“I feel the flowers growing over me,” John Keats had said on his Roman deathbed. At the Ardeatine Caves, sweet tuberoses perfumed the air. The first batch of five men tumbled off the tailgate. An SS officer, Captain Erich Priebke, checked their names from the fatal list. A German storm trooper prodded them into the cave, where candles guttered in the chill draft. Kneel, he ordered. They knelt. Five sharp cracks sounded, as evenly spaced as a tolling bell.
Five by five by five they staggered into the cave, each to receive a machine-pistol bullet in the brain before pitching forward into the volcanic dust. The pile grew: actors and architects, lawyers and mechanics, shopkeepers and physicians, an opera singer, a priest. An uncommon number worked in the wood trades—cabinetmakers, carpenters, joiners. The youngest was fourteen, the oldest seventy-five. Communists, atheists, Freemasons, freethinkers, Catholics, and seventy-five Jews. Ten had been seized near Via Rasella, propinquity their only crime. A few shouted “Viva l’Italia!”; others recited the rosary.
Five by five by five, each quintet now forced to clamber over the corpses of those who had come before. Kappler fetched a bottle of cognac to fortify his killers, but liquor only made them sloppy: some victims required up to four bullets before the writhing ceased.
By 8:30 P.M. the last of the 335 lay in a heap. Flashlight beams flitted across the cave mouth, then went dark. The trucks rumbled away into the night.
Relatives of the dead from the Bozen Regiment would be flown to Rome at the Reich’s expense for a grand funeral. The procession snaked down the city’s boulevards and across the piazzi, led by a military band playing somber dirges. No one sang “Hupf, Mein Mädel.”
A brief public statement on March 25 announced, without elaboration, that severe reprisals had been exacted. Kappler ordered garbage to be heaped at the Ardeatine Caves, hoping to mask one stench with another. A few days later, German soldiers blew up the shafts.
But some odors could hardly be hidden. Frantic women crisscrossed Rome in search of their husbands, their fathers, their sons. Word quickly spread of a horror near the Via Appia. A parish priest stood at the cave mouth to offer absolution. Weeping pilgrims trudged to the site, now swarming with flies. Someone left a large laurel wreath with a note: “You will be avenged.” Accounts of the atrocity soon reached Allied intelligence. “When Rome falls, please do utmost to assure adequate flow of colorful material on hunger, disease, misery under the Germans,” a memo from an American propaganda office in London urged. “Also do anything you can to get correspondents to dig up facts on reported massacre of 320 Italian hostages by Germans in reprisal for bomb explosion about March 23.”
Not for three months would the tomb be excavated and the dead—reduced to rag-clad skeletons—exhumed by forensic pathologists. Justice and vengeance would take much longer. But shortly after the killings, some Roman families received a curt note, auf deutsch: Your relative died on March 23, 1944. You may collect his belongings at the German security police offices at Via Tasso 155.
Into that malevolent place they walked, emerging with pathetic little bundles: a coat, a cap, perhaps a frayed pair of trousers. In the seam of a soiled shirt, one family found a hidden note. “I dream of the hills around Siena, and of my love whom I shall never see again,” the doomed man had written. “I shall become one gaping wound—like the winds, nothing.”
11. A KETTLE OF GRIEF
Dead Country
FIFTH Army meteorologists for months had occupied the Royal Vesuvius Observatory on Savior’s Hill, less than two miles from the crater’s lip. For those eyeing the summit through the observatory’s Palladian windows in the late winter of 1944, the fateful signs of vulcanic distress were difficult to ignore. Vesuvius always slept with one eye open, the locals warned; some three dozen eruptions had been documented since the cataclysm that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79. Beginning in early January, magma had seeped from the inner conelet like molten tears. “Flamboyant banners of light” played above the crater, according to one witness, and a smoke plume was “washed back and forth by the wind across the summit.” Then the weeping subsided and, on March 13, the smoke stopped, ominously. Naples—already plagued with typhus, hunger, and war—grew ever more anxious. It was said that dogs barked with uncommon urgency.
