The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Yet he had also sent the corps commander a private message. As the attack unspooled, Truscott should be prepared to consider “an alternative plan,” Clark wrote. “Regrouping would take place and [a] new attack launched northwest from Cisterna area.” Rather than slashing east toward Valmontone, most of the Beachhead Army could swing west of the Colli Laziali on the shortest route to Rome, the “great prize.” As Clark had told the reporters, a good commander should always keep a flexible mind.

  Smoke generators fogged the front from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Mussolini Canal. Third Division soldiers, who would carry the main attack against Cisterna, had marched forward from their wooded bivouacs, battalion by battalion tramping past a brass band that crashed through the division anthem as it had when they embarked for Anzio four months earlier:

  I’m just a dog-face soldier with a rifle on my shoulder

  And I eat a Kraut for breakfast every day.

  Light rain had fallen earlier in the evening, but the skies cleared in the small hours. Stars twinkled through the artificial haze before a gray overcast louver again slid over the beachhead from the sea. Soldiers fumbled for a final time with their web gear; many carried lengths of parachute cord, said to make superior tourniquets. A nineteen-year-old sergeant in the 15th Infantry, after receiving no mail from home for six weeks, had been handed forty letters by the company clerk late Monday night; he tucked the envelopes into his combat pack, wondering if he would live long enough to open them. From the radio in a 1st Armored Division tank drifted the improbable strains of Oklahoma! As dawn’s apricot glow brightened the eastern sky, an Old Ironsides lieutenant read aloud from Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, then exclaimed, “There’s nothing ever new in war!”

  Expectation, anxiety, release—all fluttered across the front like bats looking to roost. Clark had snatched a few hours’ rest on a metal cot; to escape the damp air of the Borghese cellar, he slept upstairs in a high-ceilinged salon with gilded chandeliers and enormous oils on the walls. After rising at four A.M. and wolfing down breakfast, he climbed into his jeep for the drive from Nettuno to the front. At 5:30, just as the sun started to peep over the horizon, he joined Truscott in a camouflaged observation post at Conca, where in January they had watched in misery as Darby’s Rangers and the 3rd Division were impaled on Cisterna’s defenses. Neither man said much, each lost in his thoughts.

  With a thunderous roar the barrage opened precisely at 5:45 A.M.: howitzers, mortars, tanks—every tube with a powder charge. “They can hear this in Rome, maybe,” one soldier shouted. Shock waves from the cannonade shimmered across the sky like heat rising off blacktop. Clouds of dust blanketed the battlefield, brilliantly lighted from within by bursting shells. Sixty fighter-bombers swept across the front, leaving charred, battered Cisterna more charred and more battered.

  Then, at 6:30, the riflemen spilled over the top, no longer singing, fury in their eyes, and fear too, the deep roar of artillery now punctuated with the pop! pop! pop! of rifle fire and the keening of a thousand machine guns. On a five-mile front, three regiments abreast, the 3rd Division threw itself against four German battalions entrenched in platoon-sized redoubts around Cisterna, three to five hundred yards apart, each encrusted with mines, barbed wire, and automatic weapons. A half mile east of Isola Bella, hard by the Rangers’ last-stand field, Company L from the 15th Infantry quickly lost 140 of 180 men. “The man in front of me was struck by a bullet,” a sergeant in I Company wrote. “I rolled him over and saw his eyes were pulled up and set.”

  Farther east, Company K of the 30th Infantry reported a dozen men left standing; German fire swept the fields like a sickle, leaving both the dead and the cut grass in windrows. On the right, Company E of the 15th fixed bayonets and in a shrieking charge swarmed through a woody grove, killing fifteen Germans and capturing eighty. Still, the line had hardly gained a quarter mile. “It is going too slow,” Major General O’Daniel, the division commander, complained at eight A.M. “Throw everything you have at them.” Jack Toffey and the 7th Infantry had been given the hardest nut to crack, in the center of the assault, but when a staff officer reported that two lead companies were pinned down, O’Daniel replied, “We have no such words in our vocabulary now.”

