Perhaps in that direction lie the best prospects for Poland.
Chapter 18
“THE DOUGHBOY’S GRIM ROUTE TO ROME”
January–May 1944
The whole world waited during the first half of 1944 for the expected invasion of France. “Plans Are Perfected,” The Times reported in early January, but the plans were difficult to realize with millions of men and thousands of ships to transport across a waterway with notoriously unpredictable weather.
There was not much to cheer in the news from other theaters, either, as the German defensive lines held in Italy and Ukraine. To circumvent the stalemate in Italy the Sixth U.S. Army Corps, under Maj. General John Lucas, tried a landing farther up the coast at Anzio to outflank the German line, but it stalled at the beachhead and became as bogged down as the rest of the line. The real key to unlocking the German front lay in the mountains and valleys around the town of Cassino, dominated by the ancient Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. Efforts to dislodge the Germans from the town and the heights were frustrated by the terrain. On February 15 the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, commanded by General Ira Eaker, flew in to demolish the abbey in the mistaken belief that the Germans were using it. Instead, the bombing created in the ruins a perfect fortress for the Germans who now took it over. Not until May was Cassino and its destroyed abbey overrun, with exceptionally high casualties. The Polish divisions that finally stormed the heights on May 17 lost 3,500 men in the process.
The Germans now began to withdraw and the road to Rome lay open. But as it turned out, it was a road, Cyrus Sulzberger wrote, of “endless sticky mud … forbidding mountain crags.” Beside the freezing rivers and shattered bridges, he saw “gutted villages peopled with tattered scavengers.” “The Doughboy’s Grim Route to Rome,” The Times called it, the very opposite of the popular image of a sunny, art-lover’s paradise.
To ease the way for the invasion of France, the Western Allies decided in March 1944 to use the heavy bombers to pulverize the transport network in northern France and the Low Countries. This was not how RAF Bomber Command or the Eighth Air Force wanted to proceed. In April The Times gave Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris several pages to describe the bombing campaign he had commanded since February 1942. Of thirty German industrial cities subjected to RAF area bombing, only five, Harris claimed, had not been heavily damaged. He made no pretense that the RAF was doing anything other than destroying half or more of the built-up areas of the target cities, with the aim of stopping production by killing workers and obliterating their houses. Harris hoped that Allied bombing might end the war without the need for invasion of the Continent. But Eisenhower insisted that tactical bombing against transportation networks was now a priority, so the bombers were diverted for five months, first to destroy the rail system, then to support the land battle in France once the invasion had taken place.
While the waiting went on, Eisenhower assured the press that they would get good coverage of the invasion when it happened. At the annual convention of the American Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a letter from the supreme commander was read out loud, in which Eisenhower hailed the war correspondents now crowding into London as part of “the great team seeking an early victory.” He promised them access to news because, in his view, “public opinion wins wars.” In this case, however, public opinion was growing increasingly impatient. Neither the defeat of a Japanese offensive on the Indian border at Kohima and Imphal in April 1944 nor the news of further advances in the Pacific could compensate for the long wait for an invasion and a second front against the Germans. From London, Times bureau chief Raymond Daniell wired the paper to expect something big.
JANUARY 1, 1944
ARMY PERFECTS JUNGLE FIGHTERS
Intensive Courses At the New Hawaiian Center Turn Out Thousands Every Week
By GEORGE F. HORNE
Special to The New York Times.
U. S. ARMY HEADQUARTERS, Central Pacific, Dec. 29 (Delayed)—The nature of the coming war in the Pacific has been brought into clear focus in 1943, and the weight of our military and naval might is shifted like that of a boxer who alters strategy to fit his opponent’s style.
New Army training courses, adapted to the lessons learned in recent engagements in the Central Pacific, are now in full swing here in the world’s greatest military training area, the Hawaiian Islands, and they are equipping soldiers thoroughly with such a variety of deadly skills that officers in charge say there is no doubt that our Army is becoming the most terrific force of any in our history.
Lieut. Gen. Robert C. Richardson Jr., commander of Army forces in the Central Pacific area, sent correspondents on a day’s inspection tour of his new unit jungle center, where thousands of men are now turned out every week after an intensive study of living and fighting in the jungles.
GENUINE COMBAT CONDITIONS
The conditions are not of mock-up caliber, for these islands afford every type of terrain, every kind of problem and obstacle to be found in the islands of the Pacific where we are going to attack and oust the enemy.
There are matted jungles through which the students hack their way under simulated fire. Behind them nature swiftly closes the man-made gaps, making a new jungle in a few weeks for coming classes.
There are streams where the men cross by their own devices under fire; there are cliffs and mountains; there are the average jungle fruits and roots on which they may live.
The program is under the direction of Col. William C. Saffarrans, of Atlanta, Ga., a former athlete and football coach and until recently instructor at the Ranger training school in Tennessee. From his schooling the outward-bound soldier, he is a tough customer, tougher than the average Japanese and better equipped to defend himself and take a personal offensive than any average American soldier has ever been.
