The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Clark was furious, rebuking Renie twice. If beguiled by public attention, he preferred to orchestrate it himself. “I do not want you to refer to me in any way in your talks,” he wrote after reading Eisenhower’s cable. “Positively no quotes from me, for some I have seen lately have been embarrassing…. Hate to write to you about this publicity business, for I feel your work is superior.” A month later, after a magazine article cited his letters, he fairly sputtered while writing to her. “I deeply regret that. I have said so much about it and gotten no place that I do not know what to do,” he complained. “For goodness sake let’s see that no more of that stuff gets out.”

  Clark’s virtues as a commander should have been evident enough without Renie’s advocacy. He was disciplined, fearless, and, as one admiring colonel put it, “broad-gauged.” He spent most waking hours among his troops, often in harm’s way, with one long leg draped over the jeep’s fender during what he called “ringside” visits. The enormous logistical and administrative complexities of running a big army fazed him not at all. He was attentive to requests from the front and to the perquisites due frontline troops returning to the rear for a rest. For esprit, he commissioned a Fifth Army song and distributed mimeographed lyrics so that puzzled theatergoers could belt out the anthem in the Caserta opera house. “I want my headquarters to be a happy one,” he declared.

  There was the rub. “The general was a difficult man to satisfy,” recalled a former aide, Vernon A. Walters, who later rose to three-star rank and served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I often lay in my sleeping bag at night reading by flashlight my letters of commendation and citations solely to reassure myself that I was not a complete damn fool.” Disinclined to seek advice or admit error, Clark conveyed a hauteur made more pronounced by his height: he literally looked down on nearly everyone. “A very impatient man,” a senior staff officer once said, and in Italy that was not necessarily a virtue. At times he berated his aides and castigated his staff, including the long-suffering Al Gruenther, whose pale skin, thin nose, and high forehead reminded one observer of “a rather Renaissance Florentine.” Early each morning Clark called his corps commanders and then rebuked his staff for knowing less than he about overnight developments; Gruenther responded by dispatching officers to the front late at night so they could phone in reports before Clark awoke.

  Already he had begun to think of Rome possessively. In late January, he told Field Marshal Wilson that Fifth Army had fought “a long and bloody battle up the Italian peninsula” and is “entitled to take Rome.” He encouraged the reporter C. L. Sulzberger to remain close so “you can tell the world just how Mark Clark took Rome.” Another correspondent, Eric Sevareid, concluded that for Clark the Italian campaign was foremost an opportunity for “personal publicity, without which warmaking is a dull job, devoid of glamour and recompense.”

  Surely that was too harsh. Like his thinning hair and drooping mouth, Clark’s growing fixation on Rome was in part a manifestation of stress. The city’s capture would not only fulfill a military and political objective but also affirm that this grievous campaign had been worthwhile. Since Salerno, battle casualties alone in Fifth Army exceeded 37,000. If one death was a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, what would the twenty thousand dead required to take Rome amount to? In a confessional moment, Clark told Vernon Walters:

  Sometimes if I appear to be unreasonable, you must remember the burdens I bear are heavy. The time comes when I have to give orders that will result in the death of a large number of fine young men—and this is a responsibility that I cannot share with anybody. I must bear it by myself.

  For two hours the torpedo boats bounded north at nearly forty knots, swinging wide of German shore batteries near Monte Circeo, where the enchantress Circe, daughter of the sun, had turned Odysseus’s men into swine. Morning haze draped the sea and the throbbing engines drowned conversation. Clark perched on his stool, lost in thought. Lookouts scanned the waves ahead. “Sometimes,” one Anzio veteran warned, “what looked like a piece of driftwood turns out to be a corpse.”

  At 8:40 A.M., twelve miles south of Anzio, the minesweeper U.S.S. Sway blinkered a challenge with its twelve-inch searchlight, asking the boats approaching out of the rising sun to identify themselves. Visibility was poor, air raids at the beachhead had just triggered an alert, and Sway several nights earlier had been attacked by German E-boats. Clark stood for a better view as PT-201 blinkered back at a range of two thousand yards, then fired the day’s recognition signal: green and yellow flares.

