The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Yet the enemy had missed his main chance. The absence of Vietinghoff, Westphal, Senger, Baade, and others impaired German dexterity; so did 350 tons of Allied bombs that battered Kesselring’s command post and demolished the Tenth Army headquarters near Avezzano, with “an unsteadying effect upon the occupants.” Confusion, error, fear—the usual frictions—played hob on the far side of the hill, and the crushing counterattack that might have crippled DIADEM never took shape.

  Three bridges, dubbed Cardiff, Oxford, and Plymouth, had been planned for the Rapido near Sant’Angelo. Cardiff was abandoned, but engineers carved ramps and filled ditches under scorching fire to throw a small span across at Oxford before nine A.M. on Friday. Two hours later and a thousand yards downstream, a pair of Sherman tanks muscled a one-hundred-foot Bailey bridge over the stream at Plymouth. Canadian tanks pelted for the far shore, “camouflaged with green boughs and looking like a harvest festival.”

  Upstream between Sant’Angelo and Cassino town, dead and dying engineers shored the riverbank. But by first light on Saturday, May 13, another span—Amazon—slid into place. A pipe major crossed, skirling, then fell mortally wounded. “Cries for help from the wounded…could be heard inside the tanks even though the crews were wearing headphones,” according to a 6th Armoured Division account. The tanks bulled ahead, riflemen clinging to their hulls with one hand and shooting with the other. Every so often the smoke and marsh mist parted to allow glimpses of the abbey, floating toward heaven.

  Gurkhas twice surged into Sant’Angelo on Friday, and twice machine gunners embedded in the rubble threw them back. Cairn by cairn, cellar by cellar, attackers rooted out defenders with grenades and curved kukri knives. A pair of Canadian tanks flanked the village, gunning down those who sought to slip away. By three P.M. Saturday, resistance had ended but for the odd sniper, at a cost of 170 Gurkha casualties. White dust floured the quick and the dead alike.

  Putrefying corpses were soaked in gasoline and set ablaze, then shoved into a trench. Some captured Germans were found to have wounds dressed with paper: enemy medics had run short of bandages. “This is real war,” a squadron commander in the 17th Battalion of the 21st Lancers scribbled in his notebook, “and makes Africa seem a picnic.” A Royal Artillery gunner in the 78th Division studied the consequences of his fall of shot: splintered rifles, smashed field glasses, dead Germans. “This is the terrifying thing about war,” he wrote. “When I saw what I had achieved, I had no regrets at all.”

  They pushed on, across the shot-torn fields, edging toward the mouth of the Liri Valley, where objectives had been code-named after famous Midlands hunts. A Canadian in the 48th Highlanders described being snagged by barbed wire with another soldier: “He was thrashing and fighting with the wire like a man gone insane. The bullets started socking into him, and he jerked and kicked with each new hit. Then he crumpled beside me. Nothing was very bad in the war after that.”

  Two secure bridgeheads merged to form a shallow purchase across the Rapido. Six more bridges opened, and thousands of smoke shells kept Monte Cassino swaddled in white. But unless the abbey and adjacent hills fell, German batteries threatened to flay anyone pushing up Highway 6 through the valley. “Flames of Jerry guns almost beautiful at dusk,” a Guards officer observed. “Spitting crimson, amber and opal.”

  In four days Eighth Army would advance just four miles, at a cost of more than four thousand casualties—a man down every five feet. Still, Leese took satisfaction where he could, even as he pondered how to convert his fragile bridgehead into the battle of annihilation that Alexander coveted.

  “Mark Clark has laid 4–1 against our crossing the Rapido,” Leese wrote. “As they say at a private school, ‘Sucks to him.’”

  Clark had troubles enough without British maledictions. Fifteen miles downstream from Cassino, on the far left of the Allied line, Geoffrey Keyes’s II Corps—composed of the 85th and 88th Divisions—had used its foothold across the Garigliano to push forward from Minturno in DIADEM’s early hours. Soldiers nervously worked their rifle bolts as they strode ahead, blankets and raincoats tied to their combat packs. Each man wore white adhesive strips or squares of white cloth on the back of his helmet and uniform sleeves to prevent fratricide; platoon leaders added extra white-tape chevrons to make themselves more recognizable to their men. Officers gobbled Benzedrine tablets. “Rome, Rome,” a lieutenant in the 88th Division chanted, “who gets Rome?”

