All Eisenhower could do was continue to bluff—by reading aloud on Allied radio in Algiers the text of Marshal Badoglio’s supposed surrender proclamation—which the Marshal was still refusing to confirm. This proclamation ordered the Italian military on the mainland and abroad to “cease all acts of hostility against the Anglo-American forces wherever they may be.”1
Badoglio’s hand was thus forced. After much handwringing, the seventy-one-year-old marshal—fearing arrest, even execution, by stalwart Italian fascists—felt he had no option but to confirm the surrender on Rome radio and seek to save himself. At 7:20 p.m. he did so—and immediately made himself scarce. Together with the royal family in the capital he fled the city on the only still-open road, in a convoy of carabinieri-protected vehicles, and bearing boxes of lire to bribe loyal fascists at roadblocks.
It was an ignominious end to the Pact of Steel: the final act of Italy’s venal participation in the war—first as Hitler’s partner in world crime, then as partner to the approaching Allies, which Badoglio now offered, on behalf of the Italian government, to become.
Others were skeptical. “The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice,” a Free French newspaper commented sarcastically.2 The inheritors of Rome’s great empire in ancient times, the Italians now merely blew with the wind. “If you analyze the matter in cold blood there is no doubt the Italians have carried out a really good double-cross; they change sides on one day!!!” Montgomery wrote the next day to friends in England. “I wouldn’t trust them a yard, and in any case they are quite useless when it comes to fighting.”3
This was the real issue—for the Germans, by contrast, were very good when it came to fighting. And merciless. As Field Marshal Kesselring remarked of the Italians, “I loved these people. Now I can only hate them”4—hate that was now authorized to be channeled into vengeance on an unsparing scale, not only against Italian military units, but women, children, and the elderly. “No mercy must be shown to the traitors,” Kesselring instructed General von Vietinghoff, his Tenth Army commander. Nor was it: the Italian general commanding the Salerno coastal division was executed in his headquarters even before the Germans turned on the approaching Allies—and the same fate befell tens of thousands of Italian troops across the country, as well as partisans, indeed anyone who challenged German military occupation or was seen to be aiding the Allies.5
General Sir Harold Alexander had willfully overestimated Italian assistance while utterly underestimating German resistance—fatally misleading the Allied commander in chief, General Eisenhower, as well as the Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark.6
As the ground-forces commander of the assault, Clark had meantime hourly become more anxious. He’d thought the removal of his airborne division a terrible mistake, and had not been amused by Eisenhower’s offhand dismissal of his doubts. “‘Well, Wayne’—he always called me Wayne,” Clark recalled Eisenhower’s words, “When it drops [on Rome], it passes to your command!’ And I said, ‘Thanks, Ike, that’s five hundred miles away!”7
With the belated decision to call off the airdrop on Rome, Clark had no airborne division to worry about in Rome—indeed, no airborne division at all.8 “As dusk came I was on the bridge. I could see the silhouettes of a hundred ships with my men in them. And I had never had such a forlorn feeling in my life,” he later recounted. Shorn of the Eighty-Second Airborne, the fifty-five thousand men (British and American) of his Fifth Army thus sailed into a trap—“spitting right into the lion’s mouth.”9
Alerted that an Allied armada of almost a hundred ships was anchoring twelve miles offshore in the Gulf of Salerno, Kesselring had sent out his orders. The enemy “must be completely annihilated and in addition thrown into the sea. The British and Americans must realize that they are hopelessly lost against the concentrated German might.”10 Facing a barrage of Luftwaffe planes, lethal 88mm guns, and dense machine-gun fire, the Allied invasion force went into battle—the scene soon resembling something out of Dante’s Inferno as both the clear Italian water and the sandy beaches ran with blood. As the veteran AP reporter Don Whitehead heard someone remark, “Maybe it would be better for us to fight without an [Italian] armistice.”11
With operations now in the hands of General Eisenhower, there was nothing President Roosevelt, as the U.S. commander in chief in Washington, could do but leave the battle to the men in combat.
