by Alex Kershaw
To block the effects of post-traumatic stress and the memories of death, many turned to the universal anodyne. Alcohol was infuriatingly barred to all noncommissioned men in the U.S. Army, but in the city of kleptomaniacs, where even the children had pockets stuffed with swiped Chesterfields, booze of every imaginable quality and variety was easier to find than clean water. The cheap vermouth and gut-rotting local wine, asprinio d’aversa, which tasted like rough cider, blotted out, for a few hours at least, the horror and violence, the screams of terror, the whiz, whistle, whisper, and whir of flying metal that every man knew would kill or wound him sooner or later. Even so, the past had a way of surging back into the present, no matter how much men drank. The guilt and pain survivors tried to bury always broke to the surface, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Over drinks one night with some fellow officers, when the talk turned away from food, dames, and booze and back to war, Sparks could not hold back his grief. He was said to have cried openly over the loss of all of his men.
Away from the front, thoughts turned more often to families and wives. Men dared to look to the future. One day, maybe, they could touch purity again and hold a woman in their arms without having to pay her. For married men, letters from their wives and children were bittersweet balms reminding them of what they stood to lose or reclaim.
Sparks’s wife, Mary, had sent pictures of herself with his son, Kirk, now almost a year old. He managed to respond to her once a week when not in combat, but then a month would go by and she would not hear from him. It made Mary angry, and she would stop writing for a couple of days to remind him not to take her letters for granted. Otherwise, every night before she went to bed, she penned a couple of pages. The photographs of her and Kirk made Sparks smile and chuckle, he wrote his parents, every time he looked at them. They were in fact the most precious things he owned, and he had taken great care not to carry them with him in combat in case he was wounded again and they were destroyed. He kept them in the glove compartment of his jeep or his footlocker instead. After his ordeal at Anzio, the letters and images—one showing dark-haired Kirk sitting on a rocking chair on a porch beside a beaming Mary—distracted him more than anything in Naples from his heartbreak and grief. He had so much to look forward to after the war, if he could stay alive.
THE OBERSALZBERG, BERCHTESGADEN, BAVARIA, MARCH 6, 1944
AT HIS MOUNTAIN retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler glared at several maps. As usual, he was far from pleased. At Anzio, his generals had failed him yet again. They had not thrown the Allies back into the sea. The abscess below Rome still festered and made him seethe with bitter resentment every time he looked at his Fourteenth Army’s positions. Since he had ordered Operation Fischfang, the German front lines had not moved much more than a mile.
It was not just Hitler who was exasperated by the situation in Italy. In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fumed: “I thought we were landing a wild cat that would tear the bowels of the Boche [Germans]. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.” That March of 1944, the much-desired linkup between the Anzio forces and those battering the Winter Line to the south seemed as distant as ever.
At Monte Cassino, where the ancient monastery had been criminally destroyed on February 15 by fourteen hundred tons of American bombs, the attrition grew ever more desperate and costly by the day. Several divisions and nationalities had been bloodied, then pulverized in Italy’s very own Stalingrad, now little more than rubble and rocks. Extraordinarily gallant Poles, flinty New Zealanders, British veterans of Africa and Salerno, and Goums—the only experienced mountain fighters in Italy—had died in their thousands in what was now a veritable international graveyard. There would be fifty-five thousand Allied casualties before Monte Cassino finally fell.
On March 6, 1944, Kesselring’s chief of staff, forty-two-year-old Generalmajor Siegfried Westphal, arrived at Berchtesgaden. He had traveled all the way from Italy in order to brief Hitler on developments at Anzio. But when he entered the headquarters, fifty-three-year-old Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht Army General Staff, denied him access to the Führer. Instead, Jodl passed on a written report to Hitler.
Hitler read the report and exploded, his penetrating blue eyes blazing with rage. He insisted on seeing the man who had “slandered” his troops. For more than three hours, Westphal bravely explained to Hitler how it had been impossible to push the Allies back into the sea. To Westphal’s surprise, Hitler listened carefully and then expressed sympathy for the German troops at Anzio who had been in intense combat for so long. They must be exhausted. But he also stressed that the German people needed a major victory to bolster their morale, which was no longer possible on the Eastern Front because of lack of resources and troops. The Soviets outnumbered the Germans there by two to one and were growing in strength by the day.
