The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The salient was gone, the beachhead imperiled. Ominous noises drifted from the wadis and woodlands, the sounds of an enemy massing. “Where is the sea?” a captured German officer asked. “I just wanted to know, since you will all soon be in it.”
On sleepless nights—and there were many now—John Lucas puffed his corncob and chatted with his watch officers about West Point, or Sherlock Holmes, or home sweet home. Rarely did he emerge from the VI Corps command post, now twenty feet beneath the Osteria dell’ Artigliere, where engineers had punched through a wall to link two sets of cellars. Naked bulbs dangled above huge oak casks banded with iron hoops, and ramps for rolling barrels up to the Vicolo del Montano bracketed the steep steps to the sandbagged entrance. Staff officers hunched over plywood desks beneath the great stone arches, their brows furrowed as they pondered dispatches from the front. Jangling telephones echoed in the alcoves; even whispers carried to the dark corners of the crypt. A large wall map with grease pencil markings showed VI Corps positions in blue and the enemy in encroaching red. Clockwise around the semicircular perimeter the Allies stretched from U.S. 45th Division troops along the Moletta River, on the left; through British and U.S. 1st Armored Division regiments in the center; to American paratroopers, 3rd Division GIs, and 1st Special Service Forcemen on the right.
“The old Hun is getting ready to have a go at me,” Lucas had advised his diary as the attack on the salient began. “He thinks he can drive me back into the ocean. Maybe so, but it will cost him money.” The bravado dissolved as the salient melted away. “The situation changed so rapidly from offensive to defensive that I can’t get my feet under me,” he wrote. Although Allied air forces in the Mediterranean now exceeded twelve thousand planes—the largest air command in the world—clearly the effort to interdict German reinforcements had faltered: twenty-seven enemy battalions had already reached the beachhead from northern Italy, and an entire Wehrmacht division had traveled from southern France in just ten days. Lucas’s own reinforcements failed to keep pace with his losses: of an average eight hundred Allied casualties each day—tantamount to a battalion—barely half were replaced. Lucas calculated that VI Corps was shrinking by nine thousand soldiers per month.
He blamed the cousins. “A terrible struggle all day trying to get the British to move,” he told his diary on February 8. “I wish I had an American division in there.” Blending the two nationalities produced a corps of “hermaphrodites.” To Clark, a day later, he wrote, “My only present concern is the inability of one of my divisions to maintain its vigorous resistance.” Clark had no doubt about which division; he derided General Penney—a meticulous, pious, high-strung engineer, who had been Alexander’s chief signals officer in North Africa—as “a good telephone operator.” When Clark confided that Lucas did not hold Penney in esteem, Alexander snapped, “Well, I do.”
Lucas’s disdain was fully reciprocated. “Complete gaff, no decision,” Penney had told his diary after one rambling conference with Lucas. Later Penney added, “Quite infuriating delay and weakness…[Lucas] very vague and no corps order.” Doubts about “Corncob Charlie,” as the British now called him, had spread up the chain of command. “We’ll lose the beachhead unless Lucas goes,” Major General G.W.R. Templer, whose 56th Division was just arriving, warned Alexander. Even Whitehall was uneasy. “I trust you are satisfied with leaving Lucas in command at the bridgehead,” Churchill cabled Alexander on February 10. “If not you should put someone there whom you trust.” As each day ended without the ballyhooed sally into Rome, the prime minister grew ever more dour. The Allies now had eighteen thousand vehicles at the beachhead, he noted in a cable to Field Marshal Wilson in Algiers, adding, “We must have a great superiority in chauffeurs.” No one bore greater responsibility for Anzio than Churchill, and he kept a pale eye peeled for possible scapegoats; a report from Washington that Marshall believed “Clark might be the man to go” intrigued him, but Lucas seemed the more likely candidate. “All this,” the prime minister sighed, “has been a great disappointment to me.”
