The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  All through the night the fighting raged, with rifle butts and tank fire. Polish troops low on ammunition threw stones and sang their national anthem. German paratrooper units were reduced to “oddments,” some battalions having fewer than one hundred men. “Impossible to get wounded away,” a German major in the 3rd Parachute Regiment wrote in his diary. “Great number of dead on the slopes—stench—no water—no sleep for three nights—amputations being carried out at battle headquarters.”

  In danger of encirclement from the north and west, German defenders began slipping away—although only after Kesselring personally ordered the recalcitrant General Heidrich to fall back to the Hitler Line: the 1st Parachute Division had become as possessive of Cassino as a jealous husband of his bride. Across the hill in Cassino town, British loudspeakers blared, “To fight on is senseless…. Cassino is lost to Germany.” From the Baron’s Palace and the Continental Hotel, shadows darted up over Hangman’s Hill. Fearful of vengeful Poles, a few surrendered by walking hands-high to the Crypt or up Highway 6, where the British 78th Division bagged eighty paratroopers creeping to the rear. By three A.M. on May 18, the town was empty of living Germans.

  The struggle for the high ground behind the abbey ended with the dawn. At seven A.M., Point 593 finally fell for good. Two hours later a Polish lieutenant from the 12th Podolski Lancers led a six-man patrol up a slope carpeted with poppies and corpses, among them Poles and Germans wrapped in death embraces. Across the ruined parking lot the Lancers scuffed, past charred debris and a cracked church bell. A sergeant climbed on his comrades’ shoulders to scale the broken wall, then helped hoist the rest inside. Fresco fragments and shards of marble statuary crunched beneath their boots. They found two German orderlies attending sixteen badly wounded paratroopers, including several lying in St. Benedict’s candlelit crypt.

  Just before ten A.M. the lancers’ regimental pennant, fashioned from a Red Cross flag and a blue handkerchief, rose on a staff above Monte Cassino’s western wall. A bugler played the “HejnaMariacki,” a medieval military call once used to signal the opening of Kraków’s gates. Then the red-and-white Polish flag rose against the midday sky. Anders’s soldiers wept.

  At 11:30 A.M. British signalers broadcast a single code word—WYE—to proclaim Cassino’s fall. Leese arrived for tea in the Crypt, then toasted Anders with champagne. Polish casualties for the week exceeded 3,700, including 860 killed; 900 unburied German dead were counted. Alexander cabled Churchill: “Capture of Cassino means a great deal to me and both my armies.”

  For the first time in five months, men in the town stood erect during daylight. They discovered roses blooming near the jail and an undamaged statue of the Virgin in a stand of splintered trees; a panzer was found parked in the Continental lobby. Grenadier Guardsmen emerged from Jane, Helen, Mary, and other dank hovels, then marched from the town toward Shit Corner for a respite. Some 2,500 British and South African engineers stood ready to clear Highway 6 only to find the drifted rubble so dense that just a few hundred could get close to the roadbed; to bulldoze a one-mile stretch would take fifty-two hours.

  In the abbey itself, further investigation brought further horrors: children killed in the February bombing; the bones of a nineteenth-century cardinal, robbed of his ring and pectoral cross, dumped in a garden tub; corpses tucked into large drawers used to store vestments. “The whole effect,” one Venus Fixer reported, “is like that of a Mesopotamian tell.” Polish, British, and Indian soldiers wandered about, scribbling graffiti and collecting souvenirs, including a carved angel’s head yanked from a choir stall. Among German sketches found in the rubble was a portrait of Frau Göring and a river scene titled “On the Lovely Banks of the Rhine.” A skillful cartoonist had also drawn a cigar-smoking Churchill standing on the Cassino plain while a German paratrooper straddled the abbey ruins. The caption read “Denk’ste”—“Think it over.”

  A solitary American fighter pilot flew low over the abbey and tossed a bouquet of roses from the cockpit. Gun flashes limned the northern horizon, a reminder that for most the war had moved on. “Don’t expect normal letters from me because I won’t be normal for some time,” Lance Corporal Walter Robson of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment wrote his wife on May 18.

  “We’ve been Stuka’d, mortared, shelled, machine-gunned, sniped, and although we’ve taken Cassino, the monastery, none of us feel any elation,” Robson added. “The losses sadden and frighten us…. When, when, when is this insanity going to stop?”

