The Day of Battle (73 page)

Yanks veered to the right, to a warren of trenches and hovels where young men wheezed like rheumy old men, scraping the muck from their uniforms with trench knives. Strange cries carried across no-man’s-land, including a heartbreaking German voice:
“Otto, Otto! Ich sterbe, Otto!”
I’m dying, Otto. “Nerves became frayed,” a lieutenant wrote. “The few abrasive personalities in the platoon seemed to become more abrasive.” At a salvage dump outside Nettuno, quartermasters each day picked through truckloads of clothing and kit from soldiers killed or wounded—sorting heaps of shoes, goggles, forks, canteens, bloody leggings. “It was best not to look too closely at the great pile,” advised Ernie Pyle. “Inanimate things can sometimes speak so forcefully.”

Nearby, more trucks hauled the day’s dead to a field sprouting white crosses and six-pointed stars. Grave diggers halted their poker game—the trestle-and-plywood table, in a bunker built from rail ties, could seat seven players—and hurried through their offices. Like the rest of the Bitchhead, the cemetery frequently came under fire, so burial services were short and often nocturnal. Grief was brief. The diggers tried to stay fifty holes ahead of demand, but keeping pace could be difficult when shells disinterred the dead, who required reburying.

Life went on, miserable and infinitely precious. “Remember,” a gunner wrote in a note to himself, “it can never be as bad as it was at Anzio.”

It got worse. Allied air attacks and the star-crossed American attack at Cisterna had disrupted Mackensen’s timetable for reducing the beachhead, even as he massed 96,000 troops, nearly 100 tanks, and more than 200 heavy antitank and assault guns, plus all those artillery tubes. “Our grand strategy demands that the beachhead be wiped out promptly,” Mackensen told his lieutenants, and they would begin by obliterating the exposed
salient—four miles deep and two miles wide—held by the British 1st Division near Campoleone, on the VI Corps left.

The attack fell heaviest on the Irish Guards and 6th Gordons, positioned, respectively, on the left and right flanks of the salient. A thousand sheep, dragooned as minesweepers, led the German attack against the Irish Guards early on Friday morning, February 4. “Like a dirty, ragged wave, a huge flock surged over the crest of the Vallelata ridges and scampered crazily through No. 3 company,” the battalion reported. Tanks and grenadiers followed the bleating vanguard through hard rain, threatening to trap the entire British 3rd Brigade by cinching the salient at its base. “The Germans are at the door,” a British company commander radioed. Panzers demolished the rear walls of farmhouses, then drove inside to shoot through the front windows. Fire raked the Via Anziate. “I never saw so many people killed round me before in all my life,” an Irish Guards corporal said later. Only valor and Allied artillery—VI Corps now massed 438 tubes, including 84 big guns on destroyers and cruisers—staved off annihilation. “You’d better get your boys out of it,” Lucas advised Major General Penney, the 1st Division commander.

They retreated by the glare of burning hayricks. “All the shells in hell came down on us,” a young soldier told the BBC. “Nothing but black smoke and what smelt like the stink of frying bodies.” By Saturday morning nearly three miles was forfeit at a cost of fifteen hundred British casualties, including nine hundred captured; Mackensen’s losses were also severe, with almost five hundred dead.

The attack resumed on Monday evening, February 7, and by midnight had spread through the badland gullies along the 24th Guards Brigade front. “Nothing heard of Number 1 company for forty-five minutes,” a Grenadier Guards captain radioed. “Numbers 3 and 4 believed overrun. Ourselves surrounded, and there is a German on the ridge above me throwing grenades.” By Tuesday enemy troops west of the Via Anziate held a key slope misnamed Buonriposo—place of good rest—and were hunting Tommies by looking for breath plumes in the frosty air. “It’s very awkward,” a Grenadier officer complained. “If we lie on our stomachs we are hit in the arse. If we lie on our backs we are hit in the balls.” German infiltrators crept so close that British mortars fired almost vertically at targets only a hundred yards away. The sight of feral swine feeding on a dead comrade provoked an anguished sergeant to ask, “Is this what we are fighting for, to be eaten by pigs?”

