The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The contretemps remained hidden from the American public until Italy had become a backwater theater of little interest. When Sevareid wrote that “there is a question whether the two aims”—capturing Rome quickly and annihilating Germans—“are compatible or mutually exclusive,” Fifth Army censors scotched the line. Clark also remained niggardly in sharing public credit for his army’s exploits; Marshall himself noted on May 26 that “this hurts Clark in this country.” After Gruenther urged that Truscott’s central role be publicly revealed, Clark told his diary, “I do not feel that his exploits have been sufficiently outstanding yet.”
“I never violated his orders,” Clark said of Alexander a quarter century after the war. “If he had wanted to do it differently he could have issued the order. To censure me for thinking only of the glory of capturing Rome is sheer nonsense.” Perhaps so, although Alexander later claimed Clark had assured him that fierce enemy resistance led to the turn away from Valmontone—an exaggeration, at best.
Pride and solipsism had got the best of a good soldier. Perhaps Livy’s observation of the Punic Wars still obtained: that the “power to command and readiness to obey are rare associates.” But as Churchill wrote Alexander on May 28, “Glory of this battle, already great, will be measured not by the capture of Rome or the juncture with the beachhead, but by the number of German divisions cut off…. It is the cop that counts.”
It was no small irony that even Clark’s rivals wished him well for the sake of a greater good. “He is terrified that we might get to Rome first, which is the last thing we now want to do,” wrote Leese, whose casualties in DIADEM were approaching fourteen thousand. “I only hope he can do it. It will save us a lot of trouble and lives.”
The old gods deplored hubris, and they now seemed determined to punish Clark’s army for his.
Beneath brilliant vernal sunshine on May 26, the right prong of the VI Corps attack—much reduced in combat heft—clattered on toward Valmontone. Led by three battalions under Hamilton Howze, who carried a red-leather copy of Clausewitz’s Principles of War as “something to cling to,” the column enjoyed a brief triumph. “There’s infantry coming in through the wheat in our direction,” a tank battalion commander radioed Howze. “Are they friendly infantry?”
“Hell, no!” Howze bellowed. “Shoot them up!” He dashed forward by jeep in time to see Sherman broadsides and machine-gun fire rip apart Hermann Göring grenadiers on a hillside three hundred yards away. Like drowning men the Germans thrashed and flailed in the shot-torn wheat until the field grew still.
The day soon darkened. Behind Howze, five confused P-40 Warhawks heeled over in a bombing and strafing run against the 3rd Division, which they mistook for retreating Germans. More than one hundred men were killed or wounded. Other planes bombed Cori, also in friendly hands. So many fratricidal air attacks occurred, despite copious yellow smoke intended to demarcate U.S. Army positions, that engineers were ordered to paint huge American flags on occupied rooftops along the front. What the pilots missed, gunners seemed to find. In Howze’s armored infantry battalion, 160 green replacements had just plodded forward when U.S. 155mm rounds scourged the ranks for ten minutes with “ruinous effect.” Terrified survivors leaked to the rear. When the shelling finally ceased, the battalion commander was dead and his unit had been chopped to half strength.
The Germans had their own troubles. “All daytime movement is paralyzed and the use of large repair crews has become impossible,” Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army war diary complained on May 26. The Hermann Göring Division, straggling south on three roads from Livorno under incessant attack, began arriving at Valmontone with only eleven of eighty Mk IV panzers and half the division artillery intact.
Somehow it was enough. Counterattacks against Howze’s left flank, and enemy infiltration on Saturday night, May 27, prevented the 3rd Division from moving beyond Artena, a medieval village on a ridge three miles south of Valmontone. Howze watched trucks heaped with dead American soldiers jounce back toward Cisterna. A battalion in the 15th Infantry also reported two hundred men down with ptomaine poisoning from tainted C rations, further attenuating a force simply too weak to break through the makeshift German defense.
