The Day of Battle (90 page)

Patrols reclaimed small swatches of dead country, and battalions took turns firing every weapon for a minute or two before dawn to discomfit the enemy. Truscott pestered Clark for “at least one additional infantry division,” and soon he would receive Fred Walker’s 36th Division. The entire 1st Armored Division also consolidated at the beachhead, giving Ernie Harmon 232 tanks and bringing the Anzio force to seven divisions. For weeks, a dozen or more Shermans had trundled forward each night to fire harassment rounds before retreating at first light; now each morning a few slipped into concealed forward laagers, joining a hidden armored spearhead gathering near the front. Some crews built extra ammunition racks with angle iron, cramming 250 shells inside and another 40 on the back deck, plus 16,000 machine-gun rounds. “It was crowded,” a company commander said later, “but we went out shooting.”

In a letter to his old friend Lesley J. McNair in Washington, Harmon reported that commanders at the beachhead wanted to be sure “that we have left no stone uncovered.” Even so, Harmon confessed, “I am very tense.” As for Truscott, he focused on the victory that must surely come. “We are on the eve of great things,” he wrote Sarah. “I hope that this summer will carry us a long way toward the end of the war in Europe.”

It was precisely this issue that General Alex intended to discuss when he ambled into the VI Corps cellars at Nettuno on Friday morning, May 5. When should the Beachhead Army break out, and in what direction? Point
ing to a wall map with a thick forefinger, Truscott quickly described the four options developed by his staff. He and Clark favored a plan code-named
TURTLE
: Allied forces would knife up the Albano road toward the Factory, swerve northwest at Carroceto to turn the German right flank on the west side of the Colli Laziali, then follow Highway 7—the Appian Way—into Rome.

The quizzical tilt of Alexander’s red-hatted head suggested that he had different ideas. For weeks he had eyed the stretch of Highway 6 that angled
east
of the Colli Laziali, and which gave Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army both its main supply route to the Liri Valley and a line of retreat to Rome. Once the
DIADEM
attack lured German reserves to the Cassino front, the beachhead forces could thrust northeast to cut the highway at Valmontone, a crossroads town fourteen miles beyond Cisterna. Truscott’s staff officers had drawn precisely such a plan, code-named
BUFFALO
, as one of their four options. Merging the Beachhead Army with the Cassino front might take a month, Alexander believed, but by seizing Valmontone VI Corps could trap Tenth Army in a decisive battle of annihilation. So certain was he of his course after talking to Truscott that Alexander issued an order of uncommon clarity, dated May 5, directing Fifth Army “to cut Highway 6 in the Valmontone area, and thereby prevent the supply or withdrawal of troops from the German Tenth Army.”

Clark had spent the morning in Caserta conferring with Juin, Keyes, and other lieutenants, followed by a lunch of cold cuts and beer. At two
P.M
. an aide handed him a coded radio message from Truscott, reporting that Alexander seemed intent on
BUFFALO
.

Clark was furious. “Alex trying to run my army,” he told his diary. In a phone call across the Caserta compound to Lemnitzer, he railed at Alexander for “issuing instructions to my subordinate commanders” that contradicted Clark’s desire to remain flexible by keeping several plans in play. Upon reaching General Alex himself, he complained of being offended and “thoroughly astounded.” In a memo of the conversation, Clark quoted himself as insisting that “under no circumstances would I tolerate his direct dealings with my subordinates…. He assured me that he had no intention of rescinding my order.”

Unappeased, Clark fumed. In a visit to Nettuno on Saturday, he told Truscott, “The capture of Rome is the only important objective.” The British, he added, were hatching nefarious schemes to get there first. Moreover,
BUFFALO
was tactically dubious. Too many roads ran north from the Cassino front to trap Tenth Army by severing Highway 6. German forces, Clark believed, would simply detour onto other routes.

On Monday morning, May 8, he confronted Alexander directly in his Caserta command post. “I told him he had embarrassed me. He replied that he had no intention to do so,” Clark recorded. Alexander “kept pulling on me the idea that we were to annihilate the entire German army…. I told him that I did not believe that we had too many chances to do that; that the Boche was too smart.” Alexander asked whether the American had doubts about
DIADEM
. “I assured him,” Clark wrote, “that the Fifth Army attack would be as aggressive as any plan or attack he had ever been in or read of.” The tense session ended with Alexander solicitous but resolved: the Beachhead Army would strike for Valmontone, as ordered on May 5 and embodied in
BUFFALO
. “I am thoroughly disgusted with him and with his attitude,” Clark confided to his diary.

