The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
By late Saturday, a swastika flag flew above Hangman’s Hill. Heidrich’s patrols counted 165 Gurkha corpses, now dusted in white. “There has been a heavy fall of snow,” a German machine gunner jotted in his diary on March 25. “You would think we are in Russia.”
The New Zealand Corps disbanded at noon on Sunday, March 26, having outlived its usefulness. In the past eleven days the corps had suffered 2,100 casualties, nearly twice as many as Senger’s defenders. The 4th Indian Division in particular had been grievously injured at Cassino, with more than four thousand casualties since mid-February. Leaving behind what one British general called “that valley of evil memory,” the Rajputs and Gurkhas limped to a quiet sector on the Adriatic to lick their wounds. Other divisions were to stand by for orders. “We are now to assume an attitude of ‘very offensive defensive probing,’” Keyes advised his diary. “What in God’s name is that?”
Operation DICKENS was the third Allied attempt in two months to break through at Cassino, and the third failure. Through the ranks spread “a persistent feeling that something, somewhere, had gone wrong,” the official U.S. Army history later acknowledged. Most of the terrain won had been seized early by the Americans in their futile escalade in January; since then, little had been gained and many had been lost. In this most recent assault, as a Gurkha officer wrote, “The strongest defences in Europe were attacked by a single corps, consisting of two divisions, on a narrow front in the heart of winter without any attempt at diversionary operations.” The New Zealand official history conceded that “the attack showed little of that tactical originality which is commonly called surprise.”
Something had gone wrong. For Allied soldiers, each battle had become an attritive bloodletting on ground not of their choosing. No coherent master plan governed the offensives, but rather a succession of unsynchronized schemes that lacked the requisite heft: a division here, a division there, probing for soft spots. Limitations on the weight of metal had been revealed, first at the abbey, then in the town, which in addition to all those bombs absorbed almost 600,000 artillery shells. The Kiwi history concluded that “Cassino was a battle of the First World War fought with the weapons of the Second,” but at times it resembled a battle of the Second fought with weapons of the First.
Failure in combat usually implies inadequate leaders, and brilliant Allied generalship was conspicuously absent at Cassino. Freyberg and other Commonwealth commanders fretted at Clark’s insouciance about casualties. Just so, but the strategy of “naked attrition”—as the British official history called it—belonged to Alexander. The British also still considered the tank a decisive arm, as if the Apennines were Alamein, rather than recognizing it for “what it was in Italy, a crawling monster which produced little except congestion, confusion and delay.” Freyberg had six hundred tanks parked around Cassino, sixfold Senger’s armored fleet, but he never could fling more than a tenth of them into the fight simultaneously. Other martial axioms had been forgotten or brushed aside at the Gustav Line: that command of the sea gave an open flank into the enemy’s rear, often obviating the need for terrestrial frontal assault; that rubbly, cratered battlefields impeded mobility, as had been seen, in fact, at Passchendaele in July 1917; that the ancient requisite for an attacker to muster a three-to-one manpower advantage rarely was truer than in mountainous terrain, which devoured battalions. The New Zealand Corps never managed even a two-to-one ratio. General Tuker, sidelined in his sickbed, considered these accumulated miscalculations “military sins no less.”
“Bombardment alone never had and never will drive a determined enemy from his position,” Clark wrote, with the thin satisfaction of a man vindicated by calamity. Cassino had thrice proved “a terrible nut to crack,” as Ernie Harmon observed in a sympathy note to Clark on March 28. If Heidrich was right, if direct assault was doomed to fail, then only a wide flanking maneuver through inaccessible terrain by a division or two of agile, well-provisioned troops would break the deadlock.
Juin, Keyes, and others had for months urged such a course, and Alexander now saw merit in their petition. To the prime minister he wrote, “A little later when snow goes off [the] mountains, the rivers drop, and the ground hardens, movement will be possible over terrain which at present is impassable.” Churchill, whom one British strategist described as the “presiding deity throughout this soft underbelly campaign,” replied sourly, “The war weighs very heavy on us all just now.”
It weighed heavy on the far side of the mountain as well. Senger continued his lonely tramps over hill and dale, proud to still hold the superior high ground. Hangman’s Hill, Point 593, the abbey itself—all remained in German hands. Yet Senger was too good a soldier for self-delusion. “All this,” he wrote, “did not blind me to the fact that our successes were of a temporary nature.”
Dragonflies in the Sun
THE war weighed heaviest on the men actually fighting it, of course. Nine months of combat in Italy had annealed those whom it had not destroyed. The fiery crucibles from Sicily to Cassino left them hard and even hateful. “After you get whipped and humiliated a couple of times and you have seen your friends killed, then killing becomes a business and you get pretty good at it pretty fast,” one Tommy explained. Plodding up the Italian boot, they left their peaceable civilian selves on the roadsides like shed skins. In a letter to his family in Indiana, a lieutenant who had once been a newspaper reporter described “a callousness to death, a bitter hatred of the Jerries, a burning desire to avenge what they have done to us. This supersedes fear for ourselves.” Every payload dumped by a B-17 became a personal token of malice. “We get quite a kick out of the devastation wrought by our Fortresses,” another soldier wrote home. “War is like that: you actually enjoy the knowledge that you are killing countless numbers of your enemies.”
