He continued:
I looked at it this way—if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives that winter we would save a half million lives in Europe—if those things were true, then it was best as it was.
I wasn’t sure they were true. I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.
Faith and imagination were required to elevate the Italian campaign, to see as the poet Richard Wilbur, a veteran of Cassino and Anzio, saw: “the dreamt land / Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.” Even Pyle, who knew better than most that “war isn’t romantic to the people in it,” sensed the sublime in moments “of overpowering beauty, of the surge of a marching world, of the relentlessness of our fate.”
George Biddle had found that in “misery, destruction, frustration, and death,” certain annealed qualities seemed “to give war its justification, meaning, romance, and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty.” Even Mauldin, that flinty-eyed skeptic, would concede, “I stopped regarding the war as a show to help my career. I felt a seriousness of purpose, and I felt it in my bones.” A medic who had landed at Salerno later wrote his wife, “This is something that is born deep inside us, when we come to know why we are here, when we have learned how very important it was that we did leave you and all we love.”
Somewhere north of Rome, Glenn Gray wrote in his diary: “I watched a full moon sail through a cloudy sky…. I felt again the aching beauty of this incomparable land. I remembered everything that I had ever been and was. It was painful and glorious.”
Another day passed, and another night. The circling stars glided on their courses. The poets and the dreamers again struck their tents and shouldered their rifles to begin that long, last march.
NOTES
The following abbreviations appear in the endnotes and bibliography.
45th ID Mus 45th Infantry Division Museum, Oklahoma City
AAF Army Air Forces
AAFinWWII W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II unless otherwise noted
AAR after action report
AB After the Battle
AD armored division
admin administration
AF air force
AFHQ micro Allied Forces Headquarters microfilm, NARA RG 331
AFHRA Air Force Historical Research Agency
ag adjutant general
AGF Army Ground Forces
ALM Audie Leon Murphy papers, USMA Special Collections, West Point
AR armored regiment
AS Armored School
ASEQ Army Service Experiences Questionnaire, MHI
ASF Army Service Forces
AU Air University
Battle W.G.F. Jackson, The Battle for Italy
bde brigade
bn battalion
CA working papers for Cassino to the Alps
Calculated Mark W. Clark, Calculated Risk
CARL Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, Kans.
CBH Chester B. Hansen diary, MHI
CCS Combined Chiefs of Staff
CEOH U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Office of History
CGSC Command and General Staff School, U.S. Army
Chandler Alfred Chandler, ed., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower: The War Years
CINCLANT Commander-in-Chief, Atlantic Fleet
CJB Clay and Joan Blair collection, MHI
CM L. K. Truscott, Jr., Command Missions
CMH U.S. Army Center of Military History, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C.
co company
Coakley Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943–1945
Col U OHRO Columbia University Oral History Research Office
corr correspondence
CSI U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
ct combat team
CtoA Ernest F. Fisher, Jr., Cassino to the Alps
DA Department of the Army
Danchev Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
DDE Dwight David Eisenhower
DDE Lib Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
Destruction I.S.O. Playfair and C.J.C. Molony, The Mediterranean and the Middle East, vol. IV
diss dissertation
div division
DSC Distinguished Service Cross
DTL Donovan Technical Library, now Donovan Research Library
E entry
EJD Ernest J. Dawley, including papers at Hoover Institution Archive
ENH Ernest N. Harmon, including papers at U.S. Army Military History Institute
ETO European Theater of Operations
FA field artillery
FAJ Field Artillery Journal
FCP Forrest C. Pogue, including background material for The Supreme Commander
FDR Lib Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library
FLW Fred L. Walker
FMS Foreign Military Studies
FOIA Freedom of Information Act
FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington and Quebec, 1943
Ft. K Fort Knox, Ky.
Ft. L Fort Leavenworth, Kans.
Garland Albert N. Garland and Howard McGaw Smyth, Sicily and the Surrender of Italy
GCM Lib George C. Marshall Library, Lexington, Va.
