The Day of Battle (62 page)

By any reckoning, two U.S. infantry regiments had been gutted in one of the worst drubbings of the war; the losses were comparable to those suffered six months later at Omaha Beach, except that that storied assault succeeded. “I had 184 men,” a company commander in the 143rd Infantry said. “Forty-eight hours later I had 17. If that’s not mass murder, I don’t know what is.” Two scarecrow battalions of the 141st when merged under the command of a captain could barely muster two hundred riflemen. Engineers reported scavenging eight M-2 boats, 323 paddles, and 4,100 feet of half-inch manila rope “in a bad tangled mess.” After pinning a Silver Star on a double amputee, Walker told his diary, “When I think of the foolish orders of the higher command which caused those broken bodies and deaths unnecessarily, it makes me feel like crying
halt.
”

Clark soon summoned Walker for a conference at Mignano. The two men shook hands and then strolled down the road in the morning sun, the tall, bony army commander towering above his stocky former instructor. Clark worried about the division’s morale. What could be done? Walker acknowledged a dejection after the “recent reverses and heavy losses of leaders.” Yes, Clark agreed, but those reverses had reflected a dearth of capable officers in key positions. He intended to make wholesale changes by removing Brigadier General Wilbur, both of the regimental commanders who had fought at the Rapido, the division chief of staff, and Walker’s two sons.

Stunned, Walker asked whether he also was to be sacked. “No, you are doing all right,” Clark replied. “But you have surrounded yourself with officers whose abilities do not measure up.” Walker doubted he would be spared. “This was a blow,” he told his diary. “I am marked for relief from command of the division as soon as Clark can find an easy way to do it.” When a new commander arrived to replace Colonel Martin in the 143rd Infantry, Walker told him, “Your predecessor has committed no sins of commission or omission as far as I’m concerned.”

That was wrong. Every senior officer at the Rapido had committed sins; none emerged unstained. The Army’s official history, rarely given to indictment, detected “a series of mishaps, a host of failures, a train of misfortune,” including “a mounting confusion that led to near hysteria and panic.” Clark soon found himself fighting a rearguard assault on his generalship. “If I am to be accused of something, thank God I am accused of attacking instead of retreating,” he declared.

But bluff bellicosity would not serve, as even Clark sensed. In the last diary reference he would ever make to the Rapido, he wrote on January 23:
“Some blood had to be spilled on either the land or the
SHINGLE
front, and I greatly preferred that it be on the Rapido, where we were secure, rather than at Anzio with the sea at our back.” Perhaps so. Some strategists linked the Rapido calamity with Normandy, and with the pinching need for landing craft that had dictated quick action in Italy. “The blame must rest with those who allowed the tyranny of
OVERLORD
to dominate the tactical as well as the strategic battlefield,” wrote W.G.F. Jackson. Certainly Clark and Keyes had failed to enlighten Walker about how his attack at Sant’Angelo fit into larger strategic ambitions at Anzio and in western Europe.

At a cost of two thousand casualties, not even a toehold had been won at the Rapido. That also implied tactical malfeasance. “From a military standpoint, it was an impossible thing to attempt,” Kesselring would observe after the war. German defenders were unaware that an entire U.S. division had attacked; despite Kesselring’s shift of two reserve divisions from Rome to the Garigliano, no reserves had been diverted to Sant’Angelo, because none were needed. The Americans had failed to seize the high ground, failed to coordinate with the adjacent 46th Division, failed to use tank fire effectively, and failed to neutralize German artillery on the flanks.

“The attack was insufficiently planned and poorly timed,” Kesselring added. “No general should leave his flanks exposed.” Sergeant Billy Kirby of Gatesville, Texas, was no field marshal, but he concurred. “Anybody who had any experience knew this ain’t the place to cross the river,” Kirby said. A tank platoon leader expressed the prevalent disgruntlement. “It would be nice to be a private in the ranks,” he said, “untainted by association with the leadership.”

Those ranks were in a surly mood, “on the edge of mutiny,” a lieutenant in the 141st Infantry reported. Some resented being used as “cannon fodder,” as the departing Colonel Martin put it, and many shared his conviction that “a fine National Guard division was being destroyed on faulty orders from a West Point commander,” presumably Clark. Unknown to Walker, a cabal of his Texas officers met secretly after the Rapido and resolved to request a congressional inquiry after the war.