For soldiers in twenty or more Allied divisions, war by the early spring of 1944 seemed ever more primeval. “One goes on fighting, killing, simply because one has to,” wrote Raleigh Trevelyan, a British lieutenant at Anzio. A 1st Special Service Force soldier from St. Louis told Eric Sevareid, “It’s so easy to kill. It solves all your problems, and there are no questions asked. I think I’m getting the habit.” Daily life in combat units resolved itself into noise, filth, isolation, confusion, fatigue, and mortality; everything else seemed extraneous. Soldiers distrusted the gung ho, the cocksure, and anyone less miserable than themselves. “We learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago, as simply as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for another,” wrote John Muirhead, a B-17 crewman. The conceits of fate, destiny, and God comforted some, but believers and nonbelievers alike rubbed their crucifixes and lucky coins and St. Christopher medals with a suspicion, as Muirhead said, that “one is never saved for long.”
They saw things that seared them forever: butchered friends, sobbing children, butchered children, sobbing friends. “Watched an amputation last night,” an ambulance driver wrote in his diary. “A Tommy stretcher bearer had stood on a mine and he had to have both legs taken off. One above the knee and one below the knee.” It made soft men hard and hard men harder. A counterintelligence officer noted that combat veterans “are sometimes possessed by a fury that makes them capable of anything…. It is as if they are seized by a demon.” Soldiers walking through a killing field sometimes stomped on the distended bellies of dead Germans to hear the flatulent noises the corpses made. “Slowly I am becoming insensitive to everything,” wrote one soldier in his diary. “God in Heaven, help me to keep my humanity.”
Many considered humanity an impediment to survival. A survey of infantry divisions in the Mediterranean later found that 62 percent believed hatred for the enemy could help them through tough times. “The more you hate, the better soldier you become,” explained one command sergeant major. “Love is completely absent in the heart of a rifleman.” Like lightning seeking a ground, the high-voltage animus surging through Allied combat regiments discharged on one conducting rod: the German. “He has no right to do this to
Many atrocity stories circulated, particularly of German white-flag ruses. Some were true, all were believed. “There’s no rules in this war,” a 45th Division soldier said. “If they want to fight like that, it’s okay with us.” Because of a supposed German tendency to shoot surrendering Yanks, one soldier reported, the 6th Armored Infantry Regiment’s unofficial slogan had become “Take No Prisoners.” He added, “We now do the same thing, and we have plenty of Germans to do it to.”
From the Tunisian campaign, four U.S. combat divisions had emerged full of killers. Italy created many more, American as well as British, Canadian, French, New Zealand, Indian, Polish, and others. Together they would form an avenging and victorious army, a terrible sword of righteousness. A VI Corps officer proposed that every soldier embody the “three R’s—ruthless, relentless, remorseless.” As the abbey and Cassino town had been pulverized, so would a thousand other strongholds. God could sift the guilty from the innocent. The war had come to that.
“This is a war for keeps,” an Air Force captain wrote his mother from Italy. “We will not rest satisfied until starvation and butchery have been visited upon German soil. There can be no parleying with the Devil.”
Eager boys no longer scaled Rome’s clock towers to watch for the Anglo-American legions pressing north from Anzio. For days after the SHINGLE landings in January, tens of thousands of Romans had kept vigil on their rooftops in the Eternal City. Allied flags flapped from balconies, and bookstores reported a run on English dictionaries. Jumpy German sentries one night fired on a sinister platoon of figures, which proved to be the stone saints lining the façade of the basilica of St. John Lateran.
Those heady hopes for imminent liberation had long faded. These days the nearest Allied troops flew four miles overhead in air armadas said to resemble “dragonflies in the sun.” Nervous Romans kept their weather eyes peeled for the clear skies of what came to be called una giornata da B-17, a B-17 day. The worst bombing of the capital since July occurred on March 14, when various rail yards were pummeled; civilian casualties proved particularly grim among those queued up for water at street fountains. Graffiti on city walls now chided the liberators for dawdling. One mordant gibe proclaimed: “Allies, don’t worry! We are coming to rescue you!”
Eight months of occupation had sharpened Roman cynicism. At first the German fist only lightly swiped the city. Wehrmacht looters plucked clean the palaces of the turncoat royal family, such as the Villa Savoia, where Mussolini had been arrested. “Everything went,” one witness reported, “including the nails in the walls.” But the cinemas soon reopened, and the royal opera house. Recruiting posters for German labor battalions showed a smiling Italian tradesman with a flower in his buttonhole, smoking a cigarette. “Do you want to work? Are you in need?” the caption asked. “Employment only within your country. You are assured good clothes, good food, good pay, and good fellowship.” Fifty thousand Italians, volunteers and otherwise, still toiled on fortifications along the country’s west coast.
