The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  The Guards’ command post occupied the crypt beneath a Catholic church, entered only on hands and knees through a hole scratched in the rubble. A decomposing German soldier lay near the entrance and those passing in or out would subsequently bow to him for luck, whispering, “Good evening, Hans.” Shell fire and bombs had sliced open the burial vaults in the upper walls, scattering skeletons about the nave, and Tommies hung flypaper in a losing battle against insects. Pickets occupied three forward outposts, known as Jane, Helen, and Mary, in wrecked buildings barely a hundred yards from the German line. Sentries cradled their Bren guns beneath cockeyed wall prints of the Virgin, whose eyes remained fixed on heaven.

  “There is no day, only two kinds of night—a yellow, smoky, choking night, and a black, meteor-ridden night,” wrote one soldier consigned to a Cassino cellar. Guardsmen plugged their nostrils with mosquito repellent against the stench, and took turns standing watch at their periscopes, like submariners. “We looked out upon a dead world,” a Black Watch soldier reported. “Nothing stirred in the ruins. Even so, hidden eyes watched everything.” They scribbled letters and sipped tea, saving a half inch in their morning mugs to shave. Endless hours were devoted to discussions about sex, politics, and life’s absurdity, all to stave off what Fred Majdalany called “that deadly sameness which is the hardest thing of all to bear in war.” German shells tumbled about; British gunners answered, targeting suspected strongholds code-named for film stars—Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire. At dusk they crept out to relieve themselves, Majdalany recalled, ranks of buttocks “showing white in the semi-darkness like grotesque friezes.”

  Life across the rubble was no finer. German paratroopers in baggy smocks and chamber-pot helmets soaked bandages in cologne and tied them over their mouths and nostrils. Others wore bandages over their eyes, damaged from stone splinters. A German order dated April 16 warned, “Effective at once the word ‘catastrophe’ will be eliminated in all reports and orders, as well as from the conversational vocabulary.” Half a dozen swastika banners adorned the rubble on April 20 to mark the Führer’s fifty-fifth birthday, but if “catastrophe” was removed from the lips it was never far from the mind. German gunners fired leaflets that depicted Death holding a pair of calipers and measuring on an Italian map the scant 123 kilometers—76 miles—covered by the Anglo-Americans since landing at Salerno in September; the rest of the peninsula was marked with phase lines and projected dates, including a putative crossing of the Swiss border in April 1948, and then, “to Berlin, another 650 kilometers, arrival about 1952.” If illustrative of Allied dawdling, the map also reminded each Gefreiter how far he was from home.

  “Everything is in the hands of the fates, and many of the boys have met theirs already,” a German machine gunner wrote in his diary. “I badly want to get home to my wife and son. I want to be able to enjoy something of the beauty of life again. Here we have nothing but terror and horror, death and damnation.”

  For all its inhumanity, a peculiar dignity obtained at Cassino for those condemned to share its squalor. Every Guardsman could appreciate the German voice that abruptly broke into the Coldstream radio network one evening to acknowledge, in English: “You are all brave. You are all gentlemen.”

  Shortly after seven A.M. on Monday, May 1, the entire Fifth Army staff, along with the army band, tiptoed through the olive grove beyond the carp ponds and marble statuary in the Caserta Palace gardens. Without a sound, they encircled the new caravan recently built for their commander in an ordnance depot. Slathered in green and brown camouflage paint, the trailer featured not only fluorescent lights and a flush toilet, but full-length mirrors and an extra-long bed.

  Mark Clark was a meticulous creature of habit, so it was a bit odd when 7:30 A.M. passed without his usual ring for an orderly to bring his breakfast. Al Gruenther, who had organized this fête for Clark’s forty-eighth birthday, impatiently glanced at his watch before finally ordering the air-raid siren sounded. As a shrill wail carried across the palace grounds, the bandsmen hoisted their instruments and struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” followed by a new ditty, “The Fifth Army’s Where My Heart Is,” with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.

