The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
Columns of weary GIs shuffled through the city. Some carried small Italian tricolors. Others sported flowers in their helmet nets or rifle barrels. Eric Sevareid watched throngs of Italians sob with joy as they tossed blossoms at the tramping soldiers and cheered them to the echo. “I felt wonderfully good, generous, and important,” he wrote. “I was a representative of strength, decency, and success.”
A message to the Combined Chiefs in Washington and London formally announced, “The Allies are in Rome.” How long it had taken to proclaim those five words; how much heartbreak had been required to make it so.
In classical Rome, a triumphant general returning from his latest conquest made for the Capitoline, the lowest but most sacred of the city’s seven hills, where he sacrificed a snow-white bull in gratitude for Jove’s beneficence. His face painted with vermilion, his head crowned with laurel, and his body cloaked in a purple toga, the victor rode to the hill in a chariot drawn by four white steeds. At the foot of the slope, the trailing column of prisoners fell out to be strangled or slain with an ax in the Mamertine Prison, where the apostle Peter also would be held in chains. It was here too that Brutus, bloody dagger in hand, harangued his fellow Romans after the murder of Julius Caesar, and here that Juno’s geese were said to have gabbled in alarm when stealthy Gauls tried to scale the Capitoline ramparts. And it was amid the ruins atop the hill in October 1764 that the British historian Edward Gibbon—a plump man in “a bag-wig, a snuff-brown coat, knee breeches, and snowy ruffles,” as the travel writer H. V. Morton later described him—claimed that “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”
Mark Clark had neither vermilion face paint nor a laurel wreath, but he possessed a sense of theater, and it was on the Capitoline that he bade his lieutenants appear for a rendezvous at ten A.M. on Monday, June 5. At 7:30 Clark flew from Nettuno by Piper Cub, landing in a wheat field outside the city where II Corps had been ordered to arrange an escort of clean tanks, trucks, and soldiers. Upon learning that it would take hours to wash the vehicles, Clark said, “Oh, the hell with that,” and bolted with his retinue up Highway 6 through the Porta Maggiore.
Within minutes they were lost. Wandering across the blue-gray Tiber to St. Peter’s Square, Clark flagged down a priest and asked, “Where is Capitoline Hill? My name is Clark.” The cleric dragooned a boy on a bicycle to lead the convoy, bellowing “Clark! Clark!” to clear a path through the teeming streets. Arriving at the Via del Teatro Marcello at the foot of the Capitoline, Clark climbed the Cordonata ramp—designed by Michelangelo in 1536 to receive the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—and crossed the elegant Campidoglio to find the peach-hued town hall locked. He pounded on the door, but when a caretaker finally peeked out, Clark chose to linger at the porch balustrade until Truscott, Keyes, and Juin arrived to join him. Opening a map and pointing with exaggerated pantomime toward Berlin, Clark turned to the reporters and photographers now gathered on the square.
“Well, gentlemen, I didn’t really expect to have a press conference here—I just called a little meeting of my corps commanders to discuss the situation,” he said slowly. “However, I’ll be glad to answer your questions. This is a great day for the Fifth Army.” A hundred flashbulbs popped as Clark delivered a brief victory oration—the equivalent of slaughtering a white bull—without mentioning Eighth Army or other contributors. His lieutenants flushed with discomfort, glancing self-consciously at a Movietone cameraman filming the scene. Truscott later voiced disgust at “this posturing.”
Then it was off to a luncheon at the Hotel Excelsior, which engineers had searched for time bombs and booby traps. In starched black-and-white livery the hotel staff lined the lobby to greet the new occupiers, having said arrivederci to the Germans only a day before. Clark gave another short address from a second-floor balcony, then slipped into a suite for a private moment. Kneeling on the bedroom floor, he thanked God for victory and prayed for the souls of his men. A hand gently touched his shoulder. Clark turned to find Juin behind him. Beneath his brushy mustache, the Frenchman smiled and said, “I just did the same thing.”
