Castaldi cocked his head, holding the paddle at high port like a halberd. Through the open window came a noise from the sea, a distant clamor. “Keep still a moment,” he told two colleagues. “Something’s happening.” Clanking metal and the thrum of engines carried on the night. Castaldi recognized the sound, from Sicily. “I can hear them,” he said. “I can hear them. The Americans are coming!” Grabbing his jacket, he yanked down the window blinds and sprinted through the door to alert his brother and uncle. As he rounded the corner into the Via Cavour, a brilliant light bleached the night sky and the ground trembled as if Neptune himself had impaled the earth with his trident.
The Americans were indeed coming, and so too the British. Three miles offshore the armada had dropped anchor at 12:04 A.M., four minutes late, in a dead calm and diaphanous haze. Scout boats puttered toward shore and at 1:50 A.M., just as young Castaldi darted into the street, a pair of British rocket boats opened fire with fifteen hundred 5-inch projectiles intended to cow coastal defenders and detonate beachfront mines. The five-minute bombardment “made a tremendous noise, achieved no good results, and was prejudicial to surprise,” an intelligence officer reported. Only silence answered the barrage, and shortly after two A.M. the first infantrymen swarmed onto the beach, bent on adding injury to the rockets’ insult.
Before the war, before the killings and the expulsions and those last sad looks at the sea, Anzio-Nettuno had been a thriving resort, just two hours from Rome by fast Fiat, with a fine harbor and garish bathhouses. In waterfront eateries known for their zuppa di pesce, patrons could watch the fireworks on feast days. Nettuno had grown a bit larger in modern times, but Anzio, ancient Antium, had greater notoriety. Nero and Caligula had both been born here—the former’s fiddling during the conflagration of Rome was said to have occurred in Antium’s theater—and the patrician rebel Coriolanus supposedly was slain here in 490 B.C. Silver-throated Cicero owned a villa in Antium; Trajan had enlarged the port; and various emperors bred elephants along the coast. Antium had worshipped the goddess Fortune as the town’s protectress, but she proved inconstant. The harbor silted up during Rome’s decline, and piracy eclipsed tourism. Through the centuries, the goddess alternately smiled and scowled capriciously.
Now her temper would be tested again. Anchoring the VI Corps’ left flank, the British splashed ashore five miles up the coast on Red, Green, and Yellow Beaches. A few desultory rounds of German artillery plumped the shallows, but naval gunfire soon answered and the only resistance across the shingle came from mines and soft sand. Much bellowing with bullhorns accompanied the landings: a subsequent analysis advised that “no amount of shouting through loud-hailers will induce troops to advance through a minefield.” British lorries, lacking four-wheel drive, tended to bog down in the narrow dune exits—“The waste of time was fantastic,” a beach commander lamented—and tempers flared. When a landing craft coxswain scraped the hull of the flagship H.M.S. Bulolo, a naval officer roared, “Don’t stand about like a half-plucked fowl. Cast off!”
Soon enough twelve-foot lanes were cleared through the mines and marked with luminous paint. Hundreds and then thousands of Tommies scuffed into the piney Padiglione Woods, searching in vain for an enemy to overrun. Three Germans were found sleeping in a cowshed amid plundered bottles of Italian perfume and nail polish. One surrendered in his underwear, though the other two escaped in an armored car. “It was all very gentlemanly, calm and dignified,” the Irish Guards reported. Carrying a large black umbrella as he arrived in a DUKW, the Irish Guards commander “stepped ashore with the air of a missionary visiting a South Sea island and surprised to see no cannibals.”
No cannibals appeared on the right flank either. Truscott’s 3rd Division made land just south of Nettuno, while Darby and his Rangers beat for the white dome and terraces of the Paradiso, a casino overlooking Anzio harbor. Most troops came ashore wetted only to the knees, if not completely dryshod. A few spurts from a flamethrower encouraged shrieking surrenders in an antiaircraft battery; nineteen enemy soldiers emerged hands-up from a bunker that still sported a scraggly Christmas tree. Engineers found more than twenty tons of explosives stuffed in the docks and doorways, but winter weather had corroded the charges and a new German plan to blow up the mole had not yet been effected. Prisoners trickled in, including Wehrmacht rustlers captured while searching for cattle to feed their unit.