Westphal left the meeting believing his Führer had understood the situation at Anzio clearly. Sixty-two-year-old Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, supreme commander of German Armed Forces, met with Westphal as he prepared to return to Italy. Keitel was notorious for his sycophancy, hence his nickname “Lakeitel”—“Lackey.”
“You were lucky,” Keitel told Westphal. “If we old fools had said even half as much, the Führer would have had us hanged.”
ANZIO, ITALY, APRIL 1944
THEY ARRIVED OFF the boats with long winter coats, looking like nervous high school students before the biggest game of their lives. They were a mere fraction of the fourteen thousand troops brought in to fill the Allied lines that March. When Sparks reported back to his regimental command post after returning from Naples, he was given a hundred and fifty of them and told to create a new E Company.
Some of the new men were shunned or ignored by the regiment’s combat veterans, who knew from bitter experience that most replacements did not last long. Why bother to get to know yet another kid who was bound to be killed? That only invited more unnecessary pain. They were not interested in these doomed teenagers unless they shared the same foxhole—not to mention being subjected to their inane chatter about how their hometown was best and their high school sweetheart, the virgin they loved beyond reason, was the most beautiful and loyal.
Worse still, the new boys were woefully unprepared for the horrors that lay ahead. Some could barely salute, and none had any training in how to deal with the psychological trauma of combat. One did not know who Hitler was. Guy Prestia, a machine gunner, remembered an anxious nineteen-year-old who had not even fired an M1. Prestia showed him how one afternoon, stressing the importance of keeping the breach clean to prevent it from jamming in battle. The replacement used his gun for the first time the following night. “He only fired one shot,” recalled Prestia. “The one he used to kill himself.”
On Easter Sunday 1944, Sparks ordered a group of eight replacements to dig foxholes. But before they had so much as lifted a spade, a German bomb landed nearby with an enormous explosion that killed every one of them. He had witnessed death almost every day in combat, but he was still shocked to the core. The war’s immense horror always had a way of exploding back into his psyche and reminding him of its utter unpredictability.
It was a miserable Easter indeed. It rained hard and men battled to stay dry in their foxholes and dugouts, which stank of stale sweat, sweet tobacco, and urine. Living conditions resembled those on the Somme or at Verdun during the trench warfare of World War I. Across the “Bitch-Head,” what Churchill had most wanted to avoid—the nightmare of a static war of attrition—was a depressing, enervating reality. Neither side had the power or will to land the knockout blow, so they grappled, punch-drunk, on the ropes.
Thunderbirds likened themselves to rats living in an ocean of mud, where any movement aboveground—day or night—was risky, given the German bombardment. They learned how to walk without standing upright—the “Anzio slouch.” The taller men like Sparks looked enviously at their smaller comrades, who took not nearly as long to get their heads below groun
d level. Others became known as “turtles.” Neither the propaganda leaflets dropped by the Germans showing scantily clad Fräuleins, nor the delivery of hot food and the odd bottle of Coke that men sipped for hours, could persuade them to get out of their holes and stretch their cramped legs.
The inability to escape the danger grated at and finally wore down everyone’s nerves. “The jitters were known as ‘Anzio anxiety’ and ‘Nettuno neurosis,’ ” wrote Ernie Pyle, who was nearly killed when a shell landed on a villa occupied by correspondents in the actual town of Anzio. “A person would hold out his hand and purposely make it tremble, and say, ‘See, I’m not nervous.’ ” But everyone was, from Mark Clark to Sparks on down to the greenest of replacements clasping their shiny new dog tags as if they were rosaries.
One day, Sparks received a letter from a distraught mother in Dayton, Ohio, who had learned that her son, Corporal Robert Fremder, had been missing in action since February 16—the first day of the German attack that had wiped out E Company. “Oh My Dear Captain, why did this war have to be? He was only a boy of nineteen. He would be twenty this coming July. What has happened to him and what has he gone through to make him feel like a man of forty years?… Won’t you please tell me what happened to my son?”
