The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Thursday morning was better yet. Charles Ryder’s 34th Division widened the purchase on Highway 7 to five miles on the left, flushing more quail into the sights of homicidal fighter planes. “The carnage was extreme,” one account noted; the kills included fifteen Tigers. Over one hundred .50-caliber machine guns poured scorching fire into Cisterna, now said to surpass even Cassino as the most devastated town in Italy. A battalion from the 7th Infantry had a foothold in Cisterna’s southwest corner by first light, and two sister regiments, the 15th and 30th, closed to within shouting distance of each other northeast of town. The noose had been cinched.
Clark watched with pleasure as the blue grease-pencil lines on his battle map tracked the northeast surge of the Beachhead Army. In less than forty-eight hours, the front had shoved three to four miles in a salient seven miles wide. But it was the southern edge of the battlefield that held him rapt. Keyes’s II Corps had covered almost sixty miles in two weeks; combat engineers had nearly finished carving a six-mile detour through the mountains around Terracina when scouts on Wednesday morning found the seaside town abandoned except for the stinking carcasses—mule and human, as usual—lining the curbs. More patrols nosed into the Pontine Marshes and reported heavy German demolitions, although shovel-wielding Italians filled the craters almost as quickly as they were blown.
The coastal road to the beachhead was open. Late Wednesday, in a tone that was peremptory to the point of imperial, Clark wrote Gruenther at Caserta:
The joining up of my two Fifth Army forces will be one of the highlights of the Fifth Army’s career. It is primarily a Fifth Army matter, and I want you to tell Gen. Alexander that I want authority given me immediately to issue a simple communiqué from here as soon as II Corps troops have moved overland.
If Alexander insisted on making the announcement himself, “you make damn sure that their communiqué is properly worded, making it a Fifth Army show.” Clark even drafted proposed language that began: “Climaxing a spectacular advance of 60 miles…” Almost as an afterthought, he noted that Truscott’s battle casualties approached 2,500. When Eric Sevareid wrote in his broadcast script that soon there would be “only one front in Italy,” a press censor in Nettuno instead proposed, “There will be one Fifth Army front in Italy.”
At 7:30 on Thursday morning, May 25, an engineer task force from the beachhead arrived outside Borgo Grappa, a coastal village beaten into rubble twenty miles north of Terracina. On a narrow bridge spanning an irrigation canal, Captain Benjamin Harrison Sousa of Honolulu, the engineer commander, spotted Lieutenant Francis X. Buckley of Philadelphia, a II Corps cavalryman.
“Where in hell do you think you’re going?” Sousa demanded.
“Anzio,” Buckley replied.
“Boy, you’ve made it.”
The two men shook hands and sat down to share a box of candy from Buckley’s pack.
Three hours later Clark roared up with a gaggle of two dozen correspondents piled one atop another in open jeeps. As faint battle sounds drifted south from Cisterna, gum-chewing soldiers removed their helmets and with much backslapping and exaggerated swapping of cigarettes reenacted the scene for movie cameras. In another message to Gruenther, Clark reported that the initial junction “took place this morning at 1010 hours on Anzio–Terracina road”—rewriting history by several hours.
After 125 days Anzio’s isolation was over. The beachhead had dissolved. Clark wrote Renie:
It may have sounded dramatic in the papers the way I rushed to witness the joining of the two forces, but it meant more to me than anything since our success at Salerno. The way some of the correspondents expressed it, it may have sounded as though I was looking for publicity. Did you get that impression? At any rate, I had to be there when the two forces joined up. It meant too much to me.
Soon enough the day would come when “I can return home to you and pick up our happy home life where we left it off. I think I will be ready to settle down.” But before that day, Clark vowed, “We will capture Rome…. They can’t stop us now.”
Truscott drove toward his Conca command post at midday on Thursday after a tour of the battlefront. He felt, by his own description, “rather jubilant.” His old 3rd Division was slashing through Cisterna, house by gutted house, toward a final German redoubt in the town hall, now known as the Castle. Other troops cantered toward Cori, six miles to the northeast on the western flank of the Lepini Mountains. More than 2,600 enemy prisoners had been caged.
