The Day of Battle (101 page)

On June 6, Alexander ordered the Fifth and Eighth Armies to make all possible speed for Pisa and Florence, respectively. Some 170 miles separated the Allied front from the next chain of German redoubts, the formidable Gothic Line, but many rivers and hills lay in between. “If only the country were more open,” Alexander lamented, “we could make hay of the whole lot.”

Howitzers barked wheel to wheel in the Villa Borghese gardens above the Via Veneto. Wreathed in smoke, the guns banged away at the retreating enemy north of the Tiber. Soldiers crowded around platoon radios with heads cocked and mouths agape, listening to the latest news from France and laying bets on when the war would end. “No one put down a date past Thanksgiving,” a soldier in the 36th Division recalled. “I often wondered what happened to that money.”

Weary sergeants ordered them to fall in and move out. “C’mon, man, c’mon,” Ernie Harmon urged a Sherman commander. “There are places to go.” A tanker in Old Ironsides told his diary: “Drove through Rome to the other side of Tiber River. People threw flowers at us. Stopped and had coffee.” The 88th Division vanguard radioed General Keyes a two-word message: “Beyond Rome.”

Olive-drab columns streamed across the river and past the cylindrical Castel Sant’Angelo, tomb of the warrior-emperor Hadrian. On the roof stood the bronze statue of St. Michael the Archangel, patron of soldiers, sheathing his sword. GIs smelling of Chianti and Chesterfields jammed the deuce-and-a-half trucks or straddled the towed artillery tubes, souvenir lithographs and Fascist postage stamps tucked into their packs.

Then up they climbed, along the dark ridge of the Janiculum, where the ancients once kept a shrine to two-faced Janus, the god of beginnings, and where augurs had studied their auspices. From the hillcrest on this cloudless day, Rome unfurled below in a tapestry of reds, browns, and yellows. Beyond the park where Cleopatra once lived in Caesar’s villa stood the bell towers and the spires, the cupolas and the domes. On the southern horizon lay the faint blue smudge of the Colli Laziali.

Why did it take you so long?
the Italians asked, and the answer could only be:
Because so many of us died to set you free.

North they rolled, on the high ground beneath cypresses and umbrella pines, past Roman gardeners working the flower beds of gray marl and yellow sea sand. North they rolled, and the scent of roses lingered in their wake.

M
ORE
than three weeks passed before Jack Toffey’s family learned of his death. “We see you captured Rome,” his mother-in-law wrote him. George Biddle, also corresponding with a dead man, encouraged Toffey to “write one short word about the run into Rome. It left me restless and envious.”

At the house on East Long Street in Columbus, Helen and the two children went about their days without knowing that their lives had changed forever. An early summer heat wave scorched central Ohio. Toffey’s beloved Reds slipped to fourth place in the National League, but the minor league Columbus Red Birds climbed to second in the American Association. In an exhibition game featuring the pitching greats Dizzy Dean and Satchel Paige, Model Dairy of Columbus beat the Chicago American Giants, a Negro League club.

The news from Rome and Normandy electrified the city, which on the evening of June 6 observed a long minute of silence “in respect to the boys of the united nations now fighting to free an enslaved continent.” Blood donors in Columbus set a new record by giving almost a thousand pints in one day, and absenteeism at local war plants plummeted. Three thousand inmates at the Ohio State Penitentary held a prayer vigil, asking the Almighty to bless
OVERLORD
, and radio station WCOL broadcast twenty daily news reports to track “the beginning of a new world for all who cherish freedom.”

Columbus organized a war bond parade on Sunday, June 11, and sailors in white caps marched down Broad Street past displays of jeeps, half-tracks, and a Navy Helldiver airplane that had been built in the local Curtiss-Wright factory. Rationing stamps were still required to buy sugar, shoes, gasoline, and liquor, but the nation suddenly had three billion surplus eggs and every family was urged to eat an extra dozen. Paley’s Pants Shop on West Broad Street offered Father’s Day slacks for as little as $4, while Roy’s jewelry store advertised diamond rings from $65 to $225, including the 20 percent federal tax. Recalling the giddy rampage that followed the armistice announcement in November 1918, downtown
merchants announced a victory plan that included locking their doors and boarding up windows when word arrived that World War II had ended.

The fatal telegram from the adjutant general came to East Long Street on Sunday morning, June 25. “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your husband, Lieutenant Colonel John J. Toffey, Jr., was killed in action on 3 June in Italy. Letter follows.” Helen received his posthumous Purple Heart, which was Toffey’s third of the war, and a posthumous Silver Star, his second. Eventually a footlocker of personal effects arrived, including his pen-and-pencil set and a bloodstained glasses case.

