The Liberator

by Alex Kershaw

  So it went all along the Anzio front. Kesselring threw everything he had at the advancing Allies, but he no longer had either enough men or artillery shells to stop them. Sparks’s battalion stabbed northwest across the Campo di Carne, aiming for the town of Velletri in the Alban Hills, from which the Germans had fired countless shells for more than four months. Regimental commander Colonel John Church pushed Sparks and his other field officers relentlessly toward the vital high ground. Medic Robert “Doc” Franklin was in Church’s command post when he learned that I Company commander, Captain J. G. Evans, had dared to question Church’s orders to take yet another well-defended German position.

  “Take that hill!” snapped Church.

  “Colonel, if I take that hill I’ll be cut off and captured. I have no flank protection.”

  “I don’t give a damn! Take that hill!”

  I Company took the hill, but Evans and others were indeed captured.

  In another memorable action, lanky technical sergeant Van T. Barfoot, from Edingburg, Mississippi, earned himself one of just eight Congressional Medals of Honor given to Thunderbirds in World War II. When his platoon was pinned down, he crawled on his belly through a field of wheat until he was around twenty yards from a German machine-gun position. He reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it at the Germans. The gun was silenced. There was a slit trench nearby. A rampaging Barfoot jumped into it and opened up with his ten-pound Thompson machine gun, hitting several figures in gray uniforms with .45 rounds. Later that afternoon, after he had reassembled his platoon, he managed to stop a tank with a bazooka, shoot its crew, and disable a German artillery piece. Before the day was over, he had also carried two wounded soldiers to safety.

  Other men were as courageous but not as fortunate. By nightfall, there were more than five hundred casualties from the 45th Division—so many that Thunderbirds were forced to share cots with each other in aid stations.

  ANZIO, ITALY, MAY 25, 1943

  IT WAS AROUND 7:30 A.M. when Captain Ben Souza, leading a platoon of combat engineers, stepped onto a damaged bridge. He looked up to see a jeep speeding toward him. The jeep’s driver, Lieutenant Francis Buckley, pulled over and saluted Souza.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” asked Souza.

  “I’m trying to make contact with the Anzio forces,” said Buckley.

  Souza smiled. “Boy, you’ve made it.”

  Buckley belonged to the Fifth Army forces that had finally taken Monte Cassino, broken through the Winter Line with the help of fifteen hundred artillery guns, and then pushed north toward Anzio. There were no longer two fronts in Italy. The long-awaited linkup was finally a reality.

  The news relayed from the field kept getting better in Mark Clark’s command post. On May 27, several German divisions began to retreat. Thousands of grim-faced but relieved Germans filed along the shell-holed Via Anziate, hands above heads, bound for enormous POW cages in Nettuno. The breakout gathered momentum as Kesselring opted to pull back his remaining forces in the hope of establishing yet another defensive position, aptly named the Hitler Line, north of Rome.

  It had taken four days of costly bludgeoning. More than four thousand men had been lost, one every minute. Among the fatalities was Sergeant Leon Siehr, the only man from E Company other than Sparks who had returned from the Battle of the Caves that February. But after 127 days of stalemate, the Allies had finally broken free from Anzio.

  VELLETRI, ITALY, JUNE 2, 1944

  GRATEFUL LOCALS WELCOMED Sparks and his Second Battalion and plied them with wine as they entered the hill town of Velletri. Unlike Cisterna and every other town on the beachhead below, Velletri had suffered little damage. The Thunderbirds had at long last left the “Bitch-Head” behind. “It was like being freed from the greatest of Nazi concentration camps,” recalled an elated Jack Hallowell, who arrived with the regimental headquarters staff. “Men looked down on the old beachhead from the heights they now occupied and wondered how they had survived.”

