The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  True enough, all of it, but perhaps not the whole truth. If “to advance is to conquer,” in Frederick the Great’s adage, then the Allies continued to conquer in the Mediterranean, albeit slowly. When Rome fell, only eleven German U-boats still operated in the entire Mediterranean, and no Allied merchantman would be sunk there for the rest of the war; controlling the middle sea proved vital in liberating Europe, and in guaranteeing another route for Lend-Lease matériel to Russia via Persia. The bomber offensive continued apace from Italian fields that crept ever closer to the Reich; a sustained and ultimately fatal campaign against German oil production facilities included six thousand Fifteenth Air Force sorties in the summer of 1944 that targeted vital refineries around Ploesti, Romania. As the historian Douglas Porch wrote, “One must not lose from view the Mediterranean’s importance in breaking the offensive power of German arms, and forcing the Reich onto the defensive, after which any hope of victory eluded them.”

  Moreover, all criticism of the Italian strategy butts against an inconvenient riposte: if not Italy, where? “Events generate their own momentum, impose their own force, and exert their own influence on the will of man,” wrote Martin Blumenson, who spent a professional lifetime pondering the Mediterranean campaign. “We went into Sicily and Italy because we had been in North Africa.” No oceangoing fleet was available to move a half million men from the African littoral to England, or anywhere else; nor could British ports, rails, and other facilities, already overwhelmed by the American hordes staging for OVERLORD, have handled such a force. Moscow would not have tolerated an idling of Allied armies during the ten months between the conquest of Sicily and the Normandy invasion—a ten-month respite the Germans badly needed. “The Italian campaign,” wrote the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “was fought because it had to be fought.”

  Historical tautology may be suspect, and opportunism lacks the panache of grand strategy. From beginning to end, Allied warmaking in the Mediterranean tended to be improvisational. The decision to continue pounding north after the capture of Rome remains especially difficult to justify. Yet the American commander-in-chief had grown comfortable with a campaign that in Italy more than in any other theater resembled the grinding inelegance of World War I. “Our war of attrition is doing its work,” Franklin Roosevelt had said a week after the invasion of Sicily, and he never renounced that strategy.

  Certainly lessons learned in Sicily and southern Italy paid dividends later in the war, notably the expertise gained in complex amphibious operations and in fighting as a large, multinational coalition. Kesselring went so far as to posit that without the Mediterranean experience, the invasion of France “would have undoubtedly become a failure.” Many other lessons were prosaic but sterling, such as the realization that the truck hauling ammunition to the front was no less vital than the gun firing it.

  For the U.S. Army, which would shoulder the heaviest burden in western Europe for the balance of the war, there was also the priceless conviction that American soldiers could slug it out with the best German troops, division by division, and prevail. A Japanese-American soldier in the 100th Battalion wrote from Italy, “I really belong to the great American Army here and feel that I am part and parcel of the forces that are fighting for the kind of America we always dreamed of back home.”

  On the day Rome fell, that great American Army numbered eight million soldiers, a fivefold increase since Pearl Harbor. It included twelve hundred generals and nearly 500,000 lieutenants. Half the Army had yet to deploy overseas, but the U.S. military already had demonstrated that it could wage global war in several far-flung theaters simultaneously, a notion that had “seemed outlandish in 1942,” as the historian Eric Larrabee later wrote.

  Of those eight million American soldiers in June 1944, about one in ten were in the Mediterranean. Most who were still in Italy, it may be surmised, would have endorsed a ditty circulating through the ranks:

  I’m glad that I came, and damned anxious to go,

  Give it back to the natives, I’m ready to blow.

  Some would blow. Kesselring continued to command German forces in Italy until October 1944, when he was badly injured in a collision between his staff car and a mobile gun. Hospitalized for months, he would eventually take command of the faltering Western Front in an hour when catastrophic defeat loomed ever closer for the Reich.

  Some blew to other fronts. Charles Ryder left the 34th Division, which he had led since before the TORCH invasion, and would end the war as a corps commander in the Philippines, staging for an invasion of Japan. Fred Walker, awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroics with the 36th Division on Monte Artemisio, was sent home soon after Rome’s capture to become commandant of the Army’s infantry school in Georgia. “I do not want to leave the division,” he wrote, “but I will not be sorry to leave this theater and this army.”

  Others were fated to remain in Italy for the duration. General von Senger would fight to the end before his capture, struggling to preserve his humanity in the midst of relentless carnage. “You can never quite get over it,” he reflected long after the war. The puppet dictator Mussolini lived near Lake Garda, where he read Tolstoy, played tennis—opponents still let him win—and pedaled about on his bicycle, trailed by a truckload of German soldiers. After moving his rump government to Milan in the spring of 1945, Mussolini would be captured by partisans while trying to escape to Switzerland, disguised in a German greatcoat and helmet; with his mistress, Clara Petacci, he was executed on April 28, 1945. The Duce’s body, badly mangled and hoisted upside down in a gas station, would be stolen by neo-Fascists in 1946, recaptured three months later by Italian police, and hidden in a convent for eleven years before final interment in the Mussolini family crypt, where the faithful still sign their names in the guest book.

