The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  British troops on the left flank managed to cross the Moletta River, but on a twenty-five-mile front from Artena to the sea Truscott rued that his offensive had been “halted at every point.” VI Corps intelligence now calculated that thirty German battalions held the Alban Hills and the Valmontone gap, a sharp increase from earlier estimates. Kesselring, fighting to save his armies rather than to keep Rome, had in truth been pummeled: in a report to Berlin he put his losses during DIADEM at 25,000 men or more already, along with 2,500 machine guns, 248 tanks, and nearly 300 guns. Many vehicles not blown apart were immobile for want of tires and spare parts.

  Still, he held the high ground and he held the capital. A reproachful Clark phoned Truscott and his division commanders, then told reporters that “this attack does not have Rome as its primary objective.” In his war diary, however, he yet again fretted that “the British have their eye on Rome, notwithstanding Alexander’s constant assurance to me.” To Renie he wrote:

  We are in as desperate a battle as Fifth Army has ever been in. If it were only the battle I had to worry about and not many other matters, it would be easy, but I am harassed at every turn on every conceivable subject—political, personal and many others…. I pray for early results.

  Perhaps the most plaintive cry came from Peter Tompkins, the OSS chief still awaiting deliverance in his Roman hideout. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed,” Tompkins told his diary. “The offensive has bogged down.”

  The Cuckoo’s Song

  IT had bogged in the south, too, despite a final shattering of the Hitler Line that cost the Canadian 1st Infantry Division nearly nine hundred casualties on May 23 alone. So intense was the carnage that a private from Calgary reflected, “I just don’t know how I lived.” A Canadian major, wounded four times, calmed his men by singing “Alouette” as bullets hummed counterpoint overhead. Survivors buried the dead, after gathering pay books and identity disks, and engineers mass-produced white wooden crosses. “Bodies keep coming in,” an exhausted chaplain wrote on May 25. “I go to bed but not to sleep.” Staggered by losses in his regiment, the commander of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry told another officer, “Those were fine boys. They are gone. I haven’t anybody left. They are all gone.”

  Eighth Army had long “lacked the instinct to finish off a maimed foe,” as one British historian later observed, beginning with the elusive Rommel at Alamein. Now Leese demonstrated the same incapacity. As Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army staggered back up the Liri Valley and abutting hills, Leese insisted on further wedging two corps abreast—the I Canadian on the left, the British XIII on the right—into a narrow funnel that boasted a single decent road, Highway 6. He imprudently chose an armored vanguard to lead his host through poor tank country seamed with hedges, walls, sunken lanes, and creeks in spate. With fields high and untended, and trees and vineyards in full leaf, visibility often dropped to one hundred feet.

  “After months of static warfare and monotony, we were thrusting northwards once more,” an optimistic British diarist wrote. In truth, the pursuit turned into a ponderous stern chase, harassed at every turn by pernicious German rear guards. In six days after the Hitler Line ruptured, XIII Corps covered but eleven miles. Leese not only seemed determined to cram all 1,300 Eighth Army tanks into the valley but also, in set-piece fashion, he methodically built supply bases and trundled forward his artillery after every incremental gain. Radio failures, farm tracks made fluvial by spring rains, and fields fecund with mines added to the misery. Brute force again revealed its limits: nearly seven hundred Eighth Army guns dumped ninety-two tons of high explosives on Aquino simultaneously, pulverizing the hometown of Thomas Aquinas and the Roman satirist Juvenal. German defenders, apparently unimpressed, refused to decamp until outflanked.

  Worse yet, poor march discipline and shabby staff work led to monumental traffic congestion. “The road was hidden in dust as we edged into the northbound convoy and came to an immediate standstill,” one observer reported. A British study cautioned that “the staff must not put more traffic on a road than the road will stand.” Yet, by one authoritative tally, “inessential vehicles” accounted for more than half of Eighth Army’s total, and roads were clogged with the sort of supernumeraries who in the Crimean War had been styled “Travelling Gentlemen.” Units advanced, slowly; units withdrew, slowly; supply lorries lumbered up and back, very slowly. “Traffic criminals of every kind rejoiced,” the British official history lamented. Inching Tommies sang, “I don’t toil all day / Simply because I’m not made that way.”

