truscott, who stood on the fantail in his leather jacket and lacquered two-star helmet. GIs rarely sang as their fathers had in the Great War. “There was no inclination to lighten burdens with a song,” as Truscott later put it. But the chorus now suggested resurgent spirits after the fraught Winter Line campaign. Many new men now filled the 3rd Division; since Sicily, the turnover of lieutenants had exceeded 100 percent. Truscott knew that esprit would be vital in the coming weeks. So, too, would robust health, and for the past month medicos had struggled to bring the division to fighting trim by treating ailments from trench foot to bronchitis to gonorrhea. To soothe his own chronically inflamed vocal chords, Truscott had scheduled three paintings of his throat with silver nitrate during the 120-mile voyage to Anzio.
The thump of drums from the dockside band carried into the crowded Biscayne deckhouse that served as the Army’s floating command post. Another major general listened to the martial beat with both pride and irrepressible dread. “I have many misgivings but am also optimistic,” John Porter Lucas had written in his diary after boarding the ship on Thursday afternoon. “I struggle to be calm and collected.”
For Lucas, that struggle had just begun. The commander of VI Corps, and thus of SHINGLE, he hardly looked the part of the warrior chieftain. He was pudgy and gray, with a brushcut widow’s peak, wire-rim spectacles, and a snowy mustache of the sort favored by French field generals in World War I. He puffed incessantly on a corncob pipe, and carried an iron-tipped cane given him by Omar Bradley. “Fifty-four years old today,” Lucas had told his diary on January 14, “and I am afraid I feel every year of it.” One Tommy thought he seemed “ten years older than Father Christmas.” Lucas gave an Irish Guardsman the impression of “a pleasant, mild, elderly gentleman being helped out of layers of overcoats.”
Born in West Virginia, he was commissioned as a cavalry officer at West Point in 1911, then rode into Mexico with Pershing’s Punitive Expedition before being wounded in France, at Amiens. Lucas later commanded the 3rd Division at the time of Pearl Harbor and served as Eisenhower’s deputy in North Africa. This was his third corps command, including a brief stint as Bradley’s successor at II Corps before Marshall and Eisenhower picked him to replace Dawley at Salerno. Clark had privately preferred Matthew Ridgway, but accepted Lucas with a shrug.
Lucas drove a jeep named Hoot, quoted Kipling “by the yard,” and had accumulated several nicknames, including Old Luke and Sugar Daddy; at Anzio he would acquire more, notably Foxy Grandpa. Although he considered the Germans “unutterable swine,” one staff officer wrote that he “never seemed to want to hurt anybody—at times, almost including the enemy.” A British general thought Lucas possessed “absolutely no presence”; a Grenadier Guards commander confessed that when Lucas visited his battalion billets above Naples Bay “our spirits sank as we watched this elderly figure puffing his way around the comp
For Lucas’s malady there was no inoculation. Empathy might ennoble a man, but it could debilitate a general. “I think too often of my men out in the mountains,” he had written during the winter campaign. “I am far too tender-hearted ever to be a success at my chosen profession.” A few days before boarding Biscayne, he added, “I must keep from thinking of the fact that my order will send these men into a desperate attack.” Upon hearing that SHINGLE had been authorized, Lucas portrayed himself as “a lamb being led to slaughter”; accordingly, he revised his last will and testament. The sanguine assurance of his superiors baffled him. “By the time your troops land, the Germans will have already pulled back past Rome,” Admiral John Cunningham, the British naval commander in the Mediterranean, had told him. Alexander claimed that the capture of Rome and subsequent hell-for-leather pursuit northward meant that “OVERLORD would be unnecessary.”
Could Alexander and others, he wondered, have additional intelligence that spawned such confidence? AFHQ asserted that it was “very questionable whether the enemy proposed to continue the defensive battle south of Rome much after the middle of February.” Fifth Army headquarters also claimed that enemy strength was “ebbing due to casualties, exhaustion, and possible lowering of morale.” Four days after landing at Anzio, the SHINGLE force would face no more than 31,000 Germans, according to Fifth Army analysts, and nearly two more weeks would pass before the enemy would be able to move even two more divisions from northern Italy. The designated military governor of Rome had already requested $1,000 for an “entertainment fund” in the capital.
