The Day of Battle (98 page)

In the five months since leaving hundreds of his soldiers to rot in the Rapido bottoms, Walker had struggled to keep his equilibrium. He had expected Clark to sack him, as so many other staff officers and subordinate commanders in the 36th had been sacked. “I am fed up with the whole damn mess,” he told Geoff Keyes, who replied, “The fact that you are commanding a National Guard division means you have two strikes against you from the start.” Yet here he was, still the Army’s oldest division commander in the field; still concealing the headaches, tachycardia, and arthritis that plagued him; still doing his duty. The division had been pulled from the Cassino line in late February for several months of refitting and mountain training near Avellino. “Walker seems a new man—full of enthusiasm and optimism,” Keyes wrote in late spring.

Now the new man was determined to find an alternative to bludgeoning an entrenched enemy who held the high ground. On the far right of the VI Corps line, two miles east of Velletri and Highway 7, patrols on Saturday had reported “an old shrubbery-covered cart path” up a steep ridge called Monte Artemisio. No enemy fieldworks or outposts could be seen. Walker scouted the area from a Piper Grasshopper on Sunday afternoon, then, late in the day, sat in a thicket below the heights, studying the terrain with the eye of the mining engineer he had once been.

“I didn’t sleep much last night,” Walker told his diary on Monday. “I worked out a plan in my head to take Velletri from the rear.” Artemisio formed the southern rim of an ancient volcanic crater; rising three thousand feet behind Velletri, it extended four miles from southwest to northeast as the lower lip of the Colli Laziali. Ancient fingers of lava reached into the flats, now alight with the green fire of grapevines and young wheat. To the left, where Highway 7 swung west around lakes Nemi and Albano, Velletri clung to the lower slope like a lichen to a rock. “It looks to me,” Walker wrote, “like this is the place to break through.”

Truscott disagreed, brushing aside the notion as impractical when Walker on Sunday night first suggested he had found “a soft spot.” But now in the malodorous dairy Walker restated his case with urgent conviction. Maps and his own reconnaissance showed that the faint ditch-and-washline up Artemisio’s face was in fact an old logging road through the chestnut brakes. Aerial photos also revealed a two-mile gap between the left flank of I Parachute Corps and the right flank of LXXVI Panzer Corps. If two regiments crossed the Velletri–Valmontone road in the dead of night and followed the trace uphill, they could seize the heights above Highway 7 to outflank the Caesar Line and occupy the Colli Laziali. The Vatican stood just fifteen miles from Lake Albano.

“You may have something here,” Truscott said. But a few thousand riflemen would not suffice, even on the high ground. Tanks and artillery would be needed to repel German counterattacks. Walker summoned his division engineer, Colonel Oran C. Stovall, a self-described “pick-and-shovel boy,” who for three days had also been poring over maps and skulking through the woods. Stovall believed the soil across the Colli Laziali was volcanic and readily sculpted: bulldozers could widen the old scar into a military road, allowing armor and heavy weapons to “shoot up over Monte Artemisio and down the other side.”

“I’ll call you back within the hour,” Truscott said, and rattled off to Conca in his jeep, his sore ribs momentarily forgotten. At eleven
A.M
., he phoned Walker. The VI Corps engineer adamantly opposed the scheme as harebrained, but Truscott was ready to gamble. He would also put an entire
engineer regiment under Walker’s command. Before ringing off he added in a low growl, “And you had better get through.”

Walker summoned his own lieutenants to the dairy at three
P.M
. and laid out his plan. The 141st Infantry Regiment would attack Velletri to fix the German garrison while the 142nd and 143rd crept up Artemisio, engineers on their heels, after moving by truck to the woods below the Velletri–Valmontone road. The supply line would stretch for eight miles through rugged terrain, but the division’s flinty experience in fighting at night in the high country on Monte Sammucro last December should serve it well.

“We are taking chances,” Walker told his diary as his commanders pelted back to their units, “but we should succeed in a big way.”

Across the Colli Laziali, Albert Kesselring was alive to his peril. In a visit to the front on Monday afternoon, the field marshal recognized that a gap persisted between the parachute and the panzer corps, and he ordered General Mackensen to suture it. Wilhelm Schmalz, the Hermann Göring commander, had also warned of “lively scouting” by American patrols east of Velletri. Schmalz sent his last reserve, an engineer platoon, into the wild uplands on Monte Artemisio. He repeatedly asked Mackensen’s headquarters to compel the 362nd Infantry Division—now holding the western rim of the Colli Laziali—to send a detachment to literally shake hands with Schmalz’s platoon, sealing the seam.

