The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy) by Rick Atkinson
The stress in Fifth Army on capturing Rome led to a palpable deflation once the capital fell. Doctors in the 1st Special Service Force reported that men in the unit were “listless, perilously close to exhaustion, and infested with lice,” a diagnosis valid for many other units as well. On July 4, the 1st Armored Division reported that barely half of Old Ironsides’ tanks remained battleworthy and that the division in six weeks had lost thirty-eight company commanders.
If the past year had been among the most catastrophic in Italian history, with invasion, occupation, civil strife, and total war, the forthcoming year would hardly be less bitter. Partisan ambushes and assassinations increased, as did brutal reprisals: under Kesselring’s orders, ten Italian deaths were exacted for every German killed. By early fall, an estimated 85,000 armed partisans roamed the mountains, with another 60,000 in Italian towns. Atrocities became commonplace.
Alexander in late August would shift Eighth Army back to the Adriatic in an effort to unhinge Kesselring’s defenses. But autumn rains and heavy casualties halted the Allied drive toward the Po River, and even Churchill realized that “the Italian theater could no longer produce decisive results,” in W.G.F. Jackson’s words. As the days grew shorter, an American officer wrote, “I wished that I were dead if I had to stay in Italy another winter.”
Alas, another miserable winter would pass, another wretched deadlock in which the campaign “sank to the level of a vast holding operation,” as the official U.S. Army history put it. Alexander’s armies grew increasingly polyglot, comprising troops from twenty-nine nations speaking a dozen languages, including Brazilians, Belgians, Cypriots, and Palestinian Jews—as well as two American forces, one white and one black. The Germans grew so feeble that eventually oxen would be harnessed to pull trucks, and any soldier on patrol who brought back a can of fuel received a thousand cigarettes. Yet not until April 1945 would the Gothic Line collapse, leading to capitulation twenty months after Allied soldiers had first made land at Reggio di Calabria.
Few who had been there at the beginning would be there to see the end. “Many men will never know if we win or lose,” Lieutenant Will Stevens had written his mother. “But if anything does happen, I’ll try to be good enough so I can meet you somewhere else and maybe we can have a cake together up where things are not rationed.” He was killed on June 25, 1944. Such deaths forever haunted those who outlived the war. “I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,” wrote the pilot John Muirhead, “for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.”
The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.
German casualties in Italy remain uncertain, as they were in North Africa. Alexander put German losses at 536,000, while the official U.S. Army history tallied 435,000, including 48,000 enemies killed and 214,000 missing, many of whom were never accounted for. Fifth Army alone reported 212,000 prisoners captured in the campaign. An OSS analysis of obituaries in seventy German daily newspapers found a steady increase in the number of seventeen-and eighteen-year-old war dead; moreover, by late summer 1944, nearly one in ten Germans killed in action was said to be over thirty-eight years old.
As the war moved north, Italian refugees returned home to find their towns obliterated and their fields sown with land mines. The Pontine Marshes again became malarial, and nine out of every ten acres around Anzio were no longer arable. The ten miles between Ortona and Orsogna held an estimated half million mines; those straggling home carried hepatitis, meningitis, and typhus. Ancient San Pietro was a ghost town, and a ghost town it remained, a shambles of plinths, splintered roof beams, and labyrinthine rubble. Only about forty San Pietrans returned to the old village; other survivors moved away or inhabited a new town that would be built down the slope, a bit closer to Highway 6. Some who outlived the war died violently from mines, or while trying to disarm live shells to sell the copper and brass for scrap.
Sant’Angelo refugees first returned in June 1944 to harvest wheat along the Rapido River. Mines quickly took a toll here too, and continued to take a toll for years: among the lost were Pietro Fargnoli, age six, and Pietro Bove, age twelve, both born after the war, and both killed on February 27, 1959.
Malaria kept Cassino uninhabitable for two years. Eventually the Via Serpentina was rebuilt; so, too, the gleaming white abbey on the hill and the town itself, which within a few decades became prosperous and handsome, with a big Fiat plant nearby and a new autostrada that carried travelers from Naples to Rome in two hours.
Some scars were harder to heal. “The men that war does not kill it leaves completely transparent,” one colonel observed after a night of heavy shelling. A soldier in the 36th Division later wrote, “I was scared for 23 months. I saw the best troops in the world cut down and replaced three or four times.” Simply surviving exacted a price. As J. Glenn Gray told his diary, “My conscience seems to become little by little sooted.” Or, as an old paratrooper from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment said almost sixty years after the war: “I hate the smell of anything dead…. It reminds me of Salerno.”
Was the game worth the candle? Alexander thought so. “Any estimate of the value of the campaign must be expressed not in terms of the ground gained,” he later wrote, “but in terms of its effect on the war as a whole.” By his tally, when Rome fell six of Kesselring’s nine “excellent mobile divisions had been severely mauled,” and fifty-five German divisions “were tied down in the Mediterranean by the [Allied] threat, actual or potential.” As the Combined Chiefs commanded, Italy had been knocked from the Axis coalition and hundreds of thousands of Hitler’s troops had been “sucked into the vortex of defeat,” in the glum phrase of a senior German general in Berlin. Churchill later wrote, “The principal task of our armies had been to draw off and contain the greatest possible number of Germans. This had been admirably fulfilled.”
