The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Allied quartermasters had their own woes, including shortages of 155mm ammunition, watches, and binoculars. The incessant shelling at Anzio also took a grievous toll in water cans and kitchen equipment, not to mention men. Three hundred varieties of ammo, from carbine cartridges to bunker-busters, required extravagant inventory controls: bimonthly ordnance requisitions, in sextuplicate, weighed sixty pounds each. Fifth Army’s supply arm, known as the Peninsular Base Section, by early spring of 1944 employed 65,000 soldiers; like rear-echelon troops in every war, they provoked snarling resentment among frontline veterans—one account called them “the most hated folk in Italy, the Germans running a poor second.” Yet it was only necessary to visit the shoe section in the VI Corps supply dump at Anzio to sense the miracle of Allied preponderance: on any given day, clerks could instantly lay hands on new combat footwear ranging in size from 4AA to 16EEE.

  As the fifth year of carnage played out, more than ever the total war had become a struggle not between rival ideologies or opposing tacticians but between systems—the integration of political, economic, and military forces needed for sustained offensive power. Certainly courage, audacity, and sacrifice would be required to win through to Rome, and to prevail globally. But every pallet of bombs, shells, and 16EEE boots hoisted from a Liberty ship in Naples harbor amplified and complemented those battlefield virtues, ensuring that valor would never be practiced in vain.

  The Weight of Metal

  OF Italy’s 116,000 square miles, none tormented Fifth Army more than the 600-acre swatch occupied by Cassino town. Now overwatched by the gray stub of the ruined abbey, the town boasted four churches, four hotels, a botanical garden, and a jail. All 22,000 citizens had fled or died, ceding the cobbled streets to General von Senger and German paratroopers in their brimless helmets, who in late February replaced the panzer grenadiers previously holding this sector of the Gustav Line.

  All approaches from the south in this “small, peculiar and unhealthy piece of Italy,” wrote Martha Gellhorn, were marred by “sliced houses, the landslides of rubble, the torn roofs.” Highway 6, now scorched and lifeless, ran “straight as a bar of steel” for three miles from Monte Trocchio into town before swerving up the Liri Valley. Riflemen traded potshots and gunners exchanged artillery barrages, but drear stalemate took hold, in an “endless vigil that is never a quiet one,” as one Gurkha officer wrote. In his diary he added:

  Time seems to have stopped. It is as if we have been condemned to live forever in a cold, damp hell on earth, each of us obtaining but meagre shelter behind rocks or in holes in the ground.

  Not far from here, in 217 B.C., Hannibal had found himself hemmed in by mountains and Roman troops. Lashing dry twigs to the horns of two thousand rustled cattle, his soldiers set fire to the faggots and drove the herd onto the heights above confused enemy sentinels who mistook the flaming beasts for an encircling army of men carrying torches. Fearful of being outflanked, the Romans fled, Hannibal escaped, and his Carthaginians went on to win one of the greatest victories in Western military history at Cannae a year later.

  No such stratagem occurred to Alexander, Clark, or their lieutenants. The high command seemed in the grip of a plodding fatalism, as if no man “was master of his own destiny,” wrote a British officer. “There was no firm conviction among the leaders that victory would result.” Alexander was inclined to lie low until spring weather dried the ground and cleared the skies, as both his staff and General Juin urged. Yet, under pressure from London and Washington, he felt obliged to tie up as many German divisions as possible before the Normandy invasion; he also hoped to prevent Kesselring from massing for further blows at Anzio. The tail now wagged the dog: the Anzio landings had been launched to break the Gustav Line impasse at Cassino; now another attack at Cassino was deemed necessary to help the beachhead.

  In meetings at Caserta in late February, Alexander decreed that come spring the Allied front would be reconfigured to concentrate more combat power around the maw of the Liri Valley. Fifth Army was to shift to the left, taking over a coastal sector with a force that was mostly American and French. Eighth Army would also shift left, leaving a small presence on the Adriatic, while assuming responsibility for the Cassino front with the British X and XIII Corps, as well as I Canadian Corps and the newly arrived II Polish Corps. Clark privately rejoiced at unshackling himself from the British. “Anything that will divest me of the terrific responsibilities that I have had in trying to command McCreery’s [X Corps] and Freyberg’s corps will be welcome by me,” he told his diary on February 28.

