The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Among the Company E old-timers was Sergeant Frank “Buck” Eversole, a twenty-eight-year-old former Iowa cowboy who had earned two Silver Stars and a Purple Heart, and who, like Hanssen, had risen to platoon sergeant. “I’m mighty sick of it all, but there ain’t no use to complain,” he told Pyle. Still, the losses frayed him. “I’ve got so I feel like it’s me killin’ ’em instead of a German. I’ve got so I feel like a murderer,” Eversole said. “I hate to look at them when the new ones come in.”

  I want to walk in the California sunshine and wear white shoes and white trousers.

  “They live and die so miserably and they do it with such determined acceptance that your admiration for them blinds you to the rest of the war,” Pyle wrote in January. Few reporters were shrewder than Ernie Pyle, but his admiration may also have blinded him to frontline disaffection. After inspecting the Cassino front in early February at Alexander’s request, Brigadier General Lyman L. Lemnitzer reported that morale was “becoming progressively worse,” with troops “so disheartened as to be almost mutinous.”

  Certainly both life and death were miserable at Cassino, beginning at Shit Corner, where Highway 6 emerged from the shadow of Monte Trocchio. Every movement from that point north came under German observation; so many visiting officers from Naples and Caserta had blundered into the Cassino kill sack that British MPs posted a huge sign: “HALT! THIS IS THE FRONT LINE.” Fifth Army replacements bound for that line later received an orientation booklet, which urged, “Don’t be scared…. Remember that a lot of noise you hear is ours, and not dangerous.” That soothing warrant was undercut by chapters titled “If You Get Hit” and “If a Buddy Gets Hit.”

  The lucky ones found shelter, perhaps a roofless ruin with a tarpaulin stretched overhead where they could cook supper over splintered sticks of furniture, nipping on the Canadian moonshine known as steam or cheap Italian cognac redolent of “perfume and gasoline.” “We sit around quibbling and arguing like a bunch of old women about…whose turn it is to get water, who cooked up the last mess of eggs without cleaning the skillet, and who stood mail call last night,” a sergeant from Indiana later wrote home. At night they might listen by wireless to Axis Sally, also known as the Berlin Bitch. “Who’s sleeping with your wife tonight while you are over here fighting?” she purred before reciting, accurately, Fifth Army’s daily passwords.

  The unlucky crouched in damp sangars ringed with stone parapets or snow screens, so tormented by snipers that many hesitated to expose themselves even when authorized to strike for the rear. Royal Engineers in greatcoats and wool balaclavas kept the high passes open with wooden plows and rock salt, while skiers supplied the remoter outposts and evacuated the frostbitten. Infantrymen thawed their machine guns with matches and were advised to urinate, if necessary, on frozen rifles. An American tank officer, Lieutenant Colonel Henry E. Gardiner, catalogued his wardrobe in a February 7 diary entry: heavy underwear, “windproof slipover,” wool shirt and trousers, sleeveless sweater, turtleneck gaiter, cotton socks, wool socks, one-piece coverall, combat jacket, tank boots, overshoes, wool cap, helmet, trench coat, and goggles. Winter clothing issued to frontline troops in January included kersey-lined trousers and 99,000 sets of what the quartermaster called “mittens, insert, trigger finger”; but “socks, arctic, wool” proved too thick for most GI boots, and parkas designed for Alaska were too bulky for riflemen scaling Italian mountains. An infantryman’s lot, as one veteran observed, “is a life of extremes, either not enough or too much.”

  Rarely was the food excessive, in quantity or quality, although a pork-chop dinner in mid-February provoked Colonel Gardiner to speculate that “the quartermaster must be running for reelection.” More typical was a nurse’s quip to her parents, “Our meat is dead but not edible.” Some troops logged their deprivations. “I’ve had no fresh milk for nine months, no ice cream for ten months, no Coca-Cola for twelve months, no apple pie à la mode or lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches or chocolate malteds for over a year,” one major complained. Lousy food contributed to the mutinous mood Lemnitzer observed. An engineer who referred to himself in the third person told his diary, “Sometimes it felt like he was fighting the whole fucking war by himself. Picks up his rifle, heads toward the line, swearing and burping peanut butter and jelly.” Disaffected Tommies had their own cry from the heart: “What’s the use of the food coming up if the tea’s as cold as a corpse?”

