The Day of Battle (65 page)

Danger lurked below as well as above. Shortly after five
A.M
. on Wednesday, January 26,
LST 422
lay anchored twelve miles offshore, waiting for a berth to open at Anzio harbor. Built in Baltimore but crewed by the Royal Navy, she had carried seven hundred men from Naples; among them, two companies of the 83rd Chemical Mortar Battalion were to rejoin Darby’s Rangers for extra firepower. Deteriorating weather had built twenty-foot seas under a westerly gale that shoved the ship sideways, dragging her anchor yard by yard, until she tripped a German mine. The blast tore a fifty-foot hole in the starboard hull, igniting diesel oil and barreled gasoline. Flame licked through the ventilators. Within two minutes, the upper deck and bridge were ablaze. Most mortarmen were asleep in the tank deck, which simultaneously flooded and turned into a crematorium. Detonating rockets and white-phosphorus rounds soared through an aft hatch, forcing those topside to cower behind the gun mount shields. With power lost and the ship engulfed, men tumbled into the frigid sea.

Ships churning to the rescue played searchlights across the heaving waves. As
LCI 32
approached, she too struck a mine and was gone in three minutes, taking thirty crewmen to the bottom. “Heavy seas and high winds made it very difficult maneuvering ship alongside the unfortunates,” the
war log of minesweeper
YMS-43
noted at seven
A.M
. “Using the boat hook was the best method, except many of the life belts tore under the strain. Survivors were drowning all around us.”

At 8:45, with hail falling like grapeshot, the minesweeper’s log recorded: “No more floating bodies visible.” The mortar companies lost nearly 300 men, among 454 U.S. soldiers and 29 British tars who perished.
LST 422
broke in half and sank at 2:30
P.M
. Recovered bodies were sewn into canvas bags weighted with antiaircraft shells and consigned to the sea. The drowned included Private Billy C. Rhoads of Albia, Iowa, whose brother years later said of the fatal news delivered by telegram to the family’s front door, “It really was a grief which Mother never was able to be rid of.”

As the air attacks intensified, so did German shelling. By midday on January 26, when sodden survivors from
LST 422
arrived in Anzio, the beachhead had assumed the shape of an irregular rectangle, seven miles deep and fifteen miles wide. Truscott’s 3rd Division remained three miles from Cisterna, while Major General Penney’s British 1st Division held Aprilia but stood more than a mile from the rail and road junction at Campoleone, and ten miles from Albano. Every square inch of the beachhead fell within range of German guns, and every square inch felt vulnerable. One shell hit a fragrance shop, perfuming the air with the odd scent of cordite and cologne. Another hit a British dump, firing ammunition as frantic Tommies dragged away leaking petrol cans. “Everyone was dashing around like demented beings,” a Grenadier Guards corporal named E. P. Danger told his diary.

“The heavy shelling was beginning to shake us up a bit,” Corporal Danger added. One of his American cousins agreed. “Anzio was a fishbowl,” he wrote. “We were the fish.”

I will not be stampeded,
John Lucas had declared, and he would spend the rest of his life explaining that reluctance. Already skeptics had begun to wonder why the beachhead remained so compact, why the enemy had not been routed, why the campaign was not won. The senior Royal Air Force officer in the Mediterranean, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, wrote a colleague in London five days after the landings:

Lucas also sensed that Alexander, despite his effusive praise during two visits to the beachhead, had grown uneasy, perhaps goaded by the impatient Churchill. As if seeking to persuade both himself and history, Lucas wrote in his diary:

The excoriation of Old Luke had begun: for want of pluck, of audacity, of imagination. Long after the war ended, he would be pilloried as the modern incarnation of George B. McClellan, the timid Civil War general who was said to have “the slows.” Even those who applauded Lucas’s prudence regretted that he had not rushed to seize the road junctions at Campoleone and Cisterna, which would have complicated German encirclement of the beachhead. “Having gained surprise in the landing,” the judicious official historian Martin Blumenson concluded, Lucas “proceeded to disregard the advantage it gave him.”

