The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  At four P.M. on Tuesday, Clark met with thirty-one reporters at Caserta. Using a large map and a pointer, he was both calm and commanding in describing DIADEM in detail. Fifth Army now mustered 350,000 men, including the two new divisions under General Keyes. Each U.S. division had received an extra 750 men to accommodate expected casualties; the British divisions, Clark noted, “are not quite up to strength.” Kesselring’s force totaled 412,000 men in twenty-three divisions in Italy, including nine along the Cassino front in Tenth Army and five more at Anzio in Fourteenth Army. Clark kept to himself other particulars, which Ultra had revealed: Kesselring possessed 326 serviceable tanks, 616 antitank guns, and 180 assault guns—and that he rated only two of his divisions as “fit to take the offensive.”

  The animating principle behind the initial Allied attack scheduled for Thursday night was simple: “Everybody throws everything they have at the same time.” At long last, “the total resources” of both Fifth and Eighth Armies would fall on the enemy simultaneously. The subsidiary attack out of the beachhead would depend on progress in cracking the Gustav Line. Clark expected a tortuous grind, with daily progress limited to two miles or less. In view of the German scorched-earth tactics in Naples, he assumed that Rome would be despoiled. In a veiled allusion to OVERLORD, he added, “The more Boche we can hold down here, the more we can kill, the more we will contribute to operations which will overshadow this one.”

  He made no mention of his quarrel with Alexander, or his assertion to Truscott that Rome “is the only important objective.” Nor did he hint that he already had begun to consider disobeying orders.

  “The attack I would like to make under proper conditions is right out toward Route 6, to cut it,” Clark told the scribes. He gestured on the map toward Valmontone. “Rome is of political value and we hope to take it,” he added, with studied nonchalance. “But our first mission is to kill as many Germans as we can.”

  General Alex would be pleased. The Americans had fallen into line.

  Albert Kesselring knew nothing of the dispute within the Allied high command, but that condition was of a piece with his larger ignorance of enemy strength, deployment, and intentions. Axis troops—including Russian prisoner-of-war volunteers armed with antique Italian weapons—peered seaward on both coasts for the amphibious landing Kesselring was sure would fall. German intelligence analysts had identified nine of twenty-two Allied regimental command posts on the Fifth Army front, but could pinpoint none of them; nor could they identify or locate most Allied division headquarters. German gunners so consistently fired leaflets in the wrong language to the wrong troops—Urdu to the Kiwis, Arabic to the British, English to the French—that Clark’s G-2 believed “it could be only a deliberate attempt to conceal his knowledge of our order of battle.” In fact, Kesselring was blind.

  A Moroccan deserter several weeks earlier had sworn that the Allied offensive would begin April 25. Senior Wehrmacht officers packed their kit and rose early, only to feel “rather sheepish” when the front remained quiet. “Whenever you are well-prepared,” complained Major General Fritz Wentzell, the Tenth Army chief of staff, “nothing happens.” Now the attack was predicted for May 20 or later. After telling his subordinates on May 10 that he did “not expect anything in the immediate future,” Vietinghoff left for the Führer retreat in Bavaria to collect another medal. In late April, General von Senger also had taken a month’s leave to receive a similar decoration and to attend a conference in Berchtesgaden, along with Ernst-Günther Baade, his most trusted division commander. Siegfried Westphal, Kesselring’s exhausted chief of staff, had departed two weeks earlier on convalescent leave.

  If Kesselring was blind and misinformed, he was not stupid. He assumed the Allied main attack would follow Highway 6, the only avenue where armor could deploy in mass. To strengthen defenses around Cassino, he rearranged his line, summoning LI Mountain Corps from the Adriatic and shifting Senger’s XIV Panzer Corps across the Liri Valley. With the Führer determined to fight for every Italian hilltop, engineers since December had built yet another bulwark across the peninsula: the Hitler Line, a fortified string of redoubts five to ten miles behind the Gustav Line. Some 77,000 German troops shored up the beachhead perimeter, and another 82,000 held the southern front, seventy miles away. The German strategy in Italy, Kesselring now declared, was “simply to make the enemy exhaust himself.”

