The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  And in the Gestapo cells beneath Via Tasso 155, prisoners cocked an ear to the distant grumble of Allied guns. In hushed whispers, eyes agleam, they debated with urgent intensity the variables of ballistics and wind direction, trying to gauge just how far away their liberators might be.

  Not far. Eleven months after the Allies first waded ashore in Sicily, the titanic battles between army groups that characterized the Italian campaign now subsided into niggling suburban gunfights between small bands of pursuers and pursued. Seventeen major bridges spanned the Tiber along an eight-mile stretch, linking eastern Rome not only to Vatican City and the capital’s west bank but also to the highways vital to Fifth Army’s pursuit up the peninsula to the northwest. Flying columns of tanks, engineers, and infantrymen began to coalesce with orders to thrust through the city and secure the crossings.

  “Looks as if the Boche is pulling out, and [Truscott] wants you to get up there and seize the crossings over the Tiber as fast as you can,” Carleton told Ernie Harmon early Saturday afternoon. “Make all the speed you can.” A few hundred feet above Highway 6, Keyes from his observation plane dropped a penciled message to the armored task force led by Colonel Howze: “Get those tanks moving!” Howze put the spurs to his men, only to blunder into yet another chain of ambushes. “In a few minutes the lead tank would stop and burst into flames,” Howze later wrote, forcing the cavalcade to idle until the enemy blockages could be outflanked and routed.

  Such petty inconveniences hardly diminished the swelling euphoria. “The command post has gone to hell,” Gruenther radioed Clark from Caserta at 4:15 P.M. on Saturday. “No one is doing any work here this afternoon. All semblance of discipline has broken down.” According to II Corps intelligence reports, Germans were withdrawing “in such confusion and speed that their retreat has assumed proportions of a rout.” Clark sternly reminded his lieutenants to keep killing. “Your orders are to destroy the enemy facing Fifth Army,” he told the corps commanders shortly before five P.M. “Rome and the advance northward will come later.”

  Precisely who first crossed Rome’s city limits early on Sunday, June 4, would be disputed for decades. Various units claimed the honor by filing affidavits and issuing proclamations and protests. An 88th Division reconnaissance troop and Frederick’s 1st Special Service Force, which had been merged with Howze’s task force, had the strongest claims, but Clark subsequently wrote that “it is impossible to determine with certainty the unit of the Fifth Army whose elements first entered the city.” Patrols darted into the city only to be driven out by scalding gunfire. German paratroopers holding a strongpoint at Centocelle, just east of Rome, knocked out five American tanks before slipping away. On Highway 6 near Tor Pignatara, an antitank gun shattered two more Shermans, then vanished into a warren of alleys.

  Traffic jams and friendly fire, orders and counterorders, flocking journalists and even a wedding party—the bride, dressed in gray and holding a rose bouquet, tiptoed around German corpses in the roadway—threatened to turn the liberation into opera buffa. Clark left Anzio in brilliant sunshine at 8:30 A.M. with a convoy of two armored cars and six jeeps packed with more journalists. Arriving at Centocelle, he hopped from his jeep in a flurry of salutes. When Clark asked why the drive had stalled, Frederick replied, “I’m holding off the artillery because of the civilians.”

  “I wouldn’t hesitate to use it if you need to,” Clark said. “We can’t be held up here too long.”

  As he walked with Frederick and Keyes up a low hill for a better view, photographers asked the trio to pose beside a large blue and white road sign that read ROMA. Moments later a sniper’s bullet blew through the metal face with a sharp bang. Clark, Keyes, and Frederick crawled down the hill and retreated two hundred yards to a thick-walled house. There would be no triumphant entry into the Eternal City this afternoon. Clark grumbled over delays in reaching the Tiber, then drove back to Anzio. Keyes in turn told subordinates he did not want “one little gun stopping us.” He gobbled down a cold K ration and ordered another frontal assault up Highway 6 so “C could enter Rome,” as he told his diary.

