Perennial American suspicions that Churchill intended to sidetrack OVERLORD by subordinating the cross-Channel invasion to “peripheral and indecisive ventures in the Mediterranean” were again inflamed by British suggestions that a stalemate in Italy might require a postponement in France. The time had come, in Marshall’s phrase, for the British to “fish or cut bait.” Churchill had privately urged Brooke “to swing the strategy back to the Mediterranean at the expense of the Channel.” An alert Henry Stimson, who as war secretary prayed every night for a cross-Channel attack, warned Roosevelt that the prime minister was prepared “to stick a knife in the back of OVERLORD.” An ill-advised autumn campaign by the British in the Aegean—the debacle cost more than five thousand casualties and twenty-six ships—added to the distrust. The British had long justified the Mediterranean campaign as a vital antecedent to the death blow to be struck in northwest Europe; but, as Michael Howard observed, London now regarded “the Mediterranean theater not as subsidiary, but as an end in itself, the succcess of whose operations was its own justification.” Major General John Kennedy, a British planner, later conceded, “Had we had our way, I think there can be little doubt that the invasion of France would not have been done in 1944.”
They did not have their way. Stalin gruffly threw his support behind Roosevelt, insisting on both OVERLORD and a concomitant invasion of southern France. (It was said that Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, spoke only four words of English: “Yes,” “No,” and “Second front.”) Moscow also agreed to join the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. Roosevelt left Teheran convinced that Stalin was “getatable”—susceptible to the president’s charms. “The Russians are perfectly friendly,” Roosevelt insisted. “They aren’t trying to gobble up all the rest of Europe or the world.”
Outnumbered and outmaneuvered, Churchill had little choice but to agree that OVERLORD, now scheduled for May 1944, would “have first claim on the resources…of the Allies, worldwide.” The strategic drift had ended. As the historian Mark A. Stoler later wrote, “After two full years of controversy and more than ninety days of meetings, the Allies had adopted a unified, coordinated strategy for the defeat of the Axis.” Roosevelt capped the decision by selecting Eisenhower to command the western invasion, telling Marshall, “I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.” Eisenhower, the president concluded, “is the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him.”
As for Italy, London and Washington agreed on the capture of Rome and a subsequent advance limited to the Pisa–Rimini latitude, two hundred miles above the capital. Churchill had at least won that concession.
Despite the frictions, the fortnight had also seen renewed brotherhood and mutual affection. “Large families are usually more closely united than small ones,” Roosevelt proclaimed in a dinner toast. The president had roared with laughter when an Army band struck up a tune and Churchill danced with Pa Watson, the burly White House aide. Yet even before the second Cairo meeting adjourned, “things were changing,” a British staff officer, Brigadier Ian Jacob, later recalled.
It was all too clear that “by the end of the war there would only be two great powers,” Jacob said. “From that moment on, I would say, we were nothing so close as we had been.” Though Roosevelt remained “extremely friendly,” he seemed “to keep Churchill somewhat at arm’s length.”
The prime minister did not die amid the ruins of Carthage, of course. It would take more than curried prawns, Turkish delight, and Yankee estrangement to kill Winston Churchill. After six days the fever broke, although his pulse still raced to 130 on December 19; perhaps the acceleration came from the large cigar and the whiskey with soda he had consumed a couple of days earlier. Churchill became fixated on his own white blood-cell count, envisioning the battle against the pneumococci as a titanic clash of forces not unlike the world war itself. One visitor to La Marsa reported that “a lot of the fire had gone out of his eyes,” but they seemed to rekindle at the discovery of some thirty-five-year-old brandy. Churchill spurned the efforts of Eisenhower’s culinary staff to prepare meals suitable for an invalid; a Royal Navy cook was summoned to gratify his palate. When Sarah read aloud to her father from Pride and Prejudice, he interjected, “What calm lives they had, those people!”