Along the Via Veneto, another happy throng gathered to huzzah their liberators. “We waded through crowds of cheering people,” Keyes told his diary. “A couple of women nearly strangled Juin much to our amusement and his embarrassment. We had a fine lunch.”
“You have made the American people very happy,” Franklin Roosevelt cabled Clark. “It is a grand job well done.” Similar plaudits hailed what Harold Macmillan called “the expulsion of the barbarians from the most famous of all cities.” Even Stalin on June 5 cheered “the great victory of the Allied Anglo-American forces.” Churchill cast a blind eye on fraternal frictions, notwithstanding reports that some British officers were turned away from Rome at gunpoint. “Relations are admirable between our armies in every rank there,” he wrote Roosevelt in a sweet fib. “Certainly it is an absolute brotherhood.”
Across the capital the celebration continued through Monday afternoon. The San Carlo restaurant offered GIs “the very finest cuts of horse meat.” An Army doctor wrote home of “beautiful girls wearing lipstick, silk stockings, and, for a change, also shoes. Many people weep.” At the Hotel Majestic, a porter greeted a Life magazine reporter with the Fascist salute, then apologized. “A habit of twenty years,” he explained. One soldier awoke next to an Italian prostitute who wished him good morning auf deutsch. “Today I had my hair cut in Rome and drank gin and vermouth in the Excelsior,” a British signaler wrote his family. “The Italians all said, ‘We are so happy to see you at last. Why did it take you so long?’”
Exhausted soldiers wrapped themselves in blankets and dozed on the hoods of their half-tracks or in stone-dry fountains. “They slept on the street, on the sidewalks, on the Spanish Steps,” the curator of the Keats-Shelley house reported. Some felt deflated. “We prowl through Rome like ghosts, finding no satisfaction in anything we see or do,” wrote Audie Murphy. “I feel like a man reprieved from death; and there is no joy in me.”
Yet others found redemption in the city they had unchained, a gleaming symbol of the civilized values for which they fought. “Every block is interesting, beautiful, enchanting,” a 3rd Division officer wrote. “The very city fills the heart with reverence.” At five P.M. on Monday, 100,000 Italians jammed St. Peter’s Square. Bells pealed. Priests offered tours of the Vatican to GIs in exchange for American cigarettes. Pius XII appeared on his apartment balcony in brilliant white robes, then later met with reporters as flashbulbs exploded and photographers shouted, “Hold it, Pope. Attaboy!” The holy father advised Roman girls to “behave and dress properly and win the respect of the soldiers by your virtue.” A papal secretary added with a shrug, “It’s just another changing of the guard.”
At six A.M. on Tuesday, June 6, an aide woke Mark Clark in his Excelsior suite with the news that German radio had announced the Allied invasion of Normandy. Clark rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “How do you like that?” he said. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”
At the Albergo Città, a BBC correspondent burst into the Allied press headquarters. “Boys, we’re on the back page now,” he said. “They’ve landed in Normandy.” Eric Sevareid later recalled that “every typewriter stopped. We looked at one another.”
Most of us sat back, pulled out cigarettes and dropped our half-written stories about Rome on the floor. We had in a trice become performers without an audience…a troupe of actors who, at the climax of their play, realize that the spectators have all fled out the door.
On June 6, Alexander ordered the Fifth and Eighth Armies to make all possible speed for Pisa and Florence, respectively. Some 170 miles separated the Allied front from the next chain of German redoubts, the formidable Gothic Line, but many rivers and hills lay in between. “If only the country were more open,” Alexander lamented, “we could make hay of the whole lot.”
Howitzers barked wheel to wheel i
Weary sergeants ordered them to fall in and move out. “C’mon, man, c’mon,” Ernie Harmon urged a Sherman commander. “There are places to go.” A tanker in Old Ironsides told his diary: “Drove through Rome to the other side of Tiber River. People threw flowers at us. Stopped and had coffee.” The 88th Division vanguard radioed General Keyes a two-word message: “Beyond Rome.”
