The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Lucas was left alone to ponder the blue and red runes covering his wall map. Alexander seemed convinced that the enemy had been repulsed, but the map suggested otherwise. He also appeared indifferent to VI Corps’ shortages of manpower and artillery ammunition. This time there had been no hail-fellow accolades from General Alex, no “splendid piece of work” encomium.

  “I am afraid the top side is not completely satisifed with my work,” Lucas wrote. “I can’t help it. They are naturally disappointed that I failed to chase the Hun out of Italy.”

  General Mackensen, the Hun himself, hardly needed his monocle to appreciate the magnificent panorama of the beachhead he now intended to destroy. From his forward command post on the western lip of the Colli Laziali, in a farmhouse two miles southwest of mystical Lake Nemi, “not a flash of a gun or explosion of a shell from either side escapes him,” a German visitor reported. With a telescope, between breaks in the Allied smoke screen that swaddled the waterfront, Mackensen could even make out the Liberty ships, LSTs, and zigzagging destroyers eighteen miles away.

  But it was closer terrain that held the Fourteenth Army commander’s interest as daylight faded on Tuesday, February 15. Three miles of open country stretched between Aprilia and the final Allied defensive line, like a moat around an inner keep. If German assault troops now massing around the Factory and Carroceto could cross that three-mile stretch to reach the scrub pines of the Padiglione Woods, they would almost surely be able to infiltrate the final four miles to the sea, splitting the beachhead in half much as Vietinghoff’s forces had almost done down the Sele River corridor at Salerno. Here the counterattack would fling six divisions into the Via Anziate corridor; two more divisions would remain in reserve to exploit the cracked Allied line, along with two hundred Tigers, Panthers, and other tanks. A hard freeze tonight would give the panzers good footing, although the attack could not begin until first light on Wednesday because regiments just arriving were too unfamiliar with the ground to attack in darkness.

  In truth, both Mackensen and Kesselring deplored this attack plan, which had been foisted on them by Hitler. The Führer, ever more entangled in tactical minutae half a continent away, had ordered a “concentrated, overwhelming, ruthless” assault on a narrow front, massing German armor and artillery. Excision of the beachhead “abscess,” Hitler concluded, would compel the Anglo-Americans to delay their invasion of northwest Europe, which he expected in the spring or summer; he had turned a deaf ear to protests from his field commanders, who warned that a massed attack across open terrain offered lucrative targets to Allied gunners.

  Still, great pains had been taken to ensure the success of FISCHFANG, Operation FISHING. So secret was the attack date that officers visiting from Berlin were forbidden to use the telephone. Luftwaffe strikes and artillery barrages would mask the clank of approaching panzers. Ammo shortages precluded a rolling barrage in front of the attack formations, but happily most streambeds ran perpendicular to the Allied line, providing sheltered approaches in the bottoms. Units imposed draconian measures to conserve fuel and vehicle wear: this week, the Hermann Görings had issued three bicycles to each platoon “to use for short errands.”

  Darkness cloaked the battlefield on this twenty-fifth night of the Anzio beachhead. Stars shone brilliantly without kindling the slightest hope of a better tomorrow in either camp. Shells arced back and forth as usual, then subsided after midnight for a few hours of uncommon tranquillity. To the BBC’s Vaughan-Thomas, “It was as if the house lights were being lowered in the theatre.”

  At 6:30 on a cold, foggy Wednesday morning the curtain rose to the percussive roar of German artillery. For seventy-five minutes, shells fell in sheets on either side of the Via Anziate, the detonations melding “like the rolling of a drum,” in one soldier’s phrase. Birds tumbled from the trees, killed by concussion. Then from the swirl of smoke and mist came whistles and shouts and the thrum of panzer engines that reminded a GI of “so many coffee grinders.” Gray-green waves of shouting, singing German infantrymen in ankle-length coats spilled down the road and across the fallow fields.