Yet the Allied strategy in Italy seemed designed not to win but to endure. “There is little doubt that Alexander fulfilled his strategic mission,” General Jackson later observed, “[but] there is less certainty about the correctness of that mission.” Two distinguished British military historians would voice similar skepticism. John Keegan saw the campaign as “a strategic diversion on the maritime flank of a continental enemy,” while Michael Howard believed the Mediterranean strategy reflected Churchill’s desire to divert American combat power from the Pacific. The British, Howard concluded, “never really knew where they were going in the Mediterranean.”
Others would be even harsher. The Mediterranean was a “cul-de-sac,” wrote the historian Corelli Barnett, “mere byplay in the conclusion of a war that had been won in mass battles on the Eastern and Western fronts.” (There were 22 German divisions in Italy on June 6, 1944; by comparison, 157 fought in the east on that day and almost 60 more in western Europe.) Another British eminence, J.F.C. Fuller, in 1948 would call Italy “tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless campaign of the whole war.” B. H. Liddell Hart concluded that the Italian effort “subtracted very heavily” from Allied war resources, “a much larger subtraction from the total effort than the German had incurred by making a stand in Italy.” And the American historian David M. Kennedy decried “a needlessly costly sideshow,” a “grinding war of attrition whose costs were justified by no defensible military or political purpose.”
Even Kesselring, ever cheeky for a man who had lost both the battle and the war, would observe in September 1945 that Anglo-American commanders “appeared bound to their fixed plans. Opportunities to strike at my flanks were overlooked or disregarded.” Although “German divisions of the highest fighting quality…were tied down in Italy at a time when they were urgently needed in the French coastal areas,” Kesselring later added, the Allies “utterly fail
True enough, all of it, but perhaps not the whole truth. If “to advance is to conquer,” in Frederick the Great’s adage, then the Allies continued to conquer in the Mediterranean, albeit slowly. When Rome fell, only eleven German U-boats still operated in the entire Mediterranean, and no Allied merchantman would be sunk there for the rest of the war; controlling the middle sea proved vital in liberating Europe, and in guaranteeing another route for Lend-Lease matériel to Russia via Persia. The bomber offensive continued apace from Italian fields that crept ever closer to the Reich; a sustained and ultimately fatal campaign against German oil production facilities included six thousand Fifteenth Air Force sorties in the summer of 1944 that targeted vital refineries around Ploesti, Romania. As the historian Douglas Porch wrote, “One must not lose from view the Mediterranean’s importance in breaking the offensive power of German arms, and forcing the Reich onto the defensive, after which any hope of victory eluded them.”
Moreover, all criticism of the Italian strategy butts against an inconvenient riposte: if not Italy, where? “Events generate their own momentum, impose their own force, and exert their own influence on the will of man,” wrote Martin Blumenson, who spent a professional lifetime pondering the Mediterranean campaign. “We went into Sicily and Italy because we had been in North Africa.” No oceangoing fleet was available to move a half million men from the African littoral to England, or anywhere else; nor could British ports, rails, and other facilities, already overwhelmed by the American hordes staging for OVERLORD, have handled such a force. Moscow would not have tolerated an idling of Allied armies during the ten months between the conquest of Sicily and the Normandy invasion—a ten-month respite the Germans badly needed. “The Italian campaign,” wrote the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “was fought because it had to be fought.”
Historical tautology may be suspect, and opportunism lacks the panache of grand strategy. From beginning to end, Allied warmaking in the Mediterranean tended to be improvisational. The decision to continue pounding north after the capture of Rome remains especially difficult to justify. Yet the American commander-in-chief had grown comfortable with a campaign that in Italy more than in any other theater resembled the grinding inelegance of World War I. “Our war of attrition is doing its work,” Franklin Roosevelt had said a week after the invasion of Sicily, and he never renounced that strategy.
Certainly lessons learned in Sicily and southern Italy paid dividends later in the war, notably the expertise gained in complex amphibious operations and in fighting as a large, multinational coalition. Kesselring went so far as to posit that without the Mediterranean experience, the invasion of France “would have undoubtedly become a failure.” Many other lessons were prosaic but sterling, such as the realization that the truck hauling ammunition to the front was no less vital than the gun firing it.
For the U.S. Army, which would shoulder the heaviest burden in western Europe for the balance of the war, there was also the priceless conviction that American soldiers could slug it out with the best German troops, division by division, and prevail. A Japanese-American soldier in the 100th Battalion wrote from Italy, “I really belong to the great American Army here and feel that I am part and parcel of the forces that are fighting for the kind of America we always dreamed of back home.”
On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had “seemed outlandish in 1942,” as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.
