The Day of Battle (64 page)

The first alarm had come from a German corporal, a railroad engineer sent to Anzio to buy timber. At four
A.M
. on Saturday, breathless and mud-spattered, he roared into Albano aboard a motorcycle, babbling about enemy ships as far as the eye could see. A major phoned the news to Rome, where panicked officers began to pack their bags and burn official papers. “The landing,” a German naval log noted, “has come at a very bad time for us.”

Certainly it was unexpected. Hardly a week earlier, Hitler’s intelligence chief, Admiral Wilhelm F. Canaris, had told the Berlin high command, “There is not the slightest sign that a new landing will be undertaken in the near future.” Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, subsequently advised senior commanders in Italy on January 15, “I consider a large-scale landing operation as being out of the question for the next four to six weeks.” Thus reassured, Kesselring had dispatched his reserves—the 29th and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions—to confront the Garigliano threat on the southern front. Just three battalions and forty-one guns remained to guard a forty-mile coastal stretch from the mouth of the Tiber River to below Nettuno.

Few combat commanders were enjoying World War II more than Albert Kesselring. Having been bombed out of his Frascati headquarters in September, he now occupied a new command post in the Sabine Hills, twenty miles northeast of Rome on the western lip of Monte Soratte, which Lord Byron once described as “a huge wave about to break.” The views of the upper Tiber Valley were breathtaking, and local wines proved equal to the Frascati whites. Kesselring often hosted dinner parties for visiting dignitaries and diplomats, indulging his vanity by swapping his blue Luftwaffe uniform for khaki regalia of his own design, and displaying his erudition as both a soldier-scholar and a convivial raconteur. Earlier in January he had been shot down yet again while piloting his little Storch. Managing to steer the plane into a pond, he arrived at a conference covered in green slime but smiling as usual with Bavarian bonhomie. Over the past fourteen months, in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, he had demonstrated similar agility and panache, and it was the Allies’ misfortune to face him again at Anzio.

The first report of the landings reached Monte Soratte at five
A.M
., an hour after the railway corporal’s alarm. Kesselring instantly recognized the threat to Tenth Army’s rear and to Rome, where he ordered roadblocks on all approach avenues. At six
A.M
. he told Berlin of the landings and received authorization for Operation
RICHARD
, one of five contingency plans drafted in case of Allied landings at various points on the Italian littoral. At
7:10 he ordered the forces in northern Italy designated for
RICHARD
to head south, on prearranged march routes with prearranged signage, fuel, and troops assigned to clear the snow-packed Apennine passes. At 8:30 he directed General Vietinghoff to transfer all spare troops from Tenth Army to the beachhead, along with the headquarters of I Parachute Corps. Within six hours, Kesselring had ordered all or parts of eleven divisions to converge around the Colli Laziali in what he would later term a “higgledy-piggledy jumble.” By seven
P.M
., forces were moving not only from northern Italy, but from France, Germany, and the Balkans. Well-wishing Italians would toss flowers to Wehrmacht soldiers rolling toward the beachhead from Croatia. As John Lucas could see from the headlights streaming across the hills, the first reinforcements had arrived even before D-day turned to D+1.

They were just the beginning. Allied air strategists had asserted that the Italian rail system could be disrupted by aerial bombardment to prevent German forces from concentrating around Anzio; the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces now had more than seven thousand aircraft, compared with fewer than six hundred Luftwaffe planes in the entire theater. Yet carpet bombing of marshaling yards proved ineffective, to the pleasant surprise of German logisticians who nimbly rerouted trains around blocked lines and organized truck convoys on back roads. Most Italian rail workers remained at their posts, and within three days portions of eight German divisions would be at or near the beachhead, with five others en route.

They found terrain that favored the defender, as usual. From the Colli Laziali, as a Grenadier Guards history lamented, on “clear days it was possible to see the surf breaking on the shore, and almost every movement in the open country between…. The German gunners could mark the fall of every shell.” Muzzle flashes betrayed the position of Allied guns, and the flat ground had few folds to conceal men or artillery. To organize the “higgledy-piggledy jumble,” Kesselring ordered the commander of the Fourteenth Army, General Eberhard von Mackensen, to shift his headquarters south from Verona. A square-jawed, monocle-sporting cavalryman, with extensive combat experience in Poland, France, and eastern Europe, Mackensen also boasted good Prussian bloodlines: his father, a hussar whose political patrons included Kaiser Wilhelm II, had occupied Serbia and Romania as a field marshal in World War I.