  General von Senger, freshly bemedaled, had returned from his month’s leave on May 17 to find Vietinghoff, the bombed-out Tenth Army commander, squatting in his command post near Frosinone, thirty miles up the valley from Cassino. Senger also found the Gustav Line ruptured, his XIV Panzer Corps bisected, and German intelligence uncertain where on the Petrella Massif the French irregulars had gone. Vietinghoff pronounced the XIV Corps predicament “frightful.” “For the first time in nine months the corps had been breached,” Senger later wrote. Moreover, the Hitler Line had been assigned a new name to forestall embarrassment to the Führer in the event that it too failed: the Senger Line.

  That line by any name must be held, particularly the seventeen-mile western stretch from Terracina on the Tyrrhenian coast to the hill town of Pico, where the Auruncis spilled into the Liri Valley. Here Fifth Army with its phantom goumiers now posed the greatest threat. “It was left to me,” Senger added, “to prevent the annihilation of the corps.”

  The task was formidable. Longer days and better weather made the German rear ever more vulnerable to enemy aircraft, including the little spotter planes that adjusted Allied long-range artillery. “Constant, unremitting Allied fighter-bomber activity makes movement or troop deployment almost impossible,” the Tenth Army war diary reported on May 18. So many horses had been killed that equipment had to be manhandled to the rear or abandoned. The fifty-nine German battalions on the southern front now averaged under 250 soldiers each; the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, stalwarts of Troina and other southern battlegrounds, on May 20 reported only 405 men fit to fight.

  Italian supply-truck drivers were now deserting en bloc despite mass executions for “cowardice in the face of the enemy”; round-trip convoys to northern Italy sometimes took up to three weeks. Artillery barrages severed phone lines, forcing German commanders to use radios, which were vulnerable to eavesdropping and to finicky reception in the mountains. “I demand a clear picture,” Kesselring told Tenth Army in a peevish message, but there was no clear picture to be had: even Ultra cryptologists were baffled by the babel from German units.

  In truth, Kesselring had been outgeneraled. Slow to recognize the Aurunci threat on his right, he also was slow to realize that another Allied amphibious landing was but a ruse, and slow to release his reserves. On May 14, Kesselring had dispatched the first of three strategic reserve divisions, the 26th Panzer, but the seventy-mile journey from the outskirts of Rome took so long that the unit’s tanks could not fight cohesively until May 19, too late to caulk the Gustav Line. On that day, Kesselring also ordered Fourteenth Army to transfer the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division—defender of San Pietro six months earlier—from the Anzio beachhead to Tenth Army’s right wing. Petulant delays by General von Mackensen, the Fourteenth Army commander, further damaged efforts to tighten the Hitler Line, as the Allies continued to call it. Mobile divisions such as the 15th and 90th Panzer Grenadiers were broken into penny packets, with battalions scattered about and eventually defeated in detail. The Führer was even forced to strip the equivalent of three divisions from Hungary, Croatia, and Denmark for defenses in Italy.

  As for Kesselring, he was reduced to fulminating against impudent subordinates while urging his troops to resist “the enemy’s major offensive against the cultural center of Europe.” Few found such exhortations inspiriting. “You have no idea how hard this retreat is, or how terrible,” a German reconnaissance commander wrote his wife after Cassino fell. “My heart bleeds when I look at my b
eautiful battalion…. See you soon, I hope, in better days.”

  Better days were difficult to see from either side of the firing line. A Canadian described DIADEM as a thousand individual battles erupting “like spontaneous fires exploding in a rag factory,” and the rags continued to blaze. General Leese now had three corps with some twenty thousand vehicles crammed along a six-mile front in a narrow valley flanked by high hills and admirably suited to ambush and delay. Bucolic at a distance—one Canadian described an Italian village as “a vaporous fantasy on its beehive hill, topped by a grim, crenellated tower”—the Liri proved neither pastoral nor an easy avenue to Rome. Most trees had already been reduced to flinders by bombs and artillery shells. Retreating Germans fired the ricks and farmhouses, slaughtered the cattle, and murdered more than a few civilians. “German prisoners made to clear their own minefields,” a Guards officer recorded. “Half a dozen blown to blazes.”