  Alexander received a field marshal’s baton for the capture of Rome, and a few months later succeeded Wilson as supreme commander in the Mediterranean, with responsibility for Italy, Greece, and the Balkans. “The limitations of his ability began to appear when the forces under his command became so huge that their manipulation required weeks and months of forethought, not hours or days,” observed John Harding, his shrewd chief of staff. Elevated to the peerage as a viscount after the war, Alexander would serve for years as the governor-general of Canada.

  Geoffrey Keyes continued to command II Corps, receiving his third star in April 1945, and eventually serving as the postwar Allied high commissioner for Austria. Bill Darby’s life remained a compelling blend of the felicitous and the star-crossed: after a stint as a staff officer in the War Department, he returned to Italy as assistant commander of the 10th Mountain Division, only to be killed near Lake Garda by a German artillery shell on April 30, 1945. Among the last casualties of the long campaign, Darby was posthumously promoted to brigadier general. He was thirty-four.

  In an exchange of letters with Sarah after the fall of Rome, Lucian Truscott was astonished to find her unaware that he had commanded the Anzio beachhead. “I tried to tell you in every way I could,” he wrote on June 15. “What in the world did you think I was doing?” He lamented being “far removed from the softening touch of woman and home,” adding, “I’m a bit on edge. It is my belief that much hard fighting lies before us.” He was right. Truscott would lead his VI Corps through southern France to the Vosges Mountains before succeeding Clark as the Fifth Army commander in December 1944. In postwar Germany he would serve as the military governor of Bavaria.

  Clark also felt on edge. In letters to Renie he complained about her failure to send a congratulatory telegram after he captured Rome, then confessed that he was “badly in need of a rest. Never needed one more.” An intestinal infection had caused him to lose weight until he was nearly skeletal, despite a bracing regimen of sulfa drugs. Worse yet, on June 10, he was nearly killed when his Piper Grasshopper collided a thousand feet up with a barrage balloon cable. “It wrapped around the wing and we couldn’t get loose,” Clark wrote. “Finally, in s
piraling the third time, losing altitude rapidly, the cable became disengaged, although it tore the wing and ripped open the gas tank…. We miraculously got down into a cornfield…In ever had a worse experience.” On July 4 he wrote Renie, “You ask the question, ‘What after Italy?’ Perhaps you can tell me.”

  Italy would be with him for the rest of the war and beyond. He succeeded Alexander as commander of the army group and received his fourth star in March 1945 at age forty-eight, becoming by far the youngest of the thirteen U.S. officers to wear that rank during World War II. After the war Clark would precede Keyes as high commissioner in Austria before commanding United Nations forces in Korea and eventually serving as president of the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina.

  The Rapido calamity continued to torment him, particularly when congressional investigators took up the cause of disaffected Texas veterans. To Renie he would write from Vienna in March 1946, “It is the most cruel and unfair attack ever made on an officer who worked so desperately, under such adverse conditions to make what I believed, and still do [believe] was a fine record.” Lamenting Eisenhower’s silence on the subject, and suspecting his former 36th Division commander of provoking the Texans, Clark added, “I believe Walker is the ‘snake in the grass.’” To help commemorate that “fine record,” he commissioned an immense history of Fifth Army, in nine volumes.

  He would remain among the war’s most controversial commanders, a man whose very name more than a half century later could cause brows to knit and lips to purse. If his admirers considered him “clairvoyant and energetic,” in the phrase of General Juin, Mauldin spoke for many in the lower ranks in observing of Clark: “He had his limitations. But I think a lot of the criticism of him occurred because he was associated with a bad time.”

  Those who fought and suffered in Italy—that “tough old gut,” as Ernie Pyle called it—were left to extract from the bad time what redemption they could. “Few of us can ever conjure up any truly fond memories of the Italian campaign,” Pyle wrote in Brave Men in late 1944. “The enemy had been hard, and so had the elements…. There was little solace for those who had suffered, and none at all for those who had died, in trying to rationalize about why things had happened as they did.”

  He continued:

  I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was.

  I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.

  Faith and imagination were required to elevate the Italian campaign, to see as the poet Richard Wilbur, a veteran of Cassino and Anzio, saw: “the dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.” Even Pyle, who knew better than most that “war isn’t romantic to the people in it,” sensed the sublime in moments “of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our fate.”