  The views were spectacular. The Germans had been able to see everything, every movement, aboveground. Below lay the Campo di Carne, a vast field of broken machines, shell-holes, blackened rubble, and death. The splintered pines and cork trees of the Padiglione Woods, where Sparks had slept the first night he had come ashore, were clearly visible. So was the bare Buonriposo Ridge, near the caves, where he had somehow lived when so many of his men had died.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ROME

  After fighting through Sicily and at Anzio, a GI visits the Colosseum in Rome on June 9, 1944, with two Italian women. [National Archives]

  ROME, ITALY, JUNE 3, 1944

  THERE WERE NOW BLUE-AND-WHITE signs for Roma, the Eternal City, at road junctions. The first Axis capital in Europe was tantalizingly close. On June 3, members of the First Special Service Force, an elite American-Canadian paratroop brigade, passed these and other road signs, some of which had been turned to point the wrong way, as they fought their way into the city’s ugly southern outskirts.

  Leading these “Black Devils,” as the Germans respectfully called the men with red spearheads on their shoulder patches, was a truly remarkable leader of men in combat: thirty-seven-year-old Brigadier General Robert Frederick. “He wore a somewhat inconsequential mustache and this, combined with a gentle manner,” recalled Major General Lucien Truscott, “gave him more the look of a haberdashery clerk than the first-class fighting man he was.”

  Frederick would receive eight Purple Hearts by war’s end. Lithe and fit as a predatory cat, recalled a fellow officer, he was reputed to have made his first combat jump in slippers after just ten minutes’ training. He was without question unnervingly calm under fire and ruthlessly aggressive. At Anzio, his men had crept behind enemy lines and left calling cards beside the corpses of Germans whose throats they slit: “DAS DICKE ENDE KOMMT NOCH!”—“THE WORST IS YET TO COME.”

  Around midday on June 3, 1944, Frederick watched as his men began the final attack into Rome. A jeep approached. Major General Geoffrey Keyes, the fifty-six-year-old II Corps commander, got out of the jeep.

  “General Frederick,” said Keyes. “What’s holding you up here?”

  “The Germans, sir.”

  “How long will it take you to get across the city limits?”

  “The rest of the day. There are a couple of guns up there.”

  “That will not do. General Clark must be across the city limits by four o’clock.”

  Frederick questioned the sudden imposition of such an arbitrary deadline.

  “He has to have a photograph taken.”

  Frederick tried to hide his contempt.

  “Tell the General to give me an hour.”

  The Allies now enjoyed real momentum for the first time in mainland Italy. But rather than destroy the retreating German divisions of the Tenth Army, Mark Clark had actually disobeyed orders from his immediate superior, the British general Harold Alexander, commander of all Allied forces in Italy. Instead of delivering the knockout blow, he had diverted crucial forces toward Rome, which had little strategic value after it was declared an open city by Kesselring.

  The decision to do so was as stupid as it was insubordinate. In opting for a Roman apotheosis over the destruction of the Tenth Army, Clark would end up prolonging the war in Italy for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Clark’s yearning to be the great liberator of Rome would undermine everything his troops, including Felix Sparks and his fellow Thunderbirds, had fought with such immense sacrifice and suffering to achieve.

  It was Montgomery, shortly after the debacle at Salerno, who had advised Clark on how to deal with orders from Alexander: listen, nod agreement, and then do as one saw fit. In any case, Clark believed the honor of liberating the city was his by rights. “We Americans had slogged all the way from Salerno,” he recalled, “and I was not going to have this great prize denied me.”

  At 4 P.M. that day, Clark duly arrived at Frederick’s command post a
ccompanied by four staff officers and a large group of press. They found Frederick observing a fierce fight at a roadblock in the distance.

  “What’s holding up the First Special Force?” asked Clark.

  Frederick pulled out a map and indicated German positions.

  “I’m holding off the artillery because of civilians.”

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

  Flashbulbs popped as Clark turned toward a nearby road sign that spelled ROMA and asked Frederick to have his picture taken with him standing by it.

  “Golly, Bob,” Clark said as they were photographed. “I would like that sign as a souvenir. Will you get it for me?”

  A grim-looking Frederick asked one of his men, a half-track driver, to get onto a fence and knock the sign down for Clark. Suddenly there was the crack of a shot from a German sniper. Everyone dived into the nearest ditch.