It never happened. The 362nd had lost half its fighting strength on May 23 alone, just as the Hermann Görings had lost two-thirds of their infantry in the past week; Fourteenth Army’s functioning panzer fleet consisted of thirty-three tanks. The army was bleeding to death. Disorder and misapprehension carried the day: Mackensen, inattentive and resentful of Kesselring’s meddling, believed that the porous boundary between the corps had been fused. Even if a few rifle companies slipped across Artemisio, surely no tank could scale that volcanic shoulder.

Cuckoos sang in the night woods. Just enough pale light seeped from the new moon for shadows to spread beneath the chestnuts. “Douse that cigarette,” a voice snarled, “or I’ll blow your head off.” The offending glow proved to be the luminous face of a soldier’s wristwatch.

For four hours on Tuesday evening, the assault regiments gathered in the forest, stacking bedrolls, filling canteens, fixing bayonets. Congested roads had delayed the truck convoys as one battalion after another slipped from the line along the Via Appia for the sixteen-mile loop back through Cisterna before swinging northeast past Cori to dismount east of Velletri. “I may not be able to write very often in the near future. Don’t think anything of it, for it’s just routine,” a private in the 142nd Infantry scribbled in a note to his
mother. “No news here, just the same old grind.” Blued by starlight, sergeants padded through their platoons, vowing to court-martial any man who fired a shot without orders. Colonel George E. Lynch, the 142nd commander, confessed to feeling “breathless anticipation.”

At eleven
P.M
., an hour late, the great column surged forward. A dog barked, another howled; a jackass brayed in the night. “We expected to meet the enemy in every shadow,” a soldier later wrote. By 1:30
A.M
. on Wednesday, May 31, scouts had scurried across the Valmontone road, darting past the wall tombs of a local cemetery and through grapevines that twined up leaning poles to form leafy cones. Artemisio loomed like a shadow cast against the sky, black and silent but for the cuckoos. Far to the left, distant machine-gun fire—“like corn popping in a deep kettle,” Sevareid wrote—signaled the 141st Infantry’s diversionary attack against Velletri. The soldiers were climbing now, up the thin, steep scratch of the logging trace, each man chuffing so that the column seemed to suspire like a dark, winded serpent.

At three
A.M
. the drone of a plane drew antiaircraft fire near Velletri. Then chandelier flares blossomed, drenching the mountain in silver light. The men fell flat as one, lying motionless for ten minutes, twenty. The flares winked out and they scrambled to their feet. The climb resumed.

The first gray wash of dawn, at 4:15, soon leached out the stars, but haze swaddled the slope to keep the men concealed. At 6:35, three German artillery observers were captured unawares, including one found bathing in a creek. Through the morning American soldiers spread across the ridgeline, shooing away Schmalz’s engineer platoon with a spatter of rifle fire. The midday sun burned off the haze, revealing a panorama: Valmontone and Highway 6 seven miles to the east; Anzio, Nettuno, and the glittering sea twenty miles to the southwest; and directly below, Velletri and Highway 7. Tiny figures in field gray strolled about in the German rear, unaware that six thousand American soldiers were behind them.

Behind the column came the bulldozers, “roaring and rearing” along a strip of white engineering tape that demarcated the route, three dozers at first, and eventually fifteen, each adding another foot of width to the graded road. Blue sparks sprayed from the blades as they shoved rocks and saplings from the trail, slashing hairpins wide enough for a tank to turn without throwing a track. “Don’t spare the horses,” a captain told the lead dozer operator, Corporal John Bob Parks. Sappers blew over trees too big to bulldoze, or felled them with two-man timber saws. On the steepest grades, small dozers were hauled up with snatch block and cable, then slashed their way down while soldiers with shovels manicured the verges. “Up, up, up all the time,” Parks later recalled, with the captain reminding
him “again and again that I was holding up the whole damned Fifth Army…. I lost track of time and everything else except that damn white tracing tape that was always in front of me.”

