The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Most of the cargo hoisted from the arriving ships was ammunition—150 truckloads every day—which was hauled to seven American dumps under constant attack. Bulldozers cut trenches and L-shaped bunkers to contain fires, several of which blazed each week. Firefighters at first had only shovels to battle the blazes, but now they used Sherman tanks with dozer blades and steel tracks. Still, the loss of ammunition to fire averaged more than sixty tons a day.
That the cost was not greater reflected ferocious antiaircraft defenses—a thousand guns made the beachhead among Europe’s most fortified precincts—and an elaborate smoke screen that blinded enemy pilots and gunners. With each dawn, hissing smoke generators spaced half a mile apart spewed a light haze that stretched fifteen miles along the coast and four miles inland. Technicians with flatbed trucks stood by to move the generators like chess pieces should changes in wind direction, air temperature, or convection currents thin the miasma. At night, smudge pots and a different set of generators hid the port, although GIs swore the smoke simply attracted more fire.
Six Allied divisions—approaching 100,000 troops—now occupied eighty square miles, a plot slightly larger than the District of Columbia. Since the epic struggles of February, a sullen stalemate had obtained. Newcomers found that life in the Beachhead Army was not only subterranean but nocturnal, with a battle rhythm known as “Dracula days.” Soldiers near the “dead country”—the no-man’s-land between the opposing armies—often slept in their holes until four P.M., patrolled until three A.M., ate a hot meal before sunrise, then slipped underground until the next afternoon. Rumors “slide from hole to hole,” wrote Audie Murphy, now a platoon sergeant in the 3rd Division. “We believe nothing, doubt nothing.” At night the beachhead turned restless, with raids, patrols, harassing fire, and chandelier flares that stretched men’s shadows grotesquely. Mines and shell fire grew so nerve-racking, wrote Robert Capa, that “every time I sat in my jeep I put my bedroll between my legs.” Bill Mauldin noticed that during barrages, military policemen remained in their crossroads trenches and controlled traffic by “holding up a wooden hand to point directions.”
The demand for sandbags and barbed wire along the thirty-two-mile perimeter had reached Flanders proportions. The “Anzio Ritz” was an underground cinema, given to grainy showings of Cary Grant in Mr. Lucky. On fine mornings, a British soldier wrote, men beyond sniper range sunned themselves on the lip of their holes “but with one ear cocked, like rabbits ready to pop back in again.” Soldiers kept their helmets on so long that they wore bald spots in their scalps. “Men dreamed of steaks, milk, toilet seats, running water, and the exquisite problem of what color clothes to wear,” a 179th Infantry account noted. Everyone grumbled at the static “Sitzkrieg” war. One physician compiled a beachhead glossary that included “anziopectoris”—a general indisposition—and “anziating,” a distant look in the eyes. Beachhead denizens called themselves “Anzonians,” and not without pride.
“The main thing you want is not to be alone,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who had come to Nettuno for a few days and stayed for a month. With a dozen other reporters, he lived at Via Gramsci 35, a four-story waterfront villa that “trembled like a palsied old gentleman” whenever the guns barked. Plagued by anemia and intimations of mortality, Pyle wrote a friend, “Instead of growing stronger and hard as good veterans do, I’ve become weaker and more frightened…. I don’t sleep well, and have half-awake hideous dreams about the war.”
Those perturbations only intensified at seven A.M. on March 17 when a German five-hundred-pound bomb detonated thirty feet from the villa. Pyle had taken the top floor for better light, and the blast flung him to the floor, ripping doors and windows from their frames. Glass and broken brick sprayed the room. “The only wound I got was a tiny cut on my right cheek,” Pyle reported, although he found himself combing his wispy hair with a handkerchief. He lingered at the beachhead for another week “to get my nerve back,” then sailed for Naples. On April 5, he left Italy forever. “There’s such a thing,” he wrote, “as pressing your luck too far in one spot.”
