The Day of Battle (87 page)

Eaker and his apostles, particularly Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, insisted that the campaign must also target bridges, defiles, and even open track across an “interdiction belt,” forcing German logisticians to rely on inefficient, fuel-guzzling trucks, which also would be attacked. Fighter-bombers and medium bombers would be well suited to pinpoint attacks on viaduct spans and the like. With approval from the Combined Chiefs, Eaker on March 19 had laid out the campaign objectives in Bombing Directive No. 2: “to reduce the enemy’s flow of supplies to a level which will make it impossible to maintain and operate his forces in central Italy.”
STRANGLE
began badly. On the early morning of March 22, an OSS team of fifteen uniformed American soldiers—mostly Italian-speakers from greater New York—paddled ashore northwest of La Spezia in three rubber boats with orders to blow up a tunnel on the main rail line from Genoa, which Eaker’s planes could not reach. The mission was code-named
GINNY
. A pair of patrol boats that had ferried the men from Corsica returned to extract the team on two subsequent nights without success. Light signals from the beach flashed in the wrong color sequence, and aerial photos showed trains still traversing the tunnel. “Assumed lights were German trap,” the OSS reported. “Mission assumed lost.”

Lost it was. An Italian fisherman who spotted a dinghy cached in the rocks had alerted local Fascist authorities. German troops surrounded the Americans before they reached the tunnel and captured all fifteen men after a brief firefight. Under a Führer directive to exterminate all saboteurs, including those in uniform, the German corps commander, General Anton Dostler, ordered them executed. At sunrise on March 26, the men were marched to a glade near the village of Ameglia, hands lashed with wire behind their backs. On command, a firing squad cut them down; a German officer delivered the coup de grâce by pistol shot. An Ultra intercept from Kesselring’s command post to Hitler reported that American “terror troops” in Italy had been “liquidated,” but the precise fate of the
GINNY
team would not be known for another year. Justice, again, would take longer.

The bombing campaign proved more potent. Attacking planes swarmed across the interdiction belt, ultimately flying more than 50,000 sorties and
dumping 26,000 tons of high explosives. By mid-April, twenty-seven bridges had been severed, despite spotty weather that grounded the medium bombers every other day. Some targets were pounded relentlessly, including the Florence–Rome line, which was hit at twenty-two points.

Stations, bridges, engine repair shops, and parked trains were all fair game. Fighter-bombers averaged one direct hit on a bridge span every nineteen sorties, a tenfold improvement in the accuracy of heavy bombers; they also shot up rail electrical conduits, a tactic that aggravated the shortage of German electricians. The number of cuts in Italian rail lines on any given day tripled to seventy-five. By mid-April, all tracks to Rome were blocked, and trains often halted in Florence so supplies could be unloaded and trucked south. Fuel drums necessarily replaced tanker cars, but drums ran short. Troop movements slowed, timetables unraveled; on occasion, enemy victualers were forced to choose between hauling food or hauling ammunition.

Kesselring in early April ordered supply columns to move only in darkness, which, as the days grew longer, made it impossible to complete a round-trip in a single night. Some expeditions from Florence to Perugia—barely two hundred miles round-trip—took nearly a week. Italian drivers proved “distressingly unreliable” under fire, despite the opening of a convoy school to improve night-driving skills. “The difficulties seemed to pile up,” a German transportation officer later acknowledged.

Yet they did not pile up high enough. With that maddening blend of dexterity and purpose that so characterized German warmaking in Italy, the Wehrmacht simply made do. Traffic slowed but never stopped. Coastal lighters and dray carts supplemented a fleet of twelve thousand trucks. Several rail engineer companies arrived from France to mend tracks and bridges. For every boxcar destroyed, ten replaced it: the Germans owned two million in Europe. Extravagant camouflage, such as the threading of new bridge spans across the Po River through the wreckage of the old, made targets harder to find. Kesselring’s ammunition and fuel stocks remained steady. “The supply situation,” said General Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy in the Berlin high command, “could be viewed satisfactorily as a whole.”
STRANGLE
“achieved nothing more than nuisance value,” the official U.S. Army history later concluded. That was unduly dismissive; the campaign complicated Kesselring’s life and eroded his ability to resist a sustained ground offensive. Rail traffic in central Italy grew sclerotic. But even true-blue aviators voiced disappointment. Airpower “cannot absolutely isolate the battlefield from enemy supply or reinforcement,” Eaker’s British deputy, Air Marshal John C. Slessor, wrote in late spring. Nor could
bombardment “by itself defeat a highly organized and disciplined army, even when that army is virtually without air support.”

