The Day of Battle (45 page)

Drawing on a cigarette with his hands cupped to hide the ember, he watched two regiments in a line of trees below the monastery make ready by moonlight. Soldiers cinched life vests scavenged in an Italian torpedo factory and coiled cotton guide ropes over their shoulders. Others stacked rafts borrowed from the Navy and crude, canvas-bottom boats hammered together from scrap lumber and truck tarpaulins.

Garish signal flares—gold, green, red—drifted above the German lines. “Unfortunately I’m beginning to realize the truth that Ike spake when he described his loneliness to me,” Truscott had written in a “beloved wife” letter to Sarah as the division approached the Volturno. “We are lonely.” Never more than now, while watching men whom he had perhaps ordered to their deaths. He also told her:

At 1:55
A.M
. the gun batteries began to mix white-phosphorus shells with the high explosives, training their tubes on the far bank. Silvery smoke soon boiled in a cloud three miles wide and five hundred feet high. With a shout and a clatter, the troops below hoisted their rafts and their homely boats. Surging across the fallow fields, they slid down the ten-foot embankment and splashed into the muddy Volturno.

It went well enough in the American sector, less well in the British. On the far left of the Allied line, three LCTs ferried a squadron of seventeen British tanks across the river’s mouth to the north shore. But mines and boggy ground kept them immobile. British infantrymen struggled with a wider, unfordable stretch of river, as well as with German defenders—the 15th Panzer Grenadier and Hermann Göring Divisions, old adversaries from Sicily and Salerno—who found good cover in vineyards and behind the levees. Tommies lashed lumber to empty fuel cans and paddled across, or fashioned life belts from buoyant flax sheaves. Two brigades from the 46th Division secured a bridgehead near the coast, though by Thursday morning it was still only six hundred yards deep. On the 3rd Division’s immediate left, ten assault boats from the British 56th Division were sunk midstream near Capua and not a single company made the far shore in what Truscott considered a botched, halfhearted effort. “Drowning wounded men were washed away by the current into the sea,” Alan Moorehead wrote. “Everywhere machine-gunning and sniping was going on through the reeds.”

With his left flank exposed and no American armor yet across, Truscott scrambled down to the flats at dawn. Milky smoke swirled like mist. GIs waded chest-deep through the water, holding their rifles overhead with one hand and clinging to a guide rope with the other. Worry etched Truscott’s weathered face. Five battalions occupied the far shore, and American spearheads had reached Monte Caruso, four miles beyond the Volturno. But without armor they were vulnerable to counterattacking panzers. “Hurry!” he urged. “Hurry!”

Hissing fragments from a German shellburst pocked the river. “Get those damn tank destroyers and tanks across,” Truscott ordered. A tank commander, puzzled by a sharp rapping on his hull, peered from the turret to see a two-star general wielding a shillelagh. “Goddamit, get up ahead
and fire at some targets of opportunity,” Truscott demanded. “Fire at anything shooting our men, but goddamit, do some good for yourselves.” To an officer who complained of bridging difficulties, he responded with a growl. “What do you mean it can’t be done? Have you tried it? Go out and do it.”

They did. Below an oxbow loop, engineers hacked at the steep bank with picks and shovels. At eleven
A.M
. the first Sherman forded the river, muddy water streaming from the fenders as it clanked toward Highway 87. Fourteen more crossed close behind. A light bridge opened to traffic at 3:30
P.M
.—eighty jeeps sped across in eight minutes—and heavier treadway bridges followed. Massed artillery discouraged German counterattackers; like a melting shadow, the enemy drew back. Clark shifted boundary lines to give one large bridge to the Tommies—the British in Fifth Army had only 3,500 engineers, compared with 15,000 for the Yanks—and soon the entire valley was in Allied hands. On the right flank, where the meandering river doubled back on itself and required some units to make three crossings, 34th Division soldiers asked whether every stream in Italy was named “Volturno,” or whether it was simply the longest body of water in Europe.