As Mackensen tightened his grip on Aprilia and Carroceto, awaiting Hitler’s personal authorization for his next move, the Allies struggled to regroup. At 5:30 A.M. on Thursday, February 10, Penney warned Lucas that the “situation cannot go on.” His division had been halved. Some regiments were all but obliterated: more than three hundred North Staffords had been killed, wounded, or captured in eight hours, while the 5th Grenadier Guards had lost almost three-quarters of their eight hundred enlisted ranks, plus twenty-nine of thirty-five officers. In a tart note that afternoon, Penney asked Lucas for “the immediate corps plan, the corps plan for the future and the general programme, including the intentions of the higher command.” In his diary, Lucas wrote, “Things get worse and worse.”
He popped out of the command post long enough to brace the line with two reserve American infantry regiments from the 45th Division, the 179th and 180th. As usual, his plan lacked precision and nuance, having been drawn from a map rather than from careful reconnaissance. “Okay, Bill,” he told the division commander, Major General William W. Eagles, “you give ’em the works. Go places.” To Penney he wrote, “Reinforcements are on the way.”
Too few, too late. A counterattack at dawn on Friday won a foothold in Aprilia’s southeast corner, but poor coordination between U.S. rifle and tank companies hamstrung the assault. Grenadiers boiled from the Factory cellars, and panzers—followed by “deep ranks of gray-coated infantry”—drove the Yanks out on Saturday morning, February 12. A soldier in the 179th Infantry conceded, “The Germans just beat the holy hell out of us.”
General Alex had long been celebrated for beachhead verve. His panache at Dunkirk was legendary, and his visitation during a dark hour at Salerno braced Yanks and Brits alike. Now he arrived, a deus ex machina, aboard a Royal Navy destroyer on Monday morning, February 14, wrapped in his fur-lined jacket and reading Schiller in German to hone his language skills. On this Valentine’s Day, however, the old magic seemed elusive. After briefly touring the front, where American soldiers complained that his red hat drew fire, he repaired to a barren cell in the VI Corps headquarters just as air raid sirens began to wail across Nettuno. A covey of reporters, summoned to hear his assessment, filed in past wall posters that depicted wholesome American girls urging their soldier boys to “come home clean.”
The campaign had not unfolded precisely as planned, Alexander acknowledged. “We wanted a breakthrough and a complete answer inside a week,” he said. “But once you [have] stopped, it becomes a question of building up and slogging.” No one should assume that the drive to Rome had stalled; any whiff of defeatism only helped the enemy. “I assure you the Germans opposite us are a very unhappy party,” he said. “Don’t compare this situation to Dunkirk or Salerno.” Dispatches from the beachhead had been filled with “pessimistic rubbish.” Ignoring the fact that all stories were censored at the beachhead and again in Naples, he worked himself into a fine pique. “Were any of you at Dunkirk? I was, and I know that there is never likely to be a Dunkirk here.” Alexander was “very disappointed that you should put out such rot.” Henceforth, access to the radios used to transmit news dispatches from the beachhead would be severely restricted—Churchill had urged just such a suppressive action—and reporters could expect even more vigorous censorship.
Lucas tried to intervene, noting that any defeatists had long since left. “I tried to stop the tirade and tell him he had the wrong people but he refused to listen,” the corps commander jotted in his diary. Alexander tromped from the command post and soon sailed off on his destroyer, uncommonly overwrought and in need of a shave. The reporters trudged through cold rain to the decrepit waterfront villa they shared, perplexed and incensed; one hack consoled himself by picking out a tune from La Traviata on a battered upright piano.
Lucas was left alone to ponder the blue and red runes covering his wall map. Alexander seemed convinced that the enemy had been repulsed, but the map suggested otherwise.
“I am afraid the top side is not completely satisifed with my work,” Lucas wrote. “I can’t help it. They are naturally disappointed that I failed to chase the Hun out of Italy.”
General Mackensen, the Hun himself, hardly needed his monocle to appreciate the magnificent panorama of the beachhead he now intended to destroy. From his forward command post on the western lip of the Colli Laziali, in a farmhouse two miles southwest of mystical Lake Nemi, “not a flash of a gun or explosion of a shell from either side escapes him,” a German visitor reported. With a telescope, between breaks in the Allied smoke screen that swaddled the waterfront, Mackensen could even make out the Liberty ships, LSTs, and zigzagging destroyers eighteen miles away.