After watching through field glasses from the Biscayne, General Lucas advised his diary that he “could not believe my eyes when I stood on the bridge and saw no machine gun or other fire on the beach.” At 3:05 A.M. he sent Clark a coded radio message: “Paris-Bordeaux-Turin-Tangiers-Bari-Albany,” which meant “Weather clear, sea calm, little wind, our presence not discovered, landings in progress.” Later in the morning Lucas signaled “No angels yet, cutie Claudette”: No tanks ashore, but the attack was going well.
It continued to go well through the day. Truscott made for shore in a crash boat at 6:15 A.M., mute with laryngitis and so miserable from his inflamed throat that he lay down for a nap in a thicket near the beach. His men hardly needed him. All three regiments pushed the beachhead three miles inland, exchanging a few gunshots with backpedaling German scouts, and then blowing up bridges across the Mussolini Canal to seal the right flank against a panzer counterattack that never came.
By sunrise, at 7:30, Rangers occupied Anzio; paratroopers soon after reported that Nettuno also was secure. Local bakers, including the gleeful Orlando Castaldi, were ordered to bank their oven fires to prevent German gunners from aiming at the smoke. Soldiers liberated six women found chained to tethering rings in the Piazza Mazzini stable; they had been sentenced to death four days earlier while returning by train from Rome with black market food purchased in the Piazza Vittorio. The Americans gave them powdered milk, chocolate, and underwear, then sent them home.
DUKWs rolled through the streets like parade floats. Prisoners in long green field coats trudged to cages on the beach, “dusty, sweaty and noncommittal,” as one witness put it. “Move on, superman,” a GI jeered. Outside the former German command post, on a large sign that read KOMMANDANT, someone scribbled: RESIGNED. A few more shells fell along the waterfront and the Luftwaffe staged an ineffectual raid. “Maybe the war is over and we don’t know it,” said a lieutenant colonel. A GI added, “It ain’t right, all right. But I like it.” MPs tacked up road signs, and soon jeeps and trucks clotted the streets. An old woman stood at an intersection outside town, kissing the hand of every soldier tramping past. As one private reported, “She did not miss a man.”
Success brought sightseers to the beachhead. At nine A.M., to the trill of a bosun’s pipe, Alexander and Clark clambered aboard the Biscayne from a patrol boat that had whisked them north from the Volturno. Lucas summarized the news with a smile: resistance negligible, casualties light, most assault troops already ashore. Anzio’s port was in such fine condition that at least a half dozen LSTs could berth simultaneously, and the first would unload this afternoon.
From Biscayne the boating party traveled by DUKW to the beach. Clark—immaculate in peaked cap, silk scarf, and creased trousers—inspected the 3rd Division and pronounced himself pleased. Poor Truscott croaked his thanks. Alexander—no less comely in red hat, fur-trimmed jacket, and riding breeches—motored among the British battalions in the turret of an armored car. To a Scots Guardsman he resembled “a chief umpire visiting the forward position and finding things to his satisfaction.” General Alex, in fact, told a British colonel precisely that: “I am very satisfied.” Reconvening on Biscayne, the two men complimented Lucas on his derring-do, then hopped back into the patrol boat and sped off toward Naples, leaving neither orders nor a sense of urgency in their wake. As one wit commented, “They came, they saw, they concurred.”
Left alone to command his battle, Lucas decamped from Biscayne to Piazza del Mercato 16, a two-story villa in Nettuno with four bedrooms and an upstairs fireplace. Sycamores ringed the little square, framing the sculpture of Neptu
ne straddling his fish. The previous occupant of number 16, the German commandant, had bolted so quickly—only to die on the beach in the early minutes of the invasion—that a sausage and half-empty brandy glass remained on the dining table.
The Allies had won what they least expected to win: complete surprise. By midnight on D-day, 27,000 Yanks, 9,000 Brits, and 3,000 vehicles would be ashore in a beachhead that was fifteen miles wide and two to four miles deep. Only thirteen Allied soldiers had died. As one paratrooper wrote, most soldiers found it “very hard to believe that a war was going on and that we were in the middle of it.”
