His general idea remained the same. The Fifth Army was to attack in succession from the left: first two divisions of the 10th Corps towards Minturno on the 17th, then its 46th Division at S. Ambrogio on the 19th, followed by the US 36th Division of the 2nd Corps at S. Angelo on the 20th. The 2nd Corps was to open the road to Frosinone and join hands with the US 6th Corps emerging from its bridgehead at Anzio. Clark held Combat Command “A” of the US 1st Armored Division (the equivalent of an infantry RCT or a German Kampfgruppe) and the 2nd New Zealand Division in reserve ready to exploit.
The commander of the 14th Panzer Corps holding the front opposite the Fifth Army was Generalleutnant Frido Senger und Etterlin, an outstanding soldier and master of defensive tactics, but he was surprised by the opening thrust of Clark’s offensive. McCreery’s attack came in a sector where he least expected it and had penetrated a position he could not easily reinforce from the Liri valley. He had to call for help. Kesselring was for the moment at a loss. His own HQ had mistakenly placed the US 3rd Division in the centre of the line and believed that the 1st Armored Division had been reinforced, whereas in fact the first was elsewhere rehearsing for Anzio and the second had detached its CC“B” to the 6th Corps. Should he now commit his immediately available mobile reserve, relying on the Abwehr assurances that the amphibious landing in his rear which he feared was not imminent and lend immediate aid to the 14th Panzer Corps, or trust in his own judgment and keep his reserves in hand? In the event he had little choice. Von Senger had decided that the right flank of his long front was naturally the strongest and entrusted it to the low-grade 94th Infantry Division, now shattered by the unexpected 10th Corps attack. Kesselring without delay ordered forward the 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions, resting and coast-watching in the area of Rome. They came under command of von Senger on the 19th and 20th. By the 21st he had halted the 10th Corps and pushed it back in some places. McCreery, without his 46th Division, which according to the Fifth Army plan was committed to a separate attack, held his ground with difficulty and was unable to develop his potentially valuable bridgehead at Minturno. The attack on S. Ambrogio failed. On the 20th and 21st the 36th Division was repulsed bloodily at S. Angelo. With these defeats one of the two interdependent limbs of Clark’s plan had been amputated the day before Lucas landed. The new conditions demanded a review of the respective roles of the 6th Corps and the main body of the Fifth Army. Rightly or wrongly Clark had decided to retain his original plan, which intended that Lucas should be cautious, and that the initiative should come from the main front. He was not going to adopt Alexander’s conception of making the 6th Corps take the initiative. He now had to mount a costly and ultimately vain offensive (the First, Second and Third Battles of Cassino) to take the pressure off the 6th Corps, or to reach it as originally planned. He had, in fact, lost the strategic initiative when he told Lucas on the quayside at Anzio on the 22nd to be cautious.
Why did Clark act as he did in January? The answer is that he was under severe pressure to unlock the main front and he was not general enough to sit down and unravel the quandary in which he found himself and so arrive at the best course of action. He chose the less risky course, militarily and politically. To explain the first and basic element of his problem we have to refer back to the strenuous argument over landing craft, implicit in the whole question of future strategy in Italy. The Combined Chiefs of Staff had, in a final move, consented to delay the return of the landing craft required to sustain the 6th Corps in its beach-head to February 5. If rigidly interpreted this meant that by that date a land line of communications had to be open to Anzio. Such rigidity was nonsense, for complex plans can be expected to miscarry, and their projected timetables and phase lines are never more than targets. The craft reserved for ANVIL would still be in the Mediterranean, and in any case the 6th Corps could not be abandoned to its fate arbitrarily on the 5th. We can assume that Alexander’s staff understood this and did not take the terminal date as seriously as they appeared to, but this locked Clark into an unalterable time-frame, between January 22 for the launching of SHINGLE, fixed irrevocably by the factors of naval preparation, logistics and training and bringing the operation to a successful conclusion a fortnight later.
