What else awaited remained to be seen. A British commander had told Clark he had “high hopes of being in Naples the evening of D+2,” or Saturday, September 11. “Boldness must be the order of the day,” Eisenhower proclaimed. He was already planning to move his headquarters from Algiers to Naples in late September. “The time has come to discontinue nibbling at islands and hit the Germans where it hurts,” he told reporters. “Our object is to trap and smash them.”
Bravado was easier in Algiers than on the high seas steaming north. As Clark’s gaze swiveled from horizon to horizon, he felt an unnerving fatalism. “I realized I might as well be on a raft, no control, no nothing,” he later recalled. “If it wasn’t going to work now, it wasn’t going to work.” The solitude of command—that “forlorn feeling,” he called it—had set in. Surrounded by his army, with a great fleet fore and aft, he was alone.
Plots, Counterplots, and Cross-plots
EVEN as the invaders bore down on Salerno, hope persisted that diplomacy might spare Italy from being dragged lengthwise by what Churchill called “the hot rake of war.” Since Mussolini’s arrest in late July, the Italian government had repeatedly sworn fealty to the Pact of Steel. Both the king and his new plenipotentiary, Marshal Badoglio, vowed to preserve the Axis. Rome decried—with huffy assertions of Italian honor—any notions of a separate peace. In truth, the Italians had been making diplomatic overtures to the Allies since early August—in Tangiers, Madrid, and Vatican City—in a surreptitious tangle of “plots, counter-plots and cross-plots,” as diplomat Harold Macmillan put it.
Wary but intrigued, the Combined Chiefs had instructed Eisenhower to send two AFHQ officers to neutral Portugal for a clandestine rendezvous with an ostensible Badoglio emissary. On August 19, Beetle Smith and the AFHQ intelligence chief, Brigadier Kenneth W. D. Strong, flew via Gibraltar to Lisbon with forged papers in “an atmosphere of amateur theatricals,” in Macmillan’s phrase. Discomforted by chronic ulcers, Smith wore “an appalling Norfolk jacket which he had somehow purchased in Algiers and some grey flannel trousers which fitted him very ill”; only with difficulty was he persuaded to remove “a dubious hat with a feather in it,” but he insisted on toting two pistols under his armpits, with another pair holstered on his hips. “I envisaged a desperate gunfight in the best Western manner,” Strong confessed. The two envoys were chauffered around Lisbon in a rattletrap Buick by a young American diplomat named George F. Kennan.
Their Italian counterpart proved to be a short, swarthy character of Sicilian descent, with thinning hair, a hooked nose, and a loathing of the Germans matched only by his affection for political skulduggery. General Giuseppe Castellano had come to Lisbon to ask “how Italy could arrange to join the united nations in opposition to Germany”; as a token of good faith, he offered a stack of secret documents detailing the military dispositions of 400,000 Germans now in Italy. Castellano quickly discerned that the Allies were in no mood to forgive and forget. In an all-night session at the British ambassador’s house, fueled by whiskey and soda, Smith made it clear that Italy’s only choice was surrender or the ruination of total war. Paragraph by paragraph he read the proposed capitulation agreement aloud.
“We are not in a position to make terms,” Castellano admitted. In contrast to the clumsy U.S. negotiations with Vichy French officials in North Africa a year earlier, Smith displayed admirable dexterity in mixing tact with resolve. Castellano slipped from the house at seven A.M., carrying an American radio and ciphers with which Rome could secretly contact AFHQ; his government was given until the end of August to accept the Allied terms. Smith, who privately began referring to Castellano as “my pet Wop,” advised AFHQ, “The Italians expect bitter reprisals from the Germans, whom they both hate and fear.”
If Rome was in no position to make terms, Eisenhower could hardly let an Italian surrender slip away. Admitting to feeling “very anxious,” he told the Combined Chiefs on August 28 that the risks at Salerno “will be minimized to a large extent if we are able to secure Italian assistance.” Alexander feared that without such assistance AVALANCHE “might fail,” perhaps causing the fall of Churchill’s government and “seriously compromising Britain’s determination to remain in the war.” Coded messages flew between Rome and Algiers with no real agreement on surrender terms. In a letter to Roosevelt, the diplomat Robert Murphy reported that the Italians seemed to be debating “whether we or the Germans will work the most damage and destruction in Italy.”
