The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
“Head wounds are many and serious. Most occur in tank crews when tanks take a direct hit,” wrote Klaus H. Huebner, a medical officer whose 88th Division battalion aid station occupied a village bakery. “On examination their skulls feel like shattered egg shells…. Our morgue in the backyard is soon full.” In his diary Huebner added, “We are always on the bottom, and the Krauts always on top. The terrain is constantly in the enemy’s favor.”
There was nothing for it but to soldier on. Sergeants doled out rum rations in enamel cups after breakfast and sent their men off to commit mayhem. Or to have it committed upon them. A Tommy waiting at a field hospital to have both legs amputated murmured, “I couldn’t run a race, but I’ve got plenty of fight left in me, and I’m going to live.” He died after surgery. A British captain noted the “melancholy sight of a carpenter fashioning crosses for our dead.” When an American tank commander was shot through the heart by a sniper suspected of sheltering among a clutch of surrendering Germans, a company commander ordered, “Do not take any more prisoners.”
In fact, hordes were taken, by ferocious Poles and goumiers as well as by aroused Yanks. On average a thousand German prisoners marched into Allied cages each day, and the pathetic condition of many heartened their captors. “The older men are a weird and wonderful collection,” an interrogation report noted on May 22. “It would appear that the authorities had firmly closed their eyes to such things as a missing toe, lack of an eye, and other slight infirmities, not to mention age.” Still, the days of underestimating German obduracy were long gone. “One of my aid men brings in a wounded German,” the surgeon Huebner recorded. “He is smoking a cigarette. As he exhales, smoke pours out of the holes in his chest.”
As the second week of the Allied offensive slid past, Alexander studied dispatches from the front with the intensity of a seer hunched over entrails. Each day he drove north from Caserta to see for himself, eyebrows and red hat floured with dust as he peered through field glasses into the middle distance. On the far left the U.S. II Corps on May 20 had captured Fondi, where Roman legions had stopped Hannibal during the First Punic War. Keyes’s legions now threatened the port of Terracina at the southern lip of the Pontine Marshes. On the far right, Leese continued to batter the valley fortifications, dumping eight hundred artillery shells per minute on German strongpoints. In the center, French gunners caught exposed panzer grenadiers near Esperia, killing so many that bulldozers were needed to shovel away the carcasses; Senger complained that his battalions were “bleeding to death.” After cutting Highway 82 the goumiers continued their uplands tramp, and Juin’s legions on May 21 seized a foothold in the vital crossroads town of Pico, provoking ferocious German counterattacks with Tiger tanks.
From west to east the Hitler Line was crumbling. We’ve got them, Juin had exclaimed, and it seemed he might be right. Much fighting remained: the Germans—or, rather, ten thousand Italian laborers—had begun yet another string of fortifications below Rome, the Caesar Line. But Kesselring had been forced to transfer divisions from Anzio to check Allied momentum on the southern front. “The enemy has denuded the forces investing the beachhead of the bulk of their reserves,” AFHQ intelligence reported on May 22. “The risk is so great as to be surprising.”
Here was the chance Alexander had long awaited, a chance for redemption, for exculpation, for annihilation. Seven divisions in the Beachhead Army would fall on the enemy’s flank, like a dagger in the ribs. The hour was ripe, at last.
A Fifth Army Show
MARK Clark shifted his command post from Caserta to Anzio on Monday, May 22, arriving at noon in a little L-5 single-engine plane with a wingspan hardly bigger than his own. At ten P.M., after a late supper in the Borghese villa, he strode through the cellar command post to a conference room, led by a beefy colonel who barked, “’Ten-shun!” Several dozen correspondents, slouching on benches beneath the naked bulbs, came to their feet in various attitudes of resentment. “Sit down, gentlemen,” Clark said. He cut the air with the flat of his hand.
