The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  It never happened. The 362nd had lost half its fighting strength on May 23 alone, just as the Hermann Görings had lost two-thirds of their infantry in the past week; Fourteenth Army’s functioning panzer fleet consisted of thirty-three tanks. The army was bleeding to death. Disorder and misapprehension carried the day: Mackensen, inattentive and resentful of Kesselring’s meddling, believed that the porous boundary between the corps had been fused. Even if a few rifle companies slipped across Artemisio, surely no tank could scale that volcanic shoulder.

  Cuckoos sang in the night woods. Just enough pale light seeped from the new moon for shadows to spread beneath the chestnuts. “Douse that cigarette,” a voice snarled, “or I’ll blow your head off.” The offending glow proved to be the luminous face of a soldier’s wristwatch.

  For four hours on Tuesday evening, the assault regiments gathered in the forest, stacking bedrolls, filling canteens, fixing bayonets. Congested roads had delayed the truck convoys as one battalion after another slipped from the line along the Via Appia for the sixteen-mile loop back through Cisterna before swinging northeast past Cori to dismount east of Velletri. “I may not be able to write very often in the near future. Don’t think anything of it, for it’s just routine,” a private in the 142nd Infantry scribbled in a note to his mother. “No news here, just the same old grind.” Blued by starlight, sergeants padded through their platoons, vowing to court-martial any man who fired a shot without orders. Colonel George E. Lynch, the 142nd commander, confessed to feeling “breathless anticipation.”

  At eleven P.M., an hour late, the great column surged forward. A dog barked, another howled; a jackass brayed in the night. “We expected to meet the enemy in every shadow,” a soldier later wrote. By 1:30 A.M. on Wednesday, May 31, scouts had scurried across the Valmontone road, darting past the wall tombs of a local cemetery and through grapevines that twined up leaning poles to form leafy cones. Artemisio loomed like a shadow cast against the sky, black and silent but for the cuckoos. Far to the left, distant machine-gun fire—“like corn popping in a deep kettle,” Sevareid wrote—signaled the 141st Infantry’s diversionary attack against Velletri. The soldiers were climbing now, up the thin, steep scratch of the logging trace, each man chuffing so that the column seemed to suspire like a dark, winded serpent.

  At three A.M. the drone of a plane drew antiaircraft fire near Velletri. Then chandelier flares blossomed, drenching the mountain in silver light. The men fell flat as one, lying motionless for ten minutes, twenty. The flares winked out and they scrambled to their feet. The climb resumed.

  The first gray wash of dawn, at 4:15, soon leached out the stars, but haze swaddled the slope to keep the men concealed. At 6:35, three German artillery observers were captured unawares, including one found bathing in a creek. Through the morning American soldiers spread across the ridgeline, shooing away Schmalz’s engineer platoon with a spatter of rifle fire. The midday sun burned off the haze, revealing a panorama: Valmontone and Highway 6 seven miles to the east; Anzio, Nettuno, and the glittering sea twenty miles to the southwest; and directly below, Velletri and Highway 7. Tiny figures in field gray strolled about in the German rear, unaware that six thousand American soldiers were behind them.

  Behind the column came the bulldozers, “roaring and rearing” along a strip of white engineering tape that demarcated the route, three dozers at first, and eventually fifteen, each adding another foot of width to the graded road. Blue sparks sprayed from the blades as they shoved rocks and saplings from the trail, slashing hairpins wide enough for a tank to turn without throwing a track. “Don’t spare the horses,” a captain told the lead dozer operator, Corporal John Bob Parks. Sappers blew over trees too big to bulldoze, or felled them with two-man timber saws. On the steepest grades, small dozers were hauled up with snatch block and cable, then slashed their way down while soldiers with shovels manicured the verges. “Up, up, up all the time,” Parks later recalled, with the captain reminding him “again and again that I was holding up the whole damned Fifth Army…. I lost track of time and everything else except that damn white tracing tape that was always in front of me.”

  Through the night and the following day they toiled, scraping and grading, until a one-way boulevard led to Artemisio’s crest. Behind them came the tanks, self-propelled guns, and artillery observers with optics and field phones, chortling at the vista from the high ground that was finally theirs. The 143rd Infantry reported so many observers flocking to the heights that they resembled “crows on a telephone line.”