  By late Sunday the rear guards had melted away but for snipers and a few stubborn strongpoints along the river. Some captured Germans proved to be boys dragooned into combat from a school for cooks and bakers; one prisoner was seized pushing a cart laden with looted chocolate bars. From the east and south, American troops streamed through the city’s outer precincts. Howze dispatched platoons with instructions typed in Italian commanding any Roman stopped on the street to lead the patrols to specific Tiber bridges. A Forceman scuttling past the Colosseum muttered, “My God, they bombed that too!” An 88th Division soldier who peeked inside said, “I was not impressed by the interior: too small, too cluttered.” Puzzled by the “S.P.Q.R.”—“Senatus Populusque Romanus”—stamped on monuments and manhole covers, a GI speculated that it stood for “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Romans”; he was crestfallen to learn that “cruelty” was not spelled with a “q.”

  Howze at twilight led a tank company toward the central rail station to find boulevards empty and windows shuttered. Then a sash flew open, a voice shrieked “Americano!,” and Romans by the thousands swept into the streets despite the occasional ping from a sniper round. Delirious citizens flung themselves onto Howze’s jeep and “kissed me until I threatened to shoot some of them,” he reported. “Vino offered in glasses, in pitchers, in bottles, and even in kegs,” the 88th Division noted. “Kisses were freely bestowed by both male and female citizens and suffered or enjoyed by the recipient accordingly.” Signoras offered plates of spaghetti and bowls of hot shaving water. Italian men with ancient rifles and red sashes clapped their liberators on the back, then stalked off in search of Germans and Fascists. Communists and Blackshirts traded potshots, and the pop of pistol fire near the Colosseum signaled another summary execution. “It still won’t be hard to be killed here,” an American officer wrote in his diary on June 4.

  Frederick set out for the Tiber shortly before ten P.M. with seven men and a radio car. Just west of the Piazza del Popolo he found the triple arches of the Ponte Regina Margherita intact in the moonlight, but a stay-behind German squad sprayed tracers across the dark river. A wild mêlée grew wilder when a confused battalion from the 88th Division blundered into the scrap and also fired on the Forcemen. Bullets struck Frederick in the knee and elbow; his driver was killed. With eight Purple Hearts by the end of the war, Bob Frederick would be described as “the most shot-at-and-hit general in American history.”

  From the Baths of Caracalla to the Quirinal, jubilation now grew full-throated—“a complete hysteria,” as the 1st Armored Division reported. Romans in nightshirts and slippers poured into the streets, braying whatever scraps of English they could recall, including one old man who repeatedly shouted, “Weekend! Weekend!” At 1:30 A.M. on Monday, June 5, both the U.S. flag and a Union Jack were raised on staffs above the Piazza Venezia. A banner draped the Pantheon: WELCOME TO THE LIBERATORS. Shrieking crowds ransacked the flower stalls below the Spanish Steps to garland those liberators or to pelt them with roses and irises. Young men sporting hammer-and-sickle armbands marched up the Corso Umberto singing “Bandiera Rossa” and other socialist anthems. Romans stormed the Regina Coeli prison to fling open the cells. Others searched the yellow house at Via Tasso 155, where the walls and floors were flecked with blood. “Brothers,” someone called into the cellar gloom, “come out.”

  Shortly before dawn, a column of nearly three hundred vehicles rolled through Porta San Giovanni carrying S-Force, a detachment of twelve hundred American and British counterintelligence and engineering specialists. As the convoy snaked down the Via delle Quattro Fontane, squads peeled away to secure telegraph offices, power plants, and pumping stations. Others rounded up Italian utility managers: Rome’s power supply had been slashed to about 20 percent of the capital’s needs, and repairs to damaged aqueducts were to begin within a day. An S-Force platoon poking through the German embassy
found various photos of Hermann Göring, an Artie Shaw record on the phonograph, and a half ton of plastic explosives, which were later stuffed in weighted sacks and tossed into the Tiber. A half dozen safes upon cracking “revealed nothing of an unusual nature.”

  “Got across thirteen bridges. Occupied them on the far side last night,” Harmon radioed Truscott at 6:30 A.M. “None destroyed…. I am the first boy on the Tiber.”

  “Go up to Genoa if you want to,” Truscott replied.

