The Day of Battle (96 page)

True enough. Senger subsequently confirmed that his XIV Panzer Corps retreated on a road that branched from Highway 6 at Frosinone, well south of Valmontone, to snake through the Simbruini foothills. A parallel road also wound through Palestrina, and other tracks led to Highway 5, the lateral route from Rome to Pescara on the Adriatic.

Clark also feared that German artillery and panzers hidden in the Colli Laziali would “debouch from the mountains” to counterattack Truscott’s left flank as he galloped toward Valmontone. From Ultra and field reports, he believed that Kesselring’s last mobile reserve in Italy, the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, would soon congeal along Highway 6. These too were legitimate anxieties, although the staggering artillery, air, and armored firepower available to Truscott would surely punish any attack from Mackensen’s battered legions. Fourteenth Army tallied 108,000 Allied shells on Thursday, then stopped counting. Allied air attacks on the same day destroyed 655 of Mackensen’s vehicles. Moreover, only the Hermann Göring reconnaissance battalion would reach Valmontone by Friday, May 26. The rest of the division, forced to travel by day for 250 miles on exposed roads through a murderous gauntlet of Allied warplanes, would arrive piecemeal and in tatters.

Two final points must be conceded to Clark. No less an authority than George Marshall had urged the capture of Rome before
OVERLORD
, now less than two weeks away; with a second front opening in Normandy, the Italian theater would surely see a sharp decline in ammunition, supplies, troops, and public attention. Finally, Operations Instructions No. 24 attempted to
sugar the pill for Alexander by keeping more than twenty thousand VI Corps troops pounding for Highway 6, and they soon would be reinforced by Keyes’s II Corps.

Yet the harsh truth remains: with duplicity and in bad faith, Clark contravened a direct order from a superior officer. His assertion, to Keyes on May 28, that the British “are scheming to get into Rome the easiest way,” was predicated on no substantive evidence. His “thirst for glory,” as the official British history would later conclude, “spoiled the fulfilment of Alexander’s plan in order to obtain for himself and his army the triumph of being the first to enter Rome.”

Clark acknowledged as much in his postwar memoir:

This fixation, no doubt compounded by stress and exhaustion, marred his usually astute military judgment. He failed to see that Mackensen at Valmontone on May 26 would face at least three VI Corps divisions with only an eviscerated Wehrmacht division and at most a single Hermann Göring regiment. He failed to sense how badly the enemy had been hurt by Truscott, how strong the I Parachute Corps remained, or how the German high command’s recommendation to Hitler of a partial withdrawal by both armies to the Caesar Line—a recommendation quickly known to Allied intelligence—offered a chance to whack Kesselring while he was on his heels. Clark also failed to recognize that with VI Corps forty miles ahead of Leese’s plodding Eighth Army, the open terrain and ragged defenses up Highway 6 offered an expeditious path to Rome. And he failed to realize, as a U.S. Army study concluded, that he would have “been admirably situated to outflank the rest of the Fourteenth Army and to cut off the Tenth Army”—a conclusion also reached by General Wilhelm Schmalz, the Hermann Göring commander.

Juin warned Clark of “a terrible congestion of itineraries” as Eighth Army, II Corps, VI Corps, and the FEC converged on the Liri Valley and its northern extensions. Yet even his admirers suspected that one itinerary counted above all others: that of Marcus Aurelius Clarkus. His habitual antipathy toward the British surely was aggravated by the lackluster performance of the two beachhead divisions appended to Truscott’s corps. “There is no attack left in them,” Clark complained. But his actions went beyond battlefield frustration and petty xenophobia. He “appears never to have accepted Alexander as his real commander,” wrote W.G.F. Jackson, an
author of the official British history. Later, Clark claimed he had warned Alexander that he would order Fifth Army to “fire on the Eighth Army” should Leese attempt to muscle in on Rome. Shocking, if true; General Alex disputed the story.

Alexander had remained in the dark for almost twenty-four hours after Truscott was told to change direction. Not until 11:15
A.M
. on Friday, May 26, did the Allied commander learn of Operations Instructions No. 24—fifteen minutes after the new attack had irrevocably begun, and forty-five minutes after Clark briefed reporters at Nettuno on his revised plan. As Clark had appointed Brann to break the news to Truscott, so he employed Gruenther to inform Alexander at Caserta. Strolling into Gruenther’s office with Lemnitzer, Alexander lingered long enough to learn that the left wing of his army group had marched off to its own drummer. In a message to Clark at 12:20
P.M
., Gruenther reported:

Gruenther assured him that Clark would “execute a vigorous plan with all the push in the world.” While Gruenther believed that Alexander had “no mental reservations,” in fact his sentiments were mixed if well masked. Later he would confess to being “pretty upset”—Lemnitzer described him as “terribly disappointed”—even as he concluded that to impose his will would gain nothing. Although Churchill had recently insisted that “senior commanders should not ‘urge’ but ‘order,’” such was not Alexander’s way. His tolerance of impertinence, with Montgomery and then with Clark, simply encouraged more of what General Jackson labeled “prima donna” behavior.

The contretemps remained hidden from the American public until Italy had become a backwater theater of little interest. When Sevareid wrote that “there is a question whether the two aims”—capturing Rome quickly and annihilating Germans—“are compatible or mutually exclusive,” Fifth Army censors scotched the line. Clark also remained niggardly in sharing public credit for his army’s exploits; Marshall himself noted on May 26 that “this hurts Clark in this country.” After Gruenther urged that Truscott’s central role be publicly revealed, Clark told his diary, “I do not feel that his exploits have been sufficiently outstanding yet.”

