The Day of Battle (44 page)

The second escape evoked unhappy memories of the Axis getaway from Messina a month earlier. Hitler on September 12 had ordered the evacuation of German forces on Corsica, including thousands who had crossed to the island from nearby Sardinia. As French troops stormed ashore at one end of Corsica, German soldiers decamped from the other end, crossing sixty miles of deep water to northern Italy in transport planes and a cockleshell fleet of ferries. Mostly unmolested by Allied naval or air forces, which pleaded a preoccupation with Salerno, more then thirty thousand enemy troops with their arms and vehicles reached safety by early October. Given the absence of Axis shore batteries or other defenses, the evacuation was “even more astonishing” than Messina had been, as the official U.S. Navy history later conceded. Surely it was every bit as disheartening.

The third escape was the most flamboyant. Since his arrest in late July, Benito Mussolini had been shuttled from cell to whitewashed cell in the islands off Italy’s west coast, spending his days—including his sixtieth birthday—reading Ricciotti’s
Life of Jesus
and underscoring the passages on betrayal and martyrdom. Hitler’s search for his erstwhile ally included consultation with various occultists and astrologers, among them a certain “Master of the Sidereal Pendulum,” as well as more conventional intelligence clairvoyants. In late August, the Duce was moved to the Hotel Albergo-Rifugio, a vacated ski resort atop the Gran Sasso peaks in the Apennines, accessible only by funicular and guarded by 250 carabinieri. To his daily regimen the prisoner added card games, strolls across the bleak heath, and endless carping about his ulcer. Gray stubble sprouted from his unshaved pate. When Mussolini vowed never to be taken alive, jailers removed all sharp objects, including his razor. “To redeem oneself,” he told his diary, “one must suffer.”

Soon enough his whereabouts leaked. Hitler entrusted the Duce’s rescue to Captain Otto Skorzeny, a six-foot, three-inch Viennese commando whose badly scarred visage attested to the fourteen duels he had supposedly fought as a student. At one
P.M
. on September 12—just as conditions at Salerno turned grievous—Skorzeny packed 108 men into gliders and took off for the Gran Sasso, carving a hole in the canvas floor of his craft through which to watch for navigational landmarks. Mussolini was sitting
at his open bedroom window, arms folded in his iconic pose, when gliders began skittering across the cobbled ground directly outside. Skorzeny bolted up a staircase three steps at a time, flung open the door to room 201, and announced, “Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free.” Off they went, wedged into a tiny Storch airplane and saluted by the carabinieri guards. After a giddy reunion with Hitler, Mussolini was installed in an Alpine town as the puppet head of a puppet regime called the Italian Social Republic. Even the Germans, rarely celebrated for ironic sensibilities, recognized the pathos. “The Führer now realizes that Italy never was a power, is no power today, and won’t be a power in the future,” Joseph Goebbels told his diary.

Whatever Mussolini’s shortcomings as a world-historical figure, he had kept the Nazi reaper at bay by refusing to allow the deportation of Jews. That moratorium had now ended. On September 16 the first consignment of two dozen Jews was shipped from a town in northern Italy to Auschwitz. Among them was a six-year-old child, who was gassed upon arrival.

The liberation of Naples grew sanguinary again at 2:10
P.M
. on Thursday, October 7, when the first German time bomb exploded in the southwest corner of the main post office on Via Monteoliveto. “The first two floors were blown completely away,” a witness reported. “Chunks of steel and marble were thrown as far as 100 yards.” The blast ripped apart an Army work detail and Neapolitans begging for food along a mess line. A soldier, Robert H. Welker, described the carnage in a letter home:

The blast killed and wounded seventy people, half of them soldiers. Rescuers shimmied into the post office basement to dig for survivors, while medical details shoveled up heads and limbs. Welker’s first sergeant called the unit roll that night, reading out names by flashlight. “I shout a word, and live,” Welker wrote. “Another cannot give the word, and is accounted dead…. Here, now, was mortal danger for us all.”