  Kesselring learned that the enemy was in his rear when a German artillery officer on Artemisio reported GIs storming his command post. The field marshal had already lambasted Mackensen for neglecting to seal the corps boundary across the mountain. Yet the fog of war persisted even as the haze lifted. Mackensen discounted his jeopardy after a dispatch from the front at eleven A.M. on May 31 claimed that only eighty enemy soldiers had infiltrated; a subsequent report asserted they had been “mopped up completely.” Reports to the contrary simply thickened the fog. The Fourteenth Army battle log on May 31 recorded that “the enemy managed to infiltrate two battalions,” but Mackensen continued to estimate American strength on the mountain at no more than one and a half battalions.

  Kesselring at nine P.M. on May 31 ordered Mackensen “at all costs” to extirpate the Allied salient on Artemisio, now five miles deep. Privately he feared the game was up: I Parachute Corps that same evening warned that the front was “ripe for collapse.” Desperate for reinforcements, Mackensen summoned a police battalion from Rome to plug the gap; equally desperate and ineffectual, Kesselring ordered a Luftwaffe unit arriving in Livorno to hie for the front. The men were mounted on bicycles.

  Ambushes and precise artillery now began to tear apart German convoys lumbering down Highway 7 from Rome. Bazooka teams struck a tank column pushing out of Velletri; the German commander flew from his turret “like a cork out of a champagne bottle.” When enemy snipers in mottled camouflage signaled one another with cuckoo calls on Artemisio’s flanks, GIs raked the woods with blistering fire, shooting up birds and Germans alike. After a captain with a tommy gun killed a gargantuan enemy soldier, his men lay beside the corpse as if comparing themselves to a sleeping Gulliver. “I only came up to his arm pit and I was six-two,” one GI reported. “I measured him and removed his watch.” Canteens taken from the dead were found to be filled with cognac.

  By dawn on June 1, Velletri was surrounded and American scouts stood on the highest peaks in the Colli Laziali, staring down on Lake Nemi and at Castel Gandolfo, on the far shore of Lake Albano; through the haze on the northern horizon floated the domes and spires of Rome. Only eleven 36th Division soldiers had been killed.

  Outside Velletri, Walker paced beneath a rail trestle in a “state of perturbation,” urging his men to smarten the pace. When a column of captured enemy soldiers shuffled past, he gave one his boot, then regretted the impulse. “Most unbecoming of a major general to kick a German prisoner,” he wrote.

  Through Thursday afternoon, tanks and infantrymen bulled through Velletri’s rubble, battling diehards house to house and hand to hand. Those who tried to break the cordon by fleeing on foot or in trucks careering up Highway 7 drew sleeting fire that left the roadbed tiled with bodies. At dusk the final mutter of gunfire subsided, and the Allies owned another guttering town. Blood had risen in the gorge, and tankers drove across enemy corpses to hear the bones crack beneath their tracks. “It didn’t bother me,” a soldier wrote. As 250 dazed German prisoners emerged beneath white flags, Truscott drove up to find Walker again scrutinizing the landscape with his engineer’s squint. “You can go in now, General,” Walker said. “The town is yours.”

  General Schmalz reported that all phone communication within the Hermann Göring Division had ceased. He could no longer find his subordinate command posts; the reconnaissance battalion had a fighting strength of eighteen men; and his panzer grenadier regiment no longer existed. The front, he added, was “torn
wide open.”

  A 36th Division artillery lieutenant offered his own assessment. “Getting little sleep these days,” he wrote in his diary. “Going fine, victory is a wonderful thing.”

  Expulsion of the Barbarians

  CYPRESS trees stood sentinel along the northbound roads, tapered green flames that seemed to bend beneath the weight of the Allied advance. Near Highway 6, a child kicked the corpse of a Wehrmacht officer until a young woman shoved him aside and yanked off the dead man’s boots. German caisson teams sprawled in the roadbed, butchered by Spitfires. “The horses had fallen in harness, with their heads high in the air, eyes opened and distended in terror,” wrote J. Glenn Gray. “There were many of them, in columns, and the strafing bullet wounds were hardly visible.” GIs scratched their initials on the gun carriages.

  Outside Valmontone ranks of dead American soldiers lay within the garden walls of a Franciscan convent transformed into a mortuary. “Over each one of them we placed a blanket under which stuck out the shoes in the sun, giving the impression of being extremely large,” an Italian witness later recalled. German snipers popped away across hill and dale. When a GI abruptly pitched over, a tanker yelled to a crouching rifleman, “Is he hurt bad?” The rifleman shook his head. “No, he ain’t hurt. He’s dead.”

