The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Ships churning to the rescue played searchlights across the heaving waves. As LCI 32 approached, she too struck a mine and was gone in three minutes, taking thirty crewmen to the bottom. “Heavy seas and high winds made it very difficult maneuvering ship alongside the unfortunates,” the war log of minesweeper YMS-43 noted at seven A.M. “Using the boat hook was the best method, except many of the life belts tore under the strain. Survivors were drowning all around us.”

  At 8:45, with hail falling like grapeshot, the minesweeper’s log recorded: “No more floating bodies visible.” The mortar companies lost nearly 300 men, among 454 U.S. soldiers and 29 British tars who perished. LST 422 broke in half and sank at 2:30 P.M. Recovered bodies were sewn into canvas bags weighted with antiaircraft shells and consigned to the sea. The drowned included Private Billy C. Rhoads of Albia, Iowa, whose brother years later said of the fatal news delivered by telegram to the family’s front door, “It really was a grief which Mother never was able to be rid of.”

  As the air attacks intensified, so did German shelling. By midday on January 26, when sodden survivors from LST 422 arrived in Anzio, the beachhead had assumed the shape of an irregular rectangle, seven miles deep and fifteen miles wide. Truscott’s 3rd Division remained three miles from Cisterna, while Major General Penney’s British 1st Division held Aprilia but stood more than a mile from the rail and road junction at Campoleone, and ten miles from Albano. Every square inch of the beachhead fell within range of German guns, and every square inch felt vulnerable. One shell hit a fragrance shop, perfuming the air with the odd scent of cordite and cologne. Another hit a British dump, firing ammunition as frantic Tommies dragged away leaking petrol cans. “Everyone was dashing around like demented beings,” a Grenadier Guards corporal named E. P. Danger told his diary.

  “The heavy shelling was beginning to shake us up a bit,” Corporal Danger added. One of his American cousins agreed. “Anzio was a fishbowl,” he wrote. “We were the fish.”

  I will not be stampeded, John Lucas had declared, and he would spend the rest of his life explaining that reluctance. Already skeptics had begun to wonder why the beachhead remained so compact, why the enemy had not been routed, why the campaign was not won. The senior Royal Air Force officer in the Mediterranean, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, wrote a colleague in London five days after the landings:

  I have not the slightest doubt that if we had been Germans or Russians landing at Anzio, we should have had [Highway 6] two days ago and maybe Rome by now and the whole right of the enemy line opposite the Fifth Army would have crumpled.

  Lucas also sensed that Alexander, despite his effusive praise during two visits to the beachhead, had grown uneasy, perhaps goaded by the impatient Churchill. As if seeking to persuade both himself and history, Lucas wrote in his diary:

  Apparently some of the higher levels think I have not advanced with maximum speed. I think more has been accomplished than anyone had a right to expect. This venture was always a desperate one and I could never see much chance for it to succeed, if success means driving the Germans north of Rome.

  The excoriation of Old Luke had begun: for want of pluck, of audacity, of imagination. Long after the war ended, he would be pilloried as the modern incarnation of George B. McClellan, the timid Civil War general who was said to have “the slows.” Even those who applauded Lucas’s prudence regretted that he had not rushed to seize the road junctions at Campoleone and Cisterna, which would have complicated German encirclement of the beachhead. “Having gained surprise in the landing,” the judicious official historian Martin Blumenson concluded, Lucas “proceeded to disregard the advantage it gave him.”

  Perhaps, although the Allied push to the north and northeast began within forty-eight hours of the landings. More than sixty years after the Allied perdition at Anzio, Lucas’s caution seems sensible and even inevitable, given Clark’s wooly instructions and Alexander’s hail-fellow approbation. Those who most closely scrutinized the VI Corps predicament tended to concur that a pell-mell lunge for the Colli Laziali would have been reckless. Alexander’s new chief of staff, the future field marshal John H. Harding, concluded that Lucas “probably saved the forces at Anzio from disaster.” Clark came to a similar conclusion. Major General G.W.R. Templer, who would soon command a British division at Anzio and who detested Lucas, believed that if the corps had galloped north, “within a week or fortnight there wouldn’t have been a single British soldier left in the bridgehead. They would all have been killed or wounded or prisoners.” And George Marshall, who rarely condescended to adjudicate tactical squabbles, noted that “for every mile of advance there were seven or more miles to be added to the perimeter,” which would have made the Allied flanks ever more vulnerable.