Aided by a captured map that revealed British minefields, four German infantry regiments and Mk V Panther tanks swarmed toward the high ground at Carroceto, bagging another eight hundred prisoners on February 8.
A Scots Guards battalion held the Carroceto rail depot, with an observation post tucked into the stationmaster’s apartment on the second floor; when two German platoons went to ground in a nearby ditch, the Scots propped a Vickers machine gun in the window, with bags of grain to steady the tripod, and slaughtered them. The enemy answered with a tank, which halted forty yards from the station and stitched each window and door with machine-gun fire at such close range that bullets chewed through brick; then the main gun opened, gouging great holes in the station walls until the staircase inside collapsed. “This was even more unpleasant,” reported the Scots, who scrambled back three hundred yards to shelter behind a rail embankment.

More unpleasant yet was the loss by infiltration and frontal assault of Aprilia, the model Fascist town known as the Factory because a severe tower atop city hall gave the settlement an industrial aspect. By Wednesday evening, February 9, Wehrmacht troops held twenty buildings, including a police barracks, wine store, and theater; panzers refueled in the Piazza Roma, where a bronze St. Michael clutched a sword in one hand and a dragon’s head in the other.

The salient was gone, the beachhead imperiled. Ominous noises drifted from the wadis and woodlands, the sounds of an enemy massing. “Where is the sea?” a captured German officer asked. “I just wanted to know, since you will all soon be in it.”

On sleepless nights—and there were many now—John Lucas puffed his corncob and chatted with his watch officers about West Point, or Sherlock Holmes, or home sweet home. Rarely did he emerge from the VI Corps command post, now twenty feet beneath the Osteria dell’ Artigliere, where engineers had punched through a wall to link two sets of cellars. Naked bulbs dangled above huge oak casks banded with iron hoops, and ramps for rolling barrels up to the Vicolo del Montano bracketed the steep steps to the sandbagged entrance. Staff officers hunched over plywood desks beneath the great stone arches, their brows furrowed as they pondered dispatches from the front. Jangling telephones echoed in the alcoves; even whispers carried to the dark corners of the crypt. A large wall map with grease pencil markings showed VI Corps positions in blue and the enemy in encroaching red. Clockwise around the semicircular perimeter the Allies stretched from U.S. 45th Division troops along the Moletta River, on the left; through British and U.S. 1st Armored Division regiments in the center; to American paratroopers, 3rd Division GIs, and 1st Special Service Forcemen on the right.

“The old Hun is getting ready to have a go at me,” Lucas had advised his diary as the attack on the salient began. “He thinks he can drive me back
into the ocean. Maybe so, but it will cost him money.” The bravado dissolved as the salient melted away. “The situation changed so rapidly from offensive to defensive that I can’t get my feet under me,” he wrote. Although Allied air forces in the Mediterranean now exceeded twelve thousand planes—the largest air command in the world—clearly the effort to interdict German reinforcements had faltered: twenty-seven enemy battalions had already reached the beachhead from northern Italy, and an entire Wehrmacht division had traveled from southern France in just ten days. Lucas’s own reinforcements failed to keep pace with his losses: of an average eight hundred Allied casualties each day—tantamount to a battalion—barely half were replaced. Lucas calculated that VI Corps was shrinking by nine thousand soldiers per month.

He blamed the cousins. “A terrible struggle all day trying to get the British to move,” he told his diary on February 8. “I wish I had an American division in there.” Blending the two nationalities produced a corps of “hermaphrodites.” To Clark, a day later, he wrote, “My only present concern is the inability of one of my divisions to maintain its vigorous resistance.” Clark had no doubt about
which
division; he derided General Penney—a meticulous, pious, high-strung engineer, who had been Alexander’s chief signals officer in North Africa—as “a good telephone operator.” When Clark confided that Lucas did not hold Penney in esteem, Alexander snapped, “Well, I do.”

Lucas’s disdain was fully reciprocated. “Complete gaff, no decision,” Penney had told his diary after one rambling conference with Lucas. Later Penney added, “Quite infuriating delay and weakness…[Lucas] very vague and no corps order.” Doubts about “Corncob Charlie,” as the British now called him, had spread up the chain of command. “We’ll lose the beachhead unless Lucas goes,” Major General G.W.R. Templer, whose 56th Division was just arriving, warned Alexander. Even Whitehall was uneasy. “I trust you are satisfied with leaving Lucas in command at the bridgehead,” Churchill cabled Alexander on February 10. “If not you should put someone there whom you trust.” As each day ended without the ballyhooed sally into Rome, the prime minister grew ever more dour. The Allies now had eighteen thousand vehicles at the beachhead, he noted in a cable to Field Marshal Wilson in Algiers, adding, “We must have a great superiority in chauffeurs.” No one bore greater responsibility for Anzio than Churchill, and he kept a pale eye peeled for possible scapegoats; a report from Washington that Marshall believed “Clark might be the man to go” intrigued him, but Lucas seemed the more likely candidate. “All this,” the prime minister sighed, “has been a great disappointment to me.”