Of those eight million American soldiers in June 1944, about one in ten were in the Mediterranean. Most who were still in Italy, it may be surmised, would have endorsed a ditty circulating through the ranks:
I’m glad that I came, and damned anxious to go,
Give it back to the natives, I’m ready to blow.
Some would blow. Kesselring continued to command German forces in Italy until October 1944, when he was badly injured in a collision between his staff car and a mobile gun. Hospitalized for months, he would eventually take command of the faltering Western Front in an hour when catastrophic defeat loomed ever closer for the Reich.
Some blew to other fronts. Charles Ryder left the 34th Division, which he had led since before the TORCH invasion, and would end the war as a corps commander in the Philippines, staging for an invasion of Japan. Fred Walker, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroics with the 36th Division on Monte Artemisio, was sent home soon after Rome’s capture to become commandant of the Army’s infantry school in Georgia. “I do not want to leave the division,” he wrote, “but I will not be sorry to leave this theater and this army.”
Others were fated to remain in Italy for the duration. General von Senger would fight to the end before his capture, struggling to preserve his humanity in the midst of relentless carnage. “You can never quite get over it,” he reflected long after the war. The puppet dictator Mussolini lived near Lake Garda, where he read Tolstoy, played tennis—opponents still let him win—and pedaled about on his bicycle, trailed by a truckload of German soldiers. After moving his rump government to Milan in the spring of 1945, Mussolini would be captured by partisans while trying to escape to Switzerland, disguised in a German greatcoat and helmet; with his mistress, Clara Petacci, he was executed on April 28, 1945. The Duce’s body, badly mangled and hoisted upside down in a gas station, would be stolen by neo-Fascists in 1946, recaptured three months later by Italian police, and hidden in a convent for eleven years before final interment in the Mussolini family crypt, where the faithful still sign their names in the guest book.
Alexander received a field marshal’s baton for the capture of Rome, and a few months later succeeded Wilson as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, with responsibility for Italy, Greece, and the Balkans. “The limitations of his ability began to appear when the forces under his command became so huge that their manipulation required weeks and months of forethought, not hours or days,” observed John Harding, his shrewd chief of staff. Elevated to the peerage as a viscount after the war, Alexander would serve for years as the governor-general of Canada.
Geoffrey Keyes continued to command II Corps, receiving his third star in April 1945, and eventually serving as the postwar Allied high commissioner for Austria. Bill Darby’s life remained a compelling blend of the felicitous and the star-crossed: after a stint as a staff officer in the War Department, he returned to Italy as assistant commander of the 10th Mountain Division, only to be killed near Lake Garda by a German artillery shell on April 30, 1945. Among the last casualties of the long campaign, Darby was posthumously promoted to brigadier general. He was thirty-four.
In an exchange of letters with Sarah after the fall of Rome, Lucian Truscott was astonished to find her unaware that he had commanded the Anzio beachhead. “I tried to tell you in every way I could,” he wrote on June 15. “What in the world did you think I was doing?” He lamented being “far removed from the softening touch of woman and home,” adding, “I’m a bit on edge. It is my belief that much hard fighting lies before us.” He was right. Truscott would lead his VI Corps through southern France to the Vosges Mountains before succeeding Clark as the Fifth Army commander in December 1944. In postwar Germany he would serve as the military governor of Bavaria.
Clark also felt on edge. In letters to Renie he complained about her failure to send a congratulatory telegram after he captured Rome, then confessed that he was “badly in need of a rest. Never needed one more.” An intestinal infection had caused him to lose weight until he was nearly skeletal, despite a bracing regimen of sulfa drugs. Worse yet, on June 10, he was nearly killed when his Piper Grasshopper collided a thousand feet up with a barrage balloon cable. “It wrapped around the wing and we couldn’t get loose,”
Italy would be with him for the rest of the war and beyond. He succeeded Alexander as commander of the army group and received his fourth star in March 1945 at age forty-eight, becoming by far the youngest of the thirteen U.S. officers to wear that rank during World War II. After the war Clark would precede Keyes as high commissioner in Austria before commanding United Nations forces in Korea and eventually serving as president of the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina.
The Rapido calamity continued to torment him, particularly when congressional investigators took up the cause of disaffected Texas veterans. To Renie he would write from Vienna in March 1946, “It is the most cruel and unfair attack ever made on an officer who worked so desperately, under such adverse conditions to make what I believed, and still do [believe] was a fine record.” Lamenting Eisenhower’s silence on the subject, and suspecting his former 36th Division commander of provoking the Texans, Clark added, “I believe Walker is the ‘snake in the grass.’” To help commemorate that “fine record,” he commissioned an immense history of Fifth Army, in nine volumes.
He would remain among the war’s most controversial commanders, a man whose very name more than a half century later could cause brows to knit and lips to purse. If his admirers considered him “clairvoyant and energetic,” in the phrase of General Juin, Mauldin spoke for many in the lower ranks in observing of Clark: “He had his limitations. But I think a lot of the criticism of him occurred because he was associated with a bad time.”