The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The “perfunctory jogging of the haunches,” in Norman Lewis’s phrase, brought dire results to Fifth Army. The VD rate exceeded one in ten for white soldiers—it was much higher for blacks—with the average gonorrhea infection in February requiring ten days’ recuperation. “The Italian strain of gonococci proved to be 70 percent sulfa resistant,” British doctors reported. Another new wonder drug, penicillin, was generally not available in Italy until mid-February, and then in such limited stocks that it commanded the same black market price as morphine. A secret debate raged over whether penicillin should be given to infected troops or reserved exclusively for those valorously wounded. Churchill himself directed that “it must be used to the best military advantage,” and soon enough the drug would be administered to bedroom libertines and battlefield heroes alike.
Until then, Allied commanders struggled to curb their troops’ lascivious impulses. GIRLS WHO TAKE BOARDERS PROVIDE SOCIAL DISORDERS, street signs warned. Twenty “personal ablution centers” operated around the clock in Naples, providing the postcoital GI with soap, water, an iodine solution, and a receipt for his trouble. Still, as battles raged at Cassino and Anzio, 15 percent of all American hospital beds in Italy were occupied by VD patients. Another five hundred beds in Naples were reserved for infected prostitutes, in clinics dubbed “whorespitals.” At the Bagnoli racetrack outside Naples, the 23rd General Hospital filled hundreds of beds with diseased Lotharios, whose hospital tunics were stenciled with a large red “VD”; despite the barbed wire and sentries ringing the compound, an Army provost marshal reported that some patients were “jumping the wall and consorting with the prostitutes in the immediate neighborhood.” An exasperated major who discovered a tryst under way in a Bagnoli cave flushed the miscreants with tear gas grenades.
Near Avellino, in the hills above Salerno, even sterner measures were taken. “The chaplains thought the whores from Naples had been using the straw huts up and down the valley,” one infantryman reported, “so they set fire to all of them.”
The Orange Club was pleasant enough, and the opera house and the Capri chafing dishes offered an interlude from the war. But above all else Naples was a port, and by late winter 1944 it was among the world’s busiest. Here “that huge and gassy thing called the war effort”—John Steinbeck’s words—took solid form as the broad-shouldered avatar of Allied logistical hegemony. To keep a single GI fighting for a month in Italy required more than half a ton of matériel. Can do. For every artillery shell fired at Anzio, for every bomb dropped or Sherman tank lost at Cassino, two more seemed to levitate from the holds of arriving cargo ships, winched out by gantry cranes and placed on rail cars, truck beds, or LSTs bound for the front.
By now the American war machine had become the “prodigy of organization” so admired by Churchill and so dreaded by German commanders. U.S. production totals in 1943 had included 86,000 planes, compared with barely 2,000 in 1939. Also: 45,000 tanks, 98,000 bazookas, a million miles of communications wire, 18,000 new ships and craft, 648,000 trucks, nearly 6 million rifles, 26,000 mortars, and 61 million pairs of wool socks. Each day, another 71 million rounds of small-arms ammo spilled from U.S. munitions plants. In 1944, more of almost everything would be made.
The nation’s conversion from a commercial to a military economy was as complete as it ever would be. An auto industry that had made 3.5 million private cars in 1941 turned out 139 during the rest of the war while shifting to tanks, jeeps, and bombers. In artillery production alone, makers of soap, soft drinks, bedsprings, toys, and microscopes now built 60 species of big guns; they were among 2,400 prime contractors and 20,000 subcontractors in the artillery business, from a steam shovel company building gun carriages to an elevator firm fashioning recoil mechanisms.
In February 1944, the U.S. Army shipped 3 million tons of cargo overseas, parsed into 6 million separate supply items that included not only beans and bullets but mildew-resistant shoelaces and khaki-colored pipe cleaners. Enormous consignments throughout the war went to Allied armies under the Lend-Lease program, including 43,000 planes, 880,000 submachine guns, and enough cans of Spam that sardonic Russian soldiers called them “Second Fronts.” Inevitably, largesse fueled resentment, “the constant irritation to have to live to a large extent on American bounty,” as one British general acknowledged. Tommies could not help but bristle when the British Army’s daily toilet paper allotment was 3 sheets per soldier compared to the U.S. Army ration of 22½.
