“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 propoganda 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 dutifu
l 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.”
And in the Gestapo cells beneath Via Tasso 155, prisoners cocked an ear to the distant grumble of Allied guns. In hushed whispers, eyes agleam, they debated with urgent intensity the variables of ballistics and wind direction, trying to gauge just how far away their liberators might be.
Not far. Eleven months after the Allies first waded ashore in Sicily, the titanic battles between army groups that characterized the Italian campaign now subsided into niggling suburban gunfights between small bands of pursuers and pursued. Seventeen major bridges spanned the Tiber along an eight-mile stretch, linking eastern Rome not only to Vatican City and the capital’s west bank but also to the highways vital to Fifth Army’s pursuit up the peninsula to the northwest. Flying columns of tanks, engineers, and infantrymen began to coalesce with orders to thrust through the city and secure the crossings.
“Looks as if the Boche is pulling out, and [Truscott] wants you to get up there and seize the crossings over the Tiber as fast as you can,” Carleton told Ernie Harmon early Saturday afternoon. “Make all the speed you can.” A few hundred feet above Highway 6, Keyes from his observation plane dropped a penciled message to the armored task force led by Colonel Howze: “Get those tanks moving!” Howze put the spurs to his men, only to blunder into yet another chain of ambushes. “In a few minutes the lead tank would stop and burst into flames,” Howze later wrote, forcing the cavalcade to idle until the enemy blockages could be out-flanked and routed.
Such petty inconveniences hardly diminished the swelling euphoria. “The command post has gone to hell,” Gruenther radioed Clark from Caserta at 4:15 P.M. on Saturday. “No one is doing any work here this afternoon. All semblance of discipline has broken down.” According to II Corps intelligence reports, Germans were withdrawing “in such confusion and speed that their retreat has assumed proportions of a rout.” Clark sternly reminded his lieutenants to keep killing. “Your orders are to destroy the enemy facing Fifth Army,” he told the corps commanders shortly before five P.M. “Rome and the advance northward will come later.”
Precisely who first crossed Rome’s city limits early on Sunday, June 4, would be disputed for decades. Various units claimed the honor by filing affidavits and issuing proclamations and protests. An 88th Division reconnaissance troop and Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force, which had been merged with Howze’s task force, had the strongest claims, but Clark subsequently wrote that “it is impossible to determine with certainty the unit of the Fifth Army whose elements first entered the city.” Patrols darted into the city only to be driven out by scalding gunfire. German paratroopers holding a strongpoint at Centocelle, just east of Rome, knocked out five American tanks before slipping away. On Highway 6 near Tor Pignatara, an antitank gun shattered two more Shermans, then vanished into a warren of alleys.
Traffic jams and friendly fire, orders and counterorders, flocking journalists and even a wedding party—the bride, dressed in gray and holding a rose bouquet, tiptoed around German corpses in the roadway—threatened to turn the liberation into opera buffa. Clark left Anzio in brilliant sunshine at 8:30 A.M. with a convoy of two armored cars and six jeeps packed with more journalists. Arriving at Centocelle, he hopped from his jeep in a flurry of salutes. When Clark asked why the drive had stalled, Frederick replied, “I’m holding off the artillery because of the civilians.”
“I wouldn’t hesitate to use it if you need to,” Clark said. “We can’t be held up here too long.”
As he walked with Frederick and Keyes up a low hill for a better view, photographers asked the trio to pose beside a large blue and white road sign that read ROMA. Moments later a sniper’s bullet blew through the metal face with a sharp bang. Clark, Keyes, and Frederick crawled down the hill and retreated two hundred yards to a thick-walled house. There would be no triumphant entry into the Eternal City this afternoon. Clark grumbled over delays in reaching the Tiber, then drove back to Anzio. Keyes in turn told subordinates he did not want “one little gun stopping us.” He gobbled down a cold K ration and ordered another frontal assault up Highway 6 so “C could enter Rome,” as he told his diary.
By late Sunday the rear guards had melted away but for snipers and a few stubborn strongpoints along the river. Some captured Germans proved to be boys dragooned into combat from a school for cooks and bakers; one prisoner was seized pushing a cart laden with looted chocolate bars. From the east and south, American troops streamed through the city’s outer precincts. Howze dispatched platoons with instructions typed in Italian commanding any Roman stopped on the street to lead the patrols to specific Tiber bridges. A Forceman scuttling past the Colosseum muttered, “My God, they bombed that too!” An 88th Division soldier who peeked inside said, “I was not impressed by the interior: too small, too cluttered.” Puzzled by the “S.P.Q.R.”—“Senatus Populusque Romanus”—stamped on monuments and manhole covers, a GI speculated that it stood for “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Romans”; he was crestfallen to learn that “cruelty” was not spelled with a “q.”