  Still, he misread the omens: the bridging equipment unloaded near the Garigliano; the Allied patrols unspooling white tape; the oppressive silence. On Wednesday, May 10, Wentzell phoned Kesselring’s headquarters with his daily report. “To my great pleasure, everything is quiet,” he told a staff officer. “Only I do not know what is going on. Things are becoming ever more uncertain.”

  “I have told this to the field marshal,” the officer replied. “He looks very intently towards the coast.”

  “In past times one heard at least once in a while that such-and-such division had left Africa. But now one hears nothing,” Wentzell said. “I think it is not impossible that things are going on of which we have no idea.”

  Red Cross volunteers behind Monte Trocchio handed out sandbags filled with cigarettes, dates, and oranges to Allied troops tramping toward the Rapido staging areas. “It was like a goodbye gift,” one soldier said. Mule hooves now were sheathed in sacking to quiet the clop, and conspicuously white animals had been culled from the trains. Every brake and copse along the front grew stiff with soldiers. Some thumbed through a GI’s guide to Italian cities, which stressed Leonardo da Vinci’s military inventions—“hand grenades, shrapnel, the parachute”—and assured them that Rome’s Colosseum “wasn’t wrecked by Long Toms. It got that way through the passage of time.” A battalion surgeon recorded in his diary, “Blackjack for twenty dollars a card…I win over two hundred dollars and now worry where to carry all that money.”

  A Canadian soldier scrutinizing the blasted landscape near Cassino asked, “Who the hell would want to live here, let alone fight over it?” But Fred Majdalany concluded that “Cassino had become what in the earlier war Ypres was to the British, Verdun to the French. It was a cause in its own right, a cause to die for.” Many had, more would. Polish troops swapped their boots for canvas slippers or wrapped their feet in rags before creeping toward Snakeshead Ridge behind the abbey. The scent of red clover mingled with ruder scents, and the Poles tried covering Indian corpses with blankets to contain the smell. “The place was alive with rats,” a platoon leader in the 3rd Carpathian Division complained.

  A dozen miles to the southwest, an officer in the 88th Division listened to the murmur of his men praying aloud. Between the lines, the blackened bodies of soldiers killed in earlier skirmishes reminded him of “irregular pieces of driftwood on a rocky beach.” Jumpy Senegalese sentries fired at what appeared to be the glowing cigarettes of approaching strangers but proved to be fireflies, which they had never seen.

  On the gun line in the rear, engineers blasted pits for a recently arrived 8-inch battery; each tube required thirteen cannoneers to manhandle the forty-five-foot staff used to swab the barrel after each round. Others stacked shells with new molybdenum fuzes capable of penetrating steel-reinforced concrete. Small holes were drilled in the casings to intensify the scream in flight.

  From the beachhead to the Apennines, scribbling men struggled to find the right words in their letters home. “Busy days, nerve trying days,” Jack Toffey wrote Helen. “One smokes too much—drinks too much if he can get it, and sleeps too little if he can get that.” He burned most of Helen’s letters to lighten his load. “This hurts me to do,” he told her, “but space had become such a factor that I found it necessary to retain only yours of April and May.” While certain that “the Kraut is going to catch hell from all sides at any time,” Toffey confessed that “I am a bit war weary.” He had resigned himself to fighting for the duration. “I’ll be home when they build a bridge and we march over it,” he told her. “How long Oh Lord—how long?”

  Com
manders evinced the requisite public élan while privately venting their anxieties. “If Alex is a military genius, I’m Greta Garbo,” Keyes told his diary on May 10. “He is obsessed with the idea that the Germans are going to give up and run.” A few hours later Alexander cabled Churchill: “Our objective is the destruction of the enemy south of Rome.” As for the prime minister, a note of desperation had crept into the message he sent George Marshall. “We must throw our hearts into this battle for the sake of which so many American and British lives have already been sacrificed, and make it like OVERLORD—an all-out conquer or die.”

  H-hour was fixed for eleven P.M. on May 11, half an hour before moonrise. The day dawned gray and damp enough to lay the dust, then faired in the afternoon. A grizzled French spahi told a young American liaison officer, “I do not know where my son is tonight, and your father does not know where his son is. So tonight we will be father and son.” The Frenchman had ten days to live. Shelling on both sides dwindled to a mutter at last light, then ceased entirely, yielding to what Alexander called “a strange, impressive silence.” Stars threw down their silver spears. “New boys with fear and nerves and anxiety hidden under quick smiles,” a Canadian chaplain wrote. “It is the hardest thing to watch without breaking into tears.”