  One minute after the initial challenge, Sway opened fire. Three-inch shells screamed across the sea. PT-216 reversed course to port and sped away, but 201 stopped dead to acknowledge the shot across the bow. The next rounds splintered plywood and mahogany. A shell detonated against 201’s deckhouse, shattering Clark’s stool, and another blew through the tiny galley below. Fifty-caliber and 40mm rounds swarmed around the boat like hornets. “Machine gun bullets and heavier stuff tore the air overhead, making whistling sounds and swooshes,” reported Frank Gervasi, the Collier’s correspondent, who had come along for the ride. The initial salvo wounded five sailors, two of them mortally. Blood slicked the deck from an officer with a severed leg artery and a swab whose kneecap had been blown off. For a few moments, no one manned the helm, until an ensign took the wheel despite wounds to both legs. Clark seized the flare gun and fired more green and yellow flares, unaware that haze made the yellow pyrotechnics look red from Sway’s deck. The shooting continued.

  “What shall we do?” Clark asked a wounded lieutenant.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Let’s run for it.”

  Clark helped brace the helmsman as he opened the throttle and spun the wheel. The boat pirouetted and fled in a great flume of spray, chased by the minesweeper’s shells. Half an hour later, 201 rendezvoused peacefully with H.M.S. Acute, transferring her wounded to the British warship. The skipper of 216 boarded 201 and guided her into Anzio harbor at noon, although not before another German raid on the port delayed Clark further. Sway’s crew was unrepentant. “The goddam light was bad and we couldn’t read your goddam signals,” one sailor told Gervasi. While averring that the incident was “a weight on the conscience of every officer and man aboard,” Sway’s captain blamed the torpedo boats for their own misadventure. A Navy inquiry agreed, but Clark privately charged the minesweeper with “as flagrant an error of judgment…as I have ever seen.”

  If the morning had taken “a downward slant,” in Clark’s wry phrase, an afternoon in Lucas’s command post hardly redeemed the day. Staff officers of VI Corps worked in a former Italian military barracks near Nettuno’s Piazza del Mercato, but artillery fire and an unexploded bomb through the ceiling would soon drive the headquarters into the wine cellars under an osteria at Via Romana 9. For now, the sandbags around the barracks grew higher by the hour. Sailors steaming into Anzio harbor laid wagers on whether “this white apartment house or that pink villa would be standing on their return.”

  Wrapped in a belted Army trench coat and pulling on his corncob pipe, Lucas used a large map to show Clark his predicament. Heavy surf occasionally closed the landing beaches, and a sudden storm on Tuesday had marooned all Navy pontoons ashore before they could be hoisted from the water. Enemy raids often disrupted port operations and harassed the cargo fleet. Of greater concern was the imminent return to Britain of most LSTs; as few as a dozen would be left in the Medterranean after February 10, and at least seventy-two shiploads would be required in Anzio by mid-February. Daily matériel requirements had climbed from 1,500 tons a day to 2,300. Some LCIs sailing from Naples now carried a hundred tons of ammunition, triple the prudent load, and Navy brokers had begun identifying civilian schooners for use as cargo vessels.

  As for the enemy, every day Lucas’s G-2 identified more German units converging on the beachhead: the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division, then the Hermann Göring, then two armored divisions from southern France, then the 90th
Panzer Grenadier. The day before, it had been estimated that four thousand German infantry and armor troops occupied Albano, including two paratrooper battalions and several hundred horse-and motorcycle-mounted troops. If the Allies were not already outnumbered, it was only a matter of time: by Sunday, an estimated 72,000 Germans would face 61,000 Anglo-Americans. The enemy appeared intent on shoving the beachhead into the sea, although that was uncertain. “We deal not with the true,” as intelligence officers liked to say, “but with the likely.”

  Lucas sucked on his pipe stem. As he would soon write in a private note to Brigadier General Robert Frederick, whose 1st Special Service Force was heading to the beachhead, “Our enemies did not react exactly in the manner expected. Troops were rushed in.”