Sparks did not know what had happened to him. His eyes filled with tears as he read the rest of the letter. It ended with the mother asking him to give the cookies she had baked for her son to his friends in E Company instead, none of whom had returned to Allied lines. Sparks had the courage to face the Germans but lacked the bravery, he recalled, to reply to the mother. What could he possibly say to lessen her anguish? The worst pain, he realized, was not felt on the battlefield. It was not knowing what had happened to someone you loved.*
* * *
* Fremder was in fact taken prisoner and would survive the war.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE BREAKOUT
A Fifth Army GI comforts a badly wounded comrade on the first day of the Allied breakout from Anzio, Mary 23, 1943. [National Archives]
ANZIO, ITALY, MAY 21, 1944
SPRING FINALLY ARRIVED. Nightingales sang above the Via Anziate, where so many Thunderbirds had died. Poppies and other bright flowers dotted the ravaged earth, swaying lazily in the warm breezes, obscuring the scatterings of bullets and rotting corpses. As men pulled back heavy canvas covers and basked in the sunshine in their foxholes, they talked of rumors about a big buildup, this time to punch out of the ring of iron around Anzio.
Patrols became more frequent. Fake artillery pieces made of rubber and wood were spread across some rear areas to distract the German bombers as thousands of real guns were shuttled up to the front line at night. Each day, hundreds of replacements marched from the shattered docks in Anzio to jump-off positions. All through early May, long lines of trucks stretched from the port, carrying men and weapons to the front, lugging new 240mm howitzers, the largest artillery pieces ever used by the U.S. Army, capable of throwing 360 pounds of high explosive over fourteen miles.
On May 21, 1944, Sparks learned that the rumors were true. A massive attack aimed at breaking out of the beachhead, code-named Operation Buffalo, would begin in just forty-eight hours. Newly promoted to major, he was placed second in command of the regiment’s Second Battalion, which comprised three companies, and was summoned to the regimental command post to discuss the plan in detail. As Sparks approached the post, he saw several officers standing near the entrance. A lone artillery shell landed close by. Nobody was hurt, but one of the officers, a chaplain, broke down and started screaming. He had been at Anzio for only two weeks. Sparks wondered if he had suddenly lost his faith—his conviction that God would protect him.
The plan of attack, Sparks learned, was simple enough. The six German divisions trapping the Allies on the Anzio beachhead would be bombed and shelled as never before by more guns and planes than had ever been assembled on a European battlefield. Sparks’s regiment alone would be supported by ninety-six artillery pieces—four times the usual number. Two extra divisions had been brought in to bolster the Allied forces, bringing the total to 160,000 men, 20,000 more than the Germans. It would be a close-run thing with high casualties guaranteed. There was no easy way to break out of the “Bitch-Head.”
To confuse the enemy in the build-up to the attack, men like Bill Lyford, who manned a Browning automatic rifle, were ordered to open fire at different times in what soon became known as “turkey shoots.” Lyford at first enjoyed adding tracer rounds to his magazine and watching them gently arc through the sky like long chains of Christmas lights. But suddenly it was as if the whole front pivoted around and every German in Italy was firing back at him. He rolled back into his hole and took out the tracers. Turkey shooting was far more fun from the bottom of a foxhole.
For two days, Sparks and the regiment girded themselves for what Prime Minister Churchill described as “an all-out conquer or die.” Thoughts turned once more to life and death. Thunderbirds carefully cut out the red circles at the centers of Lucky Strike cigarette packs and used them as filters for their flashlights, hunkering down to write last letters home, a dim pink flicker illuminating the fading pinups of Hollywood starlets in their humid holes. When they took a shower in an abandoned German blockhouse, they asked themselves if they would ever get clean again. Some hoped they would be hit by shrapnel and be taken off the line. Losing a limb might be better than having to sprint across minefields, carpeted in spring violets and buttercups, while dodging mortar rounds.
Sparks worried too. Most of the men in the Second Battalion were now replacements—many of them just out of high school—who would have to advance into the sights of machine guns for the first time. Just like their forefathers in the Great War in Flanders, they would have to fix bayonets, leave their dugouts, and go “over the top.”
Would inexperienced squad and platoon leaders follow his company commanders’ orders when the Germans inevitably counterattacked with tanks?