There was another time factor affecting the main front: the date on which the 10th and 2nd Corps could close up on the Gustav Line, which in turn affected any redeployment across the front and the close reconnaissance of the approaches to the river and the enemy defences. The right wing of the Fifth Army in fact only reached the line of the Rapido on January 17 with all the major units in the same order from the sea on the left to the Rapido on the right as they had advanced from the Volturno to M. Camino and S. Pietro. With his painful experience at Salerno still vivid Clark judged it correct to attack on his land front first to draw away the enemy reserves from Lucas. This left him with two tactical options. One was to try to “bounce” the river line as soon as his leading troops arrived in the hope that the Gustav defences were as yet not fully manned and then as one or other of the crossings succeeded reinforce success. The other, taking into account the difficulties of a river crossing in the face of the enemy, however weak, the natural strength of the Gustav Line and the exhaustion of his troops, was to mount a deliberate attack concentrated on the most promising Schwerpunkt. Clark chose neither. Instead, he combined the most unfavourable features of both courses.
The fatal flaw in Clark’s plan was that he had decided in advance that the bridgehead he intended to exploit was to be won by the 36th Division at S. Angelo. This was reasonable enough if deduced from the terrain. The coastal route along the Via Appia ran along a narrow corridor between the sea and the southern slopes of the mountains, and was easily blocked. Further inland the Auruncan mountains were virtually trackless, with one good but narrow road leading to Ausonia. The least difficult axis was along the Via Casilina through the Liri valley and so to Rome. It was an obvious deduction to make that the Fifth Army Schwerpunkt. (The same conclusion was later reached by Alexander’s future chief of staff.) Here Clark’s thinking, hitherto sound, was inhibited by another flaw, his irrational dislike of McCreery and his lack of faith in the fighting power of the “poor dumb British”.
He was determined not to place US troops under a British commander, not because they would be misused, but because a British commander would not drive them hard enough; nor would he even have US and British troops closely associated in the same operation. Von Senger was surprised that Clark did not immediately exploit McCreery’s success. The fact was that he had no intention of doing anything of the kind. Both his corps commanders, McCreery and Major-General Geoffrey Keyes, US 2nd Corps, expressed their doubts about Clark’s plan for successive crossings, but Clark remained unmoved. The role of the 10th Corps was to draw in the German Army Group reserves, and no more. The role of the 46th Division was simply to secure the left flank of General Walker’s crossing place. After that the Gustav Line battle was to be an all-American show.
The reason for this was not military but emotional. There was another factor exerting a strong influence on Clark. When on December 8 President Roosevelt had pinned on to Clark’s blouse the medal of the Distinguished Service Cross which had been awarded for his service at Salerno, Roosevelt had charged him, rhetorically perhaps, with the task of liberating Rome.1 Clark seized upon the goal and it became his obsession. Being the man he was he began to read in every move of Alexander’s the British intention to cheat him out of such a triumph.2 The first of these moves was the transfer of the 2nd New Zealand Division from the Eighth Army which came under Clark’s command on January 20 as an exploiting force for the 2nd Corps. It was to circumvent such a plot that Clark arranged his scheme of manoeuvre to be a breakthrough at S. Angelo followed up by his own US Army divisions, the remainder of 1st Armored and the 34th Infantry.
So much for the “grand tactics” of the affair, lying between strategy and the hurly burly of the battlefield. An army commander may, or may not, confirm the f
easibility of his goals by closely examining the ground and the detailed plans in person. It is more usual, having taken the measure of a subordinate and delegated the execution to him, to trust him, but the corollary is that the superior commander must listen to his objections or recommendations. Clark, as at Salerno, was guilty of what Napoleon called “making pictures”. No one who had examined the approaches to the Rapido or the Garigliano from the south-east and the mountains looming over the right bank could have been in any doubt about the formidable nature of the operation. Serious military operations require something more than arrows drawn on the map and the sublime confidence that only the will-power of the commander is needed to carry the troops to their objective. The Fifth Army staff ignored the fact that the 46th Division had only enough assault boats to carry one brigade, and that so narrow a front invited the enemy to concentrate his fire. In the event most of the boats were lost or overturned in the strong current and only the 2nd Hampshires secured a toehold on the far bank. Next morning General Hawkesworth ordered it to be withdrawn, fortunately without further loss. McCreery agreed, as did Clark, although it strengthened the latter’s poor opinion of the British when McCreery refused to order a fresh assault at the same place.