  They were not unexpected. Aerial surveillance and captured prisoners had alerted VI Corps commanders to “a noticeable increase in enemy activity,” and Ultra decrypts in the small hours Wednesday provided details on the “timing, direction and weight of assault.” Still, few forward units had sufficiently girded themselves with mines, wire, sandbags, and tank obstacles. Compressed into a six-mile front, the German spearhead smashed into the 45th Division and, on the American left, the British 56th Division. Rifle battalions in the U.S. 157th and 179th Infantry Regiments—entrenched, respectively, left and right of the road below the Factory—buckled; only stalwart reserves and thawing mud slowed the enemy advance. Cries of “Medic!” swept the field, swallowed by the din. Panzer crews, intent on obliterating the second-story machine-gun nests that covered German infiltration routes, fired as many as ten rounds to kill a single soldier. A gunner on a tank destroyer with the 157th lashed himself to his .50-caliber machine gun with a leather strap, shooting until German fire killed him. “I watched the dust spurt out the back of his jacket as the bullets hit him,” an officer reported. Company E in the same regiment was soon pared to fourteen riflemen. They, along with the rest of the encircled 2nd Battalion, would hold fast for a week in “a savage, brutish troglodyte existence” among the Caves, a sandstone badlands of vaulted tunnels east of the Via Anziate. Of nearly 1,000 men in the battalion, only 231 would survive their heroic stand in what one called “a bastard of a place.”

  Forward companies of Royal Fusiliers and the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry disintegrated. So many enemy bullets swarmed across the landscape that a paratrooper reported “a strange chirping sound, like a flock of canaries.” German artillery severed phone lines, punctured radios, and killed or wounded forward observers calling for counterfire, including a half dozen in the 179th Infantry alone. An urgent message to Nettuno reduced the plea to seven syllables: “Give us everything you’ve got.”

  Grim as the day had been, by dusk the German gains were limited to a mile or less here and there, at a cost of seventeen hundred casualties. “Enemy resistance was strong and determined,” the Fourteenth Army log noted. The Infantry Lehr Regiment, stocked with ardent Nazis and touted by Hitler as a killer elite, had been smacked about below the Factory before skedaddling without permission. Another of the Führer’s innovations—the Goliath, a small armored vehicle packed with 250 pounds of explosives and controlled remotely with a five-hundred-yard cable that unspooled from a drum—also failed abjectly. Of thirteen Goliaths sent into battle on Wednesday, Allied artillery disemboweled three, and Wehrmacht handlers reeled in the other ten after they were thwarted by mud, ditches, and gunfire; derisive GIs dubbed them Doodlebugs. Scanning dispatches in his headquarters near Rome, Kesselring voiced dismay at the dwindling of German artillery ammunition stocks, and he pressed Mackensen to commit his reserves in the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzer Grenadier Divisions. Mackensen phoned his reply just before 6:30 P.M.: “The time has not yet come.”

  That time was coming, though, and Wednesday night brought it closer. Thousands of infiltrating German soldiers crept down streambeds and goat paths, bobbing helmets silhouetted against the skyline. At eight A.M. Thursday, after a softening raid by Luftwaffe bombers, sixty panzers and infantrymen from three divisions pressed along the Via Anziate and angled east, ripping the seam between the 157th and 179th Regiments. By noon, more air strikes and fourteen howling German battalions had driven a wedge two miles wide and a mile deep into the midriff of the 45th Division. The 179th commander, Colonel Malcolm R. Kammerer, ordered two battalions to fall back a thousand yards; fully exposed despite a milky smoke screen, the men were sliced to ribbons. Survivors stumbled back an extra thousand yards to a narrow farm lane known as Dead End Road. “Men on the verge of panic,” one company commander reported.

  “179th lost 1,000 men, mostly by surrender,” Brigadier General Ray McLain
, the division artillery chief, told his diary. “Poor leadership.” Major General Eagles agreed and ordered Kammerer relieved. Staggering back alone after his squad had been destroyed, a sergeant squatted on his haunches and “for two hours tears rolled down his cheeks unchecked.” A platoon leader bringing reinforcements from the Padiglione Woods ambled past a pile of dismembered corpses. “I wish to God I hadn’t seen that,” he muttered. A young soldier next to him cocked an ear to the raging battle ahead and asked, “Lieutenant, should I load my rifle now?”