Kesselring had expected the Allies to seize the Colli Laziali, but by Sunday evening he told Vietinghoff in a phone call that the danger of a flying column severing his supply lines on Highways 6 and 7 had passed. He guessed that VI Corps’ strength included three infantry divisions and an armored division—in fact, it was less—which Kesselring considered
“insufficient for an attack on a strategic objective” like the Alban Hills, given the need to also protect the exposed beachhead flanks.

Moreover, the Allies suffered from what Kesselring called a “Salerno complex.” Only when overwhelming combat power had been amassed, he surmised, would the enemy venture far from the beaches and protective naval gunfire. Before that buildup gained momentum, Mackensen must strike across the entire Anzio front to throw the enemy into the sea. Hitler agreed, and advised, in his own inimitable idiom, “The battle must be waged with holy hatred.”

“Please answer the following questions at once,” Clark radioed Lucas on Monday, January 24. “How far have your patrols worked? What are your intentions for immediate operations? What is your estimate of enemy situation?” The Fifth Army commander had warned, “Don’t stick your neck out,” but now he confided to his diary, “Lucas must be aggressive. He must take some chances.”

In reply, Lucas correctly surmised that the enemy “will attempt to contain our forces pending arrival of reinforcements with which to counterattack [the] beachhead.” Few tanks had been included in
SHINGLE’
s initial waves, because the Allies had expected a sharp infantry fight on the beaches. Yet the invasion to date had resembled a camping expedition. Guards Brigade officers slept in pajamas and played bridge, while their troops brewed tea, chain-smoked, and stamped their feet to keep warm: rime glazed the marsh grass at night, and thin panes of ice coated the puddles. Owl hoots carried through the quiet woods. Solders found it easy to dig in the sandy soil if they did not dig too deeply: slit trenches soon grew wet from the high water table. That hardly seemed to matter. An officer in the 56th Evacuation Hospital pointed to the northern horizon and proclaimed, “All those hills are ours, men! No need to dig foxholes.” In the weeks to come, 56th Evac soldiers often greeted enemy barrages and air attacks with a sardonic cry: “All those hills are ours, men!”

As Allied patrols were discovering, the hinterland between the beach and those hills was a strange, haunted place. Fed by streams from the Colli Laziali, the Pontine Marshes for millennia had been a malarial dead zone. In 1928, a census of the entire plain found only 1,637 people and no permanent settlements; the area was said to be inhabited “only by a few web-toed, fever-ridden corkcutters” living in straw huts. The Italian Red Cross reported that during the warm months, four of every five travelers who spent a single night in the Pontine Marshes could expect to contract malaria. The English translations of local place-names
suggested a certain obsession with mortality: Dead Woman, Land of Death, Pool of the Sepulcher, and—to honor the sullen ferryman of the dead—Charon.

Mussolini had reclaimed much of the land with an ambitious program known as the
bonifica integrale,
intended to transform the marshes into “smiling fields.” Enormous pumps drained the bogs, aided by ten thousand miles of canals and irrigation ditches, and more than a million pine trees planted in windbreaks. Five model towns were built, plus eighteen satellite villages and hundreds of two-story stone farmhouses, usually painted bright blue. Thousands of Italians seeking work and shelter during the Depression had moved to these virgin lands, which Mussolini envisioned as “human nurseries” for breeding the “great rural warriors” of a new Roman empire.

War wrecked the dream. Kesselring and his engineers saw the marshes as a potential barrier against Allied armies from the south. With Mussolini’s apparent consent after his rescue from Gran Sasso, German hydrographers studied “what measures could be taken to make this area rapidly and completely impassable by flooding.” Demolitionists blew up pumping stations, blocked canals, and bulldozed dikes. Seawater flushed the fields. Eventually 100,000 acres of reclaimed farmland were submerged; in some places “only trees and houses were visible,” a Kesselring staff officer reported. The stout farm buildings would make admirable pillboxes. Not least, German malariologists knew that come springtime the inundations would provide larval nurseries for
Anopheles labranchiae,
a Pontine mosquito proficient at breeding in brackish water. The scheme remains “the only known example of biological warfare in twentieth-century Europe,” according to the Yale University historian Frank M. Snowden.

