The Day of Battle (57 page)

Some believed his departure overdue. “He has lately been rather going to seed here,” Harold Macmillan confided to his diary. After conferring with Eisenhower during his final visit to Italy, Lucas wrote, “Ike looked well but much older. The boyish look is gone and he has the guise of a man. I think he is. A job like his will either make or break anyone.”

He left believing he had accomplished what had been asked of him. North Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and a large patch of mainland Italy had been liberated. “Fascism had been given its death blow,” he wrote in his final assessment of the Italian campaign. “Elimination of Italy from the war had been accomplished.” Some two dozen German divisions were tied down in Italy alone, and many more in the Balkans and Greece. The Mediterranean had become an Allied pond: more than a thousand ships crossed the sea in December, three times as many as in June. Even Stalin had conceded that fighting in Italy seemed to be easing some pressure on the Eastern Front.

Vigor, authenticity, and integrity remained Eisenhower’s trademarks; he possessed a big brain and a big heart. He despised the enemy—hate had finally lodged in his bones—and cherished his polyglot alliance as the surest instrument of victory. From Algiers, he would take the template for an Allied headquarters and use it to build SHAEF—the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—and eventually NATO. He also would take with him sixty hard weeks of battle experience, in logistics, diplomacy, military governance, leadership, character, and mass slaughter.

He left with a nagging sense of loose ends, as well. “I am very disappointed to leave here before we could attempt one ambitious shot at
Rome,” he told Marshall. Though he was uneasy at Churchill’s advocacy of an amphibious landing near Rome, his prescience was imperfect. “Jerry is going to write off this southern front,” he told reporters, “and I don’t think he is going to defend it long.” He vowed, wrongly, that there would be no frontal attacks against entrenched defenders. But he did not shy from the hardest of the hard truths he had absorbed: “Sometimes it just gets down to the dirty job of killing until one side or the other cracks.”

Eisenhower’s arrival in Washington would remain secret, allowing him a cocoon of privacy for perhaps the last time in his life. At 1:30
A.M
. on January 2, after plucking the general’s stars from his cap, he climbed the servants’ stairs at the Wardman Park Hotel on Connecticut Avenue for his first reunion with Mamie in eighteen months. The White House sent a cooler of thick steaks and fifty Chesapeake oysters. Later he would visit John at West Point, and his mother in Kansas. “Why, it’s Dwight!” Ida Eisenhower exclaimed. “Nothing seems real any more.” To his family he appeared “heavier and definitely more authoritative,” in John’s words; when Mamie complained of his abrupt manner, he growled, “Hell, I’m going back to my theater where I can do what I want.” Twice he absentmindedly called his wife Kay, and when the moment came to leave she told him, “Don’t come back again till it’s over, Ike. I can’t stand losing you again.”

He would go on to greater things, becoming perhaps the largest figure on the war’s largest stage. But part of him would forever linger in the Mediterranean, where he had exchanged that boyish mien for the guise of a man. In a final message, dated January 1 and read to soldiers from Tunis to Ortona and from Palermo to San Pietro, he reduced his valedictory to fifteen words: “Until we meet again in the heart of the enemy’s continental stronghold, I send Godspeed.”

Colonel Warden Makes a Plan

M
ARRAKESH
in midwinter remained a world apart, a world uninjured, a world where war was but a rumor. Snake charmers and professional storytellers thronged the teeming medina, along with tumblers, jugglers, henna
artistes,
monkey handlers, quacks, juice-squeezers, proselytizers, and dye merchants. An Army Air Forces officer described visiting a local sharif who “sat on his leather hassock fingering his white whiskers while his veiled wives brought in gorgeous five-hundred-year-old velvet robes, fists full of jade, emeralds, crystal and ambergris, and chests of gold and silver trinkets, all at very low prices.” In addition to elegant minarets and rose-tinted ramparts, Marrakesh had 28,000 registered prostitutes, and U.S. authorities attempting to curb the harlotry complained that French law required either catching a strumpet in flagrante delicto or securing from her clients a signed “statement of intercourse.” The skin trade flourished.

