The King's War

by The King's War- The Friendship of George VI

  In his Christmas broadcast, the King struck a tone of what his official biographer described as ‘mingled gratification and warning’.143 ‘In this year that is almost passed, many things have happened, under God’s providence, to make us thankful for His mercies,’ he said.

  The generous strength of the United States of America, the tremendous deeds of Russia, the endurance of China under her long ordeal, the fighting spirit of France re-born, and the flower of the manhood and womanhood of many lands that share the burdens of our forward march – all these have played their part in the brightening of our fortunes on sea, on land, and in the air.

  Since I last spoke to you many things have changed. But the spirit of our people has not changed. As we were not downcast by defeat, we are not unduly exalted by victory. While we have bright visions of the future we have no easy dreams of the days that lie close at hand. We know that much hard working and hard fighting, and perhaps harder working and harder fighting than ever before, are necessary for victory. We shall not rest from our task until it is nobly ended.

  In private, the King allowed himself some wishful thinking. In his diary entry on Christmas night, he wrote simply: ‘Let us hope next Christmas will see the end of the War.’144

  CHAPTER TEN

  The March on Rome

  Just after 2 a.m. on 22 January 1944, 40,000 Allied troops of the American Fifth Army, VI Corps and the British First Infantry Division swarmed ashore on a fifteen-mile stretch of Italian beach near the resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno, taking the Germans almost completely by surprise. The British forces included the Scots Guards, among whose number was Antony Logue, who had finally returned to his unit after a long recovery from the injuries he had suffered in North Africa.

  Operation Shingle, as the landing was known, was a bold attempt to circumvent the Gustav Line, which was still preventing the Allied troops from advancing northwards through Italy. Under the plan, General Mark Clark, the commander of the American Fifth Army, would outflank the German army by landing on the coast north of the line, about thirty miles from Rome, and then advance northwards on the capital. The operation was championed by Churchill, who had consistently argued the case for attacking Germany through its Mediterranean ‘underbelly’. He prevailed despite resistance from the Americans and the Russians, who saw the operation as a sideshow that risked distracting attention and military forces from the main event: the planned invasion of continental Europe across the Channel.

  Among the sceptics was the American Major General John Lucas, whose VI Corps, made up of British and US divisions, was to lead the assault. Lucas had been left out of the planning of the operation and did not think the forces he had been given were sufficient to achieve the goals he had been set – with good reason. ‘I felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter,’ he wrote in his diary, comparing Churchill’s role in devising the plan with the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign of the First World War with which the then First Lord of the Admiralty had been closely associated. ‘This whole affair had the strong odour of Gallipoli and apparently the same amateur Churchill was still on the coaches’ bench.’

  Despite Lucas’s misgivings, the operation got off to the best possible start. The Allies had expected they would have to fight their way in from the coast. Instead, the American forces landed without trouble of any kind. Although their British comrades had to contend with mines and barbed wire, they suffered only minor casualties. German aircraft did not appear until 8 a.m. and no sign of enemy opposition was reported until 10 a.m. – eight hours after the initial landing.

  The newspapers back home were understandably jubilant. ‘It was so easy and so simply done,’ wrote Don Whitehead, of the Combined United Press, who rode ashore with the second wave at 2.10 a.m.145

  It caught the Germans so completely by surprise that, as I write this dispatch, six hours after the landing, American troops are literally standing with their mouths open and shaking their heads in utter amazement.

  We began walking, expecting each moment that the enemy would open fire, but we just walked. Nothing happened in my sector. There were only a few scattered shots fired and most of them came from our troops to the north.

  At this early stage there is every indication that General Clark’s Fifth Army has pulled off a brilliant manoeuvre to knock the enemy from the flank and open the road to Rome.

  Yet despite this auspicious start, Lucas failed to capitalize on the element of surprise – and decided instead to delay his advance until he had sufficiently consolidated his position. His caution was partly down to his conviction that he did not have sufficient forces; he had also apparently taken to heart advice from Clark who told him on more than one occasion: ‘Don’t stick your neck out.’ Whatever the reason, it proved to be a serious miscalculation. Kesselring took advantage of the pause to form a defensive ring around the beachhead, trapping the Allies inside. Within days, almost all the German reserves had arrived to support the counter-attack. Rather than facing a force of 20,000, Lucas’s men soon found themselves up against 120,000 Germans, 70,000 of whom were combat soldiers.

  The Allied operation degenerated into the kind of trench warfare the combatants’ fathers would have known on the Western Front during the First World War. During daylight the frontlines were quiet, except when a sudden movement on one side provoked a sniper’s bullet or a burst of machine-gun, mortar or artillery fire. When darkness fell, the beachhead came to life as patrols went out, ammunition and supplies were brought forward and the dead buried. There could also be lighter moments, though, as was revealed in a bulletin by one of Antony’s fellow Scots Guards, Lieutenant H. Brooking Clark, of the 2nd battalion, dated 1 February and marked ‘CONFIDENTIAL’. Clark described how he presided over a headquarters of four – comprising a golf pro, a Blackpool football star, a keen amateur cyclist and his former servant, known throughout the battalion as ‘Flash Harrington’, who scrounged and cooked the ‘most amazing things’, including pancakes and jam tart, baked over a hole in the ground and using Andrews Liver Salts in place of baking powder. Also sharing their dugout was a white rabbit and a ‘bomb happy hen’ that hopped from bed to bed and became such a nuisance they eventually bundled her off to rear command headquarters. At one point, the relative calm was shattered by the noise of pneumatic drilling: the commanding officer was so impressed with the lieutenant’s dugout that he had a similar one carved out of the rock for himself next door.

