The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  NAPLES, ITALY, NOVEMBER 11, 1943

  MARK CLARK WALKED past fresh graves in a new graveyard full of American dead south of Naples. On Veterans Day, the Fifth Army commander stood to attention and then addressed a group of officers. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the armistice that had ended the First World War, the war to end all wars, as generals and politicians had claimed.

  “Here we are, a quarter of a century later,” declared Clark, “with the same Allies as before, fighting the same mad dogs that were let loose in 1918.”

  Clark stood beside a flagpole. Reporters and photographers watched as he straightened his back to deliver a passionate exhortation: “We must not think about going home. None of us is going home until it’s over. We’ve caught the torch that these men have flung us, and we’ll carry it to Berlin.”

  ALGIERS, NOVEMBER 1943

  IT WAS GOOD to see a familiar face, especially Colonel Ankcorn’s. A few weeks after his arrival at a hospital in Algiers, while receiving an injection as he lay in bed recovering, tubes running in and out of his body, Sparks was delighted to see Colonel Ankcorn enter his ward on crutches and hobble toward him. Ankcorn had heard that Sparks was in the hospital and wanted to see him before being shipped back to America. His mood improved further when he also received a visit from Private Campbell, the young man with the sucking chest wound whom he had given up for dead.

  Meanwhile, back in Arizona, Sparks’s wife, Mary, waited for news from her husband. She was working part-time in a Social Security office and also kept herself busy organizing a club for other women whose husbands were overseas. She always found time each night to write to Felix, and she received V-mail replies whenever he had the time to respond. One day that fall of 1943, she received a telegram from the War Department, informing her that he had been wounded. The message did not state the nature of his wound. She had to wait for news from Sparks himself to learn that he had not lost a leg like Ankcorn or been otherwise maimed.

  In Algiers, Sparks made a quick recovery thanks to superb medical provision. Astonishingly, less than 4 percent of men admitted to field hospitals during the war died. But Sparks was far from happy. He had commanded men in combat for less than a month. The sacrifice, the years lost to the army—it all now seemed as if it had been for nothing. He knew from news reports that the Allied advance had stalled in Italy. Rome was still in Nazi hands. As he grew stronger in a recuperation hospital, he yearned to be back with his men. So long as the war continued, that was where he belonged, not in North Africa.

  One day, doctors examined him and told him he was going to be given a “B rating.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You can’t go back to combat.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he protested. “I can get around as well as anybody. I want to go back to my unit.”

  He was again told he could not return to the front lines. Instead, he would help run the recuperation hospital. The prospect of spending the rest of the war in Algiers scared him far more than facing the Germans again, so the very next day, determined to get the hell out of North Africa, he visited a nearby replacement depot.

  “I want to go back to Italy to rejoin my unit,” Sparks told a major.

  “We’re short on transportation,” said the major. “I’ll let you know when something comes up.”

  Sparks returned to his jeep.

  “Let’s go to the airfield,” he ordered his driver.

  When he arrived at the nearby airfield, he saw men repairing massive B-17 Flying Fortress bombers that had been shot up over Europe. So many planes had been lost in disastrous daylight raids, seventy-seven on October 14, 1943, alone, that the USAAF had suspended missions deep into Germany.

  He found the officer in charge.

  “Have you got anything going to Italy tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, we got a B-17 and we just got a flight crew that’s flying it back.”

  “Can I get on it?”

  “Sure.”

  Early the next morning, back at the hospital, he began to pack his things.

  “Captain,” asked a nurse, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?”

  “You don’t even have discharge orders. You can’t leave without the doctor’s authority.”

  “I’m discharging myself under my own authority. I’ve a war to fight and my men are out there.”

