The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The twelve hundred rooms had been converted into dormitories, dining halls, offices, bakeries, laundries, and a barbershop, where a comb-and-razor cut cost four cents. One spacious salon served as an indoor basketball court, and a three-room suite was devoted to an exhibit on venereal disease, with graphic color photographs intended to infuse soldiers with the fear of both God and loose women. Protective paper strips covered the huge palace mirrors, but nothing could keep GI fingerprints off the silk wall coverings and tapestries in the throne room and ministry chambers.
An errant bomb had bent the organ pipes in the palace chapel, and artillery rumbling sometimes carried from the Cassino front. But war seemed ever more removed for the “garritroopers” at Caserta, as Bill Mauldin called them—“too far forward to wear ties and too far back to git shot.” An Army surgeon described the senior officers’ mess as “a stuffy, swank private dining room full of elderly colonels dining on broiled steak and other luxuries.” The tables were set with gold-trimmed palace porcelain and glassware etched with the royal crown. The chef had once worked at the Ritz in New York, but waiters were mostly “bomb-happy” GI convalescents. “It was said, rather unkindly, that if anyone dropped a plate they all dived for cover,” one visitor reported.
Officers in the palace bar drank rum or cognac mixed with Coca-Cola; George Biddle found their faces “soft and puffy” compared with the frontline visages of Jack Toffey and his ilk. At parties, a female captain wrote, “Bill or Ralph or whoever had taken one got lit up on the very cheap wine and made less and less sense and got more and more amorous.” Marathon poker games raged in the royal suite, including one in which Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, allegedly lost $3,000; it was said that he eventually paid the debt with a sheaf of English five-pound notes “big as cabbage leaves.” Twice weekly, the San Carlo Opera Company arrived from Naples to sing Tosca or Madama Butterfly in the palace theater. A box seat cost $1.25, and the cast was paid mostly in Army rations.
Caserta was a “looking glass world,” one officer wrote. He added: “One doesn’t hate on a full stomach and a hot bath.” To preserve a semblance of Army life, some commanders insisted that their garritroopers at least camp outdoors. Bivouacs soon stretched for two miles through the palace gardens, evincing their own Wonderland qualities, with shower huts, softball diamonds, backgammon tables, and volleyball courts. Grenadier Guards practiced lugging their assault boats through the rose bushes before paddling furiously across the ornamental ponds, which hungry soldiers soon emptied of fish. Clark’s floatplane landed among the lily pads on a reflecting pool a quarter mile long.
Just north of the palace, engineers built a colony for generals, known as Cascades. An elaborate fountain nearby depicted the goddess Diana and her handmaidens being surprised while bathing by the hunter Actaeon, who was consequently transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. Cascades included a lounge with a fireplace, a tennis court, a U-shaped dance hall, and a muddy, eel-infested pond that served as a swimming hole. The engineers who built the complex complained in their unit log: “The feeling of the men is that they came over here for the purpose of winning a war. The building of summer houses and swimming pools doesn’t fall under this category.”
Not least among Caserta’s oddities, the 6681st Signal Pigeon Company maintained twenty-two lofts with eight thousand cooing birds, including a blue-check splashed cock named GI Joe who was credited with carrying a message that had forestalled bombardment of a town already captured by the British. Nightingales also filled Caserta’s woods with music, leading one officer to write, “Everyone agrees that the nightingale’s song is beautiful, but I have never seen it mentioned before that it is also extremely noisy.” A British sergeant was blunter: “Wait till you’ve heard ’em every fucking night, the bloody sound they make will get in your bones.”
Clark rarely missed a chance to flee Caserta’s fleshpots for the front, and at 3:45 A.M. on Friday, January 28, he hopped in a staff car and sped down the grand driveway, past the silk mills and the rope factories, where hemp plants soaked in shallow pits to soften the fibers. Twenty-five miles due west, near the mouth of the Volturno, a wallowing launch ferried him downriver where a pair of seventy-eight-foot motor torpedo boats, PT-201 and PT-216, bobbed at anchor. After snagging on a sandbar, the little launch shipped so much water that Clark was drenched to the skin by the time he climbed onto a stool behind 201’s bridge. As the first gray hint of dawn tinted the eastern sky, the triple screws of the two patrol boats hurled them northwest across the indigo Tyrrhenian for the seventy-mile journey to Anzio. Neither boat crew took time to radio a sailing signal to the Allied fleet at the beachhead.