The prodigy also was prodigal, nowhere more than in the Mediterranean. Pilferage and ineconomy meant that “as much as one ship out of every five is stolen or wasted,” the U.S. Army’s supply chief, General Brehon B. Somervell, calculated in a letter to senior commanders on March 23. From Algiers to Naples, “we are losing gasoline, oil, food, clothing and other items which nobody can see why anybody would steal,” Major General Everett S. Hughes replied from AFHQ headquarters. A Fifth Army study estimated that two-thirds of the Naples economy “derives from transactions in stolen Allied supplies.” Thieves punched holes in moving rail cars and tossed out the contents, or surreptitiously tapped fuel pipelines running to Foggia. Frank Gervasi reported that an entire trainload of sugar had vanished, along with the train itself; the sugar supposedly sold for 400 lire a kilo on the black market, while the engine and rail cars were traced to a steel mill scrapheap. Horse-drawn funeral hearses were found stuffed with stolen goods from the docks. Whispered offers—“Pork. Beef. Pork. Beef”—could be heard in Neapolitan alleys, and a civil affairs officer claimed that “even an uncrated German fighter plane could be bought on the black market.”
A separate prison was built at the port, where a drumhead court-martial heard up to eighty cases a day. Still, despite the fifteen hundred American MPs on duty in the city, it was said that local thieves could “whip the gold out of your eyeteeth while you’re yawning.” Norman Lewis described stolen Allied kit arrayed on the Via Forcella, with a sign: IF YOU DON’T SEE THE OVERSEAS ARTICLE YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, JUST ASK US AND WE’LL GET IT.
It hardly mattered. “Total war” was largely a German concept, conceived by General Erich Ludendorff as an alternative to the grinding stalemate of World War I. But the Americans had made it their own, stamping it with a Yankee efficiency and management genius that outproduced the Axis fourfold in heavy guns, fivefold in bombers, and sevenfold in transport planes. U.S. tank production in 1943 alone exceeded Germany’s during the entire six years of war. In the last eighteen months of World War II, Germany produced seventy thousand trucks; the Allies collectively turned out more than one million.
Even though Kesselring’s divisions tended to get more men and matériel than other theaters, German forces in Italy had begun to feel a severe pinch as winter drew to an end. A dearth of fuel drums was followed by shortages of fuel itself; by summer, the allocation for Italy would be halved, and mechanics concocted ersatz fuel distilled from wine, the residue of grape presses, and even acetone salvaged from varnish factories. Tire shortages forced a reduction of truck speed limits from sixty to forty kilometers per hour, and led to experiments with wooden wheels. German motor pools contained three thousand different types of vehicles, a mélange that complicated spare parts supplies.
Wehrmacht quartermasters reported dwindling stocks of iodine, soap, insulin, plaster of Paris, X-ray film, insecticide, dentures, and glass eyes. Kesselring’s total ration strength topped one million men, including the Luftwaffe and various support units, and the daily supply allocation was fixed at a lean one kilogram per man. Not least was the difficulty in also victualing 95,000 horses, which required 900 tons of fodder every day and 200 tons of horseshoes and nails each month. Shortages of trucks and of dray horses sometimes forced gun teams to harness oxen and even cows to pull their tubes. A scheme to produce German munitions in northern Italian plants collapsed when factory managers realized that virtually all raw materials would have to be shipped south from the Fatherland, from coal and brass to tungsten and molybdenum.
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As the fifth year of carnage played out, more than ever the total war had become a struggle not between rival ideologies or opposing tacticians but between systems—the integration of political, economic, and military forces needed for sustained offensive power. Certainly courage, audacity, and sacrifice would be required to win through to Rome, and to prevail globally. But every pallet of bombs, shells, and 16EEE boots hoisted from a Liberty ship in Naples harbor amplified and complemented those battlefield virtues, ensuring that valor would never be practiced in vain.
