The Day of Battle (72 page)

They found grace notes where they could: in the strains of Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” picked up on the BBC; in a long letter from home, the pages radiant with what one officer called “bright beads of memory and of promise”; or in the apricot glow of another dawn, another dawn that they had lived to see, when the shelling had momentarily ceased and the world seemed new-made and uncorrupted.

A single rifle shot could break the spell. A 4th Indian Division signaler later wrote:

And so the day began, much like the day before. In a letter to his family, Henry Gardiner summarized the Italian campaign in ten words: “He marched up the hill and he marched down again.” But wherever they marched, or dug, or died, the abbey atop Monte Cassino seemed to loom over them. “You could never lose it,” a British soldier reported; “it was always there looking at you.” Another young British officer, Fred Majdalany, spoke for many: “That brooding monastery ate into our souls.”

A new warlord arrived at Cassino in February, determined to burn and blast the enemy from the Gustav Line by whatever means necessary. As the Americans pulled back to regroup, the Kiwis, Indians, and Tommies moved in under the command of Lieutenant General Bernard C. Freyberg, a former dentist who had become one of the British empire’s most celebrated soldier-generals. “The torch is now thrown to you,” Al Gruenther told him in a telephone call from Caserta on February 11. Freyberg grunted. “We have had many torches thrown to us,” he replied.

He was a great slab of a man, long known as Tiny. “I’m Freyberg the New Zealander,” he would introduce himself, in a voice raspy as a gate hinge. “He seemed to be large all over, both broad and deep-chested at the same time,” an admirer wrote. Freyberg’s enormous head featured a prominent chin, a delicate nose, gray eyes, and, above the inverted parabola of his mouth, a tidy mustache for ornamentation. At age seventeen he had won the New Zealand long-distance swimming championship, and it was said that he could be mistaken for a porpoise in Wellington harbor. Decorations upholstered his massive chest, including a Victoria Cross from the Somme and four awards of the Distinguished Service Order, reflective of a reputation earned at the cannon’s mouth in two wars. He believed that “a little shelling did everyone good”; one acquaintance thought “his great fearlessness owed something to a lack of imagination.” From the Great War he had emerged with twenty-seven battle scars and gashes—“riddled like St. Sebastian,” a friend said—and he would accumulate several more before this conflict ended. “You nearly always get two wounds for every bullet or splinter,” he said with a shrug, “because mostly they go out as well as go in.” One nurse insisted that he was made not of flesh but of india rubber. Between the wars physicians detected a “diastolic murmur,” a diagnosis Freyberg challenged by demanding they climb Mount Snowdon together and reexamine him on the summit. “I love his lack of humour, his frank passion for fighting,” a friend wrote of Freyberg in her diary. “There is a distinct grimness about him at all times.”

Churchill in North Africa had anointed him “the salamander of the British empire” for his ability to thrive in fire, but Freyberg more resembled
the hippogriff, that hybrid of eagle, lion, and horse. He was both sentimental—after digging the grave of his friend Rupert Brooke, he had lined it with flowering sage—and fond of aphorisms, including a line from another friend, J. M. Barrie, the author of
Peter Pan:
“God gave us memory so that we could have roses in December.” Upon arriving in Naples he asked, “One used to be able to buy very fine gloves in Italy. Can you still get them?” His impulsiveness led one exasperated subordinate to tell another, “It will be your turn tomorrow to disobey orders.”

Even his admirers acknowledged that Freyberg was at his most formidable when leading a division; temporary command of a corps in Africa seemed to overtax his powers, and he had reverted to command of the 2nd New Zealand Division after outflanking the Mareth Line in southern Tunisia. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the general would think straight?” said his most talented Kiwi brigadier, Howard Kippenberger. “Or better still, if he wouldn’t try to think at all?” Yet it was again as a corps commander that Freyberg arrived at Cassino, for Alexander in early February melded the 2nd New Zealand, the 4th Indian, and the British 78th Divisions into a new creation, the New Zealand Corps.

Described by one British observer as “clean and sprightly, rested and strong,” the corps initially was called Spadger Force to confuse German intelligence; Freyberg remained “Spadger” in Allied councils long after the ruse ended. His Kiwis and Tommies were colorful enough, but few units could match the Indians for flamboyance. The Sikhs, Punjabis, Rajputs, Mahrattas, and Gurkhas, from Nepal, arriving in truck convoys resembled a traveling circus of cutthroats, laden, as one 4th Indian signaler wrote, with “all kind of excrescences such as crates of live chickens, fire buckets, water bags, bits of furniture and clothes drying in the wind.”