  Later that morning, Sparks boarded a repaired B-17 bomber bound for Italy. The crew was comprised of a radio operator and two pilots. He was the only passenger. After landing near Naples, he walked to a road leading to the front. An endless stream of olive-drab vehicles passed by. It was easy to hitch rides. To his amazement, one driver was a Mexican-American from his hometown called “Shorty” Suarez. He said he would take Sparks wherever he wanted to go. Sparks told him to head for the 45th Infantry Division’s headquarters, where he learned that his regiment was still positioned on a mountain above Venafro, facing Kesselring’s Tenth Army on the “Winter Line,” as the Gustav Line was now known.

  The next day, he drove in a jeep to regimental headquarters near Venafro. As he climbed out of the vehicle, he heard a familiar voice greet him. It belonged to Jack Hallowell, the lanky journalist from Montana, who had helped him to an ambulance back in October. Hallowell had been transferred to the regimental headquarters staff during Sparks’s six-week absence.

  “You’re still here!” Sparks said.

  He then met with Colonel John Church, who had replaced Ankcorn as regimental commander.

  “I want my company back,” said Sparks.

  To his delight, Church agreed to let him resume his command. E Company was up on the line, dug in on the top of some nameless mountain. He climbed up to rejoin his men the next morning. Sparks recognized medic Jack Turner, who had been with the company since before the war. There were precious few other familiar faces. Only a hundred men were left in the company, about half its full strength. All but a dozen of the men he had commanded in Sicily had become casualties. He didn’t know a single officer. Every one of his lieutenants was gone.

  THE WINTER LINE, DECEMBER 7, 1943

  IT WAS THE second anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Orders had come from division headquarters for Sparks to attack north at 6:30 A.M. and to seize a mountain labeled simply as “640” on his map. It would be his first action since returning to his company. He knew he could expect stiff resistance. Later that morning, after a fierce firefight, he seized the assigned mountain. The Germans pushed back but had only fifty men compared to Sparks’s hundred and fifty and were soon beaten off by withering machine-gun fire. Later that day, they attacked once more and Sparks’s machine gunners again mowed them down. One of the Germans, a captain, fell around seventy-five feet from where Sparks was taking cover. He was badly wounded and began to cry out in pain.

  Medic Jack Turner volunteered to help the wounded German officer.

  “I want to go get him.”

  “No, Jack, you can’t go out there,” ordered Sparks.

  The firing died down. Sparks was exhausted and tried to get some sleep. He had almost nodded off when he heard one of his men cry out.

  “Captain! Turner’s out there!”

  Sparks looked up and saw Turner running toward the injured German captain. He had taken off his Red Cross armband and was waving it in the air. Then a German machine gun opened up. Sparks watched as Turner was killed instantly, almost cut in half. It was so unnecessary, so cruel. If only Turner had not been so compassionate.

  Under cover of darkness, Sparks went out and tied a piece of communication wire to Turner’s leg and to the German captain’s, then dragged them both back to E Company’s lines. For the first time, he felt real anger toward the enemy. But a few days later he realized that the Germans could be every bit as humane as his own men. E Company seized another hillside, where two sergeants from G Company had been killed. The Germans had taken their bodies and
dug two graves for them in ground that seemed as hard as granite. They had even placed two wooden crosses on their graves and hung the Americans’ dog tags from them.

  Not long after losing Turner, Sparks received an urgent message. He was to go see Colonel Church at the regimental command post.

  “They want you back in Africa,” announced Church. “They’re going to court-martial you there for being AWOL.”

  “I’m not going back,” insisted Sparks.

  Church knew how much Sparks was respected by his men in E Company and fellow officers. He had been greatly missed.

  “Don’t worry,” Church promised. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Instead of returning to face charges in Africa, Sparks celebrated his first Christmas at war in a freezing foxhole above Venafro. The few men in his company who had landed with him in Sicily and were still alive had enjoyed just six days’ rest in the last ninety-four. Indeed, there was precious little cheer as the New Year approached on the Winter Line. What was left of E Company’s esprit de corps was fast evaporating, unlike the chilling mists and soupy fogs that settled for days on end in the sullen valleys and ravines below. His men could only endure so much. Unlike Sparks, those lucky enough to be alive had spent almost four months on the line, fighting to stay sane amid the freezing mud and the howling wind and rain.

