The Day of Battle (68 page)

He still spoke in a raspy whisper, although his morbid throat had improved along with his lacerated leg: on Monday afternoon, a falling 20mm antiaircraft round had detonated six inches from Truscott’s left foot, peppering his cavalry boot, breeches, and ankle with steel fragments. After a surgeon tweezed out the shards, General Lucas insisted on handing him a Purple Heart. “It is truly superficial, but the doctors have my foot so strapped up that I hobble a bit when I walk,” Truscott wrote Sarah a day later. As for the Anzio landings, he told her, no one at home should assume “that the war is about over. Far from it, believe me.” He asked her to send his copy of
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
the rationalist edition of the New
Testament compiled by Thomas Jefferson beginning in 1804. The Jefferson Bible, as it was commonly called, seemed like good beachhead reading.

A window with casement shutters on the second floor gave Truscott a sweeping view across the Pontine Marshes. The west branch of the Mussolini Canal snaked through the farm fields a mile ahead. From Conca, the northbound road crossed the canal on a plank bridge and ran for three more miles to Isola Bella, a hamlet that marked the beachhead’s outer boundary. Two miles farther on lay Highway 7 and Cisterna, known to St. Paul as Three Taverns. Here, while under arrest en route to Rome in the first century, the apostle “thanked God and took courage” after encountering a band of Roman Christians. Modern Cisterna lay at the confluence of five major roads and a rail line. Truscott on Wednesday had suggested seizing the town immediately, using his entire division along with British troops and a newly arrived regiment from the 45th Division. But Lucas preferred to wait until more tanks from the 1st Armored Division arrived to lend heft to the British effort on the left, which offered a more direct route to the Colli Laziali and Rome.

The delay hardly seemed imprudent. Prisoner interrogations and captured German diaries depicted a glum, disheartened enemy. “Spirits are not particularly high since 4
¹
/2 years of war start to get on your nerves,” a soldier in the Wehrmacht’s 71st Division had written on January 26. Two days later, one of his comrades added, “The air roars and whistles. Shells explode all around us. Since January 21 I have not been able to take my boots off.” This morning’s 3rd Division intelligence report noted that “the enemy’s attitude on our front is entirely defensive,” with most forces hugging the hills five miles beyond Cisterna. Enemy “patrolling has not been aggressive…. There is evidence that [German] platoon and squad leadership has begun to deteriorate.” Hermann Göring troops manned “our right flank and front,” with a few other units fed “into the line piecemeal as they have arrived…. It does not now seem probable that the enemy will soon deliver a major counterattack involving units of division size.” The VI Corps attack, originally planned for early this morning, January 29, had been postponed until the following morning because of an unfortunate incident in the British sector: on Friday, three jeeps carrying officers from the 5th Grenadier Guards had missed a turn on the road to Campoleone and blundered into a German ambush. Seven men were killed or captured, and with four Grenadier companies now stripped to only four officers, General Penney requested another day to organize his attack. Lucas agreed. Again, it hardly seemed to matter.

Truscott scanned the fenny landscape with his field glasses, unaware that the intelligence assessment was delusional or that the additional delay would carry baneful consequences. Kesselring had planned a massive counterattack for January 28, then chose a four-day postponement to bring more reinforcements through the Brenner Pass. Allied air attacks had temporarily snipped the rail lines across northern Italy, but because foul weather obscured rail targets for at least half of all heavy bombing sorties, Wehrmacht troops and supplies leaked through to the beachhead. On this very evening, the 26th Panzer Division would arrive in force from the Adriatic front, “a possibility that we had not seriously considered,” Clark later confessed. Several thousand additional Germans shored up the thin Hermann Göring line at Cisterna, so that instead of encountering one division along a broad front on Sunday morning, Darby’s Rangers and Truscott’s infantry would find two. Eleven battalions defended Cisterna, roughly threefold the expected force. All told, German forces encircling the beachhead exceeded 71,000 men in 33 battalions, with 238 field guns. As General Penney noted in his diary, “The Germans don’t let mistakes go unpunished and don’t give second chances.”

Birds sang in the marsh grass and a pale sun glinted off the brimming irrigation ditches. Here and there a soldier scurried from one soggy copse to another. Outside the Conca monastery, graceful sycamore branches nodded in the breeze. Truscott saw it all, and he saw nothing. He clumped down the stairs to finish his plan.