These men are not Commandos and not Rangers. They are average American infantrymen. They go through a dozen courses at the center. Thousands of men have already gone through, and General Richardson said this afternoon that “not a single man will go out to fight in the areas under my command until he has had this training.”
In the stream-crossing course, under Lieut. William L. Fornwald of Scranton, Pa., one of the center’s fifty instructors, the men are thrown on their own to get over and attack “the enemy.” They use flotation bladders, or make rude rafts of shelter halves and poles and swim behind them.
They take a twelve-by-twelve camouflage net, fill it with coconuts and float a 30-caliber machine gun across. They take a 2 ½-ton truck tarpaulin and float twenty-four men or two tons of equipment in it. They can wrap up a jeep in a tarpaulin and push it over.
They also cross streams by net bridges, with explosives being set off under them. They learn how to jump into oil-soaked water aflame, come up splashing and swim through, pushing the fire away with their hands.
Under Lieut. Lloyd A. Behymer of Cincinnati, they are taught the handling of booby traps and demolitions including special charges now designed to meet the challenge of the palm tree shelters found on Tarawa. Special engineer classes get advanced training in this field.
There is an open hut, with three sides, equipped with chairs, tables, bottles of sake and a light extension. The instructor selects a soldier to enter the building. His nickname is “Alamaba.”
He walks gingerly up the steps. The first two are safe, but on the third a booby trap goes off. Turning on the light sets off an explosion and picking up a bottle detonates another. So they learn.
HAND-TO-HAND TACTICS TAUGHT
Under Lieut. William E. Vazzani of Monongahela, Pa., the men get hand-to-hand combat experience, the hard way. A special demonstration was given by Sgts. John R. Compton of Perry, Mich., and Barney Bernard of Grand Rapids, Mich., professional wrestlers.
They came at each other with knives or bayonets and showed how to eliminate the attacker in a painful, deadly and seemingly simple style which is best not described. They teach every soldier how to gouge and choke most efficiently.
; JANUARY 2, 1944
Editorial
INVASION YEAR PLANS ARE PERFECTED
The new year opened yesterday on a note of great expectations. In the East German armies, their lines of retreat into Poland endangered, were reeling back under the hammerblows of the Russians. Allied air fleets—more than 3,000 planes strong on one day—roared through German skies, battering at German cities. British and American armies were moving doggedly forward in Italy despite the stiffest resistance the Wehr-macht was able to offer in any theatre. All these signs seem to point to ultimate Allied victory in Europe.
The primary task for 1944 had been set at meetings of the United Nations leaders in 1943. The Allies must drive over the plains of Poland from the East, over the Alpine mountain passes from the south, over the beaches from the West into the German heartland. The vitals of Nazi war power—the industries of the Ruhr and Rhine valleys, the Lorraine coal mines, the coal and iron of Polish Silesia, the Rumanian and Galician oil fields, the minerals of Yugoslavia—must be taken. It would not be easy. It would be costly in lives, in effort and material.
CHANGES IN COMMAND
In preparation for these drives the Allied commanders were being assigned last week to the invasion tasks that lie ahead, The importance air power will play—it is now axiomatic that a bridgehead cannot be secured on a hostile shore without almost complete air cover—was indicated in the appointment of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as second in command under Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in the West. In the South Gen. Sir Henry Maitland Wilson will have as his assistant the American Lieut. Gen. Jacob L. Devers.
There were other shifts. Air Chief Marshal Trafford L. Leigh-Mallory, once head of the RAF’s School of Army Cooperation, was named head of Allied air forces in the West, with Maj. Gen. James H. Doolittle and Lieut. Gen. Carl Spaatz in charge of the American forces under him. The American Lieut. Gen. Ira C. Eaker was named head of all Allied air forces in the South. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was named to command the great sea armada that will carry the forces of the Allies across the western seas to Europe’s shores.
On all fronts the tempo of preparation was being speeded. At home Charles E. Wilson, executive vice chairman of the War Production Board, warned industry that supplies in quantities dwarfing those assembled for the invasions of Africa and Italy will be required to launch and sustain the operations of the coming year. “The $61,000,000,000 of munitions we made in 1943 must be greatly increased in 1944” he said, “without the help of new plant facilities.” President Roosevelt has declared that the 3,800,000 American troops now abroad must be increased to more than 5,000,000 by July.
Where along the walls of Festung Europa the attack will be hurled remained the secret of the Allied High-Command. In the West, where already Germany has reported increased probing thrusts by British commandos, General Eisenhower has a choice of many possible landing places ranging from the rugged coasts of Norway and the highly fortified shores of Germany, the Low Countries and northern France to the sandy beaches of western France. Some military experts have thought the possibilities might be restricted to those areas which can be reached effectively by fighter aircraft, the areas directly across the Channel. The likelihood seemed to be that on D-day blows would be aimed at many points, leaving the German High Command to guess which was the thrust with full power behind it.
When this great operation will start was also a secret of the Allied High Command. All the Germans could be sure of was that it would come some time in 1944. Meanwhile the pressure would increase. The Russians, with prospects of great victories of entrapment immediately before them, were straining to exploit their superiority to the utmost. The air war was growing in strength and the pressure from the South continued.