The Weight of Metal
OF Italy’s 116,000 square miles, none tormented Fifth Army more than the 600-acre swatch occupied by Cassino town. Now overwatched by the gray stub of the ruined abbey, the town boasted four churches, four hotels, a botanical garden, and a jail. All 22,000 citizens had fled or died, ceding the cobbled streets to General von Senger and German paratroopers in their brimless helmets, who in late February replaced the panzer grenadiers previously holding this sector of the Gustav Line.
All approaches from the south in this “small, peculiar and unhealthy piece of Italy,” wrote Martha Gellhorn, were marred by “sliced houses, the landslides of rubble, the torn roofs.” Highway 6, now scorched and lifeless, ran “straight as a bar of steel” for three miles from Monte Trocchio into town before swerving up the Liri Valley. Riflemen traded potshots and gunners exchanged artillery barrages, but drear stalemate took hold, in an “endless vigil that is never a quiet one,” as one Gurkha officer wrote. In his diary he added:
Time seems to have stopped. It is as if we have been condemned to live forever in a cold, damp hell on earth, each of us obtaining but meagre shelter behind rocks or in holes in the ground.
Not far from here, in 217 B.C., Hannibal had found himself hemmed in by mountains and Roman troops. Lashing dry twigs to the horns of two thousand rustled cattle, his soldiers set fire to the faggots and drove the herd onto the heights above confused enemy sentinels who mistook the flaming beasts for an encircling army of men carrying torches. Fearful of being out-flanked, the Romans fled, Hannibal escaped, and his Carthaginians went on to win one of the greatest victories in Western military history at Cannae a year later.
No such stratagem occurred to Alexander, Clark, or their lieutenants. The high command seemed in the grip of a plodding fatalism, as if no man “was master of his own destiny,” wrote a British officer. “There was no firm conviction among the leaders that victory would result.” Alexander was inclined to lie low until spring weather dried the ground and cleared the skies, as both his staff and General Juin urged. Yet, under pressure from London and Washington, he felt obliged to tie up as many German divisions as possible before the Normandy invasion; he also hoped to prevent Kesselring from massing for further blows at Anzio. The tail now wagged the dog: the Anzio landings had been launched to break the Gustav Line impasse at Cassino; now another attack at Cassino was deemed necessary to help the beachhead.
In meetings at Caserta in late February, Alexander decreed that come spring the Allied front would be reconfigured to concentrate more combat power around the maw of the Liri Valley. Fifth Army was to shift to the left, taking over a coastal sector with a force that was mostly American and French. Eighth Army would also shift left, leaving a small presence on the Adriatic, while assuming responsibility for the Cassino front with the British X and XIII Corps, as well as I Canadian Corps and the newly arrived II Polish Corps. Clark privately rejoiced at unshackling himself from the British. “Anything that will divest me of the terrific responsibilities that I have had in trying to command McCreery’s [X Corps] and Freyberg’s corps will be welcome by me,” he told his diary on February 28.
Before that happy day arrived, however, Fifth Army was to make one final attempt to bull through at Cassino with Spadger Freyberg’s Kiwis, Brits, and Indians. But how? For the past two months, beginning with the French thrust northeast of Cassino and the American debacle at the Rapido, Allied attackers had avoided a direct assault into the town. Minefields and inundations hemmed both sides of Highway 6, turning the roadbed into a narrow, exposed funnel for any battalion approaching from Monte Trocchio. Yet Freyberg saw no alternative to a head-on attack. Convinced that a wide flanking movement around Monte Cassino was impossible, he “put his faith in the weight of metal,” as the Indian official history later observed.
As the abbey had been pulverized, so now the town. New Zealand intelligence analysts proposed dropping three 1,000-pound bombs for each of the estimated 1,000 German paratroopers believed to be sheltering in Cassino. Freyberg calculated that just half that payload—perhaps 750 tons, reinforced by 200,000 artillery shells—would allow Allied infantry and armor forces to “walk through” the town, which he asserted could be cleared by tanks in six to twelve hours after the bombardment.