Perhaps, although the Allied push to the north and northeast began within forty-eight hours of the landings. More than sixty years after the Allied perdition at Anzio, Lucas’s caution seems sensible and even inevitable, given Clark’s wooly instructions and Alexander’s hail-fellow approbation. Those who most closely scrutinized the VI Corps predicament tended to concur that a pell-mell lunge for the Colli Laziali would have been reckless. Alexander’s new chief of staff, the future field marshal John H. Harding, concluded that Lucas “probably saved the forces at Anzio from disaster.” Clark came to a similar conclusion. Major General G.W.R. Templer, who would soon command a British division at Anzio and who detested Lucas, believed that if the corps had galloped north, “within a week or fortnight there wouldn’t have been a single British soldier left in the bridgehead. They would all have been killed or wounded or prisoners.” And George Marshall, who rarely condescended to adjudicate tactical squabbles, noted that “for every mile of advance there were seven or more miles to be added to the perimeter,” which would have made the Allied flanks ever more vulnerable.

Five years after the war, Alexander conceded that “the actual course of events was probably the most advantageous in the end.” His assessment echoed that of Field Marshal Wilson, Eisenhower’s successor at AFHQ,
who also concluded that to have pushed “to the Alban Hills with a half built-up force might have led to irreparable disaster.” John Lucas might be found wanting as a battle captain, with transparent anxieties and an avuncular mien that failed to inspire men under duress. “He was absolutely full of inertia and couldn’t make up his mind,” General Templer later complained. “He had no qualities of any sort as a commander.” But in staring through the north window of his villa on the Piazza del Mercato, Lucas found courage in convictions that would save his corps even at the price of his reputation. “Had I been able to rush to the high ground,” he wrote in his diary as German artillery and air attacks intensified,

Through the Looking Glass

O
N
a brisk January day in 1752, a column of soldiers more than half a mile long marched through a field outside the village of Caserta, twenty miles north of Naples, in a province famed in antiquity for “the beauty and gaiety of its women,” as well as for the slave revolt led by the gladiator Spartacus in 73
B.C
. With a quartet of cannons placed to denote four corners, the troops formed a rectangle that outlined the perimeter walls of a future royal palace inspired by Versailles. The building would require twenty years of toil by a regiment of stonemasons, reinforced by prison labor and galley slaves. The finished palace became a monument to Bourbon ostentation: twelve hundred rooms; four interlocking courtyards; a sweeping marble staircase grander than anything Louis XIV ever descended; a theater with forty boxes; a chapel trimmed in lapis lazuli; and interior furnishings said to cost six million ducats. Gold lined the queen’s bathtub, and bas-relief figures on the wall had their eyes painted shut to prevent their peeking at the royal derrière; a hole-and-mirror contraption allowed the queen to watch townfolk passing on the street outside while she took her soak. The building’s southern face alone was 830 feet long and 134 feet high, with 243 windows. In laying his cornerstone with a silver trowel on that January day, the Neapolitan monarch Charles III had selected a Latin invocation asking that the palace and grounds “remain forever Bourbon.”

Alas, nearly two centuries later the Anglo-Americans were firmly ensconced. Captured on October 8, Caserta Palace now served as the headquarters for both Clark’s Fifth Army and for Alexander’s 15th Army Group, which claimed the fifth floor on January 20. Every map and stick of furniture, including a pair of General Alex’s red plush chairs, had to be carried up 124 steps to what a British major described as “a muddling sort of maze through which one wandered.” A staff school for Italian aviators had previously occupied the floor, which was cluttered with aircraft motors, wind tunnels, and even a bomber fuselage. “Everything,” Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary, “was in disorder.” A war room was built, with a sentry on the door and maps on the wall. Alexander messed at the palace kennel and slept in a bivouac two miles distant, so there was a great deal of chuffing up and down those 124 steps. Ultra intelligence agents worked in caravans near the palace, forever burning secrets in an elegant brick incinerator, surmounted by steep steps like a pagan temple.