The most succinct appraisal came from General Norstad in a seven-word sentence that foreshadowed the terrestrial fight to the death now required of a million men along the Gustav Line.

“The enemy,” Norstad said, “was
not
forced to withdraw.”

“You Are All Brave. You Are All Gentlemen”

S
PRING
crept up the Italian boot, gawdy and fecund. Green wheat emerged in April, as it had for millennia in war and in peace. Hawks wheeled on the thermals in the perfect blue sky, and flowers enameled the fields: buttercups, primroses, massed violets. The leggy poplars leafed out, along with wild quince and hawthorn. Rivers danced across the black rocks to the sea. Pink and white blossoms stippled the almond trees, the delicate scent mingling with the cruder whiff of charred villages.

Herders tended their white, sloe-eyed cattle and goats collared with clanking bells. Children with big mallets trailed the ox-team plows, breaking up dirt clods in the furrows. Wires were restrung in ruined vineyards to tease out new tendrils. “I have been in Italy so long I feel like a Dago, probably look like one too,” a soldier in the 45th Division wrote home. “We speak about half Dago and about half English now, with a lot of Army slang thrown in.” Shell craters floored Purple Heart Valley; after a rain shower they glistened in the sun like scattered coins. In a letter to a friend in California, a sergeant in the 141st Infantry described “a field of blood red poppies…. It makes one fill up inside and wish to cry.” As for comrades gone west, he added, “There are so many of them sleeping under the sod, waiting for us, the living, to pick up and carry on the torch of liberty and freedom…. Life over here boils down to the simple essentials. No frills, decorations, or frivolities.”

Only at Cassino did spring seem hesitant, as if repelled. Where acacia and olives should have silvered the hillsides, blackened stumps climbed the slopes toward the abbey, now dubbed Golgotha by a British padre. In the flats below, a patina of powdered stone whitened the drifted rubble with a spectral pallor. “If ever there was a dead town, this is it,” the ambulance driver John G. Wright observed. “Shelled down to bedrock, for acres.” Even with a telescope from the shaley brow of Monte Trocchio the town looked empty—“Ghost Village,” some Tommies called it. The great trunk road of Highway 6 had been crimped to a goat path, littered with helmets and discarded bandoliers. Wayside graves dotted the landscape, usually
in expedient clusters of three or four, but many corpses lay where they had fallen. “I realized I was smelling my own kind,” the rifleman Alex Bowlby later wrote. “The unseen, unconsecrated dead assumed a most terrifying power.”

Yet in Cassino the living were also unseen and surely unconsecrated. Fifteen hundred soldiers—half German, half British—inhabited the rubble. Neither
STRANGLE
nor any other Allied gambit had persuaded General von Senger’s paratroopers to withdraw a single centimeter. They still held both the high ground and various Cassino strongpoints, including the Hotel Continental and the Hotel des Roses. Freyberg’s Kiwis in early April had yielded to the 1st Guards Brigade, who occupied a wide crescent from the jail in the north to the rail station in the south.

Each evening Guardsmen porters smoked a last cigarette in the lee of Trocchio, then removed their wristwatches to avoid fatal glints in the moonlight and shouldered knotted sandbags stuffed with another day’s provisions: food, ammo, mail, periscopes, rat poison, wire screening to thwart enemy grenades, quicklime to unstink the dead. Most wore gym shoes, or wrapped their boots in burlap sacking to muffle the footfall. The final stretch from Shit Corner into town—the Mad Mile—was navigated both by familiar landmarks, such as the dead American nurse unaccountably pinned beneath a bridge girder, and by “smell marks,” like the ripe mule at one intersection. Sometimes an enemy gunner, Spandau Joe, opened fire on the crepuscular column, raking Highway 6 with bullets that caromed off the roadbed like sparks shed from a grindstone. The porters scuttled forward and dropped their loads, then hurried back to Trocchio to lay up until the next night. One Royal Artillery lieutenant who made frequent runs into Cassino found it “increasingly difficult to speak without a fairly serious stammer.”