GK Geoffrey Keyes, including diary, author’s possession
GS IV Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, vol. IV
GS V John Ehrman, Grand Strategy, vol. V
GSP George S. Patton, Jr., including papers at the Library of Congress
Hansen draft of Omar Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story, C. B. Hansen, MHI
HCB Harry C. Butcher, including papers
HIA Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
Hill/O’Neill “Report of Col. William H. Hill and Col. E. J. O’Neill on Conference Held in Marrakech, March 10, 1994, JPL papers, MHI, box 4, 1
HKH Henry Kent Hewitt Papers
Hq headquarters
ID infantry division
IJ Infantry Journal
inf infantry
intel intelligence
Iowa GSM Iowa Gold Star Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa
IS Infantry School, Fort Benning, Ga.
IWM Imperial War Museum, London
JAG U.S. Army judge advocate general
JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff
JJT John J. Toffey, IV, “A Game for the Young,” author’s possession
JMG James M. Gavin papers
JPL John P. Lucas, including diary, “From Algiers to Anzio,” MHI
LH Basil Henry Liddell Hart
LHC Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London
lib library
LKT Jr. Lucian K. Truscott, Jr.
LOC MS Div Library of Congress Manuscript Division
MAAF Mediterranean Allied Air Forces
MBR Matthew B. Ridgway
MCC Mina Curtiss Collection
MEB Magna E. Bauer
Med Mediterranean
MHI U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pa.
micro microfilm
Molony V C.J.C. Molony et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. V
Molony VI C.J.C. Molony, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. VI, part 1
MP military police
MR Military Review
MRC FDM McCormick Research Center, First Division Museum, Cantigny, Ill.
msg message
mss manuscript
MTOUSA Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army
MWC Mark Wayne Clark, including papers at the Citadel, S.C., Archives and Museum
N Af North Africa
n.d. no date
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.
r /> NATOUSA North African Theater of Operations, United States Army
NHC Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C.
NSA National Security Agency
NWAf George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West
NWC Lib National War College Library
NYT New York Times
obit obituary
OCMH Office of the Chief of Military History
OCNO Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
OCS Office of the Chief of Staff
OH oral history
OPD Operations Division, War Department
OSS Office of Strategic Services
OW Orlando Ward Papers
Para parachute
pm provost marshal
PMR Paul McD. Robinett papers
PP Martin Blumenson, The Patton Papers, 1940–1945
PP-pres Papers, Pre-presidential
Proceedings U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings
Pyle Ernie Pyle, Brave Men
qm quartermaster
regt regiment
RG record group
RN Royal Navy
ROHA Rutgers University Oral History Archives of World War II
s.p. self-published
SC Signal Corps
SEM Samuel Eliot Morison Office Files
SM Sidney T. Matthews, including papers at MHI
SMH Society for Military History
SOOHP Senior Officer Oral History Program
SOS Services of Supply
SSA Samuel Eliot Morison, Sicily-Salerno-Anzio, vol. IX, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II
SSI working papers for Sicily and the Surrender of Italy, National Archives
SSt Omar N. Bradley, A Soldier’s Story
StoC Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, USAWWII
td tank destroyer
TdA Terry de la Mesa Allen, including papers
Texas Fred L. Walker, From Texas to Rome
Texas MFM Texas Military Forces Museum, Austin
Three Years Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower
TR Theodore Roosevelt III Papers
ts typescript
UK NA National Archive, Kew, United Kingdom (formerly Public Record Office)
USAF HRC U.S. Air Force Historical Research Center
USAF U.S. Air Force
USAWWII United States Army in World War II
USMA Arch U.S. Military Academy Archives, West Point
USMC U.S. Marine Corps
USN U.S. Navy
USNA U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md.
USNAd “U.S. Naval Administration in World War II”
USNI OHD U.S. Naval Institute, Oral History Department, Annapolis, Md.
