By contrast the Allied force was in an unhappy position, due to the failure of Alexander and Clark to think first and then issue clear orders. As we have said, the original instructions issued by HQ AAI to HQ. Fifth Army were for Lucas to advance “to” the area of the Alban Hills, and Clark had altered this to “on”, i.e., “towards”, them. Neither was satisfactory, and after it became clear that by the 21st the Fifth Army had failed to break through the Gustav Line on the Garigliano front Lucas was in even greater need of clear and unequivocal orders. Without the immediate prospect of linking up with the 2nd Corps he was in a dangerously exposed and isolated position. The courses open to him were three: (a) to establish a strong defensive perimeter around his bridgehead until his build-up was complete and his only fully mobile force, CC“B” of the 1st Armored Division had arrived; (b) to make a dash for the vital ground using his infantry supported by the tanks of the armoured battalion that had landed with the assault force; (c) using such groups, assisted perhaps by the independent parachute infantry unit and the US Rangers, to conduct an aggressive mobile defence. (This appears to have been the tenor of the comment made by Alexander, but if “mobile battle-groups” were to have been the order of the day, then Lucas should have been told earlier, so that he could train them before ever his troops were embarked.) The only other course was to delay the landing until the Fifth Army was ready to make another attempt to break through on the Garigliano front, but this was impossible.
Alexander and Clark were in an acutely difficult position, but it was of their own making. To have called off SHINGLE on the 21 st after all the fuss and the concessions made by the Combined Chiefs of Staff would have been impossible: it would have cost both their heads. Nor was a SHINGLE on the defensive any good, so instead of rethinking the situation after the collapse of the Garigliano offensive they acted blindly, gave no fresh orders to Lucas, other than Clark’s advice to him to be cautious. Then, leaving Lucas to take the hint and dig in, Clark went back to his own HQ to revive his offensive, for without it he thought that Lucas might not survive, let alone be able to exploit his position behind the Tenth Army.
What we have not so far mentioned is the arrival of the Corps Expéditionnaire Français in Italy, equipped by the Americans and organised on the same pattern as US Army divisions and therefore logically placed under command of the US Fifth Army. This fine formation will be fully described in a later chapter. Here it is sufficient to say that its divisions were in all respects regular infantry, “Free French” and native North Africans, and that its North African colonial troops were skilled in mountain warfare. Two divisions, the 2nd Moroccan (2e DIM) and 3rd Algerian (3e DIA) were already operating in the bitterest of winter weather in the massif north of Montecassino. On the 24th Clark ordered Juin to direct his effort into a left hook swinging through Belmonte and Terrelle to Piedimonte, a little mountain town perched on the escarpment overlooking the Liri valley from the north. (It was to be a key objective in the battles for Cassino and the Liri valley as it was the northern or anchor of the reserve line giving depth to the Gustav position.) Juin’s thrust was to be reinforced by Major-General Charles Ryder’s 34th Infantry Division operating inside his hook and on his left. Ryder jumped off on the 25th, one RCT with Cassino as its objective and the other on the high ground immediately behind the great and famous Monastery of Montecassino: a fortress-like building with magnificent command which was to hypnotise every commander involved in Cassino battles.
Meanwhile Alexander and Clark agreed to reinforce Lucas and spur him to take offensive action. CC“A” of the 1st Armored was due to land on the 28th. One RCT of the 45th Infantry Division was rushed to Lucas on the 25th, and the rest of the division, by this time commanded by Major-General W. Eagles, was ordered to follow CC“A”. Alexander and Clark paid Lucas separate visits on the 25th. Alexander congratulated him on the organisation of the bridgehead, but offered no operational guidance or advice. Clark seemed to be on edge as if, Lucas thought, Alexander had communicated his impatience to him. Having cautioned Lucas against a rash advance on the 22nd he now urged him to use his reinforced corps to attack and suggested that he begin by expanding his perimeter to include Cisterna and Albano. Clark could not reveal his long-term strategy, because he had none, unless it was the Micawberish expectation of a dividend from the Cassino operation. Lucas could not understand why Clark was vacillating in this way, for though his corps would be much stronger by the 30th, so would the enemy. The fact was that Clark was huntingwith the hounds while he ran with the hare, a safe policy for him, but unhelpful to his embattled corps commander.