Lucas beheld a different vision. His VI Corps intelligence analysts believed the Germans would muster a dozen battalions and a hundred tanks at Anzio on D-day, which would grow to twenty-nine battalions within a week and to more than five divisions and 150 tanks by D+16. VI Corps also estimated that, “even under favorable conditions,” reinforcement of the beachhead from the Cassino front “cannot be expected in under thirty days.” Lucas confided to his diary, “This whole affair has a strong odor of Gallipoli”—the disastrous British amphibious invasion of Turkey in 1915.
An old friend shared his premonitions. George Patton flew from Palermo to bid Lucas farewell before returning to Britain for his new army command. “John, there is no one in the Army I hate to see killed as much as you, but you can’t get out of this alive,” Patton told him. “Of course you might be only badly wounded. No one ever blames a wounded general for anything.” Patton advised reading the Bible. To Lucas’s aide he added, “If things get too bad, shoot the old man in the back end.”
Lucas’s milquetoast demeanor obscured a keen tactical brain. He recognized, as did too few of his superiors, that the exalted ambitions for SHINGLE exceeded the means allocated to achieve them. Worse yet, those ambitions were muddled and contradictory, particularly with respect to the vital high ground northeast of Anzio, known as the Colli Laziali, or Alban Hills. Under Alexander’s instructions to Clark on January 12, the SHINGLE force was “to cut the enemy’s main communications in the Colli Laziali area southeast of Rome,” and to threaten the German rear on the Cassino front. The two Allied forces were then to “join hands at the earliest possible moment,” and hie through Rome “with the utmost possible speed.”
Yet the Fifth Army order issued later the same day instructed Lucas to “seize and secure a beachhead at Anzio,” then to “advance on Colli Laziali.” Clark remained deliberately vague about whether VI Corps was to surmount the Alban Hills or simply amble toward them. Through painful experience, the Fifth Army commander now expected the Germans to fight hard, first for the beachhead, then for the approaches to Rome. Alexander might wish otherwise, but he was “a peanut and a feather duster,” as Clark told his diary in an odd, impertinent blend of metaphors.
In a private message, Clark advised Lucas to first secure the beachhead and avoid jeopardizing his corps; if the enemy proved supine, then VI Corps could lunge for the hills to cut both Highways 6 and 7, the main supply routes from Rome to Kesselring’s forces on the Garigliano and at Cassino.
“Don’t stick your neck out, Johnny,” Clark told Lucas. “I did at Salerno and got into trouble.” He added, “You can forget this goddam Rome business.”
Fantasy and wishful thinking suffused Alexander’s SHINGLE plan; Clark added realism, flexibility, and insubordinate arrogance. Now confusion clattered down the chain of command. The XII Air Support Command, which would provide the invasion force with air cover, assumed that SHINGLE was intended to “advance and secure the high ground.” The British 1st Division commander, Major General William R. C. Penney, also had the impression that his troops were to “advance north towards fulfillment of the corps mission to capture Colli Laziali.” But Lucas’s Field Order No. 19, dated January 15, lacked a detailed plan beyond the landings; Truscott’s 3rd Division, for example, was told only to establish a beachhead and to prepare to move, on order, toward the hill town of Velletri. A baffled General Penney told his diary on January 20, “Corps at least talking of plans to break out of beachhead.” Small wonder that Clark’s deputy chief of staff, General Sir Charles Richardson, later observed, “Anzio was a complete nonsense from its inception.”
