The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
By Sunday the French had advanced seven miles across a sixteen-mile front, unhinging German defenses beyond the Garigliano. “En avant!” Juin urged. FEC casualties exceeded two thousand, but nine hundred prisoners had been captured; many complained of shelling worse than in Russia. On Monte Majo’s summit appeared an enormous tricolor, measuring twelve by twenty-five feet and visible from Cassino to the sea. “This,” Juin said, “is warfare to which we are accustomed.” The 71st Division commander’s assessment was terser: “Most unpleasant.”
The unpleasantries had only begun, for with the capture of Castelforte by Algerian troops on the French left, Juin was able to slip the leash from his Berber irregulars. The vanguard of twelve thousand goumiers—invariably shortened to goums by the Yanks—had passed through the north end of town on Friday night, many on horseback. Five hundred yards beyond the last house the column swung west off the road, following a narrow trail into the Aurunci wilds with orders to cut Highway 82 between Itri and Pico—nearly twenty miles in the German rear—and thus turn the enemy’s right flank.
“Dark men, dark night,” Montgomery had once said of the goums. “Very hard to see coming.” Most wore sandals, wool socks, gloves with the trigger fingers snipped off, and striped djellabas; a beard, a soup-bowl helmet, and a foot-long knife at the belt completed the ensemble. “It was as if troops of the last century had been reincarnated and suddenly appeared at our side,” said an American colonel in the adjacent 88th Division. Juin considered them “vigorous, reliable, [and] very abstemious”; another French general said they “lived only for brigandage and war.” Some wore their booty, an Algerian officer observed: “dozens of wristwatches on their arms, collections of rings on their fingers, and strings of shoes and boots hanging on their backs.” One unit kept a tiger as a mascot. Upon encountering their Anglo-American confreres they typically gestured for a cigarette, calling, “Smokie, smokie, Joe?”
It was said that in Sicily they took not only enemy ears as trophies but entire heads. It was said that goums creeping through the night would feel a sentry’s bootlaces for the unique German loop before deciding whether to cut the man’s throat. It was said that a goum had sold a GI a quart jar of fingers pickled in brandy. A U.S. military hospital treating French casualties handled so many goums with the same single names that doctors assigned numbers on their charts—Abdullah 4, Muhammed 6. “Their long hair is braided in pigtails. They sing, chatter, and howl,” one physician wrote. “Many carry chickens under their arms.” A nurse admired their skill in “cracking nuts with their teeth,” but lamented the theft of hospital towels for turbans. “The Arab soldier is interested in just three things: women, horses, and guns,” a French officer told an American colonel, who replied, “The American soldier is the same, except that he doesn’t care anything about horses and guns.”
Up and up they climbed with a Moroccan infantry regiment and Algerian artillery, splitting into three forces, each angling west and then north through nearly trackless terrain, including one vertical stretch that rose four hundred feet in less than a half mile. “The sky was a changeless blue, the heat implacable,” a French officer reported:
From a soil glistening with mica, the hard little hooves of the Arab horses struck up clouds of grasshoppers. Beside their horses and mules, the goumiers loped tirelessly onwards with long ambling stride, forage caps askew, an eternal rictus on the lips, ignoring the heat despite woolen djellabas.
By four P.M. on May 15, the lead scouts had scaled the forward heights of the Petrella Massif; by the next morning, they stood on the crest of Monte Revole, more than four thousand feet up and a dozen miles beyond the Garigliano. When an unwitting Wehrmacht battalion blundered into a nearby valley, goumiers encircled both flanks in a horseshoe ambush, then swept down the slopes “like falling boulders.” German survivors later described “grinning savages with knives in their hands, obviously quite eager to begin the butchery.”
Men and beasts had exhausted themselves and far outrun their supply lines. Just past noon on May 17, a fleet of U.S. bombers dropped forty tons of food and ammunition across the mountain peaks. The goumiers would spend a day recovering the crates and recuperating, then push on.