UTEP University of Texas at El Paso
UT-K University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Center for the Study of War and Society
VHP Veterans’ History Project, National Folklife Center, Library of Congress
WD War Department
WP Washington Post
WSC Winston S. Churchill
WTF Western Task Force
WWII World War II
XO executive officer
YU Yale University Library, Manuscripts and Archives
EPIGRAPH
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 2006), book 7 lines 747–51.
PROLOGUE
She could be heard: NYT, Cunard Line advertising supplement, Apr. 2004, ZM1; David Williams, Liners in Battledress, 114 (Western Approaches); Harold Larson, “Troop Transports in WWII,” ts, March 1945, CMH, 4-13.1 AA12, 21–22.
She slid: corr, Lovetta Kramer, exec. dir, RMS Queen Mary Foundation and Archive, Long Beach, Calif., to author, Aug. 16, 2004; corr, Lorna Williams, Special Collections and Archives, University of Liverpool, to author, Aug. 2004; William J. Duncan, RMS Queen Mary: Queen of the Queens, 78–79, 106 (New York warehouse); Steve Harding, Gray Ghost, 49 (WW #21 W); admin memo, Offices of the War Cabinet, May 3, 1943, UK NA, PREM 4/72/2 (Scottish cages); John Mason Brown, To All Hands, 203 (“barbarities”); Louis E. Keefer, Italian Prisoners of War in America, 35, 41; “Enemy POW Camps in the USA in World War II,” CMH, Historical Resources Branch, Nov. 5, 1942, 2 (272,000); “Office of the Provost Marshal General: World War II, a Brief History,” ts, 1946, CMH, 4-4 AA (forty degrees); Arnold P. Krammer, “German Prisoners of War in the United States,” Military Affairs, Apr. 1976, 67+ (piano lessons); Gregory Kupsky, UT-K, paper, SMH, Bethesda, Md., May 21, 2004 (Sears Roebuck).
But it was on the upper decks: Danchev, 402 (Officers crowded); “Notes for Mr. Aubrey Morgan,” May 13, 1943, UK NA, PREM 4/72/2 (suite number 105).
To mislead potential spies: Duncan, 117–18 (Wilhelmina); Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate, 783; Alexander S. Cochran, Jr., “Spectre of Defeat: Anglo-American Planning for the Invasion of Italy in 1943,” Ph.D. diss, U of Kansas, 296 (wheelchair ramps); John Kennedy, The Business of War, 293 (“well and fat and pink”).
Like the Queen Mary: Harold Evans, “Roy Jenkins’ ‘Churchill: His Finest Hour,’” NYT Book Review, Nov. 11, 2001, 1 (“largest human being”); Charles Richardson, From Churchill’s Secret Circle to the BBC, 189 (trombone); Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, Whitehall, London (one of the eight); Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, 587 (scented handkerchief); admin memo, War Cabinet, May 3, 1943 (ten-pound tip and Mumm’s Cordon Rouge); Paul Fussell, Wartime, 183 (“gangster clergyman”).
“We are all worms”: Churchill Museum; Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill’s War Leadership, 14 (to be awakened), 74 (“pester, nag”); Danchev, 451 (“temperamental like a film star”); Merle Miller, Ike the Soldier, 512 (“He shouts me down”).
“In great things”: Kennedy, 315; Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring, 658, 685, 660, 662 (small things); Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill’s War Leadership, 19 (“There is no defeat”).
Sea voyages always reinvigorated: Richardson, 187 (“Master”); Gilbert, 10 (silent Remington); Churchill Museum (Johnnie Walker); W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 204–5 (“I won’t be captured”), 207 (“splitting infinitives”); Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran, 101 (“all hunched up”); W. H. Thompson, I Was Churchill’s Shadow, 114–15 (discussing seamanship); admin memo, War Cabinet, May 3, 1943 (watching films); NYT, May 12, 1943, 24 (Radio Berlin); Churchill, Closing the Ring, 91 (“Who in war”).