Alexander had prodded Clark to make this trip, wondering aloud on Thursday whether Lucas was sufficiently aggressive. Did the beachhead need “a thruster, like George Patton?” Alexander wondered. Certainly VI Corps should press forward to seize Campoleone and Cisterna. “Risks must be taken,” Alexander added. Clark promised to deliver the message.
More than five months had passed since Clark had come ashore at Salerno, and the long season had aged him. During a visit to Caserta in early January, Patton had noted—with evident pleasure—symptoms of stress in the Fifth Army commander. “The left corner of Clark’s mouth is slightly drawn down as if he had been paralyzed,” he informed his diary. “He is quite jumpy.” Clark on January 18 had asked Renie to send him some Kreml hair tonic. “I find that by massaging my hair using that it keeps from coming out, and for a while it was falling out quite badly.” The crowding at the royal palace added more strains, and Clark planned to move his own forward command post to a hillside olive grove below Presenzano, ten miles from San Pietro. Alexander “and many lesser lights have moved into Caserta on top of my headquarters,” Clark told his diary on January 23. “Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.” As for the battle at Anzio, Alexander “apparently feels as though he is running that show. Not much I can do about it.”
The solitude of high command oppressed him. “The more stars a man gets, the more lonesome he becomes,” he told Renie. Comrades “used to come around in the evening, but they don’t any more.” He suggested that for companionship she send him Pal, the family cocker spaniel. A dutiful if indifferent letter writer, he at times vented his frustration at her. When she urged him to avoid personal risks, he answered, “You turn your lamb chops on the stove, and I’ll run the Army.” On January 11, after she told him that she had been too busy to accept a luncheon invitation from Eleanor Roosevelt, he replied, “I am distressed…I think you should take time to do those things.”
As he soldiered on, so did she. Traveling for months on end, sometimes with Glenn Miller and other celebrities, Renie was credited with selling $25 million in war bonds. She also lectured widely about the virtues of both the American cause and her husband, whom she described as “working coolly [in] his tent virtually under enemy guns.” To twelve hundred ladies at a Scottish Rite luncheon in Indianapolis, she pronounced him “an awfully good man, a rather religious man.” Often she read from his letters, and even displayed the trousers, shrunk from immersion in Mediterranean brine, that Clark had temporarily lost during his celebrated secret mission to Algeria in October 1942. George Marshall had warned Clark about publicity mongering, which was so at odds with the selfless ethic embodied by the chief of staff. He also complained to Eisenhower that the army commander was “being victimized by his wife.”
“It causes me some embarrassment,” Eisenhower subsequently wrote Clark in late November, but “you are being unwittingly hurt by a particular type of publicity in the States…. G.C.M. has specifically noted that certain items so repeated have occasioned some merriment, possibly even sarcasm.”
Clark was furious, rebuking Renie twice. If beguiled by public attention, he preferred to orchestrate it himself. “I do not want you to refer to me in any way in your talks,” he wrote after reading Eisenhower’s cable. “Positively no quotes fro
Clark’s virtues as a commander should have been evident enough without Renie’s advocacy. He was disciplined, fearless, and, as one admiring colonel put it, “broad-gauged.” He spent most waking hours among his troops, often in harm’s way, with one long leg draped over the jeep’s fender during what he called “ringside” visits. The enormous logistical and administrative complexities of running a big army fazed him not at all. He was attentive to requests from the front and to the perquisites due frontline troops returning to the rear for a rest. For esprit, he commissioned a Fifth Army song and distributed mimeographed lyrics so that puzzled theatergoers could belt out the anthem in the Caserta opera house. “I want my headquarters to be a happy one,” he declared.