At first Freyberg considered a wide flanking movement to breach the Gustav Line. But with a shortage of mules and limited experience in mountain warfare, he instead chose a more prosaic plan that followed in trace the failed American attack, targeting “the strongest point in a defensive line of remarkable strength,” as the New Zealand official history later noted. To some subordinates, this scheme confirmed that Freyberg had “no brains and no imagination,” in the phrase of the 4th Indian Division commander, Major General Francis Tuker. When two of his senior lieutenants proposed a conference on the tactical difficulties at Cassino, Freyberg refused to countenance “any soviet of division commanders.”

Yet the longer Spadger studied the bleak silhouette of the ridgeline to the northwest, the more his eye was drawn to the white abbey. Was it possible to take the massif without seizing the building? Would German troops fail to occupy such an inviting observation post? How could Allied
soldiers be asked to attack the hill without first eliminating that overbearing presence?

The 4th Indian Division had initially proposed bombing the abbey on February 4, as part of a scheme to reduce any German garrison “to helpless lunacy by sheer unending pounding for days and nights by air and artillery.” Increasingly, Freyberg found that approach both prudent and inevitable. After a grim discussion about the challenge of storming the abbey’s massive gate, he dispatched a subaltern to comb through Neapolitan bookstalls, where the young man found several studies on the history and structure of Monte Cassino. An 1879 volume contained architectural detail about how the abbey had been rebuilt as a citadel after the French despoliation in 1799, with loopholed, unscalable outer walls ten feet thick and nowhere less than fifteen feet high. A prewar Italian army staff college analysis deemed Monte Cassino impregnable.

Freyberg was convinced. In a memo to Clark and Alexander he wrote:

Others disagreed. “Spadger still wants to flatten the monastery,” Keyes told his diary. “I insist there is no evidence that it is holding up our attack and refuse to accede.” Clark too demurred, although he sensed that Freyberg had General Alex’s ear. Clark privately considered “Freyburg”—he consistently misspelled the New Zealander’s name in his diary—“sort of a bull in a china closet.”

Yet Clark was unsure how long he could resist pressure from above and below. Not least in his calculations was a growing bloodlust in Allied trenches. An antiaircraft gunner’s letter home in mid-February perfectly expressed the prevailing sentiment. “I would level the Vatican itself with pleasure,” the gunner wrote, “if there were Germans to be killed inside it.”

The Bitchhead

S
IXTY
miles away, the 92,000 Allied troops penned up at Anzio had been ordered to dig in, and dig in they did. The clank of picks and shovels sounded across the beachhead, and with each passing hour life became more subterranean. Soldiers near the Pontine Marshes found water weeping into their holes at eighteen inches, but those burrowing into the sandstone
substrata around Nettuno excavated elaborate lairs lined with cardboard from ration cartons and furnished with plundered mirrors, commodes, and even candelabra. Some sheltered in huge empty wine barrels found in farmhouse vaults, the stink of stale
vino rosso
clinging to their uniforms. Catacombs and cellars also housed VI Corps offices—the sandstone seemed to telegraph every surface vibration and concussion—but engineers failed to find a tunnel rumored to have been built by Nero between Anzio and Rome. It all seemed vaguely familiar, as a 6th Gordons soldier noted in his diary:

An American medic in the 179th Infantry preferred to stress the positive. In a letter home he wrote, “My cost of living is very low.”

Luftwaffe attacks made every man happy to have his hole. “We have found our religion,” a soldier told his diary. “Jittery as can be. Five air raids tonight.” Bombs punctured all fifteen ovens and damaged the dough mixer in the Army’s beachhead bakery; eighty bakers in helmets sifted shrapnel from the flour, patched the holes, and soon turned out fourteen tons of bread a day. As on an island, everything at the beachhead arrived by sea. “Day and night, a thin black line of tiny boats moved constantly back and forth between shore and ships at anchor,” wrote Ernie Pyle, who arrived for a visit in February. After German reconnaissance flights left each afternoon, skippers weighed anchor at last light to scramble the anchorage, steaming slowly to avoid raising telltale phosphorescent bow waves. Flares, tracers, and exploding shells illuminated Anzio harbor so garishly that one sailor claimed it was “brighter than Yankee Stadium.” As they sailed back to Naples after another harrowing trip to the beachhead, LST crewmen sang, “Anzio, my Anzio, please don’t take me back to Anzio.”