As for Colonel Toffey himself, he would never get home. Instead he was buried among comrades in section J, row 4, grave 25, in the Nettuno cemetery, which had first opened two days after the Anzio landings. The muddy field, redeemed with bougainvillea and white oleander, soon became the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, a seventy-seven-acre sanctuary where almost eight thousand military dead would be interred.

Here, on Memorial Day in 1945, just three weeks after the end of the war in Europe, a stocky, square-jawed figure would climb the bunting-draped speaker’s platform and survey the dignitaries seated before him on folding chairs. Then Lucian Truscott, who had returned to Italy from France a few months earlier to succeed Mark Clark as the Fifth Army commander, turned his back on the living and instead faced the dead. “It was,” wrote eyewitness Bill Mauldin, “the most moving gesture I ever saw.” In his carbolic voice, Truscott spoke to Jack Toffey, to Henry Waskow, and to the thousands of others who lay beneath the ranks of Latin crosses and stars of David. As Mauldin later recalled:

The fall of Rome proved but a momentary interlude in a campaign that soon swept past the capital. Alexander’s optimism was unbounded. “Morale is irresistibly high,” he wrote Churchill. “Neither the Apennines nor even the Alps should prove a serious obstacle.” The prime minister urged him on, cabling, “Your whole advance is splendid, and I hope the remains of what were once the German armies will be collected.”

Late on June 7, a South African reconnaissance squadron found Kesselring’s headquarters on Monte Soratte ablaze. The field marshal and his staff had fled, though a storeroom full of fine sherry and French wine was seized intact, along with German maps depicting escape routes to the Gothic Line.

Kesselring had tried to persuade himself that the Allied legions “might succumb to the demoralizing influence of a capital city.” Yet for two weeks after Rome’s capture the Fifth and Eighth Armies bounded up the peninsula, averaging eight miles a day. Then the retreating Germans stiffened under Kesselring’s order to conduct demolitions “with sadistic imaginativeness.” By June 17, the familiar pattern of blown bridges and antitank ambushes had slowed the pursuit to two miles a day, and vicious little firefights erupted across central Italy. When an artillery captain in the 36th Division was killed in mid-June, one of his lieutenants wrote, “Damned shame that after living through all the hell of Salerno, Altavilla & Cassino he should be killed in a skirmish that no one will ever hear of.”

Alexander’s blithe dismissal of the Apennines and the Alps suggested an enduring delusion about the road ahead, where the mountains grew steeper and enemy supply lines grew shorter. Moreover, profound strategic changes would redraw the Mediterranean campaign, leaving Italy a bloody backwater. The American high command in Washington, supported by Eisenhower in London, remained intent on a late-summer invasion of southern France to reinforce the Normandy landings. A British proposal to launch an amphibious landing in the northern Adriatic for an attack through the Balkans toward Austria and southern Germany drew skepticism if not scorn. General Charles de Gaulle also insisted that French forces in Italy participate in the liberation of France; no French soldier, De Gaulle warned, would fight beyond Siena.

On July 5, AFHQ ordered that “an overriding priority” be given in the Mediterranean to assembling ten divisions for the invasion near Marseilles, code-named
ANVIL
. Just as he had given up seven divisions after the fall of Sicily, Alexander now forfeited seven more, including Truscott’s VI Corps and Juin’s FEC, as well as substantial air support and many logistical units. By mid-August, Fifth Army would shrink by more than half, to 171,000 troops, even as the total American force in the Mediterranean peaked at 880,000 troops. Alexander deemed the denuding of his force “disastrous,” and blamed Eisenhower for “halting the triumphant advance of my armies in Italy at a key moment.” Clark, abruptly in harmony with General Alex, considered the move “one of the outstanding political mistakes of the war.”

Their disappointment was understandable, yet the strategic judgment of Alexander and Clark remains suspect. Hitler had decided to rebuild Kesselring’s army group with eight more divisions and to continue fighting for Italian real estate, while construction battalions turned the Gothic Line into a barrier as formidable as the Gustav Line had been. Although Allied intelligence revealed that four German divisions had retreated from Rome as “mere shells,” and seven others were “drastically depleted,” the Allied pursuit even before the decimation of Alexander’s host was “neither strong nor quick,” as a U.S. Army assessment concluded. Night continued to give the retreating Germans “a privileged sanctuary” since Allied air fleets had only a few dozen aircraft capable of night attacks. “The cloak of darkness saved the German armies from destruction,” an Air Force study later concluded.

The stress in Fifth Army on capturing Rome led to a palpable deflation once the capital fell. Doctors in the 1st Special Service Force reported that men in the unit were “listless, perilously close to exhaustion, and infested with lice,” a diagnosis valid for many other units as well. On July 4, the 1st Armored Division reported that barely half of Old Ironsides’ tanks remained battleworthy and that the division in six weeks had lost thirty-eight company commanders.