The eruption began at 4:30 P.M. on Saturday, March 18. By midnight, orange cataracts of lava spilled down the slopes to the west and southwest, carrying trees and brush like burning boats. Huge dust clouds billowed above the summit, brilliantly illuminated by blue forks of static electricity that danced across the sky. Neapolitans watched from their rooftops, pinked by the distant glow, and reporters trudged up the cone until a guide shouted above the roar, “Gentlemen, no farther, please! The risk of life!” On Sunday evening, tongues of lava licked the first houses in San Sebastiano, which exploded in flame. Priests carried “plaster statues of their saints out of the church and placed them before the advancing river of fire,” wrote Eric Sevareid. The ubiquitous Norman Lewis watched several hundred kneeling villagers plead for intervention from Saint Gennaro, the patron of Naples. “Holy banners and church images were held aloft, and acolytes swung censers and sprinkled holy water in the direction of the cinders.” Young men formed a skirmish line and advanced “brandishing crosses within a few yards of the lava,” Lewis wrote. “Voices somewhere in the rear had begun to sing a Te Deum.” Peasants wept at the ruination of their fields.
Just after nine P.M. on Tuesday, March 21, soldiers in a cinema at the Torre del Greco garrison were watching the 1934 British musical Sing as We Go when a violent paroxysm shook the theater. Shouting men beat for the exits, even as, onscreen, Gracie Fields belted out, “Blues, where are you now?” Great fountains of lava boiled three thousand feet above Vesuvius before falling back in incandescent sheets. Near the crater, a cascade of falling tephrite stones the size of golf balls were followed by stones the size of softballs. A vast gray nimbus rose twenty thousand feet overhead before showering purple ash up to three feet deep across the coastal plain. As Pliny the Younger had written to the historian Tacitus in describing the A.D. 79 eruption: “I believed that I was perishing with the world and the world with me, which was a great consolation.”
The world, then and now, survived, but for another week the Vesuvian apocalypse persisted. “Smoke of a thick oily character like a factory chimney in the north of England,” wrote Harold Macmillan, still Churchill’s envoy in the Mediterranean. “The smoke practically obscures the whole Bay of Naples.” A Scots Guards account noted that “the streets became strangely quiet, as after a snow”—stranger still when, on March 26, snow showers fell on Naples. “We cannot help but admire this gesture of the gods,” a BBC correspondent wrote. Soldiers trooped up the hairpin road toward the undamaged observatory to gawk at molten tributaries forty feet deep and to buy ashtrays a local entrepreneur made from cooling lava.
At last the pyrotechnics faded, ceasing altogether on March 29: the last eruption of the twentieth century. The damage had been done. Twenty-six deaths were reported, some from roofs collapsing under the weight of ash. Rail lines remained blocked for days while Italian crews manned shovels, snow plows, and bulldozers to free the tracks and switches. A heavy fall of soot, ash, and vitrified clinkers pummeled the Pompeii airfield, destroying more than eighty B-25 bombers parked there—“the only group,” said one wag, “to lose its planes to enemy rocks.”
Ash mixed with rain formed an abrasive mud that ruined brake drums and curtailed military transport because of a critical shortage of replacement brake linings in the theater. Pumice scoured the bearings in ship engines, forcing captains to flee seaward for safety. Across the fleet, from Salerno to Pozzuoli, bosuns mustered their swabs on the ashy weather decks and called out, “Sweepers, start your brooms!” A B-25 bombardier who had lost his plane to Vesuvius wrote home on April 1, “Never trust a volcano.”
The world had not ended, and neither had the war. Along the Neapolitan docks, soldiers scuffed through drifted ash to the gangplank queues
, where boys hawked an English-language newspaper with the headline “Anzio Worse Than Salerno.” On average, five hundred men sailed each day to reinforce the so-called Beachhead Army, including those from the U.S. 34th Division, which after duty at Cassino had spent two months resting and rehabilitating before embarking for another maelstrom.
