The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Churchill in North Africa had anointed him “the salamander of the British empire” for his ability to thrive in fire, but Freyberg more resembled the hippogriff, that hybrid of eagle, lion, and horse. He was both sentimental—after digging the grave of his friend Rupert Brooke, he had lined it with flowering sage—and fond of aphorisms, including a line from another friend, J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December.” Upon arriving in Naples he asked, “One used to be able to buy very fine gloves in Italy. Can you still get them?” His impulsiveness led one exasperated subordinate to tell another, “It will be your turn tomorrow to disobey orders.”
Even his admirers acknowledged that Freyberg was at his most formidable when leading a division; temporary command of a corps in Africa seemed to overtax his powers, and he had reverted to command of the 2nd New Zealand Division after outflanking the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the general would think straight?” said his most talented Kiwi brigadier, Howard Kippenberger. “Or better still, if he wouldn’t try to think at all?” Yet it was again as a corps commander that Freyberg arrived at Cassino, for Alexander in early February melded the 2nd New Zealand, the 4th Indian, and the British 78th Divisions into a new creation, the New Zealand Corps.
Described by one British observer as “clean and sprightly, rested and strong,” the corps initially was called Spadger Force to confuse German intelligence; Freyberg remained “Spadger” in Allied councils long after the ruse ended. His Kiwis and Tommies were colorful enough, but few units could match the Indians for flamboyance. The Sikhs, Punjabis, Rajputs, Mahrattas, and Gurkhas, from Nepal, arriving in truck convoys resembled a traveling circus of cutthroats, laden, as one 4th Indian signaler wrote, with “all kind of excrescences such as crates of live chickens, fire buckets, water bags, bits of furniture and clothes drying in the wind.”
At first Freyberg considered a wide flanking movement to breach the Gustav Line. But with a shortage of mules and limited experience in mountain warfare, he instead chose a more prosaic plan that followed in trace the failed American attack, targeting “the strongest point in a defensive line of remarkable strength,” as the New Zealand official history later noted. To some subordinates, this scheme confirmed that Freyberg had “no brains and no imagination,” in the phrase of the 4th Indian Division commander, Major General Francis Tuker. When two of his senior lieutenants proposed a conference on the tactical difficulties at Cassino, Freyberg refused to countenance “any soviet of division commanders.”
Yet the longer Spadger studied the bleak silhouette of the ridgeline to the northwest, the more his eye was drawn to the white abbey. Was it possible to take the massif without seizing the building? Would German troops fail to occupy such an inviting observation post? How could Allied soldiers be asked to attack the hill without first eliminating that overbearing presence?
The 4th Indian Division had initially proposed bombing the abbey on February 4, as part of a scheme to reduce any German garrison “to helpless lunacy by sheer unending pounding for days and nights by air and artillery.” Increasingly, Freyberg found that approach both prudent and inevitable. After a grim discussion about the challenge of storming the abbey’s massive gate, he dispatched a subaltern to comb through Neapolitan bookstalls, where the young man found several studies on the history and structure of Monte Cassino. An 1879 volume contained architectural detail about how the abbey had been rebuilt as a citadel after the French despoliation in 1799, with loopholed, unscalable outer walls ten feet thick and nowhere less than fifteen feet high. A prewar Italian army staff college analysis deemed Monte Cassino impregnable.
Freyberg was convinced. In a memo to Clark and Alexander he wrote:
No practicable means available within the capacity of field engineers can possibly cope with this place. It can be directly dealt with by applying blockbuster bombs from the air…. The fortress has been a thorn in our sides for many weeks.
Others disagreed. “Spadger still wants to flatten the monastery,” Keyes told his diary. “I insist there is no evidence that it is holding up our attack and refuse to accede.” Clark too demurred, although he sensed that Freyberg had General Alex’s ear. Clark privately considered “Freyburg”—he consistently misspelled the New Zealander’s name in his diary—“sort of a bull in a china closet.”
Yet Clark was unsure how long he could resist pressure from above and below. Not least in his calculations was a growing bloodlust in Allied trenches. An antiaircraft gunner’s letter home in mid-February perfectly expressed the prevailing sentiment. “I would level the Vatican itself with pleasure,” the gunner wrote, “if there were Germans to be killed inside it.”
The Bitchhead
SIXTY miles away, the 92,000 Allied troops penned up at Anzio had been ordered to dig in, and dig in they did. The clank of picks and shovels sounded across the beachhead, and with each passing hour life became more subterranean. Soldiers near the Pontine Marshes found water weeping into their holes at eighteen inches, but those burrowing into the sandstone substrata around Nettuno excavated elaborate lairs lined with cardboard from ration cartons and furnished with plundered mirrors, commodes, and even candelabra. Some sheltered in huge empty wine barrels found in farmhouse vaults, the stink of stale vino rosso clinging to their uniforms. Catacombs and cellars also housed VI Corps offices—the sandstone seemed to telegraph every surface vibration and concussion—but engineers failed to find a tunnel rumored to have been built by Nero between Anzio and Rome. It all seemed vaguely familiar, as a 6th Gordons soldier noted in his diary:
So back we go to World War I. Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones.
