Price of Fame

by Sylvia Jukes Morris

  Early the next morning, Clare covered her head and joined her colleagues in an audience at the Vatican with Pope Pius XII. They sat in a crescent as the Pontiff, speaking extemporaneously, declaimed, “At this critical moment in human history, the legislators of the nations of the world carry a particularly grave responsibility.” He said that they must decide questions of “more than a passing political significance,” reaching down to “those inalienable God-given rights that are antecedent to the State and that no State dare infringe without jeopardizing its own existence.”25

  When Clare’s turn to speak came, she told Pius that “women believed less than men, perhaps, in a peace by force and brute strength.” They put their trust more “in a peace of charity and understanding.”26 At the end of the ten-minute meeting, he gave each of his visitors two strings of rosary beads, one black and one white.27

  Meeting with the Pope seemed to affect Clare in some fundamental way. She chose not to accompany the delegation on a tour of the Sistine Chapel, and went instead to an orphanage where hundreds of young refugees were being housed by the Vatican. One titian-haired, eight-year-old boy named Augusto appealed to her thwarted motherly instincts. He was eating a chunk of bread with water for breakfast, and his fingers and toes were swollen and purple from the cold. She found herself unable to walk away, and persuaded the authorities to let her borrow him for the day.28

  Back at the Grand Hotel, she fed and bathed him, and taught him to say a few English phrases: “How do you do?,” “Good-bye,” and “Give me a kiss.” She bought him wool shirts, shoes, socks, mittens, a scarf, and underwear. Employing all her military and diplomatic authority (as a traveling Congresswoman, Clare ranked as a two-star “assimilated general”), she found a church school for him.29 She arranged with a priest to give Augusto music lessons after he rushed across the reception room to a piano marked with a card reading, “Last Played by Franz Liszt.” In effect, she adopted the boy, and for the next ten years would pay for his keep and tuition.30

  Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the delegation’s host in Florence two days later, was a tall, sharp-nosed West Point graduate in his mid-forties. With his fellow commanders, Eisenhower, Patton, and Omar Bradley, he was one of the crucial men chosen for the Western theater by General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff. For the last two years he had conscientiously led the Fifth Army, appearing at the Apennine Front daily, even in the foulest weather. Rivals blamed the slow advance of the Italian campaign on his desire for glory as the captor of Rome.31 But his superiors rated him highly for strategic vision.

  He had just been promoted by Eisenhower to lead the 15th Army Group, made up of all Allied ground forces in Italy. Clark’s challenge now was to mold separately trained Americans, Canadians, Frenchmen, Poles, Brazilians, Indians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and Welsh Guards into a homogenous fighting force. The logistics of communicating in so many languages, providing religious services, and catering to the food restrictions of multiple faiths—such as having to keep a herd of goats behind the lines to feed the Punjab Brigade—were formidable.32 Nevertheless, it was with some relief that he handed over command of the Fifth Army to Lieutenant General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr.

  Truscott’s task was equally daunting. In a little more than six weeks that fall, the Allies had suffered almost thirty thousand casualties. As a result, they were critically short of combat-ready men, and also of supplies, which since D-Day had been diverted in large part to France. Alarmed by the deteriorating situation, Winston Churchill had asked the United States to send two more divisions to northern Italy, but General Marshall refused, preferring to keep the greater pressure on what he considered the primary war theater.33

  As a result, Truscott now found himself facing Clark’s old dread: a static winter campaign in the north of the peninsula. The Fifth Army and its British counterpart, the Eighth, held a line that stretched across Italy from the Ligurian Sea in the West to the Adriatic in the East. Some of Hitler’s best divisions were heavily fortified beyond it, in a parallel deployment across the Apennine Mountains between the river Arno and Bologna—the so-called Gothic Line.34

  The retreating Germans had blown up all the bridges across the Arno, sparing only the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, because it would not support tanks. If Truscott could push them north to the Po Valley, he might be able to march over the Alps and through the Balkans to Austria. On the other hand, he might not.