  The trailer door swung open and out stepped a smiling Clark—“His Highness,” as Gruenther jokingly called him—clad in blue pajamas, bedroom slippers, trench coat, and cap. After the band crashed through a rousing rendition of “Over There,” Clark thanked the assembled crowd, reminded them that there was “still much to be done in the war,” and predicted that many in the Fifth Army would eventually “see action in the South Pacific.” As he stepped back inside, the band took leave with “The Old Gray Mare.” Later in the day, Clark flew to the beach below Castel Volturno for a swim in the frigid Tyrrhenian Sea. A birthday celebration that night featured two cakes, a hypnotist, comedians, and a “card manipulator.” “He is a hard-boiled soldier, of course,” Gruenther wrote after the party, “but he does get homesick every now and then.”

  Curiously, he had just been home. While Alexander rearranged his armies for the spring offensive now planned for mid-May, Clark had proposed returning to Washington for the first time in nearly two years. Marshall at first demurred, complaining that the visit “comes at a most inopportune moment,” then relented. At three A.M. on April 11, wearing an unadorned olive-drab uniform and the green silk cravat that had become his trademark, Clark shambled down the plane ramp at Bolling Field, along the Potomac River. Renie, “as fluttery as a schoolgirl,” was stunned at how haggard he appeared, “thin and tense and tired.” A War Department colonel handed Clark a note from Marshall that contained no hint of welcome or praise, while stressing the need to keep the visit secret. A staff car took the Clarks past Arlington National Cemetery to Marshall’s residence at Fort Myer for a few hours’ sleep. “There was a strained sort of strangeness between us,” Renie later wrote. “He might just as well have been in Italy for all the attention he was able to pay me.”

  Mrs. Clark had been promoting General Clark’s career again, apparently without his knowledge, and the cool reception Marshall gave him may have reflected his annoyance. In a recent note to the chief of staff, Renie assured him, “Certainly Wayne is trying.” She also enclosed a personal letter from her husband. “I never get things the easy way, my poor men have to do it the hard way,” Clark had written her. He continued:

  You will never know, darling, the tense moments, and hours and days I have…. I go to the hospitals and see them and talk to every man in a big tent…. They lie there with their legs off and stomach and chest wounds and smile and never complain…. At times I need you to talk to—have no one I can go to and express my real feelings.

  If Marshall was sympathetic, he kept the sentiment concealed. The chief returned the letter as Renie had requested, but not before making a copy. “You are aware,” he warned in a frosty note addressed to “Remi” in early March, “of the necessity of guarding the confidential nature of letters which you receive from your husband.”

  The ten-day furlough flew past. A week after his arrival, with Marshall hovering over his shoulder at the Pentagon, Clark dictated a note to his mother, who also lived in the District of Columbia: “I know it will be somewhat of a shock to you to know that I am here in Washington…. It is absolutely imperative that you tell no one of my presence here.” With Marshall’s permission, she joined her son for a brief stay in a secluded cabin at the Greenbrier Hotel, a resort in West Virginia now converted to a rehabilitation hospital. Clark played golf and talked of retiring. When he whacked three consecutive drives into a lake, several German prisoners of war who were working as hotel groundskeepers chortled in glee. Clark stalked from the tee, grumbling, “I’m sorry I took those guys prisoner.”

  Before returning to Italy, Clark was whisked one evening from the basement garage of Renie’s apartment building on Connecticut Avenue to the private entrance of a nineteenth-century town house at 1806 I Street in downtown Washington. Here in the Alibi Club, the
well-heeled and well-connected of Washington’s elite gathered to “cook oysters, lobsters and ducks to suit themselves, play poker, and put away a lethal sort of drink based on Medford rum,” as Marshall’s biographer wrote. To hear Clark’s progress report on the war in Italy, Marshall had assembled a dozen powerful figures, including Vice President Henry A. Wallace and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. For more than an hour, while his auditors slurped oysters around the table and tossed the shells into a bowl, Clark in his deep, mellifluous voice described campaigns past and future: the desperate fight at Salerno, the march across the Volturno, the struggle at the Winter Line, the Anzio gamble, and now, soon, the great thrust that would carry Fifth Army into Rome. None of these men, Clark concluded, had any inkling of what it was like to wage war in mountainous Italy.