The Guards’ command post occupied the crypt beneath a Catholic church, entered only on hands and knees through a hole scratched in the rubble. A decomposing German soldier lay near the entrance and those passing in or out would subsequently bow to him for luck, whispering, “Good evening, Hans.” Shell fire and bombs had sliced open the burial vaults in the upper walls, scattering skeletons about the nave, and Tommies hung flypaper in a losing battle against insects. Pickets occupied three forward outposts, known as Jane, Helen, and Mary, in wrecked buildings barely a hundred yards from the German line. Sentries cradled their Bren guns beneath cockeyed wall prints of the Virgin, whose eyes remained fixed on heaven.

“There is no day, only two kinds of night—a yellow, smoky, choking night, and a black, meteor-ridden night,” wrote one soldier consigned to a
Cassino cellar. Guardsmen plugged their nostrils with mosquito repellent against the stench, and took turns standing watch at their periscopes, like submariners. “We looked out upon a dead world,” a Black Watch soldier reported. “Nothing stirred in the ruins. Even so, hidden eyes watched everything.” They scribbled letters and sipped tea, saving a half inch in their morning mugs to shave. Endless hours were devoted to discussions about sex, politics, and life’s absurdity, all to stave off what Fred Majdalany called “that deadly sameness which is the hardest thing of all to bear in war.” German shells tumbled about; British gunners answered, targeting suspected strongholds code-named for film stars—Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire. At dusk they crept out to relieve themselves, Majdalany recalled, ranks of buttocks “showing white in the semi-darkness like grotesque friezes.”

Life across the rubble was no finer. German paratroopers in baggy smocks and chamber-pot helmets soaked bandages in cologne and tied them over their mouths and nostrils. Others wore bandages over their eyes, damaged from stone splinters. A German order dated April 16 warned, “Effective at once the word ‘catastrophe’ will be eliminated in all reports and orders, as well as from the conversational vocabulary.” Half a dozen swastika banners adorned the rubble on April 20 to mark the Führer’s fifty-fifth birthday, but if “catastrophe” was removed from the lips it was never far from the mind. German gunners fired leaflets that depicted Death holding a pair of calipers and measuring on an Italian map the scant 123 kilometers—76 miles—covered by the Anglo-Americans since landing at Salerno in September; the rest of the peninsula was marked with phase lines and projected dates, including a putative crossing of the Swiss border in April 1948, and then, “to Berlin, another 650 kilometers, arrival about 1952.” If illustrative of Allied dawdling, the map also reminded each
Gefreiter
how far he was from home.

“Everything is in the hands of the fates, and many of the boys have met theirs already,” a German machine gunner wrote in his diary. “I badly want to get home to my wife and son. I want to be able to enjoy something of the beauty of life again. Here we have nothing but terror and horror, death and damnation.”

For all its inhumanity, a peculiar dignity obtained at Cassino for those condemned to share its squalor. Every Guardsman could appreciate the German voice that abruptly broke into the Coldstream radio network one evening to acknowledge, in English: “You are all brave. You are all gentlemen.”

Shortly after seven
A.M
. on Monday, May 1, the entire Fifth Army staff, along with the army band, tiptoed through the olive grove beyond the carp ponds and marble statuary in the Caserta Palace gardens. Without a sound,
they encircled the new caravan recently built for their commander in an ordnance depot. Slathered in green and brown camouflage paint, the trailer featured not only fluorescent lights and a flush toilet, but full-length mirrors and an extra-long bed.

Mark Clark was a meticulous creature of habit, so it was a bit odd when 7:30
A.M
. passed without his usual ring for an orderly to bring his breakfast. Al Gruenther, who had organized this fête for Clark’s forty-eighth birthday, impatiently glanced at his watch before finally ordering the air-raid siren sounded. As a shrill wail carried across the palace grounds, the bandsmen hoisted their instruments and struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” followed by a new ditty, “The Fifth Army’s Where My Heart Is,” with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.

The trailer door swung open and out stepped a smiling Clark—“His Highness,” as Gruenther jokingly called him—clad in blue pajamas, bedroom slippers, trench coat, and cap. After the band crashed through a rousing rendition of “Over There,” Clark thanked the assembled crowd, reminded them that there was “still much to be done in the war,” and predicted that many in the Fifth Army would eventually “see action in the South Pacific.” As he stepped back inside, the band took leave with “The Old Gray Mare.” Later in the day, Clark flew to the beach below Castel Volturno for a swim in the frigid Tyrrhenian Sea. A birthday celebration that night featured two cakes, a hypnotist, comedians, and a “card manipulator.” “He is a hard-boiled soldier, of course,” Gruenther wrote after the party, “but he does get homesick every now and then.”