  No one in II Corps, at least not yet. Sheaves of fire from the entrenched 94th Grenadier and 71st Infantry Divisions lashed the American ranks from the Gulf of Gaeta on the left to Ausente Creek on the right. Fifth Army intelligence had pinpointed 161 German machine-gun positions among some 600 along the front; that left more than 400 unaccounted for, until now. “The noise was all of a piece, an ocean of noise,” one soldier recalled. Smoke and haze clotted so that no amount of identifying tape was visible much beyond arm’s length. Red tracer vectors fired every few seconds pointed the way and demarcated unit boundaries—.50-caliber for companies, 40mm for battalions—but confusion still held sway. “What’s going on, fella?” a soldier yelled to Eric Sevareid. “They never tell us nuthin’.”

  The rising sun dried their uniforms: GIs scuttling into the mountains looked to one soldier like “a serpentine column of steam.” Sevareid described “bodies of men moving down narrow defiles or over steep inclines, going methodically from position to position between long halts.”

  Yet neither division moved far. The defiles grew narrower, the inclines steeper, the long halts longer. Most of all, the fire grew fiercer. An attack by the 351st Infantry against the hilltop village of Santa Maria Infante failed to take two critical hills known as the Tits. One company lost eighty-nine men; another fell for a German white-flag ruse, with fifty men captured. Among those killed in the day’s fighting was Frederick Schiller Faust, a prolific writer known as the King of the Pulps, who, under the pen name Max Brand, had turned out nearly four hundred westerns, including The Rangeland Avenger and Gunman’s Reckoning. Intent on writing a narrative about one platoon’s odyssey to Rome, Faust died from German 88mm fire only three hours and six hundred yards into the journey. As Sevareid observed, “Those who live are incredibly alive, and the others are stupefyingly dead.” By early Saturday morning, to Keyes’s chagrin and Clark’s dismay, the American attack had stalled.

  That left Juin’s FEC, which had pitched into the largest set-piece battle fought by the French army since 1940 with rousing choruses of the “Marseillaise” and “C’est nous les Africains.” As thirty or more artillery rounds fell on every charted German battery with little enemy fire in return, three divisions abreast surged into the craggy Auruncis.

  Plunging fire greeted them with the incivility of a slammed door. Moroccan infantrymen were pinned down in minefields beyond the Garigliano; those who breached the barbed wire and booby traps found flamethrowers and interlocking machine-gun fire waiting. Behind concrete German pillboxes stood more bunkers and blockhouses. French troops near Castelforte picked their way into a badlands teeming with snipers and mortarmen. Soon the landscape smelled of singed hair and burning flesh, human and mule. Counterattacking grenadiers slashed at the French flanks with such fury that FEC officers on Monte Faito called artillery onto their own positions to avoid being overrun.

  By midmorning on Friday, May 12, Juin’s legions were hardly beyond their starting lines. Ten assault battalions in the French center had achieved little penetration, and the FEC, like II Corps and the Poles, could claim few of its objectives. Fifth Army casualties approached sixteen hundred. Losses among French officers were particularly grievous, and it was said that German ferocity had triggered “considerable alarm in FEC headquarters.” An officer with the Tunisians observed, “Due to the intense heat, the dead take on a waxy look. They’re everywhere.”

  Juin went forward shortly before noon, beret tugged down to his ears, cigarette smoldering in its holder. First by jeep, then by hard climb, he scaled the flank of Monte Or
nito on a path carpeted with dead mules, the odd mortar shell bursting nearby. Stretcher bearers passed him on the narrow trail, carrying three wounded battalion commanders to the rear. “This thing got off on the wrong foot,” he announced at the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division command post. “We must begin again.”

  Through much of the afternoon he scrambled up and back, watching, assessing. Upon returning to his headquarters at Sessa Aurunca he summoned his staff, rapped on a table, and said in his smoky voice, “It’s gone wrong. But they are as tired as we are.” Before defeating the Germans, the FEC must first “conquer the ground.” Corps artillery would be redirected to support, preeminently, the 2nd Moroccan in a push through the center of the line toward Monte Majo, a three-thousand-foot limestone bastion that served as a gateway to the Petrella Massif. Infiltrators would first outflank enemy strongpoints on the right. Engineers could blow gaps in the barbed wire with bangalore torpedoes, and moonlight in the small hours on Saturday would suffice to lay a barrage just ahead of the attacking infantry. Juin also would fling his only reserve division into the fight. “We’ll start again tomorrow morning after a full-scale artillery preparation,” he said, “and it will go.”