Lucian Truscott had also pressed his luck by moving to the spacious top floor of a three-story Nettuno house. The VI Corps headquarters remained in the cellars beneath the Osteria dell’ Artigliere, but Truscott believed a commander must display conspicuous sangfroid. Engineers sandbagged the doorways of his billet and laid rail ties across the roof, just in case.
“I have almost become oblivious to the passage of time,” Truscott wrote Sarah in mid-March. “One day is just another group of problems and each day seems to bring its own regardless of the situation.” A week later he added, “I do not want to return until the job is done and I can return to an America on the way back to normal—and then I want peace in large doses!” Two years had passed since he left her for “the great adventure, and what an adventure it has been…. I can only do the best I can. It is your faith in me that has brought me this far on the road.”
His throat still nagged him, along with a hacking cough, nasal polyps, and aching teeth. After an examination on March 31 the doctor recommended voice exercises and cigars rather than cigarettes. Truscott quit smoking for ten days, then resumed after complaining of weight gain. The “lack of voice really affects my efficiency,” he told Sarah. Cognac, scotch, gin, and two ounces of rye before supper remained staples in the Truscott mess, but without evident impairment of the commander. He remained energetic, buoyant, and intensely absorbed in every detail of his beachhead domain.
“I can close my eyes and imagine Virginia’s countryside now,” he wrote in April as the weather warmed. “The redbud and dogwood must be beautiful, and the blue mountains and green trees. There may be something romantic about southern Italy, but personally I have not found it yet.” On Easter Sunday, April 9, he slept eight hours straight for the first time since reaching Anzio; more typically he was awakened each night by emergencies small and large, trudging downstairs in bathrobe and slippers, gray hair tousled and face lined with fatigue, but ready to take command. In his rare free moments he studied French—like Patton, he suspected it might be useful—or listened to a German radio broadcast of Handel’s Messiah.
But heartbreak was never further away than the next letter, such as one in early April from the mother of a nineteen-year-old corporal who had vanished during the FISCHFANG attack on February 16. “Please tell me if you think it could be possible he is a German prisoner, or tell me if the worst has happened, and there wasn’t even his dog tag left from him,” she wrote from Ohio. “I have dreamed of my baby son every night.”
Truscott had ordered the beachhead evacuated of all twenty-two thousand civilians, and by early April every Anzonian except for 750 Italian laborers wore a military uniform. After treatment with DDT, families gathered at the church of St. Teresa to await passage to Naples. Some carried mattresses on their backs; others clung to cardboard suitcases or a wheel of cheese, scooping up a little sand as a token of remembrance. A few screeched in protest, hurling curses at the sky or gnawing their fists. “They hate Mussolini, the Germans, and I believe they hate us,” Lieutenant Ivar H. Aas wrote his parents in Minneapolis. “I don’t think they go for this liberation idea too well.” Soldiers purchased livestock from departing farmers—$4 for a lamb, $20 for a pig. When a pregnant cow was mortally wounded by a shell fragment, an enterprising soldier performed a Cesarean delivery with an ax, delivering a calf, which he fed from his helmet.
“This beachhead is the craziest place I have ever seen,” Lieutenant William J. Segan, a signal officer, wrote to his brother in New Jersey. “The boys have their own private horses, chickens, livestock, bicycles, and everything else that the civilians left.” Near Borgo Sabatino, soldiers hitched mule to plow and planted fields of cabbage and potatoes. “I can’t do a thing with those sons of bitches,” a 1st Special Service Force officer complained. “They patrol all night and they farm all day.” Other soldiers angled for eels in the Astura River, or hunted pheasant and rabbit with shotguns used to
Troops played baseball on improvised diamonds, using folded T-shirts for bases and slit trenches for dugouts. Daredevil water-skiers slalomed across the Tyrrhenian Sea behind a DUKW. A private who called himself the Baron ambled around the beachhead in a tuxedo, performing magic shows with Chinese rings and a pet duck. Bike steeplechases, lizard races, sniper contests, and husbandry—including cattle-breeding experiments—kept the men busy while they waited for their fates to unfold. The Anzio Derby, organized by a former Baltimore handicapper now wearing sergeant’s stripes, was run over a shell-pocked course laid out with tent pegs and engineer tape. As each steed clopped from the vineyard paddock, a bugler blew the call to the post. A quartermaster bay named Six-by-Six beat a half dozen other nags and a jackass named George, surmounted by a 240-pound jockey from Brooklyn; judges ruled that in future races all steeds must outweigh their riders. Pretty nurses awarded the purse, a two-pound box of chocolates.
