The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  Sparks placed all three of the rifle platoons in his company in a line on either side of the Via Anziate. Two platoons from the regiment’s anti-tank company set up behind the riflemen in anticipation of a German strike with tanks. Two tank destroyers also moved in to support them. From briefings, Sparks knew that a mile to his east, beyond higher ground called the Buon Riposo Ridge, stood several abandoned factories. A mile to his rear, to the south, was a labyrinth of large man-made caves, big enough to drive trucks through, reaching far into a shale ridge. Here his regiment’s Second Battalion had set up its command post along with an aid station. It was also base for the 158th Artillery’s radio crew.

  At around 1 A.M. the following day, February 15, Sparks heard the rumble of trucks and the screech and clank of tank treads. The Germans were on the move. A few miles to the north, across a no-man’s-land of shallow ditches and draws, thousands of young German soldiers checked their ammunition, wrote last letters, and then began to march to their jump-off positions. They were under orders from Hitler to “lance the abscess below Rome” by charging through the Allies’ defensive lines and pushing down the Via Anziate to the sea. Operation Fischfang, aimed at destroying the Allied beachhead, was about to begin.

  As soon as he had learned of the Anzio landings, Hitler had ordered they be repelled at all costs. “Fight with bitter hatred an enemy who conducts a ruthless war of annihilation against the German people,” he now blustered. “The Führer expects the bitterest struggle for every yard.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HELL BROKE LOOSE

  Corporal Roderick Loop, 48 (right), of the 191st Tank Battalion, says good-bye to his son, Private William R. Loop, also of the 191st, after fighting together while attached to the 45th Division at Anzio. [National Archives]

  VIA ANZIATE, FEBRUARY 16, 1944

  THERE WAS A TOTAL SILENCE. No clanking of tank tracks, no drone of planes, no thunder of distant artillery. All across the beachhead, it was unnervingly quiet, as if the Germans and Allies were taking a deep breath as they sat in their corners, steeling themselves before the clang of a bell and the first round.

  Dawn broke, a faint light spreading across the battlefield. And with it came the whine of shells, then a metallic scream followed by the crash and crumple of explosions. The horizon filled with sound, and it seemed that immense trains were hurtling overhead at great speed, then smashing on top of one another. Thunderbirds were bounced around in their foxholes, like dice in a tumbler, from the impact of shell after shell landing throughout the 45th Infantry Division’s positions.

  Men lay as close as they could to the wet earth at the bases of their dugouts, curled up in balls, or crouched down in shallow trenches, hunched over, their every fiber contracted, helmets knocking their shoulders as millions of hot metal splinters seeded open ground. Dozens died from the concussive effect of shells exploding close by, their lungs burst and muddied field jackets ripped from them. The incessant crash, crash, crash could break the hardest. Sparks had already seen one of his junior officers snap and then run away, a whimpering wreck, in the middle of a barrage. Would others do the same?

  After an hour, the shelling ceased. There was a stunned silence for a few minutes. The panic-stricken fluttering inside men’s ribs disappeared. Hearts thumped with relief. A flare soared into the gray sky and the landscape was bathed in an eerie green. Then the silence was broken and another deafening symphony began, this time of crackling machine guns, rifle fire, and mortars.

  Sparks picked up his field glasses and scanned the front. It was not yet fully light and mist hung over the battlefield, littered with splintered trees, scarred by fresh shell holes as if some gargantuan plow had turned over the landscape. He could make out ant-like figures in the distance, moving closer, dressed in long overcoats, swarming into ravines and draws. They were surely the 45th Division’s 179th regiment, positioned on his flank. Who else could be so close?

  He contacted his battalion headquarters on the radio.

  “Are the 179th wearing overcoats?” he asked.

  No. They were not.

  “Then those are Krauts coming after us.”

