The Day of Battle (58 page)

Could the Germans quickly reinforce the beachhead with troops from the north? This seemed unlikely, particularly given Allied air superiority. Would the beachhead force and Fifth Army be too far apart—at least sixty miles at the outset—to support each other? This was deemed “an unavoidable risk.” Alexander’s intelligence staff posited that German Tenth Army forces would “make an attempt to seal off the beachhead, and [would] thereby be maneuvered out of their strong defensive position at Cassino.”

Field Marshal Wilson found the conversation so soporific that he went to bed. Beetle Smith, who remained the AFHQ chief of staff pending his departure for London, apologized for the commander-in-chief’s early departure. “After all,” Smith quipped, “he is getting old.” Not until Saturday morning would Wilson learn that by 1:30
A.M
. his minions had talked themselves into an invasion at Anzio. Skeptics remained, including Brigadier Strong and several logisticians, but a majority supported Churchill’s daring gambit. Alexander voiced enthusiasm, but seemed to hedge his bets in a note to himself on Saturday: “Take no chances. Keep a reserve.”

Bleary-eyed, they reassembled in the La Saadia villa at 9:30
A.M
. Saturday. Churchill had prevailed through intimidation, endurance, and imaginative panache, wearing them down like water on stone. “It will astonish the world,” the prime minister said of
SHINGLE
, “and it will certainly frighten
Kesselring.” He remained contemptuous of logistical anxieties, telling Alexander, “I do hope, General, that when you have landed this great quantity of lorries and cannon you will find room for a few foot soldiers, if only to guard the lorries.” As Harold Macmillan had recently noted, “Winston is getting more and more dogmatic…and rather repetitive.”
SHINGLE
was not a bad plan, and it embodied the military virtues of audacity and surprise. Yet enough pieces of it were bad to risk rotting the whole. The belief that Kesselring would ignore this spear in the ribs and withdraw to the north was simply wishful. “It was a bluff, to scare the Germans into pulling back,” Alexander later admitted. No flinty-eyed assessment analyzed the likely strategic reaction of an enemy that did not scare easily. Once again, the Allies lacked the true measure of their adversaries.

Moreover, the
SHINGLE
force was sized not by the number of troops required to succeed, but by the number of divisions and ships available. “You need more men,” General Middleton told AFHQ after examining the plan. “You can get ashore, but you can’t get off the beachhead.” A weak corps was being dispatched for a job that required an army. Respected voices that might have given the planners pause were unheard: Admiral Kent Hewitt had opposed
SHINGLE
in December, but was subsequently summoned back to Washington; Hewitt would not return to the Mediterranean until late January.

True, Allied air-and seapower caused perturbations in the German high command. “Where can the enemy land? Everywhere,” Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, lamented in December. “When will he land? The enemy is not tied to any season.” Yet if command of the seas gave Allied commanders the mobility to attack where they pleased—and the British had built an empire on that principle—Churchill continued to underestimate the ability of a motorized defender, using roads and rails on interior lines, to concentrate forces overland faster than they could be consolidated over a beach.

Another die had been cast, another lot of fates consigned. Churchill “had imposed his will on the generals and admirals against their better judgment,” Samuel Eliot Morison concluded in the official U.S. Navy history of the Mediterranean. Alexander accepted
SHINGLE
“out of loyalty to his patrons,” a British officer wrote. “It was an error of judgment to have done so.” He also had failed to clarify precisely what his lieutenants were to do upon reaching shore; ambiguity rarely meliorated a flawed plan.

For now a buzz and bustle took hold, a sense of possibility and purpose. “Operation
SHINGLE
is on!” Clark told his diary on January 8 upon hearing the news. A chance to break the winter stalemate was at hand. Whatever
ambivalence Clark harbored, surely the prime minister was correct: without risk there could be no honor, no glory, no adventure.

As for Churchill, he was the lion redux. Morocco had restored his health, his verve, his roar. Soon he would fly back to England, ending a two-month absence and keener than ever to obliterate Nazi despotism from the face of the earth. On January 8 he cabled Roosevelt:

The wariness of his lieutenants worried him not at all. Perhaps influenced by the lush ambiance of Marrakesh, Churchill turned to a horticultural metaphor. “They may say I lead them up the garden path,” he said, “but at every stage of the garden they have found delectable fruit and wholesome vegetables.”

