The Day of Battle (56 page)

In Naples, shoppers and boulevardiers swarmed along the Via Roma. Harbor restaurants offered decent black market meals for 140 lire, or $1.40. Soldiers polished their shoes for a dance at the enlisted club and wished one another “Merry Typhus!”—the disease had become epidemic. MPs prowled the streets, fining officers caught with their hands in their pockets; sergeants who had removed their chevrons at the front to confound snipers now risked $10 per stripe for not sewing them back on. The city evinced the “spurious brightness which you find whenever there is a rapid turnover of money,” Christopher Buckley wrote. “There was a general atmosphere of jolliness.”

Jolliness faded farther north. Mark Clark on Christmas Eve gave a carton of cigarettes to each man in his Fifth Army headquarters, which now occupied the enormous royal palace at Caserta. He then served eggnog to his staff officers during a round of caroling. After attending a concert by the Royal Artillery band, he mingled with revelers at the Red Cross club and went to midnight mass in the packed royal chapel. To his daughter, Ann, Clark wrote, “I am anxious to get this thing over and get back to see you and have a good old laughing contest.”

In a Bari hospital, where mustard gas victims continued to die, a major walked the wards in a cotton beard and a St. Nick costume fashioned from two red hospital robes. Up the Adriatic coast, in Ortona, soldiers built plank tables in the candlelit church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, then laid the settings with white linen and silver scavenged from the ruins. Companies rotated through for Christmas dinner served by their officers in the British tradition, with soup, roast pork, pudding, and a bottle of beer apiece. A lieutenant with the wonderfully seasonal name of Wilf Gildersleeve played the pump organ while a battalion padre led the caroling. “Most of the men found it hard to take in,” an officer said. Radio calls to units on the perimeter began with a few bars of “Silent Night,” played by an adjutant strumming a mandolin near the microphone. General Vokes dined alone, and wept.

“The stars have crept low tonight / To comfort half-buried dreamers,” wrote a mortarman-poet, Hans Juergensen. Sprigs of holly and mistletoe decorated various encampments, and C-ration foil festooned little pine trees. In Venafro, near the Mignano Gap, pealing bells competed with booming guns, and five priests tendered communion to filthy, bearded soldiers on their knees at the altar rail. “I prayed that there would be no more wars after this one,” a private from Denver wrote his family.

Bells rang in Orsogna, too, but Kiwi troops heard them only at a distance since Germans still held the town. “I had not seen men so exhausted since Flanders. Their faces were grey,” Brigadier Kippenberger wrote. An Italian woman living furtively in Orsogna wrote to her missing son about the “poor sad Christmas” in the battered town, then added plaintively, “And where are you?” On the other side of the hill, where German soldiers agonized over reports of carpet-bombed cities in the Fatherland, the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment order of the day declared: “Hatred and revenge overcome our hearts as we ponder the magnitude of our misfortune and the anguish which these attacks have brought to our German families.”

“Usual targets of opportunity were engaged all through the day,” an American field artillery battalion reported, “climaxed by a salvo of colored smoke for Xmas greeting.” In one field hospital, surgeons operated by flashlight and fell flat whenever they heard the rush of approaching shells. When blood for transfusions ran short, nurses circulated among the gun crews and motorpool drivers, soliciting donations. A clerk in the 36th Division sorted Christmas packages and scribbled “KIA” on mail to be returned to the sender; at length, utterly spent, he sat at a typewriter and pecked out, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

And in the 34th Division, Captain Leslie W. Bailey assembled his company and read aloud from the second chapter of the Gospel According to Saint Luke. “Glory to God in the highest,” Bailey concluded, “and on earth peace and good will toward all men.”