One other issue added to Lucas’s unease: the rehearsals for SHINGLE, on the beaches below Salerno, had been fiascoes. The British failed to disembark either brigade or division headquarters. The Americans, in an exercise code-named WEBFOOT, did worse. The Navy abruptly changed the landing beach, and only eleven of thirty-seven LSTs showed up. Rough weather and navigation errors on the night of January 17 kept the fleet fifteen miles offshore, and forty DUKWs making for land sank in the high seas, taking twenty-one howitzers, radio gear, and several men to the bottom. “I stood on the beach in an evil frame of mind and waited,” Lucas reported. “Not a single unit landed on the proper beach, not a single unit landed in the proper order, not a single unit was less than an hour and a half late.”
Truscott was so furious about the preparation for Anzio that he wrote Al Gruenther, “If this is to be a forlorn hope or a suicide sashay, then all I want to know is that fact.” Before boarding Biscayne, Truscott—with Lucas’s blessing—also sent Clark an account of WEBFOOT. The army commander was appalled at “the overwhelming mismanagement by the Navy.” But he told Truscott, “Lucian, I’ve got your report here and it’s bad. But you won’t get another rehearsal. The date has been set at the very highest level. There is no possibility of delaying it even for a day. You have got to do it.”
Italy for eons had been a land of omen and divination, of portents and martial prophecy. During earlier campaigns on the peninsula it was said that two moons had risen in the sky, that goats grew wool, that a wolf pulled a sentry’s sword from its scabbard and ran off with it. It was said that scorching stones fell like rain, that blood flowed in the streams, that a hen turned into a cock and a cock into a hen, that a six-month-old baby in Rome shouted, “Victory!” It was said that soldiers’ javelins in midflight had burst into flame.
Modern men had no use for bodings or superstition, of course. Still, it was a bit surprising that the SHINGLE force ignored the ancient sailors’ injunction against sailing on a Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion. But at 5:20 A.M. on Friday, January 21, the Anzio flotilla weighed anchor and made for the open sea after first feinting south. Some soldiers fingered their rosary beads or huddled with a chaplain. Others snoozed on deck or basked in the sun, scanning the distant shore for the Temple of Jupiter at Cumae, where an Allied radar team played a recording of “Carolina Moon.” “Most talk is of home and regular G.I. stuff,” an airman wrote in his diary. Steaming at a languid five knots, the convoys “look more like a review than an invasion armada,” one British lieutenant wrote.
In his cabin aboard the crowded Biscayne, Lucas spread his bedroll and shoved his kit into a corner. Truscott, who had gone to have his throat painted, would sleep
8. PERDITION
“Something’s Happening”
ONLY the bakers were astir in the small hours of Saturday, January 22. The fragrance of fresh bread wafted through the dark streets from the wood ovens in Margherita Ricci’s little shop, past the shuttered tobacco stall and the bronze statue of Neptune riding a huge fish. In Nettuno and adjacent Anzio—the woodlands of the Borghese villa separated the sister towns—bakery workers were among the few citizens still permitted in the coastal exclusion zone established by the Germans four months earlier. More than fifteen thousand exiles lived in shanties in the nearby Pontine Marshes or on the slopes of the Colli Laziali. Anyone caught within three miles of the coast risked a bullet to the nape, usually delivered against a wall in the Via Antonio Gramsci, where the condemned were told to turn their heads for a final glimpse of the sea before the fatal shot.
Dusted with flour and smelling of yeast, Orlando Castaldi shoved his flat wooden peel beneath a batch of rolls browning in the oven. Castaldi had been in Sicily during the Allied invasion six months earlier, eventually fleeing to Nettuno, where his brother and uncle worked in another bakery just two hundred yards north, in the Via Cavour. Brief but plucky resistance to the German occupation in September had been punished with executions, deportations, and the usual kidnapping of able-bodied men for labor battalions. Those consigned to the marshes had endured a bitter early winter, using ashes for soap and living on the loaves carted out from Ricci’s each morning. Some chanced reprisals by sneaking into Rome to trade gold earrings or family linen for black-market pasta or a few liters of cooking oil. Allied bombing along the coast had gnawed the waterfront and forced the removal of the Madonna of Graces—an ornate wooden statue of Nettuno’s patron—to a basilica in Rome for safekeeping.