The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  For the last two weeks of October, they pushed north by northwest in Alexander’s “slogging match,” following a rugged corridor between the upper Volturno and Highway 6, known ever more sardonically as Victory Road. American maps often labeled the terrain here simply “mountainous hinterland.” Through stone pines and flame-shaped cypresses they trudged, past farm cottages with chimneys poking like snorkels above the red tile roofs. Peasants keened over their dead, or rummaged through their ruined crofts to salvage a copper pot or a rag doll. “Nothing I can do for him,” a medic told Toffey, pointing to a prostrate old man. “He is as dead as he will ever be.” German corpses, most from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division, flattened the weeds; some had been carbonized by artillery fire, others were simply carrion. GIs pocketed their Gott mit Uns buckles and moved on.

  Across the cobblestones of Liberi and Roccaromana and Pietravairano they plodded, past the townfolk dressed in mourning and the bambini diapered in newspapers. Mines detonated, gunfights erupted, and all too often Toffey stood over a dying boy, whispering, “The stretchers are coming up, kid. Hang on.” Turning to a squad leader during one brawl he said, “I think we have the machine gun nest surrounded up there among the rocks…. Go get ’em—and don’t bring ’em back.”

  At night they put the battalion command post in a fire-blackened cave or a farmhouse loft, sleeping on cold ground or corn shucks. Biddle sketched the tableau: battle maps spread across a camp table; flickering candle stubs flinging monstrous shadows on the whitewashed walls; empty cans of Spam or C ration peas tossed in a corner; a demijohn of rough red wine passed from hand to filthy hand. Cooks whipped up powdered eggs with powdered milk and powdered coffee; soldiers insisted that the Army would next issue powdered water. Sometimes the radio picked up Axis Sally, who closed her broadcasts by purring, “Easy, boys, there’s danger ahead.” Toffey slept with a field phone near his head, alert to calls for Paul Blue Six, his sign.

  For a few weeks, Biddle—a Harvard-educated, World War I veteran whose brother was Roosevelt’s attorney general—gave Toffey someone to talk to, a rare prize for a commander. Toffey told of being wounded in Tunisia, and of how so many recuperating officers had sought rear-echelon duties to avoid a return to combat. “If I had to do it again,” he mused, “I wonder if I wouldn’t look for a swivel chair?” He wondered aloud how to develop “the killing instincts…. Our boys aren’t professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing.” He talked to Helen, too, in his letters, about how his knee grew “stiff and tired in the wet weather and rough country,” and about how he “would like a rest, a bath, a home and my family.” He fantasized about a stateside assignment. “At this point, Bragg would look good, and Dix or Lewis positively luxurious,” he told her, ticking off Army posts.

  He did not mention the close calls, as when a German shell detonated in a chestnut tree on October 21, wounding two staff officers ten yards from where he was reading an August issue of Time. Nor did he tell her of the shells that a day later chased him from a grassy ledge on Monte della Costa, where he had been puffing his pipe and writing her a letter. Nor of the deaths of two other battalion commanders in the 15th Infantry, including one crushed in his foxhole by the engine of a downed German fighter.

  Then another wet, gray dawn arrived and they edged forward, and upward. One account likened the soldier’s day in Italy to “climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung.” They learned to shun skylines and to dull the glint of helmet rims and mess kits with mud. They listened for the mewing of cats, a favorite German signal. Barbasol shave cream was a good balm for sore feet, but nothing could compensate for the lack of overcoats, wool underwear, and shelter halves, which remained in barracks bags stranded in Palermo. Every man’s shoulders instinctively hunched at the rush of artillery, but still they debated with theological intensity whether it was true that a man never heard the shell that hit him.

  Easy, boys, there’s danger ahead. On occasion Paul Blue Six lost his temper, as in late October when he berated staff officers for incaution. “I’m goddam sick and tired of seeing these picnic gatherings in the open,” he barked. “I’m sick of telling you guys to wear your helmets and carry your arms.” On October 28 he asked Biddle to sketch a sergeant who had been shot dead on Monte Caievola. Pulling back a blanket, Toffey nodded at the dead man’s sunken face and said, “The people at home ought to see things like that.” When artillery raked the battalion again, he rang the regimental headquarters. “This is Toffey. Get the meat wagon down here,” he said. “There are two more killed and one wounded.”

