The Day of Battle (46 page)

Even as Hitler vacillated he began shifting forces south, from northern Italy and elsewhere, in part to forestall an Allied leap into the Balkans. It was said that he was dictating the order appointing Rommel supreme commander in Italy when he changed his mind in favor of Kesselring. “Military leadership without optimism is not possible,” the Führer later explained, adding, “Rommel is an extraordinarily brave and able commander. I don’t regard him as a stayer.”

Rommel shrugged. “I’ll take it as it comes,” he wrote his wife, Lucie, on October 26. Hitler in early November signed a formal order demanding “the end of withdrawals,” thereby condemning a million men to the agonies of Cassino, Ortona, the Rapido River, and Anzio. Rommel would be sent west to oversee the Atlantic Wall coastal defenses, including those in Normandy, where he had won military glory in 1940. “The war is as good as lost,” he told one comrade, “and hard times lie ahead.”

Thanks to Ultra, the stiffening of German strategy had become all too evident to the Allied high command. Decrypted radio intercepts revealed both Hitler’s growing reluctance to yield ground and the construction south of Rome of three fortified lines, which collectively would be known as the Winter Line. The Germans appeared ready to wage a protracted war of attrition, with a view to exhausting the Allies.

The optimism of early October vanished, supplanted by extravagant despair. After reviewing the latest intelligence, Alexander cabled London on October 21: “We are committed to a long and costly advance to Rome, a ‘slogging match.’” The return of seven Allied divisions to Britain for
OVERLORD
left, for the moment, only eleven facing a German force that had swelled to twenty-three divisions and could grow “to the order of sixty.” The Allied buildup had dwindled, too: where thirteen hundred vehicles had been arriving in Italy each day, now only two thousand came per week. The terrain was abominable, the weather filthy. (Twenty inches of rain would fall in the final three months of 1943.) Fifth Army was advancing less than a mile a day and had yet to hit the main German line. On the Adriatic, Eighth Army crept forward on a thirty-five-mile front into what Alexander called a “cul-de-sac of rather unimportant country.”

In supposing that Hitler would abandon southern Italy after losing Naples, the Allies had once again underestimated German resolve—or capriciousness—in the Mediterranean. Eisenhower saw no alternative to bulling ahead. “It is essential for us to retain the initiative,” he cabled the Combined Chiefs on October 25. Referring to the enemy, he added: “If we can keep him on his heels until early spring, then the more divisions he uses in a counteroffensive against us, the better it will be for
OVERLORD
.”

Nor did the high command in Washington and London see a need to revise the rather vague strategic objectives in Italy: to engage as many German troops as possible and, although this goal remained more tacit than explicit, to liberate Rome. Churchill tried to sugar the pill by assuring Roosevelt on October 26, “The fact that the enemy have diverted such powerful forces to this theater vindicates our strategy.”

The prospect of waging a bitter mountain campaign rather than wintering in lovely Rome pleased no one, although the official British history
later doubted “whether anyone in high places fully understood what a winter campaign in Italy implied.” Alexander translated the strategic objectives into a line on the map, roughly fifty miles above Rome and stretching northeast across the peninsula to the Adriatic, which he urged Clark and Montgomery to reach as soon as possible.

Alexander’s despondency was aggravated by a bout of jaundice, and his ecru complexion compromised efforts to put on a determined public face. “We’ll just have to punch, punch, punch, and keep Jerry on the run until we reach Rome,” he told reporters. Privately, he saw “no reason why we should ever get to Rome.”

Montgomery at least sensed what the Anglo-American legions were in for. He believed that Allied strategists needed to rediscover what W.G.F. Jackson called “ancient truths” about seasonal fighting in Europe. “I do not think we can conduct a winter campaign in this country,” Montgomery wrote on October 31. “If I remember, Caesar used to go into winter quarters—a very sound thing to do!”

The Mountainous Hinterland

L
IEUTENANT
Colonel Jack Toffey surely would have found sense in Montgomery’s prescription had it reached his ear. “The road to Rome is a long one,” Toffey wrote, “and in many respects like the road to hell—inclusive of the good intentions.” Yet there would be no winter quarters, no sheltered wait for the roads to dry and the skies to clear, no Caesarian pause for a better day. Toffey commanded only one of a hundred Allied infantry battalions scattered from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic, but he and his men were of a piece with the larger army group. What they endured, many endured. What they suffered, many suffered. As Toffey was emblematic of the young commanders who carried forward the battle experience of Morocco, Tunisia, and now Sicily, so his unit—the 2nd Battalion of the 15th Infantry Regiment, in Truscott’s 3rd Division—typified others trying to chivvy the Germans out of the interlocking fortifications of the Winter Line.

