As Allied patrols were discovering, the hinterland between the beach and those hills was a strange, haunted place. Fed by streams from the Colli Laziali, the Pontine Marshes for millennia had been a malarial dead zone. In 1928, a census of the entire plain found only 1,637 people and no permanent settlements; the area was said to be inhabited “only by a few web-toed, fever-ridden corkcutters” living in straw huts. The Italian Red Cross reported that during the warm months, four of every five travelers who spent a single night in the Pontine Marshes could expect to contract malaria. The English translations of local place-names suggested a certain obsession with mortality: Dead Woman, Land of Death, Pool of the Sepulcher, and—to honor the sullen ferryman of the dead—Charon.
Mussolini had reclaimed much of the land with an ambitious program known as the bonifica integrale, intended to transform the marshes into “smiling fields.” Enormous pumps drained the bogs, aided by ten thousand miles of canals and irrigation ditches, and more than a million pine trees planted in windbreaks. Five model towns were built, plus eighteen satellite villages and hundreds of two-story stone farmhouses, usually painted bright blue. Thousands of Italians seeking work and shelter during the Depression had moved to these virgin lands, which Mussolini envisioned as “human nurseries” for breeding the “great rural warriors” of a new Roman empire.
War wrecked the dream. Kesselring and his engineers saw the marshes as a potential barrier against Allied armies from the south. With Mussolini’s apparent consent after his rescue from Gran Sasso, German hydrographers studied “what measures could be taken to make this area rapidly and completely impassable by flooding.” Demolitionists blew up pumping stations, blocked canals, and bulldozed dikes. Seawater flushed the fields. Eventually 100,000 acres of reclaimed farmland were submerged; in some places “only trees and houses were visible,” a Kesselring staff officer reported. The stout farm buildings would make admirable pillboxes. Not least, German malariologists knew that come springtime the inundations would provide larval nurseries for Anopheles labranchiae, a Pontine mosquito proficient at breeding in brackish water. The scheme remains “the only known example of biological warfare in twentieth-century Europe,” according to the Yale University historian Frank M. Snowden.
Into this landscape of “bog, bush, and water,” as one soldier described it, the Allied force began to push. On the VI Corps left, British patrols edged up the Via Anziate, past Italian farmers who shouted from behind their plows, “Niente tedeschi!”—“No Germans”—even as occasional shell bursts sent their white longhorn cattle bucking across the fields. Italian women clapped and waved handkerchiefs from their croft doorways, leading a British captain to comment, “These peasants are really damned good people, aren’t they?” Guardsmen with a squadron of tanks drove a panzer grenadier battalion out of Aprilia—one of those five model Fascist towns—and captured a hundred prisoners. By Tuesday, January 25, the British 1st Division was halfway to Albano and the Highway 7 intersection.
On the VI Corps right, the Yanks also extended the bridgehead despite Truscott’s lingering indisposition. The commanding general’s “throat is worse today and he goes to bed early, after remaining in command post all day,” the 3rd Division chief of staff had noted on Sunday. Four companies cantered toward Cisterna on Monday, only to butt against unexpected resistance; a larger American force at dawn on Tuesday also found Hermann Göring Division troops with machine guns or antitank guns in nearly every farmhouse. Cisterna, through which Highway 7 also passed, remained three miles away.
Still, high spirits prevailed. A Ranger lieutenant rummaging through an abandoned villa emerged in a black stovepipe hat and a tuxedo; another Ranger dressed up as a butler to serve him lunch. Churchill cabled Alexander, “Am very glad you are pegging out claims rather than digging in beachhead.”
Clark and Alexander came calling again shortly after noon on Tuesday. Now, on D+3, forty thousand American and sixteen thousand British troops occupied the beachhead, along with almost seven thousand vehicles. While warning Lucas to brace for an inevitable counterattack, Clark also urged him to finish seizing Campoleone on the left and Cisterna on the right. Alexander seemed delighted with VI Corps’ progress. “What a splendid piece of work,” he told Lucas. “This will really hurt the Germans.”
“I must keep my feet on the ground and my forces in hand and do nothing foolish,” the corps commander confided to his diary after his superiors left. “This is the most important thing I have ever tried to do, and I will not be stampeded.”