The bottom of the year brought the Allied camp more hope than despair, even if it delivered neither peace nor universal goodwill. “The war is won,” Churchill had told his daughter, and War Department analysts now forecast Germany’s defeat in October 1944. If too optimistic by eight months, optimism seemed warranted.
Life
magazine noted in a year-end editorial that American factories already planned to resume production of consumer goods on a modest scale in 1944, including bobby pins, baby buggies, hot water heaters, and two million irons. On all battlefronts, with the notable exceptions of Italy and Burma, Allied forces were advancing. In the Pacific, the outer perimeter of Japan’s empire had been pierced in the
Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the inner ring of the Carolines and Marianas would soon loom in American crosshairs. General Douglas MacArthur continued to angle toward the Philippines, which would provide a springboard to Formosa and the Chinese mainland. Allied domination of the seas, among the signal achievements of 1943, was further demonstrated on December 26 when the Royal Navy trapped and sank the German battleship
Scharnhorst
off northwest Norway. Nearly two thousand German sailors were lost. On the Eastern Front, 175 German divisions continued their epic retreat.

Italy was a different matter. “The campaign is heartbreakingly slow,” John Lucas told his diary on December 26. “We haven’t enough troops to go very fast and I am afraid we will get weaker instead of stronger as time goes on because I figure this is becoming a secondary theater.” Fifth Army’s strength of 200,000 had hardly grown since October, and in December alone the army tallied 23,000 hospital admissions. Battle casualties had whittled away more than 10 percent of U.S. combat power since Salerno; for the British, the figure was 18 percent. The German high command on December 31 noted with satisfaction that the Allied advance on Rome had been “equal to about six miles per month.” Moreover, the Anglo-Americans were stuck not only in the Italian mud but also in the Mediterranean: more than twenty-five Allied divisions and five thousand combat planes remained in the theater “with no shipping available to move them elsewhere,” the Army concluded. Except for the seven divisions already sent from Sicily, overburdened British ports could not handle additional transfers from the Mediterranean on top of the floodtide of Yanks now arriving from the States. Italy, as Martin Blumenson wrote in the official U.S. Army history, had become “a war of position, static warfare at its worst.”

Dark thoughts intruded. “One rather wondered what we achieved,” admitted Major General Freddie de Guingand, the Eighth Army chief of staff. “We began to think about Passchendaele.” Farley Mowat told his family in Canada, “Things have changed so much since Sicily. Too many pals gone West. Too many things that go
wump
in the night.”

Doubts about the battlefield leadership also intruded, among both high and low. Alan Moorehead decried “a plan that was distinctly conservative and lacking in imagination”; the Allied armies, he added, “had come into Europe with very muddled ideas of what we were going to find.” Now when Alexander strolled into his war room to study the map in quiet reflection, some might wonder not what he was thinking but whether he was thinking at all. The manipulation of an army group “required weeks and months of forethought, not hours or days” as with smaller tactical units, his chief of staff later noted, and it was uncertain that Alexander possessed the capacity
for such forethought. “He had the average brain of an average English gentleman. He lacked that little extra cubic centimeter which produces genius,” said Lord Louis Mountbatten, commander of forces in Southeast Asia and hardly a towering intellect himself. The disjointed attacks by Fifth and Eighth Armies allowed German forces to shift back and forth across the peninsula to parry the blows in turn. Thanks to Ultra, Alexander was better informed about his adversaries than any general in modern history: “the Allies often knew almost as much about the enemy’s formations as he did himself,” a British intelligence history concluded. Yet the Allied brain trust seemed unable to overcome “the old methodical way” of war, as Kesselring put it.

Discontent clattered down the chain. Eisenhower privately wished that Patton rather than Clark commanded Fifth Army, although, given Patton’s inattention to logistics and medical issues in Sicily, his mastery of the infinitely harder welfare issues in an Italian winter was hardly assured. Clark in turn groused about Lucas and threatened to sack Doc Ryder, commander of the 34th Division, while Lucas groused about Middleton of the 45th Division and Middleton groused about his own subordinates. “The battalion commander problem is serious. It is our weakest link,” Middleton wrote in December. “My battalion executives are no good.”

Fortunately for the Allied cause, the enemy had problems, too. Twenty-three German divisions were mired in Italy, with nearly 300,000 troops. Joseph Goebbels lamented that if the Wehrmacht had another fifteen or twenty division to throw into the Eastern Front “we would undoubtedly be in a position to repulse the Russians. Unfortunately we must put these fifteen or twenty divisions into combat in the Italian theater.” Even Smiling Albert turned querulous. “For two months now,” Kesselring complained, “I have not been able to exercise proper command because everything evaporates between my fingers.”

