The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
That prospect pleased Lucas no more than Alexander’s hovering presence at Caserta pleased Clark. In his diary, the corps commander wrote:
His gloomy attitude is certainly bad for me. He thinks I should have been aggressive on D-day and should have gotten tanks and things out to the front…. I have done what I was ordered to do, desperate though it was. I can win if I am let alone but don’t know whether or not I can stand the strain of having so many people looking over my shoulder.
In a message to Clark on Saturday morning, Lucas affected a doughty determination. “Will go all out tomorrow,” he signaled, “or at once, if conditions warrant.” As Alexander had urged, risks must be taken.
The brightest news awaiting Clark at Anzio was not on the beachhead but a mile above it. On January 27 and 28, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. Inspiriting as the action was for Lucas’s corps, the contribution of a couple dozen black pilots—known collectively as the Tuskegee airmen, after the Alabama field where they had learned to fly—would resonate beyond the beachhead, beyond Italy, and beyond the war.
This moment had been a long time coming. Blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution; of more than 200,000 to serve in Union uniforms during the Civil War, 33,000 had been killed. After the war, Congress created four black Army regiments, including two cavalry units later known to High Plains Indians as “buffalo soldiers” because of the supposed resemblance of the troopers’ hair to a bison’s coat.
More than one million blacks also served in uniform in World War I, but only fifty thousand saw combat. The white commander of one black unit denounced his troops as “hopelessly inferior, lazy, slothful…. If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes.” A lieutenant colonel quoted in a 1924 War Department study articulated the prevalent white bias: “The Negro race is thousands of years behind the Caucasian race in the higher psychic development.” Between the world wars, military camps in the American south increasingly adopted local Jim Crow laws and customs; a War Department directive in 1936 appended the designation “colored” to any unit composed of nonwhite troops.
There were not many. When World War II began in September 1939, fewer than four thousand blacks served in the U.S. Army; more than two years later, the U.S. Navy had only six black sailors—excluding mess stewards—plus a couple of dozen others coming out of retirement. A seven-point White House policy issued in 1940 began with the premise that “Negro personnel in the Army will be proportionate to that in the general population (about 10 percent)” and ended with a bigot’s pledge: “Racial segregation will be maintained.” Few leadership opportunities existed. At the time of the Anzio landings, the U.S. Army had 633,000 officers, of whom only 4,500 were black. The U.S. Navy was worse, with 82,000 black enlisted sailors and no black officers; the Marine Corps, which had rejected all black enlistments until President Roosevelt intervened, would not commission its first black officer until several months after the war ended.
Another War Department decree of 1940 asserted that segregation “has proven satisfactory over a long period of years.” A survey of white enlisted men in 1942 revealed “a strong prejudice against sharing recreation, theater, or post exchange facilities with Negroes”; of southern soldiers polled, only 4 percent favored equal PX privileges for their black comrades. White soldiers “have pronounced views with respect to the Negro,” the adjutant general concluded. “The Army is not a sociological laboratory.” Segregation created perverse redundancies—an Army memo in July 1943 noted that “the 93rd Division has three bands, and the 92nd Division has four bands”—but the status quo obtained. “Experiments within the Army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, and morale,” George Marshall warned.
The 1940 Draft Act banned racial discrimination, but only 250 blacks sat on the nation’s 6,400 draft boards; most southern states forbade any African-American board members. White America’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of black volunteers and draftees ranged from unfortunate to despicable. The Mississippi congressional delegation asked the War Department to keep all black officers out of the state for the duration. Discrimination and segregation remained the rule in military barracks, churches, swimming pools, libraries, and service clubs. German and Italian prisoner trustees could use the post exchange at Fort Benning, Georgia; black U.S. Army soldiers could not. Time reported that “Negro troops being shipped through El Paso, Texas, were barred from the Harvey House restaurant at the depot and were given cold handouts. They could see German prisoners of war seated in the restaurant and fed hot food.” A War Department pamphlet, “Command of Negro Troops,” advised white officers in February 1944 that black soldiers preferred not to be called “boy, darky, nigger, aunty, mammy, nigress, and uncle.” Churning resentment led to bloody confrontations between white and black troops, not only in the Deep South but also in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, and England. When a whites-only café in South Carolina refused service to sixteen black officers, they shouted, “Heil, Hitler!” Many blacks endorsed the “Double V” campaign proposed by a Pittsburgh newspaper: a righteous struggle for victory over both enemies abroad and racism at home.