“Like the earthworm, I seem to bore into what’s in front and leave debris in the rear and am barely sensible of the passage of days and nights,” Truscott wrote Sarah as the bridgehead expanded on October 14. “Days of the week? I hardly know there is a distinction between them.” He added, “This business of killing Boche is an absorbing and all-consuming proposition.”

Inelegant and exhausting though it was, the Volturno crossing would serve. By moving more quickly than expected on a broad front, and by leaving the main roads to infiltrate around enemy strongpoints, the Anglo-Americans had advanced thirty-five miles past Naples. Hills loomed ahead, as every corporal could see, and beyond those hills loomed higher hills. “This is not the place for masterminding,” Eisenhower said with a shake of the head upon viewing the terrain. But beyond the higher hills, barely 130 road miles from the Volturno, lay Rome.

Italy would break their backs, their bones, and nearly their spirits. But first it would break their hearts, and that heartbreak began north of the Volturno, where the terrain steepened, the weather worsened, and the enemy stiffened. Allied casualties in Italy totaled eighteen thousand between September 3 and October 20—fifteen thousand in Fifth Army and three thousand in Eighth Army. Yet that was only a down payment on the campaign to come.

German demolitions had begun five miles from Salerno—“no bridge or culvert seems too small to escape their eye,” an Army observer
reported—and it soon became evident that Italy would be a battle of engineers: the speed of advance would be determined by bulldozers, if not by a nervous soldier on his hands and knees, prodding for mines with a bayonet. An AFHQ study estimated that one thousand bridges would be needed to reach the Po River in the north, a disheartening number given that for weeks the U.S. Army had only five prefabricated Bailey bridges in Italy. In the event, the Allies would erect three thousand spans in twenty months, with a combined length of fifty-five miles. Some were built and rebuilt, as autumn rains put the Italian rivers in spate. The fickle Volturno soon rose eighteen feet in ten hours, sweeping away every hard-won bridge but one. “The floods bring down quantities of debris, ranging from whole trees to bulls, the horns of which had a disastrous effect on the plywood sides of a pontoon,” Fifth Army engineers reported.

Ingenuity became the order of the day, every day. When German sappers blew up stone houses to block narrow village streets, American sappers bulldozed “new tracks across the rubble heaps, often at the level of the second stories,” Truscott noted. Engineers reportedly filled road craters with “broken bathtubs and statues and sinks and hairbrushes and fancy fedora hats.” Bridge builders fashioned a pile driver from the barrel of an Italian 240mm gun, and the Allies built rolling mills, cement works, foundries, nail works, and enough sawmills to cut nine thousand tons of Volturno lumber a month. They used the timber to corduroy muddy roads, as armies had for centuries.

Yet no engineer could corduroy the weather. “It got darker, colder, wetter,” a 45th Division soldier recalled. Autumn rains began on September 26, and soldiers soon realized why their Italian phrase books included
Piove in rovesci,
“It’s raining torrents.” Censorship rules forbade writing home about the weather—“One may write of mist,” a wag proposed, “but not of rain”—though nothing precluded bivouac grousing. “No conversation, genteel or otherwise, can be carried on without mentioning the weather,” a diarist in the 56th Evacuation Hospital noted in November. Campfires were banned after five
P.M
., so troops ate at four, bolting their supper before rain pooled in their mess kits, then went to bed at 7:30. Craps games lasted “until darkness obscures spots on the dice.” Rain soon grayed the soldiers, making them one with the mud in which they slept and fought until they seemed no more than clay with eyes.

As Allied planners had misjudged the harsh North African winter, so they underestimated—perhaps less pardonably—the even harsher Italian climate: Rome shares a latitude with Chicago. “The desert war had made men forget the mud of Flanders,” wrote the British general W.G.F. Jackson, but no veteran of Italy would ever forget Italian mud, which Bill Mauldin
insisted lacked “an honest color like ordinary mud.” A private from Michigan complained, “The trouble with this mud is that it’s too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Even in summer, the roads of southern Italy were barely adequate; now the British and Americans would be canalized on the only northbound hard-surface roads—Highways 6, 7, 16, and 17—that could carry the prodigious traffic of armies. Foul weather constrained maneuver, obviated the advantages of motorization, and undermined air superiority by halving the number of Allied bombing sorties. Churchill cursed the “savage versatility” of Italy’s climate, but GIs simply called it “German weather.”