Lucas, still in two minds, adopted a policy cautiously offensive instead of cautiously defensive; of piecemeal nibbling along the front. The British 1st Division was to take Aprilia and then Campoleone, the 3rd US Isobella and then Cisterna. The 3rd lost a complete Ranger battalion and failed to take Cisterna, while the 1st got as far as the railway station at Campoleone, and there its trouble began.
Lucas had a fair share of the soldierly virtues; he was clear-headed, methodical and a sound if unenterprising tactician, but he was an insular American, unable to enter into the minds of soldiers as idiosyncratic as the British or as exotic as the Brigade of Guards. At first he was impressed by their smartness and efficiency, noting in his diary: “I think they will be all right but they are sometimes a little hard to understand. They are, however, splendid soldiers. No braver in the world.” He soon changed his tune. “I had lost confidence, at least to some extent, in the British division and its commander. They seem unable to make even the simplest recce without getting into trouble. They would advance with the greatest possible bravery but always with heavy losses which could not be replaced, and always on a narrow front that gave the enemy opportunity for his pinching off tactics.” On February 4 when the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division with the aid of elements of four other divisions was indeed “pinching out” Penney’s salient at Campoleone: “The British are in serious trouble … they have occupied an advanced position for days and are now in danger. I ordered General Penney to withdraw but due to enemy pressure he has been unable to do so. I hope it is not too late.”
There is a certain irony in this complaint, because it was to be the constant gripe of the Americans that the British refused to accept casualties, but it was Lucas who was to blame. He had missed the bus (if ever there had been a bus to catch) on the 22nd, the 29th was far too late for the sort of operation he had launched, and it was he who had ordered Penney into an impossible position just as the Germans were about to strike back. He was still talking about offensive action on the 6th, though by then he had already been warned by Clark to change over to the defensive, on the basis of Ultra information that the Fourteenth Army would attack on the 7th, which it did.
By the time the brigade at Campoleone had extricated itself with heavy loss Penney was back on the defensive line Buono Riposo ridge–Carroceto–Aprilia, though over-extended with gaps in his front that the Germans were not slow to exploit. On the 7th the Germans struck as predicted and forced him off his three main positions to a far less suitable line further back, among the infamous “wadis”, deep water-courses subjected to flash floods and covered with thick scrub on the left, and the Anzio wetlands of canals and irrigation ditches on the right. There both sides paused to reorganise, for the British had made the Germans pay dearly. Clark relieved Penney and put the 45th Division in the line.
On February 16 von Mackensen launched his deliberate counter-offensive, FISCHFANG (catching fish) straight down the Via Anziate, the Anzio–Albano road. He made one deep penetration, but by the 19th halted after some of the bitterest and most costly fighting in the Italian war. The British contingent had been reinforced by Major-General Templer’s 56th Division, from the moribund Garigliano front. One of its brigades had taken over the defence of Aprilia on the 4th, and another the defence of the wadis on the 11th, where British and Germans were to play a lethal game of hide and seek until mid-May. The sector was further
reinforced by the US 504th Parachute Regiment, after which the remnants of the 1st Division went out of the line. On the 19th, when the German attacks had died away, CC“A”, the 30th RCT of the 45th Division and the 1st Division, in the line again and still full of fight, counter-attacked. They threw the Germans back, taking hundreds of prisoners, and then to their astonishment, white flags began to go up in front of them. The Germans had had enough. They had shown incredible determination, but the weather was terrible, the ground soggy and unsuitable for their heavy tanks and from beginning to end they were subjected to the unceasing and overwhelming Allied fire-power until even German nerves snapped. The casualties on both sides were brutal, each side lost some 19,000. German bodies were found behind their front line stacked up like cordwood awaiting burial. On the 28th von Mackensen attacked again and kept on until March 3 but with no other result than more losses.
By February 20 the 6th Corps had won a decisive defensive victory. The German attack had been pressed on Hitler’s orders because he wished to demonstrate that an Allied invasion force could be thrown back into the sea, and that that would be the fate of attempting the Channel crossing. It had failed signally. No counter-attack on such a scale was ever again launched in the west, except in the Ardennes in December 1944.