“Nothing Was Right Except the Courage”

A
T
last, at long last, they had reached the end of Purple Heart Valley. On the chilly Sabbath morning of January 16, a footsore regiment from the U.S. 34th Division crept up the limestone flank of Monte Trocchio, four miles northeast of San Pietro Infine. Olive trees bearded the lower slopes and a few splintered cedars ringed the crest. So many American artillery shells had crashed across Trocchio before dawn—shells chalked in vengeance with the names of American soldiers killed or wounded in the recent fighting—that red-hot fragments “fell in gusts like a thunderstorm,” wrote Margaret Bourke-White. Now the riflemen plodded upward, scrutinizing every lichen-covered rock for booby traps and straining for the telltale clap of exploding shoe mines. An occasional
pop!
carried across the slope, followed by an anguished shriek, but German troops had decamped. At noon the lead scouts wriggled onto the rocky summit to behold a panoramic view of the perdition behind and the perdition still ahead.

To the rear lay the Mignano Gap and a seven-mile stretch of sanguinary eminences: Camino and La Difensa, Rotondo and Lungo, Sammucro and the slag heap once known as San Pietro. To cross that seven-mile stretch and pierce the Bernhardt Line had taken the Fifth Army six weeks, at a cost of sixteen thousand casualties.

Ahead lay a pastoral river plain, three miles wide. Highway 6 bisected these alluvial flats from Monte Trocchio to Cassino—now the most fortified
town in Italy—then swerved up the Liri Valley toward Rome, eighty miles distant, before vanishing in the midday haze. Behind Cassino loomed its beetling namesake, Monte Cassino, crowned with the gleaming white Benedictine abbey that for fifteen centuries had been among Christianity’s most venerated shrines. A serpentine river threaded the alluvial flats from right to left past Cassino. The complex watercourse bore several names, but to American engineers—who had built intricate plaster relief models of this terrain, based on seventy thousand aerial photos—it was known as the Rapido. Several miles downstream, the Rapido swam into the Liri to become the Garigliano, which then flowed southwest for fifteen miles to the sea.

The Rapido-Garigliano floodplain and the steep uplands beyond it formed the western segment of the Gustav Line, the most ominous of Kesselring’s fortified barriers below Rome. The line stretched for one hundred miles across the Apennines to the Adriatic north of Ortona, but nowhere was it stouter than around Cassino, gateway to the beckoning Liri Valley. Already in spate from January rains, the Rapido and other streams were enhanced by a German “flooding program” under which dikes were demolished and canals diverted to create shallow polders across the flats.

The highland glens above Cassino concealed more than four hundred German guns and rocket launchers. Field wire linked each battery to observers in field gray who nested in the high rocks like birds in a rookery, watching with supernal omniscience the movements of the living creatures below. For more than two months German engineers and press-ganged Italian laborers had blasted gun pits from the rock face, reinforcing the bunkers with telephone poles sawed into eight-foot lengths and roofing the structures with oak beams, more poles, and several feet of dirt. The defenses extended up to three thousand yards in depth. In Cassino town, fields of fire were cleared around the fortified rail station and Hotel Continental. Hitler provided even more defensive matériel than Kesselring demanded: more concrete, mines, and barbed wire; more antitank guns, engineers, and slave laborers; more three-ton armored turrets with charcoal burners to keep the gunners warm.

It was here that Kesselring hoped the Anglo-Americans would “break their teeth,” and it was here that they intended to attack.

The impending landing at Anzio on January 22 lent urgency to Fifth Army’s assault on the Gustav Line. On this southern front, Clark now counted seven divisions in his army, parceled into three corps across a thirty-five-mile front. Although the winter fighting had already left many units disorganized and bereft of reserves, Clark intended to press the attack immediately to divert German attention from the beachhead. “The
momentum of our advance must be maintained at all costs,” Alexander urged four days after leaving Marrakesh.