Kesselring was an airman, and although the Luftwaffe could muster less than a tenth the strength of the Allies, it was from the air that the Germans initially struck back. The first costly raid came at twilight on Sunday, January 23, when an aerial torpedo demolished the bridge and forecastle of the destroyer H.M.S. Janus. She broke apart and capsized in twenty minutes, taking 159 men with her. Survivors clinging to the flotsam sang “Roll Out the Barrel.”
More than one hundred bombers scorched the transport anchorage on Monday, again at twilight, killing fifty-three sailors aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Plunkett. But the most shocking attack came against the hospital ship St. David, which had sailed from Anzio at dusk after embarking wounded troops. With all lights burning and an enormous red cross displayed topside, she was ambushed twenty miles offshore at eight P.M. by Luftwaffe planes that sprinkled magnesium flares and then bombs. An explosion staggered the St. David and quenched the lights. Patients hobbled on deck or were carried by stretcher. “The ship is sinking,” a voice cried. “Jump.” Lieutenant Laura R. Hindman, a surgical nurse, leaped into a lifeboat only to hear shrieks from other castaways. Looking up, she saw “the ship turning over and it seemed to be falling right on top of us.” Dumped into the sea, she later recalled:
I was being dragged down by the ship’s suction. I fought and tried to swim and moved about but came up only far enough to hit my head against something hard which appeared to be part of the ship…. I struggled frantically and thought I was trapped under the ship when suddenly my head bobbed up. I saw stars.
St. David sank five minutes after she was hit. Of 229 people aboard, 96 perished.
The strikes continued through the week, often with the guided bombs previously seen at Salerno. Radio chatter by Luftwaffe pilots, who sometimes could be heard even while taxiing on runways near Rome, gave beachhead eavesdroppers fair warning of impending attacks. Allied fighters and antiaircraft gunners parried many raids, shooting down more than two dozen bombers and scattering others. Still, the attacks so menaced the fleet—particularly late in the day, when air cover was weakest—that all cruisers and most destroyers were ordered to retire seaward each afternoon at four. The loss of minesweeper YMS-30 with seventeen crewmen was typical. “There was a terrific wall of flame,” a witness reported, “then the vessel disappeared.”
Danger lurked below as well as above. Shortly after five A.M. on Wednesday, January 26, LST 422 lay anchored twelve miles offshore, waiting for a berth to open at Anzio harbor. Built in Baltimore but crewed by the Royal Navy, she had carried seven hundred men from Naples; among them, two companies of the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion were to rejoin Darby’s Rangers for extra firepower. Deteriorating weather had built twenty-foot seas under a westerly gale that shoved the ship sideways, dragging her anchor yard by yard, until she tripped a German mine. The blast tore a fifty-foot hole in the starboard hull, igniting diesel oil and barreled gasoline. Flame licked through the ventilators. Within two minutes, the upper deck and bridge were ablaze. Most mortarmen were asleep in the tank deck, which simultaneously flooded and turned into a crematorium. Detonating rockets and white-phosphorus rounds soared through an aft hatch, forcing those topside to cower behind the gun mount shields. With power lost and the ship engulfed, men tumbled into the frigid sea.
Ships churning to the rescue played searchlights across the heaving waves. As LCI 32 approached, she too struck a mine and was gone in three minutes, taking thirty crewmen to the bottom. “Heavy
seas and high winds made it very difficult maneuvering ship alongside the unfortunates,” the war log of minesweeper YMS-43 noted at seven A.M. “Using the boat hook was the best method, except many of the life belts tore under the strain. Survivors were drowning all around us.”
At 8:45, with hail falling like grapeshot, the minesweeper’s log recorded: “No more floating bodies visible.” The mortar companies lost nearly 300 men, among 454 U.S. soldiers and 29 British tars who perished. LST 422 broke in half and sank at 2:30 P.M. Recovered bodies were sewn into canvas bags weighted with antiaircraft shells and consigned to the sea. The drowned included Private Billy C. Rhoads of Albia, Iowa, whose brother years later said of the fatal news delivered by telegram to the family’s front door, “It really was a grief which Mother never was able to be rid of.”
