The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  On Tuesday morning, Walker strode from his command post on the eastern face of Monte Rotondo and drove south through Mignano on Highway 6. The January sun sat low in the southern sky, “sickly, whitish and weak,” as one lieutenant said, and even wool underwear hardly warmed Walker’s bones. The usual odors of damp canvas and scorched coffee filled the II Corps headquarters tent, where staff officers drew on acetate maps with colored grease pencils. Walker was greeted by Major General Keyes, the corps commander, who was trim and impeccable in polished boots.

  Walker reviewed his attack plan as crisply as if delivering a War College lecture. At eight P.M. on Thursday, the 141st Infantry Regiment would cross the Rapido in small boats at a single ferry site one mile upstream from the town of Sant’Angelo in Theodice; simultaneously, the 143rd Infantry intended to cross at two points downstream. In this sector, the Rapido meandered north to south, so the attack would flow east to west before securing Sant’Angelo and swinging north into the Liri Valley. In keeping with Keyes’s orders, “large, strong fighting patrols” had slipped across the river for the past two nights to “keep contact with the enemy” and assess German defenses.

  Those were formidable, Walker said with a knowing look. German troops from the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division—escapees from Sicily who had also fought at Salerno and Monte Camino—were “very well organized, wired in, and in depth, supported by automatic weapons, small arms fire, [and] prepared defensive fires of artillery, mortars.” Of seven boats launched the previous night by the 141st Infantry, five had been lost on a current clocked at four miles per hour. Scouts reported a double apron of barbed wire beyond the far bank and a broad mine belt nearly a mile long. As expected, German demolitionists had blown the bridge at Sant’Angelo three days earlier; the river had been dredged two years before, and spoil lined both banks to form steep gravel dikes. Mud remained “shoe mouth deep” despite recent dry weather. Six-man mine removal teams crawled about on their hands and knees each night, but German sappers sneaked over the river to reseed cleared approaches. Yesterday, a division surgeon reported “an epidemic…of traumatic amputations of one or both legs.” As he finished sketching his plan, Walker again cocked an eyebrow.

  Keyes listened intently. He was careful not to betray his own doubts, about the attack and about Walker. A frontal assault across the river was “unsound,” Keyes had warned Clark; given German command of the high ground, the crossings would be made “in a fishbowl.” Even back in Sicily, Keyes had drafted alternative plans for precisely this tactical conundrum. His favorite, dubbed Big Cassino, envisioned an assault across the Garigliano by both II Corps and the British X Corps, which then would scale the massif southwest of Cassino to outflank the fortified mouth of the Liri Valley. The scheme intrigued Clark. But Alexander and McCreery, the X Corps commander, considered it “a tactical monstrosity”; British troops had neither training nor equipment for mountain warfare. Clark sided with the British—he was increasingly beguiled by the image of American tanks roaring toward Rome—and Big Cassino slid into a drawer.

  Keyes persisted. In late December, he proposed crossing the Rapido “a day or two” after the Anzio landings. “If the enemy withdraws forces now on our front to oppose VI Corps [at Anzio], there is a chance that this corps can make a real advance,” he wrote. Clark demurred, insisting that the Rapido attack precede SHINGLE. On January 13, Keyes warned that the British 46th Division, which was to protect Walker’s left flank, planned to cross the Garigliano with a modest, two-battalion assault. “The effort of the 46th Division should be made by the entire division,” Keyes wrote, otherwise it risked a “gradualism” that could leave the Americans exposed. Clark again declined to intervene.

  Geoff Keyes knew his business. He possessed, in the estimation of George Patton, “the best tactical mind of any officer I know.” Son of a cavalry officer, Keyes grew up on horseback along the Mexican border. Two years ahead of Eisenhower at West Point, Keyes in one football game scored two touchdowns, kicked both conversions, and booted a forty-three-yard field goal to account for seventeen points; the academy’s legendary Master of the Sword, Marty Maher, proclaimed him “the only man who could stop Jim Thorpe” on the gridiron. “If there is a man in the Corps who is more universally liked than he,” the academy yearbook stated, “we have yet to find him.”

