The Day of Battle (35 page)

Sixty-two transports were already circling when Licata South appeared below, with more taking off each minute. Unable to land on the clogged runway, Lemnitzer grabbed a flare pistol and began firing from both sides of the cockpit as the Beaufighter skimmed the treetops. The takeoffs stopped, the Beaufighter landed, and Lemnitzer tore hell-for-leather to the small command post off the runway apron. There he found Ridgway, wearing his parachute and ready to climb into a C-47. The 82nd commander had whiled away the afternoon playing cribbage and strolling through the olive trees with a chaplain, “trying to reconcile myself” to the certain destruction of his command. “Didn’t you get our message?” Lemnitzer asked over the engine roar. Ridgway’s eyes widened. “What message?”

Jeeps raced about, herding paratroopers back to their bivouacs. Recall orders went out to those in the air. Exhausted and relieved, Ridgway stumbled into a tent where one of his officers sat trembling on a cot. Ridgway poured two drinks from a whiskey bottle, and as darkness fell and calm again enveloped Licata South, they sat slumped together, silent but for the sound of their weeping.

At 6:30
P.M
. on September 8, Eisenhower’s flat Kansas drawl announced over Radio Algiers: “The Italian government has surrendered its armed forces unconditionally…. All Italians who now act to help eject the German aggressors from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the united nations.” Ten minutes later, having heard no answering confirmation from Radio Rome, Eisenhower authorized the broadcast of Badoglio’s proclamation, the text of which Castellano had provided at Cassibile: “The Italian forces will…cease all acts of hostility against the Anglo-American forces wherever they may be.”

King Victor Emmanuel, Badoglio, and other Italian officials had assembled for a conference in the Quirinal Palace when a Reuters news bulletin at 6:45
P.M
. informed them of Eisenhower’s proclamation. After much anguished discussion, the king concluded that Italy could not change sides yet again. Badoglio hastened to the Radio Rome studio, and at 7:45
P.M
. affirmed the capitulation.

For 1,184 days, Italy had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Germany. Now she had cast her lot with her erstwhile foes, trusting in providence
and an Allied shield for protection from Hitler’s wrath. Neither would stay the hot rake. “Italy’s treachery is official,” Rommel wrote his wife. “We sure had them figured out right.”

In the hours following Badoglio’s announcement, jubilation and confusion radiated from Rome to the remotest hamlet of every Italian province. Citizens exulted at the presumed arrival of peace. But no intelligible orders had been issued to the Italian fleet or to the sixty army divisions of 1.7 million troops. Telephone queries from Italian garrisons in Greece, northern Italy, and elsewhere received incoherent replies or no reply at all. The frantic
ring-ring
of unheeded phones soon became the totemic sound of capitulation. The armistice caught fourteen of sixteen government ministers by surprise; one summoned a notary to witness his affidavit of utter ignorance.

No effort was made to stop six battalions of German paratroopers tramping into the capital from the south; their commander even paused to buy grapes at a farmer’s market. Grenadiers closed on the city from the north. Rome’s police chief estimated that six thousand German secret agents infested the capital, and within hours the only open escape route was on the Via Tiburtina to the east. It was on this poplar-lined avenue that the royal family fled by night in a green Fiat: the king—“pathetic, very old and rather gaga,” according to a British diplomat—carrying a single shirt and two changes of underwear in a cheap fiberboard suitcase; the beefy queen, ingesting drops of uncertain provenance; and the middle-aged crown prince, Umberto, head in hands, muttering, “My God, what a figure we’re cutting.” Badoglio and a few courtiers fled with them in a seven-car convoy. Crossing the Apennines to the Adriatic port of Pescara, they scattered 50,000 lire among their carabinieri escorts, then boarded the submarine chaser
Baionetta
for passage to Brindisi, on the heel of the boot. In a suitable epitaph, a Free French newspaper observed, “The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice.”

The biggest fish had escaped, but German troops snared thirty generals in Rome, as well as hundreds of Italian officials. A few firefights erupted, around the Caius Cestius pyramid and in Via Cavour and old Trastevere. Italian snipers near the railroad station crouched behind overturned carts to fire at Germans breezing into the Hotel Continentale. Swiss Guards at the Vatican swapped their pikes and halberds for rifles. Looting broke out near the Circus Maximus, as terrified Romans stockpiled cheese and bundled pasta, and buried their valuables in oilcloth parcels. “The Jews are in a panic and trying to leave the city,” one witness reported. Italian envoys pleaded for a chance to negotiate Rome’s fate.