Three days later, on Sunday morning, Clark, Ridgway, and several thousand troops were attending a mass of thanksgiving in the Duomo beneath the vivid frescoes of Paradise when another muffled roar sent them hurrying to a nearby barracks. That blast, in the Corso Orientale, killed twenty-three combat engineers who had fought with Darby’s Rangers at Chiunzi
Pass. The two generals helped extricate broken bodies—“sacks of burlap,” in one paratrooper’s description—as well as survivors. “Nice work, boys, thanks,” said a soldier who was pulled from the rubble and hoisted to his feet before falling over, dead. “It makes us all the more determined to crush them completely,” Clark wrote Renie that evening. A bomb squad “delousing” a different wing in the Prince of Piedmont Barracks later found nearly a ton of explosives in stacked boxes with a ticking German fuse set to detonate at seven
A.M
. on Tuesday, October 19.

Bombs would continue to explode for three weeks. Norman Lewis, a British intelligence officer in Fifth Army, described one demolished apartment building along Via Nazario Sauro in which survivors stood “as motionless as statues, and all coated in thick white dust…. A woman stood like Lot’s wife turned to salt.” Others, in fetal curls, reminded Lewis of “bodies overcome by the ash at Pompeii.” Frantic sappers ultimately searched hundreds of buildings, disarming explosives in seventeen of them. An official “list of suspicious noises” grew to 150 entries. Maledictions on the German fiend grew proportionately fervent, although rarely was it mentioned that Allied planes were dropping thousands of bombs with delay fuses.

Fears that more hidden bombs would be triggered when electricity again surged through the repaired power grid led to a mass evacuation of western Naples in late October. Lewis watched “men carrying their old parents on their backs” and wounded soldiers being wheeled from hospitals. Any loud noise sent women and children stampeding in panic, “leaving trails of urine.” Another British officer, Malcolm Muggeridge, described the evacuees as “a vast concourse gathered on the hills around the city, like a vision of the Last Day, when all the dead arise.” The lights winked on without incident, and the citizenry shambled home.

Neapolitan life after liberation remained brutish for weeks. “There are 57 varieties of grief, but only about 7 of that number that some flour would not cure,” an American officer told his superiors. “These people are hungry.” All the tropical fish in the municipal aquarium were devoured, and the city’s cat population was said to have thinned dramatically. Brackish watering holes and even broken sewer mains drew thousands of parched residents “with buckets, bottles, barrels, cauldrons, [and] coffee pots,” George Biddle noted. Army engineers soon set up two dozen faucets but soldiers with bayonets were needed to quell the rioting.

Twenty-six thousand tons of wheat would be sent from North Africa and the Middle East, but even famine relief had to compete with war matériel for scarce shipping space. The port’s ruin complicated the task, and a third of the food in the initial shipments was stolen. Prices spiraled,
sometimes quadrupling overnight. A spectacular black market flourished. Frank Gervasi catalogued the apparently limitless cupboard of luxury goods available even as Neapolitans grew gaunt and the first cases of typhus appeared in October: “silver fox capes in furriers’ windows…ladies’ hats, shoes, gloves…Venetian lace…perfume by weight.” Citizens joked bitterly that “when the Germans were here we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come we eat once a week.”

Reconstruction had begun on Neapolitan roads and railways on October 2, and an engineer team entered the harbor from the sea at noon on the same day to take soundings. Bulldozers, minesweepers, and salvage ships soon resembled “an army of ants eating their way into the wreckage,” in one admiral’s description. Divers pumped compressed air into sunken wrecks to create buoyancy and tugs then dragged the hulks from the harbor with huge slings. Dynamite periodically scared off the Italian workforce, and only three berths were opened in the first weeks; but within three months Naples would claim more tonnage handled than New York harbor. Potable water began flowing on October 13; Italian submarines provided power for pumping stations, hospitals, and flour mills, and the sewers would be fixed by mid-December.

As thousands of Allied soldiers poured into Naples, street life rekindled in one of the world’s most flamboyant cities. Garbagemen sang Rossini and hunchbacks sold lottery tickets, permitting each buyer a stroke of the hump for luck. A few restaurants reopened, though the veal Milanese often proved to be horsemeat and, as Norman Lewis observed, Italian patrons sat bundled in coats “made from our stolen blankets.” Thievery, beggary, and harlotry flourished in a city that was desperately hungry. “It wasn’t safe to go to town without a gun,” a paratrooper recalled, and GIs joked that if you dropped even your voice an Italian pauper would pick it up. Thousands of Italian women turned to prostitution to avoid starvation. Little boys pimped for streetwalkers around the Piazza Garibaldi; troops who paid with Monopoly money, claiming it was occupation scrip, found the joke repaid with a strain of Neapolitan gonorrhea that proved resistant to sulfa. An airman told his diary on October 6: “‘Fik’ can be had for chocolate.”