More than thirty Anzonian newspapers covered such activities; the Beachhead Bugle also printed travel notes, including a roster of departing reporters that began: “The following rats deserted the sinking ship yesterday…” No sport aroused greater passion than beetle racing, in which insects—stabled in jam jars and daubed with racing colors—were dropped in the center of a six-foot circle; the first to reach the perimeter was declared the winner. Thousands of dollars were wagered on big sweepstakes, and it was said that shady bookmakers fixed one race by purchasing the favorite and stomping it to death.
Alcohol provided some consolation to losing bettors, as well as “catacomb courage” to the frightened and lonely. Distilleries built from fuel cans and tubing salvaged from aircraft wreckage produced “gasoline,” a potent hooch flavored with pineapple juice. Bootleggers from the 133rd Infantry blended fifty pounds of fermented raisins and a dash of vanilla to make “Plastered in Paris,” while others preferred fermented fig bars from Army rations. “The still blew up,” a corporal wrote in his diary, “but they got some good liquor while it lasted.” In April the first authorized beer arrived at the beachhead, roughly a pint per man each fortnight, brewed in Naples under specifications provided by Budweiser. To prevent pilferage, sutlers rolled the kegs ashore and stored them under guard behind barbed wire.
Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey’s change-of-command party featured whiskey sours made from C-ration lemon powder and medicinal alcohol. Having led an infantry battalion in combat with little respite since TORCH in November 1942, Toffey in mid-March left his 2nd Battalion of the 15th Infantry to become executive officer—second in command—of the 7th Infantry, another 3rd Division regiment that also had bivouacked at the beachhead. Truscott personally ordered the change to give Toffey a bit of relief while allowing a larger unit to benefit from his battle expertise.
“There are days and other days in this game—some good—some bad,” he wrote Helen in Columbus. “All in all it is a terrific strain on health, mind & body…. I am somewhat easier in the mind than I was and more confident of our ability to kick hell out of this damn Hun.” He apologized for letters that are “dumb, dull and stupid—but perhaps I’m getting that way.” To his old friend George Biddle he confessed, “Efficiency in general and combat efficiency in particular suffer when individuals remain too long and too constantly under the gun.” In joining the 7th Infantry, he had come full circle: his father had served as the regimental adjutant at Fort Wayne, Michigan, when Jack was born in August 1907. After moving into a tiny subterranean trailer outside Nettuno, with light provided by a jeep battery and Helen’s photo hung on the wall, Toffey wrote, “I have seen about enough of Italy and enough of war…. I live in a cave-like place which is damp and makes me stoop over. I’m full of kinks and aches as a result.”
Only a few miles from the beetle races and volleyball tournaments, the dead country remained as dangerous and forbidding as any battle zone in Italy. “For four months no man dared stand upright by day,” wrote the BBC reporter Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. Unable to bury the dead, soldiers in the foremost foxholes crawled out at night to sprinkle creosote on the ripening corpses; others swapped shouted insults with the enemy. “Roosevelt is a Jew” would be answered with “Hitler is a bastard.” Tommies trapped rats in empty sandbags and slung them into German observation posts. Private First Class Robert W. Komer described watching no-man’s-land through field glasses: “Here a few helmeted heads peeping cautiously from a foxhole, there a couple of tanks snuggled against the side of a shattered house…. A squad of infantrymen straggled by across the field toward their positions, an ambulance came tearing down the road, litter bearers picked their way carefully among the ditches and the holes.”