  Clark took nothing for granted, even as the breakthrough on Monte Artemisio “caused all of us to turn handsprings.” Ubiquitous and intense, aware of the imminent invasion at Normandy, he lashed the troops with unsparing urgency. Eleven of his divisions pounded north along five trunk roads that converged on Rome from the lower boot. Alexander on Friday, June 2, shifted the interarmy boundary north of Highway 6 to give Fifth Army—now 369,000 strong—a wider attack corridor. General Harding, Alexander’s chief of staff, phoned Gruenther with effusive praise. “He stated it with such a sincere tone that I am certain he meant what he said,” Gruenther told Clark. “For my part I am throwing my hat in the air and yelling, ‘Hip, hip, hooray.’”

  Clark’s peaked cap remained on his head. “I’m disappointed in the 45th and 34th today. They’ve not gotten anyplace,” he told Don Carleton in a call to VI Corps early Friday evening.

  “They got a lot of prisoners and killed a lot of Germans,” Carleton replied.

  “But they haven’t gone any place,” Clark said. “I want to take ground.”

  With casualties climbing and Harmon’s 1st Armored Division losing over two hundred tanks in eight days, Clark fretted that another delay likely meant waiting for Eighth Army “to get into the act.” Indeed, Alexander on Friday night privately mused that if Clark failed to finish routing the enemy within forty-eight hours, “we shall have to stage a combined attack by both Fifth and Eighth armies when the latter gets up.” Even Clark’s mother urged alacrity. “Please take Rome soon,” she wrote her son from Washington. “I’m all frazzled out.”

  He was trying, driven by dreams of glory undimmed and unshared. When Alexander’s headquarters proposed a communiqué that would read, “Rome is now in Allied hands,” Clark told Gruenther, “They carefully avoid the use of ‘Fifth Army,’ and say ‘Allies.’ You call Harding immediately. Tell him I don’t agree to this paper.” Churchill renewed his plea for shared Anglo-American honors. “I hope that British as well as Americans will enter the city simultaneously,” the prime minister had written Alexander on Tuesday. But few Tommies could be found in the Fifth Army vanguard. When Alexander proposed that a Polish contingent join the spearhead into Rome as a tribute to their valor at Monte Cassino and in acknowledgment of their Roman Catholicism, Clark ignored the suggestion.

  “The attack today must be pushed to its limit,” he told Truscott on Friday. Only to his diary did Clark confide, “This is a race against time, with my subordinates failing to realize how close the decision will be.”

  Valmontone was found abandoned on Friday, at last. “No contact with enemy anywhere along the front,” the 3rd Division reported. A reconnaissance battalion crept up Highway 6, and by dawn on Saturday, June 3, Truscott’s VI Corps and Keyes’s II Corps were poised for a bragging-rights race into Rome from the south and southeast, respectively. Roving Italian barbers gave haircuts and shaves to unkempt soldiers keen to look groomed for the liberation.

  Like Gruenther’s tossed hat, the tonsorial primping was premature. German rearguard panzers lurked in the shadows to ambush the incautious. Fearful of a counterattack from the east that could sever the new Fifth Army supply route on Highway 6, Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey led two depleted 7th Infantry battalions into the rolling meadows below Palestrina, an ancient Etruscan town famous for its roses and said to have been founded by Ulysses. Early Saturday morning Toffey informed the regimental command post of a troublesome Tiger tank, “hull down in a road cut.” Later in the day, as Palestrina’s cyclopean walls hove into view, he reported seeing outriders from Juin’s FEC on his flank.

  That would be his last dispatch. At 2:14 P.M., a radio message to the regiment reported that Colonel Toffey had been wounded half a mile below Palestrina. After climbing to the second floor of a tile-roof farmhouse for a better view of German positions, Toffey was sitting on the floor with a radio between his knees when a tank round slammed into the upper story. At least one officer believed the shell came from a disoriented Sherman tank crew a few hundred feet behind the farmhouse; others insisted the round was German. Regardless, dust filled the dismembered room as Toffey lay sprawled against the front wall with a shell fragment in the back of his head. “His eyes were open but seeing nothing,” an officer noted. At 2:40 P.M., a radio report to the command post announced his death. A lieutenant and three enlisted men had also been killed, and a tank battalion commander badly wounded.