  A gruff, no-nonsense Texan one month short of fifty, Truscott was generally acknowledged to be the best American combat officer in Europe. On his second day in Sicily, he had won the Distinguished Service Cross for valor in action. His men revered him as a soldier’s soldier, so fearless that he coolly studied maps on Jeep hoods in the midst of enemy fire. Yet Truscott drove them hard. “Every good commander,” he said, “has to have some son of a bitch in him.”35

  When Clare met the new commander, she felt an instant sexual attraction. He was burly, with blunt features and penetrating blue eyes. His voice was husky from accidentally swallowing carbolic acid as a boy, and exacerbated by heavy smoking. He wore cavalry breeches with high boots, a russet leather jacket, and a black-lacquered helmet reminiscent of General Patton’s. There the similarity ended. In Bill Mauldin’s opinion, Truscott could have “eaten a ham like Patton any morning for breakfast.”36

  Clare rides in a Jeep with General Mark Clark (center), December 17, 1944 (illustration credit 10.1)

  Aware of his qualities from a recent cover story in Life, Clare saw at once that Truscott was “the real thing.” She resolved to see as much of him as possible in the days ahead.37 But it was Clark who gave her and the other delegates their first look at the Fifth Army Front.

  Early on Sunday, December 17, they left the comforts of the Excelsior Hotel and assembled for a publicity shot in battle clothing. They wore steel helmets with their names painted on them, and winter camouflage outfits that were brown outside and pure white inside. “Just before the photographers snapped,” an army public relations officer recalled, “Mrs. Luce, with perfect timing, suddenly reversed her jacket, and there was our Clare, a gorgeous laughing snow bunny, surrounded by a dozen drab nobodies who were obviously out of her league at this sort of thing.”38

  Clare took her turn riding with Clark in a procession of thirty Jeeps along twisting, sludgy, rock-strewn chamois trails The mountain terrain was half-familiar. She had surveyed it from the air a few days before, and noted that its countless shell and bomb craters swollen with slime made the earth look as if it had “a hideous case of smallpox.”39 Now she found herself bumping through the ravaged landscape for more than eight frigid hours, traveling as far forward as Loiano in the center of the last massif before Bologna.40

  At one point the delegation was deposited in ankle-deep mud only four miles from the Gothic Line.41 As Clare tramped about in her bulky outfit, a German 88 shell dropped less than a thousand yards away.42 Bill Mauldin rode with the press attachment, observing Clare closely. “She was as bright as a bird through the whole trip, taking notes and talking to soldiers.”43 At an evacuation hospital, he noticed that few other Representatives shared her interest in amputees and other casualties, unless the patients hailed from their own states. Coming upon a wounded German captive, one member wondered aloud what kind of care “the krauts” were giving American POWs. When reminded that Germans usually abided by Geneva Convention rules, he said that all the same, he hoped that this one would not get the ward’s last bottle of plasma.44

  Mauldin caught Clare’s eye when another Congressman draped his arm around a GI and said, “Gee, we sure would like to share Christmas with you fellas. But we have to get home to be with our families.” No words could have more demoralized the soldiers standing around.45

  The delegation was scheduled to fly back to Naples from Florence on December 18, departing the following day for Washington. Clare went to General Truscott.

  “Look, can you fix it up for me to miss the plane?”

&n
bsp; “Oh yes,” he said. “I think I can arrange that.”46

  Clare visits a wounded GI (illustration credit 10.2)

  Telling her colleagues that she wanted to make a final visit to Twelfth Air Force headquarters, she took herself off. When, in due course, they left without her, she told a reporter that fog and an earache had prevented her from joining them.47

  Married, but starved for female companionship, Truscott was as attracted to Clare as she was to him. He later admitted, “I was drawn to you as iron is drawn by a magnet and was almost as helpless.”48

  He had a suite at the Anglo American Hotel in Florence, and offered it to her for as long as she wanted it.49 Since he himself was going to be quartered in a grand tent at the front, he invited her to join him there for Christmas.