  Before that happy day arrived, however, Fifth Army was to make one final attempt to bull through at Cassino with Spadger Freyberg’s Kiwis, Brits, and Indians. But how? For the past two months, beginning with the French thrust northeast of Cassino and the American debacle at the Rapido, Allied attackers had avoided a direct assault into the town. Minefields and inundations hemmed both sides of Highway 6, turning the roadbed into a narrow, exposed funnel for any battalion approaching from Monte Trocchio. Yet Freyberg saw no alternative to a head-on attack. Convinced that a wide flanking movement around Monte Cassino was impossible, he “put his faith in the weight of metal,” as the Indian official history later observed.

  As the abbey had been pulverized, so now the town. New Zealand intelligence analysts proposed dropping three 1,000-pound bombs for each of the estimated 1,000 German paratroopers believed to be sheltering in Cassino. Freyberg calculated that just half that payload—perhaps 750 tons, reinforced by 200,000 artillery shells—would allow Allied infantry and armor forces to “walk through” the town, which he asserted could be cleared by tanks in six to twelve hours after the bombardment.

  The use of airpower to bludgeon a hole through the Gustav Line found favor with Hap Arnold, the Army Air Forces chief, whose cables from Washington had become increasingly shrill. Why were daily air sorties in Italy running at 1,500 or fewer when “you with the British have a total of approximately 5,000 airplanes?” he asked Ira Eaker on February 24. “Why not 3,000 [sorties] until the situation is more in our favor?” In a petulant letter a few days later, Arnold condemned “the lack of ingenuity in the air action,” adding, “We are all very greatly disturbed here at the apparent bogging down of the Italian campaign.” Was it not possible to “break up every stone in the town behind which a German soldier might be hiding?” Such an attack “could really make air history,” he wrote. “The whole future of the air forces is closely knit into this whole problem.” Behind Arnold’s military advice lay a larger political calculus: Air Force success in breaking the impasse at Cassino would strengthen his campaign to make the service independent of the U.S. Army.

  Lieutenant General Eaker yielded to no man in airpower enthusiasm. Born in Texas and raised in southeast Oklahoma, he had been commissioned as an infantry officer in 1917 before transferring immediately to the flying service. As chief pilot of Question Mark in 1929, Eaker demonstrated the potential of airborne refueling by remaining aloft over Los Angeles for six days; several years later he made the first transcontinental flight while navigating solely by instruments. Coauthor with Arnold of three books on what they fondly called “this flying game,” Eaker personally had persuaded Churchill a year earlier to endorse the Combined Bomber Offensive, a round-the-clock pummeling of Axis strategic targets with U.S. heavy bombers by day and British bombers by night. “There is nothing that can be destroyed by gunfire that cannot be destroyed by bombs,” he once proclaimed. Before taking over the Mediterranean air forces in January, he had commanded the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Britain, where appalling crew losses and irregular bomb accuracy failed to shake his belief that the Third Reich could be gutted from the air.

  He was less certain about Cassino. Obliterating the abbey had simply given German defenders both the moral and topographical high ground. Contrary to Freyberg’s sunny estimate, an Army Air Forces study warned that “due to cratering and debris, tanks would probably not be able to pass through the town for 48 hours after
the bombing.” To Arnold, Eaker wrote on March 6, “Do not set your heart on a great victory as a result of this operation. Personally, I do not feel it will throw the German out of his present position completely and entirely, or compel him to abandon the defensive role.” Unless ground forces attacked promptly, “little useful purpose is served” by bombardment. “We shall go forward and capture Rome when the weather permits,” Eaker added, “and not before.”

  Yet in the absence of a plausible alternative—the latter-day equivalent of flaming livestock—Freyberg’s plan carried the day: after bombers flattened the town, the 2nd New Zealand Division with help from Indian troops and American tanks would occupy the ruins and forge a bridgehead across the Rapido, while Indian troops seized Monte Cassino and opened the Liri Valley for armored forces to trundle up Highway 6 toward Rome. The scheme was code-named Operation DICKENS in honor of Charles Dickens, who after visiting Monte Cassino abbey had written a lugubrious account of “the deep sounding of its bell…while nothing is seen but the grey mist, moving solemnly and slowly, like a funeral procession.”

