An odor of vomit mixed with the smell of unwashed men as the ship pitched on the winter swells. I was standing a few inches from a steel bulkhead, at whose paintwork I was staring under the strip light. On warships, paint is the only upholstery; nothing else is thought necessary to separate flesh from metal. I wondered as I gazed at the rivets and flanges, painted and repainted by some able seaman on fatigue, whether Donald Sidwell’s mother would really have wished him to spend five years like this. Casualties at sea might have been fewer than in the infantry, but at least we had seen villages and woods, sand and stars.
If we couldn’t be on deck, my remedy against seasickness was to breathe deeply and hold the air in the lungs. By now I could feel the cold sweat on my scalp and the tingling sensation in feet and hands that mean the moment is near. I had always thought it odd that such a trivial complaint should feel so deathly.
The day before, as we steamed north of Naples, Richard Varian gave a talk to the men of our battalion. We were called together at 0900 hours on B deck and told to stand easy. Varian looked confident and clear-eyed. He wore a well-ironed battle dress with a cream scarf at his neck.
“You’d probably like to know what’s going on,” he said. “Though I know you’ve all heard rumors. The truth is quite dramatic enough. We’re going to make a surprise landing about an hour south of Rome by road, at a seaside town called Anzio. There are twenty-seven battalions going in. That’s roughly fifty thousand men. Our aim is to be in Rome in less than two weeks.”
There was some muttering from the men. They were clearly proud to have been given such a task, but daunted too. They knew the Germans by now. Varian waited for the noise to die down.
“All right,” he said. “A little bit of background. Forgive me if I’m teaching my grandmother … but some of you won’t know this. Since last September, the Americans and some of our chaps have been battering their way up the boot of Italy—up mountains, over rivers, down coastal plains—facing an enemy who’s always had the high ground. And nowhere more so than at Cassino, which is about ninety miles southeast of Anzio, where the Germans hold a monastery on a hilltop and the Allied advance has come to a halt.”
He glanced round to see if they were still following. “Our landing at Anzio will give us the back door to Rome. The enemy will have to move reinforcements up from Cassino, and this will enable us to break through there at last. When we push out of the beachhead, we’ll join the Americans coming up from the south. Then we can outflank the Germans, take large numbers of prisoners, and march on to Rome without too much resistance.”
Varian coughed and looked down at his notes for a moment. “Of course,” he said, “it’s a risky operation, but it’s more than a stunt. Our leaders are certain that the loss of Rome will be a blow to German pride. This means that when the second front opens—yes, I know you’re all sick of hearing about it, but it will happen one day … When the Allies do finally land in northern Europe, wherever it may be, the enemy will be demoralized. The Italian campaign—our campaign—is not just a sideshow, a tactic to divert German troops from France. It’s vital in its own right. You are the first fighting men to take back occupied Europe from the Nazis. You should be proud.”
Here he paused to give the men a moment to congratulate themselves. The odd thing about Richard Varian was that with his cigars and his poetry books and his light, sardonic manner, he seemed detached from the business of war. Yet soldiering was his profession. He had been embarrassed by the DSO awarded him in Tunisia, accepting it, he told us, only as recognition of the battalion’s efforts; but we had seen enough of him in action to think it was deserved.
“We expect strong resistance,” he said, “but look at it this way. Isn’t it better to be fighting here, alongside men you’ve been with for years, than starting guerrilla warfare in Burma, like the poor old Third Battalion? I can guarantee you will also have much better rations. We’ll be fighting with the Americans, and you know what that means. Food. The terrain where we establish our beachhead tonight is a reclaimed marsh, between the coast and the inland mountains. It may be wet, but it will be flat, and B Echelon will never be far behind us.”
The men of our regiment were known as big eaters, so such news always cheered them. Richard Varian ended with the traditional appeal to the regiment’s history, including the Peninsular Wars, and to the courage, discipline, and fellowship of the men.
Roland Swann grabbed my sleeve as we dispersed. “Brace yourself,” he said. “Richard never appeals to the regiment unless they expect heavy casualties.”