  George Biddle had found that in “misery, destruction, frustration, and death,” certain annealed qualities seemed “to give war its justification, meaning, romance, and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty.” Even Mauldin, that flinty-eyed skeptic, would concede, “I stopped regarding the war as a show to help my career. I felt a seriousness of purpose, and I felt it in my bones.” A medic who had landed at Salerno later wrote his wife, “This is something that is born deep inside us, when we come to know why we are here, when we have learned how very important it was that we did leave you and all we love.”

  Somewhere north of Rome, Glenn Gray wrote in his diary: “I watched a full moon sail through a cloudy sky…. I felt again the aching beauty of this incomparable land. I remembered everything that I had ever been and was. It was painful and glorious.”

  Another day passed, and another night. The circling stars glided on their courses. The poets and the dreamers again struck their tents and shouldered their rifles to begin that long, last march.

  * * *

  Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from U.S. Army Signal Corps archives.

  * * *

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt with Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, during an interlude in the TRIDENT conference, mid-May 1943 (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

  The president and prime minister with their Combined Chiefs of Staff in a posed portrait at the White House on May 24, 1943, the last day of the TRIDENT conference. Standing from left to right: Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the senior British officer stationed in Washington; Lieutenant General Sir Hastings L. “Pug” Ismay, chief of staff to Churchill; Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles F. A. Portal, chief of the British air staff; General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff; Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the British First Sea Lord; Admiral William D. Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief military adviser; General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff; Admiral Ernest J. King, the U.S. chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney, an Army Air Forces pilot who served as Marshall’s deputy chief of staff. The senior AAF commander, General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, spent the conference in the hospital for treatment of a heart condition. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)

  Allied troops boarding assault craft in a North African port, apparently Bizerte, Tunisia, en route to Sicily for Operation HUSKY in early July 1943

  General Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) and General George C. Marshall during a meeting in Algiers in September 1943

  Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt (right), who commanded American naval forces during the invasions of Morocco, Sicily, and Salerno, on the deck of his flagship with the war correspondent Quentin Reynolds (U.S. Navy, National Archives)

  Major General Terry de la Mesa Allen (left) commander of the 1st Infantry Division, studies a map with the man who became his nemesis, Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, commander of the U.S. II Corps. Censors have inked out a landmark between the two to avoid pinpointing their location in Sicily.

  Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division during the invasion of Sicily, shown here with his jeep in January 1944. An admirer described him with four adjectives: “Bald, burnt, gnarled, and wrinkled.”

  Axis aircraft attack Allied invasion ships in the anchorage off Gela, Sicily, on July 11, 1943. After bombs struck the Liberty ship S.S. Rowan in this area on the same day, one witness described “a flat sheet of crimson fire in a frame of black smoke.”

  Dead and dying Italian soldiers lie in a road near Palermo in July 1943, after their truck inadvertently hit an Italian mine while being pursued by U.S. troops. Near a jeep in the background, medics dress the wounds of an American lieutenant.

  Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr. (right), commander of the U.S. Seventh Army, at the Royal Palace in Palermo with his rival, General Bernard L. Montgomery (center), commander of the British Eighth Army, and Major General Geoffrey Keyes, Patton’s deputy

  Company A of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, on July 28, 1943, moving toward Troina, the highest and perhaps most fiercely defended town in Sicily. “Troina was the toughest battle Americans have fought since World War I,” one general concluded, “and there were very few in that war which were its equal.”

  Major General Matthew B. Ridgway (left), commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, with a Signal Corps cameraman in central Sicily, July 25, 1943. “Hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth from intensity,” one subordinate said of Ridgway.

  Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the senior German commander in the Mediterranean, was a former artilleryman who had learned to fly and had transferred to the Luftwaffe. An exceptional tactician who believed that most of Italy could be defended, Kesselring argued for a strategic concept that involved keeping th
e war as far from the Fatherland as long as possible. (U.S. Army Military History Institute)

  Riflemen from the 143rd Infantry Regment, 36th Infantry Division, wade toward the beach at Paestum, south of Salerno, at the start of Operation AVALANCHE on September 9, 1943. The milky haze from artificial smoke was intended to blind German gunners on the high ground ringing the landing sites.

  U.S. Navy sailors and Coast Guardsmen hug the shingle during a German air raid on the anchorage at Salerno. Debris from an exploding bomb can be seen in the background. The wire mesh laid across the beach was intended to improve traction for military vehicles.

  Major General Ernest J. Dawley commanded the U.S. VI Corps during the landings at Salerno in September 1943. A stocky, cautious artilleryman from Wisconsin who had been described in his West Point yearbook as “a quiet lad that one seldom sees or hears of,” Dawley had warned his superiors before Salerno, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and chew damn well.”

  Lieutenant General Richard L. McCreery commanded the British X Corps at Salerno, anchoring the Allied left flank. A pious, blunt Anglo-Irish cavalryman—“tall, lean, and vague,” as one American described him—McCreery still limped from a World War I wound and tended when aggravated to lower his voice to a near-whisper.