As the air attacks intensified, so did German shelling. By midday on January 26, when sodden survivors from LST 422 arrived in Anzio, the beachhead had assumed the shape of an irregular rectangle, seven miles deep and fifteen miles wide. Truscott’s 3rd Division remained three miles from Cisterna, while Major General Penney’s British 1st Division held Aprilia but stood more than a mile from the rail and road junction at Campoleone, and ten miles from Albano. Every square inch of the beachhead fell within range of German guns, and every square inch felt vulnerable. One shell hit a fragrance shop, perfuming the air with the odd scent of cordite and cologne. Another hit a British dump, firing ammunition as frantic Tommies dragged away leaking petrol cans. “Everyone was dashing around like demented beings,” a Grenadier Guards corporal named E. P. Danger told his diary.
“The heavy shelling was beginning to shake us up a bit,” Corporal Danger added. One of his American cousins agreed. “Anzio was a fishbowl,” he wrote. “We were the fish.”
I will not be stampeded, John Lucas had declared, and he would spend the rest of his life explaining that reluctance. Already skeptics had begun to wonder why the beachhead remained so compact, why the enemy had not been routed, why the campaign was not won. The senior Royal Air Force officer in the Mediterranean, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, wrote a colleague in London five days after the landings:
I have not the slightest doubt that if we had been Germans or Russians landing at Anzio, we should have had [Highway 6] two days ago and maybe Rome by now and the whole right of the enemy line opposite the Fifth Army would have crumpled.
Lucas also sensed that Alexander, despite his effusive praise during two visits to the beachhead, had grown uneasy, perhaps goaded by the impatient Churchill. As if seeking to persuade both himself and history, Lucas wrote in his diary:
Apparently some of the higher levels think I have not advanced with maximum speed. I think more has been accomplished than anyone had a right to expect. This venture was always a desperate one and I could never see much chance for it to succeed, if success means driving the Germans north of Rome.
The excoriation of Old Luke had begun: for want of pluck, of audacity, of imagination. Long after the war ended, he would be pilloried as the modern incarnation of George B. McClellan, the timid Civil War general who was said to have “the slows.” Even those who applauded Lucas’s prudence regretted that he had not rushed to seize the road junctions at Campoleone and Cisterna, which would have complicated German encirclement of the beachhead. “Having gained surprise in the landing,” the judicious official historian Martin Blumenson concluded, Lucas “proceeded to disregard the advantage it gave him.”
Perhaps, although the Allied push to the north and northeast began within forty-eight hours of the landings. More than sixty years after the Allied perdition at Anzio, Lucas’s caution seems sensible and even inevitable, given Clark’s wooly instructions and Alexander’s hail-fellow approbation. Those who most closely scrutinized the VI Corps predicament tended to concur that a pell-mell lunge for the Colli Laziali would have been reckless. Alexander’s new chief of staff, the future field marshal John H. Harding, concluded that Lucas “probably saved the forces at Anzio from disaster.” Clark came to a similar conclusion. Major General G.W.R. Templer, who would soon command a British division at Anzio and who detested Lucas, believed that if the corps had galloped north, “within a week or fortnight there wouldn’t have been a single British soldier left in the bridgehead. They would all have been killed or wounded or prisoners.” And George Marshall, who rarely condescended to adjudicate tactical squabbles, noted that “for every mile of advance there were seven or more miles to be added to the perimeter,” which would have made the Allied flanks ever more vulnerable.
Five years after the war, Alexander conceded that “the actual course of events was probably the most advantageous in the end.” His assessment echoed that of Field Marshal Wilson, Eisenhower’s successor at AFHQ, who also concluded that to have pushed “to the Alban Hills with a half built-up force might have led to irreparable disaster.” John Lucas might be found wanting as a battle captain, with transparent anxieties and an avuncular mien that failed to inspire men under duress. “He was absolutely full of inertia and couldn’t make up his mind,” General Templer later complained. “He had no qualities of any sort as a commander.” But in staring through the north window of his villa on the Piazza del Mercato, Lucas found courage in convictions that would save his corps even at the price of his reputation. “Had I been able to rush to the high ground,” he wrote in his diary as German artillery and air attacks intensified,
…nothing would have been accomplished except to weaken my force by that amount because the troops being sent, being completely beyond supporting distance, would have been immediately destroyed. The only thing to do was what I did.