  Not yet. At seven A.M., Sergeant John Vita of Port Chester, New York, wandered through the fifteenth-century Palazzo Venezia to find himself in the Sala del Mappamondo. Mussolini’s cavernous office, clad in marble, featured a desk the size of a yacht. Stepping onto the Duce’s notorious balcony, Vita drew a crowd on the piazza below by tossing out rolls of Life Savers and declaiming, “Victory! Not for Mussolini, but for the Allies.”

  That Allied victory had cost them 44,000 casualties since DIADEM began on May 11: 18,000 Americans—among them more than 3,000 killed in action—along with 12,000 British, 9,600 French, and nearly 4,000 Poles. German casualties were estimated at 52,000, including 5,800 dead. Americans losses in less than four weeks almost equaled those sustained during seven months of fighting in North Africa. Combat in the Mediterranean had achieved an industrial scale.

  Columns of weary GIs shuffled through the city. Some carried small Italian tricolors. Others sported flowers in their helmet nets or rifle barrels. Eric Sevareid watched throngs of Italians sob with joy as they tossed blossoms at the tramping soldiers and cheered them to the echo. “I felt wonderfully good, generous, and important,” he wrote. “I was a representative of strength, decency, and success.”

  A message to the Combined Chiefs in Washington and London formally announced, “The Allies are in Rome.” How long it had taken to proclaim those five words; how much heartbreak had been required to make it so.

  In classical Rome, a triumphant general returning from his latest conquest made for the Capitoline, the lowest but most sacred of the city’s seven hills, where he sacrificed a snow-white bull in gratitude for Jove’s beneficence. His face painted with vermilion, his head crowned with laurel, and his body cloaked in a purple toga, the victor rode to the hill in a chariot drawn by four white steeds. At the foot of the slope, the trailing column of prisoners fell out to be strangled or slain with an ax in the Mamertine Prison, where the apostle Peter also would be held in chains. It was here too that Brutus, bloody dagger in hand, harangued his fellow Romans after the murder of Julius Caesar, and here that Juno’s geese were said to have gabbled in alarm when stealthy Gauls tried to scale the Capitoline ramparts. And it was amid the ruins atop the hill in October 1764 that the British historian Edward Gibbon—a plump man in “a bag-wig, a snuff-brown coat, knee breeches, and snowy ruffles,” as the travel writer H. V. Morton later described him—claimed that “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”

  Mark Clark had neither vermilion face paint nor a laurel wreath, but he possessed a sense of theater, and it was on the Capitoline that he bade his lieutenants appear for a rendezvous at ten A.M. on Monday, June 5. At 7:30 Clark flew from Nettuno by Piper Cub, landing in a wheat field outside the city where II Corps had been ordered to arrange an escort of clean tanks, trucks, and soldiers. Upon learning that it would take hours to wash the vehicles, Clark said, “Oh, the hell with that,” and bolted with his retinue up Highway 6 through the Porta Maggiore.

  Within minutes they were lost. Wandering across the blue-gray Tiber to St. Peter’s Square, Clark flagged down a priest and asked, “Where is Capitoline Hill? My name is Clark.” The cleric dragooned a boy on a bicycle to lead the convoy, bellowing “Clark! Clark!” to clear a path through the teeming streets. Arriving at the Via del Teatro Marcello at the foot of the Capitoline, Clark climbed the Cordonata ramp—designed by Michelangelo in 1536 to receive the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—and crossed the elegant Campidoglio to find the peach-hued town hall locked. He pounded on the door, but when a caretaker finally peeked out, Clark chose to linger at the porch balustrade until Truscott, Keyes, and Juin arrived to join him. Opening a map and pointing with exaggerated pantomime toward Berlin, Clark turned to the reporters and photographers now gathered on the square.

  “Well, gentlemen, I didn’t really expect to have a press conference here—I just called a little meeting of my corps commanders to discuss the situation,” he said slowly. “However, I’ll be glad to answer your questions. This is a great day for the Fifth Army.” A hundred flashbulbs popped as Clark delivered a brief victory oration—the equivalent of slaughtering a white bull—without mentioning Eighth Army or other contributors. His lieutenants flushed with discomfort, glancing self-consciously at a Movietone cameraman filming the scene. Truscott later voiced disgust at “this posturing.”

