As the war’s fifth winter ended, the Combined Bomber Offensive was well along in dropping more than a million tons of explosives on German targets, which would kill or wound over a million civilians and destroy almost four million dwellings. American commanders belatedly realized that despite the hundreds of .50-caliber machine guns bristling from B-17 Flying Fortress formations, long-range fighters were needed to escort the bombers deep into the Reich. That need had been answered with the swarming arrival in early 1944 of P-51 Mustangs, which by March had a range of 850 miles, well beyond Berlin; truculent P-51s dropping their wing tanks to meet oncoming Luftwaffe fighters were likened to “barroom brawlers stripping off their coats.” American pilots were ordered “to pursue the Hun until he was destroyed. Put the fear of God into them.”
In late February, a long-delayed bombing offensive code-named ARGUMENT attacked almost two hundred industrial and military targets, from aircraft factories to rubber plants. Nearly 4,000 bombers from Britain and Italy struck for days on end in a relentless bashing soon known as Big Week. Eighth Air Force dropped almost as much bomb tonnage in six days as it had during its first year in combat. Allied losses were bitter: 226 bombers, 28 fighters, and 2,600 crewmen. Hopes of crippling Germany’s aircraft industry fell short; more Luftwaffe planes rolled from German plants in 1944 than in any other year of the war, although at the expense of bomber production. Factories dispersed underground and into remote forests. Yet the blow was severe. The Luftwaffe in February lost more than one-third of its single-engine fighters and nearly one-fifth of its fighter pilots. The latter loss was especially grievous; the combat career of a new German pilot now lasted, on average, less than a month.
The weight of metal had begun to “un-gear the German war economy,” in Eaker’s phrase. Daylight bombing by the Yanks and night bombing by the Brits finally achieved the synergy that air theorists had promised for more than a year. With better weather, Allied heavy bombers in April dumped on average two tons of high explosives on German targets every minute of every day. The Luftwaffe would become almost as ineffectual in central Europe as it already was in the Mediterranean. German synthetic oil facilities, the Achilles’ heel of Hitler’s war machine, were now clearly within range and attacks began in earnest in mid-May.
Even so, the hard winter for airmen yielded to a hard spring. Allied air forces flying from England lost twenty bombers a day in March; another three thousand Eighth Air Force bombers were damaged that month. Morale problems could be seen in the decision of nearly ninety U.S. crews in March and April to fly to neutral countries, usually Sweden or Switzerland, to be interned for the duration. The Army Air Forces hardly helped their reputation for precision when they repeatedly bombed Switzerland. One pummeling, on April 1, left a hundred casualties in the town of Schaffhausen.
Losses remained dreadful from flak that was thicker than ever. Only one in four Eighth Air Force bomber crews flying in early 1944 could expect to complete the minimum quota of twenty-five missions required for reassignment to the United States; those not dead or missing would be undone by accidents, fatigue, or other misadventures. Bomber Command casualties were comparable to those of British infantrymen in World War I. Here was a pretty irony: airpower, which was supposed to preserve Allied ground forces from another Western Front abattoir, simply supplemented the butchery. A B-17 pilot described one harrowing mission:
When a plane blew up, we saw their parts all over the sky. We smashed into some of the pieces. One plane hit a body which tumbled out of a plane ahead. A crewman went out the front hatch of a plane and hit the tail assembly of his own plane. No chute. His body turned over and over like a bean bag tossed into the air…. A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somesault through our formation. No chute.
“When I fly a mission, I’m scared,” John Muirhead told a friend. “When I’m not flying, I’m bored. When they get killed, I’m glad it’s not me.” Crewmen sang a parody of the theme song from Casablanca: “You must remember this / The flak can’t always miss / Somebody’s gotta die.” Accidents alone killed 13,000 U.S. airmen; by war’s end, 140,000 Allied crewmen would be dead. “On my last four raids I have been hit three times,” a flier in the 17th Bomb Group wrote home in late February. “The flak was so thick I couldn’t see the planes in front of me, and that’s no lie.” Many fuselages were quilted with the aluminum patches used to repair bullet holes and flak perforations. A B-25 bombardier in a letter home described “the enlarged pupil, the quickened breath, the dry mouth…. It is a terrible responsibility not to hit a hospital.”