  Also a cavalryman, Keyes had attended the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris and served as Patton’s deputy during the invasions of Morocco and Sicily. “The impetuous, vitriolic, histronic Patton is considerably leavened by the calm, deliberate, circumspect Keyes,” a War Department observer had reported to Washington from Palermo. Slender, pleasant, and tactful, Keyes was a devout Roman Catholic who attended mass each morning and eschewed profanity—“not even hell or damn,” one comrade said. Eisenhower unfairly described him as “a man who has everything but a sense of humor”; in fact, he possessed a puckish streak. Behind Patton’s endorsement, Keyes in September took command of II Corps after Omar Bradley’s departure for England. “Don’t be afraid to show pleasant reactions in your contact with your subordinates,” Eisenhower told him. “Every commander is made, in the long run, by his subordinates. We are all intensely human, and war is a drama, not a game of chess.”

  Like so many American generals, Keyes distrusted the British, and his spare, bemused diary entries revealed an intense Anglophobia as the Rapido attack drew near. “God forbid we ever have to serve with or near the British again,” he wrote on January 16. A day later he added, “Clark insists we are not being sold down the river but I am not convinced. Every move is a repetition of the slick maneuver of the British in planning HUSKY and the Sicilian campaign.” On the day of Walker’s visit, he wrote, “The British are going to contribute nothing as usual.”

  As the conference in the II Corps command post drew to a close, much remained unsaid, and in that silence sprouted mistrust and discord. Walker privately considered Keyes “too cavalry,” with a “Boy Scout attitude” toward the grim infantry combat ahead. The notion of Sherman tanks storming up the Liri Valley was “visionary,” Walker believed; the term was not a compliment. Sensing Walker’s hostility, Keyes felt a reciprocal antipathy. He wondered whether the division commander was overmatched.

  More important, both men remained mute about their shared disquiet. Can-do zeal required obedience and a bluff optimism. Walker finished his brief, then scooped up his maps and papers. He would prefer to attack elsewhere, he said. But in a final burst of bravado, and perhaps sensing that his rendezvous with the Rapido was ineluctable, he advised Keyes that he was “confident of success.” The 36th Division, he added, would “be in Sant’Angelo on the morning of the 21st.”

  Only in his diary did Walker speak from the heart: “We have done everything that we can, but I do not now see how we can succeed.”

  Sant’Angelo was a drab farm village on a forty-foot bluff above the turquoise Rapido. The local cantine served Peroni beer and a vino renowned for potency. Pastel houses with iron balconies and red tile roofs crowded the narrow main street. Flying buttresses shored up the church of San Giovanni Battista, with its handsome campanile. Black-bordered death notices were pasted on a billboard beneath the narthex.

  The notices had multiplied after the first bombs hit Sant’Angelo on September 10, killing a three-year-old girl and her parents. The Germans soon arrived from nearby Cassino, carrying large hooks with which to drag the haystacks in search both of contraband and of young men for their labor battalions. Electricity and running water became sporadic and then nonexistent. Mail delivery ended. Phones went dead. Farmers toiled at night, hitching oxen to their plows and listening for what the locals called the “she-wolf,” the six-barreled Nebelwerfer mortar, which fired rounds that wailed in flight. As the Allied army drew closer, German sappers mined the local mill and demolished houses to fortify the town center, sparing the rectory, which had a deep cellar and became a command post.

  Three hundred impressed Italians dug trenches and cleared brush on
the Rapido flats for better fields of fire. German commanders now considered Sant’Angelo the “strongest point of the defensive line.” The river’s west bank was defended by two battalions from the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, described by Allied intelligence as “the strongest single German division in the Italian theater,” with a full roster and ample heavy weapons. Aggressive American patrolling kept them alert and edgy. “Extensive enemy movements observed opposite left wing of 15th Panzer Grenadier Division,” the Tenth Army war diary recorded on January 17. “The enemy has crept up to the riverbank.”