  Then it was off to a luncheon at the Hotel Excelsior, which engineers had searched for time bombs and booby traps. In starched black-and-white livery the hotel staff lined the lobby to greet the new occupiers, having said arrivederci to the Germans only a day before. Clark gave another short address from a second-floor balcony, then slipped into a suite for a private moment. Kneeling on the bedroom floor, he thanked God for victory and prayed for the souls of his men. A hand gently touched his shoulder. Clark turned to find Juin behind him. Beneath his brushy mustache, the Frenchman smiled and said, “I just did the same thing.”

  Along the Via Veneto, another happy throng gathered to huzzah their liberators. “We waded through crowds of cheering people,” Keyes told his diary. “A couple of women nearly strangled Juin much to our amusement and his embarrassment. We had a fine lunch.”

  “You have made the American people very happy,” Franklin Roosevelt cabled Clark. “It is a grand job well done.” Similar plaudits hailed what Harold Macmillan called “the expulsion of the barbarians from the most famous of all cities.” Even Stalin on June 5 cheered “the great victory of the Allied Anglo-American forces.” Churchill cast a blind eye on fraternal frictions, notwithstanding reports that some British officers were turned away from Rome at gunpoint. “Relations are admirable between our armies in every rank there,” he wrote Roosevelt in a sweet fib. “Certainly it is an absolute brotherhood.”

  Across the capital the celebration continued through Monday afternoon. The San Carlo restaurant offered GIs “the very finest cuts of horse meat.” An Army doctor wrote home of “beautiful girls wearing lipstick, silk stockings, and, for a change, also shoes. Many people weep.” At the Hotel Majestic, a porter greeted a Life magazine reporter with the Fascist salute, then apologized. “A habit of twenty years,” he explained. One soldier awoke next to an Italian prostitute who wished him good morning auf deutsch. “Today I had my hair cut in Rome and drank gin and vermouth in the Excelsior,” a British signaler wrote his family. “The Italians all said, ‘We are so happy to see you at last. Why did it take you so long?’”

  Exhausted soldiers wrapped themselves in blankets and dozed on the hoods of their half-tracks or in stone-dry fountains. “They slept on the street, on the sidewalks, on the Spanish Steps,” the curator of the Keats-Shelley house reported. Some felt deflated. “We prowl through Rome like ghosts, finding no satisfaction in anything we see or do,” wrote Audie Murphy. “I feel like a man reprieved from death; and there is no joy in me.”

  Yet others found redemption in the city they had unchained, a gleaming symbol of the civilized values for which they fought. “Every block is interesting, beautiful, enchanting,” a 3rd Division officer wrote. “The very city fills the heart with reverence.” At five P.M. on Monday, 100,000 Italians jammed St. Peter’s Square. Bells pealed. Priests offered tours of the Vatican to GIs in exchange for American cigarettes. Pius XII appeared on his apartment balcony in brilliant white robes, then later met with reporters as flashbulbs exploded and photographers shouted, “Hold it, Pope. Attaboy!” The holy father advised Roman girls to “behave and dress properly and win the respect of the soldiers
by your virtue.” A papal secretary added with a shrug, “It’s just another changing of the guard.”

  At six A.M. on Tuesday, June 6, an aide woke Mark Clark in his Excelsior suite with the news that German radio had announced the Allied invasion of Normandy. Clark rubbed the sleep from his eyes. “How do you like that?” he said. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”

  At the Albergo Città, a BBC correspondent burst into the Allied press headquarters. “Boys, we’re on the back page now,” he said. “They’ve landed in Normandy.” Eric Sevareid later recalled that “every typewriter stopped. We looked at one another.”

  Most of us sat back, pulled out cigarettes and dropped our half-written stories about Rome on the floor. We had in a trice become performers without an audience…a troupe of actors who, at the climax of their play, realize that the spectators have all fled out the door.

  On June 6, Alexander ordered the Fifth and Eighth Armies to make all possible speed for Pisa and Florence, respectively. Some 170 miles separated the Allied front from the next chain of German redoubts, the formidable Gothic Line, but many rivers and hills lay in between. “If only the country were more open,” Alexander lamented, “we could make hay of the whole lot.”