For half an hour, unhurried and precise, he explained his attack plan in detail, occasionally pointing to the enormous map tacked like a pelt to the wall behind him. The artillery would open fire in less than eight hours, a thousand guns. General Truscott’s VI Corps had grown to an army within Fifth Army: seven divisions plus Brigadier General Robert Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force. The host included the U.S. 36th Infantry Division, which had secretly arrived by sea over the last four days as part of General Alex’s plan “to dribble them in unseen.” Clockwise around the beachhead perimeter, the attacking force included the British 5th and 1st Divisions on the left, then the U.S. 45th Infantry, the 1st Armored—with a regiment from the 34th Infantry—and the 3rd Infantry Divisions. The Forcemen protected the right flank, while the 36th and the bulk of the 34th remained in reserve. Opposing this juggernaut, Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army comprised five and a half divisions.
Under Operation BUFFALO, “the main impetus of our attack” would be to seize Cisterna, Clark continued, no easy task since the town had been heavily fortified after the Rangers’ disastrous assault in January. The spearhead would then stab northeast through Cori to cut Highway 6 at Valmontone, “with the ultimate objective of destroying as many Germans as possible.” He intended to “bottle up the main body of the German army from the Cassino front,” Clark said. The attack did not “have as its purpose to capture Rome,” but he intended to keep “a flexible mind.” After a glance at the map he seemed to correct himself. “We’re going to take Rome,” he said.
As the correspondents shuffled from the cellar, staff officers confided that the press could assure the public that General Clark was “in personal command.” To drive home the point, Clark radioed Gruenther at Caserta. “There is no restriction placed on [disclosing] my whereabouts,” he advised his chief of staff. “You tear anybody to pieces who attempts to change this.” Moreover, Gruenther was to ensure that any communiqué announcing the attack “is properly worded and that it is a Fifth Army show. I do not want the first announcement of this to come out to the effect that Alexander’s troops have attacked from the bridgehead.”
If Clark had disclosed much of his plan, he also kept much to himself. Internecine bickering over the timing and direction of the attack had only intensified. Alexander remained adamant that once the Beachhead Army stood athwart Highway 6 at Valmontone, “fast, mobile patrols” could cut other German escape routes to the east. Clark just as vigorously insisted that trapping Tenth Army “couldn’t be done”; he also noted that under BUFFALO the enemy would still occupy the Colli Laziali, with the usual high-ground advantages.
A face-to-face meeting at Caserta on May 20 had failed to resolve their differences. Alexander ordered the beachhead attack for the night of May 21, evidently on the misapprehension that the Hitler Line had been breached by Eighth Army at Aquino. When Clark protested, Alexander agreed to hang fire until the morning of the twenty-third; he also would simultaneously renew Leese’s attack in the Liri Valley, while hoping to “conserve losses” in the battle-weary Eighth Army.
Clark suspected double-dealing. “I am convinced that Eighth Army will hold their attack and let the French carry the ball for them as they have done so far in this battle,” he told his diary. “All their actions are always dictated by their desire to save manpower and let someone else do it.”
Precisely what Clark intended may not have been evident even to him. Later he would acknowledge telling himself, “Hell, we shouldn’t even be thinking about Rome. All we should be thinking about is killing Germans.” Capturing the capital would be glorious to be sure, an honor “we felt that we more than deserved.” Still, orders were orders, and Alexander’s were explicit. Clark had radioed Truscott before leaving Caserta: “Operation BUFFALO will be launched at 0630 hours on May 23rd.”
Yet he had also sent the corps commander a private message. As the attack unspooled, Truscott should be prepared to consider “an alternative plan,” Clark w
Smoke generators fogged the front from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Mussolini Canal. Third Division soldiers, who would carry the main attack against Cisterna, had marched forward from their wooded bivouacs, battalion by battalion tramping past a brass band that crashed through the division anthem as it had when they embarked for Anzio four months earlier:
I’m just a dog-face soldier with a rifle on my shoulder
And I eat a Kraut for breakfast every day.
Light rain had fallen earlier in the evening, but the skies cleared in the small hours. Stars twinkled through the artificial haze before a gray overcast louver again slid over the beachhead from the sea. Soldiers fumbled for a final time with their web gear; many carried lengths of parachute cord, said to make superior tourniquets. A nineteen-year-old sergeant in the 15th Infantry, after receiving no mail from home for six weeks, had been handed forty letters by the company clerk late Monday night; he tucked the envelopes into his combat pack, wondering if he would live long enough to open them. From the radio in a 1st Armored Division tank drifted the improbable strains of Oklahoma! As dawn’s apricot glow brightened the eastern sky, an Old Ironsides lieutenant read aloud from Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, then exclaimed, “There’s nothing ever new in war!”
