The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  General Montgomery sipped his morning tea in a seaside olive orchard and scanned the first reports from Eighth Army’s vanguard, now poking through the battered streets of Reggio di Calabria on the opposite shore. German troops had melted into the hills. Montgomery lingered at a sound truck parked by the Messina beach to offer his thoughts to the BBC and to record a suitably lionhearted proclamation for Eighth Army. “I think that’s all right, don’t you?” he asked, listening to himself. “Good recording. Good recording.” Then he called for his boat, “much as one would set out for a picnic on the Thames,” and sang in his reedy voice, “Now, let’s go to Italy.”

  To Italy he went, standing erect and khaki-clad in the DUKW’s bow, his sharp chin lifted like a ship’s figurehead. Several hundred cartons of cheap Woodbine cigarettes had been stacked along the hull. His batman would bring Montgomery’s twittering aviary of parakeets and canaries, kept in cages outside his trailer; he hoped to find a pair of lovebirds for sale, although another feathered camp follower—a handsome peacock—had appeared at last night’s dinner table on a platter, roasted and garnished. Several hundred yards from shore, the DUKW nuzzled up to a Royal Navy corvette. Scrambling aboard, Montgomery descended to the cramped wardroom, where he drank three cups of coffee and nibbled on cookies while telling reporters how he planned to wage war in Italy:

  You must never let the enemy choose the ground on which you fight…. He must be made to fight the battle according to your plan. Never his plan. Never…. You must never attack until you are absolutely ready.

  Returning topside, he waved to the hooting troops packed to the gunwales in a passing landing craft. The Italians would likely fold “within six weeks,” Montgomery predicted, but the Germans “will fight.” As for this invasion, BAYTOWN, “it’s a great satisfaction.” His black-and-red pennant snapped from the corvette’s mast.

  In truth, he was peeved and disgruntled, and already had begun sulking in his trailer. Alexander had brushed aside his advice on how to fight the Italian campaign and Eighth Army was relegated to a supporting role; BAYTOWN had even shrunk to a mere four battalions until Montgomery’s protests restored his invasion force to two divisions, the British 5th and the Canadian 1st. No effort had been made to coordinate Eighth Army with Fifth Army, now scheduled to land three hundred tortuous road miles north at Salerno in less than a week. To beach an army in the toe made little sense, even as a diversion; Montgomery thought it “daft.” Alexander’s instructions on whether to simply open the Messina Strait or to begin tramping up the length of Italy had been vague; when pressed to name an objective, he simply urged Montgomery to do what he could. Mounting BAYTOWN meant that AVALANCHE, the Salerno invasion, would be smaller and would comprise mostly inexperienced units and commanders. Eisenhower had prodded Montgomery to jump the strait sooner, but Eighth Army “wanted everything fully prepared” before moving. Again Eisenhower did not insist.

  Strategic guidance was no more enlightened. Roosevelt and Churchill had convened another conference in mid-August, this time in Quebec. They reaffirmed the OVERLORD invasion of western Europe for the following spring, but the British still considered an extended campaign in Italy vital to that cross-Channel attack because it would siphon German reserves from the Atlantic Wall. The Americans disagreed, incessantly reciting Napoleon’s maxim that Italy, like a boot, should be entered only from the top. Eight hundred miles long, it was the most vertebrate of countries, with a mountainous spine and bony ribs. No consensus existed on what to do if the Germans fought for the entire peninsula, or whether this was a worthwhile battleground if Italy quit the war.

  A shout rose from the shingle just north of Reggio as the corvette drew close and troops ashore realized that Montgomery had come to join them. Clambering back into another DUKW, he rolled onto the continent at 10:30 A.M., goggles around his neck and beret cocked just so, tossing cigarettes with a grin. Hundreds of Italian soldiers also rushed to the beach “with hands upraised, shouting, laughing,” eager to help unload enemy stores. Montgomery made straight for the local Fascist headquarters, where he purloined a sheaf of stationery on which he would scribble his correspondence for months. That evening he ate an early dinner and retired to bed with a novel. In a note to General Brooke in London before he drifted off, Montgomery wrote, “The only person who does not get tired is myself.”