There was the rub. “The general was a difficult man to satisfy,” recalled a former aide, Vernon A. Walters, who later rose to three-star rank and served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I often lay in my sleeping bag at night reading by flashlight my letters of commendation and citations solely to reassure myself that I was not a complete damn fool.” Disinclined to seek advice or admit error, Clark conveyed a hauteur made more pronounced by his height: he literally looked down on nearly everyone. “A very impatient man,” a senior staff officer once said, and in Italy that was not necessarily a virtue. At times he berated his aides and castigated his staff, including the long-suffering Al Gruenther, whose pale skin, thin nose, and high forehead reminded one observer of “a rather Renaissance Florentine.” Early each morning Clark called his corps commanders and then rebuked his staff for knowing less than he about overnight developments; Gruenther responded by dispatching officers to the front late at night so they could phone in reports before Clark awoke.
Already he had begun to think of Rome possessively. In late January, he told Field Marshal Wilson that Fifth Army had fought “a long and bloody battle up the Italian peninsula” and is “entitled to take Rome.” He encouraged the reporter C. L. Sulzberger to remain close so “you can tell the world just how Mark Clark took Rome.” Another correspondent, Eric Sevareid, concluded that for Clark the Italian campaign was foremost an opportunity for “personal publicity, without which warmaking is a dull job, devoid of glamour and recompense.”
Surely that was too harsh. Like his thinning hair and drooping mouth, Clark’s growing fixation on Rome was in part a manifestation of stress. The city’s capture would not only fulfill a military and political objective but also affirm that this grievous campaign had been worthwhile. Since Salerno, battle casualties alone in Fifth Army exceeded 37,000. If one death was a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, what would the twenty thousand dead required to take Rome amount to? In a confessional moment, Clark told Vernon Walters:
Sometimes if I appear to be unreasonable, you must remember the burdens I bear are heavy. The time comes when I have to give orders that will result in the death of a large number of fine young men—and this is a responsibility that I cannot share with anybody. I must bear it by myself.
For two hours the torpedo boats bounded north at nearly forty knots, swinging wide of German shore batteries near Monte Circeo, where the enchantress Circe, daughter of the sun, had turned Odysseus’s men into swine. Morning haze draped the sea and the throbbing engines drowned conversation. Clark perched on his stool, lost in thought. Lookouts scanned the waves ahead. “Sometimes,” one Anzio veteran warned, “what looked like a piece of driftwood turns out to be a corpse.”
At 8:40 A.M., twelve miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper U.S.S. Sway blinkered a challenge with its twelve-inch searchlight, asking the boats approaching out of the rising sun to identify themselves. Visibility was poor, air raids at the beachhead had just triggered an alert, and Sway several nights earlier had been attacked by German E-boats. Clark stood for a better view as PT-201 blinkered back at a range of two thousand yards, then fired the day’s recognition signal: green and yellow flares.
One minute after the initial challenge, Sway opened fire. Three-inch shells screamed across the sea. PT-216 reversed course to port and sped away, but 201 stopped dead to acknowledge the shot across the bow. The next rounds splintered plywood and mahogany. A shell detonated against 201’s deckhouse, shattering Clark’s stool, and another blew through the tiny galley below. Fifty-caliber and 40mm rounds swarmed around the boat like hornets. “Machine gun bullets and heavier stuff tore the air overhead, making whistling sounds and swooshes,” reported Frank Gervasi, the Collier’s correspondent, who had come along for the ride. The initial salvo wounded five sailors, two of them mortally. Blood slicked the deck from an officer with a severed leg artery and a swab whose kneecap had been blown off. For a few moments, no one manned the helm, until an ensign took the wheel despite wounds to both legs. Clark seized the flare gun and fired more green and yellow flares, unaware that haze made the yellow pyrotechnics look red from Sway’s deck. The shooting continued.
“What shall we do?” Clark asked a wounded lieutenant.
