The Day of Battle (75 page)

For the moment, he had a battle to command. Shell by shell, bomb by bomb, bullet by chirping bullet, Allied firepower began to tell. Scudding clouds kept most planes grounded on Friday, but shortly before noon a Piper Grasshopper pilot spotted 2,500 Germans tramping south from Carroceto; in twelve minutes, VI Corps gunners unlimbered 224 tubes and chopped the formation to pieces. “Bits of Kraut all over the place,” an Irish Guards sergeant reported. The same observation pilot massed fires on four additional targets in the next hour. The British 1st Loyals reported “clouds of exhausted, struggling field-grey figures.” Wehrmacht officers shouted threats at men beyond threatening, and the clank of falling truck tailgates signaled the arrival of more fodder for the cannons. When artillery caught additional Germans on a lane from Carroceto, a forward observer radioed, “Please don’t stop now. We are knocking them over like pins in a bowling alley. They keep on coming, marching right over their own dead.” The road became better known as the Bowling Alley. A single British machine-gun company fired 32,000 rounds on Friday, and when the enemy attack axis swerved to the east the U.S. 180th Infantry held the right shoulder and threw them back. An American officer later described how some grenadiers “turned and ran up the slope with their tin mess kits shining on their back.” With assault battalions pared to 150 men, German losses were likened to “the Light Brigade without the horses.”

At 9:30
P.M
. a lull settled over scarlet fields glazed with flare light. Tanks lurched forward from dumps in the Padiglione Woods, hauling water and rations to the parched and hungry. Men peered over their leaking sandbags at the scattered hummocks of olive drab and field gray that had once been
men. General Mackensen had reached his high-water mark; this wrack of dead grenadiers and smoking wreckage marked the falling tide. The terrain proved “not suitable for tank employment as had been presumed,” a staff officer wrote in the Fourteenth Army log, then added, “No decisive breakthrough.”

Lucas sensed his shifting fortunes. At Truscott’s urging, he ordered a counterattack for dawn on Saturday, February 19, the fourth day of a battle that had become an existential struggle between two exhausted armies. A preemptive German surge down the Via Anziate at four
A.M
. nearly spoiled his plan—Allied cooks, drivers, and Anzio dockworkers rushed forward to caulk the line. Sea mines dumped in the roadstead by Luftwaffe raiders kept British reinforcements from joining the counterattack as planned. But at 6:30
A.M
., two rested American regiments—the 30th Infantry and 6th Armored Infantry—emerged from the Padiglione Woods with two dozen Sherman tanks and pivoted northwest up the Bowling Alley. Barrages of American artillery danced up and down the road ahead of the advancing troops.

Lucas had the right man in charge: Major General Ernest N. Harmon woke every morning spoiling for a fight. The Old Ironsides commander was barrel-shaped, with stubby legs, lungs like a blacksmith’s bellows, and a cowcatcher jaw only slightly softened by a Clark Gable mustache. Raised in Vermont, Harmon had been Mark Clark’s classmate at West Point, where he held the academy middleweight boxing title. Having ridden in the only U.S. horse cavalry unit to see combat in the Great War, he still wore breeches and knee-high boots. Admirers considered him a “poor man’s George Patton”: he lacked Patton’s personal wealth, and his profanity, while just as intense, was marginally less inventive. “He was independent as a hog on ice,” said Hamilton H. Howze, a subordinate who later rose to four-star rank. “But he loved to fight.” Never reluctant to condemn “the stupidity of the high command,” Harmon had castigated Lucas only a week earlier for the lack “of a well-established plan” to defend the beachhead. “The enemy has his troubles,” Harmon told his men, “and is scared the same as you are.”

Now he set out to make the German troubles worse. From foxholes lining the road, 45th Division soldiers cheered the passing platoons in their rain-slick ponchos. “Give ’em hell!” they cried. Harmon quickly won back a mile, but at 8:30 the attack stalled under galling panzer fire from the scrub-brush bottoms north of the Bowling Alley. For five hours engineers toiled to repair a blown bridge, as tank and machine-gun rounds sang all about. Harmon paced and snarled, cadging cigarettes from subordinates,
until at 1:30
P.M
. the attack resumed with a clattering drive into the German line. Stunned grenadiers threw up their hands or scorched to the rear. A dozen Shermans bulled north for a mile, crossed Spaccasassi Creek, and clanked toward the Factory until Harmon called them back at dusk to laager for the night.

