The Day of Battle (67 page)

Lucas agreed. In fact, Truscott today had drafted his order for an attack on Cisterna, to be led by infiltrating Rangers and two 3rd Division regiments, all bound for Highway 7. VI Corps Field Order No. 20 would coordinate a British lunge on the left with that American thrust on the right, both intended to “seize the high ground in the vicinity of Colli Laziali” and to “prepare to continue the advance on Rome.” The attack was to begin the next day, Saturday, January 29.

Clark nodded. He hoped this would mollify Alexander, and whoever in London was lashing him on. With a few parting words of encouragment, he strode from the command post and climbed into a jeep for the short ride to the Villa Borghese; in a pine thicket behind the hundred-room seventeenth-century mansion, he planned to install another Fifth Army command post to keep a closer eye on the beachhead.

That prospect pleased Lucas no more than Alexander’s hovering presence at Caserta pleased Clark. In his diary, the corps commander wrote:

In a message to Clark on Saturday morning, Lucas affected a doughty determination. “Will go all out tomorrow,” he signaled, “or at once, if conditions warrant.” As Alexander had urged, risks must be taken.

The brightest news awaiting Clark at Anzio was not on the beachhead but a mile above it. On January 27 and 28, an obscure fighter unit, known formally as the 99th Fighter Squadron (Separate), made its first significant mark in combat with guns blazing, shooting down twelve German aircraft. Inspiriting as the action was for Lucas’s corps, the contribution of a couple dozen black pilots—known collectively as the Tuskegee airmen, after the Alabama field where they had learned to fly—would resonate beyond the beachhead, beyond Italy, and beyond the war.

This moment had been a long time coming. Blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution; of more than 200,000 to serve in Union uniforms during the Civil War, 33,000 had been killed. After the war, Congress created four black Army regiments, including two cavalry units later known to High Plains Indians as “buffalo soldiers” because of the supposed resemblance of the troopers’ hair to a bison’s coat.

More than one million blacks also served in uniform in World War I, but only fifty thousand saw combat. The white commander of one black unit denounced his troops as “hopelessly inferior, lazy, slothful…. If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes.” A lieutenant colonel quoted in a 1924 War Department study articulated the prevalent white bias: “The Negro race is thousands of years behind the Caucasian race in the higher psychic development.” Between the world wars, military camps in the American south increasingly adopted local Jim Crow laws and customs; a War Department directive in 1936 appended the designation “colored” to any unit composed of nonwhite troops.

There were not many. When World War II began in September 1939, fewer than four thousand blacks served in the U.S. Army; more than two years later, the U.S. Navy had only six black sailors—excluding mess stewards—plus a couple of dozen others coming out of retirement. A seven-point White House policy issued in 1940 began with the premise that “Negro personnel in the Army will be proportionate to that in the general population (about 10 percent)” and ended with a bigot’s pledge: “Racial segregation will be maintained.” Few leadership opportunities existed. At the time of the Anzio landings, the U.S. Army had 633,000 officers, of whom only 4,500 were black. The U.S. Navy was worse, with 82,000 black enlisted sailors and no black officers; the Marine Corps, which had rejected all black enlistments until President Roosevelt intervened, would
not commission its first black officer until several months after the war ended.

Another War Department decree of 1940 asserted that segregation “has proven satisfactory over a long period of years.” A survey of white enlisted men in 1942 revealed “a strong prejudice against sharing recreation, theater, or post exchange facilities with Negroes”; of southern soldiers polled, only 4 percent favored equal PX privileges for their black comrades. White soldiers “have pronounced views with respect to the Negro,” the adjutant general concluded. “The Army is not a sociological laboratory.” Segregation created perverse redundancies—an Army memo in July 1943 noted that “the 93rd Division has three bands, and the 92nd Division has four bands”—but the status quo obtained. “Experiments within the Army in the solution of social problems are fraught with danger to efficiency, discipline, and morale,” George Marshall warned.

The 1940 Draft Act banned racial discrimination, but only 250 blacks sat on the nation’s 6,400 draft boards; most southern states forbade
any
African-American board members. White America’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of black volunteers and draftees ranged from unfortunate to despicable. The Mississippi congressional delegation asked the War Department to keep all black officers out of the state for the duration. Discrimination and segregation remained the rule in military barracks, churches, swimming pools, libraries, and service clubs. German and Italian prisoner trustees could use the post exchange at Fort Benning, Georgia; black U.S. Army soldiers could not.
Time
reported that “Negro troops being shipped through El Paso, Texas, were barred from the Harvey House restaurant at the depot and were given cold handouts. They could see German prisoners of war seated in the restaurant and fed hot food.” A War Department pamphlet, “Command of Negro Troops,” advised white officers in February 1944 that black soldiers preferred not to be called “boy, darky, nigger, aunty, mammy, nigress, and uncle.” Churning resentment led to bloody confrontations between white and black troops, not only in the Deep South but also in Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Arizona, and England. When a whites-only café in South Carolina refused service to sixteen black officers, they shouted, “Heil, Hitler!” Many blacks endorsed the “Double V” campaign proposed by a Pittsburgh newspaper: a righteous struggle for victory over both enemies abroad and racism at home.

Yet getting into the fight was itself a struggle. Among the prevalent stereotypes was a belief that blacks were too dumb, too lazy, or too apathetic to serve as combat troops. An Army study decried their “lack of education and mechanical skill,” as well as “a venereal rate eight to ten times that of white troops, a tendency to abuse equipment, lack of interest in the war,
and particularly among northern troops a concern for racial ‘rights,’ which often culminated in rioting.” In the summer of 1943, only 17 percent of black soldiers were high school graduates, compared with 41 percent of whites. In Army tests that measured educational achievement rather than native intelligence, more than four in five blacks scored in the lowest two categories compared to fewer than one in three whites. General McNair, the chief of Army Ground Forces, declared that “a colored division is too great a concentration of Negroes to be effective.”