Yet getting into the fight was itself a struggle. Among the prevalent stereotypes was a belief that blacks were too dumb, too lazy, or too apathetic to serve as combat troops. An Army study decried their “lack of education and mechanical skill,” as well as “a venereal rate eight to ten times that of white troops, a tendency to abuse equipment, lack of interest in the war, and particularly among northern troops a concern for racial ‘rights,’ which often culminated in rioting.” In the summer of 1943, only 17 percent of black soldiers were high school graduates, compared with 41 percent of whites. In Army tests that measured educational achievement rather than native intelligence, more than four in five blacks scored in the lowest two categories compared to fewer than one in three whites. General McNair, the chief of Army Ground Forces, declared that “a colored division is too great a concentration of Negroes to be effective.”
Consequently, blacks were shunted into quartermaster companies for duty as truck drivers, bakers, launderers, laborers, and the like. By January 1944, 755,000 blacks wore Army uniforms—they made up 8.5 percent of the force—but only two in ten served in combat units compared to four in ten whites. Under pressure from black civic leaders and a crying need for fighters, three black Army divisions had been created: the 2nd Cavalry, which arrived in North Africa only to be disbanded to provide service troops; the 93rd Infantry, shipped to the Pacific; and the 92nd Infantry, which would arrive in Italy in late summer 1944 as the only African-American division to see combat in Europe.
Officered above the platoon level almost exclusively by whites, the 92nd would endure trials by fire that only partly involved the Germans. Training was halted for two months to teach the men to read, since illiteracy in the division exceeded 60 percent. A black veteran later described “an intangible, elusive undercurrent of resentment, bitterness, even despair and hopelessness among black officers and enlisted men in the division.” That sentiment in some measure could be laid at the feet of the 92nd commander, Major General Edward M. Almond, an overbearing Virginian who would oppose integration of the armed forces until his dying day in 1975. “The white man…is willing to die for patriotic reasons. The Negro is not,” Almond declared. “No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn’t care…. People think that being from the south we don’t like Negroes. Not at all. But we understand his capabilities. And we don’t want to sit at the table with them.” In a top secret report after the war, Almond asserted that black officers lacked “pride, aggressiveness, [and] a sense of responsibility.” His chief of staff added, “Negro soldiers learn slowly and forget quickly.”
Such obstacles
Those achievements proved hard to come by. A week before the invasion of Sicily, a black lieutenant shot down an enemy plane over the Mediterranean. But for months thereafter the 99th was relegated to such routine duty that not a single Axis aircraft was encountered, much less destroyed. Accidents killed several pilots, and the squadron earned a hard-luck reputation. White superiors voiced doubts about “a lack of aggressive spirit,” and accused the Tuskegee pilots of shortcomings in stamina, endurance, and cold-weather tolerance. “The negro type has not the proper reflexes to make a first-class fighter pilot,” one general asserted. Hap Arnold, the AAF chief, suggested moving the 99th to a rear area, “thus releasing a white squadron for a forward combat area.” Citing leaked classified information, Time reported in late September that “the top air command was not altogether satisfied with the 99th’s performance.”
Davis, who was promoted to command an all-black fighter group, returned to Washington to refute the criticisms before a War Department committee in October. Others rallied to the squadron’s defense, including one accomplished white pilot who described the 99th as “a collection of born dive bombers.” Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, the senior American airman in the Mediterranean, concluded that “90 percent of the trouble with Negro troops was the fault of the whites.” The 99th moved closer to the action at an airfield outside Naples. Still, the squadron in six months had flown nearly 1,400 sorties on 225 missions without downing a single Luftwaffe plane.
Then came the morning of January 27. A patrol of sixteen P-40 Warhawks led by Lieutenant Clarence Jamison flew at five thousand feet over Peter Beach, several miles north of Anzio, just as fifteen FW-190s pulled out of an attack on the Allied anchorage. The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half dozen .50-caliber machine guns. “I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail,” Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr., later reported. “I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot.” Flames spurted from the enemy fuselage, then from another and another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops and fled toward Rome only to clip the earth in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one flaming wing. “The whole show lasted less than five minutes,” Major Spanky Roberts said. “It was a chasing battle, as the Germans were always on the move. We poured hell into them.”
After refueling in Naples, the 99th returned to the beachhead, then in another snarling dogfight at 2:25 P.M. shot down three more enemy raiders, including one plane that was bushwacked while closing on a Warhawk’s tail. On Friday morning, as Clark struggled to reach Nettuno on PT-201, the 99th slammed into another raiding party, shooting down four. In two days the squadron tallied twelve enemy planes destroyed, three probable kills, and four damaged. A single American pilot was killed.
It was a chasing battle, as Major Roberts had said, and it would remain a chasing battle. But nothing would ever be quite the same. One black soldier, fated to die in action in Italy a year later, wrote home: “Negroes are doing their bit here, their supreme bit, not for glory, not for honor, but for, I think, the generation that will come.”