Late in the evening of September 9, once his meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff was over, the President therefore set off in the Ferdinand Magellan for Hyde Park with his British guests, the Prime Minister and his family. He had delivered another Fireside Chat the previous night, from the Diplomatic Reception Room, to announce the armistice with Italy—and to warn his listeners against complacency or idle assumptions. He welcomed the Italian people, who were “at last coming to the day of liberation from their real enemies, the Nazis.” But “let us not delude ourselves that this armistice means the end of the war in the Mediterranean. We still have to drive the Germans out of Italy as we have driven them out of Tunisia and Sicily; we must drive them out of France and all other captive countries; and we must strike them on their own soil from all directions. Our ultimate objectives in this war will continue to be Berlin and Tokyo,” he made clear.
“I ask you to bear these objectives constantly in mind—and do not forget that we still have a long way to go before we attain them,” he’d warned. “The great news that you have heard today from General Eisenhower does not give you license to settle back in your rocking chairs and say, ‘Well, that does it. We’ve got ’em on the run. Now we can start the celebration.’ The time for celebration is not yet. And I have a suspicion that when this war does end, we shall not be in a very celebrating frame of mind. I think that our main emotion will be one of grim determination that this shall not happen again.
“During the past weeks,” he continued, “Mr. Churchill and I have been in constant conference with the leaders of our combined fighting forces. We have been in constant communication with our fighting allies, Russian and Chinese, who are prosecuting the war with relentless determination and with conspicuous success on far distant fronts. And Mr. Churchill and I are here together in Washington at this crucial moment. We have seen the satisfactory fulfillment of plans that were made in Casablanca last January and here in Washington last May. And lately we have made new, extensive plans for the future,” he added—a coded reference to Overlord. “But throughout these conferences we have never lost sight of the fact that this war will become bigger and tougher, rather than easier, during the long months that are to come.
“This war does not and must not stop for one single instant. Your fighting men know that. Those of them who are moving forward through jungles against lurking Japs—those who are landing at this moment, in barges moving through the dawn up to strange enemy coasts—those who are diving their bombers down on the targets at roof-top level—every one of these men knows that this war is a full-time job and that it will continue to be that until total victory is won.”12
At Hyde Park, once the party arrived, the Prime Minister found himself on tenterhooks. Though the President tried as far as possible to keep the Churchills, including young Mary, entertained, Winston remained anxious. Giant II had been canceled; fearing savage Wehrmacht reprisals, Badoglio had reportedly attempted to renege on the Italian surrender.
The news that did come through was not good—indeed, with more German troops racing toward the battle zone at Salerno in succeeding days, Clark not only asked Eisenhower’s authority to use troops of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, but to drop them on the very beaches of Salerno, to bolster the infantry—and even ordered contingency plans be made for possible evacuation, á la Dunkirk.13
Daisy Suckley, watching the President, was amazed at his sang-froid. “Sunday, September 12, 1943,” she wrote in her diary, three days into the invasion. “Sitting on his wheelchair, with all the Chur
chill party standing around, he sent for Jennings, and, in two minutes arranged for the visit, next week-end,” of his son John Roosevelt and John’s wife, Anne, “with two children & a nurse, and 6 Norwegians with a maid.”14
The President had spent the morning driving his visitors about the estate, “at the wheel, his dog Fala beside him,” and had arranged for lunch to be served for them all “at his own cottage (higher up the hillside than Mrs R’s Val-Kill).” Following this they’d lain on the veranda—Churchill telling his daughter Mary the colors he would use, were he painting the scene, and commenting with a smile on “the wisdom of God in having made the sky blue & the trees green. ‘It wouldn’t have been nearly so good the other way round.’”
“To me these moments with Papa are the golden peaks of my life,” Mary noted in her diary—aware that, between them, the President and the Prime Minister had it in them to protect and preserve civilization as they knew it. Then, after dinner, where the President had proposed the health of his guests Winston and Clemmie, who were celebrating their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, “FDR drove us down to the train,” the subaltern jotted in her diary.15
“God Bless You,” Daisy heard Churchill say, leaning into the President’s car. “I’ll be over with you, next spring.”