The 1st Armored Division continued to bull north, although steep terrain, antitank guns, and a Panther counterattack near Velletri cost Harmon seventeen more tanks. Fighting was savage and confused. More American artillery fell on American soldiers, and at least ten incidents of fratricidal air attacks would be reported on this day. “Sniper shot off the lieutenant’s elbow,” Corporal Robert M. Marsh of the 81st Armored Reconnaissance Battalion advised his diary. After the miscreant was captured, Marsh added, “Lieutenant drew his .45 pistol with his left hand and shot the sniper through the heart.” Germans who balked at surrendering were buried alive with tank dozers. Tankers found a huge wine barrel “standing on end with the top end bashed in,” Marsh noted. “They drank lots of wine until they found a dead German in it.”
At the point of the VI Corps spear, a four-battalion force led by Colonel Hamilton H. Howze sidled through olive orchards and deserted crofts into the handsome valley between the Colli Laziali on the west and the stony Lepinis to the east. Soon enough a dozen Sherman tanks would close to within half a mile of Highway 6. “I am in a soft spot,” Howze reported. “For Pete’s sake, let the whole 1st Amored Division come this way!” Truscott believed that sometime Friday his entire corps “would be astride the German line of withdrawal through Valmontone.”
That agreeable vision dissolved the moment Truscott walked into his Conca war room. There, standing with five somber VI Corps colonels, was Clark’s operations officer, Brigadier General Donald W. Brann. “The boss wants you to leave the 3rd Infantry Division and the Special Force to block Highway 6, and mount that assault you discussed with him to the northwest as fast as you can,” Brann said.
Truscott was dumbfounded. While the Forcemen and O’Daniel’s troops plowed ahead to Valmontone, most of the corps was to pivot 90 degrees to the left. That put them on the shortest path to Rome, west of the Colli Laziali, but the route angled into the most formidable segment of the Caesar Line, now manned by I Parachute Corps. Operation BUFFALO was succeeding. Why switch to the old Operation TURTLE?
“I discussed this with General Clark several days ago,” Truscott said, “and I told him this was not to be done, in my opinion, unless there’s a significant weakening on the left. I’ve seen no sign of such weakening. I need to talk to General Clark. Where is he?”
“He’s not at the beachhead,” Brann replied evenly. Clark had flown back to Caserta and could not be reached by phone or even radio. Truscott protested, his raspy voice thickening. This was “no time to change direction,” he told Brann. Conditions were “not right.” Untangling the current attack and swinging the 45th, 34th, 36th, and 1st Armored Divisions off in a new direction would take time. “A more complicated plan,” Truscott warned, “would be difficult to conceive.”
Then he fell silent. Later Truscott insisted that he had protested “in the most vigorous possible” terms, but believed that subordinate fealty required acquiescence. His staff now had responsibility for drafting the new attack plan, and any hint that he lacked confidence would evince “poor leadership.” He considered Clark an able tactician, who was loyal to his lieutenants and ceded them autonomy even if he declined to offer public credit—no underling commanders were ever named in Fifth Army dispatches. A subordinate’s duty demanded reciprocal fidelity; whatever misgivings Truscott had initially voiced about the new scheme, he soon professed full support. At four P.M. Brann radioed Clark—suddenly communicado again—and reported that the VI Corps commander was “entirely in accord.” Two hours later Truscott phoned Brann
Privately, however, the corps commander could not shake his qualms. When Clark flew back to Nettuno on Thursday night, a subdued Truscott laid out his doubts in the privacy of Clark’s Borghese office. Dividing the corps was “a mistake” with Highway 6 so near; to the northwest, the Germans had “not thinned out their ranks on the line in front of the new main effort.” Clark remained adamant, waving away Truscott’s protests and insisting that German defenses had begun to thicken at Valmontone, thanks in part to reinforcements now arriving from northern Italy. Sure of his course, Clark seemed buoyant, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In a message to Gruenther, he depicted an enemy “in what may be a demoralized condition at the present time. You can assure General Alexander that this is an all-out attack. We are shooting the works!”