  He heard the clatter and clank of tank tracks. He looked again through his field glasses, peering into the early-morning light. Several spotted gray Mark VI Tiger and Mark V Panther tanks, spewing clouds of bitter exhaust, were about a mile away, trundling down the Via Anziate toward his company’s positions. The lumbering twenty-five-ton behemoths of the 3rd Panzergrenadier Division were followed by hundreds more gray-uniformed young men, some drunk and drugged, bellowing orders, blowing whistles, barking encouragement to one another. Some were even singing beer hall songs learned in the Hitler Youth. They belonged to the first wave of assault troops from the experienced 715th Infantry Division. It was part of the German Fourteenth Army commanded by the highly capable General Eberhard von Mackensen, who answered to master strategist Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

  As far as the attacking Germans were concerned, Sparks’s position was the crucial Schwerpunkt: a place to concentrate their energies in the hopes of breaking through. They had been told that the Americans standing in their way were a National Guard outfit, manned, according to one report, “largely by Red Indians, racially inferior people who had no love of the white man and probably wouldn’t fight.” They were confident of victory. And they didn’t have far to push: Just five miles and the Allies would be ditched back into the Mediterranean.

  Sparks peeked out of his foxhole again. The gray hulks of three German Panzer IVs were visible on his left flank. They were avoiding the Via Anziate, their commanders knowing that American artillery fire would zero in and destroy them if they took the road. The tanks were coming fast, only two hundred yards away. With their machine guns blinking streams of bullets, they sliced through one platoon of his men like a scalpel through thin tissue.

  Sparks called to two M10 tank destroyers nearby.

  “Get them!”

  The officer in charge of the tank destroyers hesitated. His head was clearly visible as he stood in the hatch of one of the green M10 vehicles.

  “Are those British tanks?” asked the officer.

  “Hell, no—they’re German tanks!” shouted Sparks. “Shoot them.”

  The M10s opened fire. Two German tanks exploded, their inch-thick armor blasted to shreds. The third tank pulled back, its commander wisely deciding to retreat before he too was killed.

  An M10 moved thirty yards to the east of the Via Anziate and stopped not far from Sparks’s foxhole. He figured its commander wanted to gain a better line of fire. There was the scream of a shell. It exploded and the M10 erupted, flames shooting into the sky, killing the crew. Sparks had to jump into another foxhole to avoid being burned.

  From his new hole, he again looked to his front, to the north, along the Via Anziate. Hundreds of German soldiers were closing on his positions. He gave the order to open fire. The air filled with bullets. Machine guns snarled. Snipers picked off German officers. There was a constant crackling of M1 rifle fire, interrupted by barely audible pings as magazines emptied. Sparks’s machine gunners, led by Sergeant Otto Miller of Lamar, Colorado, soon mowed down most of the first wave. Germans fell in agony, their bodies piling up in some places and obscuring marksmen’s views.

  A few got through the hail of machine-gun and small-arms fire. Some even managed to close on Sparks’s foxhole. He spotted one of his men, a sergeant, who had strapped himself to the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tank destroyer. The sergeant opened up on the Germans closing on Sparks, just yards from his hole, killing most of them. But one German, armed with a light machine gun, survived and crawled toward the sergeant manning the machine gun. There was a brrrrrp sound. Sparks saw dust fly from the back of his sergeant’s field jacket as bullets riddled his chest. A few moments later, one of his men put the German out of action. Several corpses lay close to Sparks’s hole. The sergeant had stopped the Germans at its very edge and saved his life.

  There
were whistles and whines of more incoming shellfire. One of the M10s burst into flames, victim of a direct hit. Explosions ripped through E Company’s positions, killing one of Sparks’s platoon leaders, an entire rifle squad of twelve men, and knocking out the company’s anti-tank guns. More German tanks appeared in the distance and were soon on top of several positions, blowing Sparks’s men from their holes at close range.

  “Medics!” cried wounded men. “Medics!”