Afterwards, there was a more detailed briefing for the Five Just Men (Varian’s name for Sidwell, Pears, Swann, Passmore, and me) and each company’s second in command. This took place in his cabin and was an informal occasion with whisky and cigarettes.
“Now then. This Italian adventure.” Varian poured himself a refill. “Entirely between ourselves and not a whisper outside this cabin, but I’m getting a whiff of staff cock-up. Of Gallipoli. These joint operations … I don’t know. I’ve nothing against the Americans, but they have their own priorities. And their General Clark seems prone to get the wind up. There are far too many chiefs in my view. It’s all come down from Allied command, from the politicians. You can tell that when they talk about a ‘blow to German pride.’ That’s a politician’s idea of a battle, not a soldier’s one. Our objectives are more complicated than those in Tunisia and will depend on communication and good timing. And, of course, the biggest factor of all. Which is?”
We all knew. Luck.
“Having shared the Jeremiah stuff,” Varian went on, “let me say that as long as we can break out of the beachhead quickly, we’ll be all right. Otherwise … I hope you’ve got some good trench diggers. We expect strong retaliation, so you’ll have to dig fast. The terrain also means we could be fighting at close quarters.”
“And if we do end up being there a long time, sir?” said Brian Pears.
“Then we’ll draw on all our resources, we’ll think again. But communication will be the key. Think ahead. Make sure the radio is always working.”
“First time for everything,” said Passmore.
“All right,” said Varian. “Point taken. Try and get a backup set.”
“When we’re dug in,” said Donald Sidwell, “would you like me to lead a patrol to see how far back the enemy line is?”
Richard Varian lit a cigarette and sat back in his chair. “My dear Donald,” he said, “are you mad?”
As we were leaving, Varian said, “One moment, Hendricks.”
I waited till the others had gone.
“Another drink?”
“Thank you. Just a small one.” I had never been keen on whisky, but I knew it was a privilege.
“Once we’ve established our position in the beachhead,” said Varian, “I’m putting Nichols in charge of base company. That means I’ll need an adjutant. Do you fancy having a go? There’d be a promotion to major.”
“I wouldn’t want to leave Major Swann alone in charge of the landings, sir.”
“You don’t have to. Help him get B Company ashore and dug in. Then he can have Bell as his second in command. Bell’s a good man, isn’t he?”
“Certainly.”
“Don’t look so suspicious, Robert. It’s quite normal to move people round in wartime. But I want to leave the company commanders as they are. And don’t worry if you think you’re going to miss any action. We won’t. There’ll be enough action to go round.”
* * *
I THOUGHT ABOUT Varian’s offer as I stood among the pale, retching men belowdecks. It had become a matter of pride for me not to throw up myself, but I could tell by the sweating and tingling that I didn’t have long left. Surely they must let us up soon or we wouldn’t have time to get onto the landing craft. Perhaps death by bullet would be less drawn out, less relentlessly unpleasant than this awful …
A whistle blew; somebody shouted. There was a stampede of hobnails.
Up on de
ck, the night seemed dark after the strip lights below. When I had breathed deeply for a minute or so, I looked about and could just see behind us the shapes of hulking warships with their guns raised, waiting for the signal to fire. Such sights you see in naval dockyards or in photographs; I’d never expected to witness them in action—in reality. I thought of all the planning and the navigation it had taken to have these leviathans aligned exactly to the will of a distant politician, now presumably in bed.
For the first time, I had a sense of how many vessels were in our silent armada. Minesweepers had gone ahead to clear the channels for the frigates and destroyers I had just made out; nearer to us on the troopships were smaller vessels that had been protecting the convoy, as well as hundreds of landing craft. I was reassured by the size of our force, by the solid steel of our shipping, but if this was the weight of our sledgehammer, with fifty thousand men waiting to go ashore, then the nut that we were preparing to crack must be …
Breathing in again, I decided not to think about the enemy. I pictured instead the Italian inhabitants of the town and its surroundings, whose lives had only a few minutes of relative tranquility left to run: sleeping children, two or three to a wooden bed; grandmothers in their widow’s black; farmers who had already yielded their meager harvests to the enemy; boat builders and peasants … Who else might scrape a living from the edges of the marsh? Now Jupiter Omnipotens was about to unleash his thunderbolts on the plain of Latium.