  On May 28, just as Canadian engineers completed a 120-foot bridge across the Liri, the entire span broke apart and sank. The Sacco River valley beyond the Liri also proved inhospitable, with wooded ridges and a thousand ditches. On a sprightly day, touched by the spur, the army covered four miles, liberating another hilltop hamlet or two amid chortling villagers who spilled into the streets. “You are welcome!” they yelled in rehearsed English. “Kill all Germans!” Italian flags flapped from the rooftops and red-and-green Savoy bunting draped the balconies. Flowers were strewn, and local eminences presented the commanding officer with a rose and an egg.

  Canadian troops would enter Frosinone on May 31, but the advance remained “muscle-bound”—in the sorrowful phrase of the official history, which concluded that Vietinghoff was “in very little danger from Eighth Army.” Valmontone still lay twenty-five miles to the northwest. Without doubt, Clark’s failure to provide an anvil on which to flatten Tenth Army was compounded by the feebleness of Leese’s hammer.

  The lurching convoys lurched on. Every soldier listened for the stutter of machine guns or the whip-crack of sniper bullets. A Canadian soldier described finding a German marksman who had been plinked by tank fire from his perch on an evergreen bough: “When we got to him he was sitting against a tree with a cigarette going. He had one leg off and he’d taken off his belt and made a tourniquet. His sniper’s rifle had six notches in it.” The dead were buried, the living moved on, again. “It’s surprising how deep six feet is,” a British rifleman noted. “It didn’t take much to make the lot of us cry like children.”

  On Leese’s left, Juin and his FEC made better progress, notwithstanding the French commander’s distress at having his long right flank exposed by Eighth Army’s dawdling. From Pico the French had swiftly scuttled northwest along the spine of the Lipini Mountains and through contiguous valleys. General Westphal, Kesselring’s chief of staff, complained of “those damned French hanging around our necks.”

  Soon others damned them with equal vehemence. After contributing so much to Allied success in DIADEM, some colonial troops now disgraced themselves, their army, and France. Hundreds of atrocities—allegedly committed mostly by African soldiers—stained the Italian countryside in the last two weeks of May, including murders and gang rapes. “All day long our men observed them scouring the area for women,” an American chaplain wrote Clark on May 29. “Our men are sick at heart, and are commenting that they would rather shoot the Moroccan Goums than the Germans…. They say we have lost that for which we fight if this is allowed to continue.”

  Another chaplain cited specifics: a fifteen-year-old girl raped by eighteen colonial soldiers; a twenty-seven-year-old raped by three soldiers; a twenty-eight-year-old raped by five. An American artillery battalion commander described an Italian woman shot in the right ankle and raped by four Moroccans while her daughter was shot in the left foot and also raped. In Ceccano, he added, “approximately 75 women ranging in age from 13 to 75 years had been raped; one woman claimed to have been raped 17 times on the night of the 29th and 11 times on the morning of the 30th.” Another battalion commander described a three-year-old shot dead by French colonials after his mother resisted their advances. “A delegation of frenzied citizens and priests” begged GIs to post guards in Pisterzo to forestall further butchery, he reported. American soldiers “came in as crusaders to save Europe from such things,” he added. “The occurrences are seriously
affecting the morale and willingness to fight in my men.” The U.S. commander of the 13th Field Artillery Brigade, attached to the FEC, advised Clark that all thirteen of his battalion commanders could testify to similar depravities.

  Italian authorities tallied seven hundred crimes of “carnal violence” in Frosinone province alone. “All over the mountain,” a woman in Esperia reported, “you could hear the screaming.” Among many affidavits from victims was that of a sixteen-year-old girl in Lenola: “I was taken and violated four times by Moroccans. There was a 12-year-old girl with me…who suffered the same violation.” Norman Lewis, the British intelligence officer and author, investigated various allegations and found “wholesale rape” in many villages. “In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but—as there were not enough to go round—children and even old men were violated,” Lewis wrote.

  “At any hour of the day or night, men and women, old and young, are subject to acts of force of every type, which range from beatings to carnal violence, woundings to murder,” an Italian general wrote Clark on May 25. “I beg your excellency…intervene for the honor of the Allied cause.”

