Scouts in canvas shoes and dark pullovers swam the Rapido at night, creeping among fireflies blinking in the reeds. Indian sappers crawled along the banks, probing for mines left by the Yanks in January. Five hundred yards from the river, South African troops lay low in their sangars and foxholes during daylight, which now lasted from 4:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night.
Every tree along Highway 6 leading to Shit Corner concealed supplies. Dumps grew mountainous: Fifth Army alone stockpiled 11,000 tons of ammunition for the first two days of DIADEM, including 200,000 105mm shells. One hundred miles of six-inch fuel pipeline stretched from Naples to forward depots, and forty-three Italian sawmills turned forests into engineer lumber. Fifth Army artisans, working at their casting tables in twelve-hour shifts, made intricate models depicting every quarry, cliff, and monastery on the approaches to Rome. Map depots stocked millions of sheets on four different scales. To produce the five-color maps requested by Clark’s headquarters, cartographers mixed ersatz inks from mercurochrome, tobacco juice, and Atabrine tablets, which turned paper as well as soldiers bright yellow.
Endless supply convoys crept forward at six miles an hour behind trucks outfitted with water sprayers to keep down telltale dust. Specially tuned jeeps crept to the forward dumps with their hoods wrapped in rubber pads to muffle any squeaks. And all night long the clop of hooves could be heard from the Garigliano to the Sangro. Fifth Army alone had mustered ten thousand mules and two thousand horses into pack trains. “No mules,” Juin told anyone who would listen, “no maneuver.”
Truscott in early May returned to the beachhead, tanned and rejuvenated after a five-day furlough in Naples. “I think of you every day when I look at my garden,” he wrote Sarah from Nettuno. “The roses are blooming in great profusion. You know how I love them.” At his request, orderlies snipped bouquets for the hospital wards in Hell’s Half-Acre. He reminded his wife that he had now served in uniform for twenty-seven years. “I suppose the passing years have taken their toll and left their marks. Strange to say I actually feel younger than I did at the time.” In another note he added, “I hope that I have not become conceited or swell-headed, and I do not believe that I have. I have retained my sense of humor and am still able to laugh at myself.”
At the beachhead, too, preparations for DIADEM took on a febrile intensity. More than one million tons of matériel would be stockpiled at Anzio to supply Fifth Army during the drive north. Engineers crushed stone from demolished houses for roadbeds and fashioned three hundred brush fascines for marshy ground. Phone lines toward the front were buried in trenches dug with a jeep-drawn plow. A stockade for five thousand prisoners sprang up near Conca.
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? Pointing 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.
Gen. Alex arrived this morning. When I informed him of the four plans on which I’m working, he stated that I was paying too much attention to alternate plans…. I assume that you are fully cognizant of Gen. Alex’s ideas on the subject, but I want you to know what he told me today…. You know that I am with you all the way. Truscott.
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 a
ccommodate 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 destructio
n 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.”
H-hour was fixed for eleven P.M. on May 11, half an hour before moon-rise. The day dawned gray and damp enough to lay the dust, then faired in the afternoon. A grizzled French spahi told a young American liaison officer, “I do not know where my son is tonight, and your father does not know where his son is. So tonight we will be father and son.” The Frenchman had ten days to live. Shelling on both sides dwindled to a mutter at last light, then ceased entirely, yielding to what Alexander called “a strange, impressive silence.” Stars threw down their silver spears. “New boys with fear and nerves and anxiety hidden under quick smiles,” a Canadian chaplain wrote. “It is the hardest thing to watch without breaking into tears.”
12. THE GREAT PRIZE
Shaking Stars from the Heavens
THE BBC pips had not finished signaling the top of the hour at eleven P.M. on Thursday, May 11, when gusts of white flame erupted in a thirty-mile crescent across the hills of central Italy. Light leaped from two thousand gun pits, laving the cannoneers as they danced bare-chested at their breechblocks, shoving home another shell, and another, and another. Ruby tongues licked from the muzzles, as drifting smoke rings lassoed the constellations and concussion ghosts chased one another through the night. “It seemed it must shake the very stars out of the heavens,” a Black Watch soldier wrote.
Men peered from their trenches or crowded into farmhouse doorways to watch the spectacle, their faces reddened in the glow and their helmets jarred by the percussive shock. “Rome, then home!” they bellowed. Nightingales had sung in the silence before the cannonade; now they sang louder but to small effect. “The roar of the guns is so deafening that you can shout at the man next to you and still not be heard,” a medical officer in the 88th Division wrote. “Sheets of flame spring behind every bush. The hills to our north are spattered with phosphorus bursts that illuminate the entire horizon.” Above the abbey and Cassino town, scores of German flares added their own sibilant brilliance, tiny red and silver supernovas that stretched the shadows. “The sky,” a Royal Hampshire account noted, “was full of noises.”