That resolution would be revived in January 1946, when the 36th Division Association demanded an investigation into the “fiasco”; the Texans accused Clark of being “inefficent and inexperienced,” and willing “to destroy the young manhood of this country.” Both the Senate and the House of Representatives held hearings, which generated more heat than light. If the Texans blamed Clark, Clark blamed Walker. “Walker’s mental attitude, that a defeat was inevitable, was a decisive factor,” Clark would tell the Pentagon. The secretary of war determined that the Rapido attack “was a necessary one and that General Clark exercised sound judgment.” The
investigation ended, but the controversy endured for decades, a nasty, suppurating wound.

For now, as accounts of the carnage spread across Italy, officers shook their heads and thanked their lucky stars to have been spared that particular agony. Brigadier Kippenberger, whose New Zealand troops were still recovering from their own ordeal in the Winter Line, studied the field reports and concluded, “Nothing was right except the courage.”

Some hours after the final shots faded on the Rapido, a captured American private who had been released to serve as a courier stumbled into the 141st Infantry command post carrying a written message for
“den englischen Kommandeur
.” The panzer grenadiers proposed a three-hour cease-fire to search for the living and retrieve the dead. GIs fashioned Red Cross flags from towels and iodine, and even before the appointed hour paddled across to both regimental bridgeheads.

They found a few survivors, including Private Arthur E. Stark, known as Sticks, who had carried a battalion switchboard across the river for the 143rd Infantry before being hit by shell fragments. For three days he had lain exposed to January weather. “Did you have a big Christmas? You should have seen mine,” he had written his eleven-year-old sister, Carole, earlier that month. “The little boys and girls over here didn’t have much Christmas.” Sticks lingered for two days after his rescue, then passed over. Other cases ended better: a forward observer with half his face blown away appeared to be dead, but a medic noticed the lack of rigor mortis. Surgeons would reconstruct his visage from a photograph mailed by his family.

For three hours they gathered the dead, reaping what had been sown. Wehrmacht medics worked side by side with the Americans, making small talk and offering tactical critiques of the attack. German photographers wandered the battlefield, snapping pictures. An American reporter studied the looming rock face of Monte Cassino with its all-seeing white monastery. “Sooner or later,” he said, “somebody’s going to have to blow that place all to hell.”

The short peace ended. Dusk rolled over the bottoms. The mists reconvened. A final clutch of medics emerged carrying a long pole with a white truce flag that caught the dying light. More than a hundred bodies had been retrieved. But hundreds more remained, and would remain for months, carrion for the ravenous dogs that roamed these fens. Here the dreamless dead would lie, leached to bone by the passing seasons, and waiting, as all the dead would wait, for doomsday’s horn.

The Show Must Go On

M
UCH
had happened through antiquity in the half-moon port once known as Puteoli. Just inland, at Lake Avernus, Aeneas reputedly entered the underworld, crossing the river Styx to find in the Fields of Mourning “those souls consumed by the harsh, wasting sickness, cruel love.” On the Puteoli wharf, St. Paul had at last arrived in Italy aboard a grain packet after his shipwreck on Malta. The Roman amphitheater, third largest on the peninsula, featured sixty trapdoors that could be lifted as one to release wild beasts purchased from theatrical agents in Africa; it was said that the lions here refused to eat Saint Gennaro in
A.D
. 305, and authorities were forced to cut off his holy head. Modern Puteoli—renamed Pozzuoli—in January 1944 was home to a skinny nine-year-old girl called Stuzzicadenti by her schoolmates. After the war, skinny no more, the Toothpick would be better known as Sophia Loren.

Pozzuoli also was the temporary home for thousands of Allied soldiers. Here, ten miles northwest of Naples, the staging for
SHINGLE
neared completion even as the first sketchy reports arrived of fighting on the Rapido, fifty miles north. The Anzio assault force in VI Corps comprised two infantry divisions—the U.S. 3rd and the British 1st—plus paratroopers, American Rangers, and British Commandos, for a total of 47,000 men and 5,500 vehicles. Another 11,000 soldiers would follow immediately, including an armored brigade. The four-hundred-ship armada now loading in Pozzuoli and three other ports near Naples included four Liberty ships, eighty-four LSTs, eighty-four LSIs, and fifty LCTs. U.S. Navy and Royal Air Force meteorologists for days had studied their barometers and weather charts with the intensity of augurs scrutinizing entrails. Their forecast for H-hour on Saturday morning, January 22, was heartening: light airs, calm seas, haze, 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