“Next spring” had meant before D-day. There was a long way to go before Overlord, however. Behind the bonhomie, the war in Europe was now entering a critical time for the Western Allies.
Churchill’s moral and political sturdiness had certainly bucked up the President, but his military judgment, once again, was of a different order. The campaign in Italy upon which he’d so set his heart would now, inexorably, prove the very quagmire that General Marshall and the U.S. chiefs had foretold.
Even Churchill’s doctor recorded how anxious, at the White House the week before, Winston had become: his thoughts “wandering to the coming landing at Salerno. That is where his heart is. As the appointed day draws near, the P.M. can think of nothing else. On this landing he has been building all his hopes. There are no doubts in his mind; anyway he admits none. It must succeed, and then Naples will fall into our hands. Last night, when the stream of his conversation was in spate, he talked of meeting Alex [General Alexander] in Rome before long—the capture of Rome has fired his imagination; more than once he has spoken about Napoleon’s Italian campaign.”16
At Hyde Park, three days after Clark’s landings, Dr. Wilson had then noted the effect on Winston when the troops landed on the Salerno beaches and “it did not prove to be a walk-over. On the contrary, the news that filtered into Hyde Park, where we had followed the President, was disquieting: the Germans had launched a strong counter-attack and the situation was very uncertain.”17
This was the reverse of what Churchill had so confidently forecast. There would be heavy casualties and loss of life, it seemed—American as well as British. “These things always seem to happen when I am with the President,” the Prime Minister confided to Wilson, thinking of Tobruk the previous year—Sir Charles noting: “Poor Winston, he had been so anxious to convince Roosevelt that the invasion of Italy would yield a bountiful harvest at no great cost.” Now that the first bill had come in, it was proving almost prohibitively expensive—both in human life and in the very vessels and logistical backup the U.S. chiefs wanted transferred to Britain for D-day. “When we left Hyde Park tonight, on the long journey to Halifax,” Wilson recorded in his diary, “the situation was still very obscure.”18
Churchill was embarrassed—and as his train bore him back to Canada, where he was to embark for Britain, the news from Italy only became more forbidding. Instead of seemingly effortless victory initially—the Italian fleet having sailed south from Taranto to join the Allies, pursued by German U-boats and Luftwaffe that sank many of them—Eisenhower’s ground campaign turned sour. By September 16, Eisenhower was admitting to his naval aide that, if the Salerno battle ended in disaster,” he himself would “probably be out.”19
For his part, Churchill saw his once-glorious predictions for an Allied campaign in southern Europe exposed as wishful thinking. He’d earlier called upon his British chiefs of staff to be much bolder in their plans, and to “use all our strength against Italy,” even without American help. He’d even recommended making plans for British assault landings as far north along the coast of Italy as possible, in order to “cut off” as many Germans as they could. Far from throwing their proverbial hats further over the fence, as Churchill had urged his military team, the Prime Minister was now faced with having to eat his own. Though from his train he cabled directly Eisenhower’s field deputy, General Alexander, urging him to go ashore in person at Salerno and avoid another Dardanelles fiasco, it could not alter the bitter, bitter truth: namely that the Allied campaign in Italy, as planned, had been based upon a false premise: not only that the Italians would help, but that the Germans would fail to offer a serious defense of Italy south of the Po.
