Among the most exposed troops were those consigned to Hell’s Half-Acre, the medical compound outside Nettuno and only six miles from frontline outposts. At 3:30 P.M. on February 7, a Luftwaffe bomber chased by a Spitfire jettisoned five antipersonnel bombs over the 95th Evacuation Hospital, where four hundred patients lay in ward tents. Newly wounded soldiers had just arrived by ambulance, and operating rooms were jammed when flame and steel swept the compound. “I went outside and saw several dead bodies in the parking area in front of the receiving tent,” the hospital commander, Colonel Paul Sauer, reported. “One of the nurses in the first surgical tent was crying, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I went in to look at her and she was pulseless and white.” Twenty-eight died, including three nurses, two doctors, and six patients; another sixty-four were wounded, and the blasts shredded twenty-nine ward tents. The German pilot was shot down and treated in the same hospital. Two days later, a shell fragment killed a VI Corps surgeon as he emerged from Lucas’s command post in Nettuno.
“God, help us,” a 1st Armored Division mess sergeant prayed after the hospital bombing. “You come yourself. Don’t send Jesus. This is no place for children.” By early February, General von Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army had ringed the beachhead with 370 artillery tubes, putting every Allied soldier at risk—“like a dog on an iceberg,” as a Fifth Army supply officer put it. Each German gun caliber sang a different tune, from the crying-cat noise of an 88mm to the railroad gun shells that were likened to “an outhouse going end-over-end with the door open and paper flapping.” Shells killed bakers baking, cooks cooking, and clerks clerking. “Sometimes we heard them coming, and sometimes we didn’t,” Pyle wrote. “Sometimes we heard the shell whine after we heard it explode.” One British officer described a near miss “as though someone had hurled a dining room table against my heart.” All too often the fall of shot was followed with a cry, “Morphine, for God’s sake, morphine.” A company clerk confessed to a growing dislike for Italy: “Too much iron in the atmosphere here.”
They did what they could. Deep holes grew deeper, including subterranean garages intended to reduce punctured tires and radiators. Every soldier learned the Anzio shuffle—also known as the Anzio amble or Anzio slouch—which required walking in a crouch, head hunched between the shoulders and helmet pulled low. Engineers clear-cut windbreaks along the Mussolini Canal to eliminate tree bursts, leaving the landscape as flat and shot-torn as Flanders. During one ferocious Nebelwerfer attack, a Scots Guardsman sang out, “The sons of the prophet were hardy and bold / And quite unaccustomed to fear,” but an American tanker, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of another with trembling hands, philosophized, “You can’t get used to bein’ scared.” Much discussion was devoted to the fabled “million-dollar wound,” which would excuse a soldier from further combat. All agreed that it ought not be disfiguring and must not impair sexual function. “One ear could go, but not two,” wrote Paul W. Brown, an enlisted medic who would become a professor of orthopedic surgery at Yale University Medical School. “Fingers and toes were deemed expendable, but no consensus was reached on how many.” To channel anger and anxiety, riflemen zeroed their weapons by firing at the helmets of dead Teds—tedeschi—on a distant slope. A British company also organized a frontline shooting gallery for snipers, with targets sorted into “Large Teds,” “Small Teds,” “Crawling Teds,” and “Bobbing Teds.”
Each day new arrivals stepped onto the harbor jetty, where MPs barked, “Get moving, get moving!” They scurried past waterfront villas gnawed by shell fire—the masonry peeling “like sunburned skin,” as the writer John Lardner put it—out to the “small, wet world” now known to its denizens as the Bitchhead. “You could see a squirt of white tracer and it seemed to float toward our lines. That was Jerry. Ours answered with bursts that had red tracer in them,” a 3rd Division soldier recalled. Tommies veered to the left toward a sector called the Hatbox of Hell, where local landmarks were named for their shapes on a map or their ambiance: the Lobster Claw, Sheep Pen Farm, Piccadilly, Oh God Wadi. “I was alone in my lonely world,” one British sergeant wrote. A British officer excessively steeped in the classics recalled his Virgil with each journey forward: Facilis est descensus Averni. Easy is the descent to Hell.