“The Bible says you must do just what Moran orders,” Roosevelt cabled from Washington, “but at this moment I cannot put my finger on the verse and chapter.” Couriers came and went from the La Marsa cottage at all hours with war news, including landing craft tallies from the Indian Ocean and drydock status reports in the Mediterranean: Churchill had taken a keen interest in launching another amphibious landing to outflank the Winter Line. “The stagnation of the whole campaign on the Italian front is becoming scandalous,” he cabled the British chiefs. When Beetle Smith and a gaggle of staff officers came to Churchill’s bedroom, he peppered them with questions about available landing craft before snapping, “You don’t seem to know much. You’re no use.”
Not until late Friday afternoon, December 24, did he rise from his sickbed. Wrapped in a padded-silk Chinese dressing gown with blue and gold embroidered dragons, he scuffed to the dining room in slippers stitched with his initials in gold thread across each foot. “Looking in his strange costume rather like a figure in a Russian ballet,” as Macmillan put it, he joined Alexander and other senior British officers at the table for a discussion that lasted until midnight. When they broke, Christmas had come, and with it a consensus that an amphibious assault in Italy “must be carried out on a sufficient scale to ensure success.” The most promising beaches lay southwest of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea, near a resort town called Anzio.
Churchill telegraphed the news to the British chiefs in London, then scribbled a note to Roosevelt in hope of the president’s concurrence. “This,” he wrote, “should decide the battle of Rome.”
Christmas had come, and across the Mediterranean a million soldiers far from home opened gifts that, however impractical or improbable, made them long for home all the more: black silk socks, cologne, Life Savers, canned Spam, slivers of prewar soap, a volume of Lytton Strachey, polka-dot neckties, Cherry Blossom boot polish, straw house slippers, Brasso, louse powder, a carefully wrapped bottle of Coca-Cola, and crumbling loaves of “war cake,” baked without benefit of sugar or shortening but larded with love.
Had he been home in Ohio, “I would be fussing with tree lights or a tree stand or doing my last second shopping or coming home from an office party,” Lieutenant Colonel Jack Toffey wrote Helen on Christmas Eve. “As far as I am concerned it is time for me to see you all again.” Sutlers shipped 170 tons of turkey to the troops, along with 90 tons of apples and 112 tons of Sicilian oranges. Combat units also received “morale crates” that implied a certain rear-echelon misapprehension of life on the Winter Line. Box no. 11, for example, included eighty phonograph records and a pair of tennis rackets, while box no. 21 contained 258 Ping-Pong balls and box no. 171 held wrestling mats, tennis nets, boxing gloves, makeup kits, and masquerade costumes.
In Naples, shoppers and boulevardiers swarmed along the Via Roma. Harbor restaurants offered decent black market meals for 140 lire, or $1.40. Soldiers polished their shoes for a dance at the enlisted club and wished one another “Merry Typhus!”—the disease had become epidemic. MPs prowled the streets, fining officers caught with their hands in their pockets; sergeants who had removed their chevrons at the front to confound snipers now risked $10 per stripe for not sewing them back on. The city evinced the “spurious brightness which you find whenever there is a rapid turnover of money,” Christopher Buckley wrote. “There was a general atmosphere of jolliness.”
Jolliness faded farther north. Mark Clark on Christmas Eve gave a carton of cigarettes to each man in his Fifth Army headquarters, which now occupied the enormous royal palace at Caserta. He then served eggnog to his staff officers during a round of caroling. After attending a concert by the Royal A
rtillery band, he mingled with revelers at the Red Cross club and went to midnight mass in the packed royal chapel. To his daughter, Ann, Clark wrote, “I am anxious to get this thing over and get back to see you and have a good old laughing contest.”