Consequently, blacks were shunted into quartermaster companies for duty as truck drivers, bakers, launderers, laborers, and the like. By January 1944, 755,000 blacks wore Army uniforms—they made up 8.5 percent of the force—but only two in ten served in combat units compared to four in ten whites. Under pressure from black civic leaders and a crying need for fighters, three black Army divisions had been created: the 2nd Cavalry, which arrived in North Africa only to be disbanded to provide service troops; the 93rd Infantry, shipped to the Pacific; and the 92nd Infantry, which would arrive in Italy in late summer 1944 as the only African-American division to see combat in Europe.

Officered above the platoon level almost exclusively by whites, the 92nd would endure trials by fire that only partly involved the Germans. Training was halted for two months to teach the men to read, since illiteracy in the division exceeded 60 percent. A black veteran later described “an intangible, elusive undercurrent of resentment, bitterness, even despair and hopelessness among black officers and enlisted men in the division.” That sentiment in some measure could be laid at the feet of the 92nd commander, Major General Edward M. Almond, an overbearing Virginian who would oppose integration of the armed forces until his dying day in 1975. “The white man…is willing to die for patriotic reasons. The Negro is not,” Almond declared. “No white man wants to be accused of leaving the battle line. The Negro doesn’t care…. People think that being from the south we don’t like Negroes. Not at all. But we understand his capabilities. And we don’t want to sit at the table with them.” In a top secret report after the war, Almond asserted that black officers lacked “pride, aggressiveness, [and] a sense of responsibility.” His chief of staff added, “Negro soldiers learn slowly and forget quickly.”

Such obstacles and more faced the 99th Fighter Squadron. Before the war, only nine black Americans possessed commercial pilot certificates, and fewer than three hundred had private licenses. Training began at Tuskegee Army Air Field in July 1941; the first pilots received their wings the following spring, then waited a year before deploying to North Africa as the only black AAF unit in a combat zone. Commanding the squadron
was Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., the thirty-year-old son of the Army’s sole black general. Young Davis at West Point had endured four years of silence from classmates who refused to speak to him because of his race, reducing him to what he called “an invisible man.” From that ordeal, and from the segregated toilets, theaters, and clubs at Tuskegee, Davis concluded that blacks “could best overcome racist attitudes through their achievements,” including prowess in the cockpit.

Those achievements proved hard to come by. A week before the invasion of Sicily, a black lieutenant shot down an enemy plane over the Mediterranean. But for months thereafter the 99th was relegated to such routine duty that not a single Axis aircraft was encountered, much less destroyed. Accidents killed several pilots, and the squadron earned a hard-luck reputation. White superiors voiced doubts about “a lack of aggressive spirit,” and accused the Tuskegee pilots of shortcomings in stamina, endurance, and cold-weather tolerance. “The negro type has not the proper reflexes to make a first-class fighter pilot,” one general asserted. Hap Arnold, the AAF chief, suggested moving the 99th to a rear area, “thus releasing a white squadron for a forward combat area.” Citing leaked classified information,
Time
reported in late September that “the top air command was not altogether satisfied with the 99th’s performance.”

Davis, who was promoted to command an all-black fighter group, returned to Washington to refute the criticisms before a War Department committee in October. Others rallied to the squadron’s defense, including one accomplished white pilot who described the 99th as “a collection of born dive bombers.” Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, the senior American airman in the Mediterranean, concluded that “90 percent of the trouble with Negro troops was the fault of the whites.” The 99th moved closer to the action at an airfield outside Naples. Still, the squadron in six months had flown nearly 1,400 sorties on 225 missions without downing a single Luftwaffe plane.

Then came the morning of January 27. A patrol of sixteen P-40 Warhawks led by Lieutenant Clarence Jamison flew at five thousand feet over Peter Beach, several miles north of Anzio, just as fifteen FW-190s pulled out of an attack on the Allied anchorage. The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half dozen .50-caliber machine guns. “I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail,” Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr., later reported. “I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot.” Flames spurted from the enemy fuselage, then from another and another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops and fled toward Rome only to clip the earth in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane
fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one flaming wing. “The whole show lasted less than five minutes,” Major Spanky Roberts said. “It was a chasing battle, as the Germans were always on the move. We poured hell into them.”

After refueling in Naples, the 99th returned to the beachhead, then in another snarling dogfight at 2:25
P.M
. shot down three more enemy raiders, including one plane that was bushwacked while closing on a Warhawk’s tail. On Friday morning, as Clark struggled to reach Nettuno on
PT-201,
the 99th slammed into another raiding party, shooting down four. In two days the squadron tallied twelve enemy planes destroyed, three probable kills, and four damaged. A single American pilot was killed.

It was a chasing battle, as Major Roberts had said, and it would remain a chasing battle. But nothing would ever be quite the same. One black soldier, fated to die in action in Italy a year later, wrote home: “Negroes are doing their bit here, their supreme bit, not for glory, not for honor, but for, I think, the generation that will come.”

Jerryland

O
N
Saturday afternoon, January 29, Lucian Truscott limped up the narrow staircase to the second floor of his new command post, an old stone monastery with a red tile roof in the medieval village of Conca, midway between Nettuno and Cisterna. Gum trees and sycamores gave the compound an arboreal tranquillity, dispelled by the proximate grumble of artillery. A squat tower resembling a blockhouse poked above the roofline; from the peak an American flag had briefly flown until German gunners began using it as an aiming stake. The 3rd Division war room filled the first floor with maps, jangling phones, and the anticipatory hum that always preceded a big offensive. Truscott had spread his bedroll in the tiled kitchen with no expectation of sleep.