The plots, counterplots, and cross-plots thickened. On September 1, an ambiguous radio signal from Badoglio declared, “The reply is affirmative.” Castellano flew to Sicily a day later and was escorted to a private tent in the thirty-acre olive and almond orchard at Cassibile, south of Syracuse, where Alexander now kept his headquarters. In quizzing Castellano inside the tent, Macmillan and Murphy were distressed to learn that he still lacked authority from Rome to sign an armistice. Leaving the envoy to bake beneath the hot canvas, they rushed off to find Alexander in his trailer.
More amateur theatricals followed. Hearing a commotion through the nut trees, Castellano pushed back the tent flaps to find a British honor guard in parade order, smartly presenting arms as the commanding general’s staff car roared up with flags flying. Alexander emerged in his finest dress uniform, “cut breeches, highly polished boots with gold spurs, and gold peaked cap.” Medals and campaign ribbons spilled down his chest. “I have come to be introduced to General Castellano,” he boomed. “I understand he has signed the instrument of surrender.”
Macmillan stepped forward, his face a study in regret. “I am sorry to say, sir, but General Castellano has not signed the instrument, and says that he hasn’t the authority from his government to sign such a document.”
Alexander swiveled slowly. His icy gaze locked on the abject Castellano.
“Why, there must be some mistake!” Alexander said. “I have seen the telegram from Marshal Badoglio stating he was to sign the armistice agreement.” Alexander’s eyes widened, as if suddenly seeing the awful truth. “In that case, this man must be a spy. Arrest him!”
A dreadful fate would befall Italy as well as Castellano, Alexander intimated. Within twenty-four hours, Rome would be destroyed in reprisal for Italian recalcitrance. As the diplomats counseled moderation, Alexander seemed to reconsider. Perhaps, if Castellano telegrammed Rome, asking Badoglio to confirm his authority to sign the surrender, calamity might be avoided. That, Alexander said slowly, was “the only way out of this.” Alexander turned on his heel, the guard again presented arms, and off he stalked, “booted, spurred, and bemedaled,” a gold-capped avatar of imperial wrath.
The telegram was sent posthaste, and at four P.M. on September 3, explicit permission arrived from Rome. Seventy-five minutes later, beneath a gnarled olive tree on a scarred wooden camp table hastily upholstered with napkins, Castellano and Smith signed Italy’s capitulation using a borrowed fountain pen. Eisenhower, who flew in for the occasion, looked on with Alexander. Someone produced a whiskey bottle and dirty glasses for a toast, and each witness plucked an olive sprig for a memento.
The surrender was to be jointly announced in Rome and Algiers on the eve of D-day. Castellano pressed to learn that precise date, but Smith in a low voice replied, “I can say only that the landing will take place within two weeks.” Castellano soon advised his government that there was still a fortnight to prepare. “Today’s event must be kept secret,” Eisenhower cabled the Charlie-Charlies, “or our plans will be ruined.”
Those plans grew more convoluted by the hour. Smith had rejected Italian demands that fifteen Allied divisions land north of Rome; had the Anglo-Americans possessed such a capability, he archly noted, they would not be treating with Castellano. But as an earnest of the Anglo-American commitment, the Allies would consider dropping the 82nd Airborne Division on Rome to help Italian forces secure their capital. With little consideration, Eisenhower and his lieutenants approved the scheme “to stiffen Italian formations”; the 82nd was t
hus plucked from Clark’s reserves at Salerno. “They all thought the risk was worth taking,” Murphy wrote Roosevelt, “even if the [division was] lost.”
The scheme was cockamamie—“perfectly asinine,” as Clark put it, and “tactically unsound,” according to the AFHQ staff. In the course of the AVALANCHE planning, Major General Ridgway for more than a month had been ordered to prepare his 82nd for one ill-conceived mission after another, including a proposed amphibious landing north of Naples, although “not one individual in the entire division, officer or enlisted man, had ever had any experience or instruction in amphibious operations.” Nothing, apparently, had been learned from the airborne disasters in Sicily. One 82nd Airborne officer, echoing Macmillan’s phrase, lamented the “remarkable series of orders, counter-orders, plans, changes in plans, marches and counter-marches, missions and remissions, by air, water, and land.”