  The “long and bloody battle up the Italian peninsula,” as Clark had called the ordeal in a note to Field Marshal Wilson, had only grown longer and bloodier. But the moment was approaching that would make it all worthwhile. Flying back to Italy, Clark carried both the family cocker spaniel, Pal, for companionship, and packages from Katherine Marshall, the chief’s wife, for two sons from her first marriage who were now serving as young officers in Italy. The brief trip home, Clark wrote Renie from Caserta, “seems like a dream.”

  Under Alexander’s reorganization of the Allied legions in Italy, Clark now commanded thirteen divisions—seven American, four French, and two British—a force quadruple the size of the army he had brought to Salerno nine months earlier. Even as he took pride in leading such a formidable host, the increased demands—and another fifty thousand Fifth Army casualties since mid-January—weighed heavily. Cool and remote, yet capable of conviviality and brilliance, Clark could also be picayune and mulish, protective of his prerogatives, and as the war went on he grew increasingly ready to take offense at slights real or imagined. The nickname Marcus Aurelius Clarkus never seemed to fade.

  At times, Clark seemed to feud with every senior general in the Mediterranean. “He treats his corps commanders as he would a company commander—and of course with less consideration for us Americans,” Geoff Keyes told his diary. Weary of Clark’s carping, Truscott twice reminded him that he had the authority to sack the VI Corps commander “at any time”; in his diary, Clark decried Truscott’s “whining attitude.” An ancient grudge with his former West Point mathematics instructor, Lieutenant General Devers—now the senior American commander in the Mediterranean—grew so toxic that Devers refused to deal directly with Clark; he used Lyman Lemnitzer, Alexander’s American deputy, as an intermediary. “They could not be together three minutes without being in a fight,” Lemnitzer said later. Clark considered Devers “a dope” and informed him that he had “too many bosses already.” To Field Marshal Wilson, Devers said of the Fifth Army commander, “He thinks he is God Almighty. He’s a headache to me and I would relieve him if I could, but I can’t.”

  Clark’s frictions with the British had only intensified in the spring. He complained that the Royal Navy “acted in many high-handed ways” and was “in no way cooperating with me.” On several occasions he grew so insolent with Alexander that Lemnitzer expected him to be fired, and warned Clark accordingly. The British high command in the Mediterranean so resented Clark’s “vexatious attitude” that in March there had been talk of requesting his relief; the insurrection collapsed after word of it leaked to the Pentagon, and for lack of support from Churchill.

  “Many happy returns of the day,” the prime minister had written in a birthday greeting to Clark. If still fond of the man he called “the American eagle,” Churchill was not above using other wildlife metaphors to assail the stalemate at Anzio. “We hoped to land a wildcat that would tear out the bowels of the Boche,” he told Eisenhower. “Instead, we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.” Churchill also fretted, as he told Wilson, about “a feeling of bitterness in Great Britain when the claim is stridently put forward, as it surely will be, that the Americans have taken Rome”; he urged that credit be “fairly shared.” While refusing to countenance a coup in Caserta, Churchill mused aloud about having Alexander command the Beachhead Army while Wilson took over the Cassino front, a crackpot notion that caused poor Brooke to confide, “I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic.”

  The task of handling Clark fell to Alexander, who demonstrated both patience and the shrewd eye of a gifted draftsman. From his palette of adjectives, Alexander later captured the man with precise brushstrokes: “Temperamental, very sensitive, extremely ambitious, vain, learned a lot as the campaign went on.” Although General Alex would have preferred to see Omar Bradley or Patton in command of Fifth Army—even if he suspected the latter was “too restless for slogging”—he rated Clark a fine commander. “Always cool in battle,” he added. “Never saw him frightened.”

