The Day of Battle (89 page)

Alexander’s final order, issued in early May, remained silent on which force would seize Rome and thus further inflamed Clark’s suspicions. But for weeks the battle plan had clearly laid out a scheme in which Eighth Army bulled up Highway 6 before veering east of the capital toward either Florence or Ancona on the Adriatic, depending on whether the Combined Chiefs chose southern France or Austria as Alexander’s ultimate destination. Fifth Army would follow the Tyrrhenian coastline to Viterbo and then Livorno.

There would be glory enough to go around. Still, sensing fraternal rivalries, AFHQ informed all reporters that “no invidious comparison [should] be made between Eighth and Fifth armies and the FEC; no exaggeration, no overcolorful narratives…. Speculation should be avoided.”

Monochrome proved difficult, given the vivid legions assembled for
DIADEM
. On the Allied right, Eighth Army—having tramped from Cairo across two continents in the past nineteen months—now secretly sideslipped more than a quarter million men east to west over the Apennines. Their commander, Lieutenant General Oliver W. H. Leese, was as tall as Clark and much stouter, with a black mustache and twinkling brown eyes that could darken in sudden rage—“a big ungainly bruiser,” in Keyes’s tart description. Blooded at the Somme, with the scars to prove it, Leese was bluff and toothy, given to khaki plus-fours and a straw hat. He remained a Montgomery protégé at heart, fond of thunderous artillery barrages, cheap smokes tossed to the lads, and conferences with subordinates while he soaked in his tub. “Never frig about on a low level,” he liked to advise. Leese later became an expert in horticultural succulents, such as cacti and begonias; now he settled for tending his tulips.

He compared this, his first big battle as an army commander, to “having a baby.” Alexander thought him methodical to a fault. “Not the pusher Clark was,” he said after the war. “Some army commanders have to be pushed with a little ginger, like Leese, who always needed a little prodding.” A Canadian general at one point decried his “prancing about waving his hands like a whore in heat.” Yet Leese’s guffaws and ribald humor masked a shrewd cunning. “I think I can work with Clark,” he wrote his wife. “He thinks I am a bloody fool. He will have a great awakening.”

Leese’s seven infantry and three armor divisions included a new contingent in the Allied panoply: 56,000 Poles, who had been assigned to take
Monte Cassino itself. They were led by General W
adys
aw Anders, a slender, handsome cavalryman with “the ardour of a boy,” in Macmillan’s phrase, and the grit of a man intent on settling scores. Anders had fought both Germans and Russians in 1939; wounded three times and captured on crutches, he spent twenty months in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison and other dungeons, much of it in solitary confinement. After Hitler invaded Russia, he was released—reportedly wearing only a shirt and underpants—to eventually form a Polish corps against the common Nazi foe. His men were drawn from prison camps scattered as far away as Siberia; in an anabasis that took them through Iraq and Persia, they joined other Poles who had fled through Hungary and Romania to fight with valor in the Middle East under British patronage.

Anders’s two divisions were understrength but as ardent as he: they drew lots to see which would have the privilege of liberating the abbey itself. “We never take prisoners,” a Polish colonel told one Grenadier Guardsman. “It’s such a nuisance having to feed them and, after all, they started it.” None of the Poles would hang back on May 11, as Anders later said, “for we had no men to spare for reserves.” For II Polish Corps, the way home led through the Gustav Line.

On the Allied left, wedged into a twelve-mile front from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the lip of the Rapido flats, Clark’s army also included a contingent for whom
DIADEM
was a grudge match. “The eyes of suffering France are fixed upon you,” Juin told his FEC. His corps had swelled to nearly 100,000 men, parceled among four divisions and three groups of
goumiers,
irregular Berber tribesmen known for agility and ruthlessness. After enduring eight thousand casualties in the winter fighting around Cassino, Juin had spent the spring retraining his forces in mountain warfare, with a stress on speed, stealth, and infiltration. Only by “invading the mountains,” he believed, could the Allies widen their front and circumvent the constricted tank trap in the Liri Valley.

That meant scaling the Auruncis, a primeval upland three thousand to five thousand feet high forming a broad belt between the valley and the sea. Sculpted by defiles and pinnacles, the range was crowned by the Petrella Massif, a height peopled mostly by shepherds and charcoal makers, and deemed impassable by Germans and Anglo-Americans alike.

But not by Juin. Wrapped in a greatcoat, with his blue Basque beret pulled down around his ears, useless right arm dangling, and an unlit cigar clamped between his crooked teeth, he stumped through the shadows below the range, eyeing approaches and saddles. Photo reconnaissance showed two narrow trails winding over the massif—and little enemy fortification. With patience and persistence, in passionate French and fractured
English, he had persuaded first Keyes and then Clark to broaden and deepen the Fifth Army attack. “The Americans are not people one can hustle,” he wrote a French colleague. “They like us a lot, but they are also imbued with their sense of omnipotence and with a touchiness that you could hardly imagine.”