  A Kiwi tanker negotiating a hillside vineyard described “the Shermans pitching like destroyers in and out of the ditches that parallel every row, men sitting in front with heavy wire-cutters to hack a passage.” Brick culverts under the side roads collapsed beneath the weight of thirty-ton tanks, and traffic jams soon rivaled those that had bedeviled Eighth Army at Alamein: one brigade trying to move toward the sound of the guns took eighteen hours to travel thirteen miles. A Canadian general complained that Highway 6 was “jammed by trucks nose to arse.”

  If the Hitler Line lacked natural impediments like the Rapido River and Monte Cassino, it boasted a fortification belt half a mile wide that had been under construction by a five-thousand-man labor force since December. The “medley of fieldworks” included mines, antitank ditches, double-apron barbed wire, and nearly three thousand firing positions. Panther tank turrets, sporting a high-velocity 75mm gun that was among the war’s cruelest, had been mounted on brick plinths. An initial Eighth Army probe on May 19 ended with thirteen Canadian tanks in flames. Across the Auruncis, heavy fire also demolished five U.S. Shermans, including one named Bonnie Gay that burned so furiously that “the only trace of the crew were fillings of the teeth,” a tank battalion history recorded.

  “Head wounds are many and serious. Most occur in tank crews when tanks take a direct hit,” wrote Klaus H. Huebner, a medical officer whose 88th Division battalion aid station occupied a village bakery. “On examination their skulls feel like shattered egg shells…. Our morgue in the backyard is soon full.” In his diary Huebner added, “We are always on the bottom, and the Krauts always on top. The terrain is constantly in the enemy’s favor.”

  There was nothing for it but to soldier on. Sergeants doled out rum rations in enamel cups after breakfast and sent their men off to commit mayhem. Or to have it committed upon them. A Tommy waiting at a field hospital to have both legs amputated murmured, “I couldn’t run a race, but I’ve got plenty of fight left in me, and I’m going to live.” He died after surgery. A British captain noted the “melancholy sight of a carpenter fashioning crosses for our dead.” When an American tank commander was shot through the heart by a sniper suspected of sheltering among a clutch of surrendering Germans, a company commander ordered, “Do not take any more prisoners.”

  In fact, hordes were taken, by ferocious Poles and goumiers as well as by aroused Yanks. On average a thousand German prisoners marched into Allied cages each day, and the pathetic condition of many heartened their captors. “The older men are a weird and wonderful collection,” an interrogation report noted on May 22. “It would appear that the authorities had firmly closed their eyes to such things as a missing toe, lack of an eye, and other slight infirmities, not to mention age.” Still, the days of underestimating German obduracy were long gone. “One of my aid men brings in a wounded German,” the surgeon Huebner recorded. “He is smoking a cigarette. As he exhales, smoke pours out of the holes in his chest.”

  As the second week of the Allied offensive slid past, Alexander studied dispatches from the front with the intensity of a seer hunched over entrails. Each day he drove north from Caserta to see for himself, eyebrows and red hat floured with dust as he peered through field glasses into the middle distance. On the far left the U.S. II Corps on May 20 had captured Fondi, where Roman legions had stopped Hannibal during the First Punic War. Keyes’s legions now threatened the port of Terracina at the southern lip of the Pontine Marshes. On the far right, Leese continued to batter the valley fortifications, dumping eight hundred artillery shells per minute on German strongpoints. In the center, French gunners caught exposed panzer grenadiers near Esperia, killing so many that bulldozers were needed to shovel away the carcasses; Senger complained that his battalions were “bleeding to death.” After cutting Highway 82 the goumiers continued their uplands tramp, and Juin’s legions on May 21 seized a foothold in the vital crossroads town of Pico, provoking ferocious German counterattacks with Tiger tanks.

  From west to east the Hitler Line was crumbling. We’ve got them, Juin had exclaimed, and it seemed he might be right. Much fighting remained: the Germans—or, rather, ten thousand Italian laborers—had begun yet another string of fortifications below Rome, the Caesar Line. But Kesselring had been forced to transfer divisions from Anzio to check Allied momentum on the southern front. “The enemy has denuded the forces investing the beachhead of the bulk of their reserves,” AFHQ intelligence reported on May 22. “The risk is so great as to be surprising.”