Wide-eyed they lined the rails as the ships slid into Anzio harbor—now known as Bomb Bay—utterly unconvinced by a memo from higher authority that declared, “The chances of being hit by a shell from a shore battery are negligible, being approximately 37,000 to 1 for every shell actually falling in the anchorage.” Stevedores moved with feline agility, unloading fifty vehicles from an LST tank deck in four minutes or stacking three tons of cargo into a DUKW in six minutes, all the while straining for the whistle of artillery or the glint of an enemy plane. In twelve weeks the port and anchorage had sustained 277 Luftwaffe raids, one every seven hours. Radio-controlled Fritz X bombs had been largely neutralized by electronic jammers on destroyers and minesweepers, but torpedoes, aerial mines, machine-gun strafings, and conventional bombs—plus shells by the tens of thousands—continued to batter both roadstead and beachhead. The toll could be seen in the hundred or so casualties waiting dockside each day for the return convoy to Naples: wounded men on litters clutched their own X-rays in big brown envelopes, and those in casts wore medical descriptions of their injuries scribbled on the plaster. When German rounds began to fall, patients lashed to stretchers sometimes outscreamed the screaming shells. One commander greeted a new consignment of troops by telling them, “You’re going to suffer. You came here to suffer.”
A British officer arriving in March described Anzio as “a small town rapidly getting smaller.” Beyond the barrage balloons along the seawall “there was hardly a building intact. Lonely walls leaned drunkenly against piles of rubble; roofs seemed to have gone out of fashion: and wires dangled everywhere.” The captain of H.M.S. Grenville concurred that “the whole waterfront had a very moth eaten look about it.” Upon making shore with reinforcements for the 1st Armored Division, tank commander Henry E. Gardiner told his diary, “Our first sight as we drove inland was a shockingly large United States cemetery.”
Most of the cargo hoisted from the arriving ships was ammunition—150 truckloads every day—which was hauled to seven American dumps under constant attack. Bulldozers cut trenches and L-shaped bunkers to contain fires, several of which blazed each week. Firefighters at first had only shovels to battle the blazes, but now they used Sherman tanks with dozer blades and steel tracks. Still, the loss of ammunition to fire averaged more than sixty tons a day.
That the cost was not greater reflected ferocious antiaircraft defenses—a thousand guns made the beachhead among Europe’s most fortified precincts—and an elaborate smoke screen that blinded enemy pilots and gunners. With each dawn, hissing smoke generators spaced half a mile apart spewed a light haze that stretched fifteen miles along the coast and four miles inland. Technicians with flatbed trucks stood by to move the generators like chess pieces should changes in wind direction, air temperature, or convection currents thin the miasma. At night, smudge pots and a different set of generators hid the port, although GIs swore the smoke simply attracted more fire.
Six Allied divisions—approaching 100,000 troops—now occupied eighty square miles, a plot slightly larger than the District of Columbia. Since the epic struggles of February, a sullen stalemate had obtained. Newcomers found that life in the Beachhead Army was not only subterranean but nocturnal, with a battle rhythm known as “Dracula days.” Soldiers near the “dead country”—the no-man’s-land between the opposing armies—often slept in their holes until four P.M., patrolled until three A.M., ate a hot meal before sunrise, then slipped underground until the next afternoon. Rumors “slide from hole to hole,” wrote Audie Murphy, now a platoon sergeant in the 3rd Division. “We believe nothing, doubt nothing.” At night the beachhead turned restless, with raids, patrols, harassing fire, and chandelier flares that stretched men’s shadows grotesquely. Mines and shell fire grew so nerve-racking, wrote Robert Capa, that “every time I sat in my jeep I put my bedroll between my legs.” Bill Mauldin noticed that during barrages, military policemen remained in their crossroads trenches and controlled traffic by “holding up a wooden hand to point directions.”
The demand for sandbags and barbed wire along the thirty-two-mile perimeter had reached Flanders proportions. The “Anzio Ritz” was an underground cinema, given to grainy showings of Cary Grant in Mr. Lucky. On fine mornings, a British soldier wrote, men beyond sniper range sunned themselves on the lip of their holes “but with one ear cocked, like rabbits ready to pop back in again.” Soldiers kept their helmets on so long that they wore bald spots in their scalps. “Men dreamed of steaks, milk, toilet seats, running water, and the exquisite problem of what color clothes to wear,” a 179th Infantry account noted. Everyone grumbled at the static “Sitzkrieg” war. One physician compiled a beachhead glossary that included “anziopectoris”—a general indisposition—and “anziating,” a distant look in the eyes. Beachhead denizens called themselves “Anzonians,” and not without pride.