On the French left, the Americans also were on the move after punching through the stout but brittle enemy line that had thwarted II Corps for two days at a cost of three thousand casualties. With ample replacements in the wings, Keyes replenished his ranks and threw fresh troops against the depleted grenadiers on the same narrow front. Santa Maria Infante fell on May 14 after relentless pummeling by fighter-bombers and white-phosphorus shells. Soon the 85th Division was pressing along the Via Appia in the coastal flats with a dust-churning flotilla of men, trucks, mules, tanks, and tank destroyers. On the heights to their right, the 88th Division lunged through Spigno and onto the Petrella Massif, guided by local peasants along goat paths a few miles south of the FEC.
The enemy had been “rushed off his feet,” in Juin’s phrase. On the Fifth Army right, the nearly extinct 71st Division had suffered five thousand casualties, mostly from 150,000 artillery rounds; the division told Kesselring’s headquarters that no more than a hundred riflemen were still fit to fight. Allied shells and aircraft battered the German rear, terrorizing horses hitched to gun carriages and supply wagons. After a gallant stand by one grenadier unit, Kesselring told Vietinghoff, “One could cry with admiration.”
All this buoyed the Allied high command after so many miscarriages. Alexander bounded into Clark’s command post to pronounce himself “very pleased” with the attack. Juin swanned about in his jeep, barking, “We’ve got them.” The replenished goumiers would cut Highway 82 while the rest of the FEC converged on Pico in the German rear, within rifle range of the Liri.
Only Clark remained somber. He sent Juin two congratulatory bottles of whiskey, but the “delinquency” of II Corps irked him. The FEC had averaged about two miles a day since DIADEM began, compared with just over one for II Corps. The Americans also seemed unprepared for headlong pursuit, so much so that Clark threatened “disciplinary action” against all laggards. Keyes’s troops overran surprised German artillery batteries at Spigno and then seized Itri on Highway 82. But traffic snarls at the narrow crossroads delayed the 88th Division’s push toward Fondi, nine miles to the northwest and a linchpin of the Hitler Line.
“I am disappointed in the rigidity of II Corps plans,” Clark told his diary with the reproachful tone of a man determined to disapprove. “They have not shown a flexibility of mind and an aggressive attitude.” Keyes in turn wrote of Clark:
Called me about 6 times. Each time finding fault, saying he was embarrassed and his face was red at the French and Goums doing so well and getting so many prisoners…. He acts like a 15-year-old kid…. A [shell] fragment tore a hole in the seat of my jeep. I wasn’t in it.
Even as he lashed his commanders, and as much as he wanted to lead the liberation procession into Rome, Clark harbored tactical anxieties about his troops surging too far beyond the British. By May 18, the FEC would be six miles ahead of Eighth Army, putting the Allied front on a severe slant and exposing Fifth Army’s right flank to counterattacks. Clark could only conclude, again, that Leese and the British were not pulling their weight. “I am disappointed,” he wrote, “in the effort of the Eighth Army.”
That same Eighth Army was about to claim the grandest prize on the Gustav Line. With British and Canadian troops inching past Cassino town to force the Liri Valley, Leese at seven A.M. on Wednesday, May 17, once again ordered Anders and his Poles into the breach. Once again the 5th Kresowa Division sortied against Phantom Ridge, a mile north of the abbey, while the 3rd Carpathian swarmed up Snakeshead Ridge, shooting at every silhouette suggestive of a paratrooper’s chamber-pot helmet.
All through the night the fighting raged, with rifle butts and tank fire. Polish troops low on ammunition threw stones and sang their national anthem. German paratrooper units were reduced to “oddments,” some battalions having fewer
In danger of encirclement from the north and west, German defenders began slipping away—although only after Kesselring personally ordered the recalcitrant General Heidrich to fall back to the Hitler Line: the 1st Parachute Division had become as possessive of Cassino as a jealous husband of his bride. Across the hill in Cassino town, British loudspeakers blared, “To fight on is senseless…. Cassino is lost to Germany.” From the Baron’s Palace and the Continental Hotel, shadows darted up over Hangman’s Hill. Fearful of vengeful Poles, a few surrendered by walking hands-high to the Crypt or up Highway 6, where the British 78th Division bagged eighty paratroopers creeping to the rear. By three A.M. on May 18, the town was empty of living Germans.