  Freyberg insisted that the bombing coincide with three consecutive days of fair weather to dry the ground for attacking tanks. This demand fell on the Fifth Army meteorologist, Captain David M. Ludlum, a former high school history teacher who had earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and who was admired for his panache in wearing pajamas to bed during the darkest hours at Salerno. Perhaps to encourage a favorable forecast, the actual bombardment of Cassino town was named Operation LUDLUM.

  Alas, the honor failed to inspire meteorological favor. Beginning in late February, rain fell day after dreary day. The eponymous captain studied his weather charts from dawn until midnight only to report yet again: more rain. A week passed, then another. In the hills behind Monte Cassino, Indian troops waited in their soggy holes, emerging only at night to briefly stretch their cramped muscles. Sickness or battle wounds claimed another Indian soldier every twenty minutes on average. Nebelwerfer fire raked the Allied positions, and by mid-March fifty-five German mortars had been counted around Cassino. With the entire New Zealand Corps keyed to attack on twenty-four hours’ notice, “staleness, physical and psychological, was inevitable,” as the official Kiwi history noted. Worse luck: on the afternoon of March 2, the able New Zealand division commander Howard Kippenberger climbed Monte Trocchio to survey the approaches along Highway 6 and tripped an undetected S-mine. The blast blew off one foot and mangled the other so badly that surgeons trimmed it away. In less than a month, Freyberg had lost his two best lieutenants, Tuker of the 4th Indian Division and now Kippenberger.

  Never in his legendary career had he faced “so difficult an operation,” Freyberg admitted in early March. The newly arriving commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General Sidney C. Kirkman, found Freyberg “very gloomy about the proposed attack” and furious at Clark, who, he complained, had “no ideas except to launch a succession of attacks regardless of casualties.”

  Unknown to Freyberg, Kirkman carried a note from the Eighth Army commander, General Leese, authorizing him to take command from Freyberg “if I saw fit.” After several long conversations with the New Zealander, Kirkman chose to keep the warrant in his pocket, not least because Freyberg “would have been most annoyed and humiliated.” But Operation DICKENS, he warned Leese on March 4, would likely gain little and cost much. The ground was too boggy for a sprightly advance and Allied reserves too meager to exploit any rupture in the Gustav Line.

  The ground grew boggier: rain fell for a third week. Each evening, as twilight’s gray tint faded to black in the west, the ravines and mountain roads leaped to life. Quartermasters hurried forward with supplies stacked in the beds of their grinding trucks, the cat’s-eye blackout lights creeping up the muddy inclines until the track grew too steep or the enemy too bold. Swaying mule trains clopped behind the ridgelines, moving no quicker than a mile per hour despite whispered exhortations from the skinners; each animal could lug eighteen mortar rounds or an equivalent load, and a report from the front observed that “the mules are tranquil during shell fire, the Italian mule leaders are not.” Only men could scale the steepest slopes, and panting bearers trudged toward the forward outposts with water cans and ammo belts lashed to their packboards, every ear cocked for the whine of a sniper’s bullet or the telltale pumpf! of a mortar shell leaving its tube.

  At dawn the landscape again grew still except for greasy smoke spiraling from one detonation or another. German ambulances rolled down Highway 6 with impunity until observers spied armed troops climbing from the rear; Kiwi artillery sent the next one fishtailing back up the Liri Valley. Careless enemy soldiers risked the frustrated wrath of the entire Fifth Army: a gunner on Monte Trocchio reported that when a solitary German strayed from his hole in Cassino town one morning “he was engaged by a holocaust of fire, including that of 8-inch howitzers.”

  At seven A.M. on Wednesday, March 15, Clark and Gruenther left the Fifth Army command post in Presenzano and drove by jeep past Monte Lungo to Freyberg’s headquarters near San Pietro. Captain Ludlum had at last delivered good news. His Tuesday night forecast reported that a “frontal system over France yesterday morning has moved rapidly south-eastward” to provide perfect bombing weather in Italy for the ides: sunshine, dead calm, a few thin clouds. The long-awaited warning order, drawn from cricket terms, was broadcast to all units: “Bradman will be batting tomorrow.” Troops closest to Cassino crept back a thousand yards.