Expectation, anxiety, release—all fluttered across the front like bats looking to roost. Clark had snatched a few hours’ rest on a metal cot; to escape the damp air of the Borghese cellar, he slept upstairs in a high-ceilinged salon with gilded chandeliers and enormous oils on the walls. After rising at four A.M. and wolfing down breakfast, he climbed into his jeep for the drive from Nettuno to the front. At 5:30, just as the sun started to peep over the horizon, he joined Truscott in a camouflaged observation post at Conca, where in January they had watched in misery as Darby’s Rangers and the 3rd Division were impaled on Cisterna’s defenses. Neither man said much, each lost in his thoughts.
With a thunderous roar the barrage opened precisely at 5:45 A.M.: howitzers, mortars, tanks—every tube with a powder charge. “They can hear this in Rome, maybe,” one soldier shouted. Shock waves from the cannonade shimmered across the sky like heat rising off blacktop. Clouds of dust blanketed the battlefield, brilliantly lighted from within by bursting shells. Sixty fighter-bombers swept across the front, leaving charred, battered Cisterna more charred and more battered.
Then, at 6:30, the riflemen spilled over the top, no longer singing, fury in their eyes, and fear too, the deep roar of artillery now punctuated with the pop! pop! pop! of rifle fire and the keening of a thousand machine guns. On a five-mile front, three regiments abreast, the 3rd Division threw itself against four German battalions entrenched in platoon-sized redoubts around Cisterna, three to five hundred yards apart, each encrusted with mines, barbed wire, and automatic weapons. A half mile east of Isola Bella, hard by the Rangers’ last-stand field, Company L from the 15th Infantry quickly lost 140 of 180 men. “The man in front of me was struck by a bullet,” a sergeant in I Company wrote. “I rolled him over and saw his eyes were pulled up and set.”
Farther east, Company K of the 30th Infantry reported a dozen men left standing; German fire swept the fields like a sickle, leaving both the dead and the cut grass in windrows. On the right, Company E of the 15th fixed bayonets and in a shrieking charge swarmed through a woody grove, killing fifteen Germans and capturing eighty. Still, the line had hardly gained a quarter mile. “It is going too slow,” Major General O’Daniel, the division commander, complained at eight A.M. “Throw everything you have at them.” Jack Toffey and the 7th Infantry had been given the hardest nut to crack, in the center of the assault, but when a staff officer reported that two lead companies were pinned down, O’Daniel replied, “We have no such words in our vocabulary now.”
Just past noon, five more Sherman tanks trundled into the fight, each towing an O’Daniel brainstorm: “battle sleds,” fabricated in great secrecy from torpedo tubes sawed in half lengthwise, with steel runners welded to the bottom. Eight feet long, two feet wide, and just deep enough to carry a prostrate, nervous soldier, the sleds were joined end to end, six to a train, with each tank dragging two trains. Ditches and mines proved their undoing. Hardly had sixty sleds slid onto the stage than they could slide no farther; the riders spilled out, grateful to take their chances dismounted.
Yard by bloody yard, the advance drew nearer Cisterna. By day’s end, beneath spattering rain, 3rd Division soldiers would close within six hundred yards of the town, and a mile nearer Rome than they had been at dawn. But none had severed Highway 7 or the parallel rail embankment, and casualties had been outlandish: one thousand killed, wounded, or missing, the division’s most sanguinary day during World War II thus far, and among the costliest for any U.S. Army division on any day in the war. Damaged boys outnumbered the litter bearers available to carry them away. Seeing carnage all about, a young private lamented, “Must I be knocked off before I have had a woman?”