  The next days passed with little sense of urgency. German demolitionists had wrecked bridges and road culverts, but active resistance was mounted only by a puma and a frightened monkey, both fugitives from the Reggio zoo. Fuel and ammunition dumps swelled in size. Eighth Army scouts pushed from the toe to the instep, at times conducting reconnaissance from the passenger carriages of local trains. Wild orchids and golden gorse grew in the uplands where for centuries Greek and Roman shipwrights had cut their timber. Women with scarlet petticoats beneath black skirts glided through the little villages, bundles of firewood balanced on their heads. The scent of crushed fennel sweetened the air, and nights grew chill as the soldiers tramped away from the Jasmine Coast and into the mountains. Canadian troops shivered in their khaki drill shorts, and some rifled through the abandoned uniform closets of the Blackshirt Legion for warmer garb.

  Alexander advised London on September 6 that the Germans were resisting Eighth Army “more by demolition than by fire.” In fact, as Brooke acknowledged the same day, “no Germans troops have been met so far.” On the night of September 7, in a modest effort to flank the enemy, several battalions sailed from Messina with the intent of landing near Pizzo, on the Gulf of St. Eufemia, twenty-five miles northeast of the toe. “Everything went wrong,” a Royal Hampshire account conceded. The wrong battalions landed on the wrong beaches in the wrong sequence. “Our exact whereabouts was not known to our naval friends,” the Dorsetshires reported. “It was a pitch black night with no moon.” Commando landing craft went astray; among the first Dorsets finally ashore was “an NCO with a bag of mail over his shoulder.” A light drizzle of German mortar shells turned into a deluge, with “many casualties suffered by those in the craft or trying to land.” The expedition accomplished little. A German war diary several days later noted that, in Calabria, “the enemy is not crowding after us.”

  Montgomery meanwhile made himself comfortable. He offered visiting journalists glasses of spiked lemonade and tours of the new shower and tub in his personal trailer, “happy as a youngster with a new electric train.” The birds chirped in their cages. Was it true, he asked the reporter Quentin Reynolds, that fashionable girls in New York now wore Monty berets?

  On Sunday, September 5, Eisenhower hosted a small bridge party at his seven-bedroom estate in Algiers, the Villa dar el Ouard: Villa of the Family. Often to relax he played Ping-Pong on the green table in his library, or sang old West Point songs at the grand piano in the music room. But cards remained his favorite pastime, and for this game he rounded up three skilled players: Harry Butcher, Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, and the chief of staff for Clark’s Fifth Army, Major General Alfred M. Gruenther. Tricks were taken, tricks were lost, and between hands there was little palaver. Clark seemed preoccupied and failed to count trump properly; he and Butcher lost the rubber to Eisenhower and the formidable Gruenther, who as a young lieutenant had supplemented his Army pay by refereeing professional bridge tournaments in New York.

  Reluctantly, they threw in their cards. Summoning his limousine, Eisenhower bundled Clark and Gruenther in back and rode with them to the port, now alive with the usual embarkation frenzy of shouting stevedores and swinging booms. The commander-in-chief gripped Clark’s hand—they had been close friends for three decades, since the academy—and wished him godspeed, then watched the two officers stride up the gangplank to join Kent Hewitt on his new flagship, the U.S.S. Ancon. Antennae wrapped her superstructure like a spider’s web. Thirty staff officers of Fifth Army soon boarded, as well as a few commanders who had come to bid Clark good luck. Among the well-wishers was Truscott. “Hell, Lucian,” Clark told him. “You don’t ha
ve to worry about this operation. This will be a pursuit, not a battle.”

  Exhausted from the long weeks of preparing his army, Clark soon retired to his cabin, where the bunk barely accommodated his six-foot-three-inch frame. Before flicking off the light, he opened a small volume called The Daily Word. “With Thee I am unafraid, for on Thee my mind is stayed,” read the entry for September 5. “Though a thousand foes surround, safe in Thee I shall be found.” Just in case, Clark had tucked several four-leaf clovers into his wallet.