Glum yet resigned, Truscott drove back to Conca. Shortly before midnight, his division commanders filed into the command post, begrimed with war but convinced that the day was theirs. Cisterna finally had fallen late in the afternoon. In defiance of an order from Kesselring to “defend fanatically,” Mackensen authorized the garrison to retreat: too late. After hours of street brawling around the Castle, a Sherman tank had blasted a seam into the inner courtyard. Riflemen stormed the keep, flipping grenades through cellar grates and flushing 250 dazed intransigents, gray with dust. The 3rd Battalion of the 7th Infantry had lost its commander, three company commanders, and 80 percent of its strength. Cisterna lay silent but for the crackle of flames and the crunch of armored tracks on masonry.
Truscott came to the point. “The fact that the enemy is withdrawing from the south and has brought reserves in from the north has led the army commander to believe that in the Valmontone gap the going will grow increasingly more difficult,” he said. “The army commander feels that we have an opportunity to break this line very quickly by a drive through in this direction.” Standing at a map, Truscott jabbed a tent-peg finger along the western rim of the Colli Laziali. “I might add that it is an idea in which I am heartily in accord.”
None of his battle captains shared their leader’s enthusiasm; even Truscott’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Don E. Carleton, considered the move “a horrible mistake.” Harmon and O’Daniel, whose divisions stood so near Highway 6, were especially waspish. “I realize perfectly the enormous problem that confronts us,” Truscott said. Shifting artillery to the northwest and pulling Old Ironsides across the rear to the new front would require heroic efforts through the night. “I realize all of these troops are tired,” he added. “There never has been a battle that wasn’t won by tired troops.”
Again he gestured at the map, as if laying hands on the new battlefield. “I propose to begin this with an artillery preparation of all the violence we can put into fifteen minutes, and then we shall strike just as we did three days ago,” Truscott said. “I am confident—I am certain—that the Boche in that area is badly disorganized, has a hodge-podge of units, and if we can drive as hard tomorrow as we have done for the last three days, a great victory is in our grasp.”
Truscott brought the conference to a close. Operations Instructions No. 24 from Fifth Army now called for “a new attack along the most direct route to Rome.” The corps commander studied the skeptical faces of his subordinates, then added, “These are the orders.”
Mark Clark would spend the rest of his long life defending an indefensible impertinence that for more than sixty years has remained among the most controversial episodes in World War II. Then and later he had plausible reason to doubt BUFFALO. “It was based on the false premise that if Route #6 were cut at Valmontone a German army would be annihilated,” Clark told his diary on May 27. “This is ridiculous, for many roads lead to the north from Arce, Frosinone and in between.”
True enough. Senger subsequently confirmed that his XIV Panzer Corps retreated on a road that branched from Highway 6 at Frosinone, well south of Valmontone, to snake through the Simbruini foothills. A parallel road also wound through Palestrina, and other tracks led to Highway 5, the lateral route from Rome to Pescara on the Adriatic.
Clark also feared that German artillery and panzers hidden in the Colli Laziali would “debouch from the mountains” to counterattack Truscott’s left flank as he galloped toward Valmontone. From Ultra and field reports, he believed that Kesselring’s last mobile reserve in Italy, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, would soon congeal along Highway 6. These too were legitimate anxieties, although the staggering artillery, air, and armored firepower available to Truscott would surely punish any attack from Mackensen’s battered legions. Fourteenth Army tallied 108,000 Allied shells on Thursday, then stopped counting. Allied air attacks on the same day destroyed 655 of Mackensen’s vehicles. Moreover, only the Hermann Göring reconnaissance battalion would reach Valmontone by Friday, May 26. The rest of the division, forced to travel by day for 250 miles on exposed roads through a murderous gauntlet of Allied warplanes, would arrive piecemeal and in tatters.