But it was closer terrain that held the Fourteenth Army commander’s interest as daylight faded on Tuesday, February 15. Three miles of open country stretched between Aprilia and the final Allied defensive line, like a moat around an inner keep. If German assault troops now massing around the Factory and Carroceto could cross that three-mile stretch to reach the scrub pines of the Padiglione Woods, they would almost surely be able to infiltrate the final four miles to the sea, splitting the beachhead in half much as Vietinghoff’s forces had almost done down the Sele River corridor at Salerno. Here the counterattack would fling six divisions into the Via Anziate corridor; two more divisions would remain in reserve to exploit the cracked Allied line, along with two hundred Tigers, Panthers, and other tanks. A hard freeze tonight would give the panzers good footing, although the attack could not begin until first light on Wednesday because regiments just arriving were too unfamiliar with the ground to attack in darkness.
In truth, both Mackensen and Kesselring deplored this attack plan, which had been foisted on them by Hitler. The Führer, ever more entangled in tactical minutae half a continent away, had ordered a “concentrated, overwhelming, ruthless” assault on a narrow front, massing German armor and artillery. Excision of the beachhead “abscess,” Hitler concluded, would compel the Anglo-Americans to delay their invasion of northwest Europe, which he expected in the spring or summer; he had turned a deaf ear to protests from his field commanders, who warned that a massed attack across open terrain offered lucrative targets to Allied gunners.
Still, great pains had been taken to ensure the success of FISCHFANG, Operation FISHING. So secret was the attack date that officers visiting from Berlin were forbidden to use the telephone. Luftwaffe strikes and artillery barrages would mask the clank of approaching panzers. Ammo shortages precluded a rolling barrage in front of the attack formations, but happily most streambeds ran perpendicular to the Allied line, providing sheltered approaches in the bottoms. Units imposed draconian measures to conserve fuel and vehicle wear: this week, the Hermann Görings had issued three bicycles to each platoon “to use for short errands.”
Darkness cloaked the battlefield on this twenty-fifth night of the Anzio beachhead. Stars shone brilliantly without kindling the slightest hope of a better tomorrow in either camp. Shells arced back and forth as usual, then subsided after midnight for a few hours of uncommon tranquillity. To the BBC’s Vaughan-Thomas, “It was as if the house lights were being lowered in the theatre.”
At 6:30 on a cold, foggy Wednesday morning the curtain rose to the percussive roar of German artillery. For seventy-five minutes, shells fell in sheets on either side of the Via Anziate, the detonations melding “like the rolling of a drum,” in one soldier’s phrase. Birds tumbled from the trees, killed by concussion. Then from the swirl of smoke and mist came whistles and shouts and the thrum of panzer engines that reminded a GI of “so many coffee grinders.” Gray-green waves of shouting, singing German infantrymen in ankle-length coats spilled down the road and across the fallow fields.
They were not unexpected. Aerial surveillance and captured prisoners had alerted VI Corps commanders to “a noticeable increase in enemy activity,” and Ultra decrypts in the small hours Wednesday provided details on the “timing, direction and weight of assault.” Still, few forward units had sufficiently girded themselves with mines, wire, sandbags, and tank obstacles. Compressed into a six-mile front, the German spearhead smashed into the 45th Division and, on the American left, the British 56th Division. Rifle battalions in the U.S. 157th and 179th Infantry Regiments—entrenched, respectively, left and right of the road below the Factory—buckled; only stalwart reserves and thawing mud slowed the enemy advance. Cries of “Medic!” swept the field, swallowed by the din. Panzer crews, intent on obliterating the second-story machine-gun nests that covered German infiltration routes, fired as many as ten rounds to kill a single soldier. A gunner on a tank destroyer with the 157th lashed himself to his .50-caliber machine gun with a leather strap, shooting until German fire killed him. “I watched the dust spurt out the back of his jacket as the bullets hit him,” an officer reported. Company E in the same regiment was soon pared to fourteen riflemen. They, along with the rest of the encircled 2nd Battalion, would hold fast for a week in “a savage, brutish troglodyte existence” among the Caves, a sandstone badlands of vaulted tunnels east of the Via Anziate. Of nearly 1,000 men in the battalion, only 231 would survive their heroic stand in what one called “a bastard of a place.”