  Clare not only accepted but went a step further and decided to stay in Italy for another ten days. She let Harry’s office know that she would be unable to spend Christmas with her husband in Florida, as planned. Harry had already made the trip South, and he reacted angrily.50

  On the evening of December 22, Clare spoke at a forum for several hundred servicemen at the Red Cross Club in Rome. The weekly event was officially “off the record,” so she was even franker than usual. When asked what form of government Americans might adopt after the war, she said the administration was “headed towards some form of national socialism.” But so were “governments all over the world.” She inveighed against “economic trends” at home similar to those that had led Europe to Fascism. A reporter in the audience sent a summary of her remarks to Eleanor Roosevelt.51

  Clare went again to the front the next day. This time she traveled with General Truscott’s personal driver.52 Their journey from Florence followed the notoriously perilous Route 65 through the Apennines. Trucks loaded with ammunition, rations, and mail accompanied them northeast, while a steady stream of camouflaged vehicles came toward them, bringing battle-fatigued troops south for a three-day break. As the Jeep bounced and skidded on the frozen road, soft snow swirled in icy blasts. The temperature fell to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Clare tried to keep warm by zipping her body into a sleeping bag and covering her head with an “Ernie Pyle” knit cap. Even so, she was recognized by GIs who were digging, chopping wood, and repairing vehicles along the roadside. They smiled and waved as she called out, “Merry Christmas.”53

  She made several impromptu stops, including one at a field hospital. For lunch she ate the same C rations as the soldiers: sausages, Spam, potatoes, beans, and bread, washed down with an unpalatable powdered lemonade drink. Clare observed that troops in foxholes or pup tents boiled canned meat and vegetables in their helmets, then put soap in the remaining water to shave and wash socks.54

  As the Jeep climbed higher, the landscape of trees, hedges, cornstalks, walls, and farmhouses became a scene of wintry beauty. Every valley was dotted with black tents, their ropes festooned with icicles. Stovepipe chimneys emitted plumes of dark smoke that were carried off by gusts of wind. At last they found the Fifth Army command post. In a huge tent, with shadows lighted by a roaring fire, Truscott stood waiting.55

  General Lucian K. Truscott, Jr. (illustration credit 10.3)

  That evening, Clare put on her black silk suit for dinner with the general. He told her what she already knew: that most Americans had the impression Italy was a secondary front with not much fighting. Some of his men had received letters from home saying how glad the family was that their boy was in “sunny Italy,” not in France, “where all the shooting is.” The truth was that the Fifth Army had been battling the Wehrmacht nonstop for four hundred days, keeping some of Germany’s best divisions “off the necks of the fellows in France.”56

  The conversation turned to literature and politics, and Clare found that Truscott, a former teacher who carried Tolstoy novels in his kit bag, was as much at ease talking of these subjects as he was of military matters. She countered by showing off her knowledge of Homer Lea, the hunchbacked American military strategist who at the turn of the century had helped Chinese rebels overthrow the Manchu monarchy.57 General Willoughby had interested her in Lea in the aftermath of Japan’s 1938 invasion of China, and she had published two long articles about the little man’s life and work. She had also written introductions to reprints of two Lea books, in which he had accurately predicted the rise of Germany and Japan, and the methods both would use to attack Britain and America.58

  Truscott was impressed. Waxing confidential, he invited her to sit on his regulation cot. Used as Clare was to men making passes, she was not surprised at this development. She warily settled at one end, with him at the other. Soon he reached out, grabbed her knee, and said he was going to tell her something.59

  The most beautiful thing in this world is an American division! There’s nothing my division can’t do. You want somebody to put on a show, sing a song, fight a battle, build a bridge, pull a tooth, deliver a baby, my men will do it. An American division is a beautiful thing.60