Darby’s Rangers spent Saturday afternoon in a piney wood near Nettuno sharpening their blades, cleaning their rifles, and napping on pine-bough beds. A week on the beachhead had left them “solemn, tired, and quiet,” one Ranger recalled. Few had shaved since sailing from Pozzuoli—a disgusted paratrooper wrote that they “looked like cutthroats [or] the sweepings of the bar rooms”—and company barbers stayed busy until the light failed. Each rifleman stuffed his pockets with grenades and coiled two extra bandoliers over his shoulders, removing the tracer rounds to avoid pinpointing a shooter’s position at night. Bedrolls and barracks bags were stacked on a canvas ground cloth in the custody of the company cooks; souvenirs accumulated since Gela and Maiori were carefully tucked away: a German knife, a British Commando cap, a pumice fragment from Vesuvius. Mail arrived late Saturday, but with no time for mail call—a Ranger never carried personal letters into combat—the clerks promised to haul the sacks to Cisterna on Sunday morning. Teamsters from Nettuno also brought up extra ammunition. Shells rattled in the truck beds like dry bones.

Darby had been busy since dawn. After a war council with his three battalion commanders, at one
P.M
. he conferred with Truscott in the Conca monastery, then scouted the road to Isola Bella. His 4th Battalion, led by an eight-man minesweeping crew, would press down that road at two
A.M
. on Sunday, opening a path toward Cisterna for heavy weapons and supplies. The 1st and 3rd Battalions would creep up the Pantano
fosso,
a deep irrigation ditch that roughly paralleled the road from the Mussolini Canal to within a mile of Cisterna. Ranger infiltration had succeeded admirably in Tunisia, and Darby stressed “avoiding contact with the enemy” as long as possible through the terrain the Rangers now called Jerryland. Behind the Ranger spearhead, Truscott’s 7th Infantry Regiment on the left and 15th Infantry on the right would advance on a seven-mile front, to cut Highway 7 north and south of Cisterna.

While careful to display only robust confidence to his men, Darby felt uncommon ambivalence about this evening’s mission. The size of the attack heartened him, as did intelligence suggesting the road to Cisterna was lightly held, perhaps by a German infantry regiment protecting artillery and antitank batteries. An OSS agent—one of several anti-Fascists recruited in Naples and living in a Nettuno barracks equipped with a radio and a Ping-Pong table—had just returned from two days behind the lines to report seeing only four enemy battalions along the Conca–Cisterna corridor. The Rangers seemed indomitable. When Darby asked a young private first class if he was nervous, the soldier replied, “I’m not nervous, sir. I’m just shaking with patriotism.” They were “the finest body of troops ever gathered together,” Darby had told an OSS officer. “They don’t surrender either. They fight for keeps.”

Yet the expansion of the force from one battalion to three, and the loss of veteran Rangers since the
TORCH
landings fifteen months earlier, had led to a deterioration in fighting skills, noise discipline, and fieldcraft. Too many men still bunched up when moving cross-country, or failed to freeze when a flare popped. How many knew to muffle a canteen with an old sock, or to suppress a cough with fingers pressed on the Adam’s apple, or to dull a helmet’s gleam with mud or wood smoke?

The Cisterna plan also nagged at Darby. Was it too risky, too bold? Would Truscott’s infantry quickly reinforce the Ranger infiltrators? No Ranger reconnaissance had been possible past Isola Bella for fear of alerting the Germans. Aerial photos had seemed to show fields crisscrossed with hedgerows, which instead proved to be briar-choked irrigation ditches. The loss on Wednesday of two mortar companies aboard the ill-fated
LST 422
had been a blow, and this afternoon Darby realized that the ground was too boggy for other mortarmen to negotiate the Pantano Ditch; the
heavy tubes instead would have to come up the road behind the 4th Battalion, along with the machine guns. Finally, a new fragment of intelligence had arrived an hour after sunset, at 6:35
P.M
.: “The city may have considerable opposition.”

By then the men had begun to filter out of their pine redoubt, singing “Pistol Packin’ Mama” as they shambled under an overcast sky in columns of twos toward the line of departure, seven miles north. Usually the passwords chosen for an operation contained sounds difficult for German-speakers to pronounce: the “th” in “thistle” or the rolling “r” in “price.” Tonight’s challenge-and-parole was simple: “bitter/sweet.” Upon reaching Cisterna—known by the unfortunate code-name
EASY
—the Rangers were to loft several red Very flares to signal their success.

The singing ceased. “Morale of men was excellent,” the 1st Battalion log noted. The 3rd Battalion commander, Major Alvah H. Miller, had recently written a poem describing a walk through the Ranger bivouac late at night, listening to the sounds of his slumbering men: one laughs aloud, playing with the son he has never seen; another murmurs his wife’s name, Marilyn; another whimpers under dreamy shell fire that unsettles his sleep.