Two final points must be conceded to Clark. No less an authority than George Marshall had urged the capture of Rome before OVERLORD, now less than two weeks away; with a second front opening in Normandy, the Italian theater would surely see a sharp decline in ammunition, supplies, troops, and public attention. Finally, Operations Instructions No. 24 attempted to sugar the pill for Alexander by keeping more than twenty thousand VI Corps troops pounding for Highway 6, and they soon would be reinforced by Keyes’s II Corps.
Yet the harsh truth remains: with duplicity and in bad faith, Clark contravened a direct order from a superior officer. His assertion, to Keyes on May 28, that the British “are scheming to get into Rome the easiest way,” was predicated on no substantive evidence. His “thirst for glory,” as the official British history would later conclude, “spoiled the fulfilment of Alexander’s plan in order to obtain for himself and his army the triumph of being the first to enter Rome.”
Clark acknowledged as much in his postwar memoir:
Not only did we intend to become the first army in fifteen centuries to seize Rome from the south, but we intended to see that the people back home knew that it was the Fifth Army that did the job and knew the price that had been paid for it.
This fixation, no doubt compounded by stress and exhaustion, marred his usually astute military judgment. He failed to see that Mackensen at Valmontone on May 26 would face at least three VI Corps divisions with only an eviscerated Wehrmacht division and at most a single Hermann Göring regiment. He failed to sense how badly the enemy had been hurt by Truscott, how strong the I Parachute Corps remained, or how the German high command’s recommendation to Hitler of a partial withdrawal by both armies to the Caesar Line—a recommendation quickly known to Allied intelligence—offered a chance to whack Kesselring while he was on his heels. Clark also failed to recognize that with VI Corps forty miles ahead of Leese’s plodding Eighth Army, the open terrain and ragged defenses up Highway 6 offered an expeditious path to Rome. And he failed to realize, as a U.S. Army study concluded, that he would have “been admirably situated to outflank the rest of the Fourteenth Army and to cut off the Tenth Army”—a conclusion also reached by General Wilhelm Schmalz, the Hermann Göring commander.
Juin warned Clark of “a terrible congestion of itineraries” as Eighth Army, II Corps, VI Corps, and the FEC converged on the Liri Valley and its northern extensions. Yet even his admirers suspected that one itinerary counted above all others: that of Marcus Aurelius Clarkus. His habitual antipathy toward the British surely was aggravated by the lackluster performance of the two beachhead divisions appended to Truscott’s corps. “There is no attack left in them,” Clark complained. But his actions went beyond battlefield frustration and petty xenophobia. He “appears never to have accepted Alexander as his real commander,” wrote W.G.F. Jackson, an author of the official British history. Later, Clark claimed he had warned Alexander that he would o
Alexander had remained in the dark for almost twenty-four hours after Truscott was told to change direction. Not until 11:15 A.M. on Friday, May 26, did the Allied commander learn of Operations Instructions No. 24—fifteen minutes after the new attack had irrevocably begun, and forty-five minutes after Clark briefed reporters at Nettuno on his revised plan. As Clark had appointed Brann to break the news to Truscott, so he employed Gruenther to inform Alexander at Caserta. Strolling into Gruenther’s office with Lemnitzer, Alexander lingered long enough to learn that the left wing of his army group had marched off to its own drummer. In a message to Clark at 12:20 P.M., Gruenther reported:
Gen. Alexander agreed that the plan is a good one. He stated, “I am for any line of action which the army commander believes will offer a chance to continue his present success.” About five minutes later he said, “I am sure that the army commander will continue to push toward Valmontone, won’t he? I know that he appreciates the importance of gaining the high ground…. As soon as he captures that he will be absolutely safe.”
Gruenther assured him that Clark would “execute a vigorous plan with all the push in the world.” While Gruenther believed that Alexander had “no mental reservations,” in fact his sentiments were mixed if well masked. Later he would confess to being “pretty upset”—Lemnitzer described him as “terribly disappointed”—even as he concluded that to impose his will would gain nothing. Although Churchill had recently insisted that “senior commanders should not ‘urge’ but ‘order,’” such was not Alexander’s way. His tolerance of impertinence, with Montgomery and then with Clark, simply encouraged more of what General Jackson labeled “prima donna” behavior.