  Just past noon, five more Sherman tanks trundled into the fight, each towing an O’Daniel brainstorm: “battle sleds,” fabricated in great secrecy from torpedo tubes sawed in half lengthwise, with steel runners welded to the bottom. Eight feet long, two feet wide, and just deep enough to carry a prostrate, nervous soldier, the sleds were joined end to end, six to a train, with each tank dragging two trains. Ditches and mines proved their undoing. Hardly had sixty sleds slid onto the stage than they could slide no farther; the riders spilled out, grateful to take their chances dismounted.

  Yard by bloody yard, the advance drew nearer Cisterna. By day’s end, beneath spattering rain, 3rd Division soldiers would close within six hundred yards of the town, and a mile nearer Rome than they had been at dawn. But none had severed Highway 7 or the parallel rail embankment, and casualties had been outlandish: one thousand killed, wounded, or missing, the division’s most sanguinary day during World War II thus far, and among the costliest for any U.S. Army division on any day in the war. Damaged boys outnumbered the litter bearers available to carry them away. Seeing carnage all about, a young private lamented, “Must I be knocked off before I have had a woman?”

  Truscott’s flanks found hard fighting as well. On the right, Frederick’s Forcemen scampered across Highway 7 below Cisterna only to retreat pell-mell under lashing fire from Tigers seemingly impervious to antitank rounds. “All hell has broken through up here,” a staff officer radioed Truscott. “The Germans have unleashed everything.” On the far left, British troops held their ground but no more in an attack designed mostly as a diversion. The 45th Division waded through thigh-high wheat, sidestepping skeletons in moldering field gray, until machine-gun cross fire sent the men to ground. German gunners traced the trails carved through the grain by low-crawling GIs, and the dull thud of bullets hitting home carried across the golden fields. A counterattack by more than a dozen Tigers flayed one battalion caught in the open and chewed into another before artillery fire shooed them off.

  By nightfall the 45th reported 458 casualties and aid stations were so taxed that wounded soldiers were forced to share cots. “The fellow in the bed next to me had been hit in the back with shrapnel and kept begging the doctors to let him die,” one artilleryman later recalled. A captain who had stepped on a mine studied the stump where his foot had been and reflected, “That’s the one that was always getting cold anyway.”

  The day’s last best hope fell to the 1st Armored Division, attacking with 232 tanks on a three-mile front east of Cisterna. “Whether or not we can get our tanks through remains a question. I expect to lose heavily,” Ernie Harmon had written a friend a week earlier. Those losses, he warned, could include one hundred tanks in the first half hour. Harmon’s dark mood hardly brightened when his right wing—Combat Command B—blundered into a poorly marked American minefield sown during the winter’s fighting. Thirty Shermans soon sat immobilized with fractured tracks and broken bogey wheels less than a quarter mile from the start line.

  On the left, however, Combat Command A used another battlefield invention to excellent effect. Before dawn, tanks had shoved into no-man’s-land a pair of four-hundred-foot “snakes”—four-inch pipe packed with several tons of explosives. While puzzled German pickets shook tin cans filled with rocks to sound the alarm, a burst of machine-gun fire detonated the pipes with “an appalling violence” that carved a smoldering channel twenty-five feet wide through the minefield. Two more snakes extended the corridor and Harmon’s tanks poured into the gap like floodwaters through a ruptured dike. Riflemen from the 135th Infantry clung to the Sherman hulls then leaped clear to round up prisoners and slaughter the diehards.

  By one P.M. U.S. tanks had crossed the cinder brow of the rail embankment, provoking
a frantic flapping of white flags, and an infantry battalion held the high ground five hundred yards to the north. Combat Command B—which had eschewed the snakes for fear that a premature detonation would alert enemy defenders—belatedly blew its own gap and sallied within main gun range of Highway 7 before laagering for the night. Infantrymen slept on their arms behind sandbags hauled forward on the tanks.

  The day had cost Harmon eighty-six tanks and tank destroyers, most of them crippled by American mines. He quickly made good the wastage from his reserves. Other losses were harder to fix. Fifth Army casualties for this Tuesday totaled almost two thousand, the highest single-day tally in the Italian campaign, with 334 killed in action: a life snuffed out every four minutes. By midnight the olive-drab crescent of men struggling to break free of the beachhead was dyed black with blood.