Forward companies of Royal Fusiliers and the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry disintegrated. So many enemy bullets swarmed across the landscape that a paratrooper reported “a strange chirping sound, like a flock of canaries.” German artillery severed phone lines, punctured radios, and killed or wounded forward observers calling for counterfire, including a half dozen in the 179th Infantry alone. An urgent message to Nettuno reduced the plea to seven syllables: “Give us everything you’ve got.”
Grim as the day had been, by dusk the German gains were limited to a mile or less here and there, at a cost of seventeen hundred casualties. “Enemy resistance was strong and determined,” the Fourteenth Army log noted. The Infantry Lehr Regiment, stocked with ardent Nazis and touted by Hitler as a killer elite, had been smacked about below the Factory before skedaddling without permission. Another of the Führer’s innovations—the Goliath, a small armored vehicle packed with 250 pounds of explosives and controlled remotely with a five-hundred-yard cable that unspooled from a drum—also failed abjectly. Of thirteen Goliaths sent into battle on Wednesday, Allied artillery disemboweled three, and Wehrmacht handlers reeled in the other ten after they were thwarted by mud, ditches, and gunfire; derisive GIs dubbed them Doodlebugs. Scanning dispatches in his headquarters near Rome, Kesselring voiced dismay at the dwindling of German artillery ammunition stocks, and he pressed Mackensen to commit his reserves in the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzer Grenadier Divisions. Mackensen phoned his reply just before 6:30 P.M.: “The time has not yet come.”
That time was coming, though, and Wednesday night brought it closer. Thousands of infiltrating German soldiers crept down streambeds and goat paths, bobbing helmets silhouetted against the skyline. At eight A.M. Thursday, after a softening raid by Luftwaffe bombers, sixty panzers and infantrymen from three divisions pressed along the Via Anziate and angled east, ripping the seam between the 157th and 179th Regiments. By noon, more air strikes and fourteen howling German battalions had driven a wedge two miles wide and a mile deep into the midriff of the 45th Division. The 179th commander, Colonel Malcolm R. Kammerer, ordered two battalions to fall back a thousand yards; fully exposed despite a milky smoke screen, the men were sliced to ribbons. Survivors stumbled back an extra thousand yards to a narrow farm lane known as Dead End Road. “Men on the verge of panic,” one company commander reported.
“179th lost 1,000 men, mostly by surrender,” Brigadier General Ray McLain, the division artillery chief, told his diary. “Poor leadership.” Major General Eagles agreed and ordered Kammerer relieved. Staggering back alone after his squad had been destroyed, a s
Four hundred Allied gun tubes barked and barked throughout the day, spitting “murder concentrations” at German gun flashes. Smoking piles of spent brass littered the pits, and gunners stained black with powder shouted to uncomprehending mates long deaf from the relentless roar. Three dozen tanks joined the bombardment, along with four batteries of 90mm antiaircraft guns shouldered into the line to snipe at ground targets. Along the shingle, destroyers and two cruisers pressed “close enough for the Germans to count the rivets,” according to a U.S. Navy account; their shells traced crimson parabolas into the enemy rear. Eight hundred planes dumped a thousand tons of explosives along the front line, the heaviest payload in a single day of close air support in the war thus far. A third of that weight fell from heavy bombers flying tactical missions, as they had at Salerno. Bombs landed danger-close, some within four hundred yards of Allied lines. Nary a rifleman complained.
Another day faded with the beachhead intact, if shrunk by several square miles. Bodies lay stacked so high in front of the 157th Infantry that marksmen had trouble peering over them for fresh targets. Jeeps careering to the rear often carried half a dozen corpses. In the Nettuno crypt, staff officers parsed the fragmentary reports. “Don’t leave the phone, son,” a colonel shouted to a besieged lieutenant. “Let me know what is going on.” No one really knew, of course; such was the way of desperate battles. Some things were best unknown: the Ox and Bucks battalion adjutant reported that when a machine gunner who had been killed by a sniper was found stiff with rigor mortis, still hunched in a sitting position, two men “were obliged to sit on the knees of the body in order to bring the Bren into action.”