Yanks veered to the right, to a warren of trenches and hovels where young men wheezed like rheumy old men, scraping the muck from their uniforms with trench knives. Strange cries carried across no-man’s-land, including a heartbreaking German voice: “Otto, Otto! Ich sterbe, Otto!” I’m dying, Otto. “Nerves became frayed,” a lieutenant wrote. “The few abrasive personalities in the platoon seemed to become more abrasive.” At a salvage dump outside Nettuno, quartermasters each day picked through truckloads of clothing and kit from soldiers killed or wounded—sorting heaps of shoes, goggles, forks, canteens, bloody leggings. “It was best not to look too closely at the great pile,” advised Ernie Pyle. “Inanimate things can sometimes speak so forcefully.”
Nearby, more trucks hauled the day’s dead to a field sprouting white crosses and six-pointed stars. Grave diggers halted their poker game—the trestle-and-plywood table, in a bunker built from rail ties, could seat seven players—and hurried through their offices. Like the rest of the Bitchhead, the cemetery frequently came under fire, so burial services were short and often nocturnal. Grief was brief. The diggers tried to stay fifty holes ahead of demand, but keeping pace could be difficult when shells disinterred the dead, who required reburying.
Life went on, miserable and infinitely precious. “Remember,” a gunner wrote in a note to himself, “it can never be as bad as it was at Anzio.”
It got worse. Allied air attacks and the star-crossed American attack at Cisterna had disrupted Mackensen’s timetable for reducing the beachhead, even as he massed 96,000 troops, nearly 100 tanks, and more than 200 heavy antitank and assault guns, plus all those artillery tubes. “Our grand strategy demands that the beachhead be wiped out promptly,” Mackensen told his lieutenants, and they would begin by obliterating the exposed salient—four miles deep and two miles wide—held by the British 1st Division near Campoleone, on the VI Corps left.
The attack fell heaviest on the Irish Guards and 6th Gordons, positioned, respectively, on the left and right flanks of the salient. A thousand sheep, dragooned as minesweepers, led the German attack against the Irish Guards early on Friday morning, February 4. “Like a dirty, ragged wave, a huge flock surged over the crest of the Vallelata ridges and scampered crazily through No. 3 company,” the battalion reported. Tanks and grenadiers followed the bleating vanguard through hard rain, threatening to trap the entire British 3rd Brigade by cinching the salient at its base. “The Germans are at the door,” a British company commander radioed. Panzers demolished the rear walls of farmhouses, then drove inside to shoot through the front windows. Fire raked the Via Anziate. “I never saw so many people killed round me before in all my life,” an Irish Guards corporal said later. Only valor and Allied artillery—VI Corps now massed 438 tubes, including 84 big guns on destroyers and cruisers—staved off annihilation. “You’d better get your boys out of it,” Lucas advised Major General Penney, the 1st Division commander.
They retreated by the glare of burning hayricks. “All the shells in hell came down on us,” a young soldier told the BBC. “Nothing but black smoke and what smelt like the stink of frying bodies.” By Saturday morning nearly three miles was forfeit at a cost of fifteen hundred British casualties, including nine hundred captured; Mackensen’s losses were also severe, with almost five hundred dead.
The attack resumed on Monday evening, February 7, and by midnight had spread through the badland gullies along the 24th Guards Brigade front. “Nothing heard of Number 1 company for forty-five minutes,” a Grenadier Guards captain radioed. “Numbers 3 and 4 believed overrun. Ourselves surrounded, and there is a German on the ridge above me throwing grenades.” By Tuesday enemy troops west of the Via Anziate held a key slope misnamed Buonriposo—place of good rest—and we
re hunting Tommies by looking for breath plumes in the frosty air. “It’s very awkward,” a Grenadier officer complained. “If we lie on our stomachs we are hit in the arse. If we lie on our backs we are hit in the balls.” German infiltrators crept so close that British mortars fired almost vertically at targets only a hundred yards away. The sight of feral swine feeding on a dead comrade provoked an anguished sergeant to ask, “Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?”