Field Marshal Kesselring was disinclined to parley. He had narrowly escaped death at noon on September 8 in a decapitation attack on Frascati by 130 American B-17s; it was these planes and the subsequent detonation of four hundred tons of high explosives that Taylor and Gardiner heard from the Palazzo Caprara. The hour-long attack obliterated the bucolic vineyard town, including the charming restaurant with its panoramic view of St. Peter’s where Kesselring had placed his command post. An estimated two thousand civilians and dozens of German staff officers died. Temporarily dispossessed of both his headquarters and his smile, Kesselring crawled from the rubble, convinced that the Italians had set him up. Even as he appealed to residual Fascist brotherhood, the field marshal threatened to blow up Rome’s aqueducts and to raze the city. Among those trying to protect the capital, General Carboni mounted a brief, hapless defense; resistance soon sputtered and died. “It is finished, but there is no need to despair,” Carboni told another officer. “I have saved what there is to be saved.”

Kesselring, now viceroy of the Eternal City, shrewdly allowed Italian troops to leave the capital with marching bands and unfurled flags. There would be ample time to settle scores. Much had become clear to the Italophile who had so steadfastly clung to Rome’s pledges of fidelity. He could see in retrospect that “every event was like a flash of sheet lightning, more foreshadowing than clearing the atmosphere.” Suddenly Italy was just “a card missing from the pack.” As for the Italians, Kesselring added, “I loved these people. Now I can only hate them.”

The Stillest Shoes the World Could Boast

U
NMOLESTED
and apparently undetected, Kent Hewitt’s armada of 642 ships steamed north in a thousand-square-mile swatch of the Mediterranean, bound for
HARPSICHORD
, as the Gulf of Salerno was now code-named. If the sea remained calm, the sun was searing. Little ventilation penetrated the packed troop holds, and few were as lucky as those aboard the converted Polish liner
Sobieski,
which had a swimming pool. Food on most vessels during the three-day passage was dreadful. “Whenever I tore a bun open and found a worm, I would cover it with jam and butter and eat ahead,” a mortarman wrote his family in Indiana. “I couldn’t be watching out for those worms, as they had to look out for themselves.” Troops in the three assault divisions—two British and one American—packed and repacked their kit, stuffing a week’s supply of salt tablets and Atabrine pills in knotted condoms before scribbling just-in-case letters to be left with their battalion chaplains.

The usual muddles and nugacities followed the fleet. Four thousand combat soldiers had sailed without weapons, which were in short supply in North Africa (along with binoculars and wristwatches); they would disembark at Salerno as they had boarded: unarmed. Troops of the 36th Division wandered through the sweltering holds with cans of paint, heeding a recent War Department decree that the white-star insignia on all Army vehicles now be enclosed within a white circle. On one British ship, a loftman released his carrier pigeons for a bit of exercise only to see them wing toward Africa, never to return. The cargo manifest on a vessel loaded in Oran simply listed “400 cases military impedimenta.” Hewitt was so incensed by loading infractions—bombs had been dumped into troop holds, for instance, and crates of shoes marked “Signal Equipment”—that he ordered a broad search for contraband. No little befuddlement resulted because the British Army and Royal Navy used different numbering systems for their LSTs. “Both numbers are painted on the hull of the ship and cause considerable confusion,” the British X Corps noted. So many changes had disfigured the fleet’s sailing formations that a senior Navy operations officer confessed to keeping himself “informed by hearsay” because he was “not sure who was where.”

As always, soldiers found diversions to take their minds off the coming battle. British Commandos gambled away the hours with endless games of housey-housey, akin to bingo. Tommies in the 56th Division, concerned that their desert-bleached khaki would be too conspicuous on a mottled European battlefield, dyed the uniforms in cauldrons of boiling coffee; the treatment left them not only darker but also scented with espresso. Aboard the
Duchess of Bedford,
after listening to an intelligence officer lecture at length on Italian politics, one soldier told his diary, “We know nothing.” Others studied the government-issue “Italian Phrase Book,” which included not only the words for lobster, oysters, and butter, but five pages of handy medical language—
Arrestate il sangue!
“Stop the bleeding!”—as well as the hopeful
Voglio passare la notte,
“I want to spend the night,” and the eternal
Il governo americano vi pagherà,
“The U.S. government will pay you.”