Lucas also found it hard to believe. From the north window of number 16, he could plainly see his prize. Fifteen miles distant, the Colli Laziali rose above the myrtles and umbrella pines, burnished by the setting sun that kissed the red tile rooftops before plunging into the Tyrrhenian Sea. White haze scarped the hills, which rose three thousand feet above the coastal plain in a volcanic massif nearly forty miles in circumference. Wind-tossed chestnut groves softened the tufa ridges, providing haunts for cuckoos and dryads and ancient enchantresses. Here too lay Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer home, where in years past the pontiff could have been seen riding a white mule among the cypresses, trailed by cardinals robed in scarlet.
Dusk sifted over the beachhead. Lights winked on in up-country villages, and convoy headlights drifted in tiny chains across the hills like ships steaming on the far horizon. In his tidy, contained cursive, Lucas wrote, “We knew the lights meant supplies coming in for the use of our enemies, but they were out of range and nothing could be done about it.”
Thirty-four miles from this window lay Rome, known in Allied code-books as BOTANY. Two routes crossed the “hinterland,” as the British called the landscape beyond the beachhead. One road angled northeast from Nettuno, across the Pontine Marshes to Cisterna, twelve miles distant, and then fifteen more miles to Valmontone, astride Highway 6 in the Liri Valley. The other road, known as the Via Anziate, ran due north for almost twenty miles from Anzio to intersect Highway 7, the twenty-three-century-old Appian Way, at Albano.
Both roads led to glory, and Lucas intended to follow both. The world seemed to believe that BOTANY was all but his. The Sunday edition of The New York Times reported the Allies “only sixteen miles from Rome.” Radio broadcasts heard in the beachhead were even more optimistic. “Alexander’s brave troops are pushing towards Rome,” the BBC reported on Sunday, “and should reach it within forty-eight hours.”
Neither the Times nor the BBC had consulted Field Marshal Kesselring.
The first alarm had come from a German corporal, a railroad engineer sent to Anzio to buy timber. At four A.M. on Saturday, breathless and mud-spattered, he roared into Albano aboard a motorcycle, babbling about enemy ships as far as the eye could see. A major phoned the news to Rome, where panicked officers began to pack their bags and burn official papers. “The landing,” a German naval log noted, “has come at a very bad time for us.”
Certainly it was unexpected. Hardly a week earlier, Hitler’s intelligence chief, Admiral Wilhelm F. Canaris, had told the Berlin high command, “There is not the slightest sign that a new landing will be undertaken in the near future.” Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, subsequently advised senior commanders in Italy on January 15, “I consider a large-scale landing operation as being out of the question for the next four to six weeks.” Thus reassured, Kesselring had dispatched his reserves—the 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions—to confront the Garigliano threat on the southern front. Just three battalions and forty-one guns remained to guard a forty-mile coastal stretch from the mouth of the Tiber River to below Nettuno.
Few combat commanders were enjoying World War II more than Albert Kesselring. Having been bombed out of his Frascati headquarters in September, he now occupied a new command post in the Sabine Hills, twenty miles northeast of Rome on the western lip of Monte Soratte, which Lord Byron once described as “a huge wave about to break.” The views of the upper Tiber Valley were breathtaking, and local wines proved equal to the Frascati whites. Kesselring often hosted dinner parties for visiting dignitaries and diplomats, indulging his vanity by swapping his blue Luftwaffe uniform for khaki regalia of his own design, and displaying his erudition as both a soldier-scholar and a convivial raconteur. Earlier in January he had been shot down yet again while piloting his little Storch. Managing to steer the plane into a pond, he arrived at a conference covered in green slime but smiling as usual with Bavarian bonhomie. Over the past fourteen months, in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, he had demonstrated similar agility and panache, and it was the Allies’ misfortune to face him again at Anzio.