Mines made it much worse. “All roads lead to Rome,” Alexander quipped, “but all the roads are mined.” So were footpaths, lovers’ lanes, alleys, goat trails, streambeds, shortcuts, and tracks, beaten and unbeaten. “I never had a moment that I didn’t worry about mines and booby traps,” a 7th Infantry officer said. Forty percent of Fifth Army battle casualties in early November came from mines. “Watch where you step,” Clark’s headquarters advised, “and have no curiosity at all.”

North of the Volturno, “you could follow our battalions by the bloodstained leggings, the scattered equipment, and the bits of bodies where men had been blown up,” the 168th Infantry reported. Big Teller mines could destroy a truck or cripple a tank, but German antipersonnel mines became particularly diabolical. “Castrators” or “nutcrackers” fired a bullet upward when an unwitting soldier stepped on the pressure plate. “Shoe” mines, built mostly of wood, proved nearly impossible to detect. Enemy sappers mined or booby-trapped doorknobs and desk drawers, grapevines and haystacks, apples on the tree and bodies on the ground, whether Italian or German, Tommy or Yank. At least two chaplains lost legs trying to bury the dead above the Volturno.

“A man’s foot is usually blown loose at the ankle, leaving the mangled foot dangling on shredded tendons,” an Army physician noted in his diary. “Additional puncture wounds of both legs and groin make the agony worse.” A combat medic later wrote, “Even though you’d give them a shot or two of morphine, they would still scream.” In a minefield, Bill Mauldin observed, “an old man thinks of his eyes and a young man grabs for his balls.” The Army bought 100,000 of the SCR-625 mine detector—dubbed a “manhole cover on a stick”—but they proved useless in the rain and befuddled by the iron ore and shell fragments common in Italian soil. The device also required its operator to stand upright, often under fire, while listening for the telltale hum that signified danger. A secret program to train canine detectors—“M dogs”—failed when half the mines in field tests remained unsniffed.

None of it—not the demolitions, nor the rain, nor the nasty Ms—would have thwarted the Allies’ upcountry march even temporarily had the Germans adhered to their original plan of an expedient fighting withdrawal to fortifications in the northern Apennines. Then perhaps the prime minister could have enjoyed autumn Chianti in Rome, and Alexander might indeed have captured Florence by year’s end.

Instead, as the Allies splashed across the Volturno, an intense debate raged in the German high command over whether to change strategies. Rommel, who still commanded nine divisions in northern Italy, had spent much of September recuperating from an appendectomy. “Domineering, obstinate, and defeatist,” as one admirer described him, he was increasingly disaffected with his military superiors in Berlin and adamant that German forces must retreat to a line below the Po River valley, or risk being out-flanked and encircled. He chalked that line in blue on his headquarters map.

Kesselring, commanding eight divisions in the south, argued otherwise. Italy remained a comparatively minor theater: 3 million Germans fought in 163 divisions on the Eastern Front, and 34 divisions occupied France and the Low Countries. But Italy was the one active battleground where the inexorable German retreat might be arrested. Abandoning Rome would be a psychological blow, Kesselring insisted. More important, in Allied possession the airfields around the capital would complement those already captured at Foggia, making Austrian aircraft factories, Romanian oil fields, and the Danube basin even more vulnerable to enemy bombers.

Smiling Albert had his own map, and his own chalked lines. The Italian Peninsula was narrowest south of Rome, just eighty-five miles from sea to sea. Across this neck of country so wild it was home to wolves and bears, the Germans could build three progressively stout fortified lines, to be named Barbara, Bernhardt, and Gustav. “The object is to create an impregnable system of positions in depth, and so to save German blood,” Kesselring said. “Leaders of all ranks must never forget this high moral responsibility.” The Gustav Line, anchored on the vertical massif at Monte Cassino, could become the most formidable defensive position in Europe, strong enough that “the British and Americans would break their teeth on it.”