If the past year had been among the most catastrophic in Italian history, with invasion, occupation, civil strife, and total war, the forthcoming year would hardly be less bitter. Partisan ambushes and assassinations increased, as did brutal reprisals: under Kesselring’s orders, ten Italian deaths were exacted for every German killed. By early fall, an estimated 85,000 armed partisans roamed the mountains, with another 60,000 in Italian towns. Atrocities became commonplace.

Alexander in late August would shift Eighth Army back to the Adriatic in an effort to unhinge Kesselring’s defenses. But autumn rains and heavy casualties halted the Allied drive toward the Po River, and even Churchill realized that “the Italian theater could no longer produce decisive results,” in W.G.F. Jackson’s words. As the days grew shorter, an American officer wrote, “I wished that I were dead if I had to stay in Italy another winter.”

Alas, another miserable winter would pass, another wretched deadlock in which the campaign “sank to the level of a vast holding operation,” as the official U.S. Army history put it. Alexander’s armies grew increasingly polyglot, comprising troops from twenty-nine nations speaking a dozen languages, including Brazilians, Belgians, Cypriots, and Palestinian Jews—as well as two American forces, one white and one black. The Germans grew so feeble that eventually oxen would be harnessed to pull trucks, and any soldier on patrol who brought back a can of fuel received a thousand
cigarettes. Yet not until April 1945 would the Gothic Line collapse, leading to capitulation twenty months after Allied soldiers had first made land at Reggio di Calabria.

Few who had been there at the beginning would be there to see the end. “Many men will never know if we win or lose,” Lieutenant Will Stevens had written his mother. “But if anything does happen, I’ll try to be good enough so I can meet you somewhere else and maybe we can have a cake together up where things are not rationed.” He was killed on June 25, 1944. Such deaths forever haunted those who outlived the war. “I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,” wrote the pilot John Muirhead, “for I am strangely bound to all that happened to them.”

The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.

German casualties in Italy remain uncertain, as they were in North Africa. Alexander put German losses at 536,000, while the official U.S. Army history tallied 435,000, including 48,000 enemies killed and 214,000 missing, many of whom were never accounted for. Fifth Army alone reported 212,000 prisoners captured in the campaign. An OSS analysis of obituaries in seventy German daily newspapers found a steady increase in the number of seventeen-and eighteen-year-old war dead; moreover, by late summer 1944, nearly one in ten Germans killed in action was said to be over thirty-eight years old.

As the war moved north, Italian refugees returned home to find their towns obliterated and their fields sown with land mines. The Pontine Marshes again became malarial, and nine out of every ten acres around Anzio were no longer arable. The ten miles between Ortona and Orsogna held an estimated half million mines; those straggling home carried hepatitis, meningitis, and typhus. Ancient San Pietro was a ghost town, and a ghost town it remained, a shambles of plinths, splintered roof beams, and labyrinthine rubble. Only about forty San Pietrans returned to the old village; other survivors moved away or inhabited a new town that would be built down the slope, a bit closer to Highway 6. Some who outlived the war died violently from mines, or while trying to disarm live shells to sell the copper and brass for scrap.

Sant’Angelo refugees first returned in June 1944 to harvest wheat along the Rapido River. Mines quickly took a toll here too, and continued to take a toll for years: among the lost were Pietro Fargnoli, age six, and
Pietro Bove, age twelve, both born after the war, and both killed on February 27, 1959.

Malaria kept Cassino uninhabitable for two years. Eventually the Via Serpentina was rebuilt; so, too, the gleaming white abbey on the hill and the town itself, which within a few decades became prosperous and handsome, with a big Fiat plant nearby and a new
autostrada
that carried travelers from Naples to Rome in two hours.

Some scars were harder to heal. “The men that war does not kill it leaves completely transparent,” one colonel observed after a night of heavy shelling. A soldier in the 36th Division later wrote, “I was scared for 23 months. I saw the best troops in the world cut down and replaced three or four times.” Simply surviving exacted a price. As J. Glenn Gray told his diary, “My conscience seems to become little by little sooted.” Or, as an old paratrooper from the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment said almost sixty years after the war: “I hate the smell of anything dead…. It reminds me of Salerno.”

Was the game worth the candle? Alexander thought so. “Any estimate of the value of the campaign must be expressed not in terms of the ground gained,” he later wrote, “but in terms of its effect on the war as a whole.” By his tally, when Rome fell six of Kesselring’s nine “excellent mobile divisions had been severely mauled,” and fifty-five German divisions “were tied down in the Mediterranean by the [Allied] threat, actual or potential.” As the Combined Chiefs commanded, Italy had been knocked from the Axis coalition and hundreds of thousands of Hitler’s troops had been “sucked into the vortex of defeat,” in the glum phrase of a senior German general in Berlin. Churchill later wrote, “The principal task of our armies had been to draw off and contain the greatest possible number of Germans. This had been admirably fulfilled.”