  The situation seemed hopeless. Sparks faced a very tough decision. His only realistic hope of survival was to order his own artillery to fire on his positions to stall the German attack. Some of his own men might be killed, but “pulling the chain,” as it was called, was his only option. Even so, it was a desperate move.

  The 158th Artillery responded with impressive results. Throughout Sparks’s company’s positions, shells exploded with devastating power. The sky itself seemed to be shrieking, and the noise was all consuming, blotting out thought and reason. Men were probably so terrified they could not see straight, losing depth of perception so that every enemy tank and soldier appeared much closer than in reality. Fragments of shells and ricochets hurtled through the air in all directions, with the ground shaking and jolting men like an earthquake, every near explosion reverberating through their nervous systems, their vision blurring, lungs clogging with smoke, ears ringing, the cries of wounded men and the piercing whine of bullets and shrapnel barely audible. Heart rates soared and some men’s motor skills no doubt disappeared under the paralyzing stress, so they could not move, breathe, or think straight, scared speechless and feeling oddly detached, as if the action unfolding around them were a film rather than reality.

  Finally, the German tanks and infantry stalled and then withdrew. In other sectors, the enemy continued to advance, breaking through Allied lines. To the west, the 179th Regiment pulled back, unable to hold the rushing waves of Germans. To the east, the British were also forced to withdraw. Sparks and his company, the tip of the Allied spear at Anzio, now risked being cut off. The Germans had only to repeat their attack on his position with tanks and artillery and his decimated company would be quickly wiped out.

  At around 11 A.M., something extraordinary happened. Sparks spotted a German half-track, bearing a white flag, moving toward his position. A German captain dismounted. He clearly wanted to talk with an American counterpart. Sparks pulled himself out of his foxhole and approached the half-track.

  “Captain, you have a great number of wounded here and we have a number of wounded,” the German officer said in fluent English. “Would you agree to a truce of thirty minutes so we can evacuate our wounded?”

  Sparks nodded.

  “Yes, that would be all right. Let’s get busy.”

  Sparks shouted orders, telling his men to hold their fire while both sides retrieved their wounded. German litter bearers picked up several wounded and placed them onto a half-track. He decided not to notify any higher headquarters of the brief truce. In all likelihood his superiors would not sanction any pause in the fighting. The Germans now threatened to overwhelm the entire Allied line, all across the Anzio beachhead.

  He helped some of his men lift more than twenty wounded men onto a truck. The injured were caked in mud and blood, their faces ghostly pale, shivering badly from the cold, hasty dressings wrapped around their wounds. There was no attempt by either side to recover the many dead bodies lying nearby. It would have taken too long.

  Sparks knew that his men could take only so much more. When would he get orders to pull back? Should he request permission to do so? The Germans had thrown at least two battalions, more than a thousand men, at his position already. Hope of holding back another attack faded further when he learned that his last tank destroyer was out of ammunition.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he told its commander. “You can’t do us any more good.”

  Until he received orders to pull back, he would have to bolster his position as best he could. He radioed his Second Battalion’s command post in the caves to his rear and asked if several tanks could be attached to his company. To his relief, he was told that they would be provided. But he would have to wait until darkness.

  Even those who had fought at Salerno were shocked at the ferocity and scale of the German assaults that morning. Seven enemy divisions were now pushing south across the Anzio plain, an area that the Italians had ironically called the Campo di Carne—“Field of Meat.” The casualties for the Thunderbirds’ three regiments were unprecedented and no more so than along the crucial Via Anziate. Sparks had lost more than 100 men from the 230 he had commanded at dawn.

  Later that afternoon, as he waited for darkness, he heard the haunting cry of a wounded German who had gotten entangled in barbed wire in no-man’s-land.

  “My name is Müller. I am wounded.”

  A few minutes later, the man cried out again.

  It was maddening to listen to the man begging for help. But Sparks knew that if a medic went to help the German, there was no telling if he would be shot by the enemy, just as Jack Turner had been gunned down two months before in the mountains.

  “My name is Müller. I am wounded.”