  “That’s what’s holding up the First Special Service Force!” blurted Frederick.

  Clark and his entourage withdrew.

  Around 6 P.M. that evening, Frederick joined the forward elements of his force as they crossed over the Tiber on the marble-faced San Angelo Bridge, completed in A.D. 134 by the Roman emperor Hadrian. It was starting to get dark when a group of Germans, retreating from the south, suddenly appeared.

  “Halt!” shouted Frederick.

  The Germans opened fire. Frederick pulled out his .45 and emptied the clip while one of his men cut loose with a tommy gun. Frederick fell to the ground, hit in the right thigh and right arm, and then crawled back across the bridge toward cover, leaving a trail of blood a foot wide behind him. Several minutes later, a GI found him lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

  “I’m okay,” said Frederick. “I’m okay.”

  The Germans had meanwhile pulled out. Frederick spotted the half-track he had arrived in. Its driver had been killed. Minutes later, he was being treated at an aid station. A medic pleaded with him to go to a hospital.

  “I don’t have time,” said Frederick.

  Despite being in terrible pain and feeling tremendous guilt at the loss of his driver, he continued to issue orders as the battle to secure entry into Rome raged that evening. By 11 P.M., he learned that his men had seized all eight of the bridges across the Tiber that they had been assigned. With the help of his men, he left the aid station and made his way to the headquarters of Major General Alfred Gruenther, the Fifth Army’s chief of staff. En route, he noticed a blue-and-white sign, ROMA, similar to the one Clark had earlier requested. He pulled it down and tucked it under his arm. Shortly after, he limped into Gruenther’s tented HQ, where he found Charles Saltzman, the Fifth’s deputy chief of staff.

  Frederick handed him the sign.

  “It occurred to me that General Clark might want to add this to his souvenir collection.”

  Saltzman did not respond to Frederick’s thinly veiled sarcasm. “Frederick was continuing on his nerves and whatever painkiller was in him,” he recalled. “He said he hadn’t slept for sixty hours.” Saltzman accompanied Frederick to see the no-nonsense Gruenther, notorious for grilling his generals during debriefings. Frederick impressed Saltzman by answering all of Gruenther’s questions accurately. A few hours later, on June 4, he was seated with aides in a hastily commandeered building in central Rome, still refusing to sleep as he examined maps and issued orders.

  Reporter and cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who admired Frederick as much as he disdained Clark, found the Black Devils’ commander on the morning of June 4 lying in a bed, heavily bandaged. Frederick was angry that his men had been recklessly rushed toward Rome to secure Clark’s undying fame, causing avoidable casualties.

  THERE WAS PRECIOUS little glory for the Thunderbirds as Rome fell, no celebrating with a raffia-wrapped flagon of cheap Chianti in St. Peter’s Square. Sparks could see the Eternal City in the distance, but he had been ordered to move his battalion a few miles to the west. The journey to there was a joyous one, however, even if he didn’t get to celebrate in the ancient capital. Ecstatic locals showered him with flowers as he passed through villages toward the regiment’s assigned bivouac area.

  Later that morning, Clark convened a press conference in the magnificent Palazzo Senatorio overlooking the Piazza del Campidoglio. Thirty-two-year-old CBS news correspondent Eric Sevareid found the general lounging against a balcony, surrounded by correspondents.

  “Well, gentlemen, I didn’t really expect to have a press conference here,” said Clark. “I just called a little meeting.”

  Newsreel cameras rolled. Flashbulbs popped.

  “This is a great day for the Fifth Army,” added Clark.

  Sevareid was disgusted. “This was the immortal remark of Rome’s modern-day conqueror,” he later wrote. “It was not, apparently, a great day for the world, for the Allies, for all the suffering people who had desperately looked toward the time of peace.” There was no mention of Montgomery’s Eighth Army that had fought the Axis since November 17, 1941, in North Africa, accompanied the U.S. Fifth Army across Sicily, and then slogged up the jagged, fatal spine of Italy. No mention of the seven Allied nations whose sons had died in the still smoldering ruins of Monte Cassino. They had suddenly disappeared from history. As Sevareid pushed his way out of the press huddle, he overheard a colleague mutter: “On this historic occasion I feel like vomiting.”