Propeller turbulence, faulty electrical suits—temperatures in unheated bombers could reach -60 degrees Fahrenheit—and anoxia from defective oxygen masks all added to the risk. Enemy fighters modified their tactics to break through bomber defenses; Allied airmen were warned about Luftwaffe attack profiles dubbed the “Sisters’ Act,” the “Twin-Engine Tailpecker,” and the “Hun in the Sun.” A flight leader’s momentary lapse could have catastrophic consequences. One squadron commander, a Hollywood actor named Jimmy Stewart, later said, “I didn’t pray for myself. I just prayed that I wouldn’t make a mistake.”
In the Mediterranean the Air Force steadily increased mission quotas, especially for medium bombers, whose sorties tended to be shorter and less hazardous than the heavies, at least in theory. In February the “fixed tour” was abolished altogether in favor of “a variable one subject to local conditions.” Airmen now wore T-shirts that read, “Fly ’til I die.”
Among those affected by the ever spiraling quotas was a twenty-one-year-old bombardier from Brooklyn, whose B-25 bomber group moved to Corsica with new airplanes in April after being violently evicted from Vesuvius airfield by the volcano’s eruption. Lieutenant Joseph Heller would fly sixty sorties over Italy and southern France, refracting his experiences through the story of an iconic B-25 bombardier named John Yossarian in the greatest novel to emerge from the war, Catch-22.
“They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation,” Heller later wrote in a memoir. “They were trying to kill me…. I began crossing my fingers each time we took off and saying in silence a little prayer. It was my sneaky ritual.”
Command of the Italian skies emboldened Allied airmen to aver that they could extend their dominion to the ground. An interdiction campaign that severed enemy logistical lines in central Italy would force “a German withdrawal made necessary by his inadequate supply,” Eaker wrote Hap Arnold in early April. Starving Kesselring’s armies of food, fuel, and ammunition might even make a “ground offensive unnecessary,” opening the road to Rome while saving countless lives. The campaign would be code-named STRANGLE.
Extravagant claims for airpower’s efficacy had been made before, at Messina, Salerno, and Anzio, and at Cassino, twice; Eaker had even promised Truscott that his pilots would silence Anzio Annie. STRANGLE was the boldest assertion yet “of the airmen’s claim to be able to win the land battle for the soldiers,” as W.G.F. Jackson wrote. Italy seemed an ideal laboratory for air interdiction, given the narrowness of the peninsula, the long supply lines from Germany, and the steep terrain, which canalized rail tracks through narrow defiles with many bridges and tunnels.
Much of the thinking about how best to hurt the Germans from on high had been entrusted to a South African–born anatomist and primate specialist named Solly Zuckerman, who had moved beyond studies such as The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes to consider the pernicious effect of bombs falling on human beings. A Churchill favorite whose friends before the war included Evelyn Waugh, Lillian Hellman, and the musical Gershwins, Zuckerman with his logarithms and probabilities had loomed large in AFHQ’s bombardment planning since before the invasion of Sicily. In a report endorsed by the British Air Ministry in late 1943, he posited that the best way to “isolate the battlefield” in southern Italy was through the relent
less bombardment of rail marshaling yards, especially those with big repair shops. Zuckerman’s influence had led to a keen focus in the last several months on such rail center bottlenecks in central and northern Italy.
But Zuckerman had decamped to join Eisenhower in London, and at Caserta a backlash developed against his theology. Intelligence analysts noted that since the capture of Naples more than eight thousand tons of bombs had fallen on Italian marshaling yards “without critically weakening the enemy supply position.” The Italian rail system under German control included at least four dozen major marshaling yards, and a hundred other centers with ten or more tracks; all were hard to cut and easy to either fix or circumvent. Kesselring’s divisions on the Cassino, Anzio, and Adriatic fronts needed an estimated four thousand tons of supplies each day, hauled on fifteen trains that used less than a tenth of the Italian rail capacity. Germany also had so many locomotives—63,000 in all of Europe—that it “could have afforded to discard at the end of each haul the locomotives needed for the fifteen trains,” according to Allied intelligence.