ANZIO, ITALY, MAY 23, 1944
LONG BEFORE DAWN, Thunderbirds boiled instant coffee and smoked Lucky Strike after Lucky Strike. Some spoke in staccato whispers, scared to break the eerie silence. Few felt like eating their K ration breakfasts. Riflemen checked newly oiled M1s, platoon leaders snapped magazines into their tommy guns, BAR gunners like Bill Lyford strapped on leather harnesses holding ammunition and waited for the call of a lieutenant to move out. Dawn cracked on the horizon. Squads filed into gullies, their faces etched with fear, and crept toward no-man’s-land. For late May, the weather was unusually brisk and cool.
At a forward observation post, the Fifth Army’s Mark Clark joined General Lucian Truscott, who had replaced Lucas as commander of the Anzio forces, to wait for over five hundred artillery pieces to open up on the German positions.
It was 5:40 A.M.
“In about five minutes those Krauts will catch the damndest barrage they ever saw,” said an artillery observer. “And after that I wouldn’t give two hoots in hell for anybody’s chances.”
At 5:45 A.M., the horizon filled with flashes and explosions as the Allies launched the greatest barrage of the war to date. Countless thousands of rounds hurtled overhead, and within seconds a dense pall of smoke was spreading across the beachhead. A timid sun peaked over the limestone Lepini Mountains to the west as General Truscott stared into the distance in awe. “A wall of fire appeared as our salvos crashed into the enemy front lines,” he recalled, “then tracers wove eerie patterns in streaks of light as hundreds of machine guns of every caliber poured a hail of steel into enemy positions.” The din was so great that men had to shout into each other’s ears to be heard. It seemed Mark Clark had mustered every howitzer in the Mediterranean in his attempt to blow his way out of Anzio. Not a single Thunderbird complained of profligacy as the ground trembled beneath his feet. To Sparks, it sounded like the “world was coming to an end.”
When the shelling ended, teenagers in Sparks’s Second Battalion gritted their teeth and fixed sharpened
bayonets to their M1s. Platoon leaders snapped orders. Men climbed out of their foxholes and moved toward barbed wire and enemy trenches. They were soon passing through wheat fields at a running crouch, crawling through deep draws, creeping through a cemetery with its broken and shattered headstones, and sprinting for cover as they closed on the ruins of farmhouses where snipers and artillery observers from the Third Panzergrenadier Division lurked among the piles of bloodstained bricks and cracked terracotta tiles. Men tossed grenades down cellar gratings and sprayed .45 bullets at every window and door.
Open ground lay beyond, leading to the Second Battalion’s first objective, a high-banked railroad track close to the Via Anziate. Then came the crunch and crump of mines exploding, followed by screams of men whose legs and feet had been blown off. The Germans had buried mines everywhere, seeding no-man’s-land with “Bouncing Betties” that castrated with three hundred and sixty flying ball bearings, “nutcrackers” that fired a single round into the groin, and Shu mines, each containing a quarter pound of TNT, which were buried an inch or two under the sandy ground.
Sparks ordered tank destroyers to clear paths through the mines. His men advanced once more and had reached the railroad by sundown. Elsewhere, Allied units had pushed several miles from their jumping-off points. On the Thunderbirds’ right flank, the Third Division had punched its way to the reeking ruins of a village called Cisterna but had paid heavily for a charge across no-man’s-land with fixed bayonets, losing almost a thousand men, the greatest one-day loss for an American infantry division in World War II.
The following day, Sparks’s Second Battalion attacked once more. The silvery specks of fighters dueled far above. Vapor trails left by Flying Fortress bombers latticed the southern sky. American Piper Cubs, so small and flimsy in comparison, circled like hawks trying to spot the enemy’s movements. Early that afternoon of May 24, one reported that twenty-four Mark VI tanks were rolling toward the battalion. Around 3 P.M., they smashed into the Thunderbirds’ lines. “I thought we were going to have a rout on our hands,” Sparks recalled. “We had a hard time restoring order there for a while. I was yelling at everybody that they couldn’t go back.” Thanks to several tank destroyers, which had highly effective 90mm guns that fired rounds with a flat trajectory, the German tanks were halted. But it was only when the 158th Artillery also zeroed in on the Mark V and VI giants that the armored counterattack was beaten off.