It had been a “soldier’s battle”, decided by the stubborn fighting of the British and United States infantry and the leadership of the battalion commanders and their officers. In a narrative which is all too often concerned with bad blood and inter-Allied resentment at the top it is pleasant to record the camaraderie between the fighting troops. The divisional commanders, concerned only with winning the battle and not rivalry, acted together. In fact they were forced to by a total lack of grip shown by Corps HQ. It is not the way to run a battle, but Truscott, Harmon, Templer (of the 56th Division) and Penney assisted by Evelegh (the British deputy and liaison officer at Corps HQ) seemed to have run the defence and counter-attack against FISCHFANG as a sort of syndicate.4
The cement of the Allied troops was lower down. British and Americans were deeply involved (British artillery supported the Americans, US tank-destroyers the British) and the leaders of both armies displayed that cheerful sangfroid and elementary, sardonic humour that cheers soldiers up. Men like Webb-Carter, commanding the 1st Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, always immaculately turned out, “treated parlous situations with total composure and a kind of disdain that was highly comforting”, and was imitated by his subordinates. Andrew Scott, Irish Guards, affecting an American accent, would greet his neighbour, Lesley Freeman, 3rd/504th Parachute Infantry, with “Hi ya, Colonel, what d’ya know?” to which the ritual reply (“English”?) was “Morning, Colonel, not a goddam thing!” This is the description of a British battalion HQ after four days of fighting, the companies down to thirty effectives each:
Occasionally an air-burst from an 88 mm gun arrived over our heads and everyone mechanically ducked rather like worshippers at some strange rite … Battalion headquarters was in a culvert driven into the embankment … It was knee-deep in water and crowded to capacity. The Regimental Aid Post was there and a few wounded men were being treated. A heterogeneous mass of officers and men were milling about, all talking a trifle hysterically. Looking tired, but utterly unmoved in the babel was Colonel David Wedderburn, the commanding officer of the Scots Guards … surrounded by Americans, Sapper and Gunner officers all of whom were under his command in the composite force which had been scraped together to hold the position … seated in a corner and smoking a singularly evil cigar was an American officer. He was the liaison officer from the tank destroyers … A large tank was firmly stuck in the mud outside … very successfully rendering it practically impossible to get in or out. A few signallers huddled on the steps and tripped up everyone who had achieved the manoeuvre round the tank.
The battle was won, in the old phrase used by countrymen in Somerset in hard times, “by keeping on keeping on”.5
Lucas’ reward for successfully steering a course between military realities and the conflicting wishes, vaguely expressed, of his masters was the sack. This “solemn, grey-haired man who smoked a corn-cob pipe [and] looked older and smaller than he actually was” had preferred to wait for the enemy, for he was a counter-puncher by temperament. His diary reveals how he kept his force well balanced, his reserve intact and his logistics tidy. In February he had counter-punched to some purpose and had won a defensive battle. However, this was not the whole story. That he lacked charisma was not his fault, but that he seldom visited the front and that his staff remained entombed in an underground HQ, “the catacombs under Nettuno surrounded by the macabre and cheerless relicts of early Christians”, was his own choice. His divisional commanders all complained that they were never given adequate information about current operations, the enemy or Lucas’ future intentions. They had carried him to victory. Left to himself he would have hesitated totally to commit his armour to the clinching counter-stroke. He had to go.
The dismissal was necessary, but it was not well done. Clark told Lucas that it was not he but Alexander who had insisted on the change. This was disingenuous, to say the least, for Clark himself had noted that Lucas tended to dither. Both Clark and Alexander were under pressure from London and Washington from the moment that the deadline of February had passed without any strategic gain to show for the diversion of precious military resources. Churchill, following his needling practice of searching for damaging statistics, obtained the figures of 70,000 men and 18,000 vehicles shipped to Anzio. “We must have a great superiority of chauffeurs,” he said. It was this sort of enquiry that had presaged the dismissal of Wavell and Auchinleck, and though Alexander was Churchill’s protégé he did not feel entirely secure. Clark recalled that during the German attacks on the beachhead Alexander had said to him: “The position is serious. We may be pushed into the sea. That would be bad for both of us and you would certainly be relieved of your command.” Alexander may have offered this thought in a phlegmatic and semi-humorous British manner, but to Clark, always worried about his position and his growing suspicions of the motives of everyone around him, it was no joke.