Eaker and his apostles, particularly Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, insisted that the campaign must also target bridges, defiles, and even open track across an “interdiction belt,” forcing German logisticians to rely on inefficient, fuel-guzzling trucks, which also would be attacked. Fighter-bombers and medium bombers would be well suited to pinpoint attacks on viaduct spans and the like. With approval from the Combined Chiefs, Eaker on March 19 had laid out the campaign objectives in Bombing Directive No. 2: “to reduce the enemy’s flow of supplies to a level which will make it impossible to maintain and operate his forces in central Italy.” STRANGLE began badly. On the early morning of March 22, an OSS team of fifteen uniformed American soldiers—mostly Italian-speakers from greater New York—paddled ashore northwest of La Spezia in three rubber boats with orders to blow up a tunnel on the main rail line from Genoa, which Eaker’s planes could not reach. The mission was code-named GINNY. A pair of patrol boats that had ferried the men from Corsica returned to extract the team on two subsequent nights without success. Light signals from the beach flashed in the wrong color sequence, and aerial photos showed trains still traversing the tunnel. “Assumed lights were German trap,” the OSS reported. “Mission assumed lost.”
Lost it was. An Italian fisherman who spotted a dinghy cached in the rocks had alerted local Fascist authorities. German troops surrounded the Americans before they reached the tunnel and captured all fifteen men after a brief firefight. Under a Führer directive to exterminate all saboteurs, including those in uniform, the German corps commander, General Anton Dostler, ordered them executed. At sunrise on March 26, the men were marched to a glade near the village of Ameglia, hands lashed with wire behind their backs. On command, a firing squad cut them down; a German officer delivered the coup de grâce by pistol shot. An Ultra intercept from Kesselring’s command post to Hitler reported that American “terror troops” in Italy had been “liquidated,” but the precise fate of the GINNY team would not be known for another year. Justice, again, would take longer.
The bombing campaign proved more potent. Attacking planes swarmed across the interdiction belt, ultimately flying more than 50,000 sorties and dumping 26,000 tons of high explosives. By mid-April, twenty-seven bridges had been severed, despite spotty weather that grounded the medium bombers every other day. Some targets were pounded relentlessly, including the Florence–Rome line, which was hit at twenty-two points.
Stations, bridges, engine repair shops, and parked trains were all fair game. Fighter-bombers averaged one direct hit on a bridge span every nineteen sorties, a tenfold improvement in the accuracy of heavy bombers; they also shot up rail electrical conduits, a tactic that aggravated the shortage of German electricians. The number of cuts in Italian rail lines on any given day tripled to seventy-five. By mid-April, all tracks to Rome were blocked, and trains often halted in Florence so supplies could be unloaded and trucked south. Fuel drums necessarily replaced tanker cars, but drums ran short. Troop movements slowed, timetables unraveled; on occasion, enemy victualers were forced to choose between hauling food or hauling ammunition.
Kesselring in early April ordered supply columns to move only in darkness, which, as the days grew longer, made it impossible to complete a round-trip in a single night. Some expeditions from Florence to Perugia—barely two hundred miles round-trip—took nearly a week. Italian drivers proved “distressingly unreliable” under fire, despite the opening of a convoy school to improve night-driving skills. “The difficulties seemed to pile up,” a German transportation officer later acknowledged.
Yet they did not pile up high enough. With that maddening blend of dexterity and purpose that so characterized German warmaking in Italy, the Wehrmacht simply made do. Traffic slowed but never stopped. Coastal lighters and dray carts supplemented a fleet of twelve thousand trucks. Several rail engineer companies arrived from France to mend tracks and bridges. For every boxcar destroyed, ten replaced it: the Germans owned two million in Europe. Extravagant camouflage, such as the threading of new bridge spans across the Po River through the wreckage of the old, made targets harder to find. Kesselring’s ammunition and fuel stocks remained steady. “The supply situation,” said General Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy in the Berlin high command, “could be viewed satisfactorily as a whole.” STRANGLE “achieved nothing more than nuisance value,” the official U.S. Army history later concluded. That was unduly dismissive; the campaign complicated Kesselring’s life and eroded his ability to resist a sustained ground offensive. Rail traffic in central Italy grew sclerotic. But even true-blue aviators voiced disappointment. Airpower “cannot absolutely isolate the battlefield from enemy supply or reinforcement,” Eaker’s British deputy, Air Marshal John C. Slessor, wrote in late spring. Nor could bombardment “by itself defeat a highly organized and disciplined army, even when that army is virtually without air support.”