Under a different star, Toffey would have been aboard a troopship bound for Britain with the rest of the 9th Division, with which he had served in Africa and Sicily. Instead, he was among two thousand veterans transferred to the 3rd Division for immediate duty in Italy. Though he still dreamed of the day when he would “never get disheveled again,” he was pleased at the chance to serve once more under Truscott, whom he knew from Morocco, and proud to join both the 3rd Division—“the best in the
West,” he called it—and the 15th Infantry, whose antebellum alumni included George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower.

“Life is good,” he wrote his wife, Helen, in Columbus. Having reached Italy during the final hours at Salerno, he felt that he was “really soldiering again.” During the Volturno crossing “he was inexhaustible,” reported George Biddle, who joined Toffey’s men for a month of sketching and watercoloring. “He seemed to carry the whole battalion on his shoulders.” Biddle admired Toffey’s “keen, sharp mind and tough, salty American humor.” The young colonel, who possessed “the bones and conformation of a steeple-chaser rather than a racehorse,” was ubiquitous: urging his men forward, directing artillery fire, interrogating prisoners, evacuating the wounded and the dead.

For the last two weeks of October, they pushed north by northwest in Alexander’s “slogging match,” following a rugged corridor between the upper Volturno and Highway 6, known ever more sardonically as Victory Road. American maps often labeled the terrain here simply “mountainous hinterland.” Through stone pines and flame-shaped cypresses they trudged, past farm cottages with chimneys poking like snorkels above the red tile roofs. Peasants keened over their dead, or rummaged through their ruined crofts to salvage a copper pot or a rag doll. “Nothing I can do for him,” a medic told Toffey, pointing to a prostrate old man. “He is as dead as he will ever be.” German corpses, most from the 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division, flattened the weeds; some had been carbonized by artillery fire, others were simply carrion. GIs pocketed their
Gott mit Uns
buckles and moved on.

Across the cobblestones of Liberi and Roccaromana and Pietravairano they plodded, past the townfolk dressed in mourning and the
bambini
diapered in newspapers. Mines detonated, gunfights erupted, and all too often Toffey stood over a dying boy, whispering, “The stretchers are coming up, kid. Hang on.” Turning to a squad leader during one brawl he said, “I think we have the machine gun nest surrounded up there among the rocks…. Go get ’em—and don’t bring ’em back.”

At night they put the battalion command post in a fire-blackened cave or a farmhouse loft, sleeping on cold ground or corn shucks. Biddle sketched the tableau: battle maps spread across a camp table; flickering candle stubs flinging monstrous shadows on the whitewashed walls; empty cans of Spam or C ration peas tossed in a corner; a demijohn of rough red wine passed from hand to filthy hand. Cooks whipped up powdered eggs with powdered milk and powdered coffee; soldiers insisted that the Army would next issue powdered water. Sometimes the radio picked up Axis Sally, who closed her broadcasts by purring, “Easy, boys, there’s danger
ahead.” Toffey slept with a field phone near his head, alert to calls for Paul Blue Six, his sign.

For a few weeks, Biddle—a Harvard-educated, World War I veteran whose brother was Roosevelt’s attorney general—gave Toffey someone to talk to, a rare prize for a commander. Toffey told of being wounded in Tunisia, and of how so many recuperating officers had sought rear-echelon duties to avoid a return to combat. “If I had to do it again,” he mused, “I wonder if I wouldn’t look for a swivel chair?” He wondered aloud how to develop “the killing instincts…. Our boys aren’t professionals, and you have to condition them to enjoy killing.” He talked to Helen, too, in his letters, about how his knee grew “stiff and tired in the wet weather and rough country,” and about how he “would like a rest, a bath, a home and my family.” He fantasized about a stateside assignment. “At this point, Bragg would look good, and Dix or Lewis positively luxurious,” he told her, ticking off Army posts.