The shadows soon deepened. Berlin had always considered Mussolini to be weak-kneed on the Jewish question, and on September 24, 1943, with the Duce reduced to a pathetic puppet, the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, secretly ordered the Gestapo chief in Rome, Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, to arrest all Jews in the city. The thirty-five-year-old Kappler, gray-eyed son of a Stuttgart chauffeur, had lived in Rome since 1939. He was described as “intolerant, cold, vengeful, unhappily married and with interests in Etruscan vases, roses, and photography”; when he grew annoyed, the dueling scar on his cheek reddened. Two days later, Kappler gave Jewish community leaders thirty-six hours to deliver fifty kilograms of gold or face the deportation of two hundred men. On September 28, a convoy of taxis and private cars pulled up to the Gestapo headquarters at Via Tasso 155 number with the ransom, which was laid on a scale pan amid much haggling over the last gram. Three weeks later, at dawn on Saturday, October 16, storm troopers swept through the Roman ghetto anyway, seizing twelve hundred Jews; sixteen of them survived the war. Most were promptly shipped to Auschwitz and gassed, including an infant born after the roundup. Mussolini on December 1 ordered the arrest of “all Jews living on the national territory.” Italians showed admirable pluck in sheltering Jewish compatriots: nearly five thousand hid in Roman convents, monasteries, and the Vatican. More than forty thousand Jews in Italy would survive the war; nearly eight thousand perished.
Even for Romans not facing extermination, the occupation winter proved long and grim. Several hundred thousand refugees crowded the city, felling trees and chopping up park benches for firewood. Electricity supplies grew erratic: alternating neighborhoods went without power two nights each week. Tuberculosis and infant mortality spiked. Kesselring’s retreat to the Gustav Line hampered efforts to feed the city, for much of Rome’s granary lay in southern Italy; the destruction of supply trucks by Allied warplanes further complicated the task.
Prices doubled, and would redouble by early summer. Hungry livestock could graze on the new spring grass at the Villa Borghese, but the Romans had begun to starve. On downtown sidewalks women peddled their furs, scholars their books, children their shoes. The daily bread ration dwindled to the equivalent of two slices per person, from loaves made with ground chickpeas, maize flour, elm pith, and mulberry leaves. As spring arrived, so did bread riots; after one bakery was ransacked, SS troops dragged ten Italian women to a nearby bridge and shot them as they faced the Tiber.
Terror also doubled and redoubled. Blackshirts finding a film too tedious shot up the screen; another thug with a submachine gun leaped on stage at an opera and threatened to murder those who failed to stand for the Fascist anthem “Giovanezza.” In the central telephone exchange, five hundred eavedroppers reportedly listened in on local phone calls. Men were plucked from trams or rounded up in the Via Nazionale for labor battalions, with no mention made of good pay or good fellowship. A priest condemned for subversion blessed his firing squad as they shouldered their rifles.
Soon half of Rome was said to be hiding the other half. Interrogators in the Via Tasso extracted confessions by pushing pins through a suspect’s penis or by stuffing his ears with cotton and lighting it; others had their shoes removed and their toes inserted between the cylindrical drum and base plate of a mimeograph machine. “They pulled out the hairs of my mustache, and by means of screws and a steel bar, they compressed my temples until I thought my eyes were going to burst out,” a survivor said of his interrogation on the night of March 18. On the eve of his execution, one man scratched a message on his cell wall: “From my mother I ask forgiveness because in being faithful to myself I must be faithless to her love…. Long live Italy.”
Allied planes flying from Brindisi dropped tons of supplies and scores of agents behind the lines. Intended to inspirit Italian insurgents and dishearten German troops, OSS “morale operations” ranged from the clever to the puerile. Scattered pamphlets listed the bombed streets in every German city. Leaflets instructed Wehrmacht soldiers on how to defect to Switzerland, and a “malingering booklet” prescribed methods to avoid combat by feigning various illnesses. Scheisse—shit—stickers mimicking the runic double “S” of the SS were designed to “be licked on the tongue and slapped on a wall in an instant.” Small stencils could leave a painted message in seven seconds, including one in Italian that read, GERMANS OUT. Tiny rubber stamps, equipped with tiny ink pads, depicted a skull and crossbones over the word “Nazi.” Project CORNFLAKES dropped 320 sacks of coun
In Rome, the OSS by March 1944 had established a dozen observation posts on the main roads leading from the capital, with coded information about traffic radioed to the Anzio beachhead several times a day; one clandestine shortwave station operated in a boathouse belonging to the Italian Finance Ministry. An Italian operative in Kesselring’s headquarters, an ardent royalist who served as a liaison with the Fascist command in Rome, also secretly provided the German order of battle and details about the FISCHFANG counterattack.
No OSS spy in Rome was more flamboyant than a twenty-four-year-old American named Peter Tompkins, who had lived in the city as a boy after his parents moved there to study art. Educated at English boarding schools—thanks in part to the patronage of his mother’s alleged lover, George Bernard Shaw—and then at Harvard, Tompkins had worked as a foreign correspondent before joining the OSS. In late January, a Royal Navy patrol boat put him ashore near Rome carrying a Beretta pistol and papers that identified him as a Roman prince. Tompkins had expected to greet Fifth Army liberators in a few days; instead he waited week after week, jumping from safe house to safe house: a dressmaker’s shop on the Via Condotti, a room in the Piazza Lovatelli.