Aided by a captured map that revealed British minefields, four German infantry regiments and Mk V Panther tanks swarmed toward the high ground at Carroceto, bagging another eight hundred prisoners on February 8. A Scots Guards battalion held the Carroceto rail depot, with an observation post tucked into the stationmaster’s apartment on the second floor; when two German platoons went to ground in a nearby ditch, the Scots propped a Vickers machine gun in the window, with bags of grain to steady the tripod, and slaughtered them. The enemy answered with a tank, which halted forty yards from the station and stitched each window and door with machine-gun fire at such close range that bullets chewed through brick; then the main gun opened, gouging great holes in the station walls until the staircase inside collapsed. “This was even more unpleasant,” reported the Scots, who scrambled back three hundred yards to shelter behind a rail embankment.
More unpleasant yet was the loss by infiltration and frontal assault of Aprilia, the model Fascist town known as the Factory because a severe tower atop city hall gave the settlement an industrial aspect. By Wednesday evening, February 9, Wehrmacht troops held twenty buildings, including a police barracks, wine store, and theater; panzers refueled in the Piazza Roma, where a bronze St. Michael clutched a sword in one hand and a dragon’s head in the other.
The salient was gone, the beachhead imperiled. Ominous noises drifted from the wadis and woodlands, the sounds of an enemy massing. “Where is the sea?” a captured German officer asked. “I just wanted to know, since you will all soon be in it.”
On sleepless nights—and there were many now—John Lucas puffed his corncob and chatted with his watch officers about West Point, or Sherlock Holmes, or home sweet home. Rarely did he emerge from the VI Corps command post, now twenty feet beneath the Osteria dell’ Artigliere, where engineers had punched through a wall to link two sets of cellars. Naked bulbs dangled above huge oak casks banded with iron hoops, and ramps for rolling barrels up to the Vicolo del Montano bracketed the steep steps to the sandbagged entrance. Staff officers hunched over plywood desks beneath the great stone arches, their brows furrowed as they pondered dispatches from the front. Jangling telephones echoed in the alcoves; even whispers carried to the dark corners of the crypt. A large wall map with grease pencil markings showed VI Corps positions in blue and the enemy in encroaching red. Clockwise around the semicircular perimeter the Allies stretched from U.S. 45th Division troops along the Moletta River, on the left; through British and U.S. 1st Armored Division regiments in the center; to American paratroopers, 3rd Division GIs, and 1st Special Service Forcemen on the right.
“The old Hun is getting ready to have a go at me,” Lucas had advised his diary as the attack on the salient began. “He thinks he can drive me back into the ocean. Maybe so, but it will cost him money.” The bravado dissolved as the salient melted away. “The situation changed so rapidly from offensive to defensive that I can’t get my feet under me,” he wrote. Although Allied air forces in the Mediterranean now exceeded twelve thousand planes—the largest air command in the world—clearly the effort to interdict German reinforcements had faltered: twenty-seven enemy battalions had already reached the beachhead from northern Italy, and an entire Wehrmacht division had traveled from southern France in just ten days. Lucas’s own reinforcements failed to keep pace with his losses: of an average eight hundred Allied casualties each day—tantamount to a battalion—barely half were replaced. Lucas calculated that VI Corps was shrinking by nine thousand soldiers per month.
He blamed the cousins. “A terrible struggle all day trying to get the British to move,” he told his diary on February 8. “I wish I had an American division in there.” Blending the two nationalities produced a corps of “hermaphrodites.” To Clark, a day later, he wrote, “My only present concern is the inability of one of my divisions to maintain its vigorous resistance.” Clark had no doubt about which division; he derided General Penney—a meticulous, pious, high-strung engineer, who had been Alexander’s chief signals officer in North Africa—as “a good telephone operator.” When Clark confided that Lucas did not hold Penney in esteem, Alexander snapped, “Well, I do.”