  ROME’S LIBERATION WAS celebrated around the world. Europe’s first Axis capital had fallen. “You have made the American people very happy,” Roosevelt cabled Clark. It was a great victory, agreed Stalin. Paris and then Berlin now beckoned.

  Chasing the barbarians from the most famous of Italian cities had taken almost a year and cost twenty thousand American lives, with more than one hundred thousand injured. Had it been worth it? Many American strategists were unconvinced. The Italian campaign, they believed, had brought the war no nearer to an end. Churchill himself admitted that these skeptics, which included U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall, believed he had led them “up the garden path in the Mediterranean.” It would have been better to have left Italy well alone and concentrated efforts instead on opening a second front in Normandy. “But what a beautiful path it has proved to be,” Churchill added. “They [the Americans] have picked peaches here and nectarines there. How grateful they should be.” Understandably, such remarks enraged those who had long since begun to chafe at their British cousins’ thinly veiled snobbery and arrogance. “I never at any time considered Italy to be a garden path, and many of the Italian peaches had gonorrhea,” recalled Sparks. “As for the nectarines, I never saw any.”

  ROME, ITALY, JUNE 6, 1944

  MARK CLARK ENJOYED worldwide fame for less than forty-eight hours. At 6:30 A.M. on June 6, on “Omaha” and four other beaches in Normandy, Allied forces began to land on what would be remembered by most as the one and only D-Day. Thankfully, Allied planners had learned something from the fiascos of Salerno and Anzio and had decided to land as many divisions as possible over a broad front and then press rapidly inland.

  “How do you like that?” said Clark after being woken with the news. “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”

  The big story was now in France, not the rocky hell of Italy, where the Germans would yet again reassemble, this time north of Rome, and then fight on bitterly to the very end of the war against Mark Clark and his beleaguered Fifth Army. The advance would slow once more to just a few miles a day. According to the journalist Alan Whicker, who had plenty of opportunity to see Clark in action for the rest of his reign in Italy, “He remained the Germans’ favorite enemy General: he always gave them an easier time than they expected—and with his strong personality, always got away with it.”

  As the Allies stormed ashore in Normandy, on the outskirts of Rome the Thunderbirds were finally, after months of mud and horror, laying down their M1s and tommy guns, sitting in the open aboveground wi
thout “brain furnaces”—helmets—and basking in the sunshine. In a typically understated letter to his parents, Sparks wrote: “We have been going at a back-breaking clip for the last three weeks. It was really an event for us to finally break through on the Anzio Beachhead although it was no easy job. We are all completely worn out.”

  That afternoon, the Thunderbirds were able to relax for the first time in four months. Artillery radios were tuned to the BBC. Spirits soared when a news bulletin announced that Allied forces had landed successfully in France and were pushing inland. “Hope returned to the weary infantry,” recalled Jack Hallowell. “Morale went sky high. With that beachhead in France, the whole war was almost over. It had to be.” That night, for the first time in Italy, men didn’t even bother to dig in. Any day now, they would surely be headed home.

  ROME, ITALY, JUNE 1944

  EVERY THUNDERBIRD HAD the chance to visit Rome. Armed with forty-eight-hour passes and cartons of brand-name cigarettes for barter, they gaped at the Colosseum, whistled at surprisingly stylish Roman girls in silk stockings, and devoured thick and juicy horse steaks at the San Carlo restaurant, a favorite with GIs. Many went to St. Peter’s and were blessed by Pope Pius XII. He held daily audiences at 11 A.M., giving benediction to thousands of Allied troops in three languages before graciously holding out his hand so true believers could kneel and kiss his ring finger before visiting the Circus Maximus and the Pantheon, their faith in a benign God temporarily restored.