  As usual, frontline British troops paid more heed to personal hygiene than their Yankee cousins, who tended to be “disheveled, unshaven, unkempt,” as a Royal Engineer officer noted. During lulls each Tommy was expected to whip out his razor, comb, and toothbrush so that “the outer man would be refurbished to the ultimate advantage and benefit of the inner.” British tolerance for unorthodox battle dress also found free rein along the Gustav Line, where the finery included leather jerkins with extra sleeves cut from U.S. Army blankets, puttees made of empty sandbags and slathered with mud for insulation, soft-soled desert boots known as brothel creepers, and a sergeant major’s hand muff sewn from a panther skin.

  Artillery tormented everyone, aggravating the sense of isolation and life’s caprice. Day and night the guns boomed, “regular as a scythe-stroke.” One GI wrote, “There is something about heavy artillery that is inhuman and terribly frightening. You never know whether you are running away from it or into it. It is like the finger of God.” Allied gunners fired 200,000 shells at Cassino in the first two weeks of February; the cannonade included new U.S. 240mm howitzers with a range of fourteen miles and a projectile weighing 360 pounds. A mortarman whose battalion had fired four thousand shells wrote his family, “That’s sure a lot of war bonds.” Cairo was said to be “the most heavily shelled pinpoint in Italy,” but Cassino town, Shit Corner, Point 593, and other battered landmarks near the abbey vied for the title. An ambulance driver trying to sleep near an artillery battery told his diary in mid-February, “As the guns fire I feel as if someone is pounding the soles of my feet with a heavy board.” Massed fires of sixty or more guns on a single target were known as serenades, bingos, stinkos, and stonks; open terrain exposed to complete artillery coverage was known as the murder space. White phosphorus particularly vexed the enemy: a captured German paratrooper document dated January 29 advised, “Extinguish burning clothing with wet blankets…. Scrape phosphorus particles from the body. Stretcher bearers must be issued olive oil. Wet earth gives some relief.”

  If less profligate, German artillery was just as vicious. GIs consigned to cramped immobility in their holes learned to relieve the overpressure from pounding shells by breathing hard with their mouths agape. A British gunner’s diary for three consecutive days in January noted: “Digging and swearing”; then, “Digging and swearing”; then, “Digging finished. Swearing stops.” Between barrages the carrion crows strutted and pecked, stiff-legged, unsentimental; when the rounds began to fall again, they rose in a flapping black gyre. “Keep your nut down,” a veteran advised newly arriving troops. “Death-or-glory boys don’t last.”

  Those who did last became hard and wise in the ways of war, as Pyle had seen. Cynicism sometimes helped. “Enlisted men expect everything to be fucked up,” an American corporal explained. “It is a conceit founded on their experience from the day they are inducted.” A British colonel concluded that most platoons under fire had a small number of “gutful men who go anywhere and do anything,” plus a few who shirk and a majority “who will follow a short distance behind if they are well led.” The “gutful men” who survived at Cassino needed cunning and luck as well as courage. “Use good judgment but use it fast,” an Allied tactical study warned.

  On few battlefields would soldiers endure harsher conditions or witness worse carnage. “Came across three dead GIs,” a twenty-two-year-old American engineer told his diary. “They were killed by a shell concussion, skin on their face was burnt and rolled back, no eyelids or hair.” Nearby, a German coal-scuttle helmet had “half a head still in it.”

  Th
ey found grace notes where they could: in the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” picked up on the BBC; in a long letter from home, the pages radiant with what one officer called “bright beads of memory and of promise”; or in the apricot glow of another dawn, another dawn that they had lived to see, when the shelling had momentarily ceased and the world seemed new-made and uncorrupted.

  A single rifle shot could break the spell. A 4th Indian Division signaler later wrote:

  The initial crack would be answered by a couple of shots which promoted a burst of Bren gunfire which bred a rapid stutter from the German light machine guns which started the mortars off, then the 25s and 88s and finally the mediums and heavies and the whole area would be dancing, booming and crashing.

  And so the day began, much like the day before. In a letter to his family, Henry Gardiner summarized the Italian campaign in ten words: “He marched up the hill and he marched down again.” But wherever they marched, or dug, or died, the abbey atop Monte Cassino seemed to loom over them. “You could never lose it,” a British soldier reported; “it was always there looking at you.” Another young British officer, Fred Majdalany, spoke for many: “That brooding monastery ate into our souls.”