In a Bari hospital, where mustard gas victims continued to die, a major walked the wards in a cotton beard and a St. Nick costume fashioned from two red hospital robes. Up the Adriatic coast, in Ortona, soldiers built plank tables in the candlelit church of Santa Maria di Constantinopoli, then laid the settings with white linen and silver scavenged from the ruins. Companies rotated through for Christmas dinner served by their officers in the British tradition, with soup, roast pork, pudding, and a bottle of beer apiece. A lieutenant with the wonderfully seasonal name of Wilf Gildersleeve played the pump organ while a battalion padre led the caroling. “Most of the men found it hard to take in,” an officer said. Radio calls to units on the perimeter began with a few bars of “Silent Night,” played by an adjutant strumming a mandolin near the microphone. General Vokes dined alone, and wept.
“The stars have crept low tonight / To comfort half-buried dreamers,” wrote a mortarman-poet, Hans Juergensen. Sprigs of holly and mistletoe decorated various encampments, and C-ration foil festooned little pine trees. In Venafro, near the Mignano Gap, pealing bells competed with booming guns, and five priests tendered communion to filthy, bearded soldiers on their knees at the altar rail. “I prayed that there would be no more wars after this one,” a private from Denver wrote his family.
Bells rang in Orsogna, too, but Kiwi troops heard them only at a distance since Germans still held the town. “I had not seen men so exhausted since Flanders. Their faces were grey,” Brigadier Kippenberger wrote. An Italian woman living furtively in Orsogna wrote to her missing son about the “poor sad Christmas” in the battered town, then added plaintively, “And where are you?” On the other side of the hill, where German soldiers agonized over reports of carpet-bombed cities in the Fatherland, the 71st Panzer Grenadier Regiment order of the day declared: “Hatred and revenge overcome our hearts as we ponder the magnitude of our misfortune and the anguish which these attacks have brought to our German families.”
“Usual targets of opportunity were engaged all through the day,” an American field artillery battalion reported, “climaxed by a salvo of colored smoke for Xmas greeting.” In one field hospital, surgeons operated by flashlight and fell flat whenever they heard the rush of approaching shells. When blood for transfusions ran short, nurses circulated among the gun crews and motorpool drivers, soliciting donations. A clerk in the 36th Division sorted Christmas packages and scribbled “KIA” on mail to be returned to the sender; at length, utterly spent, he sat at a typewriter and pecked out, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
And in the 34th Division, Captain Leslie W. Bailey assembled his company and read aloud from the second chapter of the Gospel According to Saint Luke. “Glory to God in the highest,” Bailey concluded, “and on earth peace and good will toward all men.”
The bottom of the year brought the Allied camp more hope than despair, even if it delivered neither peace nor universal goodwill. “The war is won,” Churchill had told his daughter, and War Department analysts now forecast Germany’s defeat in October 1944. If too optimistic by eight months, optimism seemed warranted. Life magazine noted in a year-end editorial that American factories already planned to resume production of consumer goods on a modest scale in 1944, including bobby pins, baby buggies, hot water heaters, and two million irons. On all battlefronts, with the notable exceptions of Italy and Burma, Allied forces were advancing. In the Pacific, the outer perimeter of Japan’s empire had been pierced in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the inner ring of the Carolines and Marianas would soon loom in American crosshairs. General Douglas MacArthur continued to angle toward the Philippines, which would provide a springboard to Formosa and the Chinese mainland. Allied domination of the seas, among the signal achievements of 1943, was further demonstrated on December 26 when the Royal Navy trapped and sank the German battleship Scharnhorst off northwest Norway. Nearly two thousand German sailors were lost. On the Eastern Front, 175 German divisions continued their epic retreat.