We went down nets into the landing craft. The air was filled with voices calling, radios crackling, shouts of “B Company here!” or “Fourteen to the stern!” as men tried to find the right boat and their own platoon.
At such moments in the war so far, I had always thought first of my own safety. I wondered if it might be possible to go through the motions of fighting without exposing myself to danger—to advance behind the shoulder of Bill Shenton or some other big fellow; to accidentally turn an ankle; to be the first to duck, the last to leave the shelter of a slit trench or bombed villa … As a veteran of Dunkirk and North Africa, I could trade reminiscences with Richard Varian and his company commanders, rub shoulders with the men, make sardonic jokes about the radio—then hide. With an amphibious assault there would be such chaos that anyone who simply ducked and ran wouldn’t be noticed. That’s what my mother would have recommended. And then I had an image of her asleep in her bedroom at the Old Tannery, her hair in some nighttime net or curlers, her face against the pillow, clenched in shallow, unrestful sleep. I could almost smell the winter damp of the garden, hear the dripping cedar by the wall. It was a place that seemed not so much distant as unreal. The cold wind that blew against my cheek and the metal deck that rose beneath my feet could not belong in the same universe as her bedroom.
Some of the men were silently praying. I looked at their bowed heads and saw their lips move. Not one of them was by temperament suited for what lay ahead. No child is born a soldier: not Storey, Hall, McNab, Jones, Rutherford, or any of the rest whose blackened faces I strained to recognize. In that moment, I saw that my own fear was no worse than theirs and told myself to do whatever needed to be done. The worst that waited for me was a bullet or a shell, then death in the January shallows. If I was were ready to accept that possibility and go on, then in return the god of war, or whatever lunatic was in charge, would surely make it quick. And that was my version, I suppose, of “leadership.”
The shoreline lit up. There was sand leaping, trees and houses lifting from the ground. We heard the air above fill with the rockets fired from the landing craft nearby and the howling of the bigger guns far out at sea. Earth, sky, and water were fused orange; as if on cue, there came the rumble of distant bombing over the Alban hills. I felt a throb of elation at the thought of the bomber pilots in their freezing cockpits, their navigators, bomb aimers, and tail gunners giving each other a gloved thumbs-up at the end of their run from whatever distant base. I loved those men up in the icy air. Oh God, perhaps we would still do this, put an end to the meat grinding and swoop to some final victory. Then I felt pity for the enemy beneath our bombardment—their skulls crashing and bones blown out.
For a moment there was silence, as though time couldn’t move. But in this war it seemed there was always someone, usually an engineer, doing something you knew nothing about, and there was no escape, only a forward momentum through the swell. So the boats were moving.
It was difficult to make out where we were going, except when the shore was lit by our rockets and shells, but the pilots seemed to know and the boats ploughed on. When we were perhaps two hundred yards out, the enemy gun batteries responded at last. Men around me crouched down on the metal floor of our boat, holding their helmets down with both hands, as though this might help. The iron flanks of the landing craft echoed and rattled with the explosion of German shells in the water. As the hull hit the sand, we pitched forwards onto one another, fell, and staggered and stood. The front of the craft was let down with a splash. I knew that some of the men couldn’t swim, so I was anxious to make sure the sea was no more than waist deep. Some unfortunate boat had run aground on a sandbar in the deep, and I guessed only the swimmers had survived. “Keep your rifles dry!” I remembered to shout as I jumped in. I had never known sea so cold, and with the weight of my pack and the soft sand under my feet, it came to the armpits. For a second I had some absurd memory of Bexhill-on-Sea, childhood, the taste of salt … Then, roaring in protest against the icy water, I pushed on into the shallows, where the corpses of two young men were rolling, tumbling playfully back and forth.