As Mackensen tightened his grip on Aprilia and Carroceto, awaiting Hitler’s personal authorization for his next move, the Allies struggled to regroup. At 5:30
A.M
. on Thursday, February 10, Penney warned Lucas that the “situation cannot go on.” His division had been halved. Some regiments were all but obliterated: more than three hundred North Staffords had been killed, wounded, or captured in eight hours, while the 5th Grenadier Guards had lost almost three-quarters of their eight hundred enlisted ranks, plus twenty-nine of thirty-five officers. In a tart note that afternoon, Penney asked Lucas for “the immediate corps plan, the corps plan for the future and the general programme, including the intentions of the higher command.” In his diary, Lucas wrote, “Things get worse and worse.”

He popped out of the command post long enough to brace the line with two reserve American infantry regiments from the 45th Division, the 179th and 180th. As usual, his plan lacked precision and nuance, having been drawn from a map rather than from careful reconnaissance. “Okay, Bill,” he told the division commander, Major General William W. Eagles, “you give ’em the works. Go places.” To Penney he wrote, “Reinforcements are on the way.”

Too few, too late. A counterattack at dawn on Friday won a foothold in Aprilia’s southeast corner, but poor coordination between U.S. rifle and tank companies hamstrung the assault. Grenadiers boiled from the Factory cellars, and panzers—followed by “deep ranks of gray-coated infantry”—drove the Yanks out on Saturday morning, February 12. A soldier in the 179th Infantry conceded, “The Germans just beat the holy hell out of us.”

General Alex had long been celebrated for beachhead verve. His panache at Dunkirk was legendary, and his visitation during a dark hour at Salerno braced Yanks and Brits alike. Now he arrived, a deus ex machina, aboard a Royal Navy destroyer on Monday morning, February 14, wrapped in his fur-lined jacket and reading Schiller in German to hone his language skills. On this Valentine’s Day, however, the old magic seemed elusive. After briefly touring the front, where American soldiers complained that his red hat drew fire, he repaired to a barren cell in the VI Corps headquarters just as air raid sirens began to wail across Nettuno. A covey of reporters, summoned to hear his assessment, filed in past wall posters that depicted wholesome American girls urging their soldier boys to “come home clean.”

The campaign had not unfolded precisely as planned, Alexander acknowledged. “We wanted a breakthrough and a complete answer inside a week,” he said. “But once you [have] stopped, it becomes a question of building up and slogging.” No one should assume that the drive to Rome had stalled; any whiff of defeatism only helped the enemy. “I assure you the Germans opposite us are a very unhappy party,” he said. “Don’t compare
this situation to Dunkirk or Salerno.” Dispatches from the beachhead had been filled with “pessimistic rubbish.” Ignoring the fact that all stories were censored at the beachhead and again in Naples, he worked himself into a fine pique. “Were any of you at Dunkirk? I was, and I know that there is never likely to be a Dunkirk here.” Alexander was “very disappointed that you should put out such rot.” Henceforth, access to the radios used to transmit news dispatches from the beachhead would be severely restricted—Churchill had urged just such a suppressive action—and reporters could expect even more vigorous censorship.

Lucas tried to intervene, noting that any defeatists had long since left. “I tried to stop the tirade and tell him he had the wrong people but he refused to listen,” the corps commander jotted in his diary. Alexander tromped from the command post and soon sailed off on his destroyer, uncommonly overwrought and in need of a shave. The reporters trudged through cold rain to the decrepit waterfront villa they shared, perplexed and incensed; one hack consoled himself by picking out a tune from
La Traviata
on a battered upright piano.

Lucas was left alone to ponder the blue and red runes covering his wall map. Alexander seemed convinced that the enemy had been repulsed, but the map suggested otherwise. He also appeared indifferent to VI Corps’ shortages of manpower and artillery ammunition. This time there had been no hail-fellow accolades from General Alex, no “splendid piece of work” encomium.