At four
P.M
. on Tuesday, Clark met with thirty-one reporters at Caserta. Using a large map and a pointer, he was both calm and commanding in describing
DIADEM
in detail. Fifth Army now mustered 350,000 men, including the two new divisions under General Keyes. Each U.S. division had received an extra 750 men to accommodate expected casualties; the British divisions, Clark noted, “are not quite up to strength.” Kesselring’s force totaled 412,000 men in twenty-three divisions in Italy, including nine along the Cassino front in Tenth Army and five more at Anzio in Fourteenth Army. Clark kept to himself other particulars, which Ultra had revealed: Kesselring possessed 326 serviceable tanks, 616 antitank guns, and 180 assault guns—and that he rated only two of his divisions as “fit to take the offensive.”

The animating principle behind the initial Allied attack scheduled for Thursday night was simple: “Everybody throws everything they have at the same time.” At long last, “the total resources” of both Fifth and Eighth Armies would fall on the enemy simultaneously. The subsidiary attack out of the beachhead would depend on progress in cracking the Gustav Line. Clark expected a tortuous grind, with daily progress limited to two miles or less. In view of the German scorched-earth tactics in Naples, he assumed that Rome would be despoiled. In a veiled allusion to
OVERLORD
, he added, “The more Boche we can hold down here, the more we can kill, the more we will contribute to operations which will overshadow this one.”

He made no mention of his quarrel with Alexander, or his assertion to Truscott that Rome “is the only important objective.” Nor did he hint that he already had begun to consider disobeying orders.

“The attack I would like to make under proper conditions is right out toward Route 6, to cut it,” Clark told the scribes. He gestured on the map toward Valmontone. “Rome is of political value and we hope to take it,” he added, with studied nonchalance. “But our first mission is to kill as many Germans as we can.”

General Alex would be pleased. The Americans had fallen into line.

Albert Kesselring knew nothing of the dispute within the Allied high command, but that condition was of a piece with his larger ignorance of enemy strength, deployment, and intentions. Axis troops—including Russian prisoner-of-war volunteers armed with antique Italian weapons—peered seaward on both coasts for the amphibious landing Kesselring was sure would fall. German intelligence analysts had identified nine of twenty-two Allied regimental command posts on the Fifth Army front, but could pinpoint none of them; nor could they identify or locate most Allied division headquarters. German gunners so consistently fired leaflets in the wrong language to the wrong troops—Urdu to the Kiwis, Arabic to the British, English to the French—that Clark’s G-2 believed “it could be only a deliberate attempt to conceal his knowledge of our order of battle.” In fact, Kesselring was blind.

A Moroccan deserter several weeks earlier had sworn that the Allied offensive would begin April 25. Senior Wehrmacht officers packed their kit and rose early, only to feel “rather sheepish” when the front remained quiet. “Whenever you are well-prepared,” complained Major General Fritz Wentzell, the Tenth Army chief of staff, “nothing happens.” Now the attack was predicted for May 20 or later. After telling his subordinates on May 10 that he did “not expect anything in the immediate future,” Vietinghoff left for the Führer retreat in Bavaria to collect another medal. In late April, General von Senger also had taken a month’s leave to receive a similar decoration and to attend a conference in Berchtesgaden, along with Ernst-Günther Baade, his most trusted division commander. Siegfried Westphal, Kesselring’s exhausted chief of staff, had departed two weeks earlier on convalescent leave.

If Kesselring was blind and misinformed, he was not stupid. He assumed the Allied main attack would follow Highway 6, the only avenue where armor could deploy in mass. To strengthen defenses around Cassino, he rearranged his line, summoning LI Mountain Corps from the Adriatic and shifting Senger’s XIV Panzer Corps across the Liri Valley.
With the Führer determined to fight for every Italian hilltop, engineers since December had built yet another bulwark across the peninsula: the Hitler Line, a fortified string of redoubts five to ten miles behind the Gustav Line. Some 77,000 German troops shored up the beachhead perimeter, and another 82,000 held the southern front, seventy miles away. The German strategy in Italy, Kesselring now declared, was “simply to make the enemy exhaust himself.”