Olive-drab columns streamed across the river and past the cylindrical Castel Sant’Angelo, tomb of the warrior-emperor Hadrian. On the roof stood the bronze statue of St. Michael the Archangel, patron of soldiers, sheathing his sword. GIs smelling of Chianti and Chesterfields jammed the deuce-and-a-half trucks or straddled the towed artillery tubes, souvenir lithographs and Fascist postage stamps tucked into their packs.
Then up they climbed, along the dark ridge of the Janiculum, where the ancients once kept a shrine to two-faced Janus, the god of beginnings, and where augurs had studied their auspices. From the hillcrest on this cloudless day, Rome unfurled below in a tapestry of reds, browns, and yellows. Beyond the park where Cleopatra once lived in Caesar’s villa stood the bell towers and the spires, the cupolas and the domes. On the southern horizon lay the faint blue smudge of the Colli Laziali.
Why did it take you so long? the Italians asked, and the answer could only be: Because so many of us died to set you free.
North they rolled, on the high ground beneath cypresses and umbrella pines, past Roman gardeners working the flower beds of gray marl and yellow sea sand. North they rolled, and the scent of roses lingered in their wake.
EPILOGUE
MORE than three weeks passed before Jack Toffey’s family learned of his death. “We see you captured Rome,” his mother-in-law wrote him. George Biddle, also corresponding with a dead man, encouraged Toffey to “write one short word about the run into Rome. It left me restless and envious.”
At the house on East Long Street in Columbus, Helen and the two children went about their days without knowing that their lives had changed forever. An early summer heat wave scorched central Ohio. Toffey’s beloved Reds slipped to fourth place in the National League, but the minor league Columbus Red Birds climbed to second in the American Association. In an exhibition game featuring the pitching greats Dizzy Dean and Satchel Paige, Model Dairy of Columbus beat the Chicago American Giants, a Negro League club.
The news from Rome and Normandy electrified the city, which on the evening of June 6 observed a long minute of silence “in respect to the boys of the united nations now fighting to free an enslaved continent.” Blood donors in Columbus set a new record by giving almost a thousand pints in one day, and absenteeism at local war plants plummeted. Three thousand inmates at the Ohio State Penitentary held a prayer vigil, asking the Almighty to bless OVERLORD, and radio station WCOL broadcast twenty daily news reports to track “the beginning of a new world for all who cherish freedom.”
Columbus organized a war bond parade on Sunday, June 11, and sailors in white caps marched down Broad Street past displays of jeeps, half-tracks, and a Navy Helldiver airplane that had been built in the local Curtiss-Wright factory. Rationing stamps were still required to buy sugar, shoes, gasoline, and liquor, but the nation suddenly had three billion surplus eggs and every family was urged to eat an extra dozen. Paley’s Pants Shop on West Broad Street offered Father’s Day slacks for as little as $4, while Roy’s jewelry store advertised diamond rings from $65 to $225, including the 20 percent federal tax. Recalling the giddy rampage that followed the armistice announcement in November 1918, downtown merchants announced a victory plan that included locking their doors and boarding up windows when word arrived that World War II had ended.
The fatal telegram from the adjutant general came to East Long Street on Sunday morning, June 25. “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your husband, Lieutenant Colonel John J. Toffey, Jr., was killed in action on 3 June in Italy. Letter follows.” Helen received his posthumous Purple Heart, which was Toffey’s third of the war, and a posthumous Silver Star, his second. Eventually a footlocker of personal effects arrived, including his pen-and-pencil set and a bloodstained glasses case.
As for Colonel Toffey himself, he would never get home. Instead he was buried among comrades in section J, row 4, grave 25, in the Nettuno cemetery, which had first opened two days after the Anzio landings. The muddy field, redeemed with bougainvillea and white oleander, soon became the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, a seventy-seven-acre sanctuary where almost eight thousand military dead would be interred.