Lucas’s disdain was fully reciprocated. “Complete gaff, no decision,” Penney had told his diary after one rambling conference with Lucas. Later Penney added, “Quite infuriating delay and weakness…[Lucas] very vague and no corps order.” Doubts about “Corncob Charlie,” as the British now called him, had spread up the chain of command. “We’ll lose the beachhead unless Lucas goes,” Major General G.W.R. Templer, whose 56th Division was just arriving, warned Alexander. Even Whitehall was uneasy. “I trust you are satisfied with leaving Lucas in command at the bridgehead,” Churchill cabled Alexander on February 10. “If not you should put someone there whom you trust.” As each day ended without the ballyhooed sally into Rome, the prime minister grew ever more dour. The Allies now had eighteen thousand vehicles at the beachhead, he noted in a cable to Field Marshal Wilson in Algiers, adding, “We must have a great superiority in chauffeurs.” No one bore greater responsibility for Anzio than Churchill, and he kept a pale eye peeled for possible scapegoats; a report from Washington that Marshall believed “Clark might be the man to go” intrigued him, but Lucas seemed the more likely candidate. “All this,” the prime minister sighed, “has been a great disappointment to me.”
As Mackensen tightened his grip on Aprilia and Carroceto, awaiting Hitler’s personal authorization for his next move, the Allies struggled to regroup. At 5:30 A.M. on Thursday, February 10, Penney warned Lucas that the “situation cannot go on.” His division had been halved. Some regiments were all but obliterated: more than three hundred North Staffords had been killed, wounded, or captured in eight hours, while the 5th Grenadier Guards had lost almost three-quarters of their eight hundred enlisted ranks, plus twenty-nine of thirty-five officers. In a tart note that afternoon, Penney asked Lucas for “the immediate corps plan, the corps plan for the future and the general programme, including the intentions of the higher command.” In his diary, Lucas wrote, “Things get worse and worse.”
He popped out of the command post long enough to brace the line with two reserve American infantry regiments from the 45th Division, the 179th and 180th. As usual, his plan lacked precision and nuance, having been drawn from a map rather than from careful reconnaissance. “Okay, Bill,” he told the division commander, Major General William W. Eagles, “you give ’em the works. Go places.” To Penney he wrote, “Reinforcements are on the way.”
Too few, too late. A counterattack at dawn on Friday won a foothold in Aprilia’s southeast corner, but poor coordination between U.S. rifle and tank companies hamstrung the assault. Grenadiers boiled from the Factory cellars, and panzers—followed by “deep ranks of gray-coated infantry”—drove the Yanks out on Saturday morning, February 12. A soldier in the 179th Infantry conceded, “The Germans just beat the holy hell out of us.”
General Alex had long been celebrated for beachhead verve. His panache at Dunkirk was legendary, and his visitation during a dark hour at Salerno braced Yanks and Brits alike. Now he arrived, a deus ex machina, aboard a Royal Navy destroyer on Monday morning, February 14, wrapped in his fur-lined jacket and reading Schiller in German to hone his language skills. On this Valentine’s Day, however, the old magic seemed elusive. After briefly touring the front, where American soldiers complained that his red hat drew fire, he repaired to a barren cell in the VI Corps headquarters just as air raid sirens began to wail across Nettuno. A covey of reporters, summoned to hear his assessment, filed in pas
t wall posters that depicted wholesome American girls urging their soldier boys to “come home clean.”
The campaign had not unfolded precisely as planned, Alexander acknowledged. “We wanted a breakthrough and a complete answer inside a week,” he said. “But once you [have] stopped, it becomes a question of building up and slogging.” No one should assume that the drive to Rome had stalled; any whiff of defeatism only helped the enemy. “I assure you the Germans opposite us are a very unhappy party,” he said. “Don’t compare this situation to Dunkirk or Salerno.” Dispatches from the beachhead had been filled with “pessimistic rubbish.” Ignoring the fact that all stories were censored at the beachhead and again in Naples, he worked himself into a fine pique. “Were any of you at Dunkirk? I was, and I know that there is never likely to be a Dunkirk here.” Alexander was “very disappointed that you should put out such rot.” Henceforth, access to the radios used to transmit news dispatches from the beachhead would be severely restricted—Churchill had urged just such a suppressive action—and reporters could expect even more vigorous censorship.
Lucas tried to intervene, noting that any defeatists had long since left. “I tried to stop the tirade and tell him he had the wrong people but he refused to listen,” the corps commander jotted in his diary. Alexander tromped from the command post and soon sailed off on his destroyer, uncommonly overwrought and in need of a shave. The reporters trudged through cold rain to the decrepit waterfront villa they shared, perplexed and incensed; one hack consoled himself by picking out a tune from La Traviata on a battered upright piano.
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