  More often he was a sturdy, abiding presence, a steeplechaser. “Be alert and live,” he told his soldiers, echoing the motto printed in Stars and Stripes. He urged new replacement officers to “get to know your own men, every man in your platoon,” by name as well as by their strengths and weaknesses. “We need you, terribly,” he continued. “You’ll have less good personnel than you had at home. You’ll find that your company has lost its top sergeant and that the best platoon sergeant is dead. But we need you and we’ve got a job to do.” No officer was to sleep without checking perimeter security. Not a bandolier or canteen should be abandoned. “I wish you all luck,” he told them. “We’re glad to have you with us. Remember that if I can help you I’ll do it.”

  Toffey’s battalion punched through the Barbara Line, which was hardly more than a chain of outposts, but the Bernhardt Line proved obdurate. Two companies failed to oust the enemy from Monte Cesima, looming nearly four thousand feet above Highway 6. Under Truscott’s orders, the entire battalion on November 4 looped through Presenzano to flank the mountain in a night climb through spectral chestnut groves. “We circle the meadows, keeping the shadow,” Biddle wrote. Up and up they climbed, “the lips parted in that rictus which you see on the faces of distance runners.” After ten hours they reached the stony crest to find the German observation post deserted. Toffey pointed among the ferns to a dead soldier with a bullet through his left temple. Here, he told Biddle, was another lost soul “to add to your collection.”

  From the summit Toffey squinted at the northern glacis of mountains that would bedevil the Allies for the next six months: Lungo and Trocchio, Sammucro and Cassino. “Hell,” he said. “You can see all the way into Germany.” More than half the battalion had become casualties since arriving in Italy. After watching the men of his division emerge from the high country on November 5, Lucian Truscott simply piled up adjectives: “Haggard, dirty, bedraggled, long-haired, unshaven, clothing in tatters, worn out boots.”

  “Just so many dead,” Biddle wrote. Below Monte Cesima, in the valley town of Mignano, he watched in the rain as gloved soldiers heaved the pallid corpses of American and German soldiers into a truck trailer, the living “wrestling with the dead” until a full measure filled the bed. He added:

  I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire. I wish they would think of them as cold, wet, hungry, homesick and frightened. I wish, when they think of them, they would be a little sick to their stomachs.

  Toffey finally finished a letter to Helen he had started a fortnight earlier. “It at least assures you,” he told her, “of my continued existence.”

  The panorama from Monte Cesima revealed the formidable tactical challenge confronting Fifth Army. The only viable overland passage to Rome followed Highway 6 through the narrow Mignano Gap, six miles long and dominated by mountains on either flank. Several hills also sat in the gap proper, like stoppers in a bottleneck, soaring a thousand feet or so above the valley floor. North of these impedimenta, the gap emptied onto the broad plain of the Rapido River Valley, across which a final mountain barrier—dominated by Monte Cassino—guarded the entrance to the Liri Valley, boulevard to Rome.

  Mark Clark’s plan called for his infantry divisions to force the Mignano Gap and then converge on the Liri V
alley, where tanks could spearhead a run for the capital. On Fifth Army’s far right, the 34th and 45th Divisions crept through the Apennine crags, using herds of goats to clear highland minefields. Vietinghoff accurately observed of his American adversary here: “Every step forward into the mountainous terrain merely increased his difficulties.”

  On the left flank, the British 56th Division tried to loop around the western lip of the Mignano Gap on November 5 by attacking Monte Camino, a “steep solid rock leading God knows where,” as one rifleman put it. Expecting only German pickets, the 201st Guards Brigade instead found the Bernhardt Line: mines, machine guns, and mortar pits blasted from an exposed face dubbed Bare Arse Ridge. Heath fires lighted the scarps and cols, as Guardsmen clawed up a succession of summits only to find that they were false crests overshadowed by still higher ground.