Aboard Hewitt’s flagship, the voyage evoked the dreamy days when
Ancon
had catered to well-heeled travelers on Caribbean runs from Panama to New York. White-jacketed mess stewards served thick steaks with apple pie and ice cream; the leather chairs and perpetual card games in the officers’ lounge reminded one passenger of “the bridge room at the Yale Club.” Clark sat for a few rubbers but again seemed distracted. “General Clark is feeling the strain of this period of waiting,” his aide noted. “There is nothing that he himself can do now.” To pass the hours he napped, did situps,
and paced the weather deck to work up “a good sweat.” Summoning reporters to his stateroom, Clark likened
AVALANCHE
to “spitting right into the lion’s mouth.”

Some 55,000 assault troops would invade Salerno, with a comparable number of reinforcements to follow. On Fifth Army’s left, the British X Corps was to land two infantry divisions and pivot toward Naples; on the right, the U.S. VI Corps would initially land only the 36th Division, with part of the 45th Division afloat in reserve. “It’s the most daring plan of the war,” Clark said as a steward poured coffee into paper cups. “You can’t play with fire without the risk of burning your fingers.”

The 36th, entering combat for the first time, derived from the Texas National Guard. Both the officer cadre and enlisted ranks were dominated by Texans, from Carrizo Springs and Raymondville, Harlingen and Laredo, Houston and San Antonio. In stateside bars, 36th troops had been known to insist that all patrons stand and remove their caps whenever “Deep in the Heart of Texas” was sung. Since leaving Oran hardly an hour had passed on the division flagship, the
Samuel Chase,
without a rollicking chorus of “The Eyes of Texas.” The division commander, Major General Fred L. Walker, was a Regular Army officer from Ohio, but he carried in his kit bag a Lone Star flag given him by Governor Coke Stevenson. When his men sang, Walker sang too.

How much did the Germans know? a reporter asked Clark. Would
AVALANCHE
catch them unawares? “We can’t expect to achieve strategical surprise,” Clark replied. “But we do hope to achieve a degree of tactical surprise.” The British planned a fifteen-minute naval cannonade to soften defenses before the landings began. The 36th Division, on the contrary, had elected to forgo naval fire. General Walker believed the Germans were too dispersed for shelling to be effective—“I see no point to killing a lot of peaceful Italians and destroying their homes,” he said. He also was wary of short rounds falling on his men, and he still hoped that “our landing may not be discovered until we are ashore.” Hewitt had bitterly disagreed, waving his ten-page list of 275 targets with precise grid locations for machine-gun nests, bridges, and enemy observation posts. The admiral considered it “fantastic to assume that we could surprise them,” but Clark had sided with Walker, in part on the assumption that only Italian troops would defend the beaches. The prodigious power of naval gunnery displayed in North Africa, Sicily, and the Pacific was spurned, foolishly.

At 6:30
P.M
. on Wednesday, September 8, barely eight hours before the landings were to commence, Clark joined Hewitt in the admiral’s cabin, where they heard Eisenhower’s armistice announcement on Radio Algiers and Badoglio’s subsequent affirmation. Many ships piped the broadcasts
over their public address systems; officers with megaphones quickly spread the word to smaller craft.

Jubilation erupted across the fleet. On
Duchess of Bedford,
Eisenhower’s final words were drowned out by the “dancing, kissing, backslapping and roaring of the troops.” Aboard H.M.S.
Hilary,
they flung helmets in the air or banged them on the steel deck, yelling, “The Eyeties have jagged it in!” Those on the destroyer U.S.S.
Mayo
brayed, “The war is over!” The commotion “sounded like a ladies’ pink tea,” one Navy officer complained. “Yap, yap, yap.” Chaplains offered prayers of deliverance, Grenadier Guards hoisted toasts to “the downfall of Italy,” and a battalion piper was ordered to compose “The Scots Guards March Through Naples.” British tars on a warship near Messina watched Italians light fireworks and dance in a floodlit church piazza. “Seldom in history,” a Royal Navy officer observed, “can a people have celebrated so hilariously the complete defeat of their country.”