  Antony also seemed to be having a fairly quiet time of it. In a letter to his family written five days later, there was no mention of fighting. Instead he asked his parents to thank John Gordon for the bed that he had left him which was ‘serving its purpose now in no mean fashion’, and for a fleece jacket that was keeping out the strong winds. He reminisced about life back home. ‘The garden will be beginning to look wonderful again very shortly,’ he wrote:

  Did you have any snow at Beechgrove over Christmas? The first Rhododendron will be showing again soon.

  I am so glad to hear also that my nephew & niece are in the best & most resplendent spirits. Has Alexandra quietened down yet? Believe Robert is even noisier that she is, practically impossible. The next sight I suppose will be that of Val pushing a pram, you can tell him that I am going to stay away long enough to miss that phase!

  Such relative calm was not to last, however. Ordered by Hitler to ‘lance the abscess south of Rome’, Kesselring unleashed a series of attacks aimed at driving the invaders off the narrow semi-circular beachhead to which they were clinging. ‘The fighting we have been in has been described as the most bitter fighting in the war,’ wrote Lieutenant Colonel D.S. Wedderburn in a bulletin dated 12 February. ‘The battalion is said by everyone to have fought absolutely wonderfully ... We have made successful attacks and fought off, practically to the last round and last man, the most desperate counter-attacks.’

  A crucial phase began in the early hours of 16 February with the German launch of Operation Fischfang (Fishing), which was intended to drive a wedge
into the Allies’ left flank. Waves of tanks and infantry hurled themselves at the American and British defenders. Reynolds Packard, a reporter with the British United Press, who watched the assault from the roof of a barn, saw tank battles and infantry fighting stretching out along the skyline. ‘The enemy has been exposing himself to our fire as never before,’ he reported. ‘German wounded and dead are so numerous that they are hampering the infantry attacks. In some sectors the Germans attack over a carpet of their own dead.’146 Another reporter on the beachhead, Basil Gingell, was also staggered by the enemy’s determination. ‘With a disregard for life that one could scarcely believe, the German units have been formed up and flung into battle across low-lying plains into the very mouths of our artillery,’ he wrote. ‘They attempted a “Light Brigade” charge without horses and were mown down by the huge weight of shells flung against them.’147

  Like everyone else in Britain, Lionel and Myrtle were following the progress of Allied forces through reports in the newspapers, but they did not immediately realize their own son was among them. In the letter sent eight days before the landing in which he had congratulated Valentine on his wedding, Antony described his own news as ‘negligible’. And then it had gone quiet.

  Although Myrtle correctly guessed her son’s location, confirmation did not come until a month after the landing: ‘The censorship bar now having been lifted we are now able to say what you have already guessed, that we are in the Anzio Bridgehead,’ Antony wrote in a letter home, dated midnight 19 February and penned by torchlight. ‘So I hope you will understand the scarcity & incoherence of my correspondence, during the last month.’

  You can tell Val that, until last night I had not taken off my boots or my coat, or removed a stitch of my clothing for 19 days, a very different figure to the debonair figure of peacetime. Still, it has been a classic show and one that I feel should live in history forever. I am very proud to have been here and to have participated in my tiny way. The fellows have fought as only the Brigade of Guards can, more than that I cannot say.

  Pardon that handwriting, I am writing this on my hand, by the aid of a torch & it is raining like hell, oh the glories of battle!

  Despite the wretched conditions, Antony still found time to tease his newlywed elder brother. ‘Anne seems, by all accounts, to be kicking Val into shape as the model husband,’ he added. ‘I do not really believe that she can make him clean his own shoes. If she has, it is a very gallant effort and bravo Anne!’

  The determination shown by Kesselring’s forces prompted fears that the Allied offensive might end in a second Dunkirk. Miraculously, such a disaster was averted, but criticism was mounting of Lucas, who rarely left his underground headquarters in Nettuno and failed to inspire the confidence of either his own men or his superiors. On 22 February he was dismissed. ‘I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale,’ was Churchill’s damning verdict. Lucas was replaced by Major General Lucian Truscott, who had been appointed his deputy six days earlier. One of the American army’s most able commanders, the square-jawed, rough-hewn Truscott brought a dramatic change of style, visiting every unit on the beachhead within his first twenty-four hours and inspiring fierce loyalty among those under his command. Yet it took time for him to restore the Allies’ fortunes.

  When Antony wrote another letter home on 4 March, he began by apologizing for not writing before, ‘but things have been a little hectic’.