  Yet across the front fifteen hundred enemy prisoners had been taken, and Cisterna was in danger of envelopment from the northeast. The German 362nd Division had lost half its combat strength, two regiments from the 715th Division were hurt almost as grievously, and the 94th Division—shifted to beachhead defense after a drubbing in the Auruncis—reported only two hundred fighters left. In a phone call at eight P.M. on Tuesday, Kesselring told Vietinghoff, “Things do not look good on Mackensen’s front. Keep this to yourself.”

  In his own late-night dispatch to Clark, who had returned to the Borghese cellars, Truscott pared the news to ten words: “All attacks jumped off on schedule. Attack meeting moderate resistance.”

  By Wednesday afternoon, May 24, that resistance was crumbling. Harmon’s tanks looped behind Cisterna from the east, fighting off the field-gray wraiths who popped from laurel thickets to shoot the passing Shermans in the rear grills. American artillery smashed German counterattacks on the flanks, but shells also fell on friendly infantrymen again and again. By nightfall O’Daniel and Harmon had nearly completed a double envelopment of Cisterna, bagging another 850 prisoners. Germans “scatter like frightened quail,” wrote Audie Murphy. “As if we were shooting skeets, we pick them off.” A mile-long stretch of Highway 7 had been cut north of town, along with three miles to the south, and a reconnaissance battalion rambled to within four miles of Velletri on the southern lip of the Colli Laziale. The VI Corps main force stood just thirteen miles from Highway 6. “I could get into Valmontone tonight if I was sure of my left,” Harmon told Truscott.

  Thursday morning was better yet. Charles Ryder’s 34th Division widened the purchase on Highway 7 to five miles on the left, flushing more quail into the sights of homicidal fighter planes. “The carnage was extreme,” one account noted; the kills included fifteen Tigers. Over one hundred .50-caliber machine guns poured scorching fire into Cisterna, now said to surpass even Cassino as the most devastated town in Italy. A battalion from the 7th Infantry had a foothold in Cisterna’s southwest corner by first light, and two sister regiments, the 15th and 30th, closed to within shouting distance of each other northeast of town. The noose had been cinched.

  Clark watched with pleasure as the blue grease-pencil lines on his battle map tracked the northeast surge of the Beachhead Army. In less than forty-eight hours, the front had shoved three to four miles in a salient seven miles wide. But it was the southern edge of the battlefield that held him rapt. Keyes’s II Corps had covered almost sixty miles in two weeks; combat engineers had nearly finished carving a six-mile detour through the mountains around Terracina when scouts on Wednesday morning found the seaside town abandoned except for the stinking carcasses—mule and human, as usual—lining the curbs. More patrols nosed into the Pontine Marshes and reported heavy German demolitions, although shovel-wielding Italians filled the craters almost as quickly as they were blown.

  The coastal road to the beachhead was open. Late Wednesday, in a tone that was peremptory to the point of imperial, Clark wrote Gruenther at Caserta:

  The joining up of my two Fifth Army forces will be one of the highlights of the Fifth Army’s career. It is primarily a Fifth Army matter, and I want you to tell Gen. Alexander that I want authority given me immediately to issue a simple communiqué from here as soon as II Corps troops have moved overland.

  If Alexander insisted on making the announcement himself, “you make damn sure that their communiqué is properly worded, making it a Fifth Army show.” Clark even drafted proposed language that began: “Climaxing a spectacular advance of 60 miles…” Almost as an afterthought, he noted that Truscott’s battle casualties approached 2,500. When Eric Sevareid wrote in his broadcast script that soon there would be “only one front in Italy,” a press censor in Nettuno instead proposed, “There will be one Fifth Army front in Italy.”

  At 7:30 on Thursday morning, May 25, an engineer task force from the beachhead arrived outside Borgo Grappa, a coastal village beaten into rubble twenty miles north of Terracina. On a narrow bridge spanning an irrigation canal, Captain Benjamin Harrison Sousa of Honolulu, the engineer commander, spotted Lieutenant Francis X. Buckley of Philadelphia, a II Corps cavalryman.

  “Where in hell do you think you’re going?” Sousa demanded.

  “Anzio,” Buckley replied.