  Someone pulled out a grenade and removed the pin.

  “What’s your name now, you son of a—”

  The grenade exploded and Müller stopped crying.

  The awful waiting, the excruciating anticipation was over. Dusk finally settled. Sparks scrambled through several draws and ditches to the caves where he had arranged to meet with a group of four tanks. But when he got there he saw to his dismay that there were just two, not four. Still, they were better than nothing, and he guided them back to his position. At least he now had some real firepower.

  He soon needed it. Later that evening, the Germans attacked once more. There were some five hundred of them belonging to the 715th Division’s 725th Grenadier Regiment. This time, they did not rush forward, exposing themselves to machine-gun fire. They began to infiltrate Company E’s remaining positions crawling on all fours in the darkness, down the narrow gullies and ravines on either side of the Via Anziate. Shells landed just ahead of them, stunning Sparks’s exhausted men, the flashes from the German guns casting a ghastly glow over the battered ground. One by one, men in forward positions were methodically isolated, then overwhelmed and killed or taken prisoner. All of the men in the platoon positioned to the right of the crucial road were lost. Most of those in the platoon to the left of it were also overcome. But then, as dawn approached, at the very point of wiping out Sparks’s last positions, the Germans withdrew. There were no more rustling sounds made by crawling storm troopers. Sparks now had just twenty-eight men.

  He decided to pull the dozen or so soldiers still left in forward positions back to his command post before the Germans regrouped and attacked once more.

  “Send two men forward to the third platoon,” he ordered a lieutenant, “and have it withdraw to the command post.”

  The lieutenant turned to a sergeant called John “Doc” McDermott, a burly Irishman from Caddoa, Colorado.

  “Doc,” shouted the lieutenant, “take a man and see if you can bring back the third platoon.”

  “To hell with takin’ a man,” shouted McDermott, “I’ll go myself.”

  McDermott ran off, down the Via Anziate, toward the third platoon, but it was too late—German tanks had overrun it.

  McDermott was never seen again.

  ROME, ITALY, FEBRUARY 17, 1944

  IN HIS HEADQUARTERS, Kesselring glanced over dispatches and reports from Anzio and noted how fast German artillery stocks and assault units were being used up. “Enemy resistance was strong and determined,” stated a Fourteenth Army log. “The enemy prevented a breakthrough.… The Panzer Division Hermann Göring gained 1km of ground but it was forced to dig in because of effective defensive fire which caused heavy losses. Combat training units were wiped out.”

  Kesselring ordered General von Mackensen, in charge of Operation Fischfang, to co
mmit his reserves. It was vital to split the 45th Infantry Division in two. It would be a disaster indeed, he stressed, if he had to inform the Führer of a failure to break through.

  An hour before dawn, the Germans fired countless flares and the skies above the Anzio beachhead were suddenly as bright as day. An ominous drone followed, and then men heard the offbeat throb of German bombers’ engines. Bombs rained down, followed by jaw-jolting explosions destroying mortar emplacements and machine-gun nests all along the Allied front, some fifteen miles long. The regiment’s command post was hit. A house nearby, occupied by headquarters staff, was totally destroyed, severing communications with the Second Battalion in the caves. More German planes wreaked havoc in the rear, dropping thousands of butterfly bombs, notable for their brightly colored fins that whirled in the air.

  Kesselring was throwing everything in his arsenal at the battered Allied lines. It was just a matter of time—one more punch, surely—before his forces broke through and pushed the Allies back into the sea.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE

  The 45th American Division have had us in an uncomfortable spot. These damned American dogs are bombing us more and more every day. For a few days, a damned American with a Browning automatic has been shooting at us. He has already killed five of our men. If we ever get a hold of this pig we will tear him to pieces.

  —LETTER FROM A GERMAN SOLDIER AT HEIGHT OF BATTLE OF ANZIO

  A Thunderbird sergeant directs artillery fire at Anzio. [National Archives]