Here, on Memorial Day in 1945, just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stocky, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker’s platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Mark Clark as the Fifth Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. “It was,” wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin, “the most moving gesture I ever saw.” In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to Jack Toffey, to Henry Waskow, and to the thousands of others who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Mauldin later recalled:
He apologized to the dead men for their presence here. He said everybody tells leaders it is not their fault that men get killed in war, but that every leader knows in his heart that this is not altogether true. He said he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances…. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out.
The fall of Rome proved but a momentary interlude in a campaign that soon swept past the capital. Alexander’s optimism was unbounded. “Morale is irresistibly high,” he wrote Churchill. “Neither the Apennines nor even the Alps should prove a serious obstacle.” The prime minister urged him on, cabling, “Your whole advance is splendid, and I hope the remains of what were once the German armies will be collected.”
Late on June 7, a South African reconnaissance squadron found Kesselring’s headquarters on Monte Soratte ablaze. The field marshal and his staff had fled, though a storeroom full of fine sherry and French wine was seized intact, along with German maps depicting escape routes to the Gothic Line.
Kesselring had tried to persuade himself that the Allied legions “might succumb to the demoralizing influence of a capital city.” Yet for two weeks after Rome’s capture the Fifth and Eighth Armies bounded up the peninsula, averaging eight miles a day. Then the retreating Germans stiffened under Kesselring’s order to conduct demolitions “with sadistic imaginativeness.” By June 17, the familiar pattern of blown bridges and antitank ambushes had slowed the pursuit to two miles a day, and vicious little firefights erupted across central Italy. When an artillery captain in the 36th Division was killed in mid-June, one of his lieutenants wrote, “Damned shame that after living through all the hell of Salerno, Altavilla & Cassino he should be killed in a skirmish that no one will ever hear of.”
Alexander’s blithe dismissal of the Apennines and the Alps suggested an enduring delusion about the road ahead, where the mountains grew steeper and enemy supply lines grew shorter. Moreover, profound strategic changes would redraw the Mediterranean campaign, leaving Italy a bloody backwater. The American high command in Washington, supported by Eisenhower in London, remained intent on a late-summer invasion of southern France to reinforce the Normandy landings. A British proposal to launch an amphibious landing in the northern Adriatic for an attack through the Balkans toward Austria and southern
On July 5, AFHQ ordered that “an overriding priority” be given in the Mediterranean to assembling ten divisions for the invasion near Marseilles, code-named ANVIL. Just as he had given up seven divisions after the fall of Sicily, Alexander now forfeited seven more, including Truscott’s VI Corps and Juin’s FEC, as well as substantial air support and many logistical units. By mid-August, Fifth Army would shrink by more than half, to 171,000 troops, even as the total American force in the Mediterranean peaked at 880,000 troops. Alexander deemed the denuding of his force “disastrous,” and blamed Eisenhower for “halting the triumphant advance of my armies in Italy at a key moment.” Clark, abruptly in harmony with General Alex, considered the move “one of the outstanding political mistakes of the war.”
Their disappointment was understandable, yet the strategic judgment of Alexander and Clark remains suspect. Hitler had decided to rebuild Kesselring’s army group with eight more divisions and to continue fighting for Italian real estate, while construction battalions turned the Gothic Line into a barrier as formidable as the Gustav Line had been. Although Allied intelligence revealed that four German divisions had retreated from Rome as “mere shells,” and seven others were “drastically depleted,” the Allied pursuit even before the decimation of Alexander’s host was “neither strong nor quick,” as a U.S. Army assessment concluded. Night continued to give the retreating Germans “a privileged sanctuary” since Allied air fleets had only a few dozen aircraft capable of night attacks. “The cloak of darkness saved the German armies from destruction,” an Air Force study later concluded.