  Two weeks later, on January 10, 1944, the long nightmare in the mountains came to an end. The 45th Division was relieved of its positions along the Winter Line by French troops called Goums who had been recruited from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, some of whom amazed the weary Thunderbirds by walking barefoot in the snow to prove their virility.

  “That’s a habit they’ll get out of in a hurry,” commented one man.

  The Goums were an exotic sight indeed amid the gray rocks and snow of the Winter Line. They wore brightly striped burnooses and carried long knives, and many had braided pigtails. Since landing in Sicily that summer, they had earned a reputation for savagery in combat and bestial cruelty toward Italian civilians. Whenever they took a village, they promptly raped most of the women. Children and men also became victims if there were not enough females to be sodomized. In some areas, the British had needed to corral women into specially built camps and guard them against the rampaging Goums.

  At last, Sparks and his men came down from the mountains. As they trudged and stumbled down the icy trails, many looked more like scarecrows than men, bearded, bleary-eyed, numbed. A few days later, they arrived in a rest camp near Naples to recuperate. There were movies and a special USO show starring Humphrey Bogart, and long nights of uninterrupted sleep. What every man really wanted was to return home.

  The respite from fear and death did not last long. In briefings held by Colonel Church, Sparks learned that the rest period would soon end and training would begin again. In just two weeks’ time, he would have to lead his men in yet another amphibious invasion.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DANGER AHEAD

  Replacements arrive for the 45th Division at Anzio, February 1944. [National Archives]

  THE ANZIO-NETTUNO BEACHHEAD, JANUARY 1943

  WHILE SPARKS AND HIS MEN had shivered in foxholes above Venafro, Winston Churchill, ever the adventurer, had pushed a bold plan code-named Operation Shingle. It was designed to end the stalemate in Italy, where the Allies were stalled in the Liri Valley and at other key strongpoints along the Winter Line. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army would continue to push against the Winter Line but would also land forces at Anzio, some thirty miles north of Monte Cassino and ninety from Rome. The divisions at Anzio would then link up with Allied forces farther south, finally breaking the deadlock.

  There was just one problem: lack of landing craft to ferry troops to the invasion beaches. Most of the craft in the Mediterranean had been dispatched to England in preparation for Overlord—the scheduled spring 1944 invasion of France. The maximum number of troops that could therefore be landed was just two infantry divisions. “Either it was a job for a full army,” commented one American naval officer, “or it was no job at all; to attempt it with only two divisions was to send a boy on a man’s errand.” The decision to go ahead, even after the near disaster at Salerno, was made nevertheless. Again, Mark Clark opted to gamble.

  Early on January 22, 1944, the American VI Corps, commanded by Major General John P. Lucas, landed at Anzio and walked ashore with minimal loss of life. The Germans had been taken by total surprise. By midnight, more than thirty-six thousand men and three thousand vehicles were ashore, with the loss of just thirteen men killed and ninety-seven wounded. But then Lucas, commanding the two divisions at Anzio, failed to take advantage of the element of surprise and attack toward Rome.

  It was imperative that the Allies at least seize the Alban Hills, some ten miles inland, to prevent the Germans from using the higher ground to pulverize the beachhead with artillery fire. Instead, Lucas ordered his generals to dig in and prepare for a counterattack. “Lucas did not think of Rome,” recalled British journalist Alan Whicker, who was with the Fifth Army, recording its advance with a special film unit. “He thought of Gallipoli, Tobruk and Dunkirk, of desperate defeat. In the first forty-eight hours our initial Anzio victory was thrown away.”

  Why Mark Clark had chosen the timid Lucas remains a hotly debated question to this day. He was certainly no George Patton. During the planning phase, the grandfatherly, pipe-smoking Lucas had noted with ominous precision in his diary: “This whole affair has a strong odor of Gallipoli, and apparently the same amateur [Churchill] is still on the coach’s bench.”