The attack by the 36th Division proved a disaster that was to haunt Clark the rest of his life and injure his career. By the 20th the sector the 36th Division was to attack was securely held by the grenadier regiments and the reconnaissance battalion of the 15 th Panzer Grenadier Division, well dug in and stiffened with tanks and assault guns. Unlike the dejected US infantry, the panzer grenadiers patrolled vigorously on the left bank and mined the approaches to the river, conveniently marked for them by the tapes put in position by the US Engineers before H-hour. The US Engineer commander, having complained about the lack of basic engineer stores, recorded his opinion that “an attack through a muddy valley that was without suitable approach routes and exit roads and that was blocked by organised defences behind an unfordable river [would] create an impossible situation and end in failure and great loss of life”. Both Keyes and Walker thought that it would have been better to go in through the 10th Corps bridgehead, or at Cassino, but neither took a firm line for fear of appearing defeatist or cared to argue with Clark when his mind was made up.
The 36th Division itself suffered from three handicaps. Its commander Walker was defeated before the operation began, committing his doubts to his diary:
We might succeed but I do not see how we can. The mission assigned is poorly timed. The crossing is dominated by heights on both sides of the valley where German artillery observers are ready … The mission should never have been assigned to any troops with flanks exposed. Clark sent me his best wishes … I think he is worried over the fact that he made an unwise decision when he gave us the job of crossing the river under such adverse tactical conditions. However, if we get some breaks we may succeed.
The division itself was in poor shape. Only one half of the 1,000 infantry casualties suffered in the December fighting had been made good and the replacements, coming as they did in the US Army to strange battalions, had not been given time to settle down and form new fire-teams. The veterans were all tired and lacking in enthusiasm. This was not beyond the power of the regimental officers to put right, but the third handicap, the inefficiency of the divisional staff, could only have been corrected by action by a higher commander long in advance. An assault river crossing is not simply a matter of getting into boats and paddling across a river. It is an intricate set-piece operation requiring thorough reconnaissance, meticulous staff work and close supervision of the preparations. It is an engineer operation to the far bank, where the infantry take over, and an artillery operation from start to finish to protect both arms, so as to give the engineers a chance to build the bridges, for until they are open for tanks and heavy weapons to cross the bridgehead is not safe. It is also essential for the infantry and engineers to have complete mutual trust and understanding based on association and combined training.
It would be tedious to provide a catalogue of the mistakes and omissions that led to the débâcle later known as the “Bloody River”. All the basic rules were ignored. The assault strength was only four battalions, the infantry and engineers were all unknown to each other, the infantry had to carry heavy assault boats two miles over boggy ground, H-hour was set for 8 p.m. so preliminary movement alerted the enemy artillery and machine guns, and from the first the approaches and crossing places came under so intense a fire that many of the infantry threw down their loads and quit. The most amazing omission was any concerted artillery fire-plan. The American guns remained silent until daybreak for lack of previously registered targets.
After a grisly night of sunken boats and smashed footbridges, newly discovered mines, lost units, shouting and disorder amidst terrifying concentrations of Nebelwerfer* bombs and heavy shells falling in smoke and darkness, the leading companies had been driven into isolated pockets on the far bank and could not be, or were not, reinforced. The organisation of boats and bridges, never adequate, had collapsed. Walker decided to withdraw what men he could. Keyes, however, was under pressure from Clark to make Walker try again. Walker reluctantly ordered the battered regiments to assault again on the afternoon of the 21st. The renewed effort was pressed through the second night. A combination of mud, muddle, enemy shelling and lack of will-power prevented the vital Bailey bridging reaching the river. Many believed that in the conditions it was senseless to try; that it would have been impossible to assemble and launch the bridge under direct fire. All the light bridges had been smashed and the only way to reinforce the squads a few hundred yards beyond the river was for men to swim over.