The struggle for the high ground behind the abbey ended with the dawn. At seven A.M., Point 593 finally fell for good. Two hours later a Polish lieutenant from the 12th Podolski Lancers led a six-man patrol up a slope carpeted with poppies and corpses, among them Poles and Germans wrapped in death embraces. Across the ruined parking lot the Lancers scuffed, past charred debris and a cracked church bell. A sergeant climbed on his comrades’ shoulders to scale the broken wall, then helped hoist the rest inside. Fresco fragments and shards of marble statuary crunched beneath their boots. They found two German orderlies attending sixteen badly wounded paratroopers, including several lying in St. Benedict’s candlelit crypt.
Just before ten A.M. the lancers’ regimental pennant, fashioned from a Red Cross flag and a blue handkerchief, rose on a staff above Monte Cassino’s western wall. A bugler played the “HejnaMariacki,” a medieval military call once used to signal the opening of Kraków’s gates. Then the red-and-white Polish flag rose against the midday sky. Anders’s soldiers wept.
At 11:30 A.M. British signalers broadcast a single code word—WYE—to proclaim Cassino’s fall. Leese arrived for tea in the Crypt, then toasted Anders with champagne. Polish casualties for the week exceeded 3,700, including 860 killed; 900 unburied German dead were counted. Alexander cabled Churchill: “Capture of Cassino means a great deal to me and both my armies.”
For the first time in five months, men in the town stood erect during daylight. They discovered roses blooming near the jail and an undamaged statue of the Virgin in a stand of splintered trees; a panzer was found parked in the Continental lobby. Grenadier Guardsmen emerged from Jane, Helen, Mary, and other dank hovels, then marched from the town toward Shit Corner for a respite. Some 2,500 British and South African engineers stood ready to clear Highway 6 only to find the drifted rubble so dense that just a few hundred could get close to the roadbed; to bulldoze a one-mile stretch would take fifty-two hours.
In the abbey itself, further investigation brought further horrors: children killed in the February bombing; the bones of a nineteenth-century cardinal, robbed of his ring and pectoral cross, dumped in a garden tub; corpses tucked into large drawers used to store vestments. “The whole effect,” one Venus Fixer reported, “is like that of a Mesopotamian tell.” Polish, British, and Indian soldiers wandered about, scribbling graffiti and collecting souvenirs, including a carved angel’s head yanked from a choir stall. Among German sketches found in the rubble was a portrait of Frau Göring and a river scene titled “On the Lovely Banks of the Rhine.” A skillful cartoonist had also drawn a cigar-smoking Churchill standing on the Cassino plain while a German paratrooper straddled the abbey ruins. The caption read “Denk’ste”—“Think it over.”
A solitary American fighter pilot flew low over the abbey and tossed a bouquet of roses from the cockpit. Gun flashes limned the northern horizon, a reminder that for most the war had moved on. “Don’t expect normal letters from me because I won’t be normal for some time,” Lance Corporal Walter Robson of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment wrote his wife on May 18.
“We’ve been Stuka’d, mortared, shelled, machine-gunned, sniped, and although we’ve taken Cassino, the monastery, none of us feel any elation,” Robson added. “The losses sadden and frighten us…. When, when, when is this insanity going to stop?”
General von Senger, freshly bemedaled, had returned from his month’s leave on May 17 to find Vietinghoff, the bombed-out Tenth Army commander, squatting in his command post near Frosinone, thirty miles up the valley from Cassino. Senger also found the Gustav Line ruptured, his XIV Panzer Corps bisected, and German intelligence uncertain where on the Petrella Massif the French irregulars had gone. Vietinghoff pronounced the XIV Corps predicament “frightful.” “For the first time in nine months the corps had been breached,” Senger later wrote. Moreover, the Hitler Line had been assigned a new name to forestall embarrassment to the Führer in the event that it too failed: the Senger Line.