An American medic in the 179th Infantry preferred to stress the positive. In a letter home he wrote, “My cost of living is very low.”
Luftwaffe attacks made every man happy to have his hole. “We have found our religion,” a soldier told his diary. “Jittery as can be. Five air raids tonight.” Bombs punctured all fifteen ovens and damaged the dough mixer in the Army’s beachhead bakery; eighty bakers in helmets sifted shrapnel from the flour, patched the holes, and soon turned out fourteen tons of bread a day. As on an island, everything at the beachhead arrived by sea. “Day and night, a thin black line of tiny boats moved constantly back and forth between shore and ships at anchor,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who arrived for a visit in February. After German reconnaissance flights left each afternoon, skippers weighed anchor at last light to scramble the anchorage, steaming slowly to avoid raising telltale phosphorescent bow waves. Flares, tracers, and exploding shells illuminated Anzio harbor so garishly that one sailor claimed it was “brighter than Yankee Stadium.” As they sailed back to Naples after another harrowing trip to the beachhead, LST crewmen sang, “Anzio, my Anzio, please don’t take me back to Anzio.”
Among the most exposed troops were those consigned to Hell’s Half-Acre, the medical compound outside Nettuno and only six miles from frontline outposts. At 3:30 P.M. on February 7, a Luftwaffe bomber chased by a Spitfire jettisoned five antipersonnel bombs over the 95th Evacuation Hospital, where four hundred patients lay in ward tents. Newly wounded soldiers had just arrived by ambulance, and operating rooms were jammed when flame and steel swept the compound. “I went outside and saw several dead bodies in the parking area in front of the receiving tent,” the hospital commander, Colonel Paul Sauer, reported. “One of the nurses in the first surgical tent was crying, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I went in to look at her and she was pulseless and white.” Twenty-eight died, including three nurses, two doctors, and six patients; another sixty-four were wounded, and the blasts shredded twenty-nine ward tents. The German pilot was shot down and treated in the same hospital. Two days later, a shell fragment killed a VI Corps surgeon as he emerged from Lucas’s command post in Nettuno.
“God, help us,” a 1st Armored Division mess s
They did what they could. Deep holes grew deeper, including subterranean garages intended to reduce punctured tires and radiators. Every soldier learned the Anzio shuffle—also known as the Anzio amble or Anzio slouch—which required walking in a crouch, head hunched between the shoulders and helmet pulled low. Engineers clear-cut windbreaks along the Mussolini Canal to eliminate tree bursts, leaving the landscape as flat and shot-torn as Flanders. During one ferocious Nebelwerfer attack, a Scots Guardsman sang out, “The sons of the prophet were hardy and bold / And quite unaccustomed to fear,” but an American tanker, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of another with trembling hands, philosophized, “You can’t get used to bein’ scared.” Much discussion was devoted to the fabled “million-dollar wound,” which would excuse a soldier from further combat. All agreed that it ought not be disfiguring and must not impair sexual function. “One ear could go, but not two,” wrote Paul W. Brown, an enlisted medic who would become a professor of orthopedic surgery at Yale University Medical School. “Fingers and toes were deemed expendable, but no consensus was reached on how many.” To channel anger and anxiety, riflemen zeroed their weapons by firing at the helmets of dead Teds—tedeschi—on a distant slope. A British company also organized a frontline shooting gallery for snipers, with targets sorted into “Large Teds,” “Small Teds,” “Crawling Teds,” and “Bobbing Teds.”
Each day new arrivals stepped onto the harbor jetty, where MPs barked, “Get moving, get moving!” They scurried past waterfront villas gnawed by shell fire—the masonry peeling “like sunburned skin,” as the writer John Lardner put it—out to the “small, wet world” now known to its denizens as the Bitchhead. “You could see a squirt of white tracer and it seemed to float toward our lines. That was Jerry. Ours answered with bursts that had red tracer in them,” a 3rd Division soldier recalled. Tommies veered to the left toward a sector called the Hatbox of Hell, where local landmarks were named for their shapes on a map or their ambiance: the Lobster Claw, Sheep Pen Farm, Piccadilly, Oh God Wadi. “I was alone in my lonely world,” one British sergeant wrote. A British officer excessively steeped in the classics recalled his Virgil with each journey forward: Facilis est descensus Averni. Easy is the descent to Hell.