Churchill had proposed: Harriman and Abel, 202 (“One can always”); “Notes for Mr. Aubrey Morgan” (entire company stood).
Packed into the Magellan: Churchill Museum (colored yarn); Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide, 595, 652 (six thousand miles).
Victory in North Africa: Ralph Bennett, “Ultra and Some Command Decisions,” in Walter Laqueur, ed., The Second World War, 218 (“cryptologists had cracked”); GS IV, 450 (forty-seven U-boats); David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 590 (more than 3,500 and submariner casualty rate); C.B.A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, 368 (every eight hours).
Elsewhere in this global war: Gerhard L. Weinberg, A War at Arms, 590, 632–33, 637.
On the Eastern Front: GS V, 2; Matthew Cooper, The German Army, 451–52 (lost thirty divisions), 448 (“absolutely sick”); Ray S. Cline, Washington Command Post: The Operations Division, 220 (Soviet counteroffensive).
And yet: the Red Army remained: GS V, 2; Martin Gilbert, The Second World War, 421 (1.3 million forced laborers).
The next Anglo-American blow: SSA, 10; David Hunt, A Don at War, 184 (a postscript); Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943–1944, 25–26.
Beyond Sicily: Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, 390, 403; Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. II, 184 (“Great possibilities”); Coakley, 63 (“a chill of loneliness”); Churchill to H. Hopkins, May 2, 1943, UK NA, PREM 3/443/2 (“serious divergences”); Churchill to George VI, Apr. 30, 1943, UK N
A, PREM 3/443/2.
“We did not come here”: UK NA, PREM 3/44/2.
Beneath his brass: Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory, 454; G.A. Shepperd, The Italian Campaign, 1943–45, 82; John Ellis, World War II: A Statistical Survey, 254 (More than 12 percent); Gilbert, The Second World War, 426 (British battle deaths); Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. VII.
Salvation lay here: “Monthly Strength of the Army,” May 31, 1943, CMH (a thousand generals); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 280 (aircraft carriers); Alan Gropman, ed., The Big L: American Logistics in World War II, 1n, 73 (just fifty days), 89–93; Behrens, 366 (British merchant fleet); NYT, May 12, 1943, 1 (“production of airplanes”).
“the greatest American problem”: NYT, May 11, 1943, 1.
Yet at home: Gropman, ed., 35, 54–55, 89–93, 367 (full mobilization); NYT, May 10, 1943 (Wurlitzer); The Big Change-Over, film, Office of Emergency Management, NARA, 208.211 (lipstick).
So, too, had the war: James Ward Lee et al., eds., 1941: Texas Goes to War, 76–78 (“Use it up”); Fussell, 197–98 (plastic buttons); John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory, 95; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 645 (the bikini); Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History, exhibit, “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War” (Regulation L-85).
German prisoners: Lee et al., eds., 82–83 (paint-on hosiery); Fussell, 197 (“victory speed”); Dennis B. Worthen, “Pharmacists in World War II,” Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, vol. 41, no. 3 (May–June 2001), 479+ (toothpaste tubes); Salvage, film, Office of War Information, 1942, NARA, 208.118 (10 old pails).
No place in America: Scott Hart, Washington at War: 1941–1945, 40 (“frenzied capital”).
To this panoply: memo, May 11, 1943, Secret Service records, file 103-1: President Roosevelt, 1943, box 5, FDR Lib. (at 6:45 P.M.); William D. Leahy, I Was There, 158 (gray pallor).
But first the visitors: David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War, epigraph (“bust right out”), 188, 232, 238; William H. Cartwright, Jr., “The Military District of Washington, 1942–1945,” 1946, CMH, 8-2.4 AA, 190 (twelve thousand hotel rooms); “Notes for Mr. Aubrey Morgan” (sixteen Royal Marines); Hart, 108 (“tropical post pay”).