As the miserable night gave way to the misty, smoky and noisy morning of the 22nd, the defensive fire on the far bank slackened. Walking wounded accompanied by “helpers”, shock cases and simple deserters who had had enough, trickled back in large numbers. The 36th Division had shot its bolt. Its heart had not been in it. During the afternoon the operation was officially abandoned. The total casualties were 1,000 killed and missing and 600 wounded. After the last shots had been fired Generalmajor Rodt, 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, simply reported that he had “prevented enemy troops crossing at S. Angelo”. The Tenth Army had no idea that it had scored so important a defensive victory. It seemed to its staff that the attempted crossing had been part of the curious Allied plan to attack in sequence all along the line with the object of holding the German reserves on the main front, a view confirmed when Lucas landed at Anzio on the morning of the 22nd.3
It was now clear that the situation had changed out of all recognition to that envisaged in the original plan, and that Alexander and Clark needed to agree on a radical reappraisal and give Lucas positive orders. We have already emphasised Alexander’s weakness in this respect. He made a fatuous suggestion that the 6th Corps should push out mobile battle groups which was unreal as Lucas only had marching infantry divisions neither constituted nor trained in such manoeuvres. Clark, though he saw the danger now that his main attack had collapsed and Lucas was on his own, was too cautious to issue a firm order running counter to the original, vaguely offensive concept of SHINGLE. The Combined Chiefs of Staff would hardly be pleased to learn that the resources they had allotted had resulted in a defensive stalemate. (What the incensed Churchill called “a stranded whale”.) He determined to be imprecise. Lucas, the reverse of dashing, deeply pessimistic but basically sound, could see that as the Germans were now able to concentrate their whole attention on his corps it would be rash to go marching off into the wild blue yonder towards the Alban Hills leaving his base uncovered. When therefore Clark told him “not to stick his neck out”, as he had at Salerno, and “get into trouble” Lucas took it as Clark’s expressed wish, and interpreted it as an order, to be translated into action. He sat down and established a firm defensive perimeter.
Throughout the 22nd the German commanders hourly expected the news that the Allied amphibious force h
ad moved quickly to the area of the Alban Hills and was astride the line of communication of the 14th Panzer Corps. That evening von Vietinghoff telephoned Kesselring, suggesting that he should pull back from the Gothic Line, only to receive a flea in his ear and the firm order to stay put. Kesselring, always stalwart in adversity, had been busy all day. Immediately he heard the news he ordered the only local reserves he had, the 4th Parachute Division, in the process of forming and the Ersatz (replacement holding) Battalion of the Hermann Goering Division from the Rome area to block the roads leading from Anzio to the Alban Hills. As early as 8.30 a.m. he ordered von Vietinghoff to send HQ 1st Parachute Corps to Anzio to take charge of the units as they arrived; battle-groups from the 1st Parachute, 3rd Panzer Grenadier and 26th Panzer Divisions from the Adriatic front, and part of the hard-worked 29th Panzer Grenadier Division back from the right of the 14th Panzer Corps. Von Mackensen was to send the 65th Infantry Division from Genoa, the 362nd Infantry Division from Rimini and elements of the new 16th Panzer Grenadier Division from Leghorn, and to organise a new infantry division, the 92nd, in northern Italy from replacements and other oddments. To back these up the 715th Infantry and the 114th Jaeger Divisions were called from the south of France and Yugoslavia respectively. Finally von Mackensen was to come down with his Fourteenth Army HQ to take over the Anzio front when it had initiated these moves.
At 5 p.m. HQ 1st Parachute Corps was in position and in control, and by nightfall a thin containing cordon had been thrown around the 6th Corps. Kesselring was therefore once more his cheerful self. His plan was first to strengthen the containing force and then, when the time was ripe, use his battle-hardened parachute and panzer grenadier units for the Gegenangriff to throw the invaders back into the sea. On the 23rd, when Lucas had still done nothing, Kesselring felt that there was no immediate danger of the Allied perimeter expanding or of a break, confirmed later by more accurate intelligence of Lucas’ real strength. On the 26th von Mackensen arrived to establish a proper chain of command and tidy up the “multifarious” jumble of units composing the cordon round Lucas. Kesselring had given the Allied commanders and, indeed, students of the art of war a lesson in clear thinking, sound appreciation and rapid reaction.
Tug of War Page 17