Yanks veered to the right, to a warren of trenches and hovels where young men wheezed like rheumy old men, scraping the muck from their uniforms with trench knives. Strange cries carried across no-man’s-land, including a heartbreaking German voice: “Otto, Otto! Ich sterbe, Otto!” I’m dying, Otto. “Nerves became frayed,” a lieutenant wrote. “The few abrasive personalities in the platoon seemed to become more abrasive.” At a salvage dump outside Nettuno, quartermasters each day picked through truckloads of clothing and kit from soldiers killed or wounded—sorting heaps of shoes, goggles, forks, canteens, bloody leggings. “It was best not to look too closely at the great pile,” advised Ernie Pyle. “Inanimate things can sometimes speak so forcefully.”
Nearby, more trucks hauled the day’s dead to a field sprouting white crosses and six-pointed stars. Grave diggers halted their poker game—the trestle-and-plywood table, in a bunker built from rail ties, could seat seven players—and hurried through their offices. Like the rest of the Bitchhead, the cemetery frequently came under fire, so burial services were short and often nocturnal. Grief was brief. The diggers tried to stay fifty holes ahead of demand, but keeping pace could be difficult when shells disinterred the dead, who required reburying.
Life went on, miserable and infinitely precious. “Remember,” a gunner wrote in a note to himself, “it can never be as bad as it was at Anzio.”
It got worse. Allied air attacks and the star-crossed American attack at Cisterna had disrupted Mackensen’s timetable for reducing the beachhead, even as he massed 96,000 troops, nearly 100 tanks, and more than 200 heavy antitank and assault guns, plus all those artillery tubes. “Our grand strategy demands that the beachhead be wiped out promptly,” Mackensen told his lieutenants, and they would begin by obliterating the exposed salient—four miles deep and two miles wide—held by the British 1st Division near Campoleone, on the VI Corps left.
The attack fell heaviest on the Irish Guards and 6th Gordons, positioned, respectively, on the left and right flanks of the salient. A thousand sheep, dragooned as minesweepers, led the German attack against the Irish Guards early on Friday morning, February 4. “Like a dirty, ragged wave, a huge flock surged over the crest of the Vallelata ridges and scampered crazily through No. 3 company,” the battalion reported. Tanks and grenadiers followed the bleating vanguard through hard rain, threatening to trap the entire British 3rd Brigade by cinching the salient at its base. “The Germans are at the door,” a British company commander radioed. Panzers demolished the rear walls of farmhouses, then drove inside to shoot through the front windows. Fire raked the Via Anziate. “I never saw so many people killed round me before in all my life,” an Irish Guards corporal said later. Only valor and Allied artillery—VI Corps now massed 438 tubes, including 84 big guns on destroyers and cruisers—staved off annihilation. “You’d better get your boys out of it,” Lucas advised Major General Penney, the 1st Division commander.
They retreated by the glare of burning hayricks. “All the shells in hell came down on us,” a young soldier told the BBC. “Nothing but black smoke and what smelt like the stink of frying bodies.” By Saturday morning nearly three miles was forfeit at a cost of fifteen hundred British casualties, including nine hundred captured; Mackensen’s losses were also severe, with almost five hundred dead.
The attack resumed on Monday evening, February 7, and by midnight had spread through the badland gullies along the 24th Guards Brigade front. “Nothing heard of Number 1 company for forty-five minutes,” a Grenadier Guards captain radioed. “Numbers 3 and 4 believed overrun. Ourselves surrounded, and there is a German on the ridge above me throwing grenades.” By Tuesday enemy troops west of the Via Anziate held a key slope misnamed Buonriposo—place of good rest—and were hunting Tommies by looking for breath plumes in the frosty air. “It’s very awkward,” a Grenadier officer complained. “If we lie on our stomachs we are hit in the arse. If we lie on our backs we are hit in the balls.” German infiltrators crept so close that British mortars fired almost vertically at targets only a hundred yards away. The sight of feral swine feeding on a dead comrade provoked an anguished sergeant to ask, “Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?”
Aided by a captured map that revealed British minefields, four German infantry regiments and Mk V Panther tanks swarmed toward the high ground at Carroceto, bagging another eight hundred prisoners on February 8. A Scots Guards battalion held the Carroceto rail depot, with an observation post tucked into the stationmaster’s apartment on the second floor; when two German platoons went to ground in a nearby ditch, the Scots propped a Vickers machine gun in the window, with bags of grain to steady the tripod, and slaughtered them. The enemy answered with a tank, which halted forty yards from the station and stitched each window and door with machine-gun fire at such close
More unpleasant yet was the loss by infiltration and frontal assault of Aprilia, the model Fascist town known as the Factory because a severe tower atop city hall gave the settlement an industrial aspect. By Wednesday evening, February 9, Wehrmacht troops held twenty buildings, including a police barracks, wine store, and theater; panzers refueled in the Piazza Roma, where a bronze St. Michael clutched a sword in one hand and a dragon’s head in the other.