Howze at twilight led a tank company toward the central rail station to find boulevards empty and windows shuttered. Then a sash flew open, a voice shrieked “Americano!,” and Romans by the thousands swept into the streets despite the occasional ping from a sniper round. Delirious citizens flung themselves onto Howze’s jeep and “kissed me until I threatened to shoot some of them,” he reported. “Vino offered in glasses, in pitchers, in bottles, and even in kegs,” the 88th Division noted. “Kisses were freely bestowed by both male and female citizens and suffered or enjoyed by the recipient accordingly.” Signoras offered plates of spaghetti and bowls of hot shaving water. Italian men with ancient rifles and red sashes clapped their liberators on the back, then stalked off in search of Germans and Fascists. Communists and Blackshirts traded potshots, and the pop of pistol fire near the Colosseum signaled another summary execution. “It still won’t be hard to be killed here,” an American officer wrote in his diary on June 4.
Frederick set out for the Tiber shortly before ten P.M. with seven men and a radio car. Just west of the Piazza del Popolo he found the triple arches of the Ponte Regina Margherita intact in the moonlight, but a stay-behind German squad sprayed tracers across the dark river. A wild mêlée grew wilder when a confused battalion from the 88th Division blundered into the scrap and also fired on the Forcemen. Bullets struck Frederick in the knee and elbow; his driver was killed. With eight Purple Hearts by the end of the war, Bob Frederick would be described as “the most shot-at-and-hit general in American history.”
From the Baths of Caracalla to the Quirinal, jubilation now grew full-throated—“a complete hysteria,” as the 1st Armored Division reported. Romans in nightshirts and slippers poured into the streets, braying whatever scraps of English they could recall, including one old man who repeatedly shouted, “Weekend! Weekend!” At 1:30 A.M. on Monday, June 5, both the U.S. flag and a Union Jack were raised on staffs above the Piazza Venezia. A banner draped the Pantheon: WELCOME TO THE LIBERATORS. Shrieking crowds ransacked the flower stalls below the Spanish Steps to garland those liberators or to pelt them with roses and irises. Young men sporting hammer-and-sickle armbands marched up the Corso Umberto singing “Bandiera Rossa” and other socialist anthems. Romans stormed the Regina Coeli prison to fling open the cells. Others searched the yellow house at Via Tasso 155, where the walls and floors were flecked with blood. “Brothers,” someone called into the cellar gloom, “come out.”
Shortly before dawn, a column of nearly three hundred vehicles rolled through Porta San Giovanni carrying S-Force, a detachment of twelve hundred American and British counterintelligence and engineering specialists. As the convoy snaked down the Via delle Quattro Fontane, squads peeled away to secure telegraph offices, power plants, and pumping stations.
Others rounded up Italian utility managers: Rome’s power supply had been slashed to about 20 percent of the capital’s needs, and repairs to damaged aqueducts were to begin within a day. An S-Force platoon poking through the German embassy found various photos of Hermann Göring, an Artie Shaw record on the phonograph, and a half ton of plastic explosives, which were later stuffed in weighted sacks and tossed into the Tiber. A half dozen safes upon cracking “revealed nothing of an unusual nature.”
“Got across thirteen bridges. Occupied them on the far side last night,” Harmon radioed Truscott at 6:30 A.M. “None destroyed…. I am the first boy on the Tiber.”
“Go up to Genoa if you want to,” Truscott replied.
Not yet. At seven A.M., Sergeant John Vita of Port Chester, New York, wandered through the fifteenth-century Palazzo Venezia to find himself in the Sala del Mappamondo. Mussolini’s cavernous office, clad in marble, featured a desk the size of a yacht. Stepping onto the Duce’s notorious balcony, Vita drew a crowd on the piazza below by tossing out rolls of Life Savers and declaiming, “Victory! Not for Mussolini, but for the Allies.”
That Allied victory had cost them 44,000 casualties since DIADEM began on May 11: 18,000 Americans—among them more than 3,000 killed in action—along with 12,000 British, 9,600 French, and nearly 4,000 Poles. German casualties were estimated at 52,000, including 5,800 dead. Americans losses in less than four weeks almost equaled those sustained during seven months of fighting in North Africa. Combat in the Mediterranean had achieved an industrial scale.
Columns of weary GIs shuffled through the city. Some carried small Italian tricolors. Others sported flowers in their helmet nets or rifle barrels. Eric Sevareid watched throngs of Italians sob with joy as they tossed blossoms at the tramping soldiers and cheered them to the echo. “I felt wonderfully good, generous, and important,” he wrote. “I was a representative of strength, decency, and success.”
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