  Five years after the war, Alexander conceded that “the actual course of events was probably the most advantageous in the end.” His assessment echoed that of Field Marshal Wilson, Eisenhower’s successor at AFHQ, who also concluded that to have pushed “to the Alban Hills with a half built-up force might have led to irreparable disaster.” John Lucas might be found wanting as a battle captain, with transparent anxieties and an avuncular mien that failed to inspire men under duress. “He was absolutely full of inertia and couldn’t make up his mind,” General Templer later complained. “He had no qualities of any sort as a commander.” But in staring through the north window of his villa on the Piazza del Mercato, Lucas found courage in convictions that would save his corps even at the price of his reputation. “Had I been able to rush to the high ground,” he wrote in his diary as German artillery and air attacks intensified,

  …nothing would have been accomplished except to weaken my force by that amount because the troops being sent, being completely beyond supporting distance, would have been immediately destroyed. The only thing to do was what I did.

  Through the Looking Glass

  ON a brisk January day in 1752, a column of soldiers more than half a mile long marched through a field outside the village of Caserta, twenty miles north of Naples, in a province famed in antiquity for “the beauty and gaiety of its women,” as well as for the slave revolt led by the gladiator Spartacus in 73 B.C. With a quartet of cannons placed to denote four corners, the troops formed a rectangle that outlined the perimeter walls of a future royal palace inspired by Versailles. The building would require twenty years of toil by a regiment of stonemasons, reinforced by prison labor and galley slaves. The finished palace became a monument to Bourbon ostentation: twelve hundred rooms; four interlocking courtyards; a sweeping marble staircase grander than anything Louis XIV ever descended; a theater with forty boxes; a chapel trimmed in lapis lazuli; and interior furnishings said to cost six million ducats. Gold lined the queen’s bathtub, and bas-relief figures on the wall had their eyes painted shut to prevent their peeking at the royal derrière; a hole-and-mirror contraption allowed the queen to watch townfolk passing on the street outside while she took her soak. The building’s southern face alone was 830 feet long and 134 feet high, with 243 windows. In laying his cornerstone with a silver trowel on that January day, the Neapolitan monarch Charles III had selected a Latin invocation asking that the palace and grounds “remain forever Bourbon.”

  Alas, nearly two centuries later the Anglo-Americans were firmly ensconced. Captured on October 8, Caserta Palace now served as the headquarters for both Clark’s Fifth Army and for Alexander’s 15th Army Group, which claimed the fifth floor on January 20. Every map and stick of furniture, including a pair of General Alex’s red plush chairs, had to be carried up 124 steps to what a British major described as “a muddling sort of maze through which one wandered.” A staff school for Italian aviators had previously occupied the floor, which was cluttered with aircraft motors, wind tunnels, and even a bomber fuselage. “Everything,” Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “was in disorder.” A war room was built, with a sentry on the door and maps on the wall. Alexander messed at the palace kennel and slept in a bivouac two miles distant, so there was a great dea
l of chuffing up and down those 124 steps. Ultra intelligence agents worked in caravans near the palace, forever burning secrets in an elegant brick incinerator, surmounted by steep steps like a pagan temple.

  Fifteen thousand Allied soldiers eventually worked at Caserta, which soon became a baroque parody of the Pentagon. The place was so cavernous that one resident claimed it was “the only house where I’ve had my hat blown off indoors.” After studying a sheaf of palace blueprints, signal officers concluded that to thread wire through walls two feet thick was impossible; cable and phone lines therefore ran “in and out of windows and around the outside,” giving the palace an appearance of being trussed if not hog-tied. One OSS officer thought Caserta resembled “a New England cotton mill,” while another officer likened it to “Alcatraz without the bay.” A brisk breeze caused hundreds of shutters to bang so that the headquarters “sounded like midnight in a madhouse.”