  12. THE GREAT PRIZE

  Shaking Stars from the Heavens

  THE BBC pips had not finished signaling the top of the hour at eleven P.M. on Thursday, May 11, when gusts of white flame erupted in a thirty-mile crescent across the hills of central Italy. Light leaped from two thousand gun pits, laving the cannoneers as they danced bare-chested at their breechblocks, shoving home another shell, and another, and another. Ruby tongues licked from the muzzles, as drifting smoke rings lassoed the constellations and concussion ghosts chased one another through the night. “It seemed it must shake the very stars out of the heavens,” a Black Watch soldier wrote.

  Men peered from their trenches or crowded into farmhouse doorways to watch the spectacle, their faces reddened in the glow and their helmets jarred by the percussive shock. “Rome, then home!” they bellowed. Nightingales had sung in the silence before the cannonade; now they sang louder but to small effect. “The roar of the guns is so deafening that you can shout at the man next to you and still not be heard,” a medical officer in the 88th Division wrote. “Sheets of flame spring behind every bush. The hills to our north are spattered with phosphorus bursts that illuminate the entire horizon.” Above the abbey and Cassino town, scores of German flares added their own sibilant brilliance, tiny red and silver supernovas that stretched the shadows. “The sky,” a Royal Hampshire account noted, “was full of noises.”

  Gunners draped wet rags over their sizzling barrels or poured cans of water down the muzzles, then reloaded. Fifth Army alone would fire 174,000 shells in the first twenty-four hours of DIADEM, requital for months of peninsular misery. “I felt as if a bridge of iron was being erected overhead, and wondered how it was that shells did not collide,” a Polish corporal in the 3rd Carpathian Division reported. As the barrage continued, Alexander sent Churchill a prearranged confirmation that the offensive had begun: “Zip, repeat, zip.”

  Rome, then home. At midnight on the Allied right, the Eighth Army assault battalions shook out and surged forward through the vibrating air like wasps from an angry hive. Where the Americans and then the New Zealand Corps had attacked enemy strongpoints months before, Eighth Army would also attack but with twice the strength and more: two Polish divisions up Monte Cassino rather than just the 4th Indian, two British divisions across the Rapido—with two more to follow, and then the entire Canadian Corps—rather than just the U.S. 36th Division. Shell fire scythed the enemy redoubts. “We were confident,” a British platoon commander said, “that no Germans could possibly outlive such a devastating bombardment.”

  The Poles found otherwise. “Soldiers! The moment for battle has arrived,” General Anders told his men. “We have long awaited the moment for revenge and retribution over our hereditary enemy.” Troops surged up Snakeshead Ridge toward Point 593, that scabrous knuckle, following trails marked with painted phosphorescent arrows. Within five hundred yards they were burrowing beneath the bodies of dead comrades, seeking cover from murderous machine-gun and mortar fire. By mischance, the hereditary enemy had chosen the night of May 11 to relieve defenders behind Monte Cassino with fresh troops: the hillside garrison was nearly double its normal strength. Nine German battalions opposed the Poles.

  “Many of us had lost our exact bearings and there was a great deal of confusion,” a Polish platoon leader reported. To keep secret the presence of the Polish corps at Cassino, Leese had refused to let Anders reconnoiter the terrain. Hand-to-hand fighting clattered across the slopes in what Anders called “a collection of small epics.” The 5th Kresowa Division seized Phantom Ridge, a mile northwest of the abbey, but took a savage pounding on the exposed hogback. A 3rd Carpathian battalion captured Point 593 but an attack on nearby Point 569 collapsed after Polish artillery fire—hampered by a shortage of observation posts—lifted too quickly and riflemen were slaughtered in a saddle below the hill. When Polish sappers later balked at clearing a minefield, a Carpathian commander barked over the radio, “If they do not obey orders, shoot them.” They obeyed: of twenty engineers in one minesweeping detail, eighteen would be killed or wounded. “You don’t know how dreadful death can be,” a dying Pole told his comrades. “Now I shall have to miss the rest of the battle.”