  None of this surprised Clark. Ultra intercepts had provided transparent detail of German movements under Operation RICHARD, including the shift of troops from fourteen divisions in France, Germany, northern Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Even the German venereal disease hospital in Rome had been combed out. In many cases, however, only fragments of those enemy units had reached the beachhead. Clark told Lucas that the cumulative opposition “does not exceed three full divisions,” with “indications that [Kesselring] is having difficulties reinforcing your front.” All the more reason, Clark added, to seize Cisterna and Campoleone quickly.

  Lucas agreed. In fact, Truscott today had drafted his order for an attack on Cisterna, to be led by infiltrating Rangers and two 3rd Division regiments, all bound for Highway 7. VI Corps Field Order No. 20 would coordinate a British lunge on the left with that American thrust on the right, both intended to “seize the high ground in the vicinity of Colli Laziali” and to “prepare to continue the advance on Rome.” The attack was to begin the next day, Saturday, January 29.

  Clark nodded. He hoped this would mollify Alexander, and whoever in London was lashing him on. With a few parting words of encouragment, he strode from the command post and climbed into a jeep for the short ride to the Villa Borghese; in a pine thicket behind the hundred-room seventeenth-century mansion, he planned to install another Fifth Army command post to keep a closer eye on the beachhead.

  That prospect pleased Lucas no more than Alexander’s hovering presence at Caserta pleased Clark. In his diary, the corps commander wrote:

  His gloomy attitude is certainly bad for me. He thinks I should have been aggressive on D-day and should have gotten tanks and things out to the front…. I have done what I was ordered to do, desperate though it was. I can win if I am let alone but don’t know whether or not I can stand the strain of having so many people looking over my shoulder.

  In a message to Clark on Saturday morning, Lucas affected a doughty determination. “Will go all out tomorrow,” he signaled, “or at once, if conditions warrant.” As Alexander had urged, risks must be taken.

  The brightest news awaiting Clark at Anzio was not on the beachhead but a mile above it. On January 27 and 28, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. Inspiriting as the action was for Lucas’s corps, the contribution of a couple dozen black pilots—known collectively as the Tuskegee airmen, after the Alabama field where they had learned to fly—would resonate beyond the beachhead, beyond Italy, and beyond the war.

  This moment had been a long time coming. Blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution; of more than 200,000 to serve in Union uniforms during the Civil War, 33,000 had been killed. After the war, Congress created four black Army regiments, including two cavalry units later known to High Plains Indians as “buffalo soldiers” because of the supposed resemblance of the troopers’ hair to a bison’s coat.

  More than one million blacks also served in uniform in World War I, but only fifty thousand saw combat. The white commander of one black unit denounced his troops as “hopelessly inferior, lazy, slothful…. If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes.” A lieutenant colonel quoted in a 1924 War Department study articulated the prevalent white bias: “The Negro race is thousands of years behind the Caucasian race in the higher psychic development.” Between the world wars, military camps in the American south increasingly adopted local Jim Crow laws and customs; a War Department directive in 1936 appended the designation “colored” to any unit composed of nonwhite troops.

  There were not many. When World War II began in September 1939, fewer than four thousand blacks served in the U.S. Army; more than two years later, the U.S. Navy had only six black sailors—excluding mess stewards—plus a couple of dozen others coming out of retirement. A seven-point White House policy issued in 1940 began with the premise that “Negro personnel in the Army will be proportionate to that in the general population (about 10 percent)” and ended with a bigot’s pledge: “Racial segregation will be maintained.” Few leadership opportunities existed. At the time of the Anzio landings, the U.S. Army had 633,000 officers, of whom only 4,500 were black. The U.S. Navy was worse, with 82,000 black enlisted sailors and no black officers; the Marine Corps, which had rejected all black enlistments until President Roosevelt intervened, would not commission its first black officer until several months after the war ended.