  “Boy, you’ve made it.”

  The two men shook hands and sat down to share a box of candy from Buckley’s pack.

  Three hours later Clark roared up with a gaggle of two dozen correspondents piled one atop another in open jeeps. As faint battle sounds drifted south from Cisterna, gum-chewing soldiers removed their helmets and with much backslapping and exaggerated swapping of cigarettes reenacted the scene for movie cameras. In another message to Gruenther, Clark reported that the initial junction “took place this morning at 1010 hours on Anzio–Terracina road”—rewriting history by several hours.

  After 125 days Anzio’s isolation was over. The beachhead had dissolved. Clark wrote Renie:

  It may have sounded dramatic in the papers the way I rushed to witness the joining of the two forces, but it meant more to me than anything since our success at Salerno. The way some of the correspondents expressed it, it may have sounded as though I was looking for publicity. Did you get that impression? At any rate, I had to be there when the two forces joined up. It meant too much to me.

  Soon enough the day would come when “I can return home to you and pick up our happy home life where we left it off. I think I will be ready to settle down.” But before that day, Clark vowed, “We will capture Rome…. They can’t stop us now.”

  Truscott drove toward his Conca command post at midday on Thursday after a tour of the battlefront. He felt, by his own description, “rather jubilant.” His old 3rd Division was slashing through Cisterna, house by gutted house, toward a final German redoubt in the town hall, now known as the Castle. Other troops cantered toward Cori, six miles to the northeast on the western flank of the Lepini Mountains. More than 2,600 enemy prisoners had been caged.

  The 1st Armored Division continued to bull north, although steep terrain, antitank guns, and a Panther counterattack near Velletri cost Harmon seventeen more tanks. Fighting was savage and confused. More American artillery fell on American soldiers, and at least ten incidents of fratricidal air attacks would be reported on this day. “Sniper shot off the lieutenant’s elbow,” Corporal Robert M. Marsh of the 81st Armored Reconnaissance Battalion advised his diary. After the miscreant was captured, Marsh added, “Lieutenant drew his .45 pistol with his left hand and shot the sniper through the heart.” Germans who balked at surrendering were buried alive with tank dozers. Tankers found a huge wine barrel “standing on end with the top end bashed in,” Marsh noted. “They drank lots of wine until they found a dead German in it.”

  At the point of the VI Corps spear, a four-battalion force led by Colonel Hamilton H. Howze sidled through olive orchards and deserted crofts into the handsome valley between the Colli Laziali on the west and the stony Lepinis to the east. Soon enough a dozen Sherman tanks would close to within half a mile of Highway 6. “I am in a soft spot,” Howze reported. “For Pete’s sake, let the whole 1st
Amored Division come this way!” Truscott believed that sometime Friday his entire corps “would be astride the German line of withdrawal through Valmontone.”

  That agreeable vision dissolved the moment Truscott walked into his Conca war room. There, standing with five somber VI Corps colonels, was Clark’s operations officer, Brigadier General Donald W. Brann. “The boss wants you to leave the 3rd Infantry Division and the Special Force to block Highway 6, and mount that assault you discussed with him to the northwest as fast as you can,” Brann said.

  Truscott was dumbfounded. While the Forcemen and O’Daniel’s troops plowed ahead to Valmontone, most of the corps was to pivot 90 degrees to the left. That put them on the shortest path to Rome, west of the Colli Laziali, but the route angled into the most formidable segment of the Caesar Line, now manned by I Parachute Corps. Operation BUFFALO was succeeding. Why switch to the old Operation TURTLE?

  “I discussed this with General Clark several days ago,” Truscott said, “and I told him this was not to be done, in my opinion, unless there’s a significant weakening on the left. I’ve seen no sign of such weakening. I need to talk to General Clark. Where is he?”

  “He’s not at the beachhead,” Brann replied evenly. Clark had flown back to Caserta and could not be reached by phone or even radio. Truscott protested, his raspy voice thickening. This was “no time to change direction,” he told Brann. Conditions were “not right.” Untangling the current attack and swinging the 45th, 34th, 36th, and 1st Armored Divisions off in a new direction would take time. “A more complicated plan,” Truscott warned, “would be difficult to conceive.”