  The Germans grew even edgier after the British attack began on the lower Garigliano at nine P.M. that night. The 5th and 56th Divisions surged across the river, a dozen miles downstream from Sant’Angelo. “The waiting is the worst part,” the Royal Artillery signaler Spike Milligan had written as the assault began. “I oil my tommy gun. I don’t know why, it’s already oiled.” To the surprise of Jerry and Tommy alike, by dawn on January 18 ten battalions occupied the far bank; German commanders had doubted the Allies would attack on a moonless night. “Moving off in trucks with our hearts in our mouths,” a Scots Guards lieutenant told his diary. “Passing very ominous blood wagons coming back the other way…. I wonder if we look heroic filing away in the darkness.”

  They gained the far bank but not much more: the X Corps bridgehead barely extended three miles, and a ferocious German counterattack almost shoved the lead companies back into the river. The crossing sites would remain under German artillery fire for three months, and British soldiers complained that the alluvial plain resembled a “mine marsh.” Still, they had made a promising start. “I am convinced that we are now facing the greatest crisis yet encountered,” Kesselring advised Vietinghoff, his Tenth Army commander, shortly before ten A.M. on January 18. The Americans, he added, would now likely attack below Cassino in an attempt to storm the Liri Valley.

  Not yet. On Wednesday night, January 19, British 46th Division soldiers, drawn from Yorkshire and the North Midlands, crept through the Garigliano mists four miles downstream from Sant’Angelo. This was “a bleak, disturbing place,” a landscape of grays and blacks beneath scudding clouds. Assault troops cinched their Mae Wests, slung their rifles, and shoved the first boats into the dark water.

  “Then nothing went right,” the Royal Hampshires reported. Far upstream, German engineers had opened a set of sluice gates, raising the water level several feet and turning the Garigliano into a millrace. Boats bucked and spun on the current, then vanished in the fog as exhausted oarsmen slapped their way back to shore, a mile or more downstream. Again they tried, and then again. By early morning, despite only sporadic German opposition, a single company hugged the far bank. Gunfire riddled their vessels, and soon the isolated vanguard was besieged. A few survivors splashed back to safety beneath a smoke screen. At dawn on Thursday, enemy artillery sliced up the crossing site, and McCreery ordered the 46th Division to abandon further attempts.

  A few hours later, the burly British division commander, Major General John Hawkesworth, known as Ginger to his friends, appeared at Fred Walker’s command post in the lee of Monte Rotondo. Three old wounds from the Great War hobbled Hawkesworth, and he leaned on an ashplant stick. The attack had failed, he told Walker. The river had run higher than expected: a contumacious beast, really. No further attempt was possible. Walker’s left flank would be exposed during the Rapido attack this evening. Hawkesworth was sorry, but there it was. Walker nodded and returned to his preparations. “The British are the world’s greatest diplomats,” he told his diary, “but you can’t count on them for anything more than words.”

  Keyes and Clark were both alarmed. “Always the same story,” Keyes wrote in his diary. “Too few, too little practical preparations. This is serious for us tonight.” Clark attributed the aborted British crossing “to lack of strong aggressive leadership at the division level.” Fifth Army engineers reported that Hawkesworth had failed to properly reconnoiter the river or the crossing site. In a memorandum dictated on Thursday, Clark added, “The failure of the attack of the 46th Division to reach its objective…was quite a blow. I was fearful that General Hawkesworth had a mental reservation.” The army commander dispatched Gruenther to see McCreery, who warned that the Rapido attack “has little chance of success” and should be canceled. Unmentioned was McCreery’s growing concern at Clark’s apparent willingness to accept high casualties for dubious gains; the British commander now thought of Clark as “the Man of Destiny I somehow imagined he always wanted to be.”

  That surely was unfair, although not untrue. With Eisenhower gone from the theater, Clark now stood in the footlights at center stage as the most prominent American commander in the Mediterranean. Yet the Man of Destiny was hardly a free agent. Clark had been ordered by Alexander to attack quickly, and to eject the enemy from Rome; for all practical purposes, he also had been ordered by Churchill to plop two vulnerable divisions behind German lines the day after tomorrow. Were he to curtail the Rapido offensive, nearly fifty thousand men now embarking for SHINGLE would face the full fury of a German counterstrike in isolation.

  Destiny held Clark in thrall, but not Clark alone. A great rolling tide of tragedy and fate and human folly swept them all along, like those fog-swaddled boats beating against the Garigliano current.