  A new warlord arrived at Cassino in February, determined to burn and blast the enemy from the Gustav Line by whatever means necessary. As the Americans pulled back to regroup, the Kiwis, Indians, and Tommies moved in under the command of Lieutenant General Bernard C. Freyberg, a former dentist who had become one of the British empire’s most celebrated soldier-generals. “The torch is now thrown to you,” Al Gruenther told him in a telephone call from Caserta on February 11. Freyberg grunted. “We have had many torches thrown to us,” he replied.

  He was a great slab of a man, long known as Tiny. “I’m Freyberg the New Zealander,” he would introduce himself, in a voice raspy as a gate hinge. “He seemed to be large all over, both broad and deep-chested at the same time,” an admirer wrote. Freyberg’s enormous head featured a prominent chin, a delicate nose, gray eyes, and, above the inverted parabola of his mouth, a tidy mustache for ornamentation. At age seventeen he had won the New Zealand long-distance swimming championship, and it was said that he could be mistaken for a porpoise in Wellington harbor. Decorations upholstered his massive chest, including a Victoria Cross from the Somme and four awards of the Distinguished Service Order, reflective of a reputation earned at the cannon’s mouth in two wars. He believed that “a little shelling did everyone good”; one acquaintance thought “his great fearlessness owed something to a lack of imagination.” From the Great War he had emerged with twenty-seven battle scars and gashes—“riddled like St. Sebastian,” a friend said—and he would accumulate several more before this conflict ended. “You nearly always get two wounds for every bullet or splinter,” he said with a shrug, “because mostly they go out as well as go in.” One nurse insisted that he was made not of flesh but of india rubber. Between the wars physicians detected a “diastolic murmur,” a diagnosis Freyberg challenged by demanding they climb Mount Snowdon together and reexamine him on the summit. “I love his lack of humour, his frank passion for fighting,” a friend wrote of Freyberg in her diary. “There is a distinct grimness about him at all times.”

  Churchill in North Africa had anointed him “the salamander of the British empire” for his ability to thrive in fire, but Freyberg more resembled the hippogriff, that hybrid of eagle, lion, and horse. He was both sentimental—after digging the grave of his friend Rupert Brooke, he had lined it with flowering sage—and fond of aphorisms, including a line from another friend, J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: “God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December.” Upon arriving in Naples he asked, “One used to be able to buy very fine gloves in Italy. Can you still get them?” His impulsiveness led one exasperated subordinate to tell another, “It will be your turn tomorrow to disobey orders.”

  Even his admirers acknowledged that Freyberg was at his most formidable when leading a division; temporary command of a corps in Africa seemed to overtax his powers, and he had reverted to command of the 2nd New Zealand Division after outflanking the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the general would think straight?” said his most talented Kiwi brigadier, Howard Kippenberger. “Or better still, if he wouldn’t try to think at all?” Yet it was again as a corps commander that Freyberg arrived at Cassino, for Alexander in early February melded the 2nd New Zealand, the 4th Indian, and the British 78th Divisions into a new creation, the New Zealand Corps.

  Described by one British observer as “clean and sprightly, rested and strong,” the corps initially was called Spadger Force to confuse German intelligence; Freyberg remained “Spadger” in Allied councils long after the ruse ended. His Kiwis and Tommies were colorful enough, but few units could match the Indians for flamboyance. The Sikhs, Punjabis, Rajputs, Mahrattas, and Gurkhas, from Nepal, arriving in truck convoys resembled a traveling circus of cutthroats, laden, as one 4th Indian signaler wrote, with “all kind of excrescences such as crates of live chickens, fire buckets, water bags, bits of furniture and clothes drying in the wind.”

  At first Freyberg considered a wide flanking movement to breach the Gustav Line. But with a shortage of mules and limited experience in mountain warfare, he instead chose a more prosaic plan that followed in trace the failed American attack, targeting “the strongest point in a defensive line of remarkable strength,” as the New Zealand official history later noted. To some subordinates, this scheme confirmed that Freyberg had “no brains and no imagination,” in the phrase of the 4th Indian Division commander, Major General Francis Tuker. When two of his senior lieutenants proposed a conference on the tactical difficulties at Cassino, Freyberg refused to countenance “any soviet of division commanders.”