Through the Looking Glass
ON a brisk January day in 1752, a column of soldiers more than half a mile long marched through a field outside the village of Caserta, twenty miles north of Naples, in a province famed in antiquity for “the beauty and gaiety of its women,” as well as for the slave revolt led by the gladiator Spartacus in 73 B.C. With a quartet of cannons placed to denote four corners, the troops formed a rectangle that outlined the perimeter walls of a future royal palace inspired by Versailles. The building would require twenty years of toil by a regiment of stonemasons, reinforced by prison labor and galley slaves. The finished palace became a monument to Bourbon ostentation: twelve hundred rooms; four interlocking courtyards; a sweeping marble staircase grander than anything Louis XIV ever descended; a theater with forty boxes; a chapel trimmed in lapis lazuli; and interior furnishings said to cost six million ducats. Gold lined the queen’s bathtub, and bas-relief figures on the wall had their eyes painted shut to prevent their peeking at the royal derrière; a hole-and-mirror contraption allowed the queen to watch townfolk passing on the street outside while she took her soak. The building’s southern face alone was 830 feet long and 134 feet high, with 243 windows. In laying his cornerstone with a silver trowel on that January day, the Neapolitan monarch Charles III had selected a Latin invocation asking that the palace and grounds “remain forever Bourbon.”
Alas, nearly two centuries later the Anglo-Americans were firmly ensconced. Captured on October 8, Caserta Palace now served as the headquarters for both Clark’s Fifth Army and for Alexander’s 15th Army Group, which claimed the fifth floor on January 20. Every map and stick of furniture, including a pair of General Alex’s red plush chairs, had to be carried up 124 steps to what a British major described as “a muddling sort of maze through which one wandered.” A staff school for Italian aviators had previously occupied the floor, which was cluttered with aircraft motors, wind tunnels, and even a bomber fuselage. “Everything,” Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “was in disorder.” A war room was built, with a sentry on the door and maps on the wall. Alexander messed at the palace kennel and slept in a bivouac two miles distant, so there was a great deal of chuffing up and down those 124 steps. Ultra intelligence agents worked in caravans near the palace, forever burning secrets in an elegant brick incinerator, surmounted by steep steps like a pagan temple.
br /> Fifteen thousand Allied soldiers eventually worked at Caserta, which soon became a baroque parody of the Pentagon. The place was so cavernous that one resident claimed it was “the only house where I’ve had my hat blown off indoors.” After studying a sheaf of palace blueprints, signal officers concluded that to thread wire through walls two feet thick was impossible; cable and phone lines therefore ran “in and out of windows and around the outside,” giving the palace an appearance of being trussed if not hog-tied. One OSS officer thought Caserta resembled “a New England cotton mill,” while another officer likened it to “Alcatraz without the bay.” A brisk breeze caused hundreds of shutters to bang so that the headquarters “sounded like midnight in a madhouse.”
The building had little heat, less sanitation, and “a 180-year accumulation of fleas.” Staff officers sat at plywood-and-sawhorse desks, “alternately shivering and scratching fleabites.” The British wanted the windows open, the Americans insisted they remain shut, and Alexander was forced to issue a Solomonic decree that “whoever arrived first at the office could have the windows as he liked for the day.” A polyglot host streamed in and out of the palace: Tommies and GIs, RAF pilots and Red Cross girls, carabinieri in swallowtail coats and tricorne hats; Indians in turbans; Poles wearing British battle dress with red-and-white shoulder tabs; French colonials in fezzes and Uncle Sam’s olive twill. Even an occasional Moroccan goum stumped past in the striped burnoose that GIs called a “Mother Hubbard wrapper.”
The twelve hundred rooms had been converted into dormitories, dining halls, offices, bakeries, laundries, and a barbershop, where a comb-and-razor cut cost four cents. One spacious salon served as an indoor basketball court, and a three-room suite was devoted to an exhibit on venereal disease, with graphic color photographs intended to infuse soldiers with the fear of both God and loose women. Protective paper strips covered the huge palace mirrors, but nothing could keep GI fingerprints off the silk wall coverings and tapestries in the throne room and ministry chambers.