Looking into the future, Adolf Hitler delivered gloomy messages to the German peoples and armies. He saw a “second year of great crisis.” “In this war,” he said, “there will be no victors and losers, but merely survivors and annihilated.”
JANUARY 2, 1944
Our Hard-Hitting Invasion Chief
General Eisenhower brings to his new task the qualities of steel—coolness, precision, power.
By MILTON BRACKER
Algiers (By Wireless).
Since November, 1942, Dwight D. Eisenhower has been directing the gigantic task of kicking in the southern door to Germany. Now he is about to shift his approach to “other points of the compass,” as President Roosevelt put it. But his primary objective will remain the same—to kill Germans.
The general, himself, reduced his job to these terms, and they cannot be improved upon. When the glorious and terrible moment of the invasion comes, greater Allied land, air and possibly sea forces than have ever struck a blow together, will combine to do just that—kill Germans. And General Eisenhower is the kind of man who is prepared to kill just as many of them as is necessary to beat Hitler’s Nazis to their knees.
In his position as Allied Commander in Chief for the invasion, General Eisenhower becomes the symbol of all Allied hope—and confidence—in an Allied victory this year, if possible. He is the arm that swings the hammer, and it will strike a terrible blow.
In the job he is about to assume, Eisenhower will find many problems paralleling those he has solved in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. For the supreme commander of any striking force remains fundamentally the point of liaison between the will of his Government and the armed forces themselves. Men like President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and General Marshall may do much of the larger planning, but there will be a complex substructure of planning for Eisenhower, himself.
It will be he, for instance, who will figure out the proper relationship between the air, land and sea power at any given place and time, the necessary allocation of men and materials. It will be he who will decide whether plan A or B must be invoked to meet a given situation, and he who must fully exploit a sudden advantage.
It will be Eisenhower to whom the surrender of defeated Germany will be addressed. This will be a supreme moment for a man whose ancestors fled religious persecution in Germany in the seventeenth century.
General Eisenhower’s character is in his face. It is a roundish, imperturbable, candid face with wide-set gray-blue eyes and a hard compactness about the features. He can snap his jaw like a steel trap, and the implication that he may do so at any moment is never lacking.
If there is one thing certain about his approach to his new job, it is that the qualities of steel—which include the ability to get white hot and cut through almost anything—will go with it. Yet there will be a minimum of sparks, a maximum of smooth, deadly driving power. That is the impression “Ike” inevitably gives—coolness, precision, speed, power and potential ruthlessness.
He is always canny and he can be tough—with his best friends if necessary. But like so many of his fellow-American soldiers, he is shot through with sentiment and with humor. His devotion to his Scotty, called Telek, is something of a legend, and it goes back to his boyhood when he found a terrier with a broken leg and coaxed it back to health.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower in January, 1944.
Sentiment on a nobler plane was demonstrated by Eisenhower on the shores of Malta in July. His second tremendous D-day was about to dawn. The plans were made, the ships were en route. The very heavens themselves could not have called back the armada the one-time Kansas cowboy had launched. Through the night the planes droned toward Sicily bearing the paratroopers, many of whom were to be shot down while still hanging in their shrouds, as the general must have known they would be. As he looked into the darkness after them, the general’s eyes misted.
General Eisenhower has never forgotten that while the general staffs map larger strategy and men like himself carry it out, it is the ordinary foot soldier who imposes it with gun and bayonet upon the stubbornly resisting foe. When he recently decided it was time to “plug” one specific branch of the service, it wasn’t the glamorous Air Force or the tank troops he had schooled in World War I t
hat he singled out; it was the mudstained and weatherbeaten infantrymen, of whom the general said:
“We realize it in our own consciousness but does the man in Abilene, Kan., or in some little village in England? Does he realize just exactly what these people are doing, how they are performing?”
The general loves a good soldier and deplores a bad one and he has no difficulty in talking to the ordinary G.I. because he is as blunt as a chin and the antithesis of bunk. On his tours of the front, Eisenhower talks to everyone and manages to do it more naturally than most multiple-starred officers.
He speaks a language his men can understand. He never says “We’d better do something to remedy the situation.” He simply snaps “Hell, we’ll change that.” His political view of the war is as simple and direct: “What the hell are we in this war for but to beat fascism and autocracy?”
His daily routine involves a lot of deskwork; any commanding general’s does. But paperwork is the phase of his job that he likes least, so he breaks it with periodic trips to advance headquarters and the front. Within a few weeks of the establishment of the new western land front, it is a safe bet that he will be flying again to be among the men who are doing the actual fighting. And this process is sure to continue as the march toward Berlin gets under way.
He has assumed the most colossal task ever assigned to any man in American military history. He has become the single most dramatic and most important figure in the Allied military scheme. Yet with it all he remains the Texan from Kansas, or perhaps more accurately the Kansan from Texas, who reads “Ivanhoe” and Cromwell and who quotes Lewis Carroll’s philosophical walrus.
JANUARY 9, 1944
POLISH ISSUE SHARPENS AS REDS CROSS BORDER
The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945 Page 111