Among the most exposed troops were those consigned to Hell’s Half-Acre, the medical compound outside Nettuno and only six miles from frontline outposts. At 3:30
P.M
. on February 7, a Luftwaffe bomber chased by a Spitfire jettisoned five antipersonnel bombs over the 95th Evacuation Hospital, where four hundred patients lay in ward tents. Newly wounded soldiers had just arrived by ambulance, and operating rooms were jammed when flame and steel swept the compound. “I went outside and saw several dead bodies in the parking area in front of the receiving tent,” the hospital commander, Colonel Paul Sauer, reported. “One of the nurses in the first surgical tent was crying, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying.’ I went in to look at her and
she was pulseless and white.” Twenty-eight died, including three nurses, two doctors, and six patients; another sixty-four were wounded, and the blasts shredded twenty-nine ward tents. The German pilot was shot down and treated in the same hospital. Two days later, a shell fragment killed a VI Corps surgeon as he emerged from Lucas’s command post in Nettuno.

“God, help us,” a 1st Armored Division mess sergeant prayed after the hospital bombing. “You come yourself. Don’t send Jesus. This is no place for children.” By early February, General von Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army had ringed the beachhead with 370 artillery tubes, putting every Allied soldier at risk—“like a dog on an iceberg,” as a Fifth Army supply officer put it. Each German gun caliber sang a different tune, from the crying-cat noise of an 88mm to the railroad gun shells that were likened to “an outhouse going end-over-end with the door open and paper flapping.” Shells killed bakers baking, cooks cooking, and clerks clerking. “Sometimes we heard them coming, and sometimes we didn’t,” Pyle wrote. “Sometimes we heard the shell whine after we heard it explode.” One British officer described a near miss “as though someone had hurled a dining room table against my heart.” All too often the fall of shot was followed with a cry, “Morphine, for God’s sake, morphine.” A company clerk confessed to a growing dislike for Italy: “Too much iron in the atmosphere here.”

They did what they could. Deep holes grew deeper, including subterranean garages intended to reduce punctured tires and radiators. Every soldier learned the Anzio shuffle—also known as the Anzio amble or Anzio slouch—which required walking in a crouch, head hunched between the shoulders and helmet pulled low. Engineers clear-cut windbreaks along the Mussolini Canal to eliminate tree bursts, leaving the landscape as flat and shot-torn as Flanders. During one ferocious Nebelwerfer attack, a Scots Guardsman sang out, “The sons of the prophet were hardy and bold / And quite unaccustomed to fear,” but an American tanker, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of another with trembling hands, philosophized, “You can’t get used to bein’ scared.” Much discussion was devoted to the fabled “million-dollar wound,” which would excuse a soldier from further combat. All agreed that it ought not be disfiguring and must not impair sexual function. “One ear could go, but not two,” wrote Paul W. Brown, an enlisted medic who would become a professor of orthopedic surgery at Yale University Medical School. “Fingers and toes were deemed expendable, but no consensus was reached on how many.” To channel anger and anxiety, riflemen zeroed their weapons by firing at the helmets of dead Teds—
tedeschi
—on a distant slope. A British company also organized a frontline shooting gallery for snipers, with targets sorted into “Large Teds,” “Small Teds,” “Crawling Teds,” and “Bobbing Teds.”

Each day new arrivals stepped onto the harbor jetty, where MPs barked, “Get moving, get moving!” They scurried past waterfront villas gnawed by shell fire—the masonry peeling “like sunburned skin,” as the writer John Lardner put it—out to the “small, wet world” now known to its denizens as the Bitchhead. “You could see a squirt of white tracer and it seemed to float toward our lines. That was Jerry. Ours answered with bursts that had red tracer in them,” a 3rd Division soldier recalled. Tommies veered to the left toward a sector called the Hatbox of Hell, where local landmarks were named for their shapes on a map or their ambiance: the Lobster Claw, Sheep Pen Farm, Piccadilly, Oh God Wadi. “I was alone in my lonely world,” one British sergeant wrote. A British officer excessively steeped in the classics recalled his Virgil with each journey forward:
Facilis est descensus Averni
. Easy is the descent to Hell.