No field glasses could reveal how badly the Germans at Anzio had been bruised and bled. From 133,000 men on March 9, the Fourteenth Army in the next six weeks would shrink, through battle losses and transfers to the Cassino front, by 43,000 men, 170 guns, and 125 tanks, while Allied strength steadily grew. Kesselring condemned the “lack of aggressiveness by both officers and men,” and Berlin insisted that “we must continue the attack in the Nettuno sector in order to keep the initiative.” General Mackensen replied angrily that “German divisions are battle weary,” with some reduced to three thousand men or less. For every German shell fired, the Allies now answered with fifteen—“quantities hitherto hardly imaginable,” complained one German commander, who also lamented the “enormous blast and gouge effect” of naval gunfire. Even Sherman tanks joined the barrages, their barrels elevated with logs stacked beneath the tracks. Crews slammed another shell into the breech and sang out, “Call the roll, Kesselring. Here we come.”
To be sure, the biggest German guns remained terrifying. A pair of seventy-foot barrels, called Robert and Leopold by the Germans but known variously to the Allies as Anzio Annie or Whistling Pete, each fired a six-hundred-pound shell as far as thirty-eight miles. Near misses in the anchorage raised water spouts two hundred feet high; even duds ashore burrowed fifty feet into the earth. Mounted on rail flatcars, the guns after firing a half dozen shells withdrew into a tunnel two miles from Ciampino. Despite muzzle flashes brighter than any dragon’s fire, Allied pilots and gunnery observers never pinpointed the battery. Perhaps the only saving grace was a shortage of shells: Robert and Leopold by the end of April would together throw just 523 rounds.
Yet it was the close fight, at distances from bayonet length to potshot range, that remained most sinister and most intimate. Toffey organized three “battle patrols” of fifty ruthless men each, ensured that they got regular hot meals and dry clothing, then sent them out to wreak havoc. Pulling a wicked blade from his leggings, one soldier slashed at the air. “My friends back home gave me this knife,” he said. “I’m saving it to use on Hitler when I see him.” Snipers, known in the 7th Infantry as “pickers-off,” sprayed themselves with camouflage paint, shielding their eyes with scraps of cardboard, then lay motionless for hours in hopes of one clean shot.
“The march up is something that no one likes,” a soldier told his diary on April 1. “If you stumble into each other, the procedure is to blast away for a short time and then take off in a hurry.” Patrols navigated in the dark by using various corpses as landmarks—“just skeletons in clothes.” Scouts sniffed the air for the telltale scents of tobacco and fresh-turned earth. Audie Murphy earned the first of his many valor decorations for leading a patrol near Cisterna to fire an immobilized panzer with a grenade through the hatch. Like most of his comrades, he distrusted bravado—“All the heroes I know are dead,” he later said—but he had concluded that “audacity is a tactical weapon. Nine times out of ten it will throw the enemy off-balance and confuse him.”
Propaganda tried to do the same. Leaflets covered the beachhead like Vesuvian ash. More than four billion Allied leaflets would be printed in the Mediterran
Enemies who could not be talked from their works must be winkled out. Night after night, “house-blowing” patrols whittled away the beachhead skyline between the opposing armies: tanks, mortars, and 8-inch howitzers pulverized the upper floors of suspected strongpoints while riflemen screened by thick smoke splashed across the polders to exterminate any survivors. On the foreheads of dead Germans, Forcemen left calling card stickers with a spearhead insignia and a warning that das dicke Ende kommt noch: the worst is yet to come. Every haystack, every manure bin, every outdoor oven—anything that could hide an enemy soldier with a machine pistol—came under seething fire. “Houses 5 and 6 are in our possession,” reported a battalion commander after suffering fifty-three casualties in one nameless skirmish. “Our front line is now 500 yards closer to Rome. We turn our faces grimly toward Houses 7, 8, 9.”