  At dawn, the rising sun fired the hilltops as if they had been dipped in copper. All morning and past the meridian the killing continued. German snipers used the light to lethal advantage, picking off Poles “like sitting birds.” Anders had been given sixteen flamethrowers but little instruction in how to use them; most were ruined by German artillery and mortar fire, including two that burst into flame. “I was working on my knees. I was smeared all over with blood,” a Polish surgeon reported. “A corporal came and stood among the wounded…. Through his torn tunic I saw a wound the size of two hands, the shoulder-bone bared.” The corporal told him, “I shan’t let you evacuate me until I’ve thrown all my grenades.”

  Yet even Polish valor could not win through. Hundreds of dead men sprawled among the poppies and wild irises. By four P.M. on Friday, May 12, all momentum had seeped away. With his assault battalions depleted by half, Anders ordered both divisions back to their starting lines. The attack, one Polish writer noted, “was really no more than a very costly reconnaissance.”

  A British officer who arrived at General Leese’s command post late in the afternoon found him rambling through a field. As the officer began to deliver the bad news—attack repulsed, fearsome Polish losses—Leese held up a huge hand. “Let’s pick some cornflowers,” he said. They picked until their arms were laden with blue-headed stalks, then Leese said, “Right! Now tell me about the casualties.”

  Upon driving to the Polish II Corps headquarters, Leese found the usually elegant Anders slumped in his caravan, disheveled and in need of a shave. His eyes red, his face gray, the Polish commander turned and asked, “What do we do now?”

  What, indeed? If Eighth Army’s right wing had failed, the left wing was hardly capering toward Rome. Along the Rapido, the 8th Indian Division had been assigned to cross the river and capture Sant’Angelo, the dolorous village that had so bedeviled the 36th Division in January. As the barrage lifted early Friday morning, vapors from the river swallowed the rising moon. Khaki-drill columns wended through the fens, following white tape and hooded hurricane lanterns to the east bank. Vehicles crept forward, hauling boats or towing antitank guns. From upstream, a rude clanking carried on the night: a squad of 6th Lancers, crouching in defilade, banged angle iron against pieces of rail track as a deception to draw fire.

  Fire they drew, but so did the rest of the bridgehead. Assault troops splashed and paddled across the Rapido only to trip both antipersonnel mines left five months earlier by the Yanks and smoke canisters emplaced by German gunners as aiming
stakes. Within minutes smoke, mist, and cordite billowed through the bottoms “like a yellow London fog,” in Leese’s phrase. Visibility dropped to two feet.

  Men stumped about in flame-stabbed confusion, pitching into ditches and walking in circles. British gunners fired Bofors tracers overhead to show the azimuth of liberation, but “in the mist the shells quickly dimmed and were lost to sight,” a reporter observed. Royal Fusiliers reached the west bank above Sant’Angelo with few casualties, each soldier clinging to the bayonet scabbard of the man ahead. But now the ground between river and village was covered by a vermilion loom of enemy bullets, and stick grenades showered the bottoms from the Sant’Angelo bluffs. “Oh, God, don’t let me die yet,” Fusilier F. R. Beacham pleaded. “I promise that I will always be good if you let me live.” Coming upon a mortally wounded comrade, Beacham lifted a water bottle to his lips. “Thanks a lot, mate,” the man said, then passed over.

  Twelve of sixteen Gurkha boats sank or floated away. The four surviving craft ferried men through the small hours, with much shouting above the din from bank to bank. Farther upstream, all forty boats manned by a brigade of the British 4th Infantry Division were soon gone. Drowned men drifted on the dark current that had drowned so many before.

  By midday, no battalion in either the 8th Indian or the 4th Infantry had gained more than five hundred yards of an intended two thousand. Barely half of Leese’s objectives had been secured on the left, none on the right. Snipers whittled away the British as they did the Poles. After a major in the Derbyshire Yeomanry fell dead with a bullet in the brain, a subordinate offered a terse elegy: “He was an autocratic man but a good leader, and we came to regret his death.” A Fusilier who spent May 12 facedown in a ditch listening to the “sough and whiffle” of shells overhead later noted, “The day passed ever so slowly.”