GIANT II, as the drop on Rome was code-named, was the most “harebrained” notion yet, in Ridgway’s estimation. The division would arrive piecemeal—because of an aircraft shortage, only two battalions could jump the first night—on a pair of airfields twenty miles northwest of Rome and nearly two hundred miles from the Salerno landings. Before leaving Cassibile, Castellano had rashly promised that Italian forces would silence all antiaircraft weapons; outline the runways with amber lights; block approach avenues to the drop zones; and provide vital matériel that included 355 trucks, 12 ambulances, 500 laborers, 50 interpreters, 100 miles of barbed wire, picks, shovels, switchboards, fuel, and rations.
The more Ridgway heard, the less he believed. The Italians, he warned Smith, “are deceiving us and have not the capability for doing what they are promising.” Smith disagreed, insisting that inflamed Romans would assist the 82nd by dropping “kettles, bricks, [and] hot water on the Germans in the streets of Rome.” Alexander was equally cavalier, crediting “full faith” to Italian guarantees. “Don’t give this another thought, Ridgway,” he added. “Contact will be made with your division in three days—five days at the most.” But when Ridgway persisted, warning of the “sacrifice of my division,” Alexander agreed to let him gauge Italian resolve by infiltrating a pair of American officers into downtown Rome.
As the sun sank into the Tyrrhenian Sea on Tuesday, September 7, the Italian corvette Ibis rounded the headland at Gaeta, a scruffy port midway between Naples and Rome where, Virgil recounted, Aeneas had buried his beloved nurse. As the helmsman eased through a minefield and into the harbor, two American officers on the corvette’s lower bridge deranged their uniforms, tousled their hair, and splashed themselves with seawater. “Look disconsolate,” an Italian admiral advised them. Dockworkers watched from the quay while bawling Italian tars prodded the men down the gangplank and into a naval staff car, apparent prisoners-of-war bound for an interrogation cell.
In truth they were the Italians’ guests, having been plucked from a British patrol boat after a secret rendezvous north of Palermo early that morning. A handsome, graceful Missourian was the ranking officer of the pair. Brigadier General Maxwell D. Taylor had been first captain of his West Point class and now, at age forty-two, commanded the 82nd Airborne’s artillery. A gifted linguist who had taught French and Spanish at the academy, Taylor evinced a diplomatic bearing that, together with his study of “Italian in Twenty Lessons,” sufficiently qualified him for this secret mission. Beneath his Army field jacket he carried 70,000 lire—equivalent to $700—in a money belt borrowed from the photographer Robert Capa, who had won it in a poker game. Colonel William T. Gardiner, junior in rank but senior in age at fifty-one, wore his Army Air Forces dress uniform with ribbons earned in both this war and the last one. A former lawyer who was also fluent in French, Gardiner had served as the speaker of Maine’s house of representatives and then, for four years, as governor. Both men knew intimate details of the Salerno invasion, set to begin in hours, and before leaving Sicily they had been advised: “If you get captured, put your forgetter to work.”
Through Gaeta the staff car rolled, slowing to yield the right-of-way to military trucks packed with German soldiers in flanged helmets. On a remote road outside Gaeta, the vehicle lurched to a halt beside a waiting ambulance with frosted side windows. The Americans climbed in back with their luggage, including a radio in a fine leather case. North they sped, hugging the coast as far as Terracina, then veering inland at twilight on the ancient Via Appia, through the Latin countryside and the drained polders of the Pontine Marshes, past the walled vineyards and the roadside tombs and the stone highway markers that counted down the distance to Rome.
By 8:30 P.M., Taylor and Gardiner had been deposited at the Palazzo Caprara, a four-story mansion opposite the Italian war office at the intersection of Via Firenze and Via XX Settembre in central Rome. In a wainscoted suite on the palazzo’s second floor, Italian waiters set a table with linen and silver, then served consommé, veal cutlets, and crêpes Suzette catered by the Grand Hotel. Italian staff officers came and went, shrugging off Taylor’s requests to meet with the high command. “It appeared to me that they were attempting to stall,” Gardiner later noted.