“I never violated his orders,” Clark said of Alexander a quarter century after the war. “If he had wanted to do it differently he could have issued the order. To censure me for thinking only of the glory of capturing Rome is sheer nonsense.” Perhaps so, although Alexander later claimed Clark had assured him that fierce enemy resistance led to the turn away from Valmontone—an exaggeration, at best.

Pride and solipsism had got the best of a good soldier. Perhaps Livy’s observation of the Punic Wars still obtained: that the “power to command and readiness to obey are rare associates.” But as Churchill wrote Alexander on May 28, “Glory of this battle, already great, will be measured not by the capture of Rome or the juncture with the beachhead, but by the number of German divisions cut off…. It is the cop that counts.”

It was no small irony that even Clark’s rivals wished him well for the sake of a greater good. “He is terrified that we might get to Rome first, which is the last thing we now want to do,” wrote Leese, whose casualties in
DIADEM
were approaching fourteen thousand. “I only hope he can do it. It will save us a lot of trouble and lives.”

The old gods deplored hubris, and they now seemed determined to punish Clark’s army for his.

Beneath brilliant vernal sunshine on May 26, the right prong of the VI Corps attack—much reduced in combat heft—clattered on toward Valmontone. Led by three battalions under Hamilton Howze, who carried a red-leather copy of Clausewitz’s
Principles of War
as “something to cling to,” the column enjoyed a brief triumph. “There’s infantry coming in through the wheat in our direction,” a tank battalion commander radioed Howze. “Are they friendly infantry?”

“Hell, no!” Howze bellowed. “Shoot them up!” He dashed forward by jeep in time to see Sherman broadsides and machine-gun fire rip apart Hermann Göring grenadiers on a hillside three hundred yards away. Like drowning men the Germans thrashed and flailed in the shot-torn wheat until the field grew still.

The day soon darkened. Behind Howze, five confused P-40 Warhawks heeled over in a bombing and strafing run against the 3rd Division, which they mistook for retreating Germans. More than one hundred men were killed or wounded. Other planes bombed Cori, also in friendly hands. So many fratricidal air attacks occurred, despite copious yellow smoke intended to demarcate U.S. Army positions, that engineers were ordered to paint huge American flags on occupied rooftops along the front. What the pilots missed, gunners seemed to find. In Howze’s armored infantry battalion, 160 green replacements had just plodded forward when U.S. 155mm
rounds scourged the ranks for ten minutes with “ruinous effect.” Terrified survivors leaked to the rear. When the shelling finally ceased, the battalion commander was dead and his unit had been chopped to half strength.

The Germans had their own troubles. “All daytime movement is paralyzed and the use of large repair crews has become impossible,” Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army war diary complained on May 26. The Hermann Göring Division, straggling south on three roads from Livorno under incessant attack, began arriving at Valmontone with only eleven of eighty Mk IV panzers and half the division artillery intact.

Somehow it was enough. Counterattacks against Howze’s left flank, and enemy infiltration on Saturday night, May 27, prevented the 3rd Division from moving beyond Artena, a medieval village on a ridge three miles south of Valmontone. Howze watched trucks heaped with dead American soldiers jounce back toward Cisterna. A battalion in the 15th Infantry also reported two hundred men down with ptomaine poisoning from tainted C rations, further attenuating a force simply too weak to break through the makeshift German defense.

Reluctantly, Clark agreed to halt the drive toward Valmontone until II Corps could reinforce the attack. He would claim that American artillery had severed Highway 6, but that was wishful thinking: enemy traffic swept up and down the road all night, harried but undissuaded. Outside Artena, now thick with GIs licking their wounds, the BBC’s Vaughan-Thomas watched a young mother run through a vineyard, clutching an infant. “You mustn’t bring the war with you,” she cried. “You must take your war away.”

It was much too late for that, although the worst of the war had shifted westward where Truscott, as ordered, opened his new attack with a barrage by 228 guns at 10:30
A.M
. on May 26. Half an hour later, the 45th, 34th, and 1st Armored Divisions surged forward, elbow to elbow to elbow. Infantry regiments covered a bit more than a mile by dusk, shuffling through the thigh-high grain past German graves with
“Unbek. Soldat”
—“Unknown Soldier”—scratched on the rude crosses. But Harmon lost eighteen tanks before pulling back to refit; by Saturday night, the attack remained two miles short of Campoleone Station, where VI Corps troops had fought and died in January. On Sunday at six
P.M
., the 34th Division commander, Major General Ryder, reported to Truscott in his Kansas drawl, “This thing is a little sticky up here.”

Every yard proved costly. The I Parachute Corps improvised brilliantly, aided by poor tank country that bedeviled Harmon on the flanks of the Colli Laziali. Ravines and creekbeds ran perpendicular to Truscott’s axis of advance, providing natural barriers. German gunners fired down the washes into the American flanks, and dense olive groves gave close cover to snipers
with the German bazookas called Panzerfausts. The Caesar Line, though rudimentary, boasted six-foot fire trenches, mortars, machine guns, and extravagant snarls of barbed wire. After months of wet feet and little exercise, U.S. riflemen now suffered such severe blisters that “blood could be seen seeping from some men’s shoe seams,” one soldier reported.

Before dawn on Monday, May 29, Truscott pushed Harmon’s division up the Albano road with gunfire support from a French cruiser in the Tyrrhenian shallows. By midafternoon the tanks had bypassed German strongpoints and far outrun the infantry, exposing tanker and foot soldier alike to murderous fire from the rear and both flanks. “An 88-mm round blew up the Sherman in front of us and we could hear the screaming inside,” a tank sergeant later recalled. “It was terrible to listen to men being burned to death and not being able to help.” For negligible gains Harmon’s losses would grow to sixty tanks. The 45th Division took such heavy casualties that a lieutenant commanded a battalion until he, too, was killed.