  ANZIO, ITALY, JANUARY 29, 1944

  THE TYRRHENIAN SEA off the coast of Anzio was unnervingly calm. The sun shone brightly that morning as Sparks approached the town’s harbor. What had happened to the Germans? There was no angry clatter of machine guns, no need to hunch down and flinch at every whistle of a shell. Men scanned the shoreline in disbelief and wondered if the war had in fact ended.

  The regiment unloaded almost casually at the dockside in Anzio, once the home of the debauched Roman emperor Caligula and the birthplace of Nero. Men had to step over toppled telephone polls as they moved inland, past stony-faced British troops manning anti-aircraft guns. Ahead lay rolling farmland that stretched inland for fifteen miles toward the first visible high ground, the Alban Hills. A few miles to the north of Anzio, they set up camp near a forest of pine and cork, known as the Padiglione Woods. The nearby Pontine Marshes had been successfully drained by Mussolini but then, in what many considered an act of biological warfare, had been flooded by the Germans to impede the Allies. It didn’t take long for the Thunderbirds to realize the marshes were now the source of swarms of mosquitoes.

  “Whatever we’re going into,” said one laconic Thunderbird, “it can’t be worse than fighting those damned mountains. The sun’s shining, there’s no mud, and no hills to climb. Buck up, we got nothin’ to worry about.”

  As Sparks and his men settled down for the night in the Padiglione Woods, they had no idea that General Lucas had failed to seize the initiative and that seventy thousand Germans were headed their way. Sparks in fact believed that the landings had been a great success. He would soon be leading his men victoriously toward Rome.

  On their radios in their bivouacs beneath the towering pines, the Thunderbirds heard the German propaganda broadcaster, Axis Sally, read out the names and serial numbers of men who had been taken prisoner. “Easy, boys, there’s danger ahead,” Sally then purred before playing a recording of “Lili Marlene,” a tune so popular that both Axis and Allied troops whistled it throughout Europe.

  Two days later, on January 31, 1944, Sparks learned that some Allied troops, fifteen miles inland, at the very edge of the Anzio beachhead, were being hit hard by the Germans. He was then ordered to move his company up to the front and relieve a hard-pressed company of the 36th Engineer Regiment positioned on the left flank of the beachhead, soon to be dubbed the “Bitch-Head” by cynical GIs.

  Fearing some of his me
n might go AWOL as the company moved up to the front lines, Sparks placed E Company’s first sergeant and executive officer in the rear.

  “Don’t let anybody drop out,” Sparks told them.

  Once a man was allowed to go missing from action, his willpower was smashed for good and he would be useless in combat.

  The engineers’ positions were a grim spectacle indeed. Dead bodies lay strewn across the shell-holed battlefield nearby. It was equally unsettling to discover that the engineers had been pressed into frontline combat. There was clearly an acute lack of manpower. Sparks began to suspect that all was not well on the beachhead.

  Because the Allies had failed to seize the Alban Hills, the Germans were able to look down on every inch of the beachhead. They soon started to pound the landing beaches and then the town of Anzio itself. As artillery zeroed in on key targets in every sector of the beachhead, Albert Kesselring’s troops massed for an all-out attack: more than ten divisions of armor and men, several of them crack combat units. Not since the Blitzkrieg of spring 1940, when the Germans had rolled to Paris in less than six weeks, had such a large attacking force gathered to do battle in the West. The key objective was the main road that led from Anzio to Rome, the Via Anziate. If German armor could advance south along it, then Kesselring would be able to push the Allies back into the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Allied intelligence quickly identified the German buildup, and Lucas ordered the 45th Division and other units to shore up defenses to prevent a German breakthrough. On February 14, 1944, Sparks and his men in E Company were therefore ordered to take up new positions. Beneath a bright moon they dug in two miles north of a railroad bridge, dubbed the “Flyover” by GIs, which spanned the vital Via Anziate.