The Red City had been Winston Churchill’s Shangri-La since 1936, and it was here that he chose to recuperate from the pneumonia that had laid him low at Carthage. It was also here that he intended to refine his brainstorm: the plan to toss two divisions onto the beach at Anzio and “decide the battle of Rome,” as he had promised Roosevelt. Before leaving Tunisia, the prime minister donned his uniform in the La Marsa cottage—Clementine buckled the belt for him—and slowly shuffled past the drawn-up Coldstream Guard. Driving to El Aouina airfield, he led a spirited chorus of “When the Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’” before winging across Africa to Morocco on December 27 under the nom de guerre of Colonel Warden.

In Marrakesh he occupied La Saadia, a lush former olive plantation where he and Roosevelt had stayed for a night precisely a year earlier, after the Casablanca conference. Built in 1923, the stucco villa opened onto an orangery, with the distant, snow-crowned Atlas peaks framed by swaying palms. Bougainvillea vines climbed through the courtyard where lizards
basked in the winter sun; the interior rooms featured shoulder-high Moorish wall mosaics and carved-wood ceilings. A huge staff flew in from London, among them half a dozen cipher clerks and enough naval officers for around-the-clock vigilance in the map room abutting Churchill’s suite. Still weak, the prime minister loitered in bed until noon, then wallowed in a sunken bath filled with great gouts of hot water. For hours he listened to gramophone records of
The Pirates of Penzance
or played poker in a style described as “wildly rash but successful.” At sunset, aides improvised a sedan chair and lugged him up the winding staircase of La Saadia’s six-story observation tower—“it was certainly heavy going,” one bearer reported. Here amid the fluttering moths he sipped his tea and listened to the muezzins’ cry, as he had with Roosevelt. The mountains caught the dying carmine light, then stood as sentinels for the coming night. “This war,” Churchill mused, “will be known in history as the Unnecessary War.”

As his strength returned, he organized daily picnics in the Atlas foothills. The borrowed Cadillac roared through native villages, trailed by a retinue of servants, boon companions, and American MPs in open jeeps. Wearing a huge sombrero, Churchill flashed his V-for-victory at gaping Moroccan peasants, who soon began flashing it back. “We tear after him over the red plain in clouds of red dust,” Moran reported. “Deck chairs and hampers are piled on top of the cars…. Arab children gather round like sparrows waiting for crumbs.” Scrambling down a steep path to lunch beside a mountain brook, the prime minister found the return climb too arduous. “We took the white tablecloth, folded it like a rope and put it round his middle,” Moran added. Two soldiers “tugged him up while two of us pushed from behind, and a third carried his cigar.”

By early January, Churchill was again master of all he surveyed. “Can’t I ever get any commanders who will fight?” he complained to one senior officer. “You don’t care if we lose the war. You just want to draw your pay and eat your rations.” Patting his staff officers on the shoulder, he had told them, “Be good boys and write me a nice plan.” But when logisticians carefully documented the shortfall of landing craft needed to carry out his various amphibious schemes around the globe, he replied, “Magnificent, but negative as usual.” In his air commodore’s uniform, he mounted a reviewing stand to take the salutes of parading French colonial troops bound for Italy—“black as pitch, in reddish uniforms with red fezzes and bayonets on their rifles,” one witness reported, “hopelessly out of step but obviously tough soldiers.” The jubilant crowd huzzahed him with shouts of “
Vive,
Churchill!”

Finding that he could easily phone Algiers, he pestered AFHQ with calls despite warnings that the French had likely tapped the lines. “Undue
discretion was never one of the P.M.’s faults,” Macmillan wrote. In London, a peevish Brooke told his diary:

Not likely. As Moran noted, “The P.M. has a bright idea. He is organizing an operation all on his own…. Twice the picnics have had to be sacrificed to stern duty.” When Moran observed that Hitler seemed engrossed not only in grand strategy but also in the minute details of German war operations, the prime minister nodded. “Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s just what I do.”