A festive mood infused the docks. Along the Pozzuoli waterfront, LSTs had beached with bow doors yawning on the flat rocks used by fishermen to spread their nets. Columns of jeeps and overloaded trucks snaked through the crooked alleyways toward the ships. Italian vendors sang out from the street corners, offering fruit, wine, and—to the dismay of security officers—postcards of Anzio. Irish Guardsmen marched to their ships as a band played “Saint Patrick’s Day”; their commander took his troops’ salute while teetering on a statue pedestal. Supplies sufficient for fifteen days of combat were hoisted into the holds—and, upon discovery by vigilant quartermasters, some extraneous items were hoisted out, including a portable organ and several thousand hymnals.

Bum boats swarmed through the anchorage, peddling oranges to Royal Navy tars with shouts of “Good-a luck!” An airman wrote in his diary: “Native dagoes were fast to row alongside our boat and sell everything from nuts & apples to liquers.” Troops awaiting embarkation in a nearby warehouse watched a feature film, which was repeatedly interrupted whenever more units were called to the gangways. Soldiers shrugged and gathered their gear, repeating a GI aphorism always uttered with irony if not contempt: “The show must go on.”

Robert Capa arrived in Pozzuoli with his camera bag and $150 worth of black-market Spanish brandy. He joined Bill Darby, newly promoted to full colonel and now commanding three battalions that had been melded into the 6615th Ranger Force. “The boys were ordered to spread the rumor they were going home,” Capa wrote. Hundreds of Italian girls swarmed to the docks

Boarding the
Princess Beatrix,
the
Winchester Castle,
the
Royal Ulsterman,
and three LSTs, the Rangers slung their hammocks, filled their canteen cups with “Limey tar” from the coffee urns, and repaired to the weather decks for calisthenics. “They think it’s gonna be all love and nickel beer,” Darby said, “but I don’t think it will be.”

On the Naples waterfront, below broad-shouldered Vesuvius, the 3rd Division band crashed through a medley of marches as raw-boned infantrymen tromped past in a panoply of smart salutes and snapping guidons. “All that fanfare didn’t seem quite right,” a staff officer wrote. “The whole thing had a feeling of unreality about it.” When the band struck up the division anthem in march time, soldiers burst into song:

Aboard the U.S.S.
Biscayne,
a former seaplane tender now converted to a flagship, the roaring voices pleased Lucian Truscott, who stood on the fantail in his leather jacket and lacquered two-star helmet. GIs rarely sang as
their fathers had in the Great War. “There was no inclination to lighten burdens with a song,” as Truscott later put it. But the chorus now suggested resurgent spirits after the fraught Winter Line campaign. Many new men now filled the 3rd Division; since Sicily, the turnover of lieutenants had exceeded 100 percent. Truscott knew that esprit would be vital in the coming weeks. So, too, would robust health, and for the past month medicos had struggled to bring the division to fighting trim by treating ailments from trench foot to bronchitis to gonorrhea. To soothe his own chronically inflamed vocal chords, Truscott had scheduled three paintings of his throat with silver nitrate during the 120-mile voyage to Anzio.

The thump of drums from the dockside band carried into the crowded
Biscayne
deckhouse that served as the Army’s floating command post. Another major general listened to the martial beat with both pride and irrepressible dread. “I have many misgivings but am also optimistic,” John Porter Lucas had written in his diary after boarding the ship on Thursday afternoon. “I struggle to be calm and collected.”

For Lucas, that struggle had just begun. The commander of VI Corps, and thus of
SHINGLE
, he hardly looked the part of the warrior chieftain. He was pudgy and gray, with a brushcut widow’s peak, wire-rim spectacles, and a snowy mustache of the sort favored by French field generals in World War I. He puffed incessantly on a corncob pipe, and carried an iron-tipped cane given him by Omar Bradley. “Fifty-four years old today,” Lucas had told his diary on January 14, “and I am afraid I feel every year of it.” One Tommy thought he seemed “ten years older than Father Christmas.” Lucas gave an Irish Guardsman the impression of “a pleasant, mild, elderly gentleman being helped out of layers of overcoats.”