  Vengeful Italians occasionally retaliated, Lewis noted. Near Cancello, five colonial soldiers were reportedly poisoned, then castrated, then beheaded. Some French officers responded with what an American officer described as “a ‘so-what’ shrug,” or proposed that Italians were collecting the just deserts of making common cause with Hitler. J. Glenn Gray, a U.S. counterintelligence lieutenant with a doctorate from Columbia University, wrote that “the complaints have been taken to the French general in charge, who merely laughed and said, ‘This is war.’”

  General Juin was not laughing, although his initial crackdown lacked force. In a memorandum on May 24, Juin condemned “acts of brigandage,” and warned that “however strong our feelings may be against a nation which treacherously betrayed France, we must maintain an attitude of dignity.” As more accusatory reports flooded in, Clark dispatched Gruenther to FEC headquarters on May 27 and penned a sharp letter of rebuke to the French commander. Juin that day told his officers that the rapacious behavior had “excited indignation in Allied circles.” He demanded “punishment without mercy.” Fifteen colonial miscreants reportedly were executed—shot or hanged in village squares—and fifty-four others drew prison terms ranging from five years to life.

  In an attempt to cool goumier concupiscence, Clark approved the transport of Berber women to Italy aboard Navy LSTs; to make them less conspicuous, some were said to wear men’s uniforms. The Italian government, which kept meticulous records of Allied offenses against Italian civilians, documented more than five thousand alleged crimes by French colonials. “We suffered more during the 24 hours of contact with the Moroccans than in the eight months under the Germans,” one Italian complained. They were “savages,” a GI in the 88th Division concluded, and they “gave war and soldiers a bad name.”

  Lucian Truscott was in pain and poor humor at nine A.M. on Tuesday, May 30, when he arrived in the dilapidated dairy that served as the 36th Infantry Division headquarters in Torécchia Nuova, three miles north of Cisterna near the Via Appia. His enflamed throat tormented him again, and chest X-rays earlier that morning had revealed a cracked rib to complement the bruises he had sustained in a minor jeep accident. Every breath hurt.

  Worse yet, the attacks by his 34th, 45th, and 1st Armored Divisions had again failed to sunder the Caesar Line along the western face of the Colli Laziali. That hurt too, but Truscott—goaded by Clark—had ordered another “day of slugging,” with “hard assaults” by the three divisions, including four tank companies attacking abreast. If VI Corps could just reach the high ground beyond Lanuvio near Lake Albano, “the thing is cinch,” Truscott promised. Still, he knew that Old Ironsides was nearly spent—Harmon calculated that the division had but one day’s fight left in it—and other units were almost as frayed.

  The usual camp smells of canvas and stale coffee mingled with a sharp bovine odor in the command post, where staff officers milled about in the abandoned barn stalls. Truscott hardly knew the 36th Division, which had arrived in Anzio just a week earlier, yet he was wary of his fellow Texans, whose travails at Salerno, San Pietro, and the Rapido had earned the unit a hard-luck reputation. Truscott had hoped to give the three infantry regiments an easy assignment to avoid “a crushing blow to their morale”; but four days of brutal combat quashed such sensibilities, and he had ordered the 36th to prepare today for an imminent attack into the line.

  To the stocky officer at Truscott’s elbow, squinting at the large map of the Colli Laziali, it all seemed too familiar: another frontal assault, not unlike the one he had been ordered to make at the Rapido. “You can’t always trust the higher command,” Major General Fred Walker had told his diary a few days earlier. “You have to watch them all the time to keep from being imposed upon.” In his bunk late at night, Walker had been reading Lee’s Lieutenants, the vivid group portrait of Civil War generals by Douglas Southall Freeman. When Walker studied the blue icons on the map showing VI Corps dispositions, he could only wonder: was this how Lee would have fought the battle?

  In the five months since leaving hundreds of his soldiers to rot in the Rapido bottoms, Walker had struggled to keep his equilibrium. He had expected Clark to sack him, as so many other staff officers and subordinate commanders in the 36th had been sacked. “I am fed up with the whole damn mess,” he told Geoff Keyes, who replied, “The fact that you are commanding a National Guard division means you have two strikes against you from the start.” Yet here he was, still the Army’s oldest division commander in the field; still concealing the headaches, tachycardia, and arthritis that plagued him; still doing his duty. The division had been pulled from the Cassino line in late February for several months of refitting and mountain training near Avellino. “Walker seems a new man—full of enthusiasm and optimism,” Keyes wrote in late spring.