  Three panzer grenadier counterattacks on November 8 nearly flicked the British from the mountain. Tommies built stone breastworks against singing mortar fragments and a frigid east wind, stripping rations and ammo from the dead, and brewing tea with muddy water scooped from shell holes. Without blankets or winter battle dress, the wounded died from exposure; three forward Guards companies dwindled to a hundred men, combined. “A small earthquake added to the unpleasantness,” a Scots Guard account noted. In the end, four British battalions could not overcome five entrenched German battalions; after a horrid week Clark approved a withdrawal from what was now called Murder Mountain. Dead men remained propped at their posts with helmets on and rifles ready, a rear guard faithful to the end and beyond. “Altogether,” the Coldstream Guards history explained, “the difficulties were too great.”

  Too great as well for Truscott’s 3rd Division in the Fifth Army center. A ten-day effort to seize Monte la Difensa, a geological appendage to Murder Mountain, proved just as futile. On the evening of November 5, corps commander Lucas phoned Truscott with orders from Clark to help the British by also attacking Monte Lungo, one of those isolated hill masses inside the gap. Protesting the lack of reconnaissance, air support, and artillery, Truscott asked to speak to Clark.

  “Damn it,” Lucas replied. “You know the position I’m in with him. That would only make it worse, and put me in a helluva hole. You have just got to do it.”

  “I still think it’s wrong,” Truscott said, then ordered his 30th Infantry forward. One battalion captured conical Monte Rotondo and another secured a modest foothold on Lungo: that far and no farther.

  As the grim season wore on, the suffering grew epic. Audie Murphy noted that the “faces of the dead seem green and unearthly. This is bad for the morale, as it makes a man reflect upon what his own life may come to.” Since arriving in Italy less than two months earlier, the 3rd Division had tallied 8,600 casualties. Losses included almost 400 officers—half of the division’s second lieutenants among them—and nearly 4,000 privates. The three infantry regiments had lost 70 percent of their strength, an indicator of “how fragile an infantry division really is,” Truscott told Beetle Smith.

  To wife Sarah on November 10 he wrote, “You are in my thoughts a thousand times a day.” He later added, “One day merges into another while time is measured only by the capture of the next ridge, the crossing of the next stream. I’m a bit grayer than when you saw me last, but otherwise unchanged in appearance.” Even amid carnage Truscott tried to honor the beauty of this world by placing autumn flowers on his field desk every day. He also dispatched an aide to Naples to replenish the command post’s liquor supply; the lieutenant returned with thirty-five bottles of cognac. “I only pray,” Truscott told Sarah, “that I can live and measure up to what my lads seem to expect of me.”

  Ernie Pyle returned to the front in November after two months at home. Rested if not reinvigorated, he quickly sized up the Italian campaign. “The land and the weather were both against us,” he wrote. “The country was shockingly beautiful, and just as shockingly hard to capture from the enemy.” He listened to “shells chase each other through the sky across the mountains ahead, making a sound like cold wind blowing on a winter night.” Pyle found “almost inconceivable misery,” as well as a bemused fortitude. When gunners calculated that it cost $25,000 in artillery shells for each enemy soldier killed, one GI asked, “Why wouldn’t it be better to just offer the Germans $25,000 to surrender?”

  A diarist in the 56th Evacuation Hospital noted that even away from the front lines life was spare: “No shelves, no dresser, no hooks or nails on a wall. No bed table, no reading table, no cabinets. No floor except a muddy, wet one.” Pyle described a soldier playing poker by candlelight who abruptly murmured, “War, my friends, is a silly business. War is the craziest thing I ever heard of.”

  Irony and dark humor—“the greatest of protections against crackup,” in one soldier’s estimation—grew ever sharper in the ranks. During a showing of Casablanca in a British camp, when Humphrey Bogart’s gunshot victim crumpled to the ground, Tommies cried as one, “Stretcher bearer!” Spike Milligan, serving in the Royal Artillery, wrote his family, “The whole of this land we have arrived in is now top secret, in fact no one is allowed to know where it is…. However, the bloody Germans know where it is.” On November 9, Milligan wrote, “Nothing much to report except World War 2. Is it still going on where you are?”