  The building had little heat, less sanitation, and “a 180-year accumulation of fleas.” Staff officers sat at plywood-and-sawhorse desks, “alternately shivering and scratching fleabites.” The British wanted the windows open, the Americans insisted they remain shut, and Alexander was forced to issue a Solomonic decree that “whoever arrived first at the office could have the windows as he liked for the day.” A polyglot host streamed in and out of the palace: Tommies and GIs, RAF pilots and Red Cross girls, carabinieri in swallowtail coats and tricorne hats; Indians in turbans; Poles wearing British battle dress with red-and-white shoulder tabs; French colonials in fezzes and Uncle Sam’s olive twill. Even an occasional Moroccan goum stumped past in the striped burnoose that GIs called a “Mother Hubbard wrapper.”

  The twelve hundred rooms had been converted into dormitories, dining halls, offices, bakeries, laundries, and a barbershop, where a comb-and-razor cut cost four cents. One spacious salon served as an indoor basketball court, and a three-room suite was devoted to an exhibit on venereal disease, with graphic color photographs intended to infuse soldiers with the fear of both God and loose women. Protective paper strips covered the huge palace mirrors, but nothing could keep GI fingerprints off the silk wall coverings and tapestries in the throne room and ministry chambers.

  An errant bomb had bent the organ pipes in the palace chapel, and artillery rumbling sometimes carried from the Cassino front. But war seemed ever more removed for the “garritroopers” at Caserta, as Bill Mauldin called them—“too far forward to wear ties and too far back to git shot.” An Army surgeon described the senior officers’ mess as “a stuffy, swank private dining room full of elderly colonels dining on broiled steak and other luxuries.” The tables were set with gold-trimmed palace porcelain and glassware etched with the royal crown. The chef had once worked at the Ritz in New York, but waiters were mostly “bomb-happy” GI convalescents. “It was said, rather unkindly, that if anyone dropped a plate they all dived for cover,” one visitor reported.

  Officers in the palace bar drank rum or cognac mixed with Coca-Cola; George Biddle found their faces “soft and puffy” compared with the frontline visages of Jack Toffey and his ilk. At parties, a female captain wrote, “Bill or Ralph or whoever had taken one got lit up on the very cheap wine and made less and less sense and got more and more amorous.” Marathon poker games raged in the royal suite, including one in which Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, allegedly lost $3,000; it was said that he eventually paid the debt with a sheaf of English five-pound notes “big as cabbage leaves.” Twice weekly, the San Carlo Opera Company arrived from Naples to sing Tosca or Madama Butterfly in the palace theater. A box seat cost $1.25, and the cast was paid mostly in Army rations.

  Caserta was a “looking glass world,” one officer wrote. He added: “One doesn’t hate on a full stomach and a hot bath.” To preserve a semblance of Army life, some commanders insisted that their garritroopers at least camp outdoors. Bivouacs soon stretched for two miles through the palace gardens, evincing their own Wonderland qualities, with shower huts, softball diamonds, backgammon tables, and volleyball courts. Grenadier Guards practiced lugging their assault boats through the rose bushes before paddling furiously across the ornamental ponds, which hungry soldiers soon emptied of fish. Clark’s floatplane landed among the lily pads on a reflecting pool a quarter mile long.

  Just north of the palace, engineers built a colony for generals, known as Cascades. An elaborate fountain nearby depicted the goddess Diana and her handmaidens being surprised while bathing by the hunter Actaeon, who was consequently transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. Cascades included a lounge with a fireplace, a tennis court, a U-shaped dance hall, and a muddy, eel-infested pond that served as a swimming hole. The engineers who built the complex complained in their unit log: “The feeling of the men is that they came over here for the purpose of winning a war. The building of summer houses and swimming pools doesn’t fall under this category.”