That line by any name must be held, particularly the seventeen-mile western stretch from Terracina on the Tyrrhenian coast to the hill town of Pico, where the Auruncis spilled into the Liri Valley. Here Fifth Army with its phantom goumiers now posed the greatest threat. “It was left to me,” Senger added, “to prevent the annihilation of the corps.”
The task was formidable. Longer days and better weather made the German rear ever more vulnerable to enemy aircraft, including the little spotter planes that adjusted Allied long-range artillery. “Constant, unremitting Allied fighter-bomber activity makes movement or troop deployment almost impossible,” the Tenth Army war diary reported on May 18. So many horses had been killed that equipment had to be manhandled to the rear or abandoned. The fifty-nine German battalions on the southern front now averaged under 250 soldiers each; the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, stalwarts of Troina and other southern battlegrounds, on May 20 reported only 405 men fit to fight.
Italian supply-truck drivers were now deserting en bloc despite mass executions for “cowardice in the face of the enemy”; round-trip convoys to northern Italy sometimes took up to three weeks. Artillery barrages severed phone lines, forcing German commanders to use radios, which were vulnerable to eavesdropping and to finicky reception in the mountains. “I demand a clear picture,” Kesselring told Tenth Army in a peevish message, but there was no clear picture to be had: even Ultra cryptologists were baffled by the babel from German units.
In truth, Kesselring had been outgeneraled. Slow to recognize the Aurunci threat on his right, he also was slow to realize that another Allied amphibious landing was but a ruse, and slow to release his reserves. On May 14, Kesselring had dispatched the first of three strategic reserve divisions, the 26th Panzer, but the seventy-mile journey from the outskirts of Rome took so long that the unit’s tanks could not fight cohesively until May 19, too late to caulk the Gustav Line. On that day, Kesselring also ordered Fourteenth Army to transfer the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division—defender of San Pietro six months earlier—from the Anzio beachhead to Tenth Army’s right wing. Petulant delays by General von Mackensen, the Fourteenth Army commander, further damaged efforts to tighten the Hitler Line, as the Allies continued to call it. Mobile divisions such as the 15th and 90th Panzer Grenadiers were broken into penny packets, with battalions scattered about and eventually defeated in detail. The Führer was even forced to strip the equivalent of three divisions from Hungary, Croatia, and Denmark for defenses in Italy.
As for Kesselring, he was reduced to fulminating against impudent subordinates while urging his troops to resist “the enemy’s major offensive against the cultural center of Europe.” Few found such exhortations inspiriting. “You have no idea how hard this retreat is, or how terrible,” a German reconnaissance commander wrote his wife after Cassino fell. “My heart bleeds when I look at my beautiful battalion…. See you soon, I hope, in better days.”
Better days were difficult to see from either side of the firing line. A Canadian described DIADEM as a thousand individual battles erupting “like spontaneous fires explodi
A Kiwi tanker negotiating a hillside vineyard described “the Shermans pitching like destroyers in and out of the ditches that parallel every row, men sitting in front with heavy wire-cutters to hack a passage.” Brick culverts under the side roads collapsed beneath the weight of thirty-ton tanks, and traffic jams soon rivaled those that had bedeviled Eighth Army at Alamein: one brigade trying to move toward the sound of the guns took eighteen hours to travel thirteen miles. A Canadian general complained that Highway 6 was “jammed by trucks nose to arse.”
If the Hitler Line lacked natural impediments like the Rapido River and Monte Cassino, it boasted a fortification belt half a mile wide that had been under construction by a five-thousand-man labor force since December. The “medley of fieldworks” included mines, antitank ditches, double-apron barbed wire, and nearly three thousand firing positions. Panther tank turrets, sporting a high-velocity 75mm gun that was among the war’s cruelest, had been mounted on brick plinths. An initial Eighth Army probe on May 19 ended with thirteen Canadian tanks in flames. Across the Auruncis, heavy fire also demolished five U.S. Shermans, including one named Bonnie Gay that burned so furiously that “the only trace of the crew were fillings of the teeth,” a tank battalion history recorded.