Into this landscape of “bog, bush, and water,” as one soldier described it, the Allied force began to push. On the VI Corps left, British patrols edged up the Via Anziate, past Italian farmers who shouted from behind their plows,
“Niente tedeschi!”
—“No Germans”—even as occasional shell bursts sent their white longhorn cattle bucking across the fields. Italian women clapped and waved handkerchiefs from their croft doorways, leading a British captain to comment, “These peasants are really damned good people, aren’t they?” Guardsmen with a squadron of tanks drove a panzer grenadier battalion out of Aprilia—one of those five model Fascist towns—and captured a hundred prisoners. By Tuesday, January 25, the British 1st Division was halfway to Albano and the Highway 7 intersection.

On the VI Corps right, the Yanks also extended the bridgehead despite Truscott’s lingering indisposition. The commanding general’s “throat is worse today and he goes to bed early, after remaining in command post all
day,” the 3rd Division chief of staff had noted on Sunday. Four companies cantered toward Cisterna on Monday, only to butt against unexpected resistance; a larger American force at dawn on Tuesday also found Hermann Göring Division troops with machine guns or antitank guns in nearly every farmhouse. Cisterna, through which Highway 7 also passed, remained three miles away.

Still, high spirits prevailed. A Ranger lieutenant rummaging through an abandoned villa emerged in a black stovepipe hat and a tuxedo; another Ranger dressed up as a butler to serve him lunch. Churchill cabled Alexander, “Am very glad you are pegging out claims rather than digging in beachhead.”

Clark and Alexander came calling again shortly after noon on Tuesday. Now, on D+3, forty thousand American and sixteen thousand British troops occupied the beachhead, along with almost seven thousand vehicles. While warning Lucas to brace for an inevitable counterattack, Clark also urged him to finish seizing Campoleone on the left and Cisterna on the right. Alexander seemed delighted with VI Corps’ progress. “What a splendid piece of work,” he told Lucas. “This will really hurt the Germans.”

“I must keep my feet on the ground and my forces in hand and do nothing foolish,” the corps commander confided to his diary after his superiors left. “This is the most important thing I have ever tried to do, and I will not be stampeded.”

Kesselring was an airman, and although the Luftwaffe could muster less than a tenth the strength of the Allies, it was from the air that the Germans initially struck back. The first costly raid came at twilight on Sunday, January 23, when an aerial torpedo demolished the bridge and forecastle of the destroyer H.M.S.
Janus
. She broke apart and capsized in twenty minutes, taking 159 men with her. Survivors clinging to the flotsam sang “Roll Out the Barrel.”

More than one hundred bombers scorched the transport anchorage on Monday, again at twilight, killing fifty-three sailors aboard the destroyer U.S.S.
Plunkett.
But the most shocking attack came against the hospital ship
St. David,
which had sailed from Anzio at dusk after embarking wounded troops. With all lights burning and an enormous red cross displayed topside, she was ambushed twenty miles offshore at eight
P.M
. by Luftwaffe planes that sprinkled magnesium flares and then bombs. An explosion staggered the
St. David
and quenched the lights. Patients hobbled on deck or were carried by stretcher. “The ship is sinking,” a voice cried. “Jump.” Lieutenant Laura R. Hindman, a surgical nurse, leaped into a lifeboat only to hear shrieks from other castaways. Looking up, she saw
“the ship turning over and it seemed to be falling right on top of us.” Dumped into the sea, she later recalled:

St. David
sank five minutes after she was hit. Of 229 people aboard, 96 perished.

The strikes continued through the week, often with the guided bombs previously seen at Salerno. Radio chatter by Luftwaffe pilots, who sometimes could be heard even while taxiing on runways near Rome, gave beachhead eavesdroppers fair warning of impending attacks. Allied fighters and antiaircraft gunners parried many raids, shooting down more than two dozen bombers and scattering others. Still, the attacks so menaced the fleet—particularly late in the day, when air cover was weakest—that all cruisers and most destroyers were ordered to retire seaward each afternoon at four. The loss of minesweeper
YMS-30
with seventeen crewmen was typical. “There was a terrific wall of flame,” a witness reported, “then the vessel disappeared.”