  Veiled with a blanket, Toffey’s mortal remains were laid on a stretcher and driven by jeep to the rear. Since landing on the beaches of Morocco nineteen months earlier, he had fought as faithfully as any battle commander in the U.S. Army. Now his war was over, his hour spent. A short time later, Juin’s troops relieved the 7th Infantry, which would not fight in Italy again. The 3rd Division history lamented the passing of “a mad, genial Irishman,” among “the best-loved and most colorful characters in the division, if not our entire Army.” One comrade wrote that “there will never be his like again,” but that was incorrect: the country had produced enough of his ilk to finish the war Jack Toffey had helped win.

  Upon learning of Toffey’s death, Clark ordered Gruenther to draft a list of midlevel officers with long, sterling battle records who would be the generals in America’s next war. “I am sending them home because they are too valuable to risk in further combat,” Clark wrote.

  For Toffey the gesture came too late. In a note to General McNair in Washington, a grieving Truscott called him “one of the finest officers I have ever known.” But the most poignant epitaph came from a former comrade in the 15th Infantry: “Perhaps he was kept overseas a little longer than his odds allowed.”

  Even before the American thrust across Monte Artemisio, Albert Kesselring doubted whether the indefensible terrain below the Tiber River could be held much longer. Of 540 German antitank guns in Italy, 120 remained. On June 2, he advised Berlin that in three weeks his armies had suffered 38,000 casualties; among his divisions still fighting, only two were even 50 percent combat effective. Charred tanks and trucks fouled every road and cart path. The Subiaco Pass, through which much of Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army would squeeze, resembled “a huge snake of burning vehicles.”

  Vietinghoff himself was a casualty: sick and spent, he handed command to his chief of staff and stumbled off to a hospital in northern Italy. A few hours later, Kesselring’s own staff chief, Siegfried Westphal, collapsed from nervous exhaustion. Mackensen, too, was finished: Hitler approved Kesselring’s demand that he be cashiered as Fourteenth Army commander for incompetence in defending the Colli Laziali, among other alleged failings.

  Kesselring had earlier proposed a scorched-earth retreat that included the demolition of all Tiber River bridges, as well
as power, rail, and industrial facilities around Rome. Hitler demurred. Roman bridges had “considerable historical and artistic merit”; moreover, the capital held little strategic value, and leaving it in ashes would merely enhance Allied political and propaganda gains. On June 3, less than two hours after Jack Toffey’s death, the high command informed Kesselring: “Führer decision. There must not be a battle of Rome.”

  Rear guards would continue to harass the American horde in the Roman suburbs, buying time for the garrison to flee from what Berlin now declared to be an open city. Fourteenth and Tenth Army troops would hasten north, in small bands if necessary. A radio code word—ELEFANTE—warned that Allied forces were closing in on the capital.

  The sound of gunfire from the Colli Laziali had been audible since May 29, and unease among the German occupiers in Rome now gave way to panic. Papers were burned, granaries fired; an ammunition dump in the Campo Verano cemetery was blown up, along with a barracks, a Fiat plant, a phone center. The white peacocks strutting about the German embassy garden had long been shot and roasted. The Hotel de la Ville in the Via Sistina, a pleasant redoubt known as “Brighter Berlin,” emptied out. Near the Piazza Fiume, soldiers methodically looted a hardware shop, packing their booty into a covered truck. Officers living the high life on the Via Veneto pilfered the silverware and water goblets before decamping.

  “Germans streaming through the city, pushing carts, trying to swipe cars, marching on foot,” Peter Tompkins, the OSS operative, wrote in his diary. “The cafés were still open and doing big business.” A six P.M. curfew was imposed, “but it isn’t quite clear who is giving the orders.” Tompkins filled his bathtub just before the city’s water pipes ran dry. As Romans watched from behind shuttered windows, convoys streamed out of the city, vehicles three and four abreast on the Via Cassia, the Via Salaria, and abutting sidewalks. “Wild-eyed, unshaven, unkempt, on foot, in stolen cars, in horsedrawn vehicles, even in carts belonging to the street cleaning department,” one witness reported. “Some of them dragged small ambulances with wounded in them.” Fascist Blackshirts pleaded for rides or trotted north, furtively looking over their shoulders. Tompkins, the dutiful spy, recorded it all: Germans fleeing on bicycles, Germans hobbling on crutches, Germans on motorcycles with flat tires, Germans near the Piazza Venezia “trying to get away with cars that no longer have any tires, driving on the rims.”