Truscott’s flanks found hard fighting as well. On the right, Frederick’s Forcemen scampered across Highway 7 below Cisterna only to retreat pell-mell under lashing fire from Tigers seemingly impervious to antitank rounds. “All hell has broken through up here,” a staff officer radioed Truscott. “The Germans have unleashed everything.” On the far left, British troops held their ground but no more in an attack designed mostly as a diversion. The 45th Division waded through thigh-high wheat, sidestepping skeletons in moldering field gray, until machine-gun cross fire sent the men to ground. German gunners traced the trails carved through the grain by low-crawling GIs, and the dull thud of bullets hitting home carried across the golden fields. A counterattack by more than a dozen Tigers flayed one battalion caught in the open and chewed into another before artillery fire shooed them off.
By nightfall the 45th reported 458 casualties and aid stations were so taxed that wounded soldiers were forced to share cots. “The fellow in the bed next to me had been hit in the back with shrapnel and kept begging the doctors to let him die,” one artilleryman later recalled. A captain who had stepped on a mine studied the stump where his foot had been and reflected, “That’s the one that was always getting cold anyway.”
The day’s last best hope fell to the 1st Armored Division, attacking with 232 tanks on a three-mile front east of Cisterna. “Whether or not we can get our tanks through remains a question. I expect to lose heavily,” Ernie Harmon had written a friend a week earlier. Those losses, he warned, could include one hundred tanks in the first half hour. Harmon’s dark mood hardly brightened when his right wing—Combat Command B—blundered into a poorly marked American minefield sown during the winter’s fighting. Thirty Shermans soon sat immobilized with fractured tracks and broken bogey wheels less than a quarter mile from the start line.
On the left, however, Combat Command A used another battlefield invention to excellent effect. Before dawn, tanks had shoved into no-man’s-land a pair of four-hundred-foot “snakes”—four-inch pipe packed with several tons of explosives. While puzzled German pickets shook tin cans filled with rocks to sound the alarm, a burst of machine-gun fire detonated the pipes with “an appalling violence” that carved a smoldering channel twenty-five feet wide through the minefield. Two more snakes extended the corridor and Harmon’s tanks poured into the gap like floodwaters through a ruptured dike. Riflemen from the 135th Infantry clung to the Sherman hulls then leaped clear to round up prisoners and slaughter the diehards.
By one P.M. U.S. tanks had crossed the cinder brow of the rail embankment, provoking a frantic flapping of white flags, and an infantry battalion held the high ground five hundred yards to the north. Combat Command B—which had eschewed the snakes for fear that a
The day had cost Harmon eighty-six tanks and tank destroyers, most of them crippled by American mines. He quickly made good the wastage from his reserves. Other losses were harder to fix. Fifth Army casualties for this Tuesday totaled almost two thousand, the highest single-day tally in the Italian campaign, with 334 killed in action: a life snuffed out every four minutes. By midnight the olive-drab crescent of men struggling to break free of the beachhead was dyed black with blood.
Yet across the front fifteen hundred enemy prisoners had been taken, and Cisterna was in danger of envelopment from the northeast. The German 362nd Division had lost half its combat strength, two regiments from the 715th Division were hurt almost as grievously, and the 94th Division—shifted to beachhead defense after a drubbing in the Auruncis—reported only two hundred fighters left. In a phone call at eight P.M. on Tuesday, Kesselring told Vietinghoff, “Things do not look good on Mackensen’s front. Keep this to yourself.”
In his own late-night dispatch to Clark, who had returned to the Borghese cellars, Truscott pared the news to ten words: “All attacks jumped off on schedule. Attack meeting moderate resistance.”
By Wednesday afternoon, May 24, that resistance was crumbling. Harmon’s tanks looped behind Cisterna from the east, fighting off the field-gray wraiths who popped from laurel thickets to shoot the passing Shermans in the rear grills. American artillery smashed German counterattacks on the flanks, but shells also fell on friendly infantrymen again and again. By nightfall O’Daniel and Harmon had nearly completed a double envelopment of Cisterna, bagging another 850 prisoners. Germans “scatter like frightened quail,” wrote Audie Murphy. “As if we were shooting skeets, we pick them off.” A mile-long stretch of Highway 7 had been cut north of town, along with three miles to the south, and a reconnaissance battalion rambled to within four miles of Velletri on the southern lip of the Colli Laziale. The VI Corps main force stood just thirteen miles from Highway 6. “I could get into Valmontone tonight if I was sure of my left,” Harmon told Truscott.