Some soldiers behaved badly. Troops quartered in the zoological laboratories at the University of Naples smashed specimen cases, rifled the mineral collection, and used rare seashells as candle holders. GIs drove about in jeeps adorned with “stuffed toucans, parrots, eagles, and even ostriches” from the collections; the custodian of the Palazzo Reale complained that Allied troops were “carrying away anything that pleases them.” Reuben Tucker, the commander of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, ordered a bottle of champagne in a restaurant—for seventy-three cents—and toasted the capture of
Naples. “He drained his glass and smashed it on the table,” a paratrooper reported. “The rest of us did likewise.” To the proprietor, Tucker said, “That’s the price you pay for collaborating with the Germans.”

They were in fine fettle. High spirits infected all ranks after the grim struggle at Salerno. They now owned a major port and three hundred miles of Italian boot. On the same day that Naples fell, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had captured the airdromes at Foggia, near the Adriatic, which would provide bases for the bombing of Austria, southern Germany, and the Danube basin.

Everywhere Allied forces were on the march. In the southwest Pacific, parallel thrusts in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands continued to pare away pieces of the Japanese empire; the first B-29 bombers were coming off U.S. assembly lines, doubling the range of existing planes and putting Japan’s home islands at risk. British and American bomber fleets from England were already pummeling German cities, though at a frightful cost in aircrews. Hamburg had been incinerated in July with an estimated forty thousand German deaths, eight hundred died in Berlin in late August, and massive raids would batter Mannheim, Frankfurt, Hanover, and other targets across the Fatherland. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army in late September took Smolensk and crossed the Dnieper River, recapturing nearly half the territory seized by Germany since the summer of 1941. In the east, Hitler had already lost a half million dead and and two million wounded. Goebbels told his diary, “We are still retreating and retreating.”

They were retreating in Italy, too. With Naples secure and the Allied vanguard approaching the Volturno River, Clark was keen to press the fight. “He always wants speed,” Major General John Lucas, who had replaced Dawley as the VI Corps commander, observed in his diary. Clark, he added, “has ants in his pants.”

Canadian soldiers proposed the slogan “Rome by Christmas,” but they were pessimists. “Alexander and I both believe we will have Rome by [the end of] October,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall on October 4. Alexander thought Florence might fall by December, and some zealous troops began studying German to prepare for occupation duty. Churchill posited that the enemy lacked “the strength to make a front”—Kesselring always looked weaker from Whitehall than from within artillery range—and the prime minister planned to visit the Eternal City before the month was out.

Even cautious Franklin Roosevelt, who had begun pushing for Allied forces to reach Berlin “as soon as the Russians,” was swept along on the optimistic tide. To Stalin he wrote, “It looks as if American and British armies should be in Rome in another few weeks.”

“Watch Where You Step and Have No Curiosity at All”

A
LL
blithe predictions of a promenade to Rome would be challenged soon enough, but first the Allied legions faced a formidable obstacle twenty miles north of Naples. Here, at the wide Volturno, Fifth Army would make its inaugural crossing in Europe of a contested river, with six divisions abreast opposed by four from Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army.

Lucian Truscott had kept most of his 3rd Division guns quiet for nearly a week to conceal his strength, but at one
A.M
. on Wednesday, October 13, gunners flipped back their camouflage nets and let fly a barrage that stamped and howled across the dells. Artillery rippled like chain lightning down the Volturno Valley, shaming the full moon that silvered the river. Flames soon guttered from the German-held hills and farmhouses north of the river. More guns barked downstream from the three British divisions joining the assault, and upstream where two other American divisions on Truscott’s right—the 34th and 45th—anchored a forty-mile front.

From the third-floor window of an abandoned hilltop monastery, Truscott’s gray eyes searched the river below. German sentries had shouted taunts in English from the far bank—“Sleep, swine. We kill you all before breakfast”—but now the roar of gunfire swallowed all insults. Blue and white machine-gun tracers swept like heated needles from enemy bunkers hidden in the orchards and stone quarries, and mortar bursts blossomed across the muddy fields on the south bank. American gunners flailed back with braids of crimson tracers, and riflemen popped away at the winking muzzles to the north. Here the Volturno was two hundred feet wide, swift but fordable, and Truscott’s sector stretched laterally for seven miles in the center of the Allied line.