Two hundred prisoners trotted with them; uncounted other Germans lay dead, shoring the red-stained creeks or corduroying the Bowling Alley. Initiative, that turncoat, had returned to the Allied camp. Asked by reporters in Nettuno to assess the enemy’s intentions after the rout, the VI Corps intelligence chief replied, “We’ve made him worried.”

Mackensen’s troops poked and jabbed for two more days, but without conviction. Kesselring late on Saturday proposed suspending his counteroffensive, and Hitler agreed. “In the end, many hounds will kill even the swiftest hare,” a German staff officer lamented.
FISCHFANG
had cost Fourteenth Army 5,400 casualties. “It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded,” the army log noted. “All ambulances, even the armored ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.” Some units existed only in name: the 65th Infantry Division on February 23 mustered 673 men.

If the hares had been hurt, so had the hounds. VI Corps casualties also exceeded 5,000. The 45th Division alone counted 400 killed in action since Wednesday. Their scrubs blood-caked, surgeons donned nurses’ summer fatigues instead. In the month since the Anzio landings, 200,000 Axis and Allied troops combined had suffered 40,000 battle and nonbattle casualties, a double decimation that would impose at least a temporary stalemate at the beachhead.

One more casualty remained to be counted. “Message from Clark,” John Lucas wrote on Tuesday, February 22. “He arrives today with eight generals. What the hell.”

As Tommys and GIs fought their valiant fight, the delicate issue of what to do with their commander had obsessed the high command. Alexander, who privately told London that Lucas had “proved to be an old woman,” complained that he lacked “the necessary drive and enthusiasm to get things done.” A proposal by Brooke that a British general command VI Corps raised hackles in the Pentagon; Eisenhower, now in London, took a rare moment away from planning
OVERLORD
to send Marshall an eyes-only warning, then wrote Brooke, “It is absolutely impossible in an Allied force to shift command of any unit from one nationality to another during a period of crisis.” Truscott would make an admirable corps commander, he added, although if necessary Patton could serve at the beachhead for a month.

Clark still resisted sacking Lucas, arguing that he had “done all he could at Anzio.” But with the battle in the balance, Alexander shrewdly recognized that the Fifth Army commander was “a man whose own ambition was key to his actions.” Complaining that Lucas was “old physically and mentally,” Alexander told Clark: “We may be pushed back into the sea. That would be very bad for both of us—and you would certainly be relieved of your command.” Clark continued to balk at changing commanders in midbattle, but he had hedged his bet by agreeing to Truscott’s appointment as deputy commander, privately telling him on February 18—without informing Lucas—that he would likely take over “in four or five days.”

Now the moment had come. At midmorning on February 22, Clark and his entourage boarded two patrol boats in Naples. They arrived at the beachhead just as Anzio Annie, a German railway gun with shells the size of a refrigerator, raised several enormous geysers in the harbor. Clark toured the front, dodging desultory panzer fire, then at four
P.M
. repaired to his command post in the seventeenth-century Borghese Palace. Canadian miners from Gibraltar had carved out rooms beneath the mansion, linking the cellars to an abutting railroad tunnel, rigging lights and ventilators, and installing a rope-pulley elevator. They also converted an ancient Roman well into a septic tank instantly known as “Clark’s Shitter.” A sign on the tiled latrine read,
FOR GENERAL OFFICERS ONLY
.

At eight
P.M
., behind a closed door in Clark’s subterranean office, Lucas took the news like a good soldier. Clark advised that “he could no longer resist the pressure,” Lucas told his diary that night, adding wryly, “And I thought I was winning something of a victory.” He would serve briefly as deputy Fifth Army commander at Caserta, swallowing his bitterness toward Clark and the British, then return home to command a training army in Texas. In a letter to his son, Lucas quoted Sir Walter Scott:

Truscott was also summoned to the palace cellars. Despite persistent ailments—nasal polyps, abscessed tooth, raging throat—he had, in effect, served as the VI Corps shadow commander for the past five days; among other innovations, he authorized a gifted young artillery officer, Walter T. “Dutch” Kerwin, Jr., to coordinate every gun at the beachhead so as to better mass fires—setting a brigadier general at Kerwin’s side to ensure that
gunners heeded the twenty-six-year-old major. Yet in a voice reduced to a raspy whisper, Truscott now objected to Lucas’s formal ouster as unwarranted and unfair. When Clark said he hoped to avoid wounding Lucas’s pride, Truscott growled, “You can’t relieve a corps commander and not hurt him.” Clark waved away the protest. The decision had “already been made.” Privately, he wondered whether Truscott “in the event of a reversal would prefer to be second in command.”