  Not least among Caserta’s oddities, the 6681st Signal Pigeon Company maintained twenty-two lofts with eight thousand cooing birds, including a blue-check splashed cock named GI Joe who was credited with carrying a message that had forestalled bombardment of a town already captured by the British. Nightingales also filled Caserta’s woods with music, leading one officer to write, “Everyone agrees that the nightingale’s song is beautiful, but I have never seen it mentioned before that it is also extremely noisy.” A British sergeant was blunter: “Wait till you’ve heard ’em every fucking night, the bloody sound they make will get in your bones.”

  Clark rarely missed a chance to flee Caserta’s fleshpots for the front, and at 3:45 A.M. on Friday, January 28, he hopped in a staff car and sped down the grand driveway, past the silk mills and the rope factories, where hemp plants soaked in shallow pits to soften the fibers. Twenty-five miles due west, near the mouth of the Volturno, a wallowing launch ferried him downriver where a pair of seventy-eight-foot motor torpedo boats, PT-201 and PT-216, bobbed at anchor. After snagging on a sandbar, the little launch shipped so much water that Clark was drenched to the skin by the time he climbed onto a stool behind 201’s bridge. As the first gray hint of dawn tinted the eastern sky, the triple screws of the two patrol boats hurled them northwest across the indigo Tyrrhenian for the seventy-mile journey to Anzio. Neither boat crew took time to radio a sailing signal to the Allied fleet at the beachhead.

  Alexander had prodded Clark to make this trip, wondering aloud on Thursday whether Lucas was sufficiently aggressive. Did the beachhead need “a thruster, like George Patton?” Alexander wondered. Certainly VI Corps should press forward to seize Campoleone and Cisterna. “Risks must be taken,” Alexander added. Clark promised to deliver the message.

  More than five months had passed since Clark had come ashore at Salerno, and the long season had aged him. During a visit to Caserta in early January, Patton had noted—with evident pleasure—symptoms of stress in the Fifth Army commander. “The left corner of Clark’s mouth is slightly drawn down as if he had been paralyzed,” he informed his diary. “He is quite jumpy.” Clark on January 18 had asked Renie to send him some Kreml hair tonic. “I find that by massaging my hair using that it keeps from coming out, and for a while it was falling out quite badly.” The crowding at the royal palace added more strains, and Clark planned to move his own forward command post to a hillside olive grove below Presenzano, ten miles from San Pietro. Alexander “and many lesser lights have moved into Caserta on top of my headquarters,” Clark told his diary on January 23. “Never before in the history of warfare have so few been commanded by so many.” As for the battle at Anzio, Alexander “apparently feels as though he is running that show. Not much I can do about it.”

  The solitude of high command oppressed him. “The more stars a man gets, the more lonesome he becomes,” he told Renie. Comrades “used to come around in the evening, but they don’t any more.” He suggested that for companionship she send him Pal, the family cocker spaniel. A dutiful if indifferent letter writer, he at times vented his frustrati
on at her. When she urged him to avoid personal risks, he answered, “You turn your lamb chops on the stove, and I’ll run the Army.” On January 11, after she told him that she had been too busy to accept a luncheon invitation from Eleanor Roosevelt, he replied, “I am distressed…I think you should take time to do those things.”

  As he soldiered on, so did she. Traveling for months on end, sometimes with Glenn Miller and other celebrities, Renie was credited with selling $25 million in war bonds. She also lectured widely about the virtues of both the American cause and her husband, whom she described as “working coolly [in] his tent virtually under enemy guns.” To twelve hundred ladies at a Scottish Rite luncheon in Indianapolis, she pronounced him “an awfully good man, a rather religious man.” Often she read from his letters, and even displayed the trousers, shrunk from immersion in Mediterranean brine, that Clark had temporarily lost during his celebrated secret mission to Algeria in October 1942. George Marshall had warned Clark about publicity mongering, which was so at odds with the selfless ethic embodied by the chief of staff. He also complained to Eisenhower that the army commander was “being victimized by his wife.”

  “It causes me some embarrassment,” Eisenhower subsequently wrote Clark in late November, but “you are being unwittingly hurt by a particular type of publicity in the States…. G.C.M. has specifically noted that certain items so repeated have occasioned some merriment, possibly even sarcasm.”