Still, he misread the omens: the bridging equipment unloaded near the Garigliano; the Allied patrols unspooling white tape; the oppressive silence. On Wednesday, May 10, Wentzell phoned Kesselring’s headquarters with his daily report. “To my great pleasure, everything is quiet,” he told a staff officer. “Only I do not know what is going on. Things are becoming ever more uncertain.”

“I have told this to the field marshal,” the officer replied. “He looks very intently towards the coast.”

“In past times one heard at least once in a while that such-and-such division had left Africa. But now one hears nothing,” Wentzell said. “I think it is not impossible that things are going on of which we have no idea.”

Red Cross volunteers behind Monte Trocchio handed out sandbags filled with cigarettes, dates, and oranges to Allied troops tramping toward the Rapido staging areas. “It was like a goodbye gift,” one soldier said. Mule hooves now were sheathed in sacking to quiet the clop, and conspicuously white animals had been culled from the trains. Every brake and copse along the front grew stiff with soldiers. Some thumbed through a GI’s guide to Italian cities, which stressed Leonardo da Vinci’s military inventions—“hand grenades, shrapnel, the parachute”—and assured them that Rome’s Colosseum “wasn’t wrecked by Long Toms. It got that way through the passage of time.” A battalion surgeon recorded in his diary, “Blackjack for twenty dollars a card…I win over two hundred dollars and now worry where to carry all that money.”

A Canadian soldier scrutinizing the blasted landscape near Cassino asked, “Who the hell would want to live here, let alone fight over it?” But Fred Majdalany concluded that “Cassino had become what in the earlier war Ypres was to the British, Verdun to the French. It was a cause in its own right, a cause to die for.” Many had, more would. Polish troops swapped their boots for canvas slippers or wrapped their feet in rags before creeping toward Snakeshead Ridge behind the abbey. The scent of red clover mingled with ruder scents, and the Poles tried covering Indian corpses with blankets to contain the smell. “The place was alive with rats,” a platoon leader in the 3rd Carpathian Division complained.

A dozen miles to the southwest, an officer in the 88th Division listened to the murmur of his men praying aloud. Between the lines, the blackened bodies of soldiers killed in earlier skirmishes reminded him of “irregular pieces of driftwood on a rocky beach.” Jumpy Senegalese sentries fired at what appeared to be the glowing cigarettes of approaching strangers but proved to be fireflies, which they had never seen.

On the gun line in the rear, engineers blasted pits for a recently arrived 8-inch battery; each tube required thirteen cannoneers to manhandle the forty-five-foot staff used to swab the barrel after each round. Others stacked shells with new molybdenum fuzes capable of penetrating steel-reinforced concrete. Small holes were drilled in the casings to intensify the scream in flight.

From the beachhead to the Apennines, scribbling men struggled to find the right words in their letters home. “Busy days, nerve trying days,” Jack Toffey wrote Helen. “One smokes too much—drinks too much if he can get it, and sleeps too little if he can get that.” He burned most of Helen’s letters to lighten his load. “This hurts me to do,” he told her, “but space had become such a factor that I found it necessary to retain only yours of April and May.” While certain that “the Kraut is going to catch hell from all sides at any time,” Toffey confessed that “I am a bit war weary.” He had resigned himself to fighting for the duration. “I’ll be home when they build a bridge and we march over it,” he told her. “How long Oh Lord—how long?”

Commanders evinced the requisite public élan while privately venting their anxieties. “If Alex is a military genius, I’m Greta Garbo,” Keyes told his diary on May 10. “He is obsessed with the idea that the Germans are going to give up and run.” A few hours later Alexander cabled Churchill: “Our objective is the destruction of the enemy south of Rome.” As for the prime minister, a note of desperation had crept into the message he sent George Marshall. “We must throw our hearts into this battle for the sake of which so many American and British lives have already been sacrificed, and make it like
OVERLORD
—an all-out conquer or die.”