War was never linear, and in the Mediterranean its road seemed especially meandering and desultory. “What will 1944 do to us?” Lucas asked his diary. Yet sometimes a soldier in a slit trench saw more clearly than the generals on their high perches. “You got the feeling that you were part of a vast war machine which could not be defeated and would never retreat,” wrote P. Royle, a Royal Artillery lieutenant in the British 78th Division. “It had all been so different a year ago in Tunisia when we were very much on the defensive and at times hanging on for dear life.”

For the Allies, things would continue to go
wump
in the night, and many more pals would go West. But the winter solstice had passed; each night grew shorter. Light would seep back into their lives, bringing renewed optimism as well as firm ground and fair skies.

“A terrible year has ended,” the monks in the Benedictine abbey atop Monte Cassino wrote in their log on December 31. “God forgive us our errors.”

The old year slipped away, lamented by no one. A ferocious storm with gale winds howled through Italy, destroying forty spotter planes and uprooting acres of tentage. Undaunted, troops in the 36th Division commemorated New Year’s Eve with a concoction of ethyl alcohol and grapefruit juice; the bitter weather made many nostalgic for a Texas blue norther. Soldiers across the front listened to German Radio Belgrade, which played “Lili Marlene” endlessly. “We’d pinched the enemy’s song, pinched his girl in a way,” said a British rifleman. Thousands wrote year-end letters to reassure their families. “We sleep plenty, eat plenty, and keep busy, so that’s enough to keep a guy living,” John S. Stradling, the seventh of eight children, told his mother. “And when the mail starts coming through, what else could a guy want besides a discharge?” In three weeks Stradling would be dead, killed by a mine.

Truscott’s 3rd Division headquarters roasted a piglet, then threw an Auld Lang Syne party in an abandoned church. Officers danced with thirty nurses and Red Cross workers until midnight, when fireworks—machine-gun tracers, mortar shells, and Very lights—welcomed the new year. The festivities continued until dawn, ending with a champagne breakfast. “Thought I might as well let them get it out of their systems because it will be a long time before they have another fling,” Truscott wrote Sarah. He added, “The road to Rome is one on which one does not make speed, at this season at any rate. After all, Hannibal spent 14 years on the road.”

Out with the old year went two familiar faces from the Mediterranean theater. Escorted by Spitfires, Montgomery flew from Italy on December 31, having been ordered back to London to command an army group in
OVERLORD
. He would be replaced in Italy by a protégé, General Oliver Leese, commander of the British XXX Corps. Before departing, Montgomery mounted the stage in the Vasto opera house to bid farewell to his assembled Eighth Army officers. He closed his half-hour address by telling them, “I do not know if you will miss me, but I will miss you more than I can say.” Alan Moorehead reported, “There was a silence among the officers as he turned abruptly and began to walk off. Then a perfunctory, well-bred, parade ground cheer broke out.”

“So there we are,” Montgomery wrote in his journal, trying to assay the Italian campaign. “After a brilliant start, we rather fell off. And it could have been otherwise…. I have enjoyed the party myself and am full of beans.” In northwest Europe he would start anew, if not quite afresh; for
good and ill, he left the Mediterranean encumbered by a reputation. “No one who has not been in the Eighth Army can appreciate just what he meant to us,” a British sapper wrote home. “He was a real human person.”

Eisenhower also left on the thirty-first. At 11:30
A.M
., he strode for the last time from the Hôtel St. Georges, where he had kept his headquarters through fourteen months of reversal and triumph. An hour later he lifted off from Maison Blanche airfield, bound for Washington via Morocco, the Azores, and Bermuda. Roosevelt a week earlier had announced Eisenhower’s appointment as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and Marshall insisted that he come home for a brief rest before traveling to London. “Allow someone else to run the war for twenty minutes,” Marshall urged. The new Mediterranean theater commander, Field Marshal Henry Maitland Wilson, known as Jumbo for his elephantine bearing, had hoped for three days’ overlap with Eisenhower in Algiers; Wilson instead arrived from Cairo to find him long gone. Most of Eisenhower’s inner circle would follow him to England, including Beetle Smith, Harry Butcher, and Kay Summersby.