The first report of the landings reached Monte Soratte at five A.M., an hour after the railway corporal’s alarm. Kesselring instantly recognized the threat to Tenth Army’s rear and to Rome, where he ordered roadblocks on all approach avenues. At six A.M. he told Berlin of the landings and received authorization for Operation RICHARD, one of five contingency plans drafted in case of Allied landings at various points on the Italian littoral. At 7:10 he ordered the forces in northern Italy designated for RICHARD to head south, on prearranged march routes with prearranged signage, fuel, and troops assigned to clear the snow-packed Apennine passes. At 8:30 he directed General Vietinghoff to transfer all spare troops from Tenth Army to the beachhead, along with the headquarters of I Parachute Corps. Within six hours, Kesselring had ordered all or parts of eleven divisions to converge around the Colli Laziali in what he would later term a “higgledy-piggledy jumble.” By seven P.M., forces were moving not only from northern Italy, but from France, Germany, and the Balkans. Well-wishing Italians would toss flowers to Wehrmacht soldiers rolling toward the beachhead from Croatia. As John Lucas could see from the headlights streaming across the hills, the first reinforcements had arrived even before D-day turned to D+1.
They were just the beginning. Allied air strategists had asserted that the Italian rail system could be disrupted by aerial bombardment to prevent German forces from concentrating around Anzio; the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces now had more than seven thousand aircraft, compared with fewer than six hundred Luftwaffe planes in the entire theater. Yet carpet bombing of marshaling yards proved ineffective, to the pleasant surprise of German logisticians who nimbly rerouted trains around blocked lines and organized truck convoys on back roads. Most Italian rail workers remained at their posts, and within three days portions of eight German divisions would be at or near the beachhead, with five others en route.
They found terrain that favored the defender, as usual. From the Colli Laziali, as a Grenadier Guards history lamented, on “clear days it was possible to see the surf breaking on the shore, and almost every movement in the open country between…. The German gunners could mark the fall of every shell.” Muzzle flashes betrayed the position of Allied guns, and the flat ground had few folds to conceal men or artillery. To organize the “higgledy-piggledy jumble,” Kesselring ordered the commander of the Fourteenth Army, General Eberhard von Mackensen, to shift his headquarters south from Verona. A square-jawed, monocle-sporting cavalryman, with extensive combat experience in Poland, France, and eastern Europe, Mackensen also boasted good Prussian bloodlines: his father, a hussar whose political patrons included Kaiser Wilhelm II, had occupied Serbia and Romania as a field marshal in World War I.
Kesselring had expected the Allies to seize the Colli Laziali, but by Sunday evening he told Vietinghoff in a phone call that the danger of a flying column severing his supply lines on Highways 6 and 7 had passed. He guessed that VI Corps’ strength included three infantry divisions and an armored division—in fact, it was less—which Kesselring considered “insufficient for an attack on a strategic objective” like the Alban Hills, given the need to also protect the exposed beachhead flanks.
Moreover, the Allies suffered from what Kesselring called a “Salerno complex.” Only when overwhelming combat power had been amassed, he su
rmised, would the enemy venture far from the beaches and protective naval gunfire. Before that buildup gained momentum, Mackensen must strike across the entire Anzio front to throw the enemy into the sea. Hitler agreed, and advised, in his own inimitable idiom, “The battle must be waged with holy hatred.”
“Please answer the following questions at once,” Clark radioed Lucas on Monday, January 24. “How far have your patrols worked? What are your intentions for immediate operations? What is your estimate of enemy situation?” The Fifth Army commander had warned, “Don’t stick your neck out,” but now he confided to his diary, “Lucas must be aggressive. He must take some chances.”
In reply, Lucas correctly surmised that the enemy “will attempt to contain our forces pending arrival of reinforcements with which to counterattack [the] beachhead.” Few tanks had been included in SHINGLE’s initial waves, because the Allies had expected a sharp infantry fight on the beaches. Yet the invasion to date had resembled a camping expedition. Guards Brigade officers slept in pajamas and played bridge, while their troops brewed tea, chain-smoked, and stamped their feet to keep warm: rime glazed the marsh grass at night, and thin panes of ice coated the puddles. Owl hoots carried through the quiet woods. Solders found it easy to dig in the sandy soil if they did not dig too deeply: slit trenches soon grew wet from the high water table. That hardly seemed to matter. An officer in the 56th Evacuation Hospital pointed to the northern horizon and proclaimed, “All those hills are ours, men! No need to dig foxholes.” In the weeks to come, 56th Evac soldiers often greeted enemy barrages and air attacks with a sardonic cry: “All those hills are ours, men!”