Clark had cause to be worried, although it is not known whether he was aware that he was under scrutiny. The US Chiefs of Staff were deeply dissatisfied, and not soothed when in reply to their enquiries of General Sir Maitland Wilson, the British Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, he explained the difficulties on the main front, but suggested that at Anzio an opportunity had been missed. Marshall then asked Major-General Jacob Devers, Wilson’s US deputy, to find out if “any or all the US commanders had failed”. When General Sir John Dill, the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, observed that perhaps Clark, not Devers was the man to ask, Marshall replied, “Clark may be the man to go”. Lucas was therefore a perfect scapegoat, especially as he had no “constituency” and was the sort of officer who accepted his fate without complaint, except to his diary.
During this period, fraught with operational setbacks and difficulties of every kind, Churchill offered Alexander excellent advice that he should neither advise nor urge his subordinates but order them to do what he wanted:
American authorities … say their Army has been formed more on Prussian than on the more smooth British lines, and that American commanders expect to receive positive orders which they will obey … I trust that you are satisfied with leaving Lucas in command at the bridge-head. If not you should put someone there whom you trust.
Unfortunately Alexander was psychologically incapable of following Churchill’s advice, and whether it would have worked with Clark is conjectural. Perhaps not, as Clark, set on a predetermined course and under severe stress, was probably unmanageable.
Clark never spared himself, physically or mentally. The burden of command of an army in the field is a very heavy one and it bore heavily on Clark. Every visit to Anzio was a risk. His light aircraft was twice involved in accidents, and once when travelling by sea his naval pat
rol boat was fired on and Clark had to prop up the wounded skipper while he steered to safety. In Anzio he rescued a British driver from a blazing ammunition truck under shell-fire. For this a Bronze Star was added to the DSC he had won at Salerno, but while commanding generals should not lurk in deep dugouts or remote chateaux they should as far as possible be spared such experiences. (The opinion of General William Slim. After he had given a rousing pep-talk to a British battalion a soldier called out, “We’ll be right behind you, sir, never fear!” “Oh, no you won’t,” replied the General, “I’ll be a long way behind you.”) All this is only to Clark’s credit, but temperamentally he nursed his anxieties. He was unable to relax and detach himself from the immediate present, or believe that “Quiet, calm contemplation will unravel every knot”. As his diaries reveal he was in a constant state of agitation, as worried about the way the high command was about to treat him as about the enemy. There is not a line of self-criticism, or consciousness of having made an operational error. His failures were the fault of others, usually the British. Worse, he suspected every British move as designed to frustrate him, reduce his span of command and eventually rob him of the goal of liberating Rome with American arms.
He complained to Devers about the British military hegemony in the Mediterranean; Wilson in Algiers, Cunningham at sea (there is a long complaint about Cunningham’s high-handed alterations to naval sup-port and maintenance for the bridgehead, by no means unjustified). What Clark lacked was a sage adviser, like Eisenhower. Devers, damagingly, played Iago to Clark’s Othello when he revealed his anxiety to him. He told him of Alexander’s proposal to relieve Clark of Anzio so that he could concentrate on the Cassino–Garigliano front which, in the event, he discarded in favour of shortening the Fifth Army front, later giving the Eighth Army the Liri valley–Cassino sector. In January (as we shall explain later) Alexander was given a new British chief of staff, and following his advice he decided that the true centre of gravity of operations was west of the Apennines. At first move he had already transferred the 2nd New Zealand Division, and the 4th Indian Division followed in the first week of February. He was undecided for the moment whether to group them under Clark, to alter the inter-army boundary or command them directly from HQ AAI. This greatly upset Clark, as did later moves to rationalise the composition of the Fifth Army with its all-US 2nd Corps, mixed-US 6th Corps, British 10th Corps and the French Corps. He wrote in his diary:
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