  Four hundred Allied gun tubes barked and barked throughout the day, spitting “murder concentrations” at German gun flashes. Smoking piles of spent brass littered the pits, and gunners stained black with powder shouted to uncomprehending mates long deaf from the relentless roar. Three dozen tanks joined the bombardment, along with four batteries of 90mm antiaircraft guns shouldered into the line to snipe at ground targets. Along the shingle, destroyers and two cruisers pressed “close enough for the Germans to count the rivets,” according to a U.S. Navy account; their shells traced crimson parabolas into the enemy rear. Eight hundred planes dumped a thousand tons of explosives along the front line, the heaviest payload in a single day of close air support in the war thus far. A third of that weight fell from heavy bombers flying tactical missions, as they had at Salerno. Bombs landed danger-close, some within four hundred yards of Allied lines. Nary a rifleman complained.

  Another day faded with the beachhead intact, if shrunk by several square miles. Bodies lay stacked so high in front of the 157th Infantry that marksmen had trouble peering over them for fresh targets. Jeeps careering to the rear often carried half a dozen corpses. In the Nettuno crypt, staff officers parsed the fragmentary reports. “Don’t leave the phone, son,” a colonel shouted to a besieged lieutenant. “Let me know what is going on.” No one really knew, of course; such was the way of desperate battles. Some things were best unknown: the Ox and Bucks battalion adjutant reported that when a machine gunner who had been killed by a sniper was found stiff with rigor mortis, still hunched in a sitting position, two men “were obliged to sit on the knees of the body in order to bring the Bren into action.”

  The crisis came on Friday, February 18. After parrying a weak midnight counterattack by three American battalions, field-gray wraiths flitted through pelting rain down the Moletta River ravines. Another German barrage fell before dawn, and cold, wet, heartsick GIs lay in their holes, defecating into helmets or C-ration cans and flinging the contents over the lip in the general direction of the enemy. Wounded soldiers still in the line smeared their bandages with mud to dull the white glint. Now the time had come to commit the reserves, Mackensen concluded, even if the Allied line had not yet fractured. Fresh battalions of panzer grenadiers, veterans of Sicily, Salerno, and the Winter Line, swept into battle, singing and shouting taunts, while predatory tanks roamed the fields, undaunted by the occasional shell that caused panzer hulls to peal like church bells. A sergeant in the 157th Infantry told his men, “Get as small as you can.”

  By noon the 179th Infantry had been eviscerated. Survivors retreated almost to the Flyover, a road overpass that marked the last defensive line before the Padiglione Woods. “Men trickled back in small groups, hysterical and crying,” a company commander later recalled.

  At two P.M., a reassuring, square-jawed figure sauntered into the regimental command post: Colonel Bill Darby had been sent by Lucas to take command. “Sir,” a major said, “I guess you will relieve me for losing my battalion?” Darby smiled. “Cheer up, son,” he replied. “I just lost three of them, but the war must go on.” He pointed to the sparkle of muzzle flashes from a hundred artillery batteries to the rear. “Just look at that. That’s the most beautiful sight in the world,” Darby said. “No one can continue to attack through that.”

  He was right, although eight German divisions tried, carving a bulge from the Allied line almost three miles deep and four miles wide. Confusion swept the field; so, too, terror, valor, and profound sacrifice. Leaders fell, other leaders rose. A German shell burst in a tree above General Penney’s trailer in a piney thicket. Peppered with shrapnel, his uniform in shreds, he crawled from the wreckage. “My face,” Penney subsequently wrote his wife, “is not very attractive at the moment.” General Templer took command of the 1st Division, as well as his own 56th.

  In the midst of the crisis, Lucas was nonplussed to read in a message from Clark that Truscott had been appointed deputy VI Corps commander; the 3rd Division would go to Brigadier General John W. O’Daniel, a short and ebullient former Delaware National Guardsman known as Iron Mike for his foghorn voice. Truscott arrived in the command-post crypt, affecting insouciance but worried enough. If the beachhead fell, he suggested, “we’ll fight our way back to Cassino.” In his diary Lucas wrote, “I think this means my relief and that [Truscott] gets the corps. I hope I am not to be relieved…. I have done my best. I have carried out my orders and my conscience is clear.”