Churchill’s “bright idea” had been bandied about since shortly after the capture of Naples, when Fifth Army planners began studying the beaches southwest of Rome. Alexander in a dreamy reverie had envisioned five fresh divisions falling on the German flank. But when neither the troops nor the means to move them materialized, Clark proposed landing a single division, reinforced to 24,000 troops who would cling to the shingle for a week until relieved by their Fifth Army brethren arriving overland through the Gustav Line. The scheme in fact was code-named
SHINGLE
. Truscott’s 3rd Division was to be given the honor of landing alone one hundred miles behind enemy lines. “You are going to destroy the best damned division in the United States Army,” Truscott warned Clark. “For there will be no survivors.” When stalemate froze the Winter Line, a chastened Clark recommended canceling the plan. On December 22, Alexander complied.

Churchill refused to capitulate. “It would be folly to allow the campaign in Italy to drag on,” he said while still in his La Marsa sickbed. He wheedled and pleaded, bullied and petitioned. If Rome were not captured, the world would “regard our campaign as a failure,” he insisted, because “whoever holds Rome holds the title deeds of Italy.” Without Rome, the campaign would “peter out ingloriously,” he wrote Clark. A jab in the flank could well compel Kesselring to withdraw his forces from central Italy, freeing Fifth and Eight Armies from their hyperborean fetters. Galvanized by the prime minister’s elan, Clark replied, “I have felt for a long time that it was the decisive way to approach Rome.”

The revival of Operation
SHINGLE
had gathered momentum on Christmas Day, when Churchill extracted from Alexander and other senior
commanders pledges of support for a larger, two-division landing. With Eisenhower’s departure, leadership in the Mediterranean devolved to the British; the malleable Field Marshal Wilson simply observed that it was “a good idea to go around them rather than be bogged down in the mountains.” Eisenhower had tendered a few departing words of caution, noting that the enemy “hasn’t been predictable so far, and there’s no guarantee he’s going to act the way you want him to now.” If disquieted by
SHINGLE
, the departing commander-in-chief chose not to assert himself; the British formally recorded that he and his top lieutenants “signified their agreement with the prime minister’s proposal.” As Eisenhower left the theater, he concluded that Churchill had “practically taken tactical command in the Mediterranean.”

“I have arrived in Italy, O Best of Emperors!” the Byzantine general Belisarius wrote to Justinian in
A.D.
544 at the start of his campaign against the Ostrogoths. “In great want of men, of horses, of arms, and of money.” For latter-day invaders, the want was mainly of ships. The Anglo-Americans from 1940 to 1945 would build 45,000 landing vessels of all types, but there would never be enough: every major American and British campaign in World War II began with an amphibious operation, and the global demand for shipping far outweighed the supply.

“Shipping [is] at the root of everything,” Admiral King observed, and that prosaic truism obtained for Italy as it had for North Africa and would for Normandy. To land and sustain two divisions required 88 LSTs and 160 lesser landing craft; of the 105 LSTs currently in the Mediterranean, two-thirds were scheduled to return to England by January 15 for refitting in time for
OVERLORD
. First at La Marsa and then in Marrakesh, Churchill “produced set after set of calendar dates” to prove that delaying the departure of several dozen LSTs for a few weeks would not upset the sacrosanct Normandy timetable. To the prime minister’s elated surprise, Roosevelt endorsed his efforts in a cable from Washington. “I thank God for this fine decision,” Churchill replied. “Full steam ahead.”