We followed a white tape through a minefield on the beach and regrouped at a half-destroyed building beside the road. The men were shivering and wet but elated at having come this far alive. Some made jokes about swallowing water and doing the breaststroke. “It’s colder than bloody Bridlington,” said Hall.
By now there were German bombers overhead as well as artillery fire from the direction of Rome, but as yet there seemed to be no ground troops. Knowing the enemy as we did, we guessed they were waiting for a better moment to attack. We feared a trap. There were too many of our own troops on the one paved road, and it was hard for men to find their units. Eventually, I had gathered those I was supposed to be with and, after some torch and compass work, we set off across the fields towards the Moletta River. I had Three Platoon with me and was told by Vesta Swann to lead the way to our first objective, an improbably distant farmhouse. This was what all company commanders seemed to do: delegate at once, don’t go yourself, but show your commitment and aggressive intent by sending your second in command with his best men. Private Hall was our champion map reader, so I put him in front with Sergeant Warren and half a dozen others whose wariness and stamina I trusted.
There were burning buildings in the stubble fields, where icy puddles cracked beneath our feet. We expected every barn or haystack to conceal an ambush, so we went at a steady pace, rifles at the ready. I said nothing to the men, but by now I was certain we had caught the enemy by surprise. As I looked left towards the sea to get a bearing, I saw one of our ships—a frigate, I think—on fire in the bay, and it filled me with an awful melancholy, more than the sight of burning flesh.
The pace slowed as we entered thick pine woods; by the time we emerged, it was starting to grow light: a smear over dun-colored marsh. My boots had let in seawater, but in the course of the night had let most of it out again. The plodding over heavy ground through dripping woods was what we had been trained to do, and though my neck and shoulders ached, my legs were still willing.
I conferred with Hall and Warren. Through my field glasses I could see our objective: a two-storey, blue-painted farmhouse, one of hundreds built as part of Mussolini’s project to reclaim the marsh for agriculture. We took another map reading to be sure. I was keen to get there before full daylight, so after a five-minute rest, we moved on at the double.
A hundred yards short of the house, we aimed some mortar rounds at the front as a distraction, whi
le I sent a patrol of six led by Bill Shenton to go round the back. Within five minutes a flare went up to tell us it was all clear. Inside the house they had a three-generation Italian family of ten lined up in the living room and four Germans taken prisoner.
I took Private Hall upstairs, and in a sort of hayloft we found two more Germans asleep. Hall prodded them awake with his rifle butt, and we dragged them out. They looked appalled as we pushed them along the candlelit passage, but by the time we had gotten them downstairs their faces were beginning to show a furtive relief. I ordered Corporal Parfitt, a Wearsider I trusted, and two others from the platoon to take the Germans back to base. It was an awful task, really, to tramp over the same ground, but at least it saved them the digging-in that awaited the rest of us. I watched these somnolent German men walk out of the war with a sense of raging envy.
Bill Shenton was smashing out the windows and organizing men to fill sandbags, while the Italian women wept at the desecration of their home. I told them in my rough Italian to be quiet and make some food. “Piano, piano, per favore … Inglesi molto gentili … Tutto bene, no lacrima … Mangare … Pasta, formaggio, zuppa … presto, presto. Come on, come on! Domani, voi…” I smiled and pointed back towards the port to suggest that tomorrow we would safely evacuate them. “Tutto bene per voi.”
A woman of about forty, presumably the mother of the house, seemed to understand and went reluctantly towards the kitchen. A signals unit was meanwhile moving in with a radio to make an observation post upstairs, in the room where Hall and I had routed out the sleepers.
At about ten o’clock I was joined by Vesta Swann, who had been clearing out stragglers, as he put it, from some farm buildings along the way. He looked tired, the skin stretched tight over his large, blank face, but I was happy to hand over command to him of what had become known after its former occupants as the “Dormitory.”
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