Rather than employ the FEC as a battering ram to punch a hole in German defenses, which would then be ploddingly exploited by Keyes’s II Corps, Juin proposed attacking full-fury with both corps abreast: 170,000 men, 600 artillery tubes, 300 tanks. Given the tilt of the Italian boot, the attack would initially angle into the mountains from east to west. To provision a single corps in such terrain would be difficult; to supply two would be herculean. But Fifth Army could outflank German defenses and unhinge the Gustav Line. Once across the Auruncis, the Americans could sweep up the coast toward Anzio and Rome while the FEC veered into the Liri Valley from the southwest.

Clark’s admiration for Juin had only deepened since their first encounter in Algiers during Operation
TORCH
. It was no accident that Fifth Army headquarters assigned him the radio call-sign Hannibal. Among other gallantries, the Frenchman had voluntarily surrendered one of his four stars in order not to outrank his army commander. “Radiate confidence,” Juin advised, “and enjoy taking risks.”

Audacious and improbable, the plan also offered Fifth Army a bigger role than the vague, subordinate mission outlined in Alexander’s order. Clark still cherished one bit of arcana memorized by every West Point plebe: “A calculated risk is a known risk for the sake of a real gain. A risk for the sake of a risk is a fool’s choice.”

He knew the difference.

Half a million players scurried to find their places before the curtain rose. The landscape seethed with activity, concealed from German eyes by darkness or deception. On the far left, Italian laborers built dummy pillboxes at the mouth of the Garigliano under orders “not to camouflage too well.” Farther upstream, twenty undetected French battalions squeezed into a swale barely four miles across; Juin’s men donned British soup-bowl helmets to obscure the departure of McCreery’s X Corps to the far side of Cassino. At night, engineers hacked trails into the Aurunci foothills with hand tools to minimize the noise, then scattered brushwood before dawn to hide their tracks.

Canadian signalers in April had gone off the air along the Adriatic; now they began broadcasting again near Salerno to persuade German eavesdroppers that an amphibious operation was being mounted. In truth,
barely two hundred men operated sixty-one radios in a carefully scripted electronic deception. At Termoli, on the Adriatic, the 1st Palestinian Camouflage Company floated dummy landing craft in the harbor and spread garnished nets over two acres of jetties to inspire the imagination of any German reconnaissance pilot. To discourage collaborators, Allied leaflets resembling funeral announcements displayed the names and photos of those executed for espionage or sabotage.

Military traffic signs appeared in Polish, English, French, and Hindi. Engineers built new trails along the front, concealed with lime, straw, stones, and turf. Long screens made of chicken wire festooned with steel wool hid roads, bridges, and depots. Timber parties carefully thinned the olive groves to create fields of fire for artillery, sawing the trunks three-quarters through and bracing the trees upright until H-hour, when they would be tipped over. Anders’s troops blackened their kit, donned seven thousand mottled sniper suits, and slapped six thousand gallons of camouflage paint on their vehicles.

Scouts in canvas shoes and dark pullovers swam the Rapido at night, creeping among fireflies blinking in the reeds. Indian sappers crawled along the banks, probing for mines left by the Yanks in January. Five hundred yards from the river, South African troops lay low in their sangars and foxholes during daylight, which now lasted from 4:30 in the morning until 9:30 at night.

Every tree along Highway 6 leading to Shit Corner concealed supplies. Dumps grew mountainous: Fifth Army alone stockpiled 11,000 tons of ammunition for the first two days of
DIADEM
, including 200,000 105mm shells. One hundred miles of six-inch fuel pipeline stretched from Naples to forward depots, and forty-three Italian sawmills turned forests into engineer lumber. Fifth Army artisans, working at their casting tables in twelve-hour shifts, made intricate models depicting every quarry, cliff, and monastery on the approaches to Rome. Map depots stocked millions of sheets on four different scales. To produce the five-color maps requested by Clark’s headquarters, cartographers mixed ersatz inks from mercurochrome, tobacco juice, and Atabrine tablets, which turned paper as well as soldiers bright yellow.

Endless supply convoys crept forward at six miles an hour behind trucks outfitted with water sprayers to keep down telltale dust. Specially tuned jeeps crept to the forward dumps with their hoods wrapped in rubber pads to muffle any squeaks. And all night long the clop of hooves could be heard from the Garigliano to the Sangro. Fifth Army alone had mustered ten thousand mules and two thousand horses into pack trains. “No mules,” Juin told anyone who would listen, “no maneuver.”

Truscott in early May returned to the beachhead, tanned and rejuvenated after a five-day furlough in Naples. “I think of you every day when I look at my garden,” he wrote Sarah from Nettuno. “The roses are blooming in great profusion. You know how I love them.” At his request, orderlies snipped bouquets for the hospital wards in Hell’s Half-Acre. He reminded his wife that he had now served in uniform for twenty-seven years. “I suppose the passing years have taken their toll and left their marks. Strange to say I actually feel younger than I did at the time.” In another note he added, “I hope that I have not become conceited or swell-headed, and I do not believe that I have. I have retained my sense of humor and am still able to laugh at myself.”

At the beachhead, too, preparations for
DIADEM
took on a febrile intensity. More than one million tons of matériel would be stockpiled at Anzio to supply Fifth Army during the drive north. Engineers crushed stone from demolished houses for roadbeds and fashioned three hundred brush fascines for marshy ground. Phone lines toward the front were buried in trenches dug with a jeep-drawn plow. A stockade for five thousand prisoners sprang up near Conca.