  I hear that the Grenadiers are getting a bit of publicity in the big city just now, thank god the Brigade is getting written up at last even only 1st battalion of it! Most of the stories I have heard over the wireless and in the papers about the fighting here are all nonsense, but it has been a most remarkable affair from beginning to end, & which I feel sure will leave its mark on the history of the war. The story of it can never be told in a letter, it will have to wait until I can tell it to you myself.

  Antony wrote home again several times in the ensuing weeks, though censorship meant he was not able to go into detail. His letters instead included more mundane matters, such as requests to help manage his financial affairs. He also made his usual quips about his eldest brother’s exploits in Africa. Writing on 14 April, he said the letters he had received included ‘a rather more pathetic one from Laurie, saying that having tracked a miserable green river in the heart of God knows where, to its final disappearance into the sand, (infuriating!), he now struggled on to Mogadishu (wherever that may be) and is now in bed with the doctor (metaphorically) with Amoebic Dysentery (whatever that is) and will be in bed for at least three weeks. This last is the only piece of good news in the epistle, it will keep him out of trouble!’ A few weeks later, Antony wrote home to announce his own promotion: ‘His Majesty has realized that my talents have been ignored for too long and his government have seen fit to make me a Captain!’

  As Antony noted in his letter, the achievements of the British forces in Italy were finally receiving some praise in the newspapers back home. A piece in The Times that March headlined ‘Scots Guard in the Beach-Head: Valour against Odds’, described in glowing terms a battle on the Anzio beachhead that ended with twenty guardsmen taking eighty Germans prisoner at the point of a bayonet.148 Recognition of what they were up against went down well with Antony and his comrades. ‘I am glad that you read the tribute to the Regiment in The Times’, he wrote to his parents on 5 May. ‘I had heard that it was very good, and as you say, much overdue.’

  Then, on 23 May, after several months of bloody stalemate, the Allied forces finally attempted a breakout offensive. The first day’s fighting was intense: the 1st Armored Division lost 100 tanks and the 3rd Infantry Division suffered 955 casualties, the highest single daily tally for any US division during the war. The Germans took heavy casualties too: the 362nd Infantry Division lost an estimated half of its fighting strength. But as the VI Corps broke free of the Anzio beachhead, German opposition began to collapse. Rome now lay within the Allies’ sights – although such was Clark’s determination to be the first to take the city that he allowed the retreating German Tenth Army to escape unscathed – to fight again.

  Allied forces entered Rome in the early hours of 4 June. Later that morning, Clark held an impromptu press conference on the steps of the city hall on the Piazza del Campidoglio. Leaning against the stone railing and looking out over a sea of British, American and Italian flags, he proclaimed it a ‘great day for the Fifth Army and for the French, British and American troops of the Fifth that have made this victory possible’. Below the terrace, the hill swarmed with jeeps, command cars and light armoured vehicles.

  The capture of the first of the three Axis capitals was a major symbolic victory for the Allies. The New York Times struck a suitably portentous note: ‘With some twenty-seven centuries looking down upon him, an American general, crowned not with the laurel leaves of the Caesars but with a simple overseas cap over a simple field uniform, and riding not in a chariot but in a jeep, drove up to Campidoglio of Rome yesterday and formally proclaimed the occupation of the Eternal City by his troops,’ it said of Clark. ‘This campaign not only accomplished what Hannibal had failed to do – namely, capture Rome from the south – but also so outmanoeuvred the enemy that he had to leave the city intact to save himself.’149

  Antony recounted his experiences in a letter dated 15 June. ‘I apologise most abjectly for the lapse of time preceding this letter but the reason is obvious. I have not travelled so fast or so far willingly for some considerable time,’ he wrote:

  Well, what price the beachhead now, eh! It proved its worth during the last few days of its life all right. Unfortunately, we were not there to break out of the never to be forgotten country north of Anzio, but as you know in the terrific shuffle round, we had come out for some rest and came up from Canino, so I have seen both sides of the battle front now.

  As you may well imagine, we were tremendously bucked at getting into Rome. I was in it in a Jeep on the second night, one of t
he most beautiful cities I have ever seen, all was completely quiet and orderly, people enjoying their ordinary lives without disturbance and except for the stream of the convoys, no soldiers to be seen. It was the finest occupation I have experienced. We were in a wood north of Rome when we heard of the second front, and since then we have not stopped. I have had enough ecstatic welcomes during the last fortnight to last me all my days. These northern Italian cities, amongst the most beautiful in the world, have welcomed us right royally, and in most cases the Germans fires have not yet gone out. A most exciting time.

  Yet the battle for Italy was still far from over: ‘Our last month has been indescribable,’ Antony continued five days later:

  We have been in the forepart of this great tidal wave, and although on the BBC one hears all about these simple operations of ‘winkling out’ Germans and ‘mopping up’ and ‘patrol activity’ it is a very different proposition when you come to do these ‘routine’ operations. You will be hearing a lot now that the Western front is open again about the glorious feats of the fancy supporting armies. They are great performers, for a short time, but it is the old infantryman who takes the damned objective and (what is more) holds it.