The next day, as Churchill’s train bore him to Halifax, where HMS Renown would take him across the Atlantic, things sounded “no better,” Sir Charles noted. “I have never seen him more on edge during a battle. Three ‘bloodys’ bespattered his conversation, and twice, while I was with him, he lost his temper with his servant, shouting at him in a painful way. He got up and walked down the train.” Without information he seemed bereft. “‘Has any news come in?’ he kept demanding. In truth, “the reports that are reaching him only leave him more anxious,” his doctor noted. “There is a dreadful hint, though it is carefully covered up, that we might be driven into the sea. It appears, as far as I can tell, that the P.M. is largely responsible for this operation; if anyone is to blame, he is the man; and, from the way things seem to be going, I suppose he is beginning to think that there might be a good deal to explain.”20
Without the President to calm him, Churchill was metaphorically at sea—and soon was in reality, where he remained “immured in his cabin”21 the whole voyage home, firing off telegrams to General Alexander to do more, and other wild cables, too, such as to General Maitland Wilson to accelerate a British seizure of the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean—without the agreement of the President—and be ready for potentially war-altering operations in the Balkans, where the Germans might, following the Italian surrender, be forced to withdraw to the Danube . . .
To Sir Charles Wilson this was all of a piece: the Prime Minister a bundle of nerves when things did not go in the way he had optimistically and impetuously planned.
At Hyde Park, however, the President neither blamed Winston nor worried unduly. He’d gotten to talk at length with young General Mark Clark during his stay in Casablanca, and was confident the U.S. troops—many of them in their first battle—would acquit themselves well. Moreover that General Eisenhower would recognize the gravity of the crisis and commit all he could to rectify the situation.
Neither Rome nor even Naples was the point, after all. Even if Clark failed to make much headway, the Italians had surrendered—unconditionally. All the Allies had to do, now, was secure the vital Foggia airfields, and bring the Germans to battle in Italy over the next months, until D-day was launched.
If Clark was forced to evacuate, after all, Allied troops could be sent to reinforce Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Calabria. All would be well. Most importantly, the United States had demonstrated to the Soviets an absolute determination to fight on the mainland of Europe—first in southern Italy, then across the Channel. He and Churchill would show Stalin they meant business, and would follow through on their promises—moreover, that it would be best for the Russians to maintain civil discourse with the Western Allies in the fight to defeat the Third Reich.
The President thus slept a full ten hours after Churchill’s train left the Hudson railway halt. He would spend only three days out of the next two weeks in Washington.
The fact was, he had bigger things on his mind than Salerno: his meeting with the Russian dictator, who in a flurry of new cables had finally agreed to a meet
ing of the Big Three—though not outside Russia. His tone had been, however, more “civil,” as the principal private secretary to King George VI had noted in his diary at Buckingham Palace in London; “he re-iterates his wish to have a three-party meeting,” Sir Alan Lascelles aptly put it, “but he won’t go outside Russia, and I don’t see how the President is to be got inside it.”22
What had changed the Russian dictator’s attitude?
There was much speculation—though few were sure. Certainly, in terms of public attention, the Allied conference at Quebec, coming on top of the summit at Casablanca, had monopolized the attention of the free world. Russia was losing the very respect it was looking for, internationally—Stalin conspicuous by his absence at such conferences, a fact that, in view of the many invitations to take part, began to suggest an ominous Russian agenda rather than genuine commitment to the anti-Axis cause and the Atlantic Charter/Declaration of the United Nations.
Above all, though, the war had moved into a new phase: the endgame. American, British, and Canadian troops were now on the mainland of Europe, only eight hundred miles from Berlin—while Russians were still fighting deep in the Soviet Union, more than a thousand miles from the German capital. As a result, Russian media calling for an immediate Second Front, instead, sounded silly—however strategically necessary a cross-Channel assault might be in terms of the military defeat of the Third Reich. The President and Mr. Churchill, in short, appeared to be in control of the moral and political dimensions of the war, even the military—leaving the Russians out on a limb, despite the almost obscene casualties they were suffering in their struggle to evict the Germans from their country.
In the new cables, Stalin still speciously claimed his presence was needed on a daily basis to control the battles raging on the Eastern Front (“where more than 500 divisions are engaged in the fighting in all”), but he now went out of his way not only to compliment the President on the “new brilliant success in Italy” but to acknowledge, for the first time, something even more significant. As Stalin put it, in his telegram to the President on September 11, “the successful landing at Naples and break between Italy and Germany will deal one more blow upon Hitlerite Germany and will considerably facilitate the actions of the Soviet armies at the Soviet-German front.”23
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