Reluctantly, Clark agreed to halt the drive toward Valmontone until II Corps could reinforce the attack. He would claim that American artillery had severed Highway 6, but that was wishful thinking: enemy traffic swept up and down the road all night, harried but undissuaded. Outside Artena, now thick with GIs licking their wounds, the BBC’s Vaughan-Thomas watched a young mother run through a vineyard, clutching an infant. “You mustn’t bring the war with you,” she cried. “You must take your war away.”
It was much too late for that, although the worst of the war had shifted westward where Truscott, as ordered, opened his new attack with a barrage by 228 guns at 10:30 A.M. on May 26. Half an hour later, the 45th, 34th, and 1st Armored Divisions surged forward, elbow to elbow to elbow. Infantry regiments covered a bit more than a mile by dusk, shuffling through the thigh-high grain past German graves with “Unbek. Soldat”—“Unknown Soldier”—scratched on the rude crosses. But Harmon lost eighteen tanks before pulling back to refit; by Saturday night, the attack remained two miles short of Campoleone Station, where VI Corps troops had fought and died in January. On Sunday at six P.M., the 34th Division commander, Major General Ryder, reported to Truscott in his Kansas drawl, “This thing is a little sticky up here.”
Every yard proved costly. The I Parachute Corps improvised brilliantly, aided by poor tank country that bedeviled Harmon on the flanks of the Colli Laziali. Ravines and creekbeds ran perpendicular to Truscott’s axis of advance, providing natural barriers. German gunners fired down the washes into the American flanks, and dense olive groves gave close cover to snipers with the German bazookas called Panzerfausts. The Caesar Line, though rudimentary, boasted six-foot fire trenches, mortars, machine guns, and extravagant snarls of barbed wire. After months of wet feet and little exercise, U.S. riflemen now suffered such severe blisters that “blood could be seen seeping from some men’s shoe seams,” one soldier reported.
Before dawn on Monday, May 29, Truscott pushed Harmon’s division up the Albano road with gunfire support from a French cruiser in the Tyrrhenian shallows. By midafternoon the tanks had bypassed German strongpoints and far outrun the infantry, exposing tanker and foot soldier alike to murderous fire from the rear and both flanks. “An 88-mm round blew up the Sherman in front of us and we could hear the screaming inside,” a tank sergeant later recalled. “It was terrible to listen to men being burned to death and not being able to help.” For negligible gains Harmon’s losses would grow to sixty tanks. The 45th Division took such heavy casualties that a lieutenant commanded a battalion until he, too, was killed.
“The day’s attack,” a dispatch from Old Ironsides reported, “was costly and fruitless.” Charred bodies hung from charred vehicles, “the grisly bric-a-brac of war.” Among those killed: Lieutenant Allen T. Brown, a tank platoon leader, shot in the head by a sniper while standing in his turret hatch near Campoleone. As a twelve-year-old in 1930, young Brown had encouraged the marriage of his widowed mother, Katherine, once a prominent Shakespearian actress, to the widower George C. Marshall. Now it would fall to Marshall to tell his wife that her younger son was dead.
British troops on the left flank managed to cross the Moletta River, but on a twenty-five-mile front from Artena to the sea Truscott rued that his offensive had been “halted at every point.” VI Corps intelligence now calculated that thirty German battalions held the Alban Hills and the Valmontone gap, a sharp increase from earlier estimates. Kesselring, fighting to save his armies rather than to keep Rome, had in truth been pummeled: in a report to Berlin he put his losses during DIADEM at 25,000 men or more already, along with 2,500 machine guns, 248 tanks, and nearly 300 guns. Many vehicles not blown apart were immobile for want of tires and spare parts.
Still, he held the high ground and he held the capital. A reproachful Cl
We are in as desperate a battle as Fifth Army has ever been in. If it were only the battle I had to worry about and not many other matters, it would be easy, but I am harassed at every turn on every conceivable subject—political, personal and many others…. I pray for early results.
Perhaps the most plaintive cry came from Peter Tompkins, the OSS chief still awaiting deliverance in his Roman hideout. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed,” Tompkins told his diary. “The offensive has bogged down.”