  “It is essential that I make the attack, fully expecting heavy losses, in order to hold all the [German] troops on my front and draw more to it, thereby clearing the way for SHINGLE,” Clark wrote on Thursday. “The attack is on.”

  Since the Salerno landings, nineteen weeks earlier, war had gutted the 36th Division. Rifle company losses in the 141st Infantry exceeded 60 percent. In one typical 143rd Infantry battalion, three-quarters of the officers had joined the unit in Italy. Texas drawls no longer dominated the division. “We were no longer a team,” a captain complained. “Gone was the feeling that you knew you could rely on your people.” Together the two assault regiments mustered about four thousand men; many units were understrength, often by a third, and undertrained. New bazooka teams arrived at the front having never fired a bazooka. Training for a river assault was limited to paddling on the placid Volturno. A platoon leader in the 141st considered his soldiers “unprepared physically, mentally, and morally.”

  Several hundred replacements showed up on the eve of the Rapido attack to find that all troops had removed their unit insiginia to confound the enemy; sergeants spent hours trying to determine who belonged to whom. Many replacements never found their proper companies, and some would die without meeting their squad leaders or knowing a single comrade in their new platoons. “Can’t expect these replacements to be good soldiers,” an officer told the reporter Will Lang. “They ain’t mad.”

  Walker continued to fret in private. “The mission should never have been assigned to any troops and, especially, when both flanks will be exposed when we get across,” he scribbled on January 20. Clark phoned on Thursday afternoon to wish him luck. “He is worried over the fact that he made an unwise tactical decision,” Walker concluded, then added:

  If we get some breaks we may succeed. But they will have to be in the nature of miracles…. I will have little influence on the battle because everything is committed; I have no reserves.

  And then it began. The last smudges of violet light faded in the west. Hundreds of soldiers rose from their burrows on Monte Trocchio and from behind the marsh hummocks on the Rapido flats. Fixing bayonets with an ominous metallic click, they looped extra bandoliers over their twill field jackets. Fog coiled from the riverbed and crept across the fields, swallowing the stars and a rising crescent moon. A company commander handed a cigar to each of his sergeants, as a talisman.

  At 7:30 P.M., sixteen artillery battalions opened fire in gusts of white flame. Soldiers flinched as more than a thousand shells per minute shrieked overhead in a cannonade that ignited the mist and gouged the far bank with rounds calibrated to explode every six and a half yards. Crewmen flipped back the camou
flage nets on fifty Sherman tanks, hidden four hundred yards from the river, and yellow tongues of flame soon licked from the muzzles to join the bombardment. Sixty fighter-bombers swooped down the river, and their tumbling silver pellets blossomed in fire and black smoke across Sant’Angelo, adding ruin to ruination. Four hundred white-phosphorus mortar shells traced the river line with topographic precision; the night was windless, and instead of billowing to form a low screen, the smoke spiraled vertically for 150 feet, framing the shore in fluted alabaster columns.

  The attack was to fall across a three-mile front, centered on Sant’Angelo. On the right, the 141st Infantry tramped down a farm road toward an oxbow in the river, led by the 1st Battalion in a column of four companies. Wet fog grew as thick as cotton batting. Barely able to see their feet, soldiers bunched up to keep sight of the bobbing helmet ahead. Stragglers and shirkers melted away. When the column stalled, men dozed off and awoke to find that those in front had vanished. Units became jumbled, and sotto voce queries carried in the night, calling for 3rd Platoon or B Company.

  Along the rail tracks south of Trocchio, boats had been readied in a hidden dump: rubber dinghies that carried two dozen men, of whom half would paddle, and M-2 plywood scows, weighing nearly a quarter ton each and capable of ferrying a dozen men with a two-man crew. German artillery that afternoon had already holed twenty rubber boats, and ugly gashes marred several M-2s. Wooden catwalks also lay scattered about the dump: laid across rubber rafts lashed together as pontoons, they would make footbridges. Two sturdy Bailey bridges, dubbed Harvard and Yale, would subsequently be erected for the two hundred tanks waiting behind Trocchio to storm the Liri Valley.