The new corps commander returned to his Nettuno villa to have his throat painted yet again with silver nitrate. After a late supper, he sat by a crackling fire past midnight with a bottle of B&W scotch. “My one and only purpose is to serve my country,” he wrote Sarah. “If this command offers a bigger opportunity, I must accept it even though I may feel my own inadequacy.”

If Clark felt inadequate, he kept the sentiment to himself. A staff officer in the Borghese command post described him as “cool, level, taciturn.” No one wore the mask of command better than Mark Clark. Yet the weight pressed. In his war diary he noted that as of this day Fifth Army had sustained 72,982 casualties since landing at Salerno, a man down every three minutes for more than six months. Now another had fallen, wounded in spirit if not in body. “Bringing Johnny back with me in the morning,” he cabled Gruenther. “May send him direct to Sorrento for rest.” To his daughter, Ann, Clark scribbled a note thanking her for a buoyant V-mail letter. “As you can well imagine, I don’t have much to laugh about these days. I was pleased to hear you express confidence that you had in your dad. I hope that I will never disappoint you.”

Only in a letter to Renie did his frustrations spill out. The officers and men at Anzio “have done all that could have been expected of them,” he told her. The on-to-Rome carping of armchair generals in London and Washington infuriated him. “It is sheer nonsense for these people to criticize them for not having moved on to Rome. The troops would have been cut off,” he wrote. “It is no use arguing. We will let history take care of that.”

Prodded by Hitler, Kesselring and Mackensen would attack again on February 29, this time against the Allied right. The usual singing, shouting gray-green swarms advanced across the polders only to be flattened by 66,000 Allied artillery shells in a single day; German casualties topped 3,500, for no gain. When Alexander asked General O’Daniel how much ground his 3rd Division had lost to the counterattackers, Iron Mike replied, “Not a goddamned inch, sir.”

Truscott pinned a Bill Mauldin cartoon over his desk, with one shabby GI telling another, “Th’ hell this ain’t th’ most important hole in th’ world.
I’m in it.” His jaw jutting, Truscott told reporters, “We’re going to have a tough time here for months to come. But, gentlemen, we’re going to hold this beachhead come what may.”

Still, February was sobering for the Allies. For the Americans it would be the bloodiest month in the Mediterranean to date, with nineteen hundred dead. There would be no quick, decisive success via the beachhead flank. Alexander believed the battles at Anzio and Cassino had revealed alarming Allied weakness and German strength. “He is quicker than we are,” he wrote Clark, “quicker at re-grouping his forces, quicker at thinning out a defensive front to provide troops to close gaps at decisive points…quicker at reaching decisions on the battlefield. By comparison, our methods are often slow and cumbersome.”

This was true enough, but it was not the whole truth. The greater revelation was of Allied strength and German weakness. “Without air support,” a German staff officer complained, “all planning was an illusion.” Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, the senior American airman in the Mediterranean, concurred. “In the air in Italy,” Eaker wrote, “the Hun is absolutely flat on his back.” If less prostrate, German artillery had proved another deficiency, particularly because of ammunition shortages. VI Corps fired 158,000 rounds during
FISCHFANG
, a ten-to-one advantage over German gunners. American artillery, singularly good since the Mexican War, kept getting better, aided by aerial spotting, the profusion of radios, nimble fire control, and those murderous queens offshore. Truscott soon demanded, and got, counterbattery fire in four minutes, less than half the time previously required. A single 105mm howitzer shooting every thirty seconds could, in one hour, seed 43,000 square yards with two tons of lethal steel fragments. Allied artillery inflicted three-quarters of all German battle casualties at Anzio.