The Cuckoo’s Song
IT had bogged in the south, too, despite a final shattering of the Hitler Line that cost the Canadian 1st Infantry Division nearly nine hundred casualties on May 23 alone. So intense was the carnage that a private from Calgary reflected, “I just don’t know how I lived.” A Canadian major, wounded four times, calmed his men by singing “Alouette” as bullets hummed counterpoint overhead. Survivors buried the dead, after gathering pay books and identity disks, and engineers mass-produced white wooden crosses. “Bodies keep coming in,” an exhausted chaplain wrote on May 25. “I go to bed but not to sleep.” Staggered by losses in his regiment, the commander of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry told another officer, “Those were fine boys. They are gone. I haven’t anybody left. They are all gone.”
Eighth Army had long “lacked the instinct to finish off a maimed foe,” as one British historian later observed, beginning with the elusive Rommel at Alamein. Now Leese demonstrated the same incapacity. As Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army staggered back up the Liri Valley and abutting hills, Leese insisted on further wedging two corps abreast—the I Canadian on the left, the British XIII on the right—into a narrow funnel that boasted a single decent road, Highway 6. He imprudently chose an armored vanguard to lead his host through poor tank country seamed with hedges, walls, sunken lanes, and creeks in spate. With fields high and untended, and trees and vineyards in full leaf, visibility often dropped to one hundred feet.
“After months of static warfare and monotony, we were thrusting northwards once more,” an optimistic British diarist wrote. In truth, the pursuit turned into a ponderous stern chase, harassed at every turn by pernicious German rear guards. In six days after the Hitler Line ruptured, XIII Corps covered but eleven miles. Leese not only seemed determined to cram all 1,300 Eighth Army tanks into the valley but also, in set-piece fashion, he methodically built supply bases and trundled forward his artillery after every incremental gain. Radio failures, farm tracks made fluvial by spring rains, and fields fecund with mines added to the misery. Brute force again revealed its limits: nearly seven hundred Eighth Army guns dumped ninety-two tons of high explosives on Aquino simultaneously, pulverizing the hometown of Thomas Aquinas and the Roman satirist Juvenal. German defenders, apparently unimpressed, refused to decamp until out-flanked.
Worse yet, poor march discipline and shabby staff work led to monumental traffic congestion. “The road was hidden in dust as we edged into the northbound convoy and came to an immediate standstill,” one observer reported. A British study cautioned that “the staff must not put more traffic on a road than the road will stand.” Yet, by one authoritative tally, “inessential vehicles” accounted for more than half of Eighth Army’s total, and roads were clogged with the sort of supernumeraries who in the Crimean War had been styled “Travelling Gentlemen.” Units advanced, slowly; units withdrew, slowly; supply lorries lumbered up and back, very slowly. “Traffic criminals of every kind rejoiced,” the British official history lamented. Inching Tommies sang, “I don’t toil all day / Simply because I’m not made that way.”
On May 28, just as Canadian engineers completed a 120-foot bridge across the Liri, the entire span broke apart and sank. The Sacco River valley beyond the Liri also proved inhospitable, with wooded ridges and a thousand ditches. On a sprightly day, touched by the spur, the army covered four miles, liberating another hilltop hamlet or two amid chortling villagers who spilled into the streets. “You are welcome!” they yelled in rehearsed English. “Kill all Germans!” Italian flags flapped from the rooftops and red-and-green Savoy bunting draped the balconies. Flowers were strewn, and local eminences presented the commanding officer with a rose and an egg.
Canadian troops would enter Frosinone on May 31, but the advance remained “muscle-bound”—in the sorrowful phrase of the official history, which concluded that Vietinghoff was “in very little danger from Eighth Army.” Valmontone still lay twenty-five miles to the northwest. Without doubt, Clark’s failure to provide an anvil on which to flatten Tenth Army was compounded by the feebleness of Leese’s hammer.