Italy was a different matter. “The campaign is heartbreakingly slow,” John Lucas told his diary on December 26. “We haven’t enough troops to go very fast and I am afraid we will get weaker instead of stronger as time goes on because I figure this is becoming a secondary theater.” Fifth Army’s strength of 200,000 had hardly grown since October, and in December alone the army tallied 23,000 hospital admissions. Battle casualties had whittled away more than 10 percent of U.S. combat power since Salerno; for the British, the figure was 18 percent. The German high command on December 31 noted with satisfaction that the Allied advance on Rome had been “equal to about six miles per month.” Moreover, the Anglo-Americans were stuck not only in the Italian mud but also in the Mediterranean: more than twenty-five Allied divisions and five thousand combat planes remained in the theater “with no shipping available to move them elsewhere,” the Army concluded. Except for the seven divisions already sent from Sicily, overburdened British ports could not handle additional transfers from the Mediterranean on top of the floodtide of Yanks now arriving from the States. Italy, as Martin Blumenson wrote in the official U.S. Army history, had become “a war of position, static warfare at its worst.”
Dark thoughts intruded. “One rather wondered what we achieved,” admitted Major General Freddie de Guingand, the Eighth Army chief of staff. “We began to think about Passchendaele.” Farley Mowat told his family in Canada, “Things have changed so much since Sicily. Too many pals gone West. Too many things that go wump in the night.”
Doubts about the battlefield leadership also intruded, among both high and low. Alan Moorehead decried “a plan that was distinctly conservative and lacking in imagination”; the Allied armies, he added, “had come into Europe with very muddled ideas of what we were going to find.” Now when Alexander strolled into his war room to study the map in quiet reflection, some might wonder not what he was thinking but whether he was thinking at all. The manipulation of an army group “required weeks and months of forethought, not hours or days” as with smaller tactical units, his chief of staff later noted, and it was uncertain that Alexander possessed the capacity for such forethought. “He had the average brain of an average English gentleman. He lacked that little extra cubic centimeter which produces genius,” said Lord Louis Mountbatten, commander of forces in Southeast Asia and hardly a towering intellect himself. The disjointed attacks by Fifth and Eighth Armies allowed German forces to shift back and forth across the peninsula to parry the blows in turn. Thanks to Ultra, Alexander was better informed about his adversaries than any general in modern history: “the Allies often knew almost as much about the enemy’s formations as he did himself,” a British intelligence history concluded. Yet the Allied brain trust seemed unable to overcome “the old methodical way” of war, as Kesselring put it.
Discontent clattered down the chain. Eisenhower privately wished that Patton rather than Clark commanded Fifth Army, although, given Patton’s inattention to logistics and medical issues in Sicily, his mastery of the infinitely harder welfare issues in an Italian winter was hardly assured. Clark in turn groused about Lucas and threatened to sack Doc Ryder, commander of the 34th Division, while Lucas groused about Middleton of the 45th Division and Middleton groused about his own subordinates. “The battalion commander problem is serious. It is our weakest link,” Middleton wrote in December. “My battalion executives are no good.”
Fortunately for the Allied cause, the enemy had problems, too. Twenty-three German divisions were mired in Italy, with nearly 300,000 troops. Joseph Goebbels lamented that if the Wehrmacht had another fifteen or twenty division to throw into the Eastern Front “we would undoubtedly be in a position to repulse the Russians. Unfortunately we must put these fifteen or twenty divisions into combat
in the Italian theater.” Even Smiling Albert turned querulous. “For two months now,” Kesselring complained, “I have not been able to exercise proper command because everything evaporates between my fingers.”
War was never linear, and in the Mediterranean its road seemed especially meandering and desultory. “What will 1944 do to us?” Lucas asked his diary. Yet sometimes a soldier in a slit trench saw more clearly than the generals on their high perches. “You got the feeling that you were part of a vast war machine which could not be defeated and would never retreat,” wrote P. Royle, a Royal Artillery lieutenant in the British 78th Division. “It had all been so different a year ago in Tunisia when we were very much on the defensive and at times hanging on for dear life.”
For the Allies, things would continue to go wump in the night, and many more pals would go West. But the winter solstice had passed; each night grew shorter. Light would seep back into their lives, bringing renewed optimism as well as firm ground and fair skies.
“A terrible year has ended,” the monks in the Benedictine abbey atop Monte Cassino wrote in their log on December 31. “God forgive us our errors.”
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