At midnight, Darby met for a final time with his battalion commanders beside the Conca road. The officers stamped their feet against the biting cold as he reminded them to maintain radio silence for as long as possible.

Good luck, Darby told them. With his rolling gait, elbows cocked, he strode to an isolated farmhouse on the right side of the road where his command post had been set up. The commanders rejoined their waiting troops, blue and vague in the moonless night. Only their eyes glinted from faces daubed with burnt cork. Beyond the Mussolini Canal, four miles from Cisterna, the three battalions separated. The 4th veered left toward the road. The 1st and 3rd tramped single file across a fallow field. Soon the column descended into the Pantano Ditch, like a snake slithering into a hole. The officers took compass readings by matchlight, then pressed north.

At three
A.M
., near Isola Bella, barely half a mile up the Conca road, the 4th Battalion found trouble. A long burst from a German machine pistol tore open the night, and sheets of fire soon poured from several red farm buildings. One Ranger company was pinned down three hundred yards east of the road; fifteen minutes later a second company was immobilized. Enemy rifle pits had been dug every thirty feet and stiffened by machine-gun nests at hundred-yard intervals. Grazing fire swarmed a foot off the ground, killing a Ranger captain, among others. Mortar rounds stomped across a landscape that soon reeked of blown powder and turned earth. A
crude roadblock built from two wrecked jeeps and an Italian truck halted the rest of the battalion, and for the rest of the night three hundred Rangers lay flat in their icy furrows, shooting at muzzle flashes fifty yards away. Worse yet, in the Anzio anchorage twelve miles distant a burning ammunition ship exploded at four
A.M
. in a white pillar of flame, casting long shadows across the Conca road and backlighting the Rangers for enemy snipers. From his farmhouse command post, Darby kept an ear cocked to the commotion two thousand yards north. “This was the first intimation,” he later wrote, “that all was not well.”

All was not well in the Pantano Ditch, either. Eight hundred helmets bobbed just below field level as the mile-long column meandered through the muddy scarp, often knee-deep in black water. “We could hear mortar and artillery barrages landing to our left flank,” a Ranger later reported. “Someone whispered, ‘The 4th must be having a bad time.’” Two miles from Cisterna, the 1st Battalion commander, Major Jack Dobson, realized that the 3rd Battalion had fallen behind. Ordering three companies to wait, Dobson pressed ahead with his other three. A runner dispatched to find the missing Rangers soon returned with inauspicious news: Alvah Miller, the 3rd Battalion poet-commander, had been blown to pieces by a point-blank panzer shell in a chance encounter at a German outpost. Avenging Rangers fired the tank with sticky grenades, but the column had been sundered.

Dobson’s vanguard of 150 Rangers crept past a pair of Nebelwerfer batteries, near enough to hear German voices and to see whip antennas silhouetted against the sky. A mile from Cisterna, the ditch angled northwest to end in a culvert under the Conca road. German vehicles whizzed past in both directions, and a pair of self-propelled guns two hundred yards away fired at the beachhead with a monotonous thud. In hushed tones, Dobson tried to reach Darby by radio; the enemy force appeared much larger than expected, and with Miller dead perhaps it made sense to swing both battalions to the east, where the Mussolini Canal could shield their flank. After ten minutes, unable to raise the command post, Dobson cradled the handset. Without Darby’s approval, he could not alter the plan.

Across the road the Rangers stole, melting into an olive orchard on the far side. A German sentry flopped beneath a silver bough, blood cascading from his slashed throat. Tendrils of gray light began to bleach the eastern sky. Dobson swerved north on a trail parallel to the Conca road, the Rangers now at a trot, racing the dawn. A shout carried, then another, then a gunshot. Dark figures wrapped in blankets rose from the earth, stumbling about as Dobson’s men realized they had blundered into a German camp. Another sentry fell with his throat opened in a crimson crescent, screaming to wake the living and the dead alike. The mêlée spread
across the bivouac—“chaos compounded,” in one description—and the pulpy sound of plunging knives and bayonets could be heard between the grenade bursts and crackling rifles. “I emptied my M-1 so much and so fast that the wood [stock] was smoking,” a Ranger later reported. The butt end of 1st Battalion scampered across the road toward the sound of the guns, followed by several companies from 3rd Battalion, including bazooka teams that shattered two tanks in a brilliant spray of orange flame.