  Now the new man was determined to find an alternative to bludgeoning an entrenched enemy who held the high ground. On the far right of the VI Corps line, two miles east of Velletri and Highway 7, patrols on Saturday had reported “an old shrubbery-covered cart path” up a steep ridge called Monte Artemisio. No enemy fieldworks or outposts could be seen. Walker scouted the area from a Piper Grasshopper on Sunday afternoon, then, late in the day, sat in a thicket below the heights, studying the terrain with the eye of the mining engineer he had once been.

  “I didn’t sleep much last night,” Walker told his diary on Monday. “I worked out a plan in my head to take Velletri from the rear.” Artemisio formed the southern rim of an ancient volcanic crater; rising three thousand feet behind Velletri, it extended four miles from southwest to northeast as the lower lip of the Colli Laziali. Ancient fingers of lava reached into the flats, now alight with the green fire of grapevines and young wheat. To the left, where Highway 7 swung west around lakes Nemi and Albano, Velletri clung to the lower slope like a lichen to a rock. “It looks to me,” Walker wrote, “like this is the place to break through.”

  Truscott disagreed, brushing aside the notion as impractical when Walker on Sunday night first suggested he had found “a soft spot.” But now in the malodorous dairy Walker restated his case with urgent conviction. Maps and his own reconnaissance showed that the faint ditch-and-washline up Artemisio’s face was in fact an old logging road through the chestnut brakes. Aerial photos also revealed a two-mile gap between the left flank of I Parachute Corps and the right flank of LXXVI Panzer Corps. If two regiments crossed the Velletri–Valmontone road in the dead of night and followed the trace uphill, they could seize the heights above Highway 7 to outflank the Caesar Line and occupy the Colli Laziali. The Vatican stood just fifteen miles from Lake Albano.

  “You may have something here,” Truscott said. But a few thousand riflemen would not suffice, even on the high ground. Tanks and artillery would be needed to repel German counterattacks. Walker summoned his division engineer, Colonel Oran C.
Stovall, a self-described “pick-and-shovel boy,” who for three days had also been poring over maps and skulking through the woods. Stovall believed the soil across the Colli Laziali was volcanic and readily sculpted: bulldozers could widen the old scar into a military road, allowing armor and heavy weapons to “shoot up over Monte Artemisio and down the other side.”

  “I’ll call you back within the hour,” Truscott said, and rattled off to Conca in his jeep, his sore ribs momentarily forgotten. At eleven A.M., he phoned Walker. The VI Corps engineer adamantly opposed the scheme as harebrained, but Truscott was ready to gamble. He would also put an entire engineer regiment under Walker’s command. Before ringing off he added in a low growl, “And you had better get through.”

  Walker summoned his own lieutenants to the dairy at three P.M. and laid out his plan. The 141st Infantry Regiment would attack Velletri to fix the German garrison while the 142nd and 143rd crept up Artemisio, engineers on their heels, after moving by truck to the woods below the Velletri–Valmontone road. The supply line would stretch for eight miles through rugged terrain, but the division’s flinty experience in fighting at night in the high country on Monte Sammucro last December should serve it well.

  “We are taking chances,” Walker told his diary as his commanders pelted back to their units, “but we should succeed in a big way.”

  Across the Colli Laziali, Albert Kesselring was alive to his peril. In a visit to the front on Monday afternoon, the field marshal recognized that a gap persisted between the parachute and the panzer corps, and he ordered General Mackensen to suture it. Wilhelm Schmalz, the Hermann Göring commander, had also warned of “lively scouting” by American patrols east of Velletri. Schmalz sent his last reserve, an engineer platoon, into the wild uplands on Monte Artemisio. He repeatedly asked Mackensen’s headquarters to compel the 362nd Infantry Division—now holding the western rim of the Colli Laziali—to send a detachment to literally shake hands with Schmalz’s platoon, sealing the seam.