  The following morning, Christmas Eve, Clare set off in freezing mountain air “to find out what war is all about.” Dressed in a parka, fur cap, and galoshes, she went to tour a nearby encampment. Some soldiers had decorated a small fir tree with a pack of cards, and strewn shreds of toilet paper along the snowy branches in lieu of tinsel. For her exclusive use, they had also erected a powder-room tent, and teasingly attached a placard reading, “THE WOMEN.”61

  She had a long visit with the “Blue Devil” Eighty-eighth Infantry Division. Several of the men confessed their long-term worries, such as a potential lack of jobs when they got home. Others wondered if America might resort to totalitarianism in any postwar chaos. One GI, hopeful that she would report on her trip, described what local warfare was really like: “You fight your way up that blankety-blank mountain, and you get to the top, and ahead of you is another mountain, and then you are up and you think you can relax and fight your way down easy, and ahead is another mountain, and the Jerries [are] on top of that one, too, and another one behind that one … Wonder if I’ll make the last mountain in Italy. Think of this perspective when you write.”62

  On Christmas Day, Clare rose early, put on her parka, and headed off in a Jeep, this time with Truscott himself as her escort. She told him she wanted to go to forward post areas, “where there is no Christmas.” He asked how good she was at walking. Blue eyes twinkling, she said she walked fine.63

  “What security restrictions are there on you and me?” she inquired later, seeing they were headed to unprotected positions. The general grinned, saying there were none on him and only those that he imposed on her. Clare coquettishly let him know that “Uncle Joe” Stilwell had taken her close to the action in Burma. In that case, said Truscott, he would do likewise.64

  After hurtling through the Futa Pass, the Jeep stopped beside an icily shining field, where Clare saw a spectacle that would stay with her. Kneeling in the snow was a congregation of GIs at Mass. The priest held up a wafer that seemed whiter than the surrounding snow. She found herself thinking, with a humility that surprised her, “Dear Christ, have compassion on those kids … and if it’s all the same to You, let me share their sacrifices.”65

  Even though the Jeep bore the general’s three stars, the servicemen paid it and her no attention. As the last Eucharist bell rang and Truscott’s driver pulled away, Clare looked back and saw breath from the soldiers rising like small puffs of incense curling toward the altar.66

  As they arrived at the line, Truscott ushered her so close that she could see German troopers on a distant hillside emerge from a foxhole, and tipsily perform handsprings in the snow.67

  Lunching with enlisted men at a rough table in the kitchen tent of an armored infantry battalion, she quizzed a sergeant for over half an hour about trench foot and other painful consequences of extended service in the field. She returned in the afternoon to Florence and shared Christmas dinner with the general at the Thirty-fourth Division’s 168th Regimental headquarters.68

  On December 26,
Clare left at last for Rome. Truscott was not the only officer who regretted having to bid her farewell. General Clark noted in a diary entry that the Congresswoman’s presence and understanding of what his men endured had given him “a great lift.”69 In appreciation, he gave her a white silk “escape map” scarf, used by paratroopers in Sicily. It had been autographed by several generals, and was particularly precious to her because Truscott wore one just like it.70

  By now she understood that the fight in Italy would drag on well into the next year. It was a depressing prospect, but as one of Clark’s aides wrote her, in the grimness of war, she had brought cheer to homesick men as a symbol of what they were fighting for: “the beauty of home, freedom, democracy, wholesomeness.”71

  In Rome, Clare told newsmen that of all the impressions she had gained from her visit, the most urgent was the need for troop rotations from the combat lines, such as pilots were allowed after a number of missions. As things stood, an infantryman had only medical reasons for a break, and that carried “a shell-shocked or yellow taint.” She also advocated combat pay not only for medics, as Ike had suggested, but also for reconnaissance cavalry units attached to infantry divisions. Since Truscott had started his career as a cavalry officer, she might have heard this recommendation from him.72

  On Wednesday, December 27, she broadcast to the United States a fifteen-minute summary of her visit. She said the American Fifth Army infantryman was “the proudest and bitterest” of all fighters—proud because he had “borne the hardest brunt in these endless mountains,” and bitter because he felt that his countrymen thought he was serving “on an inactive Front.”73