  Yet the longer Spadger studied the bleak silhouette of the ridgeline to the northwest, the more his eye was drawn to the white abbey. Was it possible to take the massif without seizing the building? Would German troops fail to occupy such an inviting observation post? How could Allied soldiers be asked to attack the hill without first eliminating that overbearing presence?

  The 4th Indian Division had initially proposed bombing the abbey on February 4, as part of a scheme to reduce any German garrison “to helpless lunacy by sheer unending pounding for days and nights by air and artillery.” Increasingly, Freyberg found that approach both prudent and inevitable. After a grim discussion about the challenge of storming the abbey’s massive gate, he dispatched a subaltern to comb through Neapolitan bookstalls, where the young man found several studies on the history and structure of Monte Cassino. An 1879 volume contained architectural detail about how the abbey had been rebuilt as a citadel after the French despoliation in 1799, with loopholed, unscalable outer walls ten feet thick and nowhere less than fifteen feet high. A prewar Italian army staff college analysis deemed Monte Cassino impregnable.

  Freyberg was convinced. In a memo to Clark and Alexander he wrote:

  No practicable means available within the capacity of field engineers can possibly cope with this place. It can be directly dealt with by applying blockbuster bombs from the air…. The fortress has been a thorn in our sides for many weeks.

  Others disagreed. “Spadger still wants to flatten the monastery,” Keyes told his diary. “I insist there is no evidence that it is holding up our attack and refuse to accede.” Clark too demurred, although he sensed that Freyberg had General Alex’s ear. Clark privately considered “Freyburg”—he consistently misspelled the New Zealander’s name in his diary—“sort of a bull in a china closet.”

  Yet Clark was unsure how long he could resist pressure from above and below. Not least in his calculations was a growing bloodlust in Allied trenches. An antiaircraft gunner’s letter home in mid-February perfectly expressed the prevailing sentiment. “I would level the Vatican itself with pleasure,” the gunner wrote, “if there were Germans to be killed inside it.”

  The Bitchhead

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p; SIXTY miles away, the 92,000 Allied troops penned up at Anzio had been ordered to dig in, and dig in they did. The clank of picks and shovels sounded across the beachhead, and with each passing hour life became more subterranean. Soldiers near the Pontine Marshes found water weeping into their holes at eighteen inches, but those burrowing into the sandstone substrata around Nettuno excavated elaborate lairs lined with cardboard from ration cartons and furnished with plundered mirrors, commodes, and even candelabra. Some sheltered in huge empty wine barrels found in farmhouse vaults, the stink of stale vino rosso clinging to their uniforms. Catacombs and cellars also housed VI Corps offices—the sandstone seemed to telegraph every surface vibration and concussion—but engineers failed to find a tunnel rumored to have been built by Nero between Anzio and Rome. It all seemed vaguely familiar, as a 6th Gordons soldier noted in his diary:

  So back we go to World War I. Oozing thick mud. Tank hulks. The cold, God, the cold. Graves marked by a helmet, gashed with shrapnel. Shreds of barbed wire. Trees like broken fishbones.

  An American medic in the 179th Infantry preferred to stress the positive. In a letter home he wrote, “My cost of living is very low.”

  Luftwaffe attacks made every man happy to have his hole. “We have found our religion,” a soldier told his diary. “Jittery as can be. Five air raids tonight.” Bombs punctured all fifteen ovens and damaged the dough mixer in the Army’s beachhead bakery; eighty bakers in helmets sifted shrapnel from the flour, patched the holes, and soon turned out fourteen tons of bread a day. As on an island, everything at the beachhead arrived by sea. “Day and night, a thin black line of tiny boats moved constantly back and forth between shore and ships at anchor,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who arrived for a visit in February. After German reconnaissance flights left each afternoon, skippers weighed anchor at last light to scramble the anchorage, steaming slowly to avoid raising telltale phosphorescent bow waves. Flares, tracers, and exploding shells illuminated Anzio harbor so garishly that one sailor claimed it was “brighter than Yankee Stadium.” As they sailed back to Naples after another harrowing trip to the beachhead, LST crewmen sang, “Anzio, my Anzio, please don’t take me back to Anzio.”