  Another War Department decree of 1940 asserted that segregation “has proven satisfactory over a long period of years.” A survey of white enlisted men in 1942 revealed “a strong prejudice against sharing recreation, theater, or post exchange facilities with Negroes”; of southern soldiers polled, only 4 percent favored equal PX privileges for their black comrades. White soldiers “have pronounced views with respect to the Negro,” the adjutant general concluded. “The Army is not a sociological laboratory.” Segregation created perverse redundancies—an Army memo in July 1943 noted that “the 93rd Division has three bands, and the 92nd Division has four bands”—but the status quo obtained. “Experiments within the Army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, and morale,” George Marshall warned.

  The 1940 Draft Act banned racial discrimination, but only 250 blacks sat on the nation’s 6,400 draft boards; most southern states forbade any African-American board members. White America’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of black volunteers and draftees ranged from unfortunate to despicable. The Mississippi congressional delegation asked the War Department to keep all black officers out of the state for the duration. Discrimination and segregation remained the rule in military barracks, churches, swimming pools, libraries, and service clubs. German and Italian prisoner trustees could use the post exchange at Fort Benning, Georgia; black U.S. Army soldiers could not. Time reported that “Negro troops being shipped through El Paso, Texas, were barred from the Harvey House restaurant at the depot and were given cold handouts. They could see German prisoners of war seated in the restaurant and fed hot food.” A War Department pamphlet, “Command of Negro Troops,” advised white officers in February 1944 that black soldiers preferred not to be called “boy, darky, nigger, aunty, mammy, nigress, and uncle.” Churning resentment led to bloody confrontations between white and black troops, not only in the Deep South but also in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, and England. When a whites-only café in South Carolina refused service to sixteen black officers, they shouted, “Heil, Hitler!” Many blacks endorsed the “Double V” campaign proposed by a Pittsburgh newspaper: a righteous struggle for victory over both enemies abroad and racism at home.

  Yet getting into the fight was itself a struggle. Among the prevalent stereotypes was a belief that blacks were too dumb, too lazy, or too apathetic to serve as combat troops. An Army study decried their “lack of education and mechanical skill,” as well as “a venereal rate eight to ten times that of white troops, a tendency to abuse equipment, lack of interest in the war, and particularly among northern troops a concern for racial ‘rights,’ which often culminated in rioting.” In the summer of 1943, only 17 perc
ent of black soldiers were high school graduates, compared with 41 percent of whites. In Army tests that measured educational achievement rather than native intelligence, more than four in five blacks scored in the lowest two categories compared to fewer than one in three whites. General McNair, the chief of Army Ground Forces, declared that “a colored division is too great a concentration of Negroes to be effective.”

  Consequently, blacks were shunted into quartermaster companies for duty as truck drivers, bakers, launderers, laborers, and the like. By January 1944, 755,000 blacks wore Army uniforms—they made up 8.5 percent of the force—but only two in ten served in combat units compared to four in ten whites. Under pressure from black civic leaders and a crying need for fighters, three black Army divisions had been created: the 2nd Cavalry, which arrived in North Africa only to be disbanded to provide service troops; the 93rd Infantry, shipped to the Pacific; and the 92nd Infantry, which would arrive in Italy in late summer 1944 as the only African-American division to see combat in Europe.

  Officered above the platoon level almost exclusively by whites, the 92nd would endure trials by fire that only partly involved the Germans. Training was halted for two months to teach the men to read, since illiteracy in the division exceeded 60 percent. A black veteran later described “an intangible, elusive undercurrent of resentment, bitterness, even despair and hopelessness among black officers and enlisted men in the division.” That sentiment in some measure could be laid at the feet of the 92nd commander, Major General Edward M. Almond, an overbearing Virginian who would oppose integration of the armed forces until his dying day in 1975. “The white man…is willing to die for patriotic reasons. The Negro is not,” Almond declared. “No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn’t care…. People think that being from the south we don’t like Negroes. Not at all. But we understand his capabilities. And we don’t want to sit at the table with them.” In a top secret report after the war, Almond asserted that black officers lacked “pride, aggressiveness, [and] a sense of responsibility.” His chief of staff added, “Negro soldiers learn slowly and forget quickly.”