The most succinct appraisal came from General Norstad in a seven-word sentence that foreshadowed the terrestrial fight to the death now required of a million men along the Gustav Line.
“The enemy,” Norstad said, “was not forced to withdraw.”
“You Are All Brave. You Are All Gentlemen”
SPRING crept up the Italian boot, gaudy and fecund. Green wheat emerged in April, as it had for millennia in war and in peace. Hawks wheeled on the thermals in the perfect blue sky, and flowers enameled the fields: buttercups, primroses, massed violets. The leggy poplars leafed out, along with wild quince and hawthorn. Rivers danced across the black rocks to the sea. Pink and white blossoms stippled the almond trees, the delicate scent mingling with the cruder whiff of charred villages.
Herders tended their white, sloe-eyed cattle and goats collared with clanking bells. Children with big mallets trailed the ox-team plows, breaking up dirt clods in the furrows. Wires were restrung in ruined vineyards to tease out new tendrils. “I have been in Italy so long I feel like a Dago, probably look like one too,” a soldier in the 45th Division wrote home. “We speak about half Dago and about half English now, with a lot of Army slang thrown in.” Shell craters floored Purple Heart Valley; after a rain shower they glistened in the sun like scattered coins. In a letter to a friend in California, a sergeant in the 141st Infantry described “a field of blood red poppies…. It makes one fill up inside and wish to cry.” As for comrades gone west, he added, “There are so many of them sleeping under the sod, waiting for us, the living, to pick up and carry on the torch of liberty and freedom…. Life over here boils down to the simple essentials. No frills, decorations, or frivolities.”
Only at Cassino did spring seem hesitant, as if repelled. Where acacia and olives should have silvered the hillsides, blackened stumps climbed the slopes toward the abbey, now dubbed Golgotha by a British padre. In the flats below, a patina of powdered stone whitened the drifted rubble with a spectral pallor. “If ever there was a dead town, this is it,” the ambulance driver John G. Wright observed.
“Shelled down to bedrock, for acres.” Even with a telescope from the shaley brow of Monte Trocchio the town looked empty—“Ghost Village,” some Tommies called it. The great trunk road of Highway 6 had been crimped to a goat path, littered with helmets and discarded bandoliers. Wayside graves dotted the landscape, usually in expedient clusters of three or four, but many corpses lay where they had fallen. “I realized I was smelling my own kind,” the rifleman Alex Bowlby later wrote. “The unseen, unconsecrated dead assumed a most terrifying power.”
Yet in Cassino the living were also unseen and surely unconsecrated. Fifteen hundred soldiers—half German, half British—inhabited the rubble. Neither STRANGLE nor any other Allied gambit had persuaded General von Senger’s paratroopers to withdraw a single centimeter. They still held both the high ground and various Cassino strongpoints, including the Hotel Continental and the Hotel des Roses. Freyberg’s Kiwis in early April had yielded to the 1st Guards Brigade, who occupied a wide crescent from the jail in the north to the rail station in the south.
Each evening Guardsmen porters smoked a last cigarette in the lee of Trocchio, then removed their wristwatches to avoid fatal glints in the moonlight and shouldered knotted sandbags stuffed with another day’s provisions: food, ammo, mail, periscopes, rat poison, wire screening to thwart enemy grenades, quicklime to unstink the dead. Most wore gym shoes, or wrapped their boots in burlap sacking to muffle the footfall. The final stretch from Shit Corner into town—the Mad Mile—was navigated both by familiar landmarks, such as the dead American nurse unaccountably pinned beneath a bridge girder, and by “smell marks,” like the ripe mule at one intersection. Sometimes an enemy gunner, Spandau Joe, opened fire on the crepuscular column, raking Highway 6 with bullets that caromed off the roadbed like sparks shed from a grindstone. The porters scuttled forward and dropped their loads, then hurried back to Trocchio to lay up until the next night. One Royal Artillery lieutenant who made frequent runs into Cassino found it “increasingly difficult to speak without a fairly serious stammer.”
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 162