  “The best organizer, planner and trainer of troops that I have met,” Eisenhower had written of Clark to Marshall two weeks earlier. “In preparing the minute details…he has no equal in our Army.” It was precisely these attributes that had led Eisenhower to choose Clark for the immensely complex challenge of flinging an army onto a hostile shore, a task that would make him the senior American field commander in Italy. Long-limbed and angular, with a thick lower lip and prominent Adam’s apple, Clark had dark eyes that constantly swept the terrain before him. To a British general, he evoked “a film star who excels in Westerns.” When speaking, Clark often paused to purse or lick his lips; the ears flattened against his skull accentuated a long, aquiline nose that suggested a raptor’s beak. “A fine face, full of bones,” George Biddle observed. “An intelligent face and an expression of kindliness about the mouth.”

  He had been born into the Army and grew into a frail, skinny officer’s son whose father let him attend “the college of your choice, providing it’s West Point.” As the youngest member of the entering class of 1917, Clark was promptly powdered, diapered, and put to bed early. Descended from immigrant Romanian Jews on his mother’s side, he had himself baptized as an Episcopalian in the academy chapel. At age twenty-two, soon after graduation, he was commanding a battalion in the Vosges Mountains when German shrapnel tore through his shoulder and ended his war. Promoted twice during his first four months of service, he thereafter remained a captain for sixteen years, battling both national indifference to the Army and poor health: he suffered from a heart murmur, ulcers, a diseased gallbladder, and various infections. In 1923, he met the widow of a West Point classmate who had committed suicide two years earlier. Four years older than Clark and a graduate of Northwestern University, Maurine Doran, known as Renie, was petite, lighthearted, and his equal in intelligence and ambition; they married a year later.

  Now forty-seven and known to his friends as Wayne, Clark had skipped the rank of colonel altogether and was among the youngest three-star generals in the Army’s history. Still, he had last commanded troops in combat a quarter century earlier. If Biddle detected “kindliness about the mouth,” he missed a few other traits. “He thought of himself as destined to do something unusual in this war,” a Fifth Army staff officer said, “and so he carried himself with a dignity commensurate with that.” An Anglophobe, he hid his disdain from both Eisenhower and the British; only within his inner circle would he rail against “these goddamned dumb British,” or recite the Napoleonic maxim “Don’t be an ally. Fight them.”

  He professed to “want my headquarters to be a happy one,” but Clark was too short-tempered and aloof for easy felicity. One staff officer considered him “a goddamned study in arrogance,” while another saw “conceit wrapped around him like a halo.” Perhaps only in his correspondence with Renie did the sharp edges soften. He wrote of a yen to go fishing, of the rugs and silver dishes he was sending her, of his small needs from home, like vitamin pills and gold braid for his caps. From her apartment in Washington she cautioned him about flying too much, and complained of his infrequent letters, of difficulties with his mother, of how much she missed being kissed. She had sent him the clovers.

  Clark’s compulsive self-promotion already had drawn sharp rebukes from Marshall and Eisenhower, but he still instructed photographers to snap his “facially best” left side. The correspondent Eric Sevareid considered him fixated on “personal publicity without which warmaking is a dull job, devoid of glamour and recompense.” Clark at times encouraged Renie to cooperate with the reporters in Washington who wrote profiles of him; at other times, he chastised her for extolling his virtues too vigorously. “From what I have told you about publicity,” he wrote, “you should begin to put two and two together and see the picture.” His public relations staff would grow to nearly fifty men, with each news release preferably carrying Clark’s name three times on the first page and at least once per page thereafter. Reporters were encouraged to adopt the commanding general’s preferred nomenclature: “Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark’s Fifth Army.”

  That army would need his lucky clovers. Operation AVALANCHE was to land at Salerno, seize nearby Naples, and eventually establish air bases “in the Rome area, and if feasible, further north.” As in HUSKY, preparations suffered from the diaspora of Allied planners across the ancient world. Instead of the three to five months needed to thoroughly plan a major amphibious expedition, Clark got forty-five days. Rehearsals were minimal and disheartening. Owing to the belated discovery of minefields in Salerno Bay, Hewitt would have to lower the landing craft nine to twelve miles from the beaches in order to avoid endangering his troop transports. Clark on August 24 also accelerated H-hour by thirty minutes, “upsetting all the detailed timings of convoys and assault waves.” “Men of calm dispositions,” one commander noted, “became quite irritable.” Quartermasters struggled to overcome shortages of hospital beds, bakeries, laundry units, and—because planners had simply forgotten to requisition it—100-octane aviation fuel.