  Burial details sent out at night to retrieve the dead were known as the Ghouls. When a mobile shower unit arrived at one artillery battery, a quartet of naked gunners stood singing in barbershop formation for an hour. “It’s the loss of dirt,” one explained. “It leaves you dizzy.” A 36th Division soldier wrote his father that he now lived in “a remodeled pig shed. I say remodeled because there is no pig in it.” Others occupied a heatless hovel they named Villa des Chilblains, and soldiers hooted at a mistyped headquarters order: “Latrines: all troops will ensure that faces are covered with soil after each person has deprecated.” A platoon leader who learned that his battalion commander’s radio call sign was “Big Six,” speculated that to ring the division commander he should ask for “Big, Big, Big Six,” and to reach Eisenhower he must request “Six to the Maximum Power.”

  Each man coped with calamity in his own fashion. Richard Tregaskis described a combat engineer sitting on a curb in Pietramelara in late October, nibbling the “cheese unit” from his C ration as a woman’s shrieks carried from a ruined building nearby. “She’s been yelling like that all day,” the soldier said. “Sometimes I feel kinda sorry for these poor people.” One night in mid-November, upon finding four dead 3rd Division soldiers in slit trenches, a sergeant said, “You can pray forever but those poor fellows are gone.” Pretending to play his rifle like a bull fiddle, the sergeant sang “Heart of My Heart,” while a comrade tipped his helmet forward like a vaudeville hoofer’s bowler and danced a jig to cheer the dead.

  “You can’t believe men will do to each other the things they do,” a forward observer wrote his sister. “I suppose I’m soft, but I’ve got to say, God forgive us all.” A week later he was killed when a shell severed his jugular vein.

  At 9:30 A.M. on Thursday, November 11, Clark drove through the hills below Naples to Avellino, where a new American cemetery was to be dedicated on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the armistice ending World War I. Sunlight glinted from hundreds of white crosses and stars of David, perfectly arrayed in a former potato field.

  “Here we are, a quarter century later, with the same Allies as before, fighting the same mad dogs that were loose in 1918,” Clark said, speaking without notes at the flagpole. “They gave their lives that the people at home could pursue the life which we have always wanted—a happy life—and that their children could go to the schools and churches they want, and follow the line of work they want. And we are fighting, first, to save our own land from devastation like this in Italy.”

  He drew himself to his full height, a ramrod in a peaked cap. “We must not think about going home. None of us is going home until it’s over…. We’ve caught the torch that these men have flung us, and we’
ll carry it to Berlin and to the great victory—a complete victory—which the united nations deserve.”

  An honor guard fired thrice. Wadding from the blank cartridges fluttered across the graves. A bugler blew Taps, echoed by another, unseen bugler in a nearby arbor. “That was a good ceremony,” Clark said. His jaw set, he climbed back into the jeep to return to the battlefield.

  Imperfect as a commander and at times insufferable as a person, Clark knew what he was fighting for. Few men would love him, some would detest him, but most recognized in him a forceful field general who was willful enough, indomitable enough to wage the hard war that the Italian campaign had become. He believed, as he had told Alexander’s chief of staff a week earlier, that “the war could be won in this theater”; he also believed that Fifth Army could seize Rome, “and intended to do so.” In part this was vainglory: resentful of Montgomery, Clark wanted Eighth Army to steer clear of the Italian capital and the hosannahs its capture would merit. Yet it also reflected his single-minded grit, and a determination to keep faith. He had caught the torch tossed by his dead soldiers, and he would carry it as far as necessary.

  Clark knew that the current battle had stalled. Since crossing the Volturno, Lucas’s VI Corps had covered forty-five miles on Fifth Army’s right flank and twenty-five miles in the center, at Mignano. McCreery’s X Corps on the left had covered seventeen miles. That yardage had cost the army ten thousand casualties since mid-October, and the equivalent of two divisions since landing at Salerno, including more than three thousand dead. Although the Liri Valley was barely a dozen miles ahead, it might just as well have been on the moon. MPs posted warning signs across the front, including “Nothing But Jerry Beyond This Point” and “If You Go Any Further Take a Cross With You.”