  Here was the chance Alexander had long awaited, a chance for redemption, for exculpation, for annihilation. Seven divisions in the Beachhead Army would fall on the enemy’s flank, like a dagger in the ribs. The hour was ripe, at last.

  A Fifth Army Show

  MARK Clark shifted his command post from Caserta to Anzio on Monday, May 22, arriving at noon in a little L-5 single-engine plane with a wingspan hardly bigger than his own. At ten P.M., after a late supper in the Borghese villa, he strode through the cellar command post to a conference room, led by a beefy colonel who barked, “’Ten-shun!” Several dozen correspondents, slouching on benches beneath the naked bulbs, came to their feet in various attitudes of resentment. “Sit down, gentlemen,” Clark said. He cut the air with the flat of his hand.

  For half an hour, unhurried and precise, he explained his attack plan in detail, occasionally pointing to the enormous map tacked like a pelt to the wall behind him. The artillery would open fire in less than eight hours, a thousand guns. General Truscott’s VI Corps had grown to an army within Fifth Army: seven divisions plus Brigadier General Robert Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force. The host included the U.S. 36th Infantry Division, which had secretly arrived by sea over the last four days as part of General Alex’s plan “to dribble them in unseen.” Clockwise around the beachhead perimeter, the attacking force included the British 5th and 1st Divisions on the left, then the U.S. 45th Infantry, the 1st Armored—with a regiment from the 34th Infantry—and the 3rd Infantry Divisions. The Forcemen protected the right flank, while the 36th and the bulk of the 34th remained in reserve. Opposing this juggernaut, Mackensen’s Fourteenth Army comprised five and a half divisions.

  Under Operation BUFFALO, “the main impetus of our attack” would be to seize Cisterna, Clark continued, no easy task since the town had been heavily fortified after the Rangers’ disastrous assault in January. The spearhead would then stab northeast through Cori to cut Highway 6 at Valmontone, “with the ultimate objective of destroying as many Germans as possible.” He intended to “bottle up the main body of the German army from the Cassino front,” Clark said. The attack did not “have as its purpose to capture Rome,” but he intended to keep “a flexible mind.” After a glance at the map he seemed to correct himself. “We’re going to take Rome,” he said.

  As the correspondents shuffled from the cellar, staff officers confided that the press could assure the public that General Clark was “in personal command.” To drive home the point, Clark radioed Gruenther at Caserta. “There is no restriction placed on [disclosing] my whereabouts,” he advised
his chief of staff. “You tear anybody to pieces who attempts to change this.” Moreover, Gruenther was to ensure that any communiqué announcing the attack “is properly worded and that it is a Fifth Army show. I do not want the first announcement of this to come out to the effect that Alexander’s troops have attacked from the bridgehead.”

  If Clark had disclosed much of his plan, he also kept much to himself. Internecine bickering over the timing and direction of the attack had only intensified. Alexander remained adamant that once the Beachhead Army stood athwart Highway 6 at Valmontone, “fast, mobile patrols” could cut other German escape routes to the east. Clark just as vigorously insisted that trapping Tenth Army “couldn’t be done”; he also noted that under BUFFALO the enemy would still occupy the Colli Laziali, with the usual high-ground advantages.

  A face-to-face meeting at Caserta on May 20 had failed to resolve their differences. Alexander ordered the beachhead attack for the night of May 21, evidently on the misapprehension that the Hitler Line had been breached by Eighth Army at Aquino. When Clark protested, Alexander agreed to hang fire until the morning of the twenty-third; he also would simultaneously renew Leese’s attack in the Liri Valley, while hoping to “conserve losses” in the battle-weary Eighth Army.

  Clark suspected double-dealing. “I am convinced that Eighth Army will hold their attack and let the French carry the ball for them as they have done so far in this battle,” he told his diary. “All their actions are always dictated by their desire to save manpower and let someone else do it.”

  Precisely what Clark intended may not have been evident even to him. Later he would acknowledge telling himself, “Hell, we shouldn’t even be thinking about Rome. All we should be thinking about is killing Germans.” Capturing the capital would be glorious to be sure, an honor “we felt that we more than deserved.” Still, orders were orders, and Alexander’s were explicit. Clark had radioed Truscott before leaving Caserta: “Operation BUFFALO will be launched at 0630 hours on May 23rd.”