Operation
SHINGLE
now carried an inexorable momentum. “Clark and I are confident that we have a great chance of pulling off something big if given the means with which to do it,” Alexander wrote Churchill on January 4. In truth, Clark felt ambivalent. Even two divisions landed behind German lines would be exposed “on a very long limb,” he had confided to his diary on January 2; yet he felt that “a pistol was being held at [my] head” by the prime minister. He pressed without success for a three-division landing, and for restricting all assault troops to a single nationality to simplify logistics. “We are supposed to go up there, dump two divisions ashore…and wait for the rest of the Army to join up,” Clark
told his diary. Perhaps to buck himself up, he added, “I am convinced that we are going to do it, and that it is going to be a success.”

To clinch the deal, Churchill proposed a conference in Marrakesh on Friday, January 7. Too busy to leave Italy, Clark sent several staff officers who arrived at the exquisite La Mamounia Hotel to find confusion beneath the Art Deco sconces and Moorish arabesques. Regardless of Fifth Army’s request for enough shipping to provide fifteen hundred tons of supplies per day indefinitely, the Royal Navy planned to put the assault force ashore like castaways, with a week’s provisions and no resupply. Alexander had consented to an American commander for
SHINGLE
, Major General John Lucas, while insisting on a multinational invasion because “heavy casualties might be expected” and should be shared, “lest undesirable reactions occur at home.” Yet Alexander harbored several misapprehensions about Lucas, who had replaced Dawley as the U.S. VI Corps commander after Salerno. “Lucas, who is the best American corps commander, planned and carried out the Salerno landing, and consequently has experience of amphibious operations,” Alexander had written Churchill and Brooke. None of that was true.

The conference convened at La Saadia at 6:30
P.M
. on Friday evening. The throb of drums carried from the medina, and the perfume of honeysuckle drifted through the villa where Churchill sat in his living room amid nineteen officers. The prime minister quickly reviewed the history of
SHINGLE
: how the single-division plan had expired only to be resuscitated with a bigger, better plan that eventually would fling more than 100,000 Yanks and Tommies into the enemy rear; how at least eighty-four LSTs would remain in the Mediterranean until February 5, landing not only the U.S. 3rd and British 1st Divisions, but reinforcements from the U.S. 45th and 1st Armored Divisions; how Kesselring would be forced to thin his defenses near Cassino to confront this threat to his supply lines on Highways 6 and 7, allowing Fifth Army to sunder the German line; how the quick capture of Rome would give the Allies those “title deeds” to Italy.

Questions? There were a few. The AFHQ intelligence chief, Brigadier Kenneth Strong, wondered whether the landing force could “achieve a decisive success” in the face of certain German opposition. Strong also argued that the strength of the Gustav Line at Cassino was “seriously underestimated.” Churchill had already heard Strong’s qualms at La Saadia, and he was no more ready now than then to acknowledge what he called “the seamy side of the question.” When the dour new Royal Navy commander in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir John H. D. Cunningham, agreed that the landing “involves great risks,” the prime minister snapped, “Of course there is risk. But without risk there is no honour, no glory, no adventure.”
Cunningham fell silent. A Fifth Army colonel proposed postponing the landing by three days, until January 25, to permit a rehearsal he considered “absolutely necessary.” Churchill scoffed. All troops were trained and needed no rehearsal, the prime minister said. A “single experienced officer or non-commissioned officer in each platoon” would give the force a sufficiently honed battle edge.

The conclave broke for supper, then reconvened for more discussion at the Mamounia without Churchill. Few cared to provoke the prime minister’s caustic contempt with overt opposition to
SHINGLE
. “You take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, and the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together—what do you get? The sum total of their fears!” Churchill had recently complained. Hour by hour the officers edged closer to consensus. Minefields and shallow shore gradients had narrowed the landing site options to several beaches bracketing the resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno. Those beaches also had the virtue of
not
being overlooked by high ground, like those at Salerno; the Alban Hills—the southern portal to Rome—lay twenty miles inland. Initial photo reconnaissance showed Anzio to be heavily fortified, but analysts soon realized that the area had once been an Italian military training ground; most defenses now lay abandoned.