  Only three assault divisions were available for AVALANCHE, so the operation would have less than half the heft of HUSKY. Clark had pleaded for at least four divisions, but, as usual, force size was determined by shipping capacity rather than battlefield needs. Even as Clark boarded Ancon it was unclear to Hewitt how many ships and landing craft he had in his fleet; some vessels still required refurbishing after duty in Sicily, and much shipping had been diverted to support Montgomery in BAYTOWN. Adding to Clark’s burden, Eisenhower on September 3 told him he could no longer count on the 82nd Airborne Division in reserve, a blow that Clark likened to “cutting off my left arm.”

  Eisenhower had his own disappointments. Three times he asked Washington and London to temporarily double his heavy bomber force for AVALANCHE, and three times the Combined Chiefs refused to divert planes from the growing air campaign in Britain. A separate request—to ferry another infantry division to Salerno by borrowing ten LSTs bound for India through the Mediterranean—was rejected by the Charlie-Charlies in late August. Eisenhower advised his superiors that the invasion would proceed apace with “whatever forces we have at the moment,” but that “risks must be calculated.” To bolster fighter protection for Hewitt’s ships, the Royal Navy had added a light fleet aircraft carrier—H.M.S. Unicorn—and four smaller escort carriers known as Woolworths. Allied air strength was roughly thrice that of the Axis, but most U.S. and British fighters would fly from distant Sicilian bases. Air planners estimated that they lacked about a third of the strength required to provide maximum protection for the invasion force, a shortfall Eisenhower found “rather disquieting.” He told the Charlie-Charlies in early September that the Allied air forces could not, as they had done in Sicily, prevent the enemy from reinforcing the invasion beachhead with substantial reserves.

  But would the Germans fight for Salerno? Ultra provided a detailed portrait of the sixteen German divisions now in Italy, including the four withdrawn from Sicily; those forces had grown steadily since Mussolini’s overthrow in late July. (“Treachery alters everything,” Hitler declared.) AFHQ intelligence still believed that, given limp Italian resistance, the German high command would fall back to a defensive line across northern Italy from Pisa to Rimini, blocking Allied occupation of the Po Valley, where three-quarters of Italy’s industry was located. Yet “if and when the Germans realize that our assault is not in very great strength they may move to the sound of the guns,” the Combined Chiefs were told at Queb
ec. An estimated 40,000 enemy troops would oppose the Salerno landings on D-day, but that number could grow to 100,000 within four days; the Germans may “attack us with up to six divisions some time during September,” while Clark would not have that many troops ashore until late fall. The key in amphibious landings was not the size of the landing force, but whether invaders could build up the beachhead faster than the defenders.

  Salerno would be a poor place to fight outnumbered. As an invasion site it offered nearly perfect hydrography, with few sandbars, a negligible tide, a small port in a sheltered bay, and twenty-two miles of gorgeous beaches. “This is the finest strip of coast in the whole of Italy, perhaps anywhere in the Mediterranean,” one British planner noted. But, he added, it had the misfortune of being “hemmed in by mountains.” Mostly rugged limestone, those mountains encircled an alluvial plain traversed by a pair of modest rivers, the Sele and the Calore. A terrain study for AVALANCHE warned, “The mountainous terrain completely surrounding the Sele plain limits the depth of the initial bridgehead and exposes this bridgehead to observation, fire and attack from higher ground.” Salerno’s topography, a U.S. Navy planner added, was like “the inside of a cup.”

  Risks had been calculated. At 6:30 A.M. on September 6, Ancon cast off her lines and steamed from Algiers at twelve knots in a convoy of seventy ships that included three cruisers and fourteen destroyers. Sailors awake but not on duty watched an early showing on the boat deck of Strange Cargo, with Joan Crawford. Hewitt and Clark, fellow Freemasons who had known each other since they were both stationed near Puget Sound in the 1930s, chatted on the flag bridge and scrutinized an immense map of Salerno Bay. Belowdecks, a ten-by-twenty-foot map in the war room charted the position of every Allied ship between Gibraltar and Tripoli. In forty-eight hours, six hundred vessels sailing in sixteen convoys from six ports would converge on “an enchanted land,” as Longfellow had called it, where “the blue Salernian bay with its sickle of white sand” awaited them.