  For the moment, he had a battle to command. Shell by shell, bomb by bomb, bullet by chirping bullet, Allied firepower began to tell. Scudding clouds kept most planes grounded on Friday, but shortly before noon a Piper Grasshopper pilot spotted 2,500 Germans tramping south from Carroceto; in twelve minutes, VI Corps gunners unlimbered 224 tubes and chopped the formation to pieces. “Bits of Kraut all over the place,” an Irish Guards sergeant reported. The same observation pilot massed fires on four additional targets in the next hour. The British 1st Loyals reported “clouds of exhausted, struggling field-grey figures.” Wehrmacht officers shouted threats at men beyond threatening, and the clank of falling truck tailgates signaled the arrival of more fodder for the cannons. When artillery caught additional Germans on a lane from Carroceto, a forward observer radioed, “Please don’t stop now. We are knocking them over like pins in a bowling alley. They keep on coming, marching right over their own dead.” The road became better known as the Bowling Alley. A single British machine-gun company fired 32,000 rounds on Friday, and when the enemy attack axis swerved to the east the U.S. 180th Infantry held the right shoulder and threw them back. An American officer later described how some grenadiers “turned and ran up the slope with their tin mess kits shining on their back.” With assault battalions pared to 150 men, German losses were likened to “the Light Brigade without the horses.”

  At 9:30 P.M. a lull settled over scarlet fields glazed with flare light. Tanks lurched forward from dumps in the Padiglione Woods, hauling water and rations to the parched and hungry. Men peered over their leaking sandbags at the scattered hummocks of olive drab and field gray that had once been men. General Mackensen had reached his high-water mark; this wrack of dead grenadiers and smoking wreckage marked the falling tide. The terrain proved “not suitable for tank employment as had been presumed,” a staff officer wrote in the Fourteenth Army log, then added, “No decisive breakthrough.”

  Lucas sensed his shifting fortunes. At Truscott’s urging, he ordered a counterattack for dawn on Saturday, February 19, the fourth day of a battle that had become an existential struggle between two exhausted armies. A preemptive German surge down the Via Anziate at four A.M. nearly spoiled his plan—Allied cooks, drivers, and Anzio dockworkers rushed forward to caulk the line. Sea mines dumped in the roadstead by Luftwaffe raiders kept British reinforcements from joining the counterattack as planned. But at 6:30 A.M., two rested American regiments—the 30th Infantry and 6th Armored Infantry—emerged from the Padiglione Woods with two dozen Sherman tanks and pivoted northwest up the Bowling Alley. Barrages of American artillery danced up and down the road ahead of the advancing troops.

  Lucas had the right man in charge: Major General Ernest N. Harmon woke every morning spoiling for a fight. The Old Ironsides commander was barrel-shaped, with stubby legs, lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows, and a cowcatcher jaw only slightly softened by a Clark Gable mustache. Raised in Vermont, Harmon had been Mark Clark’s classmate at West Point, where he held the academy middleweight boxing title. Having ri
dden in the only U.S. horse cavalry unit to see combat in the Great War, he still wore breeches and knee-high boots. Admirers considered him a “poor man’s George Patton”: he lacked Patton’s personal wealth, and his profanity, while just as intense, was marginally less inventive. “He was independent as a hog on ice,” said Hamilton H. Howze, a subordinate who later rose to four-star rank. “But he loved to fight.” Never reluctant to condemn “the stupidity of the high command,” Harmon had castigated Lucas only a week earlier for the lack “of a well-established plan” to defend the beachhead. “The enemy has his troubles,” Harmon told his men, “and is scared the same as you are.”

  Now he set out to make the German troubles worse. From foxholes lining the road, 45th Division soldiers cheered the passing platoons in their rain-slick ponchos. “Give ’em hell!” they cried. Harmon quickly won back a mile, but at 8:30 the attack stalled under galling panzer fire from the scrub-brush bottoms north of the Bowling Alley. For five hours engineers toiled to repair a blown bridge, as tank and machine-gun rounds sang all about. Harmon paced and snarled, cadging cigarettes from subordinates, until at 1:30 P.M. the attack resumed with a clattering drive into the German line. Stunned grenadiers threw up their hands or scorched to the rear. A dozen Shermans bulled north for a mile, crossed Spaccasassi Creek, and clanked toward the Factory until Harmon called them back at dusk to laager for the night.

  Two hundred prisoners trotted with them; uncounted other Germans lay dead, shoring the red-stained creeks or corduroying the Bowling Alley. Initiative, that turncoat, had returned to the Allied camp. Asked by reporters in Nettuno to assess the enemy’s intentions after the rout, the VI Corps intelligence chief replied, “We’ve made him worried.”