The lurching convoys lurched on. Every soldier listened for the stutter of machine guns or the whip-crack of sniper bullets. A Canadian soldier described finding a German marksman who had been plinked by tank fire from his perch on an evergreen bough: “When we got to him he was sitting against a tree with a cigarette going. He had one leg off and he’d taken off his belt and made a tourniquet. His sniper’s rifle had six notches in it.” The dead were buried, the living moved on, again. “It’s surprising how deep six feet is,” a British rifleman noted. “It didn’t take much to make the lot of us cry like children.”
On Leese’s left, Juin and his FEC made better progress, notwithstanding the French commander’s distress at having his long right flank exposed by Eighth Army’s dawdling. From Pico the French had swiftly scuttled northwest along the spine of the Lipini Mountains and through contiguous valleys. General Westphal, Kesselring’s chief of staff, complained of “those damned French hanging around our necks.”
Soon others damned them with equal vehemence. After contributing so much to Allied success in DIADEM, some colonial troops now disgraced themselves, their army, and France. Hundreds of atrocities—allegedly committed mostly by African soldiers—stained the Italian countryside in the last two weeks of May, including murders and gang rapes. “All day long our men observed them scouring the area for women,” an American chaplain wrote Clark on May 29. “Our men are sick at heart, and are commenting that they would rather shoot the Moroccan Goums than the Germans…. They say we have lost that for which we fight if this is allowed to continue.”
Another chaplain cited specifics: a fifteen-year-old girl raped by eighteen colonial soldiers; a twenty-seven-year-old raped by three soldiers; a twenty-eight-year-old raped by five. An American artillery battalion commander described an Italian woman shot in the right ankle and raped by four Moroccans while her daughter was shot in the left foot and also raped. In Ceccano, he added, “approximately 75 women ranging in age from 13 to 75 years had been raped; one woman claimed to have been raped 17 times on the night of the 29th and 11 times on the morning of the 30th.” Another battalion commander described a three-year-old shot dead by French colonials after his mother resisted their advances. “A delegation of frenzied citizens and priests” begged GIs to post guards in Pisterzo to forestall further butchery, he reported. American soldiers “came in as crusaders to save Europe from such things,” he added. “The occurrences are seriously affecting the morale and willingness to fight in my men.” The U.S. commander of the 13th Field Artillery Brigade, attached to the FEC, advised Clark that all thirteen of his battalion commanders could testify to similar depravities.
Italian authorities tallied seven hundred crimes of “carnal violence” in Frosinone province alone. “All over the mountain,” a woman in Esperia reported, “you could hear the screaming.” Among many affidavits from victims was that of a sixteen-year-old girl in Lenola: “I was taken and violated four times by Moroccans. There was a 12-year-old girl with me…who suffered the same violation.” Norman Lewis, the British intelligence officer and author, investigated various allegations and found “wholesale ra
“At any hour of the day or night, men and women, old and young, are subject to acts of force of every type, which range from beatings to carnal violence, woundings to murder,” an Italian general wrote Clark on May 25. “I beg your excellency…intervene for the honor of the Allied cause.”
Vengeful Italians occasionally retaliated, Lewis noted. Near Cancello, five colonial soldiers were reportedly poisoned, then castrated, then beheaded. Some French officers responded with what an American officer described as “a ‘so-what’ shrug,” or proposed that Italians were collecting the just deserts of making common cause with Hitler. J. Glenn Gray, a U.S. counterintelligence lieutenant with a doctorate from Columbia University, wrote that “the complaints have been taken to the French general in charge, who merely laughed and said, ‘This is war.’”
General Juin was not laughing, although his initial crackdown lacked force. In a memorandum on May 24, Juin condemned “acts of brigandage,” and warned that “however strong our feelings may be against a nation which treacherously betrayed France, we must maintain an attitude of dignity.” As more accusatory reports flooded in, Clark dispatched Gruenther to FEC headquarters on May 27 and penned a sharp letter of rebuke to the French commander. Juin that day told his officers that the rapacious behavior had “excited indignation in Allied circles.” He demanded “punishment without mercy.” Fifteen colonial miscreants reportedly were executed—shot or hanged in village squares—and fifty-four others drew prison terms ranging from five years to life.