“The main thing you want is not to be alone,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who had come to Nettuno for a few days and stayed for a month. With a dozen other reporters, he lived at Via Gramsci 35, a four-story waterfront villa that “trembled like a palsied old gentleman” whenever the guns barked. Plagued by anemia and intimations of mortality, Pyle wrote a friend, “Instead of growing stronger and hard as good veterans do, I’ve become weaker and more frightened…. I don’t sleep well, and have half-awake hideous dreams about the war.”
Those perturbations only intensified at seven A.M. on March 17 when a German five-hundred-pound bomb detonated thirty feet from the villa. Pyle had taken the top floor for better light, and the blast flung him to the floor, ripping doors and windows from their frames. Glass and broken brick sprayed the room. “The only wound I got was a tiny cut on my right cheek,” Pyle reported, although he found himself combing his wispy hair with a handkerchief. He lingered at the beachhead for another week “to get my nerve back,” then sailed for Naples. On April 5, he left Italy forever. “There’s such a thing,” he wrote, “as pressing your luck too far in one spot.”
Lucian Truscott had also pressed his luck by moving to the spacious top floor of a three-story Nettuno house. The VI Corps headquarters remained in the cellars beneath the Osteria dell’ Artigliere, but Truscott believed a commander must display conspicuous sangfroid. Engineers sandbagged the doorways of his billet and laid rail ties across the roof, just in case.
“I have almost become oblivious to the passage of time,” Truscott wrote Sarah in mid-March. “One day is just another group of problems and each day seems to bring its own regardless of the situation.” A week later he added, “I do not want to return until the job is done and I can return to an America on the way back to normal—and then I want peace in large doses!” Two years had passed since he left her for “the great adventure, and what an adventure it has been…. I can only do the best I can. It is your faith in me that has brought me this far on the road.”
His throat still nagged him, along with a hacking cough, nasal polyps, and aching teeth. After an examination on March 31 the doctor recommended voice exercises and cigars rather than cigarettes. Truscott quit smoking for ten days, then resumed after complaining of weight gain. The “lack of voice really affects my efficiency,” he told Sarah. Cognac, scotch, gin, and two ounces of rye before supper remained staples in the Truscott mess, but without evident impairment of the commander. He remained energetic, buoyant, and intensely absorbed in every detail of his beachhead domain.
“I can close my eyes and imagine Virginia’s countryside now,” he wrote in April as the weather warmed. “The redbud and dogwood must be beautiful, and the blue mountains and green trees. There may be something romantic about southern Italy, but personally I have not found it yet.” On Easter Sunday, April 9, he slept eight h
ours straight for the first time since reaching Anzio; more typically he was awakened each night by emergencies small and large, trudging downstairs in bathrobe and slippers, gray hair tousled and face lined with fatigue, but ready to take command. In his rare free moments he studied French—like Patton, he suspected it might be useful—or listened to a German radio broadcast of Handel’s Messiah.
But heartbreak was never further away than the next letter, such as one in early April from the mother of a nineteen-year-old corporal who had vanished during the FISCHFANG attack on February 16. “Please tell me if you think it could be possible he is a German prisoner, or tell me if the worst has happened, and there wasn’t even his dog tag left from him,” she wrote from Ohio. “I have dreamed of my baby son every night.”
Truscott had ordered the beachhead evacuated of all twenty-two thousand civilians, and by early April every Anzonian except for 750 Italian laborers wore a military uniform. After treatment with DDT, families gathered at the church of St. Teresa to await passage to Naples. Some carried mattresses on their backs; others clung to cardboard suitcases or a wheel of cheese, scooping up a little sand as a token of remembrance. A few screeched in protest, hurling curses at the sky or gnawing their fists. “They hate Mussolini, the Germans, and I believe they hate us,” Lieutenant Ivar H. Aas wrote his parents in Minneapolis. “I don’t think they go for this liberation idea too well.” Soldiers purchased livestock from departing farmers—$4 for a lamb, $20 for a pig. When a pregnant cow was mortally wounded by a shell fragment, an enterprising soldier performed a Cesarean delivery with an ax, delivering a calf, which he fed from his helmet.
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