Through the night and the following day they toiled, scraping and grading, until a one-way boulevard led to Artemisio’s crest. Behind them came the tanks, self-propelled guns, and artillery observers with optics and field phones, chortling at the vista from the high ground that was finally theirs. The 143rd Infantry reported so many observers flocking to the heights that they resembled “crows on a telephone line.”

Kesselring learned that the enemy was in his rear when a German artillery officer on Artemisio reported GIs storming his command post. The field marshal had already lambasted Mackensen for neglecting to seal the corps boundary across the mountain. Yet the fog of war persisted even as the haze lifted. Mackensen discounted his jeopardy after a dispatch from the front at eleven
A.M
. on May 31 claimed that only eighty enemy soldiers had infiltrated; a subsequent report asserted they had been “mopped up completely.” Reports to the contrary simply thickened the fog. The Fourteenth Army battle log on May 31 recorded that “the enemy managed to infiltrate two battalions,” but Mackensen continued to estimate American strength on the mountain at no more than one and a half battalions.

Kesselring at nine
P.M
. on May 31 ordered Mackensen “at all costs” to extirpate the Allied salient on Artemisio, now five miles deep. Privately he feared the game was up: I Parachute Corps that same evening warned that the front was “ripe for collapse.” Desperate for reinforcements, Mackensen summoned a police battalion from Rome to plug the gap; equally desperate and ineffectual, Kesselring ordered a Luftwaffe unit arriving in Livorno to hie for the front. The men were mounted on bicycles.

Ambushes and precise artillery now began to tear apart German convoys lumbering down Highway 7 from Rome. Bazooka teams struck a tank column pushing out of Velletri; the German commander flew from his turret “like a cork out of a champagne bottle.” When enemy snipers in mottled camouflage signaled one another with cuckoo calls on Artemisio’s flanks, GIs raked the woods with blistering fire, shooting up birds and Germans alike. After a captain with a tommy gun killed a gargantuan enemy soldier, his men lay beside the corpse as if comparing themselves to a sleeping Gulliver. “I only came up to his arm pit and I was six-two,” one GI reported. “I measured him and removed his watch.” Canteens taken from the dead were found to be filled with cognac.

By dawn on June 1, Velletri was surrounded and American scouts stood on the highest peaks in the Colli Laziali, staring down on Lake Nemi and at
Castel Gandolfo, on the far shore of Lake Albano; through the haze on the northern horizon floated the domes and spires of Rome. Only eleven 36th Division soldiers had been killed.

Outside Velletri, Walker paced beneath a rail trestle in a “state of perturbation,” urging his men to smarten the pace. When a column of captured enemy soldiers shuffled past, he gave one his boot, then regretted the impulse. “Most unbecoming of a major general to kick a German prisoner,” he wrote.

Through Thursday afternoon, tanks and infantrymen bulled through Velletri’s rubble, battling diehards house to house and hand to hand. Those who tried to break the cordon by fleeing on foot or in trucks careering up Highway 7 drew sleeting fire that left the roadbed tiled with bodies. At dusk the final mutter of gunfire subsided, and the Allies owned another guttering town. Blood had risen in the gorge, and tankers drove across enemy corpses to hear the bones crack beneath their tracks. “It didn’t bother me,” a soldier wrote. As 250 dazed German prisoners emerged beneath white flags, Truscott drove up to find Walker again scrutinizing the landscape with his engineer’s squint. “You can go in now, General,” Walker said. “The town is yours.”

General Schmalz reported that all phone communication within the Hermann Göring Division had ceased. He could no longer find his subordinate command posts; the reconnaissance battalion had a fighting strength of eighteen men; and his panzer grenadier regiment no longer existed. The front, he added, was “torn wide open.”

A 36th Division artillery lieutenant offered his own assessment. “Getting little sleep these days,” he wrote in his diary. “Going fine, victory is a wonderful thing.”

Expulsion of the Barbarians

C
YPRESS
trees stood sentinel along the northbound roads, tapered green flames that seemed to bend beneath the weight of the Allied advance. Near Highway 6, a child kicked the corpse of a Wehrmacht officer until a young woman shoved him aside and yanked off the dead man’s boots. German caisson teams sprawled in the roadbed, butchered by Spitfires. “The horses had fallen in harness, with their heads high in the air, eyes opened and distended in terror,” wrote J. Glenn Gray. “There were many of them, in columns, and the strafing bullet wounds were hardly visible.” GIs scratched their initials on the gun carriages.