  It went, spectacularly. A deft shift of artillery caught German counterattackers in the open at 5:30 A.M. on May 13, chopping them to pieces. Indifferent to enemy shells thudding nearby, Juin watched his Moroccans vanish into a ravine below Monte Faito, then emerge on the far slope, chanting “La Allah ihl Allah” as a column of prisoners in field gray streamed to the rear. Four hundred French and Fifth Army guns set the mountains ablaze. By midafternoon, Moroccan soldiers reported Monte Majo captured and a two-mile gap torn in the Gustav Line. The enemy 71st Division—mostly flatlanders from Lower Saxony who had considered the Auruncis impregnable—was cut in half, leaving both flanks open to exploitation. An intercepted German radio message advised, “Accelerate the general withdrawal.”

  By Sunday the French had advanced seven miles across a sixteen-mile front, unhinging German defenses beyond the Garigliano. “En avant!” Juin urged. FEC casualties exceeded two thousand, but nine hundred prisoners had been captured; many complained of shelling worse than in Russia. On Monte Majo’s summit appeared an enormous tricolor, measuring twelve by twenty-five feet and visible from Cassino to the sea. “This,” Juin said, “is warfare to which we are accustomed.” The 71st Division commander’s assessment was terser: “Most unpleasant.”

  The unpleasantries had only begun, for with the capture of Castelforte by Algerian troops on the French left, Juin was able to slip the leash from his Berber irregulars. The vanguard of twelve thousand goumiers—invariably shortened to goums by the Yanks—had passed through the north end of town on Friday night, many on horseback. Five hundred yards beyond the last house the column swung west off the road, following a narrow trail into the Aurunci wilds with orders to cut Highway 82 between Itri and Pico—nearly twenty miles in the German rear—and thus turn the enemy’s right flank.

  “Dark men, dark night,” Montgomery had once said of the goums. “Very hard to see coming.” Most wore sandals, wool socks, gloves with the trigger fingers snipped off, and striped djellabas; a beard, a soup-bowl helmet, and a foot-long knife at the belt completed the ensemble. “It was as if troops of the last century had been reincarnated and suddenly appeared at our side,” said an American colonel in the adjacent 88th Division. Juin considered them “vigorous, reliable, [and] very abstemious”; another French general said they “lived only for brigandage and war.” Some wore their booty, an Algerian officer observed: “dozens of wristwatches on their arms, collections of rings on their fingers, and strings of shoes and boots hanging on their backs.” One unit kept a tiger as a mascot. Upon encountering their Anglo-American confreres they typically gestured for a cigarette, calling, “Smokie, smokie, Joe?”

  It was said that in Sicily they took not only enemy ears as trophies but entire heads. It was said that goums creeping through the night would feel a sentry’s bootlaces for the unique German loop before deciding whether to cut the man’s throat. It was said that a goum had sold a GI a quart jar of fingers pickled in brandy. A U.S. military hospital treating French casualties handled so many goums with the same single names that doctors assigned numbers on their charts—Abdullah 4, Muhammed 6. “Their long hair is braided in pigtails. They sing, chatter, and howl,” one physician wrote. “Many carry chickens under their arms.” A nurse admired their skill in “cracking nuts with their teeth,” but lamented the theft of hospital towels for turbans. “The Arab soldier is interested in just three things: women, horses, and guns,” a French officer told an American colonel, who replied, “The American soldier is the same, except that he doesn’t care anything about horses and guns.”

  Up and up they climbed with a Moroccan infantry regiment and Algerian artillery, splitting into three forces, each angling west and then north through nearly trackless terrain, including one vertical stretch that rose four hundred feet in less than a half mile. “The sky was a changeless blue, the heat implacable,” a French officer reported:

  From a soil glistening with mica, the hard little hooves of the Arab horses struck up clouds of grasshoppers. Beside their horses and mules, the goumiers loped tirelessly onwards with long ambling stride, forage caps askew, an eternal rictus on the lips, ignoring the heat despite woolen djellabas.