The use of airpower to bludgeon a hole through the Gustav Line found favor with Hap Arnold, the Army Air Forces chief, whose cables from Washington had become increasingly shrill. Why were daily air sorties in Italy running at 1,500 or fewer when “you with the British have a total of approximately 5,000 airplanes?” he asked Ira Eaker on February 24. “Why not 3,000 [sorties] until the situation is more in our favor?” In a petulant letter a few days later, Arnold condemned “the lack of ingenuity in the air action,” adding, “We are all very greatly disturbed here at the apparent bogging down of the Italian campaign.” Was it not possible to “break up every stone in the town behind which a German soldier might be hiding?” Such an attack “could really make air history,” he wrote. “The whole future of the air forces is closely knit into this whole problem.” Behind Arnold’s military advice lay a larger political calculus: Air Force success in breaking the impasse at Cassino would strengthen his campaign to make the service independent of the U.S. Army.
Lieutenant General Eaker yielded to no man in airpower enthusiasm. Born in Texas and raised in southeast Oklahoma, he had been commissioned as an infantry officer in 1917 before transferring immediately to the flying service. As chief pilot of Question Mark in 1929, Eaker demonstrated the potential of airborne refueling by remaining aloft over Los Angeles for six days; several years later he made the first transcontinental flight while navigating solely by instruments. Coauthor with Arnold of three books on what they fondly called “this flying game,” Eaker personally had persuaded Churchill a year earlier to endorse the Combined Bomber Offensive, a round-the-clock pummeling of Axis strategic targets with U.S. heavy bombers by day and British bombers by night. “There is nothing that can be destroyed by gunfire that cannot be destroyed by bombs,” he once proclaimed. Before taking over the Mediterranean air forces in January, he had commanded the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Britain, where appalling crew losses and irregular bomb accuracy failed to shake his belief that the Third Reich could be gutted from the air.
He was less certain about Cassino. Obliterating the abbey had simply given German defenders both the moral and topographical high ground. Contrary to Freyberg’s sunny estimate, an Army Air Forces study warned that “due to cratering and debris, tanks would probably not be able to pass through the town for 48 hours after the bombing.” To A
Yet in the absence of a plausible alternative—the latter-day equivalent of flaming livestock—Freyberg’s plan carried the day: after bombers flattened the town, the 2nd New Zealand Division with help from Indian troops and American tanks would occupy the ruins and forge a bridgehead across the Rapido, while Indian troops seized Monte Cassino and opened the Liri Valley for armored forces to trundle up Highway 6 toward Rome. The scheme was code-named Operation DICKENS in honor of Charles Dickens, who after visiting Monte Cassino abbey had written a lugubrious account of “the deep sounding of its bell…while nothing is seen but the grey mist, moving solemnly and slowly, like a funeral procession.”
Freyberg insisted that the bombing coincide with three consecutive days of fair weather to dry the ground for attacking tanks. This demand fell on the Fifth Army meteorologist, Captain David M. Ludlum, a former high school history teacher who had earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and who was admired for his panache in wearing pajamas to bed during the darkest hours at Salerno. Perhaps to encourage a favorable forecast, the actual bombardment of Cassino town was named Operation LUDLUM.
Alas, the honor failed to inspire meteorological favor. Beginning in late February, rain fell day after dreary day. The eponymous captain studied his weather charts from dawn until midnight only to report yet again: more rain. A week passed, then another. In the hills behind Monte Cassino, Indian troops waited in their soggy holes, emerging only at night to briefly stretch their cramped muscles. Sickness or battle wounds claimed another Indian soldier every twenty minutes on average. Nebelwerfer fire raked the Allied positions, and by mid-March fifty-five German mortars had been counted around Cassino. With the entire New Zealand Corps keyed to attack on twenty-four hours’ notice, “staleness, physical and psychological, was inevitable,” as the official Kiwi history noted. Worse luck: on the afternoon of March 2, the able New Zealand division commander Howard Kippenberger climbed Monte Trocchio to survey the approaches along Highway 6 and tripped an undetected S-mine. The blast blew off one foot and mangled the other so badly that surgeons trimmed it away. In less than a month, Freyberg had lost his two best lieutenants, Tuker of the 4th Indian Division and now Kippenberger.