In Operations Instructions No. 34, confidently titled “The Battle for Rome,” Alexander ordered Clark to force the enemy’s retreat beyond Rome and to press on to Florence and Pisa. Intelligence analysts at 15th Army Group predicted that Kesselring would withdraw when confronted by the pincers of Fifth Army from the southeast and the
SHINGLE
force from the northwest. To speed the enemy’s departure, all three corps would attack the Gustav Line. The two-division French Expeditionary Corps, or FEC, new to the theater and keen to redeem French honor, had surged forward on the far right of Clark’s front on January 12 and was making a mile per day, mostly uphill, with grenades and bayonets. On the left, the British X Corps would attack across the Garigliano River beginning on January 17, with two divisions near the sea and another one eight miles upstream.

The heart of the assault would fall in the center. On January 20, the U.S. II Corps was to cross the Rapido River, just a mile from Monte Trocchio and three miles downstream from Cassino. With a bridgehead secured by the 36th Division—the same Texans who had fought at Salerno and San Pietro—tanks from Old Ironsides, the 1st Armored Division, would storm across two new-laid bridges, veer up the Liri Valley to Frosinone, and merge with the Anzio force for a grand entry into Rome.

Clark later denied paternity of this plan, fingering Alexander instead. Yet it bore a striking resemblance to a scheme concocted by the Fifth Army commander as early as mid-December. Like
SHINGLE
, it embodied audacity and tactical plausibility. The Rapido even at flood stage was hardly fifty feet wide, though steep-banked and deep. Here lay the most direct route into the Liri Valley, and thence to the beachhead and Rome.

But also like
SHINGLE
, the Rapido plan had defects. Possession of the heights at the mouth of the Liri Valley, particularly Monte Cassino, gave the Germans an unobstructed view of the river and the ability to mass fires on all approaches. Truscott, whose 3rd Division had briefly been considered for a Rapido assault before being consigned to
SHINGLE
, told Clark in December that the attack would fail unless those heights were captured or attacked with enough fury to divert German attention.

“As long as this condition existed, bridges over the river could not long exist and any of our troops that succeeded in crossing would be cut to pieces,” Truscott’s chief of staff, Colonel Don E. Carleton, later observed. But Clark seemed “convinced that by some act of divine providence the well-entrenched defenders at Cassino would fade away and his tanks would go storming up the Liri Valley.”

The prospect of being cut to pieces displeased Major General Fred Walker, and it preyed on him body and soul. Since shortly after Salerno and through the scalding fight at San Pietro, the 36th Division commander had eyed the Rapido on the big map in his command post, sensing that destiny was tugging him toward this obscure creek below Cassino. By early January he had persuaded himself that the Rapido resembled the Marne, where in July 1918, as a thirty-one-year-old battalion commander, he had earned the Distinguished Service Cross for repelling an attack across the river by ten thousand Germans. He had never forgotten the sodden enemy corpses lining the muddy banks and drifting on the current. “I do not see how we, or any other division, can possibly succeed in crossing the Rapido River,” he confided to his diary on January 8. A week later he added, “This is going to be a tough job and I don’t like it. There is nothing in our favor.”

Square-jawed, with a heavy brow and a large nose that made him seem bigger than his actual five feet, ten inches and 173 pounds, Fred Walker once was described as an “amiable mastiff.” Born in Ohio, he earned a degree in mine engineering from Ohio State and enlisted as a private in 1911. After fighting in the Punitive Expedition against Mexico in 1916, he won fame—and survived mustard burns—in France. Walker was curious, alert, and ironic, a chess player although not a good one, and an excellent dancer. He was the sort of man who jotted down unfamiliar words to memorize—“factitious,” “chary,” “pretentious,” “abjure”—as well as quotes from Emerson and inspirational passages from Carl Van Doren’s
Benjamin Franklin.
As an instructor at the Army War College in the 1930s, Walker had taught a young rising star named Mark Clark. Despite their nine-year age difference, the two became “very good friends,” in Walker’s estimation, and shortly before Pearl Harbor the ascendant Clark had persuaded Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the Army Ground Forces chief, to give Walker command of the 36th Division.