  By four P.M. on May 15, the lead scouts had scaled the forward heights of the Petrella Massif; by the next morning, they stood on the crest of Monte Revole, more than four thousand feet up and a dozen miles beyond the Garigliano. When an unwitting Wehrmacht battalion blundered into a nearby valley, goumiers encircled both flanks in a horseshoe ambush, then swept down the slopes “like falling boulders.” German survivors later described “grinning savages with knives in their hands, obviously quite eager to begin the butchery.”

  Men and beasts had exhausted themselves and far outrun their supply lines. Just past noon on May 17, a fleet of U.S. bombers dropped forty tons of food and ammunition across the mountain peaks. The goumiers would spend a day recovering the crates and recuperating, then push on.

  On the French left, the Americans also were on the move after punching through the stout but brittle enemy line that had thwarted II Corps for two days at a cost of three thousand casualties. With ample replacements in the wings, Keyes replenished his ranks and threw fresh troops against the depleted grenadiers on the same narrow front. Santa Maria Infante fell on May 14 after relentless pummeling by fighter-bombers and white-phosphorus shells. Soon the 85th Division was pressing along the Via Appia in the coastal flats with a dust-churning flotilla of men, trucks, mules, tanks, and tank destroyers. On the heights to their right, the 88th Division lunged through Spigno and onto the Petrella Massif, guided by local peasants along goat paths a few miles south of the FEC.

  The enemy had been “rushed off his feet,” in Juin’s phrase. On the Fifth Army right, the nearly extinct 71st Division had suffered five thousand casualties, mostly from 150,000 artillery rounds; the division told Kesselring’s headquarters that no more than a hundred riflemen were still fit to fight. Allied shells and aircraft battered the German rear, terrorizing horses hitched to gun carriages and supply wagons. After a gallant stand by one grenadier unit, Kesselring told Vietinghoff, “One could cry with admiration.”

  All this buoyed the Allied high command after so many miscarriages. Alexander bounded into Clark’s command post to pronounce himself “very pleased” with the attack. Juin swanned about in his jeep, barking, “We’ve got them.” The replenished goumiers would cut Highway 82 while the rest of the FEC converged on Pico in the German rear, within rifle range of the Liri.

  Only Clark remained somber. He sent Juin two congratulatory bottles of whiskey, but the “delinquency” of II Corps irked him. The FEC had averaged about two miles a day since DIADEM began, compared with just over one for II Corps. The Americans also seemed unprepared for headlong pursuit, so much so that Clark threatened “disciplinary action
” against all laggards. Keyes’s troops overran surprised German artillery batteries at Spigno and then seized Itri on Highway 82. But traffic snarls at the narrow crossroads delayed the 88th Division’s push toward Fondi, nine miles to the northwest and a linchpin of the Hitler Line.

  “I am disappointed in the rigidity of II Corps plans,” Clark told his diary with the reproachful tone of a man determined to disapprove. “They have not shown a flexibility of mind and an aggressive attitude.” Keyes in turn wrote of Clark:

  Called me about 6 times. Each time finding fault, saying he was embarrassed and his face was red at the French and Goums doing so well and getting so many prisoners…. He acts like a 15-year-old kid…. A [shell] fragment tore a hole in the seat of my jeep. I wasn’t in it.

  Even as he lashed his commanders, and as much as he wanted to lead the liberation procession into Rome, Clark harbored tactical anxieties about his troops surging too far beyond the British. By May 18, the FEC would be six miles ahead of Eighth Army, putting the Allied front on a severe slant and exposing Fifth Army’s right flank to counterattacks. Clark could only conclude, again, that Leese and the British were not pulling their weight. “I am disappointed,” he wrote, “in the effort of the Eighth Army.”

  That same Eighth Army was about to claim the grandest prize on the Gustav Line. With British and Canadian troops inching past Cassino town to force the Liri Valley, Leese at seven A.M. on Wednesday, May 17, once again ordered Anders and his Poles into the breach. Once again the 5th Kresowa Division sortied against Phantom Ridge, a mile north of the abbey, while the 3rd Carpathian swarmed up Snakeshead Ridge, shooting at every silhouette suggestive of a paratrooper’s chamber-pot helmet.