  After a brief stop in the New Zealand encampment, Clark and Gruenther pressed ahead in a cavalcade that sped through Purple Heart Valley and past the rubble once known as San Pietro. Operation LUDLUM had attracted an eager crowd, including Devers, Eaker, Keyes, and Freyberg. Alexander appeared from Caserta in his own jeep with a gaggle of reporters in tow. Dressed in his fleece-lined jacket and red cap, he appeared as “calm, detached and attractive as usual,” one admirer wrote; in a letter to his three children a few days earlier, Alexander had sketched a child in a nightshirt watching a hag with a pointed hat sail past on her broom. “So,” the caption read, “there are witches after all!”

  Before reaching Monte Trocchio, the convoy turned right to climb through San Vittore to the hill town of Cervaro. Clark followed a Kiwi officer into the decrepit stone house that would serve as his grandstand. After scanning the valley with his field glasses from a second-floor balcony, Clark climbed to the roof and straddled the ridgepole, his long legs dangling over the eaves. Three miles due west across the Rapido flats lay Cassino: the four churches, the four hotels, the botanical garden, the jail, all gleaming in the morning sun, all doomed.

  He hardly cared. As of Tuesday, Fifth Army comprised 438,782 soldiers—205,000 Americans, 172,000 British, 49,000 French, 12,000 Italians—and to each of them Clark felt responsible for breaking the stalemate in Italy by whatever means necessary. The rain, the casualties, the internecine bickering, the impasse at Anzio, the brouhaha over the abbey—all had worn him down, even as the long winter made him harder, more obdurate. Every visit to a ward full of wounded boys left him “very depressed.” When a sympathetic admiral wrote to remind Clark that “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” he replied, “Chastening already ample. Surely time has come to spare the rod.” In early March he told Renie:

  I know you are upset about the Italian situation, and so am I, but there is nothing I can do about it except continue to do my duty…. You must look upon this Italian campaign as one little part of a world war where perhaps we do something the hard way in order to make successes in other places easier.

  If broad-gauged and resolute, with what he described as “a keen and abiding interest in the little problems” of his men, he could also be pinched and querulous. To Geoff Keyes on Monday he had mused aloud about personally taking command at the Anzio beachhead. The feckless Lucas was gone, but Clark found Truscott “a difficult subordinate to handle. He makes demands, knowing full well that many of them can not be granted.” Yet it was the British who annoyed him most. �
�I am convinced that Alexander is floundering in his effort to solve the tactical situation here,” Clark told his war diary on March 8. Even Churchill seemed bent on provoking him from afar: an AFHQ staff officer reported that “all dispatches sent personally to the prime minister should spell ‘theater’ ‘t-h-e-a-t-r-e’ and should not spell ‘through’ ‘t-h-r-u.’” When Churchill in early March ordered that troops at Anzio be known as the “Allied Bridgehead Force,” Clark in a note to Alexander counterproposed “the Fifth Army Allied Bridgehead Force.” He confessed in his diary to being “greatly annoyed,” then added, “This is part of the steady effort by the British to increase their prestige.”

  For Clark, too, there were witches after all. Ever more convinced that others conspired to steal his thunder and deprive Fifth Army of battle honors fairly won, he struggled to keep his equilibrium against stress, exhaustion, pride, and insecurity. Only when he stood triumphant as an American pro-consul in Rome would the world see that the sacrifices from Salerno to Cassino were justified. A gifted soldier, with a brain big enough and a spine stiff enough to wage the total war required in 1944, Mark Clark at times seemed to battle his own demons as bitterly as he fought the Germans.

  A few days earlier he had mailed Renie a brooch set with red, white, and blue stones to form the Fifth Army insignia; it matched the three-star earrings she sometimes wore. “My problems get no less worrisome as the days go on,” he confided in the accompanying note. “However, things will work out, and I am waiting for the day when I can lead my Fifth Army into victory.”