Fifteen thousand Allied soldiers eventually worked at Caserta, which soon became a baroque parody of the Pentagon. The place was so cavernous that one resident claimed it was “the only house where I’ve had my hat blown off indoors.” After studying a sheaf of palace blueprints, signal officers concluded that to thread wire through walls two feet thick was impossible; cable and phone lines therefore ran “in and out of windows and around the outside,” giving the palace an appearance of being trussed if not hog-tied. One OSS officer thought Caserta resembled “a New England cotton mill,” while another officer likened it to “Alcatraz without the bay.” A brisk breeze caused hundreds of shutters to bang so that the headquarters “sounded like midnight in a madhouse.”

The building had little heat, less sanitation, and “a 180-year accumulation of fleas.” Staff officers sat at plywood-and-sawhorse desks, “alternately shivering and scratching fleabites.” The British wanted the windows open, the Americans insisted they remain shut, and Alexander was forced to issue a Solomonic decree that “whoever arrived first at the office could have the windows as he liked for the day.” A polyglot host streamed in and out of the palace: Tommies and GIs, RAF pilots and Red Cross girls, carabinieri in swallowtail coats and tricorne hats; Indians in turbans; Poles wearing British battle dress with red-and-white shoulder tabs; French colonials in fezzes and Uncle Sam’s olive twill. Even an occasional Moroccan
goum
stumped past in the striped burnoose that GIs called a “Mother Hubbard wrapper.”

The twelve hundred rooms had been converted into dormitories, dining halls, offices, bakeries, laundries, and a barbershop, where a comb-and-razor cut cost four cents. One spacious salon served as an indoor basketball
court, and a three-room suite was devoted to an exhibit on venereal disease, with graphic color photographs intended to infuse soldiers with the fear of both God and loose women. Protective paper strips covered the huge palace mirrors, but nothing could keep GI fingerprints off the silk wall coverings and tapestries in the throne room and ministry chambers.

An errant bomb had bent the organ pipes in the palace chapel, and artillery rumbling sometimes carried from the Cassino front. But war seemed ever more removed for the “garritroopers” at Caserta, as Bill Mauldin called them—“too far forward to wear ties and too far back to git shot.” An Army surgeon described the senior officers’ mess as “a stuffy, swank private dining room full of elderly colonels dining on broiled steak and other luxuries.” The tables were set with gold-trimmed palace porcelain and glassware etched with the royal crown. The chef had once worked at the Ritz in New York, but waiters were mostly “bomb-happy” GI convalescents. “It was said, rather unkindly, that if anyone dropped a plate they all dived for cover,” one visitor reported.

Officers in the palace bar drank rum or cognac mixed with Coca-Cola; George Biddle found their faces “soft and puffy” compared with the frontline visages of Jack Toffey and his ilk. At parties, a female captain wrote, “Bill or Ralph or whoever had taken one got lit up on the very cheap wine and made less and less sense and got more and more amorous.” Marathon poker games raged in the royal suite, including one in which Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s son, allegedly lost $3,000; it was said that he eventually paid the debt with a sheaf of English five-pound notes “big as cabbage leaves.” Twice weekly, the San Carlo Opera Company arrived from Naples to sing
Tosca
or
Madama Butterfly
in the palace theater. A box seat cost $1.25, and the cast was paid mostly in Army rations.

Caserta was a “looking glass world,” one officer wrote. He added: “One doesn’t hate on a full stomach and a hot bath.” To preserve a semblance of Army life, some commanders insisted that their garritroopers at least camp outdoors. Bivouacs soon stretched for two miles through the palace gardens, evincing their own Wonderland qualities, with shower huts, softball diamonds, backgammon tables, and volleyball courts. Grenadier Guards practiced lugging their assault boats through the rose bushes before paddling furiously across the ornamental ponds, which hungry soldiers soon emptied of fish. Clark’s floatplane landed among the lily pads on a reflecting pool a quarter mile long.

Just north of the palace, engineers built a colony for generals, known as Cascades. An elaborate fountain nearby depicted the goddess Diana and her handmaidens being surprised while bathing by the hunter Actaeon, who was consequently transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his
own hounds. Cascades included a lounge with a fireplace, a tennis court, a U-shaped dance hall, and a muddy, eel-infested pond that served as a swimming hole. The engineers who built the complex complained in their unit log: “The feeling of the men is that they came over here for the purpose of winning a war. The building of summer houses and swimming pools doesn’t fall under this category.”