The excellent crêpes notwithstanding, Taylor’s protests grew shrill; finally, at 9:30 P.M., the door swung open for the magisterial entrance of General Giacomo Carboni, commander of the four divisions responsible for Rome’s outer defenses. In buffed boots and immaculate tunic, with pomaded hair and a thin sliver of a mustache, Carboni struck Taylor as “a professional dandy.” Unfurling his map, he pointed to the German positions encircling the capital: 12,000 paratroopers bivouacked along the coast, from the south bank of the Tiber halfway to Anzio; another 24,000 men and 200 tanks in the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division holding a crescent-shaped area to the north; still more forces around Frascati, to the southeast.
Italian garrisons had been virtually immobilized and disarmed, Carboni continued. The Germans had stopped supplying fuel and ammunition. Some artillery batteries had only twenty rounds per gun. The Italian air force needed another week to make arrangements for the 82nd Airborne’s seizure of the two airfields; among other shortfalls, few trucks could be arranged to move the division. In a battle for Rome against the Germans, Carboni estimated, his forces would last just five hours. Some units had enough ammo to fight for only twenty minutes.
“If the Italians declare an armistice, the Germans will occupy Rome, and the Italians can do little to prevent it,” he said. The arrival of U.S. paratroopers would simply “provoke the Germans to more drastic action.” Carboni spread his manicured hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Clearly, Castellano’s blithe assurances were shaky; so, it seemed, was the surrender signed at Cassibile four days earlier. Stunned and alarmed, Taylor and Gardiner demanded to be taken to see Marshal Badoglio. Carboni temporized. The marshal was an old man, fast asleep. Surely this could wait until morning. More demands, more demurrals, but at length the Americans found themselves speeding across Rome in Carboni’s car to Badoglio’s villa. A midnight air raid had already roused the household; servants with flashlights and officers in pajamas flitted across the veranda and through the lush garden. Carboni vanished across the foyer, leaving the Americans to pace the vast carpets, studying the statuary and the oil landscapes hung on the white marble walls.
Fifteen minutes later the marshal appeared, dressed in a charcoal-gray civilian suit and low brown shoes. Bald, aging, and cordial, he reminded Gardiner of “an old hound dog” as he invited the men to take chairs in his study. The conqueror of Ethiopia, Badoglio had resigned as chief of Italy’s armed services in 1940 after the debacle in Greece. He passed his days playing cards and medicating himself with champagne from a wine cellar said to hold five thousand bottles. Only Mussolini’s arrest and the king’s summons had brought him from retirement. “I was a Fascist because the king was a Fascist,” he later explained with a shrug. “I do what the king tells me.”
Taylor asked in French whether Badoglio agreed with Carboni that “an immediate armistice and the reception of airb
orne troops” were impossible.
The marshal nodded. “Castellano did not know all the facts. Italian troops cannot possibly defend Rome.” Stepping to a large map, he pointed to the “natural defenses across Italy” that aided the Germans. “Supposing, just for the sake of discussion, landings were made at Salerno,” he continued with a knowing look. “There would be many, many difficulties.”
“Are you more afraid of the Germans than you are of us?” Taylor asked. “If you fail to announce the armistice there will be nothing left for us to do but to bomb and destroy Rome ourselves.”
Badoglio’s voice thickened. “Why would you want to bomb the city of people who are trying to aid you?”
Would General Taylor return to Algiers and explain this predicament to General Eisenhower? he asked. General Taylor would not. But perhaps Marshal Badoglio should write a message describing his “change in attitude.” Badoglio nodded, took up a pen, and drafted a single paragraph in Italian, which included the fatal phrase: “It is no longer possible to accept an immediate armistice.” Taylor drafted his own concise message, dated September 8 at 0121 hours: “GIANT TWO is impossible.” An aide took the cables to be encrypted and dispatched by radio.
Badoglio and Carboni stood, and snapped to attention with a sharp clicking of heels. “We returned the gesture,” Gardiner recalled, “endeavoring to click our heels as loudly as the Italians. There was quite a contest.” Badoglio spoke of honor, and of his half century as a soldier. He seemed near tears as the Americans left.
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