He did not mention the close calls, as when a German shell detonated in a chestnut tree on October 21, wounding two staff officers ten yards from where he was reading an August issue of
Time.
Nor did he tell her of the shells that a day later chased him from a grassy ledge on Monte della Costa, where he had been puffing his pipe and writing her a letter. Nor of the deaths of two other battalion commanders in the 15th Infantry, including one crushed in his foxhole by the engine of a downed German fighter.

Then another wet, gray dawn arrived and they edged forward, and upward. One account likened the soldier’s day in Italy to “climbing a ladder with an opponent stamping on his hands at every rung.” They learned to shun skylines and to dull the glint of helmet rims and mess kits with mud. They listened for the mewing of cats, a favorite German signal. Barbasol shave cream was a good balm for sore feet, but nothing could compensate for the lack of overcoats, wool underwear, and shelter halves, which remained in barracks bags stranded in Palermo. Every man’s shoulders instinctively hunched at the rush of artillery, but still they debated with theological intensity whether it was true that a man never heard the shell that hit him.

Easy, boys, there’s danger ahead.
On occasion Paul Blue Six lost his temper, as in late October when he berated staff officers for incaution. “I’m goddam sick and tired of seeing these picnic gatherings in the open,” he barked. “I’m sick of telling you guys to wear your helmets and carry your arms.” On October 28 he asked Biddle to sketch a sergeant who had been shot dead on Monte Caievola. Pulling back a blanket, Toffey nodded at the dead man’s sunken face and said, “The people at home ought to see things like that.” When artillery raked the battalion again, he rang the regimental
headquarters. “This is Toffey. Get the meat wagon down here,” he said. “There are two more killed and one wounded.”

More often he was a sturdy, abiding presence, a steeplechaser. “Be alert and live,” he told his soldiers, echoing the motto printed in
Stars and Stripes.
He urged new replacement officers to “get to know your own men, every man in your platoon,” by name as well as by their strengths and weaknesses. “We need you, terribly,” he continued. “You’ll have less good personnel than you had at home. You’ll find that your company has lost its top sergeant and that the best platoon sergeant is dead. But we need you and we’ve got a job to do.” No officer was to sleep without checking perimeter security. Not a bandolier or canteen should be abandoned. “I wish you all luck,” he told them. “We’re glad to have you with us. Remember that if I can help you I’ll do it.”

Toffey’s battalion punched through the Barbara Line, which was hardly more than a chain of outposts, but the Bernhardt Line proved obdurate. Two companies failed to oust the enemy from Monte Cesima, looming nearly four thousand feet above Highway 6. Under Truscott’s orders, the entire battalion on November 4 looped through Presenzano to flank the mountain in a night climb through spectral chestnut groves. “We circle the meadows, keeping the shadow,” Biddle wrote. Up and up they climbed, “the lips parted in that rictus which you see on the faces of distance runners.” After ten hours they reached the stony crest to find the German observation post deserted. Toffey pointed among the ferns to a dead soldier with a bullet through his left temple. Here, he told Biddle, was another lost soul “to add to your collection.”

From the summit Toffey squinted at the northern glacis of mountains that would bedevil the Allies for the next six months: Lungo and Trocchio, Sammucro and Cassino. “Hell,” he said. “You can see all the way into Germany.” More than half the battalion had become casualties since arriving in Italy. After watching the men of his division emerge from the high country on November 5, Lucian Truscott simply piled up adjectives: “Haggard, dirty, bedraggled, long-haired, unshaven, clothing in tatters, worn out boots.”

“Just so many dead,” Biddle wrote. Below Monte Cesima, in the valley town of Mignano, he watched in the rain as gloved soldiers heaved the pallid corpses of American and German soldiers into a truck trailer, the living “wrestling with the dead” until a full measure filled the bed. He added:

Toffey finally finished a letter to Helen he had started a fortnight earlier. “It at least assures you,” he told her, “of my continued existence.”

The panorama from Monte Cesima revealed the formidable tactical challenge confronting Fifth Army. The only viable overland passage to Rome followed Highway 6 through the narrow Mignano Gap, six miles long and dominated by mountains on either flank. Several hills also sat in the gap proper, like stoppers in a bottleneck, soaring a thousand feet or so above the valley floor. North of these impedimenta, the gap emptied onto the broad plain of the Rapido River Valley, across which a final mountain barrier—dominated by Monte Cassino—guarded the entrance to the Liri Valley, boulevard to Rome.