Jerryland
ON Saturday afternoon, January 29, Lucian Truscott limped up the narrow staircase to the second floor of his new command post, an old stone monastery with a red tile roof in the medieval village of Conca, midway between Nettuno and Cisterna. Gum trees and sycamores gave the compound an arboreal tranquillity, dispelled by the proximate grumble of artillery. A squat tower resembling a blockhouse poked above the roofline; from the peak an American flag had briefly flown until German gunners began using it as an aiming stake. The 3rd Division war room filled the first floor with maps, jangling phones, and the anticipatory hum that always preceded a big offensive. Truscott had spread his bedroll in the tiled kitchen with no expectation of sleep.
He still spoke in a raspy whisper, although his morbid throat had improved along with his lacerated leg: on Monday afternoon, a falling 20mm antiaircraft round had detonated six inches from Truscott’s left foot, peppering his cavalry boot, breeches, and ankle with steel fragments. After a surgeon tweezed out the shards, General Lucas insisted on handing him a Purple Heart. “It is truly superficial, but the doctors have my foot so strapped up that I hobble a bit when I walk,” Truscott wrote Sarah a day later. As for the Anzio landings, he told her, no one at home should assume “that the war is about over. Far from it, believe me.” He asked her to send his copy of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, the rationalist edition of the New Testament compiled by Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1804. The Jefferson Bible, as it was commonly called, seemed like good beachhead reading.
A window with casement shutters on the second floor gave Truscott a sweeping view across the Pontine Marshes. The west branch of the Mussolini Canal snaked through the farm fields a mile ahead. From Conca, the northbound road crossed the canal on a plank bridge and ran for three more miles to Isola Bella, a hamlet that marked the beachhead’s outer boundary. Two miles farther on lay Highway 7 and Cisterna, known to St. Paul as Three Taverns. Here, while under arrest en route to Rome in the first century, the apostle “thanked God and took courage” after encountering a band of Roman Christians. Modern Cisterna lay at the confluence of five major roads and a rail line. Truscott on Wednesday had suggested seizing the town immediately, using his entire division along with British troops and a newly arrived regiment from the 45th Division. But Lucas preferred to wait until more tanks from the 1st Armored Division arrived to lend heft to the British effort on the left, which offered a more direct route to the Colli Laziali and Rome.
The delay hardly seemed imprudent. Prisoner interrogations and captured German diaries depicted a glum, disheartened enemy. “Spirits are not particularly high since 41/2 years of war start to get on your nerves,” a soldier in the Wehrmacht’s 71st Division had written on January 26. Two days later, one of his comrades added, “The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us. Since January 21 I have not been able to take my boots off.” This morning’s 3rd Division intelligence report noted that “the enemy’s attitude on our front is entirely defensive,” with most forces hugging the hills five miles beyond Cisterna. Enemy “patrolling has not been aggressive…. There is evidence that [German] platoon and squad leadership has begun to deteriorate.” Hermann Göring troops manned “our right flank and front,” with a few other units fed “into the line piecemeal as they have arrived…. It does not now seem probable that the enemy will soon deliver a major counterattack involving units of division size.” The VI Corps attack, originally planned for early this morning, January 29, had been postponed until the following morning because of an unfortunate incident in the British sector: on Friday, three jeeps carrying officers from the 5th Grenadier Guards had missed a turn on the road to Campoleone and blundered into a German ambush. Seven men were killed or captured, and with four Grenadier companies now stripped to only four officers, General Penney requested another day to organize his attack. Lucas agreed. Again, it hardly seemed to matter.
Truscott scanned the fenny landscape with his field glasses, un
Birds sang in the marsh grass and a pale sun glinted off the brimming irrigation ditches. Here and there a soldier scurried from one soggy copse to another. Outside the Conca monastery, graceful sycamore branches nodded in the breeze. Truscott saw it all, and he saw nothing. He clumped down the stairs to finish his plan.
Darby’s Rangers spent Saturday afternoon in a piney wood near Nettuno sharpening their blades, cleaning their rifles, and napping on pine-bough beds. A week on the beachhead had left them “solemn, tired, and quiet,” one Ranger recalled. Few had shaved since sailing from Pozzuoli—a disgusted paratrooper wrote that they “looked like cutthroats [or] the sweepings of the bar rooms”—and company barbers stayed busy until the light failed. Each rifleman stuffed his pockets with grenades and coiled two extra bandoliers over his shoulders, removing the tracer rounds to avoid pinpointing a shooter’s position at night. Bedrolls and barracks bags were stacked on a canvas ground cloth in the custody of the company cooks; souvenirs accumulated since Gela and Maiori were carefully tucked away: a German knife, a British Commando cap, a pumice fragment from Vesuvius. Mail arrived late Saturday, but with no time for mail call—a Ranger never carried personal letters into combat—the clerks promised to haul the sacks to Cisterna on Sunday morning. Teamsters from Nettuno also brought up extra ammunition. Shells rattled in the truck beds like dry bones.