“Don’t know.”
“Let’s run for it.”
Clark helped brace the helmsman as he opened the throttle and spun the wheel. The boat pirouetted and fled in a great flume of spray, chased by the minesweeper’s shells. Half an hour later, 201 rendezvoused peacefully with H.M.S. Acute, transferring her wounded to the British warship. The skipper of 216 boarded 201 and guided her into Anzio harbor at noon, although not before another German raid on the port delayed Clark further. Sway’s crew was unrepentant. “The goddam light was bad and we couldn’t read your goddam signals,” one sailor told Gervasi. While averring that the incident was “a weight on the conscience of every officer and man aboard,” Sway’s captain blamed the torpedo boats for their own misadventure. A Navy inquiry agreed, but Clark privately charged the minesweeper with “as flagrant an error of judgment…as I have ever seen.”
If the morning had taken “a downward slant,” in Clark’s wry phrase, an afternoon in Lucas’s command post hardly redeemed the day. Staff officers of VI Corps worked in a former Italian military barracks near Nettuno’s Piazza del Mercato, but artillery fire and an unexploded bomb through the ceiling would soon drive the headquarters into the wine cellars under an osteria at Via Romana 9. For now, the sandbags around the barracks grew higher by the hour. Sailors steaming into Anzio harbor laid wagers on whether “this white apartment house or that pink villa would be standing on their return.”
Wrapped in a belted Army trench coat and pulling on his corncob pipe, Lucas used a large map to show Clark his predicament. Heavy surf occasionally closed the landing beaches, and a sudden storm on Tuesday had marooned all Navy pontoons ashore before they could be hoisted from the water. Enemy raids often disrupted port operations and harassed the cargo fleet. Of greater concern was the imminent return to Britain of most LSTs; as few as a dozen would be left in the Medterranean after February 10, and at least seventy-two shiploads would be required in Anzio by mid-February. Daily matériel requirements had climbed from 1,500 tons a day to 2,300. Some LCIs sailing from Naples now carried a hundred tons of ammunition, triple the prudent load, and Navy brokers had begun identifying civilian schooners for use as cargo vessels.
As for the enemy, every day Lucas’s G-2 identified more German units converging on the beachhead: the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division, then the Hermann Göring, then two armored divisions from southern France, then the 90th Panzer Grenadier. The day before, it had been estimated that four thousand German infantry and armor troops occupied Albano, including two paratrooper battalions and several hundred horse-and motorcycle-mounted troops. If the Allies were not already outnumbered, it was o
Lucas sucked on his pipe stem. As he would soon write in a private note to Brigadier General Robert Frederick, whose 1st Special Service Force was heading to the beachhead, “Our enemies did not react exactly in the manner expected. Troops were rushed in.”
None of this surprised Clark. Ultra intercepts had provided transparent detail of German movements under Operation RICHARD, including the shift of troops from fourteen divisions in France, Germany, northern Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Even the German venereal disease hospital in Rome had been combed out. In many cases, however, only fragments of those enemy units had reached the beachhead. Clark told Lucas that the cumulative opposition “does not exceed three full divisions,” with “indications that [Kesselring] is having difficulties reinforcing your front.” All the more reason, Clark added, to seize Cisterna and Campoleone quickly.
Lucas agreed. In fact, Truscott today had drafted his order for an attack on Cisterna, to be led by infiltrating Rangers and two 3rd Division regiments, all bound for Highway 7. VI Corps Field Order No. 20 would coordinate a British lunge on the left with that American thrust on the right, both intended to “seize the high ground in the vicinity of Colli Laziali” and to “prepare to continue the advance on Rome.” The attack was to begin the next day, Saturday, January 29.
Clark nodded. He hoped this would mollify Alexander, and whoever in London was lashing him on. With a few parting words of encouragment, he strode from the command post and climbed into a jeep for the short ride to the Villa Borghese; in a pine thicket behind the hundred-room seventeenth-century mansion, he planned to install another Fifth Army command post to keep a closer eye on the beachhead.