  Never frightened, perhaps, but often anxious. A thousand cares weighed him down. Air cover at the beachhead remained spotty, and Clark disrupted his birthday festivities at Caserta on May 1 for a snarling row with Alexander over the disproportionate fighter and bomber support given Eighth Army at the expense of the Fifth. Casualties had become so corrosive that each U.S. infantry division in Italy could expect to lose its entire allotment of 132 second lieutenants in less than three months of combat. Although basic training had expanded from thirteen to seventeen weeks, many enlisted replacements arrived with marginal military skills, and some were unable to read. The newest units to join Fifth Army—the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions, both in Keyes’s II Corps—were the first into combat of fifty-five U.S. divisions built mostly from draftees; their worth had yet to be proven. Four of six infantry regimental commanders in those two divisions had already been relieved, as Clark advised Marshall, “for a combination of age and physical reasons.”

  There was more: the two British divisions still at Anzio remained so weak that both Truscott and Clark believed they would contribute little to any renewed offensive. The British Army since Salerno had suffered 46,000 battle casualties, with thousands more sick, yet replacements had not kept up with losses. Moreover, as Gruenther also noted, “Many British troops have been fighting for four or five years, and are in some cases pretty tired.”

  Few British commanders disagreed. “Absenteeism and desertion are still problems,” wrote General Penney, back in command of the British 1st Division at Anzio after recovering from his wounds. “Shooting in the early days would probably have been an effective prophylactic.” On average, 10 British soldiers were convicted of desertion each day in the spring of 1944, and an estimated 30,000 “slinkers” were “on the trot” in Italy. “The whole matter is hushed up,” another British division commander complained.

  Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. The U.S. Army would convict 21,000 deserters during World War II, many of them in the Mediterranean. Clark condemned the surge of self-inflicted wounds in Fifth Army and the “totally inadequate” prison sentences of five to ten years for U.S. soldiers convicted of “misbehavior before the enemy.” A psychiatric analysis of 2,800 American troops convicted of desertion or going AWOL in the Mediterranean catalogued thirty-five reasons offered by the culprits, including “My nerves gave way” and “I was scared.”

  A twenty-two-year-old rifleman who deserted at Cassino after seven months in combat was typical. “I feel like my nervous system is burning up. My heart jumps,” he said. “I get so scared I can hardly move.” Those symptoms affected tens of thousands, and added to Clark’s worries. “Combat exhaustion,” a term coined in Tunisia to supplant the misnomer “shell shock,” further eroded Allied fighting strength in Italy, as it did elsewhere: roughly one million U.S. soldiers would be hospitalized during the war for “neuro-psychiatric” symptoms, and half a million would be discharged from the service for “personality disturbances.”

  All troops were at risk, but none more than infantrymen, who accounted for 14 percent of the Army’s overseas strength and sustained 70 percent of the casualtie
s. A study of four infantry divisions in Italy found that a soldier typically no longer wondered “whether he will be hit, but when and how bad.” The Army surgeon general concluded that “practically all men in rifle battalions who were not otherwise disabled ultimately became psychiatric casualties,” typically after 200 to 240 cumulative days in combat. “There aren’t any iron men,” wrote Brigadier General William C. Menninger, a prominent psychiatrist. “The strongest personality, subjected to sufficient stress a sufficient length of time, is going to disintegrate.”

  Treatment by “narcosynthesis,” often using sodium amytal or nembutal, healed some combat-exhausted soldiers with deep sleep. The 45th General Hospital in Naples, which would admit more than five thousand neuropsychiatric patients in 1944, also used extensive electric-shock therapy. But generally fewer than one “NP” patient in five returned to duty.

  All of these issues impaired Fifth Army’s ability to reach Rome, and it was Rome that increasingly obsessed Clark. In Washington, he had learned that OVERLORD was now scheduled for early June; to capture Rome and invade Normandy concurrently would provide a glorious double blow to Axis morale. Even if the Eternal City was of dubious military value, it offered a dramatic symbol, a rightful and prestigious prize after so many months of struggle.

  But getting there quickly was paramount, before OVERLORD eclipsed the Italian campaign—and before the British could steal Fifth Army’s thunder. Churchill’s suspicion was well founded: Clark had no intention of sharing credit for capturing the capital. He had, in fact, begun to exhibit signs of paranoia about British designs.